Touhou Lensed Night Sky, Kaseigai

Utterly beautiful piece of art. This games story will stick with me for a long time. Alongside a beautiful ost and artstyle, and crazy fun shmup gameplay. Please please play this. Even if you're not into touhou or shmups, give it a shot. This deserves to be experienced by as many people as possible.

AEON, ANU. YOU GUYS TRICKED ME INTO [spoiler]READING A HIFUU FANFIC[/spoiler] YOU TWO WILL SERIOUSLY PAY FOR MAKING THIS GAME AND MAKING ME CRY

Touhou fangames are such a fierce competition when it comes to quality games (they often surpass games outside of the Touhou sphere), and Lensed Night Sky proves itself among the best I've played. The soundtrack is awesome, the gameplay is fun (I love roguelikes and the standard danmaku experience, so this is right up my alley), and the story is very intriguing. I especially love the Visual Novel elements it has, they were written really well! I think it does great at having a gripping story even if a person does not really know Touhou (though obviously knowing the characters at least up to the ones you can play as is a good baseline). As of writing this, I have only beat the game on one character (Sumireko), so I don't think I have even seen the entire story (I am very interested to see how it goes). One thing I've seen people complain about are the difficult patterns, but I think for a roguelike it makes a lot of sense to make it very hard to win, otherwise the items serve little purpose. Luck of the draw is a vital element for this (I did play on normal though, so I can't speak for hard or lunatic). There are also a bunch of modifiers that keep it fresh, not to mention the plet…

Honestly I feel like I've been putting off this review for way too long now. I've played this game before the 1.0 update, and it was really cool, especially the later stages. The soundtrack was also quite good (especially in the later stages). The game had a lot of replayability and gave various ways to make the engine's life a living bullet-generating hell. I was really curious about what they were cooking up for the big update. And then it hit, and I was extremely amazed at how much it rose to new heights. The soundtrack slapped, the lore and dialogues were deep and enjoyable, a lot of the already existing content was reworked, and other secrets were laid out for the player to discover. This is one of the best touhou fangames I've played, and it made me want to 100% the game no matter what.

I did not expect the game to go this hard, touhou fangames never disapoint but this might just be one of my favorite games. The gamplay, story, OST and characters just work perfectly together to make a really memorable experience. RIP Murasa

I have once again been humbled by a lunarian.