The Shrine

One of the few Touhou games worth playing, maybe even buying if it's not impossible to get it outside of Japan.

I downloaded it here (Chinese site) http://u.115.com/file/t07f9605a9, just click on any of the button with a green arrow. It's only 40 MB, music is compressed as OGG format so you'd need something that can play that kind of file if you want music. You probably need Winrar to unpack the file. Alternatively you can find your own favorite pirate site which should have it too.

Everything besides dialogue has Engrish subtitle so it should not be too hard to figure out what's going on.

You're Cirno, the fairy of ice. Hold shift to move slower. Hold Z to charge up Ice Wall and release Z to use it when you hear the 'click' sound. X for Perfect Freeze (bomb, snowflake icon on bottom left). Hold C for turbo fire, or you can hit Z repeatedly and hurt yourself from the repetitive motion. I think you're always in the slow mode while charging up for Ice Wall. Ice Wall freezes all bullets except lasers and flaming shots. Your freeze power appears above your character while charging an Ice Wall and it's the 2nd number on the right side. You need at least 30% freeze power to charge up Ice Wall, and Ice Wall uses up all your freezing power. Higher % leads to longer duration freezes. Your life bar is on the right top and it starts at 200%. Losing a life decreases it by 100% and if it goes negative it's game over.

Your shot power, points, perfect freeze meter, and life bar are all increased by freezing stuff. Defeated enemy drop blue icons that give you points. Freeze meter is increased over time, but charges up faster if you're close to bullets (without dying), moving in slow mode, or shooting stuff.

There are 3 bosses that you face: Sunny, Luna, and Star. It should be obvious who is who based on the background even if you can't read it. The route determines which order you fight them. The first stage boss never has any Ice Wall piercing attacks. The second stage boss will have flaming shots, and the third stage boss will always have flaming shot and laser. In the final stage you only have to defeat the leader but her two sidekicks have far less health and does a lot of damage themselves.

This is the first Touhou game in the last 4 or so where continuing after you died actually sends you to where you died instead of beginning of the stage, though I needed all my continues to just get past stage 3. Lasers will shoot straight through Ice Wall and refract in multiple directions at the same time, so basically never use Ice Wall near lasers (easier said than done). If you beat all the 6 routes you can unlock the extra stage and fight Marisa Kirisame, though you'd have to at least be able to beat Normal without continuing to have a reasonable shot at the extra boss as per tradition. Route A/B/C determines where you start, and at the end of stage 1 you'll be asked where to go, and this will determine which path you end up. Sunny seems to be the hardest if you leave her to the end (A1, B1?).

There's probably an English patch somewhere. The dialogue is actually quite hilarious.

I've done some reading on this series it's just that I tend to suck at bullet hell games and I hear a bunch of these are very, very brutal. Otherwise I hear little but good things.

Touhou is a bit overrated if you go by what people say about it online since it's usually reviewed by a guy who plays shooters for all his life, or it's by someone who sucks like me who doesn't want you to think he sucks at these games so he'll lie about his skill in these games to sound cool. There are relatively few places where you can get feedback from the "Ezmodo" guys which is what you'd actually have to hear to see if the game is even worth downloading because the challenge factor is indeed very extreme.

TH8 is probably the best game of the series since you get 7 lives/continue and a ton of them, and Yukari is probably the most powerful non-glitch character you can ever play as in the series, and the game's practice mode lets you work on the bosses that give you problem without forcing you to go through a 20+ minute sequence just to get there (if it's the last boss, which it usually is). There's also a lot of variety in characters you can play that covers all the options in a shooter pretty well.

TH7 and TH6 are all very good. TH6 is a bit outdated graphically, but both are extremely hard. I can only beat TH7 on easy without continuing with Sakuya who has 4 bombs per life (and you need all 4 of them), and TH6 is hard to get to the final boss on one credit though that's why continues are there.

TH10, 11, and 12 are all stupidly hard since you get no continues in them (continues boots you to start of stage, and if you game over on final stage where you have to start with 7 lives to even have a shot you sure aren't beating it with 3 lives). TH12 is barely playable as Sanae B since she's got an extreme amount of firepower and a very long invulnerabilty time on bombs. I think there's an 8.5 and 12.6 or something and both games are for shooter masochists and I can't even get past the first stage and even diehard fans don't talk about much them.

Beat it on Easy and unlocked the Extra mode and promptly died and didn't even get to the boss. One of the paths I was dying repeatedly before the final stage but then the time I beat it I ended up with 9 lives! The gold medal is given out for beating a boss while using no Ice Walls and that usually increases the difficulty by about 3 tiers (so Easy + No Ice is about as hard as Lunatic + Ice), though ironically a lot of the final stage's patterns are easily done with no ice since the bosses only uses ice piercing attacks there so you can't ice them anyway. So far there are videos for beating Easy on no ice, and no ice videos for Hard difficulty is clearly TAS. I'm guessing it's slowed to at least 1/5th for the Hard video because some of the manuevers are at least comparable in complexity to the TAS video that beat the Phantom Moon challenge level which required slowing the game down to 1/20th, so it's probably not just a standard 1/2 speed TAS.

Although there's only 3 stages it actually works pretty well since it's set up like a traditional shooter where the difficulty in the last stage goes up dramatically and the first N-1 stages are really just there for you to build up extra lives so you can lose them in the final stage. It's easy to go to the final stage with 10 or so lives once you get the hang of it but you can also lose them very fast since dying doesn't reset the bomb meter so you could just die immediately again after your initial invulnerability frame wears off. The normal Touhou games have 6 stages and it takes you a good 20 minutes to get through the first 5 stages which should not threaten you at all but you still have to not screw up on them since you need 5-10 lives for the final stage too, and that makes replaying them rather annoying. With only 3 stages you only need about 10 minutes or so to stock up your lives for the later beatdown.