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SoEW is another one I'm not too fond of.

This is the first touhou game to actually be a bullet hell shmup, and boy does it show.

The hit boxes in this game are really weird, it's hard to explain. Reimu's overall hit box seems much bigger than in later games, and a certain bullet type in Mima's last phase has a hit box that's larger than the sprite itself, resulting in quality meme deaths.

There's also no focus in this game, so prepare for a bunch of unfocused dodging. Thankfully, this game doesn't have a lot of complex bullet patterns, so focus isn't too necessary for this game anyway. This game is also pretty abundant in resources, making it fairly easy to clear.

On Lunatic exclusively, there's this gimmick that every enemy you kill will fire aimed bullets back at you immediately upon death. It's kind of annoying but nothing you can't handle.

Stage 1 is your standard stage 1 with nothing too difficult. Rika is an easy boss too, nothing to worry about here.

Stage 2 is where the whole suicide gimmick starts to get annoying, but other than that, it's still pretty tame. Meira is an annoying boss and probably one of my least fav fights in all of touhou, that's all I need to say.

Stage 3 introduces these enemies that you can't kill, and only serve as obstacles. They also block your shot, which is irritating. Other than that, just watch out for aimed stuff, as always. The Five Magic Stones are my favourite part about this game, I LOVE this fight. It's energetic, fair (except for the random lasers at times, meh), challenging, and fun. I always look forward to fighting them.

Stage 4 is a bunch of annoying streaming that can wall you real quick if you don't have a route (which I didn't). The mid boss of this stage is a huge pain, and not only that, but she appears twice! Marisa makes her debut in this game, rocking red hair and a purple getup, cool stuff. Marisa's fight is kind of luck based, she has a bunch of attacks that she can use in any random order and you just have to pray she doesn't do the hard ones. Also, she has these spinning orbs around her at times. When they're around her, you can't damage her, you'll have to break them or wait for them to explode by themselves. The fight went alright this time around though so that's good.

Stage 5 isn't too hard, if you don't need power then don't shoot and hang out on the right side of the screen. Mima is a weird final boss as a lot of her fight is either static, or can be abused in some way. Of course, I barely play this game, so I didn't really remember her attacks, and as a result, couldn't cheese stuff which also resulted in some deaths. Thankfully, she drops resources during the fight for some reason. Her final phase is a meme, have fun.

And that's SoEW, no stage 6, which is weird. The game really isn't too hard to 1cc, so it isn't all that frustrating, but I just don't find it all that fun to play. It did pave the way for future bullet hell games in the series though, so I guess I can respect it for that,