Touhou 19 had so much potential to be one of the greatest games, but it got too rushed.
It's a very fun game and has many characters to play with and I'm enjoying it. It's sad because if only the game wasn't rushed it would have been amazing, because there are many positive things to talk about the game, but the negative aspects turn me off completely from considering buying it.
The OST's original tracks are very cool and I like them, but the rest is just rearrangements of old themes and most barely differ from the originals.
The pixel art is very cool, and the portraits are too.
The new character's designs range from really cool to meh. I like Hisami and Son Biten more than the rest.
Input delay is really good as always
Finally my controller's analog triggers work. So many games don't support these analog triggers
I can't talk about the story yet, because you progress through it as you play with each character, instead of each character being an isolated variant of the story.
Then we have the strong downsides of the game:
No score at all
No replays (wtf!!!!!)
No extra stage
Online is fucked
Some character portraits are worse than others, and generally all have the same energy to them, which doesn't help distinguishing character personalities
Unbalanced portions of the game depending on the context (for example fighting certain enemies in lunatic)
Some playable characters are very weak
Main game is the shortest ever, with every run lasting around 15 minutes
Versus mode takes forever for the enemy to get hit, feels very unfair
In story mode, the enemy doesn't get hit, you just have to clear the spellcards. This is fine, but it's weird considering it's supposed to be a versus game. Also in the same mode, the enemy live indication doesn't lower when you clear a spellcard and doesn't represent the amount of spellcards you need to clear either, so you don't know how many are left to clear unless you know from memory
This is the first Touhou game to crash on Linux when you alt-tab (if it's in fullscreen mode). I'm not sure if this happens on native Windows as well
The card mechanic is not necessary and doesn't need to be in this game. You won't care about the cards and you can't even pick the ones you want. It just feels forced
I assume the price increase to 14€ or whatever is due to zun hiring a pixel artist, but the game in its current state should not be this expensive. I hope zun patches it and improves it a little bit at least