kobito

I never really played these games for the story or characters so I can only comment on the gameplay, but I personally think WBaWC is probably the worst Touhou game in that regard. The bosses are fine enough and have some neat patterns (though nonspell variety is lacking and the fights can generally drag on a tad), but I find its stages quite bad. Every enemy feels like it has 50% more health than it should, the pacing is a bit slow compared to prior games (IN and UFO being good examples imo) and most of the enemy waves are extremely bland. Stage 3 is literally nothing but aimed bullets aside from like 2 sections where you just hang out in the bottom middle and don't even have to move, stage 4 has a bunch of sections with nothing but yin-yangs spewing completely random bullets, stage 5 has the green kunai fairies where you just tap a single direction slowly for like 20 seconds (lots of sections where you do nothing but dodge basic aimed bullets, actually) etc. I really don't find much to like about them. You could argue that the high enemy HP is justified because of the hypers but I think they just shouldn't be as broken as they are. You either melt everything super quick or enemies take forever to die, there's no real sweet spot. Most games with hypers balance enemy health around your base damage for good reason, it's how you spend most of the game after all. The spirits themselves are kind of an underwhelming mechanic, too. I remember seeing a lot of people saying that they're a good improvement over how UFO handled them and while they're not as frustrating due to you always getting something after every 5 spirits, they also lack any of the depth the UFOs had. Picking a spirit at the start is kinda neat with how you can choose to prioritize focused/unfocused shots or bombs, but since your chosen spirit also significantly boosts the duration for hypers of the same type, you have absolutely zero reason to pick up anything else. Just grab whatever spirit you picked at the start and collect all the item spirits once you have a hyper going. The resource system is also super bland. You kill enemies and some of them give you life/bomb pieces, that's it. You have no reason to get the item spirits if you don't have a hyper going, since it only gives you the reward after the hyper ends instead of the moment you pick it up and it cuts down on the hyper's duration. TD had a similar system in that you just get resources from certain enemies, but at least you could squeeze out more life/bomb pieces by using trance at the right times, and there were a handful of sections where killing enemies quickly was rewarded with additional enemies that carry pink/green spirits to make it more dynamic (not to mention the spirit trains in stage 6, which I thought were super fun to pick apart). The hidden spirits are admittedly a cool addition that makes gaining resources a bit more interesting but they're usually too inconvenient to go for when playing for a 1cc to be worth the effort. And of course there's the visibility, which can get pretty garbage in spots. The powered-up and especially the hyper shots often blend in with bullets that already often have similar colors to the background. I don't mean to exaggerate and say it's bad all the time or anything but for being the 17th mainline game (or honestly, just being a shmup released in 2019), it's really not good. For veteran players, there's even more issues that pop up. I don't think the game being relatively easy is a bad thing, but for anyone interested in no-hyper runs, I can see the random token movement being annoying, and for anyone interested in scoring...well, the game's been counterstopped (maxing out the score at 9,999,999,990), so if it wasn't for fan-made patches to fix it, that would be a pretty huge issue (not that I think the game itself should be excused because fans fixed this problem). So yeah. Strictly looking it as a shmup, I don't think WBaWC is very well-designed. I can't say how well it stacks up as a Touhou game with the characters, lore and music taken into account (though I do like the music a good bit like basically every other Touhou game even if I'm not the biggest fan of the instrumentation), but I personally don't find it very fun to play at all.