Review for Everyone: Divided in three for experts, intermediate and beginners. FOR EXPERTS (Lunatics): Extra and Phantasm are great, Look for Forlorn Souls of Wicked Past or wait for part III otherwise. FOR REGULAR PLAYERS: The devs fixed all the concerns from the first one. This is a fantastic game to pick if you happen to be waiting for the third one, that is what I did. This is the best (finished) Touhou fan game to date. I'm glad to give it a review just to boost it's Overwhelmingly Positive stats. Are you completely new to bullet hell shumps by any chance and still on the fence? Take Servants of the Harvest Wish (which is free) for a test drive, and if it Hooks you up, then this game will blow your mind. Pros + Yes, the game is peak, you won't regret it! Cons - Why on earth can you not use the D-pad with any of this fan games but only the left analog stick? On the bright side, you'll git gud with the analog stick. -Can be too addicting -Cat pitting addictor FOR BEGINNERS The game is about surviving a barrage of bullets that come in beautiful patterns and the goal is to clear the game without continuing. It also offers different levels of difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard and too hard but fun extra stages. The game is a blast on any difficulty you can handle, including easy. I provide a short glossary with the terms used all over thousands of reviews so you know what everybody is talking about. Fantastic Danmaku Festival Part II took me (average player) 4 1/2 hours and 2 attempts to 1CC on Easy, 16 hours and 5 attempts on Normal difficulty. I am currently working on some of the trophies and I am getting closer to 1CC on hard. Naturally easy is not fun for me anymore. In fact, I now understand all those skilled players that make guides and tell you no to play on easy... IGNORE THEM You can play however you want. In fact, there is a tradition for beginners to dive into Lunatic difficulties and get our butt kicked to the next universe just for a laugh... I recommend this game to those who have patience because that is one of the main things it is needed if you want to truly enjoy this kind of games. Every new gaming genre you get into requires practice and a learning curve but STG's are specially hard, yet tremendously rewarding. Now, the controller can be a pain and you could potentially have to disable the steam controller support in the global or game specific settings. This game is the coolest fan game there is at the moment and it is one of the easiest out there too. If you are a tough guy/gal/kitten you can try one of the mainline Touhou games instead :) Some History: Touhou project is a fan project by ZUN and his company (per se) is Team Shangai Alice. Touhou Project is one of the pillars of the Danmaku games and It has 20 main entries (Until May 2025) and they keep making them. Then we have <b>fan games</b> which are pretty much based on the likes of Touhou or actually include touhou characters and mechanics and can either be released for free like Servants of Harvest Wish, are commissioned or have permission to be monetised like this one. What the game conveniently doesn't explain: Movement - You can move normally in any direction, you can hold the focus button to move slowly and with more precision. While in focus mode you can see a dot in the middle of your character which is your hit box. You can check out "Barrage Musical ~ Basic Danmaku Tutorial" a cheap game that teaches you the wall hugging, how the hitboxes of the bullets actually work and other basic techniques. Bombs - Each characters has a bomb and a different more damaging bomb that can be unleashed while you are in focused mode Power ups - To blast your way through, you power up your shot until level 4 by picking up the small red squares floating downwards. The Frame (pink rectangle at the bottom left) is temporaty, has three levels and it fills up as you graze bullets or you collect the pink squares floating downwards. While the Frame is filled up and active (depletes over time), it will shield you from a miss and reset to zero, then, it will clear most of the bullets on screen. If the frame is not popped and runs out naturally, it will give you a fragment of a life or a bomb. You can go up to almost the top of the screen to pick up all the powerups on screen Characters - Reimu: Auto guided shot, best for beginners Marisa: Too fast, Loved by experts Sanae: Widespread shot and low damage. Good start if you need more movement precision Yomu: Harder to use but best damage Advice - 0 -Start Low and Go Slow, ignore those toxic postings that try to shame beginners, the best players, the grand master bullet dodging gods do you tube videos instead of judging others. I am working to post a cool video showcasing how some strong players that work harder than they should because there are things in the basic levels of play that they miss. 1 - Beat the game on Easy with every resource you have first. There is a certain amount of continues, 5 or 6 I think. Beating the game once on easy unlocks the training for whole stages and spells for that difficulty 2 - After training (specially stage 6) go for a 1CC on easy and while you are on it, you can check guides to get some trophies. After beating your first 1CC you'll unlock the replays, which are useful to analize your own strengths and weaknesses 3 - Go for a clear on Normal with continues next and notice how much more fun the game is with proper patterns. Some, while meatier, are strangely easier to dodge. Maybe the STG developers have a hard time butchering a well thought pattern XD 4 - This is it, time to go for your first 1CC on Normal. Since this game is long and you may loose your concentration quite easily, use bombs often and specially during patterns that fill up the screen (nothing worse than loosing a stock of 5 bombs to a stray bullet). That way your concentration muscle will keep fresh as a lettuce. The game has some uneven balance; level four is when the game starts being the most generous with extra lives just hang in there. 5- Congrats, you read all this piece of... err... I mean; Congrats! you unlocked the Extra Stage and are officially an above average player. Slim Glossary: 1CC = Finishing the game without using any continue Average player = super beginner baby in Danmaku terms Danmaku = Bullet Hell game Fan game = Game made in the likes of grandma Touhou by fan groups as well as licensed like this one. FDF fan games are in fact fully licensed for Arcadia EXA Frame = Temporary Shield that you can pop to clear bullets. It helps to increase the power-ups if it times out. Hurt = It means getting hit, a collision whether you loose a life or not. Lunatic = This is what the highest difficulty for the regular stages is called. Miss = You loose a life. Spell card = A boss stage. STG = Shooting game (Japanese abbreviation). A.K.A. difficult or bullet hell Cat Pitting Addictor = LOL! - According to AI, they might've meant to say like Cat petting adiction
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