Touhou 12.8 - Fairy Wars

Recently ZUN released his latest Touhou game, Touhou 12.8 - Fairy Wars at Comiket 78. Which featured Cirno the ice fairy as playable character as well as the "three fairies" from the manga "Oriental Sacred Place/Strange and Bright Nature Deity" as bosses. The game seems to be a buildup of ideas developed from ZUN's previous games, Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoilers as well as mesh between the usual danmaku stage game play style.

Game Play
Touhou - Fairy Wars plays quite similar to the main Touhou shmups in general with mid bosses and stage bosses featured in every stage as well as the player's ability to shoot enemies and bomb through difficult patterns. Of course unlike the main Touhou games, Fairy Wars features multiple routes that can be played in almost any order with the only difference is in difficulty. Additionally each route only features three stages in contrast to the traditional six stage play through, as well as an additional extra stage that requires unlocking. Of course the greatest new feature of the game is Cirno's ability to use her special ice ability to freeze nearby bullets, this ability requires the player to charge up before release which would then through a chaining effect freeze bullets ahead of the player.

The game play in general with no surprise increases in difficulty very quickly which in many of my cases certainly involved  a massacre. Understandably the game definitely requires the player to be able know how to use Cirno's ice ability in order to survive. 

Music/Art
The music score in Fairy Wars as in almost any music composed by ZUN truly captures the flow and atmosphere of the stages. Though there is no iconic stage theme that separates from the rest of the music in the game, there is definitely difference from the usual ZUN like style of music, with some themes taking an element of retro/trance genre.

Lets not forget the character art, drawn by Makoto Hirasaka (artist of Strange and Bright Nature Deity) the sprites are definitely a first for the Touhou series, being the only game featuring art not drawn by ZUN. But the color rendering or the new style blends quite well with the rest of the art, though the boss sprites of the "Three Fairies", are humongous in comparison to Cirno's.

Thoughts 
In general I find this game much enjoyable in contrast to Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoilers due to the fact that the game play follows similar to the main series of games, but this does not mean that I do not enjoy Double Spoilers and Shoot the Bullet. The steep increase in difficulty at an early stage definitely cost me many hours of frustration, but as someone who loves to play bullet hell shmups, the early difficulty definitely makes the beginning stage less boring.