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- Broken Base:
- Some fans like this game for its ice mechanic, thinking it's a fun and interesting spin on the danmaku genre and gives the game a lot of personality. Others find the ice mechanic unwieldy and uncomfortable, and/or feel it takes away too much from basic danmaku gameplay.
- Having to complete all six routes to unlock the Extra Stage helps avoid players feeling like they don't get enough playtime out of the game, and many fans are okay with this as it encourages you to polish your skills before you try your hand at the Extra Stage, but others feel like going through all routes gets exhausting or boring and starts to make the game feel a bit padded out.
- Fridge Brilliance: The Extra Stage theme is called "Loose Rain". This doesn't seem to mean much at first, but then Marisa turns out to be the boss, and you remember her surname, Kirisame (霧雨), means "drizzle".
- It Was His Sled: Many people learn that Marisa is the Extra Boss long before they even touch this game.
- More Popular Spin-Off: This is a tie-in game to the Touhou Sangetsusei manga, but many more fans have played and are familiar with this game than have read and are familiar with the manga. A few even mistakenly believe the Three Fairies of Light were introduced in this game, albeit those tend to be newer fans who don't take very long to find out about the manga's existence.
- Surprise Difficulty: This game is very light-hearted even for Touhou's Duels Decide Everything standards (with the titular "war" being more of an overblown argument), and unlike other official Touhou shmups, character art was drawn by Makoto Hirasakanote instead of by ZUN himself, giving all the major characters a more Moe look. This is also one of the games that demands you get familiar with how its gimmick works (yet having no practice mode like the mainline Windows games do, requiring one to rely on external tools): freezing bullets not only makes bullets harmless and deals damage to enemies, but using it offensively fills up motivation far faster than just shooting down enemies, is your only real source of bombs (as dying simply increases the bomb gauge by a quarter, far less than in most other games), and even increases the power of your shot! While it does smoothen out at higher level of play, especially given its short length (it's about half as long as average entry), it does have quite the barrier of entry, given that the gimmick is absolutely essential for survival (in contrast to something like the UFOs in Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object, which while obviously very helpful, can still be completely ignored as part of a Self-Imposed Challenge), and your usual character choice is replaced by Story Branching - something not done since the very first game - so what you see is what you get (in contrast to something like Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom, where each character having a different amount of bombs grants them vastly different mistake allowance).
