if you dont know what that is, its a bullet hell thats very similar to touhou where it takes place in mugenri, which i would say is sort of the len'en version of gensokyo. you can generally play as yabusame or tsubakura, which were brought to mugenri to become the priests of senri shrine because the original priest of the shrine (tsurubami) is on vacation for the outside world.
i have seen all sorts of opinions on it (in youtube comment sections, at least) and it goes from people saying its amazing and even better than touhou, to people calling it a shameless rip off. i think the general opinion though is that its pretty good.
however, i havent seen one person even mention len'en until now, so if you have played it, what did you think? did you like it?
my personal opinion is that i did like it. it has great characters, great story, great music, and even bullet hell patterns were fun. i think len'en and touhou both have things that they do better at each other with. while touhou is a bit more "clean" and overall has neater gameplay than len'en, i like len'en better in story since it seems to have more of 1 flowing story through the games while touhou has more chopped short stories of incidents that happen in gensokyo. of course, sometimes theres the games where certain things happen because of events from previous games, but the thing is generally you can start pretty much anywhere in touhou and you can still understand the story in game, which is nice and all, but i guess i just like it more where it revolves around one big story. of course, they all have their little incidents like touhou, but those incidents still add and affect the story in the end, which is why its not the greatest idea to not go with the games in order. if you have never tried len'en, i would reccomend it : )
i LOVE the games called Len'en, I had so much fun playing back in the day with Evanescent Existence, and Miraculous Earthen Sword back in the day, but before I can play with Reactivate Majestic Imperial, and the one called Brilliant Pagoda or Haze Castle, I would have to solve problem of
Connecting Chain Handserif.ttf font from english patch is too wide when playing in WINE, which drove me crazy for 10+ hours and longer that I could not figure out how to fix this issue or otherwise just make entire virtual machine for Len'en. in any case, I'll list out top 10 reasons why Lene'n is awesome, so keep reading and we'll find out why Len'en is such a great game series created by JynX back in September 12th, 2013.
1. Len'en is great because it has difficulties for every single skill level, ranging from light level + easy mode created for little babies who can barely reach the keyboard to basec level + unreal mode only 1ccable by the most hardcore cave dodonpachi shmup superplayers, which trait even extends, to extra stage where we get 3 different difficulty levels called easy extra mode, extra mode, and absurdly extra mode only obtained by unreal 1cc, which is so cool because those who are bad at the game will experience the plot and those who are super good will have the bets challenge ever.
2. this is a great series because plot is awesome, which you metnioned and so i won't summary it here, thats nuff said so that's point #2.
3. Lene'n has some of the best music out there, with iconic and groovy tracks for each stage and for each characters boss music, and it can easily said that this music is fully in par with touhou music composed by Junya Ota aka ZUN, even though JynX is more amateur he created some of the greatest OSTs in the video game industry to date. I currently especially love theme of tsurubami senri called is eternal dance engine, and other ones all sound so good, it's all so catchy and great for listening to whhile you're playing the game.
4. Peak grimdark atmosphere. Len'en has such a good atmosphere and aesthetic, because rather than super hyperchromatic saturated like lots of shmup especially touhou, there is a grim edgy darkcore aesthetic with lots of unsaturated colors, and lower in value a lot of the time tending towards black. which makes the bright parts and colorful feel so much even more radiant by comparison, it's a masterpiece and a beautiful color palette, and atmospheric environmental worldbuilding.
5,. another reason that Len'en is the best game of all time is reason of
gameplay design. when you are playing the game mechanics and etc. are always so creative, and work together such a fun, super ultra fun experience. with custom engine created using advanced DirectX framework, this game has very good feeling movement of the player character on the screen, and good convenience like holding down in slow-mode makes the items such as point items and power items gravitate towards you, led to interesting moments like when jaimers91 kited 1up so he could strategically use it for getting screen clear at Wilhelm von Clausewitz Halcyon HISUIMARU's first spell card. other features have been mentioned such as flashbombs mechanic, and even more super complex and deep features in the game BPoHC (Brilliant Pagoda or Haze Castle), which is proves that JynX is genius which is always innovating creatively instead of same old formula again and again and again .
6. The Len'en game series is totally awesome because it's more obscure. this might seem strange but justification is: you will not get tired of Len'en as easily because you are not seeing at real life, and all over social media, all the time every day, like with touhou and etc. so that way it feels more special and interesting, like a secret club of really awesome.
7. Len'en is known for great character designs, which all look so unique, but not with anything dumb like crappy deviantart OCs, it's totally following all the best practices and wisdom when it comes to designing the looks and personalities of iconic and belovable characters. This is from inspiration by touhou project game series created by ZUN aka Jun'ya Ota back in 1996, examples are traits like: really interesting clothing, connection to folklore concepts and the like, and music track reflects the personality of said character. All-in-all, these are great characters for making fanart of them and more, but there's a unique trait i didn't mention and let's talk about that in reason #8.
8. Super unique trait about series called Len'en is that all of the characters is not having a genders. which is so great because its like, the characters who are protagonist in video games undertale and deltarune by video game creator name is Toby Fox, for reason of letting player self-insert gender or whatever. but Jynx is taking it to the next level in his hit series Len'en by making all characters this way, ambiguous in is this a boy or it's a girl, so that even moreso everybody is letting have headcanon about this one is boy and this one is girl and other stuff like that. this is makes my favorite series a.k.a Len'en an interesting and unique contrast from inspiration series which is called touhou project: in that one all characters was girls monogender series, now its this one who took inspiration from the previous series is making it so all characters is ambiguous, which is so different.
9. The games is free and availabilty and accessibilty, JynX is great and friendly towards his fanbase by giving away video games for free which is like an awesome Christmas came early present gift. This makes it so much easier for more to play because they won't have to figure out moriyashrine.org is a trustworthy source of piracy, and over come there brainwashing mental barriers about doing that in the first place. and it's all made available on free game download website, its so good considering that steam is monopoly spyware program designed to restrict users rights and other nefarious anti-FSF activities. but even furthermore Jynx has friendly for westerners, that he patched and fixed his games up so it was more easy for translators to make translations of them into their native languages, that's a really good deed unlike other game which is kind of similar called Touhou has a lawyer guy called Ruw who comes after your ass with DMCA takedown, and it's hard to get officially any game and you have to use crazy dynamic binary injection patches called
THCRAP to play on english anyways.
10. Yet another good thing about Len'en is artwork, all the art is so good created in anime-like style and as I mentioned it has edgy desaturated color choices, and all of the brushes used look really nice that the art looks VERY good. All the characters artworks, backgrounds, title screen and more look super pretty and were crafted with love and best.
That's all well and amazing, but we have to remember also about reasons Lene'n its not actually that good, such as being associated with really cringy vtubers i can't stand this high-pitched voice please please please get it out of my ears i don't want to hear that anymore, as well as problem of Jynx wasted shitload of time i.e. 7 years creating some crappy gacha mobile game that never even had success and you cant understand what it says instead of making more actually good games, and Unity 3d game that he is working doesn't look like its going to better but lets hope it is. but yes, i love Len'en because it's my life to play Len'en games in my freetime and i think this series is one of the greatest in human history
