I wouldn't say that I'm a "Dark Souls elitist." I don't care if a "soulslike" follows the formula or not, I just care if it's good. And Remnant is good!

All the guns feel nice and impactful and the shooting feels good. I like the trait system instead of a typical level up system, it's nice to go in depth about what particular thing you'd like to level up, instead of a broad stat. It's a nice, refreshing take.


Though the game has a host of problems.

Farming in this game is both good and horrible. The good thing is that you can reroll individual worlds without touching your campaign so if you need to grab something quick, or if you need to farm money or upgrade materials, it's quick and easy.

However, actually doing that is just awful. Which ring/amulet/armour you get is random, meaning you will have to reroll worlds many many times.
(Do you know how many times I rerolled Earth to get the Chicago Typewriter? Minimum 30 times lmao)
And you can get duplicates of the items you already get which is just a plain bad idea (You get an amount of scrap ranging from 100 - 500 which is pretty bad).

Having there be multiple different bosses that you fight makes each playthrough unique which is cool! But it also means if you don't play the game more than once, you miss out on half the bosses. Which is just a weird design.

I played through the game solo on hard. It starts off really rough as Earth has only one guaranteed weapon (for some reason???) and it's the sniper rifle which you get after beating the Root Mother.
I was midway through Rhom where the stage sections started becoming much more manageable. Though the bosses stayed consistently harder than the stages. A stage could be easy but it's entirely possible to get stuck on the boss.

The weapon variety is weird for lack of a better term.

(wip)

What a strange little game.
Played one on a whim and finished it in a day. It's not exactly hard but it's fun.

It's a nice little time capsule to see how far touhou has become so I don't know if I can rate it fairly by looking at it from a modern lens. The ideas are all laid out here, like with one of Karumi's attacks being really similar to Nazrin's first spell card, Rare Metal Detector. It's cool!

There's some weird mechanics as it's one of the PC98 games.
Bosses are really short.
There's basically a survival spell at the end of every stage (except 6). Yuuka's master spark is unreactable so you just have to know when she's gonna use it (so it's not so bad).
No visible hitbox. Movement is really sluggish but easy to get used to.

Some backgrounds for stages 3 and 5 make it really hard to see bullets, I think that's from the limited colour palette of the PC98 (is that why Reimu's hair is purple?).

There's a lot of parts, much more than later games (I don't think it's even a thing in the windows games), where enemies just try to run into you to deal contact damage. It's strange to see but it's interesting.

When you use a bomb, it shows a really cute image of the character you're playing. This should come back, ZUN please.

Bad Apple still slaps and it was nice to hear the original.

If you can get an emulator working (I used Neko Project 21) then I would recommend it at least for the history.

For some reason I just could not get a good handle of any of the spells and I felt uncomfortable with each one. I'm not sure if it's the new engine, or the fact that all bosses have some sort of laser attack or any other reason. I dabbled in the other games before fully committing to this one and I think it's cause of those reasons.

It's not as majestic as PCB or as impactful story-wise (at least emotionally, lore-wise, it's very important).

It's also infinitely harder and for me, more frustrating for some reason (I didn't get frustrated at all when I played PCB but Kanako was a little frustrating). Don't listen to anyone who says to start with this one, please start with PCB instead, it's much more managable.

Aya is a menace who claims she'd go easy on you and it's a complete lie. What other game has a stage 4 boss with a survival card? At least Sanae is easier than Youmu though she still trips me up sometimes (though compared to the rest of the cast, she's a bit of a pushover). Kanako is one of the hardest bosses in any game I've ever played in my entire life. Right out of the gate, she's hard and only gets harder. She has some bullshit cards (the jellybeans) but overall, she's decently fair but she demands skills and playstyles that are hard to execute properly (swapping between focus and unfocus on a dime).

But still a great game of course. Amazing soundtrack, great characters, unique artstyle different from the other games. It's nice and it serves its purpose as the start of the later windows games well. It has a good tone and setting and it introduces new characters that become a mainstay. It expands the lore and setting, setting the basis for the next 2 or 3 games. The backgrounds are so beautiful that they're honestly distracting but in a good way.

The new bomb mechanic is pretty fun too, makes bombs really strong which saved my ass so often.

Though, when I finished PCB, I wanted more, I played it again and beat it another time. When i finished MoF, I was relieved to be done. I'm not really sure what that means.

If I see Yuyuko in my dreams, I see Kanako in my nightmares.