I know I shouldn't because I have like [RAPIDLY CHANGING NUMBER] amount of personal projects I am actually motivated on, and I have [AMORPHOUS BLOB] new gaming experiences right at the actual top of my game queue that I really want to try out (this means Demon's Roots)
but here I am in the DRPG numbers box which I assume will take like 200 hours and I've already put in 10 in 2 days wow (hey, I'll be done in a month!)
Labyrinth of Touhou's secret sauce, aside from girls with lasers and hats, is that it minimizes player regret extremely hard, while also offering interesting constraints. There's no penalty for wiping and pretty much every asset of your build can be reset at no charge[1], and the length of your exploration sessions is limited by each character's TP, which depletes when they take part in, and take damage in, battle.
(more after the cut)
This encourages efficient and thoughtful planning, where you rotate characters from your party of 12 in and out of your main 4 (with a left-to-right, vanguard-to-rearguard layout) in a way that stretches out your "fuel" as long as possible, both for convenience's sake and because your exp/money/drops scale with the number of battles in a given session (it's Galleria stockpiling but without the risk!).
The skills tend to be numerically opaque in ways that defy "conventional" thinking, which is to say Rumia's "basic but surprisingly powerful" beam attack outdamages Marisa's "is Master Spark" Master Spark despite a 13-fold difference in cost. I hear the wiki lets you get your hands on all the raw, dirty numbers, but I'm taking my blindness to it as a challenge to enjoy the game as it comes, and to savor the surprise when I suddenly realize I need to build a stage 1 boss team.
Though I will say this game has a sometimes-curious balance of normal, tepid numbers (celebrating 2% increases in stats a la Etrian), and completely unhinged, explosive numbers, which is great for characters that have the latter but sad for those that don't. My current main character is Hina, who reverses-and-doubles all debuffs placed on her, has a skill that debuffs to -50% every single stat for the entire battlefield, and, for good measure, has a explosive nuke that scales based on her debuffs (currently it is my most powerful attack by a factor of 10). It is possibly the most busted I have seen any character in a DRPG.
It is so busted that I immediately had to stop building Nazrin (who gets a free turn whenever she defeats an enemy and has attacks that substantially buff exp/money/drop rate) to back up the upgrade dump truck to Hina.
This kind of "joy in discovering Touhou characters I don't think about as much" extends to the light story, which mostly is a vessel for Everyone Except Reimu (and also sometimes Reimu) to act unhinged and for Reimu and Keine to play the straight girl as they explore The Big DRPG Tree.
You cross other characters often, sometimes getting them to join their party, sometimes watching them run off to chase other members of their character group. It's surprisingly natural just seeing various Touhou casts run past you in the dungeon in that sort of "of course everyone won't join me, they have their own stuff to handle" way, and it's a fun sorta will-they-won't-they to guess if you're about to gain a party member every time.
anyway see you in 190 hours I guess
[1] (there are some rare items that look permanent but you can get these rare items back with an even rarer item that Super Resets your characters