Talen Lee

Honestly, as a Touhou fan that did read through it, I hard-agree with the part involving (Lack of) character creation. Part of the fun for ttrpgs that I've managed to play is coming up with OCs to use, or figuring out if I can play an existing OC I have under the game. They're a good generator for them too, as even if I don't have specifics on backstory or list of fun facts in mind, I could work based on the build and come up with something as I interact with the GM's setting.

I think it focusing on small problems in the Gensokyo setting is alright, even if it would be nice to have something for more large scale adventures, and I also think the danmaku battle system is cool, but the lack of ANY sort of ruleset for making new characters feels... idk wrong? Like at that point it's not just because of no OCs, because like you said, there are only 30 characters available (Even less so if the character is essential to the session's plot, meaning you can't pick them), out of Touhou's 180+ characters. What if I wanted to play as my fave and couldn't because they're locked out? What if my fave isn't even available? Hell, the map provided only goes to locations up to Touhou 13 if I remember correctly, what if the GM wanted to have locations from after that game. Even if the main focus was on using the pre-made characters, having SOME sort of codified homebrew ruling would've been nice. Like you, I haven't really been able to play it myself, but unless I was in a group that really wanted to play it, I doubt I would.

Also, I never realised until now that, for non-fans, the recap being placed first WOULD probably kill a lot of interest for reading the entire thing. When I first read through it, it struck me as odd, since most of ttrpgs I've read through and/or played, save example play or example sessions for after the rules are already laid out, so once you have an idea of how the game plays, you'd be able to watch it in action to sort of fortify that understanding. I didn't read the full replay (So I guess my point on it is invalid), but my reasoning was "Odd, they put it first... well I want to know how it plays, so I'll come back to it!", but then I didn't, probably because it was late and I needed to go to bed and felt like my interest was sort of already waned due to the character system.