Compare to the older games, where bombs and lives were much more finite resources, so you had to be careful and save them for when you really needed them. Suiciding back then was much less of a valid option. Even in MoF and SA; you do get a ton of bombs, but making super risky decisions to get those bombs is probably not a good idea.
Perfect Cherry Blossom let you max out the lives counter by the end of stage three while giving you four bombs per life, and that was the best game in the series.
I really admired the economy of DDC's design; it was essentially UFO without the ufos, encouraging you to collect large numbers of items for a big reward while relying on the POC and bombs to let you do so, rather than introducing a group of other collectibles. Remember that ZUN described that game as being somewhat back to basics as well, so it might be an idea of what to expect.
Wishlist:
- I hope the bullet vibration goes away, I hated that, it made things feel imprecise.
- No hard patterns using tiny pea bullets! Those were my least favourite parts of both TD and DDC's final bosses.
- More generally, I hope there isn't too much ui screw going on. I'm optimistic about this since there wasn't really any in LOLK, but I'd have liked DDC much more without it (and Seija wasn't the worst offender).
- The difficulty curve could probably be shallower; since TD I keep finding I need to step up the difficulty a level to keep the first few levels interesting, but then get frustrated by the game's latter half.
Beyond that, and on a more positive note, I've learned never to discount a Touhou game, because I've done that before, returned to the backlog years later and ended up loving them. Although maybe that just means I should go dark on Touhou until 2020 and then catch up.
I remember reading that ZUN focuses on what he sees as the weaknesses of his previous games when making a new one. I wonder what he thinks the weaknesses of LOLK were?