DISCLAIMER: I am not really a Touhou fan! My experience with Touhou goes a little something like this:
- I have played Touhou Luna Nights like 4 years ago (fun game).
- I've managed to deduce some of the characters' names from memes over the years and think the girls are all suuuuuper pretty with great designs.
- I really like the music and respect the community for all the fan projects and just tend to seem really wholesome etc.
- I generally find bullet hells / shmups fun but I'm not into them enough to take a dive into the rabbit hole that is Touhou, although I know there's more to enjoy than just the main titles, it's still incredibly intimidating.

I have however, become a rhythm game enjoyer in recent years, and since many of the maps I play on Osu! are Touhou tracks, a Touhou rhythm game caught my attention pretty quickly. I don't know much about it other than this one fact and I decided to take a plunge, I can always refund it if it's ass. It used to be a mobile game that got discontinued or something? I don't know, if you want to know what the community thinks of this game this review isn't it so be warned.

So Phantasia Lost has a story mode and a free mode. Free mode lets you play maps whenever you like as long as you have played it in story mode first. This mode was all I had really expected from the game, so the story mode was a nice surprise, unfortunately I found it quite boring and just a glorified progression that I rushed through in order to get access to all the maps. There is a part NVL part ADV visual novel type story that I didn't care for whatsoever. I like visual novels and some of the CGs and character sprites were cute but this seemed like fanservice meant for fans of the series i.e., include as many characters as possible, have silly thing happen, repeat. I quickly got bored and started skipping them, this wasn't appealing to me and I'm sure if I was interested in Touhou lore then there's much better entries to go for.

The main rhythm game mode (Kagura) is kind of your usual step mania type rhythm game with up to 6 keys. As a beginner for this kind of game mode, I probably got a lot more enjoyment out of it than most people, it's been fun to quickly improve and has felt really good. I think I might return to this gamemode through Osu! mania eventually, now that I feel like I've gotten past an entry barrier and so I can try a (slightly) more diverse range of music with it. Pretty fun!

The other game mode...... Danmaku. I have words for whoever decided that playing a rhythm game at the same time as a shoot 'em up was a good idea. It's hilarious, this might legitimately be one of the worst things I've ever played. It's slow, unsatisfying, not explained properly, and feels pointless? I'm not sure what the reward for killing the boss is? If you die then it's over, but if the song ends and you haven't killed the boss... you still win? I never actually beat any of them so I really don't know what you get for it and I don't care to know, it's awful. For the regular rhythm game it's best to use both hands, but here since you have to move your character at the same time, I had to resort to using one hand which is completely the opposite muscle memory to how I'm playing the regular game and so awkward? I don't even know how the rhythm part contributes to your score on the stage, it's possible that I completely ignored all of the tutorials explaining these things but I'd like to point out that the translation of the game is pretty bad which doesn't help. Maybe this is a skill issue or something, but I'm missing where any of the enjoyment is meant to come from this, even if I did understand the mechanics properly. Thankfully there are enough stars going around in Kagura stages that you can completely avoid Danmaku stages for the most part.

Also getting good scores on charts (in story mode) is based on this Mitama card system, you can't get a high rank on a stage unless you've levelled up your card by playing with it equipped, over and over and over and over again, it's dumb. The cards give you certain effects within both gamemodes, but I don't care. These also need to be levelled up quite hard for any chance of beating the Danmaku stages, since they increase how much damage you do, this is partly why I never beat one of these stages. On the plus side to all of this, the number of cards is huge and each one comes with a beautiful artwork with cool effects and stuff that I found quite a bit of enjoyment in browsing through and honestly one of the bigger appeals of the game to me.

I suppose I should supplement all of my talk on the story mode with: If you want to unlock all of the base game maps without trudging through it, you can at the low price of £2.49! I guess that makes things slightly better... Speaking of DLC, 4 further map packs are announced with one already being released with 25 maps in each. For £11.49 each I can't really see myself paying up for these, I will probably just opt for something different (like Osu! mania) if I feel like I've worn this games' map set thin, but maybe I'll get an itch to play them in the Touhou game in the future and actually buy them, who knows.

It seems that in base game there are a cool selection of songs ranging across tracks from original games fan remixes with and without vocals, I'm fairly satisfied with what I paid for, but I can't say I would really recommend this game to anyone who doesn't already know that they want to play it. Also! If any Touhou fans are reading this I'd love to hear what you think about anything that I've said, I'm sure there's more enjoyment to be had here that I am missing by virtue of not being that tuned in, particularly with the story.