izigame.me

TL;DR: the majority of this game feels like a copy-paste fest and plays like a slog. Many parts of the game feel generic or unfinished. The only good parts are the boss fights.
(small edit: if you notice the lack of negative reviews, there are many more negative reviews in chinese that don't show because of default filters, I suggest you take a look at them)
I 100%ed reimu's scenario with all side quests and post game missions. And to be frank, it wasn't that pleasant of an experience.
Before I list all the cons, let me at least get the pros out of the way.
Pros
- The environments are very well made and are quite nice to look at - Gensokyo is depicted pretty faithfully and it's actually pretty cool to see it in this 3D space. I can tell a lot of work was put into them.
- The boss battles are, overall pretty good. Later in the game, the move sets and patterns do get more interesting and less "copy-paste" like. Yorihime, Yuyuko, Suika, Yukari all are quite fun to fight compared to the fare earlier in the game.
- The combat is pretty solid. Overall decently smooth. A big gimmick is the parrying or "Perfect Guard" mechanic where you can block a melee attack, becoming invincible and slowing down time for a few seconds. In my opinion it's implemented fairly well both with regular enemies as well as with bosses. Though sometimes with boss fights it can tend a bit toward waiting for the "traffic light attack", you have enough ranged options to circumvent this problem most of the time.
- The character art is good
- The music has some very good arranges, definitely worth a listen
So that's all the major pros I would like to list. Now for the cons...
Cons
The major dislike I have with this game is that the stage portions blend together into one monotonous mix and, most of the time fail to provide a sufficiently unique experience
- There is an incredible lack of variety in the enemy encounters in the game. In the first 2 hours or so, each room of enemies or enemy wave in an arena feel alright to fight. Then you notice later that the exact same enemy waves are appearing no matter what area you visit, and the rooms are filled with the exact same enemy mixtures. It's just the same thing again and again. I'm not exaggerating either - they are literally the exact same enemies spawned in the exact same way. I think I've fought the "1 big fairy 4 small fairy" wave more times than I can count.
- A lot of the enemies feel very generic or are just copypasted everywhere when they clearly don't belong. The generic enemies include: oversized bugs, flowers that spit goop, random animals and a big sentient stone brick. These just feel like filler and are put in almost every single area, even in places where they're clearly out of touch with the surrounding environment.
Of course, there's also your standard fare of touhou specific enemies - alice's dolls, fairies, tsukumogami, kappa stuff like that. These are also spammed in every single area, and the fact that they don't belong is especially apparent. It's less of "hey kappa and yamawaro aren't supposed to fight together that's not canon" and more that it's blatant copy paste of filler enemies. Of course, you could make the argument that each enemy has different move sets, but honestly they all just blend together so much that it's hard to make a meaningful distinction.
- The chief environmental obstacle is awful. They're these orange spiky poles that rotate around a pillar, like something you'd see in some mario game or a generic 3D platformer. They have absolutely zero connection with any environment anywhere, and yet they are put in almost every single location. Bamboo forest, Japanese garden, misty lake, it doesn't make a difference you'll still see them spammed. It feels like a waste to have such beautiful environments and fill them to death with this out of place filler obstacle.
- Exploring feels sort of pointless. Your reward for exploring secret areas is usually an arena encounter and a chest containing an item. However, most of the time the best gear is simply dropped from regular encounters, breaking boxes, or a previous secret chest from a different area. It only takes 1-2 drops to get a good version of an item you stick with, and after that every other item you get are probably just downgrades, even if they're from secret areas, and do nothing other than clog your inventory until you visit the shop. And speaking of the shop...
- The primary currency, gold, is near useless. You gain gold from killing enemies and also from selling unused junk gear. There are two ways to spend gold: buying the stock items from the shop (which is completely useless because of the item drop methods listed above), or reforging an item to randomize its stats. Most of the time however, your items already have a good stat selection that you can work with (that's why you're keeping them in the first place), so reforging fails to become the gold sink it is supposed to be. And that's it. So, your gold reserves are doomed to sit idle forever, and you only remember it exists when you get the achievement for hoarding a lot of it.
So, conclusion of this? The entire stage and exploration portion of the game feels like a chore rather than an actual part of the game. In the second half I found myself simply trying to run past all the enemies to get to the boss fights faster. Engaging them simply had no meaningful reward.
Alright, with this out of the way I also wanted to point out some nitpicks while I'm at it.
- This game does not really care that much about canon. The story can deviate quite a bit from canon and does have some minor misconceptions. It's a fangame though so not really a big issue.
- The game has no way to rebind the controls
- Many bosses love to use this variation on the same principle special attack, which is "spiral of bullets and rings of bullets, jump over both at the same time". You can see this in yuyuko's attack in the game description, and this same attack structure is applied to a significant number of boss attacks throughout the game. Gets old after a while.
- The game has no difficulty options. Bosses are, to be honest pretty easy and die quite fast, often not being able to flex their full arsenal due to RNG. I'm not on a sightseeing tour for patterns, so I don't intentionally stall fights so I can have the chance to see different attacks. The healing in this game is also very very generous and you can essentially face tank a good amount of fights. Seeing as a barebones difficulty option can be as simple as a global level boost (they even do this in the post game), I really don't know why there is no such option available.
- There is no way to skip dialogue. I noticed this when you get the option to replay one same side quest again (the dialogue, enemies and boss are the exact same too, but you can just, do it again for some reason? it's the only one you can repeat like that).
- There's no way to open the map of an area, you have to look at the minimap which changes with location. Very minor though.
- Some characters can feel stiff at times due to a lack of variation in their dialogue portrait. Also a minor issue.
So, to end this off, should you buy this? Well personally, given the second chance I wouldn't pay 20+$ for this at all - I can get far better experiences with that money. But if you have a lot of cash to burn then I guess you could give it a try. Until then, there's much better fangames out there for cheaper.