Touhou Endless Dream

Touhou Endless Dream is yet another Touhou fangame. It's still a bullet hell, but this time it's a twin-stick shooter roguelike. You collect items which give you passive power-ups, which is the main source of increasing your power. There are also two slots for active items, and a few slots for consumables, mostly for healing. There's some shops, meta-progression, and interestingly, the ability to play multiple characters at once by switching between them on the fly. I didn't make it far enough to determine whether there was any benefit to having more than one character though, as stacking your items on one character seems more powerful.

The game is very simple on the art and animation front, with enemies being on the level of art that I myself could make, though characters and backgrounds were slightly better. Animations are mostly just the sprites bobbing about. There's nothing particularly fancy about the gameplay, but there haven't been enough incremental roguelikes for me to be tired of something as basic as this yet. So I was having fun for about an hour, but more and more I noticed that despite setting the language to English, I was getting Chinese text. It wasn't that big of a problem with character dialogue, but after item descriptions turned Chinese, there was a real functional issue. Looking around, it seems the game's English localization was never finished. As much as I'd like to ignore it, it's really quite impossible to understand certain aspects of what I'm doing if I can't read.

I don't see this as a major loss. Even if the game had a good English translation, then the quality was not really high enough for me to be actually interested in the game. Sure, I imagine I would have played at least another couple of hours, but I have my doubts if I would have recommended it regardless. There were definitely some issues with how certain items worked, how much time I had to read, visual clarity (which matters a lot in a bullet hell game), and polish all around. But ultimately, if you can't read Chinese, you can't experience the entire game anyways, so it doesn't matter.