Touhou - Wandering Souls

Well, I finished the game on Hard and am currently in the process of going through all the post-game content. Needless to say, I still very much like the game, but there are a few things I want to suggest and a few oddities I want to point out:

1) the green things shot at you by the giant plants in the Chaos Mode version of Forest of Magic often blend into the background and are really hard to see, you may want to consider changing their color.

2) Sakuya's Blade Downfall skill continues to fall, but seems to not do any damage if she activates another time-stopping skill while it's going on.

3) It is unclear as to what the Dexterity stat actually does.

4) I'm not entirely sure how abilities/spells level up (damage dealt, simply by using them, or by killing enemies with them?) and it seems a bit odd that there isn't a notification for when one levels up even though notifications appear for when characters and equipment level up.

5) It would be really handy if there was some sort of indication of how 'complete' a stage is other than needing to walk up to it and get to the point of entering. For example, you could have one star appear over a stage when a player has simply finished it, two stars when a player has completed all the Normal Mode objectives, and three stars when all Normal and Chaos Mode objectives have been finished (or just have a Wandering Soul and Treasure Chest count icon appear when you're near it such as having a soul symbol and 0/X and a treasure chest symbol below that with 0/X).

This game is fantastic! I spent over sixty-five hours playing it and cleared it with 100% twice: first on Normal, then on Lunatic (because I am a lunatic, clearly). The battle system and movement felt great, I really liked the equipment system, and there was a good amount of variety in the stages, enemies, and strategies to use! I only have two complaints:

First, it was irritating to have to travel back to the start of the stage or let everyone die every time I wanted to restart a stage (and that happened a lot in Lunatic Mode when I had to clear a stage without dying or with only one character, haha). An option to leave or restart the stage from the pause menu would have been very helpful!

Second, there was not really any conclusion to the story after collecting all of the souls and items. (Unless I missed it?) Even though the story was not very important, it would have been nice to have a scene or bonus area where all the characters say one last thing, perhaps congratulating Reimu or the player.

There are also a few other miscellaneous things I noticed or wanted to say:

Temporary effects persist between stages, which seems a little odd to me. You can cheat a little as Sakuya by entering a stage, casting Rising Spirit and Temporal Barrier, leaving the stage, then entering again.

You can change equipment while those circles that shoot at you are present as long as there are no other enemies. Is that a glitch, or is it intentional since those are not normal enemies?

You can use certain attacks (such as Reimu's Fantasy Seals or Marisa's Flight of the Witch) to gain extra height, which makes difficult jumps easier and allows you to skip certain areas. I think this is really neat and useful for speedruns, so if it was unintentional, please leave it in!

If you want someone to proofread the English script, I would be happy to do it! Most of it is fine already, but there are a few goofy lines here and there.

The most damage I have managed to deal in a single hit so far is 429,782 (and I only bought eleven extra attack points)! That could easily be improved (even without buying more attack points), if anyone else wants to try! On second thought, it would actually be very difficult since you have to collect all the souls in Lunatic Mode first, but besides that, it would be easy to improve.

Thank you so much for making this wonderful game!

Man you are totally crazy. This game is incredibly awesome in own genre. little fighters meet megaman and shmups. Wicked animation/skills and dynamics. Cool action crazy game.

Cool game man the games that i like are touhou platformers!
I just finished gensokyo no nazo too now i have something else to play!

This is really great game. I will download this!!! And suscribe of cource. :D

Talk about this game's legacy... Maybe I'm too eager for another one, but...

Estheone, are you planning about anything like a sequel of this game or another game in mind?

Now that is some news :) I'm looking forward for it!

Wasn't on normal an item that gives you

I am still playing on hard got 110 souls and maybe one day i will then play on lunatic.

This is by far the most awe inspiring project I've seen all year. Actually, I just downloaded VX Ace because of this. I found this on youtube on the search for quality PC A-RPGs. 3 thumbs to Estheone.

Anyway, I've been looking to create a sidescroller with similar battle mechanics. Maybe different level construction, but definitely the same a-rpg/b-mup genre. I was wondering how to analyze the script data for such an engine in VX Ace. If all goes not so well in my research, I might resort to the Construct 2 'HTML5' Game engine that I'm familiar with. I'd prefer VX Ace for the database features though.

Thanks in advance =]

EDIT: I've realized it's been built in VX not VX Ace!