YMMV / Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom

• Common Knowledge: It's often believed by fans that Clownpiece's American flag-based outfit is meant to be a symbol of spite towards the Lunarians, provoking their hatred towards the Apollo mission. Literally nowhere in the game or omake is this stated, and Word of God is just that Clownpiece based her clothes off the flag because she liked the design.
• Contested Sequel: Some fans appreciate the addition of Pointdevice Mode, but others point out that ZUN seems to have used this as an excuse to create over-the-top enemy attacks.
• Difficulty Spike: Clownpiece can be considered the hardest part of the game, and you've got a fair amount of game left.
• Fan Nickname: The penultimate chapter before the boss in Stage 6 is commonly known as "Rain", due to the streams of blue bullets racing downwards looking like falling raindrops.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Sanae. She has a mix of her UFO shot types (Cobalt Spread unfocused, Sky Serpent focused, Wily Toad as bomb). Her unfocused shot has wide spread and her focused shot homes to the first enemy it sees, both which raze stage portions and are good against bosses while focusing more dodging and less on hitting the enemy. Her bomb has good duration and damage, but more importantly, it doesn't do damage right away and it has some set up time in which Sanae is invulnerable and can jump directly into the enemy danmaku, allowing her to easily get more than the 200 graze required to get life pieces.
  • Reisen. Her bomb casts a shield that negates the next three hits, which makes it relatively safe to throw out, even when considering that your hitbox gets larger while the shields are up. It does get smaller as you lose your shields, with it being almost the size of your normal hitbox when you're on your last shield. The shields also increase your grazing radius, making it easier to meet your quota for each chapter's life fragment. And she has piercing shots when focused, which are handy for a few stage sections and make Lunatic Impact slightly more bearable, as the moons can't entirely block your shots.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: Even amongst series veterans, this game is decried for being far too difficult, especially on Legacy Mode when the patterns are balanced for Pointdevice Mode. Perhaps an example of Be Careful What You Wish For, as many fans feel that the previous game, Double Dealing Character, is easier than the games that come before it.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Though it's more the game's fault than the characters'. Reimu and Marisa have their traditional shots and bombs, which aren't bad, but with a game as unforgiving as this, most people are reluctant to play Legacy Mode with anything other than Game-Breaker characters Sanae and Reisen.
• Magnificent Bastard: Junko is the true mastermind behind the Lunarians' sudden relocation from the Moon, kickstarting the game's plot. A Divine Spirit with the ability to purify anything, Junko is out for revenge after her son's death, enlisting the help of a Hell goddess to end the Lunarian hegemony and strike her target when the latter is left undefended. Junko's cunning shines when she empowers Hecatia's lowly mooks into beings of pure lifeforce to make them completely immune against the Lunarians' weapons, forcing them to abandon their Capital. Junko then has Hecatia trap the retreating Lunarians in the Dream World, forcing them to consider terraforming Gensokyo, which would entail the complete eradication of life on Earth. Her plan only falls apart when the Lunarians take no direct action against her for half a year, which eventually dissipates her anger and interest. At the end of the Extra Stage, she releases the Lunarians from the Dream World at the heroines' behest so that Gensokyo stays safe from annihilation. Even then, she muses that there'll be plenty of future opportunities to get at her mark, such is the eternal cycle of revenge.
• Memetic Mutation: Many fans joke that ZUN made this game notoriously difficult on purpose because players were complaining that the previous two games were too easy, leading to this viral pun on the game's acronym:
  Fans: Come on, ZUN, give us a harder game!
  ZUN: lol, k.
• Nintendo Hard: This game is infamous for its deliberate, notorious difficulty even by Touhou standards, and with good reason. Life fragments are earned by meeting a quota of defeated enemies and grazed bullets, bullet patterns are very complex and run the gamut from "pretty difficult" to "obnoxiously difficult" to "flat-out unfair" and even the Stage 1 boss can catch unprepared players off-guard, while the Stage 2 boss is a legitimate threat to even a prepared player. And it goes From Bad to Worse in the Extra Stage, where there is no Pointdevice Mode and lives cost 5 fragments instead of 3.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Pointdevice Mode has one glaring flaw: when a player resets to a check point, they lose one point of power out of 400 possible (shown ingame as 1.00 to 4.00). Since the reset most likely will be due to getting killed by yet another boss and the power being based on full hundreds of points, getting a reset will cause the 4.00 (max) to drop to 3.99 or less, which in turn means losing one attack orb and thus losing a staggering 25% of damage output, making the next attempt to finish the phase in question just that much harder, especially boss fights, where they are needed by far the most. Ironically, Mountain of Faith's power system would have solved this problem: power levels in that game go up to 5.00, with level 5.00 acting as a buffer (it does not increase power over 4.00).
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: It's almost as if ZUN put "Lunatic" in the title as a warning, as this game's patterns are notoriously hard even by Touhou standards, necessitating the addition of Pointdevice Mode that allows infinite retries. It doesn't help that the previous game, Double Dealing Character, is regarded as one of the easiest in the series.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Given the unusually hard bullet patterns and the use of Checkpoints, this is basically I Wanna Be the Guy as a Vertical Scrolling Shooter.
• That One Attack: This is considered one of the franchise's toughest games. Therefore, it sharing a page with the series' other entries is inevitable.
• That One Boss: Unsurprisingly for what's arguably the hardest game in this franchise, it shares a page with the rest of the series.

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