I'm getting worn out practicing for a full perfect 1cc lol, so high time I said my piece while I take a break.
The UFO-like collection system still triggers my PTSD from that game to some extent, and the tokens feel just as intrusive as before, especially with how friggin' many there are now. The good news is it's not that hard in practice to avoid picking up 3 of the same beast token if you really don't want to use the actual hyper shots; "neutral hypers only" seems like the most logical "third condition" for survival runs of this game. Having said that, I personally find the hypers themselves to be much more enjoyable to play with compared to, say, releases from HSiFS. The Wolf hypers mesh better with my playstyle, but erasing bullets and firing insanely wide shots are also very satisfying.
On the topic of shots, the Wolf versions feel like the best for "standard" survival play, giving you strong focused shots for the bosses. The Otter shots are still fantastic if you're using bombs, however - who doesn't want to fire off THREE Fantasy Seals at once? :V The downside is that after playing with a Wolf shot, it's sometimes hard for me to transfer over to another sub-shot since it's bound to feel weaker overall. Youmu is a particularly big victim of this, as her slashes seem like they have even less range and power than in TD unless you pick Wolf. As a side note, I wonder if I'm the only one who's really sad that Youmu is using her TD shot again. This is purely a subjective thing btw, I'm not calling it a "flaw" of the game by any means. It's just that I always found her TD shot to be too unwieldy for my tastes, and the fact that it keeps me from enjoying playing as my favorite Touhou character is tortuous.
I don't get all this hate towards the game's patterns. I think they're just fine, and hell, the overall difficulty curve is actually sensible, as in each stage is clearly harder than the last, at least on Lunatic (with the possible exception of Stage 2's stage portion being harder than Stage 3's imo). The number of attacks that are more trick- or strategy-based kind of reminds me of SA a little bit, and even then it's not like knowing the "trick" always makes them trivial, which is nice to see. And that talk about ZUN "reusing" Shinmyoumaru's attack style is indeed nonsense - others already mentioned how said patterns play totally differently, something I've been trying to stress as far back as VD.
I'm also digging most of this game's music. The title and Stage 2 boss themes I'm not too crazy about tbh, but the others are all good, even though nothing really stuck out to me right away like, say, HSiFS Stage 1's theme did. WBaWC's Stage 3 theme has really grown on me though - I've been listening to it all night lol. Also the Stage 3 boss's theme has the best name ever: "Seraphic Chicken". :V I don't really know enough about the characters to say much about them yet, plus I'm waiting for the dialogue translations.
As for miscellany, I really enjoy the unique beast tokens you get from midbosses - it's exactly like gameplay secrets you find in other arcade shooting games, which is a very nice touch. On the flip side, I don't like how you lose 1 full power on death again, and the boss marker on the bottom of the screen might as well be completely invisible and thus completely useless. I riff on UFO all the time for its various negative-QoL changes, and if I'm going to be fair, WBaWC should get the same amount of flak for its own.
So in summary I'd call this demo similar to VD in that it's good but not great. The second half of the game awaits us still, and then we'll see just how well that gets pulled off.
