CosmoDreamer

I'm a danmaku enjoyer, but in the last few months, I've started to burn out on the genre a bit. But this game, along with its sequel Like Dreamer, has reignited the flame for me. I highly recommend it. It feels much more Touhou than Dodonpachi, so keep that in mind before you buy it. But the polish and amount of content is above and beyond your typical Touhou game, and there are difficulty options for all skill levels. The music, the hand-drawn artwork, all the weapon options, made this one very replayable. The graze mechanic (which isn't mentioned in the tutorial, so it was a happy surprise when I noticed it was there) reminds me of a simplified version of the Cherry Point system from Perfect Cherry Blossom, with grazes increasing a score multiplier that affects the point value of everything else -- though there's no "supernatural barrier" or anything like that for when your multiplier goes up a certain amount. It also doesn't decrease when you get hit or use a bomb, another difference from Touhou. One thing I do think would have been nice is an actual graze counter, just so we could see how many bullets we grazed in a stage. The number of grazes isn't displayed anywhere, and since grazing isn't the only way to increase your multiplier (it also goes up every time you kill an enemy), you can't really figure out how many bullets you've grazed by looking at the multiplier. But this has absolutely no effect on gameplay, so it's not a big deal at all. I just personally like seeing my graze count go up in games with a graze mechanic. The Touhou item gathering line is also here, where items will be drawn to you if you move towards the top of the screen, which is a feature I don't think I've ever seen outside of Touhou. Actions that increase your multiplier also contribute to a bomb meter which, when full, will give you another bomb. Bombs don't get more expensive as you go on, meaning that the game is VERY generous with them. But you can only hold 3 at a time, so the bomb generosity is balanced out by the low bomb capacity, which also encourages you to use them rather than hoard them. At the beginning, there's an auto bomb system where getting hit while holding any bombs will activate a shield instead of taking a life, but will also deplete your bombs to zero, regardless of how many you're holding. You can set it so that you only lose one bomb per hit, but if you do, you miss out on the option to boost either your regular shot or your focused shot. Later, you also unlock the ability to turn auto bombs off entirely, which boosts both regular and focused shots. One final note -- "trial mode," the traditional arcade mode where you play through all of the stages in succession in one continuous run without saving your progress or getting your lives and bombs back between stages, isn't unlocked at the beginning. To unlock it, you have to complete each of the stages one at a time, selecting from a stage select screen, with each stage being a self-contained run. So if you want to jump in and try to 1CC the whole thing right off the bat, you can't. It would have been nice if that was an option from the start, but if you're familiar with danmaku, it doesn't take long to unlock, so, again, not a terribly big deal. All in all, I definitely recommend this game for danmaku players of all skill levels.