Touhou 19: Juuouen - Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost [Trial] 0.01a & 0.02a(Patch)

Characters/balancing
Reimu
- Easily the hardest opponent to play against. She can create undodgable walls due to there being no noticable cap on yin-yang orbs
- Surprisingly strong Charge Attack
- Super-broken Level 2 (both offensively and defensively) - makes her the best character to play

Marisa
- Very strong Charge Attack
- Has to fight Reimu in Stage 3, which makes clearing with Marisa surprisingly hard
- When fighting against her, her lasers form fast and her spell pattern can be quite troublesome

Aunn        
- Very weak charge attack
- Unfocus pointblanking is somewhat strong when coupled with bombs

Seiran
- High movespeed which is useful
- High damage output with basic shot and Charge Attack, especially when pointblanking
- Almost on par with Reimu in terms of difficulty when fighting against her. Her EX Attack summon is very dense. When you fight her in Stage 3, her triangle pattern (nonspell) is insanely fast and wide - misdirecting is at times not possible to do when there's too much on screen to maneuver through.

Nazrin        
- Insanely slow focus speed (by my estimation almost 4x slower than unfocused speed)
- A bomb that's really bad when there's alot of stuff on screen because it homes in on the closest target instead of the boss
- The scope also tracks nearby targets which can be unreliable and can sometimes get you killed when not expecting a projectile to slow down/speed up

tl:dr - playing as Aunn and Nazrin makes the game hard, the others are strong. Reimu, Seiran and Marisa are the hardest to fight against (in that order) but Nazrin and Aunn are much easier. The difference between easy and hard opponents doesn't appear balanced though.

Difficulty
The game mixes the density of PoFV and some of the fast bullets from PoDD. This game in it's current state in terms of dodging is among the hardest official games. You can totally die (effectively Game Over) on the first stage. I've also had some situations against Reimu where I got completely walled and against Seiran the patterns got so dense that I could only get through with alot of luck. This is like PoDD Shitstorms except in this game they can be hurricanes. I personally appreciate this high difficulty in the earlygame as earlygames are often too boring to want to replay through after alot of resets.

Visual design
This is easily the cutest ZUN game that is a shmup. The sprite design is top tier. Very expressive, cute and alive! All sprites are updated and while I don't find that a dealbreaker if it didn't happen, seeing something that's so much better than the outdated blurry sprites definitely improves my impression of the game and experience. ZUN should let others make art for him more often and for that matter let more people playtest and suggest ways to polish the game.

Music
Catchy and good as always. It is also nice that ZUN decided to not blatantly recycle existing themes this time.

Technicalities

• There are no reversals like in PoDD and PoFV. This means bosses have to be killed through shooting, which I'm somewhat mixed about as it can become very difficult to recover from mistakes during a boss pattern, but at the same time you do end up taking (non)spells more seriously.
• UDoALG's custom.exe doesn't function because it tries to assign changes to th19.cfg instead of th19tr.cfg.
• There are no replays. I don't expect these to be there in the full game and thus people are required to record/stream, possibly under worse conditions because fullscreen gives me consistent slowdown everywhere. Alot of people aren't gonna wanna deal with that.
• For me recording the game (and just having OBS open at all) in fullscreen slows down the game to 45-58 FPS. In Windowed this became 57-60. Playable but unstable framerate. 100BM performed identically.
• Sometimes the game will freeze and close itself during loadscreens. This happened by far the most when playing Reimu (95% chance after quitting out of an attempt)
• There's no netplay. It would be disasterous for the game if this feature isn't present (in a reliable state) in the full game as that would kill most of the incentive to replay the game alot.
• There's no scoring. This would also kill alot of the replay value given the potential that shows itself when playing as Reimu in particular, but I think netplay is much more important. That also means there are no Spell Points.