Touhou Genso Wanderer: Foresight Review (Shang.EXE)
To preface, I put 170+ hours into Genso Wanderer Reloaded and 44 in Genso Wanderer Lotus Labyrinth. I disliked Lotus Labyrinth since it regressed from Reloaded in too many ways, but then I played this right up until the final dungeon. I heavily advise you only play Reloaded, with Lotus Labyrinth being for Tenshi/Sanae/pure chaos lovers and FORESIGHT being for nobody.
FORESIGHT is even worse than Lotus Labyrinth and makes me rethink LL by comparison. It honestly breaks my heart since Reloaded is my second favorite Touhou fangame, and I don't think I've been more depressed from a Touhou game until now.
Chronicle: The Chronicle in Reloaded and Library in LL both record and describe all enemies encountered (besides some certain secret enemies at the very bottom of some postgame dungeons) and all important story characters + their VAs. FORESIGHT doesn't have either, which feels like it's hiding the sparseness of its cast.
Cut-ins: In Reloaded and LL, partners/enemies doing certain actions or being in certain situations caused a cut-in to play, illustrated by a wide variety of artists. FORESIGHT only has these for the main characters and important bosses.
Equipment: It's all gone. Reloaded has roughly 400 weapons, LL had roughly 170 if my count is right. FORESIGHT has less than 70. That alone can probably tell you everything. Dual-wielding returned, but resonance is gone.
Fusion/Materials: Fusion returns, but only for combining two weapons together for seals. That's it. No items, no weapon creation, no melding. The Izanagi system is a horrible replacement for reasons that everyone else is stating.
Enemies: From what I've seen so far, only from EoSD to IN plus oddballs like the 3 Fairies, and even then it's just a subset of the characters from those games. Most of the enemies are generics from Touhou like the fairy maids and the hobgoblins.
Characters: The largest issue by far. Reloaded (with DLC, unfortunately) had a cast of 19 characters who could be either player or partner, each with 4-8 unique danmaku and unique passives. LL stripped everyone's danmaku to just one move and bizarrely prevented you from solo diving with your favorite... but it had 80+ characters in addition to being a prequel with different mechanics. FORESIGHT has only Reimu playable, plus four partners that are solely from EoSD to IN.
If you want some positives, Reimu was buffed to at least not be as mediocre as in Reloaded in my opinion, the music's great as always, and most importantly the characters' graphics in dungeons are superb. Every character clearly has love and individuality infused in them, from the bunny youkai's changing expressions to the hasty fairy maid's blush when she uses a skill. Shanghai's a proper enemy now also.
Probably the most heartbreaking part was simply the realization after playing the IN section that... that was it. I fully expected that the plot would take us through every game from TH6 all the way to TH18, recreating the incidents of every game. It was a cliche idea, yet I thought it'd be great for beginners. But when I noticed that the TH9+ characters weren't in the game, even as generic enemies, that was all she wrote. In other words, I feel like this is quite literally just 1/4th, 25%. one quarter of a complete game.
tl;dr, just go back to replaying Reloaded.