It's kind of funny what a melting pot this game is. SMT fans who know nothing about Touhou playing this, Touhou fans who know nothing about SMT trying the genre out. However, all of it to comes out to almost unanimous praise from both sides. I am from the latter, and as someone who is a 1CC fiend for Touhou, I appreciate the series a lot. I also appreciate Touhou fan games a lot, with Luna Nights being the best Metroidvania I've ever experienced. I was well aware of Potemki11's work through fanart and the extremely solid Udongein X. But this project at first seemed like it wasn't for me. I've always been intimidated by the brutal reputation of SMT games, but I was willing to try it out in a Touhou-adorned game. It was a bit rough at first, mainly due to my freshness with the gameplay, but this game turned out to be one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. Nothing about the charm of Gensokyo is lost in translation with this game; it is captured perfectly. There isn't a ton of dialogue in this game, and writing lines for all of the sleepers is an impossible task, but every character in the series is expressed well with their gameplay. Shion has great stats for where she is in the game, but has pitiful luck. These subtle characterizations make this game succeed for someone who came into it as a sole Touhou fan. Gameplay-wise, twice there were parts in the game where I thought to myself, "Surely there's only an hour or two left in this game." Then I saw the world open up in a completely different way through an upgrade or area being opened. The difficulty level of this game is extremely fair in my opinion, and for someone who played this as their first SMT-style game, I am satisfied with the difficulty. A lot of annoyances early on are put away by items you gain access to, or upgrades later on which makes progression feel perfect. One of my only gripes with this game is that I wish that the unique abilities that are given to only a handful of the cast were buffed and each character had their own abilities. I felt the rate of new characters with abilities fell off in the mid- to late-game, and the characters felt more like stats at the end, rather than individual characters who could provide their own unique angle in fights. The abilities themselves are also extremely weak, in my opinion, outside of a select few (Hello, Heaven and Hell), and if they were universally buffed, it might save some characters with lackluster stat spreads. But outside of those truly minor gripes, this game is amazing. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with a genre I didn't think I would and am looking forward to Udongein X2!

As someone who loves moral compass telltale-esque games, the concept of this one really grabbed me. You can prevent the options you choose from being a wildly different outcome than you expected by seeing how they play out with the rewind mechanic in this game. It's neat. However the dialog of this game was dated at the time and isn't better now. This game is unintentionally hilarious at times and it does add to the charm a bit. I think this game is worse if you take it too seriously, however there is enjoyment to be had and this game holds a special place in my heart.

Touhou 19: Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost is the product of grand ambition from someone looking to show that something grand can be produced by a single person, with sparse help from others. When asked about the development of Touhou 19 around its release date, ZUN had taken notice of the amount of attention AI has been given recently. ZUN set out his goal for this game to be jam packed with content to counteract that notion. From that, Touhou 19 has materialized as an experience of being jam packed, but is missing some elements that fans have expected. I think the scale of this game might have exceeded ZUNs capabilities a bit, maybe due to his own method of game making or due to a schedule. This game is in the style of a competitive shooting game, similar to Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, Phantasmagoria of Flower View, or even going back further to Twinkle Star Sprites. This style of danmaku game is fitting for the goal of the most amount of content possible without getting repetitive. These games have historically always had more playable characters, and that amount of characters is seemingly required for the story ZUN was trying to tell in this game. UDoALG wraps up the interconnected story of Touhou since Hidden Star in Four Seasons. This “arc” of the story, if you will, is similar in structure to how Touhou 10-14 were interconnected, with the plot of a proceeding game affecting the one that comes after in some fashion. Touhou 16-19 are interconnected with Okina mentions, the beast leaders, the character cards from Unconnected Marketeers, etc. I think the story is done extremely well in 19, with each characters’ scenario giving a hint to eventually uncover the whole truth of what is going on in Gensokyo this time. However I do feel that the character list is a bit bloated. I don’t mind their inclusions as characters, but I do wish that some characters in this game, Orin and Seiran for example, had a bigger role in the overall plot to make their inclusion feel more valid. On the topic of the amount of characters in this game, this game is by far the lengthiest in mainline Touhou games when it comes to time to see the story through. Getting a 1CC for all characters on normal took me just around 10 hours, which adds to the feeling of the game being jam packed. Touching on the gameplay and difficulty of this game is hard because ZUN isn’t known for his polish on games OR his balancing. So expecting the game to be balanced and bug free from him is in a sense unfair, but some of the balancing and user experience is so out of whack it needs to be addressed in some way. Chiyari is obviously a busted character, breaking even the CPU, but the more damning thing to me is the features of the game that simply don’t work. It is no secret that the online mode of this game is dead and bad. I think the online was a big selling point on this game, the variety of characters, the format of the game, lack of extra stage, and online being an option supports that, but it is so laggy and prone to desyncs that it is basically unusable. ZUN desperately needed to get someone else to work on this part of the game, giving him more time to polish some of the balance perhaps. It isn’t even as if he is afraid to give the work to others either, as the boss sprites and card art are done by people that aren’t ZUN. It felt as if the feature was put in just to say it was in the game and was left at that. Maybe a patch will come in the future and fix the netcode at least but I have extreme doubts about that. It has been nearly 6 months since the game came out and as far as I am aware, no efforts have been made to fix it. I do like this game however despite the rough patches it has. The game is visually the best looking the mainline series has ever been, with textures and environments that look crisper, ZUN portraits being the best that they ever have been, the boss pixel art being so beautiful and full of life, this game looks amazing. The music is amazing too, with new instruments being experimented with by ZUN, most notably to me on Biten’s theme. And this game is full credit to ZUN, jammed with stuff in it. It feels like it takes elements of the past 4 games and combines them into a melting pot of danmaku, it is quite lovely in terms of theming and story. I do hope the cards are done away with after this entry though, 18, 18.5 and now 19 have all had them as a prominent game mechanic. I think they are getting a bit stale at this point. This game, which was born out of a passion to make something ambitious, the most ambitious Touhou Project game in nearly 20 years, will always be a hard sell to the series I think. With the unorthodox difficulty and game style, and lack of (working) built in online support, I think this game will be passed over a lot when looking back on the series, but it is important. There is an essence here, but it feels only achieved to about 85% of what it could be.