There's a lot of to like about Castle of Shikigami. The character designs are cool and the (albeit minimal) storytelling is kinda interesting, and will be welcome to anyone who also likes the Touhou Project series' approach of weaving characterisation and dialogue into bullet hell gameplay. The chapter-based stages and tension mechanic that increases both your score and shot power when grazing enemies/bullets are engaging, and were possibly an inspiration for Touhou LoLK's similar design. But damn, as a whole package this game just does not hold up very well.
I'm not sure if it's even "jank" as such, unless you consider a lack of game balance to be a form of jank, but yeah, this game is so disastrously unbalanced that it makes Touhou DDC look like a perfectly-balanced shmup in comparison. Kuga is the only actually good character gameplay-wise, all of the others are varying degrees of terrible and I'm not sure if the last two stages are even doable on a single credit with some of them. Hitboxes are obnoxiously big and bullet visibility is poor at times. Enemy patterns swing between snoozeworthily easy or blatantly undodgeable, untelegraphed bullshit with little middle ground and even less consideration for any kind of difficulty curve (why is the 3-3 boss harder than the 4-3 and 5-3 boss?).
While the soundtrack is... decent, it does NOT feel like a shmup soundtrack, which is even more noticeable when there aren't even separate boss themes, the stage theme just continues to play during bosses which is a big bruh moment.
I acknowledge a lot of my issues with the game balance might just be skill issue, and I might want to try routing this game out, but I know for a fact that Castle of Shikigami is obtuse and lacking, and I'll safely assume that the sequels are significantly better.
I'm not sure if it's even "jank" as such, unless you consider a lack of game balance to be a form of jank, but yeah, this game is so disastrously unbalanced that it makes Touhou DDC look like a perfectly-balanced shmup in comparison. Kuga is the only actually good character gameplay-wise, all of the others are varying degrees of terrible and I'm not sure if the last two stages are even doable on a single credit with some of them. Hitboxes are obnoxiously big and bullet visibility is poor at times. Enemy patterns swing between snoozeworthily easy or blatantly undodgeable, untelegraphed bullshit with little middle ground and even less consideration for any kind of difficulty curve (why is the 3-3 boss harder than the 4-3 and 5-3 boss?).
While the soundtrack is... decent, it does NOT feel like a shmup soundtrack, which is even more noticeable when there aren't even separate boss themes, the stage theme just continues to play during bosses which is a big bruh moment.
I acknowledge a lot of my issues with the game balance might just be skill issue, and I might want to try routing this game out, but I know for a fact that Castle of Shikigami is obtuse and lacking, and I'll safely assume that the sequels are significantly better.