As of writing, MarisaB Normal 1cc (my first of the franchise,) but not before a ReimuB run that ended right as the boss died, which got me the bad ending. Hell. Hell.

This felt like the first game that knew what it was doing, but along the way it loses a bit of charm. SoEW had good music and dialogue that was funny enough. PoDD is batshit insane and resultingly fun due to that chaos. HRtP sucks, but if you go through with a friend, it becomes an unforgettable experience. Though, the stuff that makes this stick out at all is retroactive--people didn't know what Touhou or Bad Apple was prior to release, let alone Marisa Kirisame. No game before this sold more than like, 200 copies. These things make it lovely now but that's by chance, really.

However, not quite by chance, there is at least a solid game underneath. Several steps forward were taken from SoEW's unintelligible graphics, and each of the 4 shot types make a surprising difference in gameplay--more than I was expecting, and more than Double Dealing Character provided me, to be honest. Of course there are some hiccups, like Stage 4, which is simply not fun to play, and the fact that the game's resolution is outright gated from you if you're not on a 1cc run. It did motivate me to play the game more, sure, but I'd rather be motivated by the game being fun enough to warrant a replay on its own merits, like PoDD and DDC and probably a stark majority of the franchise.

In any case, this is very clearly going in the right direction, and going off the franchise's ultimate success, I look forward to the rest.