Touhou Book of Star Mythology english patch
12 October 2024
Book of Star Mythology is an excellent touhou fangame i ran into about a year ago, and it had a mostly-complete English patch but not quite – it had really bad translations for some parts and it was missing the endings and other stuff like that. I became kind of obsessed with this game, so i was disappointed the patch was incomplete... and then i realized it's made in danmakufu, so i could finish up the patch myself! All that time spent playing around with that program as a kid is really paying off. 
I did this in June 2023 even though i'm writing about it much later. (And realizing that i missed some minor things, oh well...)
i didn't do any of the actual translation, it was all on the wiki already, i just updated the existing patch to use the most recent translations, and then i filled out the endings, rank screen images, and stuff like that. It took about a day of programming/graphics work, and another day of data entry and testing.
you can get the patch (or rather, the full pre-patched english version, since the original is free) up above, and i've uploaded it to touhou wiki page for the game. The rest of the post is just me talking about the game itself. 
so yeah, this game's amazing. 
I've been recommending it even to people who haven't played touhou before, i think this is a great entry point! The characters are all super cool, and the bullet patterns are really unique and interesting while still being intuitive to dodge. It's really well-polished and has a few cool twists you wouldn't expect! It even has an infinite-lives mode if you wanna just chill.
the stage 5 boss is a hot evil kitsune who's initially disguised as a furry version of Reimu/Marisa/Sanae (the next one in the cycle from who you're playing as), complete with cute ears and a big floofy tail. This is how you do character-specific boss spellcards. Click for a minor spoiler on my favorite bit
this is the first time i've really gotten into a touhou game's scoring system. It basically comes down to "get close to as many fairies as you can" (which is great advice in general tbh), since you get Wish items based on how close you are to enemies/bosses that you're attacking, with extremely satisfying SFX whenever you get one. Wish items are big for score and they're what unlocks the bonus Last Spell for each boss. It's not the first time that touhou's had an enemy-proximity scoring mechanic, but this has definitely been the cleanest implementation i've seen – just stay as close to them as you think you can handle! And you get a Star Rank at the end of the game with cute descriptions based on how well you did, so there's an end goal to shoot for. 
oh, and the extra stage is rad as heck, you gotta play it!