永远消失的幻想乡 ～ The Disappearing of Gensokyo

Very frustrating, and not in the "touhou is challenging" way. enemy attacks stop you from doing anything, shooting, *dodging* moving USING BOMBS, but the only thing the player's damage does to enemies is sometimes knocks them out of animations, which for most of their attacks just means they arent animation locked, so I hope you like getting 3 attacks worth of bullets sent your way. Tenshi is locked into your party as the "main character" and is one of the less useful characters due to her attacks being a sword swing and a "shotgun" style attack, which even at max upgraded range is laughably short, not that it would matter anyway since it loses damage the farther out it goes due to fewer of the shots hitting the enemy. This once again is not something enemies have problems with, their bullets will go FAR off the screen if need be, including one fairy that has an infinite range master spark that will melt your health in seconds and really teaches you how few obstacles are actually "cover" meanwhile marisa's spark is so laughably weak that even basic enemies will close the gap and hit her (thus knocking her out of her attack) long before she kills them. On the note of lack of cover this game wants to be danmaku ONLY in bullets sent out, your mobility is in most cases laughable at best (marisa being the only exception due to something we'll get into later) most maps are cramped and have weird geometry and the final level is extremely bad readability wise, which makes high numbers of bouncing projectile enemies an experience.... doubly so due to your hitbox being oddly large (or possibly just hard to read?) or just weird in general depending on character. the final stand out thing is only really a problem near the end and that's the stand out use for marisa, her speed, she is the only character capable of outrunning some attacks so she is mandatory for those fights, you wont know this until you get to the attack that requires her on them. this is especially bad on one of the final bosses since they're after a gauntlet and ANOTHER boss in the same level so if you didn't already know and didn't bring marisa at the beginning, I hope you like intentionally dying to roll for character drops in the arena or starting the level ALL THE WAY OVER with marisa in your changable slot. I wanted to love this game, and aside from some translation hiccups near the end, I did enjoy the dialogue and story, but the gameplay has so many small to medium sized problems with it that add up to this being a flat out frustrating chore to get through that I find myself unable to..... especially since the aforementioned egregious marisa required boss has one of the worst combos of phases that I'd swear it was intentionally a middle finger to the player, if you phase change too early or too late, I hope you like being chased around by seeking high damage attacks while the follow up makes 90% of the arena unusable I don't expect the game to get updated to change these problems or add more reasonable checkpointing/loading options for the egregious problems 8 years after release, and maybe i'll return to finish it when I'm less exhausted from 2 hours of resetting hoping for a marisa drop, but for this, I cant recommend