The Party Dolphin
Published
Text is a bit small - not unreadable, but very small
absolutely no controllers in menus
Needs mouse and keyboard for all menuing and robot customization, but otherwise runs fine by default. Played through a race just fine, and the in-race controls work good, but actual menus are a pain in the butt to navigate or do anything with.
Text is a bit blurry, but the in-game sharpening option seems to alleviate some of it
Works fine. Low preset, only change to settings was the sharpening option. A couple of free battles with the AI worked perfectly fine, demanding summon sections and all. The menus and stuff run at 30 FPS obviously, but that's a quirk of the port, not the Deck.
via remote play - works fine
Works flawlessly - did not test online multiplayer but it's a dead game anyways. Everything else is perfect.
I'm not sure if it was adjusted at all post release, but Low shadows, no anti-aliasing, and running it windowed at the lowest available resolution makes it very much playable, compared to how it was on release. Looks bad, like bad bad, but still playable and fun. Tested on a random stage in chapter 2, kept at least 60 fps for most of the stage, dropping to about the 50s in demanding areas. Sucks this game is so poorly optimized, but Low shadows really helps
Runs preeeeetty poorly on Steam Deck - all default settings, not gonna bother modding it or anything. Heavier sections have significant frame drops (cinematic setpieces in Sky Sanctuary were what I tried out), general gameplay can get spotty but never unplayable. Not entirely sure why Steam lists this as Verified (they really should have a category between Verified and Playable for stuff like this)
works alright - the D-Pad didn't seem to want to work by default (I played with the analog stick and older Touhous seem to do this anyways) and the configuration menu is garbled due to lack of Japanese (default configuration should be fine anyways - if you need to change something in it, you probably already know what to change anyways. the initial setup seems to be a sticking point, as you can accidentally launch it in windowed mode this way, but i guess i just got lucky). Game itself runs fine, nothing particularly wrong.
English support via Thcrap is a pain - I couldn't get the launcher to work natively, but the standalone package works with a workaround. By putting the standalone game translation in the main folder, if you rename it to "custom.exe" and rename the actual custom.exe to something different, you can play the English version by selecting the configuration option when booting the game. Handy little tip! I didn't count this in the actual verdict because it's a mod, however. The game, on its own, works fine. Modding it is just a pain.
