This game has ascended past the status of "Touhou Fangame" by a mile and stands proudly as a fantastic Metroidvania, regardless of how well you know the series.
The pixel art in this game is just beautiful. It doesn't pop out at you, desperately wanting you to look all over it, but instead sits calmly in the background. When you actually stop to look at it, you realize just how nice it looks, how detailed it is and how it's so seamless that you forget the game is done using pixel art at all.
The enemies in this game are also incredibly memorable in both design and animation - the animation especially, everything flows so nicely. Even the enemies that are basic conceptually, like the Will-O-Wisps and Skeletons are given a great amount of character just through their behavior and attacks. A great amount of them are parts of Japanese folklore, while still giving respect to the Touhou side of things - namely in the many kinds of fairy enemies. Fittingly for the Scarlet Devil Mansion, it also has a few enemies of western origin, like Frankenstein, and the White Rabbit!
The game controls incredibly nicely. The player is given an exceptionally powerful kit consisting of skills, snail time, timestop, and graze, but they will often not know how to fully utilize until towards the end of the game. This is one of my favorite schools of design in gaming - giving the player full reign of the character's abilities and letting them figure it out over time. The graze mechanic from the Touhou shmups is integrated beautifully in particular here as a way of gaining energy back and being greatly rewarding while keeping the risk of the move in play. Sakuya (the character you play as)'s basic attack feels good to throw out, stalling in the air with diagonal knifes is super cool, and every skill card in the game has its own unique use. On this last playthrough I did over the course of maybe a week, in which I 100%'d the game on 1 HP mode, I found myself having multiple genuine uses of each skill card in the game... except Stun Knife. I have no idea what Stun Knife is actually useful for.
The bosses of this game attack in a fixed pattern, yet keep you very much on your toes, giving the player the satisfaction akin to climbing a mountain after beating them, like a Dark Souls boss. Each one is very different from each other and usually require you to think outside of your usual habits in order to beat. One of the bosses, Marisa, possesses one of this game's very few glaring flaws - her Master Spark attack is really poorly designed. It deals a ton of damage and it seems like there's no way to dodge it. I now know how to dodge, but I don't even understand why it works (some weird graze mechanic). Outside of that, fighting each one is a blast. My favorite is the final boss, which is very, very long, and you end up learning much more about how to graze and gain back energy along the way. It's really tough, but not enough to feel impossible, but it is enough to really make you grow from it.
The flaws I have with this game are very few. One is Marisa's Master Spark, as stated. Another is the fact that the last boss of the Extra Stage is a ridiculously huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. It kinda makes sense, considering how Extra Stages in the actual games are, but it doesn't change the fact that it kicked my ass so badly I got demoralized and stopped playing for a while. Even now, doing it on 1 HP mode with all my game knowledge over time, the fight took me a full day to complete.
The game's most noticeable issue is its writing. The English translation here is really, really weak. Full of errors and awkward phrasing (and a couple of times going outside the textbox), it's immediately noticeable with the sign at the beginning that says "Attack with [Attack Button]." The story in this game is basic, but the bad writing definitely doesn't help things. Furthermore, as stated, this game has ascended past the status of Touhou fangame, meaning many people who know nothing about the series will inevitably play this. This means the bad translation will hurt further, because players will feel left out in a way, since they'll feel like the reason they don't understand the dialogue is because they don't know the characters, when that isn't necessarily the case. I almost wish the game had a "I Don't Know Touhou" mode which would give you a brief rundown of who you are and who the characters you meet are. You could fit most of that info on a flashcard, so it wouldn't be anything too text-heavy either.
I don't know what the game's original writing looked like, so I can't say if it's also bad in the Japanese version, but it really does come off as a bad translation. It's definitely enough to knock it half a star, but I don't want to blame it for something that is solely an issue on localization's end, not the actual game's fault.
All in all in all... a super good game! It isn't particularly long, but it is VERY replayable. Super recommend for anyone into anything metroidvania or even just platforming related!
The pixel art in this game is just beautiful. It doesn't pop out at you, desperately wanting you to look all over it, but instead sits calmly in the background. When you actually stop to look at it, you realize just how nice it looks, how detailed it is and how it's so seamless that you forget the game is done using pixel art at all.
The enemies in this game are also incredibly memorable in both design and animation - the animation especially, everything flows so nicely. Even the enemies that are basic conceptually, like the Will-O-Wisps and Skeletons are given a great amount of character just through their behavior and attacks. A great amount of them are parts of Japanese folklore, while still giving respect to the Touhou side of things - namely in the many kinds of fairy enemies. Fittingly for the Scarlet Devil Mansion, it also has a few enemies of western origin, like Frankenstein, and the White Rabbit!
The game controls incredibly nicely. The player is given an exceptionally powerful kit consisting of skills, snail time, timestop, and graze, but they will often not know how to fully utilize until towards the end of the game. This is one of my favorite schools of design in gaming - giving the player full reign of the character's abilities and letting them figure it out over time. The graze mechanic from the Touhou shmups is integrated beautifully in particular here as a way of gaining energy back and being greatly rewarding while keeping the risk of the move in play. Sakuya (the character you play as)'s basic attack feels good to throw out, stalling in the air with diagonal knifes is super cool, and every skill card in the game has its own unique use. On this last playthrough I did over the course of maybe a week, in which I 100%'d the game on 1 HP mode, I found myself having multiple genuine uses of each skill card in the game... except Stun Knife. I have no idea what Stun Knife is actually useful for.
The bosses of this game attack in a fixed pattern, yet keep you very much on your toes, giving the player the satisfaction akin to climbing a mountain after beating them, like a Dark Souls boss. Each one is very different from each other and usually require you to think outside of your usual habits in order to beat. One of the bosses, Marisa, possesses one of this game's very few glaring flaws - her Master Spark attack is really poorly designed. It deals a ton of damage and it seems like there's no way to dodge it. I now know how to dodge, but I don't even understand why it works (some weird graze mechanic). Outside of that, fighting each one is a blast. My favorite is the final boss, which is very, very long, and you end up learning much more about how to graze and gain back energy along the way. It's really tough, but not enough to feel impossible, but it is enough to really make you grow from it.
The flaws I have with this game are very few. One is Marisa's Master Spark, as stated. Another is the fact that the last boss of the Extra Stage is a ridiculously huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. It kinda makes sense, considering how Extra Stages in the actual games are, but it doesn't change the fact that it kicked my ass so badly I got demoralized and stopped playing for a while. Even now, doing it on 1 HP mode with all my game knowledge over time, the fight took me a full day to complete.
The game's most noticeable issue is its writing. The English translation here is really, really weak. Full of errors and awkward phrasing (and a couple of times going outside the textbox), it's immediately noticeable with the sign at the beginning that says "Attack with [Attack Button]." The story in this game is basic, but the bad writing definitely doesn't help things. Furthermore, as stated, this game has ascended past the status of Touhou fangame, meaning many people who know nothing about the series will inevitably play this. This means the bad translation will hurt further, because players will feel left out in a way, since they'll feel like the reason they don't understand the dialogue is because they don't know the characters, when that isn't necessarily the case. I almost wish the game had a "I Don't Know Touhou" mode which would give you a brief rundown of who you are and who the characters you meet are. You could fit most of that info on a flashcard, so it wouldn't be anything too text-heavy either.
I don't know what the game's original writing looked like, so I can't say if it's also bad in the Japanese version, but it really does come off as a bad translation. It's definitely enough to knock it half a star, but I don't want to blame it for something that is solely an issue on localization's end, not the actual game's fault.
All in all in all... a super good game! It isn't particularly long, but it is VERY replayable. Super recommend for anyone into anything metroidvania or even just platforming related!