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.

An incredibly fun bullet hell game with satisfying patterns, one of the best soundtracks ever made, and a final boss comparable to the likes of Gael or Artorias.

If you're into the niche genre of bullet hells, I highly highly highly recommend it (I cannot stress this enough).

Yuyuko my beloved...

A terrible game. It symbolizes everything wrong with the modern (2013) game industry. The writing is awful and it's made by torture fetishists so it's really awkward. The gameplay is terrible, there's so many QTE's, the guns have no impact. It's an incredibly boring, unfocused mess.

The game is written so poorly that Lara's "badass moments" are entirely undeserved and almost insulting in how they hit you over the head with them. She starts out as a uwu softe girl who can barely do anything then at the end she's heckling people as she's shooting them. And I have to ask why? How? What happened to her to make this change? It certainly can't be how many people she's killed, because she's been doing that since the start of the game. The disconnect between story Lara and gameplay Lara is atrocious. Why is there a survival mechanic, where Lara has to get food, that disappears literally the second you kill a deer and then never appears ever again? Why are there berries to pick that give you 10 exp? Why are there random animals to kill?

The writing is so bad that it's honestly insulting. The puzzles are insulting, if they're even there. Tombs are made up of the most barebones "puzzles" ever conceived by man and what do you get out of it? 250 money, I mean scrap, I mean salvage. There's no reward for exploration or doing anything.
You only get the currency you get by doing literally anything in the game. Imagine if in Dark Souls you open a chest and you only get souls, not even an item to save them for later, but literally just currency. Also you can't skip the tediously long tomb chest opening animation. There's LITERALLY TREASURE PHYSICALLY in the chests and all you get is salvage. It's a joke.

The game speaks down to you like a child through overexplaining of basic concepts (Lara sees a bow, "That bow, I could use that bow! I need to find a way to get that bow."). If a game has a button that highlights all usable objects / tells you where to go, that means the devs fucked up.

It's actually incredibly racist despite how it's a "feminist" game. You have the Spiritual Aboriginal Guy who's also fat and half his dialogue is about food. You have the Angry Black Woman who is angry. Why is she angry? Who knows! But then she stops being angry during the last hour of the game for some reason. You have the Cowardly White Guy who only cares about his career I guess and betrays everyone despite being the only reasonable one here. I mean, who are you going to listen to in this situation? The people who've captured you and will kill you if you don't listen to them or your colleague who just so happens to be stronger than god and can kill everyone (no one knew about this before)? The only good character was Roth cause he was voiced by Robin Atkin Downes so it was nice to hear Kaz Miller again (this is the only reason why he's the only good character).

The fact that 95% of the enemies are random white guys who formed a cult who I think are supposed to be Russian (one of them is named Nicolai, and two others have Russian names but I forgot what they were) yet have thick American accents despite the entire game taking place on a Japanese island. The fact that these white dudes formed a cult around a Japanese princess and then the first Japanese women they meet just so happens to be a descendant of the princess just seems so weird and contrived and kinda racist.

The environments are so goddamn ugly and colours are washed out and are mostly varying shades of grey and brown. 20% of the game takes place in a self-described shantytown. Why are we here? Are we not supposed to be on a Japanese island? Why is the palace section 20 minutes long and then it's on fire and you never return there? A real missed opportunity for anyone who likes to look at things.

All those reviewers from 2013 who gave the game "critical acclaim" should listen to the black man with the lightning.

What a waste of time.

shenmue may require no introduction, but it's amusing for me to have played so many of suzuki's games beforehand...they're all these exceptionally spirited games preoccupied with total acceleration, scenic vistas, the simple pleasures of competition (whether inward or external). their pace and their fixations are romantic and idealized, representing a striking antithesis to shenmue's monotony. just about the only thing that matches shenmue's dreamy sense of melancholy is outrun's results screen.

while suzuki's prior obsessions & formal language might ironically seem entirely absent from shenmue, im not sure this is a completely accurate assessment. ryo might be a slave to time, but just as in outrun, super hang-on, space harrier, etc, his path is pre-determined, foretold by prophecy. he has no choice but to staunchly and pragmatically follow his compulsions. a discordant sense of urgency underscores and animates his every action, and you can see his internal frustrations with the mundane & lackadaisical rhythms of his neighbours. ryo's a shark, all he knows how to do is move forward. reality might suffocate him otherwise.

iwao hazuki's last words to his son are pleading with him to keep his friends and family close to him; the rest of shenmue is a quietly straining, slow-brewing tragedy as ryo does the exact opposite. he's alienated and alone; his family never quite knows how to effectively respond to and treat his grief; he distances himself from peers, structure, romantic interests. he is made painfully aware of every passing minute of every day, but he fails to truly understand or comprehend the weight of time and of his life in yokosuka as a whole. people care about him, but he's distant & removed, and eventually they figure it may be for the best to let such a headstrong young man go his own way. ryo's defining contradiction is a naïveté characteristic of his youth at odds with his relentless drive to make forward progress. he has this unspoken expectation that yokosuka is comprised of unchanging and permanent fixtures, that things will be the same as he left them upon his return, but everything around him explicitly and implicitly signals the obvious: people, locales, and contexts change. over the course of the game ryo runs into a hot dog vendor named tom constantly, someone whose vibrance and zest for life marks him as distinct and dissimilar from ryo. he's content and lively in a way that is alien to ryo. near the end of the game, he learns that tom a.) has surprising martial arts prowess and b.) has been planning to leave yokosuka for quite some time. ryo is taken aback by this information, but it was no secret - ryo simply never asked. by the time ryo makes his way to hong kong, so much has been left unsaid. even he, for a brief moment, just beginning to grasp the gravity of his decisions, wishes he had more time.

it's an excellent game, filled to the brim with quietly devastating scenes and working with subtlety that seems unmatched compared to contemporary AAA experiences... while many cite shenmue as a game that has aged, or only has value from an innovative perspective, its deliberate and measured inclinations reveal just the opposite: that games today have regressed, and have only taken the wrong lessons from shenmue.