Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet

Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet features the essence of the saga and its redesign makes it a wonderful videogame. If you like this genre, you will find an entertaining and challenging game.

When a game has such a unique premise in terms of its gameplay, I find it disappointing to see it limited by the same traditional modes as in the average fighting game.

The Western debut of this franchise is not the best possible, but we hope it's just the first game of many to come. At least, it's quite enjoyable with another player.

Bullet Ballet has a lot of depth to it and even is fun in short bursts but is let down by a dull story mode and annoying controls.

Touhou Genso Rondo Bullet Ballet is an original mix of shoot'em up and fighting game. The gameplay is fun and sharp, but there's a lack of content and uncharted online servers.

Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet is a crazy Japanese mash-up between a fighting game and a bullet hell shooter. Its gameplay mechanics are pretty good, but the lack of a good color code for letting player recognize which bullets are good and which will hurt him when the screen is loaded with any kind of stuff, may hurt the experience.

If you’re looking for a game that will completely sell you on the Touhou series and turn you into a fan, Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet probably won’t do it, as it really feels like a weak entry with a lack of substance that doesn’t show off a lot of Touhou’s potential beyond the ability to have a massive amount of bullets appear on the screen.

It’s a tad short on content and the gameplay does have a number of balance and technical issues, but despite these problems, Bullet Ballet is an enjoyable if ultimately short lived experience. Its low rent visuals certainly don’t help, but if you can enjoy it as an arcade-style curio, there is still quite a bit to like here.

Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet is a niche title, mostly enjoyable with other players. The idea of mixing shoot’em’up and fighting mechanics it’s not so bad, even tough there’s not enough contents to play.

It’s not really “bad” or anything; it’s just too niche for its own good. I found some enjoyment in it, but after a few times playing through the story, it felt more tedious than anything. There’s not enough here to make me want to strive for greatness. Maybe if the devs had strived for it first, I would’ve stayed glued to my controller a bit longer.

Touhou Genso Rondo is a funny mix of bullet hell and fighting games, which can grant a small amount of satisfaction in mastering its frantic gameplay. However, no one could be really feel involved in this boring, repetitive title, except for shooter's fans.

Touhou Genso Rondo : Bullet Ballet is a weak title in every respect, especially from the point of view of content. The story mode is not only suffering from enormous narrative flaws, but it can be completed in less than four hours, and even one of the few playable characters is only available via DLC.

The interest that gets sparked by the sheer “weirdness” of Touhou Genso Rendo goes as fast as it appears. Lack of content, lack of variation and especially lack of balancing take this generally interesting bullet hell mix out of the skies.

There's probably a very small, hardcore audience for Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet but if your logic is 'Great! I like fighting games and I like shoot 'em ups' then, seriously, buy a fighting game and a shoot 'em up and stay away from this silliness. This is a bit like kittens and ice cream. Keep them separate. Don't blend them together and try to tell me that's a good thing.

Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet has something going for it and it is honestly something I had never seen before, but the way it plays mixed with a confusing tutorial that doesn’t explain things in the best way it could really make this game feel like I’m slogging through an interesting game while in the dark.

It’s a real shame that the first Touhou game to officially come out overseas is Touhou Genso Rondo. It really doesn’t capture the appeal or the magic of the mainline Touhou series, and there are plenty of other fan-games in vastly different genres that are at least much more mechanically polished than this one. Touhou Genso Rondo is a mild disappointment for fans of the series, but despite the broad marketing efforts of NIS America, it should simply be absolutely avoided by newcomers.

Besides the core concept being interesting, I really don’t have any other compliments to give Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet. It’s a disappointment for a number of reasons, and it really sucks that a lot of North American gamers’ first experience with the Touhou series will be this bad spin-off.