The second of the fan-made Touhou games I gave a try to was The Disappearing of Gensokyo. It was somewhat similar to the last one I played in that it's kind of like an action-RPG combined with a bullet hell game, except that here you're also shooting at the enemy instead of mostly using short-range attacks. So it's actually just like a regular bullet hell game, except it's not top-down, and you move around the levels on your own instead of just having it all scroll past.
To jump straight to my opinion - I don't think it was a conceptually bad game. There wasn't any single huge problem that drove me away but rather it was the combination of lots and lots of smaller problems and a general lack of polish. I'd highlight some of these issues and explore some of what the game offered in the progress.
To start off with something minor, I noticed the translation wasn't exactly stellar. Some mismatching pickup descriptions aside, it didn't bother me. A more annoying aspect relating to text was that half the story was given as dialogue right in the middle of the action. I missed that half because I couldn't look away from the game to read the dialogue. No one could. Some voice acting would've worked here, but alas, there was none.
Continuing on the topic of bad text or the lack of it - there were a bunch of different characters with 2 attacks, a bomb, and a dash each. These were varied and enjoyable (some characters were maybe definitely better than others, but with the ammo system forcing you to swap, that was mostly okay), but there was no description of what their abilities did or how strong they were. Sure, through trial and error I noticed some attacks had stuns or slowing effects, and some maybe had more damage in exchange for their poor range, or that some dashes were longer but slower, but it was all guesswork.
The upgrade UI was terrible, giving almost no feedback or hint as to what upgrades were selected, bought, or how to even buy them. (Double click to buy, BTW.)
From the gameplay side, the first thing I noticed was that there weren't enough checkpoints. The easy parts of the game that I didn't feel like playing over and over took most of my time as I failed some difficult part later on. Could've just turned down the difficulty, but I enjoyed overcoming a difficult fight. Some games justify this repetition by forcing you to ration better, saving your consumables, health, or whatever for the difficult parts - do better in the easy parts and the hard parts will be easier. Not this game. You have one recharging health bar and enough ammo and bombs, so you're always topped up between encounters. There's almost no reason to put the checkpoints so far from each other.
What else... There was an escort mission with an escortee who liked to run in and die. That was a good design choice, for sure. Also leaving the main character with no long-range attacks in a game were getting close could mean an instadeath. None of the characters really had a sufficient attack range like the enemies did. Maybe if dashing made you invulnerable and was available more often it could be considered some high-skill element, but it wasn't. Oh, and half the bosses I fought glitched out after death causing me to re-do the level from the beginning. Also not fun.
Saving the worst for last: The camera angle. Instead of top-down, it was tilted about 30 degrees, and ho-boy was that a burden. Couldn't see to the south of me - any ranged or dashing attacks, while properly telegraphed, were just outside my field of view, yet could reach me. That's bad. Nothing you can't see should be able to hit you faster than you can react. Further, any projectiles coming from the sides were inconsistently placed in the air. I couldn't tell where exactly my hitbox was and where I should stand for the projectiles not to hit me. Some seemed to hit my head, some my legs... Only when the enemy was to my north was the game like a proper bullet hell.
Phew, quite a long post this one, but I believe I was thorough. So yeah, as I said, it was mostly the combination of all these little design problems that caused the game to ultimately be unlikable. Better UI and a top-down view would have made this a much, much better game, but as it stands, I can't recommend it.
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