Besides the obvious "I would not have given green light to that game to begin with"...
The game has been up for almost three years (counting the original server), and there seems to be no sign it will die soon. Which is a paradox, given the fate of the previous Touhou mobile games (Cannonball and DanKagu). However, for as long as LostWord has been up, especially after getting a global server, there have been numerous complains about the nature of this mobile game and the way it has been run. And there are some who just deny the entire existence of this game/don;t want to recognize it as part of the Touhou community as a whole.
Even one of my original threads at the Shrine was one in which I was criticizing LW and the shortcomings of its systems. Only for afterwards to turn the thread into the news roundup, which lasted until January 2023. I am sorry for not having updated the news ever since, I just feel like I lost the whole drive to do that. Everything is quite stale, and outside the release of the next arc in the Beach Episode Chapter 4, there has been nothing significant going on, or worth mentioning. Therefore, the need for a fresh approach, one that can actually turn into something constructive.
Here are some of my opinions on shortcomings. To be fair, I do not really have a solution for them, as much as I would like to think of one - especially when it comes to making the game profitable:
the very nature of LostWord being a gacha game; we all know too well how predatory gacha tactics are
the story, somewhat coherent until the first half of Chapter 3, is going off the rails in the second half of that chapter and stays so ever since in terms of coherence
being a gacha game, the story can be extended indefinitely, just so you could milk the series for more money and add new OCs based on the original 2hus
the very premise of the game (having a self-insert isekai protagonist who gains the trust and affection of the 2hus) and the OC (funny how the OC is a woman - not complaining about that) is way too close to other games of the kind, best examples in my mind being Azur Lane and Kantai Collection
the characters are also quite shallow, relying a lot of fanon personalities and canon stuff being randomly thrown around just to look smart in a trivia section
speaking of which, I have not fully checked it yet, but LW seems to be quite close to being just a clone of Azur Lane, just that with a Touhou skin and slightly less horny
Fantasy Rebirth (marriage under another name) seems to also be inspired from games like AL; it is not the first Touhou fangame that introduced the concept (as far as I am aware, it existed even in older, more appreciated games like Fantasy Maiden Wars with the "wife" mechanic), but it becomes a little bit questionable at points - overall not my cup of tea, but some costumes do look cute
the game system, even if having an interesting premise on the use of elements, eventually ends up in one of the two - either you just "Auto-Play"/"Auto-Replay" because of boy, THE GRIND NEVER ENDS, or ends up in the creation of new, stronger units for stupidly hard challenges
and on the same line, since we have a gacha, you always need to push out new content; and that is not not an easy task, given this game is an adaptation of an already established series, you can pull just that many characters from ZUN's collection until you run out of them; also not to speak about power-creep...
the game...just became boring; after almost 2 years of daily checking it out, I am not longer feeling too much excitement; it's more like a chore than anything else
And probably one of the worst parts, despite being mostly a repeat of the first point, is that this is a gacha game. However, there are other problems. If it was not a gacha game, how would you have ensured the survival of the game? It eats a lot of money to be maintained, and you need a constant flow of cash to keep it going. From the stats I have seen, the situation is not really that hot, at least in terms of global server.
This is the revenue situation of the game. Even with all the gacha tactics and that, it seems to be mostly in the red through last year on Global (or at least the JP players are more willing to invest money). If this game was not a gacha, I am afraid it would not have gone past the first year, and would have never come outside Japan. It is also scary to think that if a game is not a gacha, the "mobile game" industry will not provide too much revenue on that project. Some of the stats I have seen recently show that mobile games earn more income than PC and console COMBINED. And that some gacha games can earn in the tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a single year. Therefore, I am not sure how could this game be better executed.
And this is where YOU guys come in. And for that, I am launching the following question: what do you think are the greatest shortcomings of Touhou LostWord, and how would you you have created/developed this game if you were in charge of the development team?