Touhou ThousandNightAnamnesis 4+

Okay first of all, I played this game very early on during its time where the extra stages weren’t added yet and bombs were all the same (double tap, then a force field appears similar to the bombs used in Touhou 10). I remember leaving a review where I really liked the game especially compared to the dev’s previous games, lots of great improvements made and content they added. However, I had written in the review how I wished bombing could be better because either the double tap doesn’t register, it’s too sensitive sometimes, or it’s just too hard to react in time to bomb. I remember suggesting that they could change it so that there’s a special button for bombing somewhere on the screen, and if it blocks the screen too much/too distracting, there could even be an option to make the button semi transparent. Coming back to this game after some time, what do I find... the dev actually did it!!! Not only that, characters also have unique bombs to themselves and lots of other qol features. I can’t believe it, maybe it’s because I’ve been playing other really popular games but the developers don’t always listen to feedback and it can feel like you’re talking to thin air. But this developer is not the same, it feels like they really want to make the best game experience possible and I am so pleased with how this game has become even better than it was before! I definitely recommend this game to anyone, give this game a shot for sure.

I’ve played this creators other touhou fan games and it’s apparent just looking at the game that it’s his latest one, there are 13 different characters and over 12 stages , each one is a boss rush of 7-9 bosses. I beat all of them with Reimu and it was fun all the way. There’s is a music room where you can listen to the soundtrack ( he used the house set of touhou albums for the game). But there are some problems with the game. There are ads at the bottom and I accidentally touch them and it redirects me to a random site for air conditioning or something. And in the Hidden star in 4 seasons stage, when you defeat the second boss (and only this specific boss in the entire game) it explodes sending out a bunch of bullets. basically taking one of your lives. It’s like the creator of this game tried to take one of my lives to make it harder. Besides those it’s a perfect game.

Your other ones that were all strictly Spell Practice style felt somewhat incomplete (even though a few of the official games are only that). This one feels a lot more like the original games. No fairies or fuzz-balls between bosses, but who cares about the cannon fodder (besides death-fairies like PCB stage 4 or IN Ex) anyway? Most of the patterns clearly recall ones that boss used in the real game, too. Overall, I’d call the difficulty level slightly below that of the easier official games, but this game will still destroy anyone who doesn’t take it seriously.

UPDATE 3/4/20: The most recent update is another major step forward with two of the stages having standard shmup segments before the boss fights. However, there’s a major bug where the Spell Practice menu doesn’t recognize cards after the first page have been faced. Most of the bugs and balance issues I previously noted have been addressed, but there’s still the occasional problem of patterns with more than one foe not fully clearing, usually for the team fights like the Prismriver sisters, but occasionally on minion spam patterns.