Danmaku Amanojaku ~ Impossible Spell Card.

I do recommend this game, I had a blast going through it again. This was my second clear after all those years since it fist came out and I'm a much more skilled danmaku player now. But I have some thoughts... The main premise of this game is to use different magical artefacts to help you go through supposedly impossible bullet patters, however in the entire game there were only two spell cards where I actually had to be strategic about my item choice. Most of the time if you wanted any challenge you would go itemless and in rare instances where that becomes too difficult you just use the lantern. For sub-items the choice is pretty brain-dead as well, there aren't any situations where you wouldn't want to use the doll, in some cases yin-yang would maybe be good, but reportedly it only works for lasers, making it useless. The usage of items is further discouraged by the game actually acknowledging itemless clears, so the real goal quickly becomes to clear as many scenes without items as possible. And counter-intuitively, clearing a bunch of scenes without items is also the fastest and easiest way to max their level. Difficulty of this game is all over the place. For me, even without items, about 35% of cards were either a joke or easily breakable. Further 35% were not trivially easy, but not hard either, 20% was a decent challenge and 10% (8 cards) I think would each require a multi-hour grind for an LNN level player, but for me were just impossible. The difficulty also doesn't seem to progress linearly, for example one of the spells I couldn't get was all the way back in Day 5. That all being said though, I still had a lot of fun playing this. It always felt rewarding to finally clear some of the tougher patterns after 100 or 200 attempts, but it was also satisfying to quickly blast through the easy ones. There were a couple game-break situations or cheese strats and I'm always a fan of those. I'm also very happy that I ended up with more itemless clears than during my first time round. So I do actually recommend the game. It's also a good choice to be your first Toho spin-off type game, since with proper item utilisation I would say it's the easiest one.