Azure Reflections Reviews

Finished all the content on normal mode (have only managed to 1CC the extra stage with reimu so far and not anything else) and this game is a blast some of the boss attacks are a little annoying examples being nitoris none spells and remilias dracula cradle but otherwise everything feels really fun and rewarding to dodge the danamku rush if you know what your doing lets you practically skip some boss attacks which is a little bit of a downside but if you know what your doing you were gunna make it past anyway the accessories are pretty nice looking (but thank god your allowed to hide them if you want) and are also alot of fun to mess around with so far coming up with different builds to fit each characters strengths is a blast speaking of characters all 3 of them manage to feel unique with their own strengths and weaknesses OK adding onto my review and oh my god this games lunatic patterns are really good (apart from nitoris nons their somehow worse) TLDR: great game would recomend

Mostly just another EoSD centered fan game, but the gimmick of rushing was fun and the voice acting and flare given to battles helped elevate things a little bit. It was cute-- also you can play as Cirno which is always big ups for me.

My second Touhou game after Luna Nights. I don’t have experience in proper shmups, but this is either a bullet hell or a really hard bullet heaven. But, honestly, this game is underrated and I find many of the negative reviews ridiculous or flat out wrong. C’mon… some of the top rated negative reviews are from people who [i]haven’t even beaten the game on hard [b]let alone normal![/b][/i] This is a stellar arcade game with an albeit modest budget. I imagine a lot of people come into this game with a shmup mindset, and tried to limit themselves by not using the game’s systems. Release barrier and danmaku rush are sooo important for you to practice and master if you want to beat the game at higher difficulties. Certain spell cards or attacks are crippled with a well executed danmaku rush, and release barriers are crucial for avoiding messes or unavoidable walls of danmaku. At the same time, it’s fair to say that while the game does a good job of explaining how these systems work it doesn’t actually show you examples of how valuable they can be. I struggled on certain attacks until I watched a YouTube video that demonstrated how to properly use danmaku rush. Azure Reflections does a great job of capturing the charm of these characters. I loved the illustrations and 3D models for all of the characters, and there are some exceptional poses and animations. The VAs were also very good with Marisa’s being my favorite. The soundtrack is just good, but there are a couple of tracks that are standout including its rendition of Heartfelt Fancy. Finally, here’s a few other things: - Do NOT play this game at higher than 60 fps, because game speed is tied to fps. - Buy low price accessories to increase your equip slots, then purchase the accessories that make the game easier. Find a balance that works for you. - Menu text is messed up in the game with text being cropped out. You can understand what it has to say, but this is partly why I said the budget is lower. - Friendship ended with Sakuya, Satori is new best girl

The first touhou game I've found that has Satori-related stuff like a profile background. 100% Worth it, would buy again.

I adore this game, just to get that out of the way (this review also I might seem a little scattered, first steam review after all). It's a very well made game with very clear amounts of love and passion. The three main characters, 3 different shot types each, and the several types of accessories allow for lots of gameplay variance, and let you customize the experience to something much more enjoyable to you as well. The bosses and their patterns are also very fun to fight against and learn the patterns of, thanks to the game's mechanics. Danmaku Rush is very fun to learn and use to it's fullest capacity, allowing you to even one shot certain Spell Cards if you know when to use it. The music is also all fantastic in my opinion, with very well done and enjoyable mixes across the board, with the Satori Maiden ~ 3rd Eye mix being my favorite rendition of the theme. I also very much so appreciate the library section, which gives you full descriptions and bios on the characters, along with their relationships to the main characters and other minor details, such as some glimpses into their personalities. Character bios and bestiaries such as those are always worthy of extra brownie points for me, and especially in this case. Speaking of the characters, the characterization of all the characters is also very enjoyable, and their interactions were all enjoyable, and all seemed very in character to the main series. The choices for voice acting also seem to all fit their characters, and all of them sounded like they had a blast voicing their lines. Overall, Azure Reflections is a very fun shmup, with a lot of replayability to it's name, I managed to log in 50 hours and got every achievement, so I'd definitely say it's worth it's price tag, and is personally one of my favorite bullet hell Touhou games.

For the 3 hour i been played on this game, I would recommend you to try it because of the gameplay and mechanic in the game, It would be confuse at first but when you get used to it you will love the game while playing this game maybe you will thought of yourself that wanted to try touhou bullet hell for once.

An absolute blast. Well-balanced, fun twist on the basic touhou shmup conceit by adding bullet absorbtion as a defensive/offensive move. Maybe one of my favorite touhou games, actually.

pros: -Elaborate game mechanics -Great 3D and 2D art -Fantastic soundtrack -Very replayable and has rewards to encourage you to keep trying -Performance is excellent on my PC (GTX 1080, 4k 60fps) -Multiple difficulty levels to suit any player -3 playable characters with unique dialogue interactions with each boss -Voice acting is Japanese only but it's pretty good cons: -The background of the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th stages are the same, so it becomes a bit boring seeing the same blue void -Bats are annoying -Would have been nice to have English voice acting to understand what the characters were saying in battle when you don't have time to read the subtitles -Becomes easy when you unlock many accessories but if you want a challenge you could just not use them Overall it's a great purchase if you are into Touhou games, arguably better than the originals if you aren't a hardcore lunatic mode player and better than all the other fan games I have seen. Although if you've never played bullet hell games before I'd still recommend this to you. 8.5/10

---{Graphics}--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Phenomenal ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS Paint ---{Gameplay}--- ☐ So Satisfying ☑ Good ☐ It‘s just gameplay ☐ Meh ☐ Starring at walls is better ☐ Just don‘t ---{Audio}--- ☐ Magnificent ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ Just no ---{Audience}--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ---{PC Requirements}--- ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ☐ Rich ☐ Fast ☑ Decent ☐ Potato ☐ Check if you can run paint ---{Difficulty}--- ☐ Lunatic ☐ Difficult ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Easy ☐ Just press ‚A‘ ---{Grind}--- ☐ You‘ll need a second live ☐ Too much grind ☐ Average grind level ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks/100% gameplay ☐ Nothing to grind ---{Story}--- ☐ It‘ll replace your life ☐ Lovely ☑ Pretty Good ☐ Average ☐ Text or Audio floating around ☐ Story? ---{Game Time}--- ☐ To infinity and beyond ☐ Long ☑ Average ☐ Short ☐ You will finish homework faster ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ---{Price}--- ☐ Would gladly overpay the price ☐ Worth the price ☑ If u have some spare money left ☐ Its free! ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{Bugs}--- ☑ Never had any ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

Azure Reflections is one of those games that's very much a mixed bag. It has a number of cool ideas - the Danmaku Rush and emergency bombs, for instance, are both really neat and do change the flow of the game a fair bit. The stun mechanic's cool too, meaning you'll never get outright oneshot by stray bullets. The music is fantastic, the game is, generally speaking, visauly pleasing. The writing is entertaining, and the voice acting is decent. The stun mechanic is also neat and makes the game more forgiving - which it kind of sorely needs. The added gameplay features are also neat. I don't fully agree with the lore interpolations but they're there and a neat thing, plus giving more as you go through the difficulties is a nice touch. The accessories are also cool, and can give you an edge on higher difficulties if you aren't as good at the game, which is a nice touch. The supplemental model viewer etc is also neat. Music's mostly solid. It's not quite outright banger status for most of them, and the soundtrack does feel very 'safe', sounding about what you'd expect and taking no risks, but it's still enjoyable to listen to. As for the negatives: The game is kind of...I'm not exactly the best danmaku player out there, but I can at least normally handle these games on normal or hard, but this game is difficult for all the wrong reasons. The player characters all have a rather slow movement speed and the screen's more horizontal instead of vertical nature makes it a lot harder to dodge danmaku. The spell cards are - frankly, they suffer immensely from the horizontal layout of the screen, and while they certainly work from a "dodge the bullet" point of view, they are extremely repetitive, lackluster, and most bosses don't really live up to the source material. There's some cool patterns, to be fair, but not many. There are also a number of cheap shots as well, from high speed bullets and bullet rings you kind of have to know are coming. Graphically, whilst the game is pretty, it's also riddled with issues. The stage backgrounds are - half of them are reasonably good and outright pretty at times? The other half are - all this very boring, vapid "strange space" background that the game re-uses for half of the stages on any given run. Visual acuity is also a problem. The hitbox indicators aren't really visually distinct enough from the characters, and it can be at times difficult to see where enemies are on the screen. Finally, bosses have this unskippable cutscene mid fight after their first spell, and while it's neat at times it gets to be a bit annoying on subsequent playthroughs. Additionally, there are issues with the player characters. The game gives them to you one at a time for game clears, but the game does nothing with this, telling each story as a standalone more or less, meaning there's no real reason to start with them locked. They're also not terribly diverse - the shot types feel extremely samey and none of them are standouts. There are other distinctions but none of them felt terribly compelling to me, with the only real difference that was notable being movement speed. The game is also - on one hand, one of the core motifs is "EoSD was great and all but we have to move on" (and yet this game was written in 2012...), but the game falls prey to many of the game's same issues. It bars you out of *two* stages if you dare to use a continue before Sakuya, it has too many impossible to react to cheap shots that you have to know are coming, and while it makes a piecemeal attempt to include bosses from other games, they're the ones that get the prior mentioned lazy strange space background and generally serve to dilute the game's mood if anything, feeling fairly tacked on. It's by no means a *bad* game, but given the title's numerous shortcomings and high asking price when there are numerous other high quality Touhou, Shumps, and Touhou Shumps on steam right now in English, I'd wait for at least a 30% off sale, as this game is more reasonable at 15-18 dollars or below as opposed to 25. Unfortunately due to steam's binary yes/no rating system I'll have to give it a thumbs down, as it simply is not worth the full asking price in this day and age.