#touhou lost branch of legend

[solrin]

Call on Friends

Cost: 2 of any color, 1 Green

Card Text: Choose 1 of 3 <Teammates> to add to the hand. It enters the hand summoned. *These cards will always have a total cost of 4 or less. (Upgraded: A Fairy of Light is always included as an additional choice.)

from Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend

[videogametako]

i've been waiting for this

koosh out for beta, am excited. i looked through the changelog a bit and thank the heavens above

i hated not getting to use any of my exhibits after the first turn (especially since i usually hoard exhibits)

anyway, downloaded the beta and she's really here

apologies for the quality, i play at a low resolution windowed bc of crashes (foreshadowing)

koishi a is more focused on the emotional states she has. her spell card is accurate 30 damage and gives you 1 vitality, which i found a little underwhelming ngl

koishi b deals more with the follow-up cards. i uh forgot the spell card whoops, too lazy to open the game again. i started a run with koishi a, so, yeah

ah you need a "follow-up card" in addition to a card that says to "perform a follow-up attack" to actually use the effect. i got a "perform a follow-up attack" card in my run which did nothing (because i had no follow-up cards, which, makes sense in hindsight)

i love these, she looks so cool. my first thoughts are to play serenity, switch to passion, then either win or switch out so as to not get screwed over by the double damage (or graze, if you can). there are cards that remove mental state too, so that'd be useful

i crashed in the middle of the run, so i didn't get to find a dream card as described in the patch notes

lastly, i'm really excited for this tarot line. super cool concept

buy LBoL it's really good

[itsbenedict]

Games I Played In 2023 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good (Part 2/4)

Yup, there's more! Lot of 'em this year.

[1] - 2 - [3] - [4]

Trails into Reverie

Sad to say, a... nightmarishly bad finale to the Erebonia/Crossbell saga of Trails.

The one thing I'll give it is that the core combat gameplay remains super fun, and carries the experience- they're always finding new ways to expand and iterate on the battle system, and this time is no exception.

Otherwise... man, where do I start? The story is just... such a mess. They clearly intended this to be, like... the big climax to the Crossbell games, where the people fight to reclaim their independence from Erebonian occupation- but, uh, whoops, they obviated that entire conflict with the end of Cold Steel, so they pull ridiculous Ouroboros shenanigans out of their ass to recreate that conflict as if the previous resolution never happened. Feels like they developed half the game with a specific set of antagonists in mind, and then whatever hack writer they have running the show over there changed their mind about how Cold Steel would resolve and they had to bend over backwards to make up a new antagonist who just happened to be using the same occupying army and main badguy they just dealt with already.

And structure aside, it's just... wow. Just playing the hits of awful hand-wavey writing decisions, villain motivations that make no sense, anime-ass fanservice, and sucking its own dick over how cool the cast is despite most of them doing nothing and existing only as action figures for the combat. It started stupid, threatened to become halfway interesting as it set up the intrigue, and then shat the bed in the finale by revealing that absolutely none of the intrigue mattered and that the villain was like dogs and just sort of did things arbitrarily. Never hated Trails writing more than this one. What an embarrassing display.

also like half the game's runtime is padded out with level grinding in an inexplicable magic cyber-dungeon like in Sky 3rd, which keeps acting like it's going to be important to the plot but then manages to somehow not come up even a little bit at all. and it's got a gacha in it even though it's all in-game currency and there's no real money shop so why would you bother doing that? does someone at Falcom think that gachas are actually intrinsically fun and not a shitty tactic to get people addicted to gambling? what's even wrong with them???

DREDGE

This is a fun fishing game! Except you're fishing for Lovecraftian nightmares! You're a fisherman on a fishing boat and the locals will pay extra for fish that have been horribly mutated by the unholy energies of the depths, so you have to keep finding weirder and weirder fish to finance the boat upgrades you need to find weirder and weirder fish.

I'd say... it works very well in the first half, as you're upgrading your boat and being slow-rolled on the eldritch horror, and kind of falls apart towards the end. The first couple areas are full of various NPCs and sidequests and things to do, and you always have something to do with your resources...

...but later on, the game's economy gets a little lopsided and a lot of the stuff you're hauling up just wastes space in your inventory because you're past the point where it matters but the game keeps throwing it at you. Areas are also a lot more sparse and lonely, and it ends up getting kind of repetitive.

Still, it's not too long, it has some really good atmosphere, and that first stretch is really engaging and tightly designed.

Wildfrost

This is one of them roguelike deckbuilders that are all the rage lately! And it is a difficult one. Even when you're good at it, you probably don't win most runs. Enemies are strong, you only get to play one card per turn, and you have to be really careful managing the action economy to make sure you don't get hit. You are a unit on the map, a unit without that much more health than normal summons, and if you die it's game over. Enemies hit hard and have various triggered abilities that punish you for playing sloppy- you'll frequently find yourself in no-win scenarios out of nowhere because you didn't sequence your moves right.

The other crazy thing is... the final boss? When you beat it, your hero gets possessed and becomes the final boss of the next run. Find some crazy broken synergy that steamrolls the boss? Great! Good luck finding a way to beat it next time around! The final fight's difficulty starts to scale out of control, and forces you to keep one-upping your own strategy with clever tricks.

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

This was released on April Fools, and... it's not that great, honestly. The title's basically clickbait- it's a murder mystery-themed party, and Sonic's not actually dead and no one thinks Sonic is actually dead. That wouldn't really be a problem (just kind of a missed opportunity), but...

I mean, this game is for babies. I guess I'm spoiled by real mystery games, but like... it's this completely linear sequence of rooms with one or two suspects to interrogate each, hiding precisely one secret that you uncover via the most dead-obvious deductions in the world. The core mystery works but doesn't really make you feel clever or anything.

It is, like... funny, though. Sorta. I mean, as funny as it can be with the totally toothless premise and a cast that's...

...I'm gonna be honest, I've never understood why people have so much love for the Sonic cast. They all feel so one-dimensional and tedious, and they're typically unmoored from any consistent world or setting that could give them something interesting to do. They have to get by on the strength of their personalities, which are a little flat since there's only so far they can push the bit in a kids' game.

The other thing that bugs me is... y'know ProZD's Danganronpa video? This game has a bad case of "BUT CAN YOU SPELL THE WORD KNIFE?", where in between every bit of deduction or progression, you have to play a completely unrelated minigame where you play as Sonic running along a course where you have to pick up X rings by the end or else restart it, which serves as a loose metaphor for the process of Thinking Really Hard. It's got a wonky isometric perspective and the levels are all both boring and difficult and it felt like a huge waste of time. And they get harder and longer over time, until you're spending longer on the bad minigame than on the actual game game.

Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend

This is a Slay the Spire clone, but it's Touhou.

...That's about all there is to say on the matter. It has a couple unique mechanics- colored manabases, "Teammate" cards that act kind of like planeswalkers, a chargeable super instead of potions... but it's Slay the Spire. You know what the deal is.

That said- I find it a lot more fun than Slay the Spire, honestly. The colored mana thing adds some depth to deckbuilding, boss relics give you unique buffs instead of debuffs, and a lot of the archetypes are crammed with explosive synergies that make it really fun to go off. Plus there's Touhou music through the whole thing, and it's generally better-produced and prettier despite being in early access. Only point where it loses to STS is the lack of a robust modding scene.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

I did not finish this game! It was very bad!

I saw my cousin playing the sequel to this game on his Steam Deck at an engagement party, and I was dazzled by the screens and screens of party members and stats and mechanics all over the place, and thought- this has to be fun, right? I'll check it out- oh, hey, it's a sequel, I guess I'll play the first one.

This game is... very much an Etrian Odyssey clone, except they kinda make everything worse. You have have a ton of party members, but the thing is they don't learn active skills when they level up- there's no build choices to make, just Number Increasage. The only way to customize your skills is to assign units to covens, which have preset lists of abilities and drop randomly as loot. There's the appearance of customization, but in practice there's not a lot of options. Throw in "at any time an enemy might crit and unhealably disable one of your party members until you return to town, ruining your run", and it just feels like a slog.

The other thing is that it is completely repugnant. Like it's just deeply unpleasantly anime horny in the worst ways. The main character (sorta- you play as her mute faceless magic book, not her) is the worst. She's introduced beating a child and murdering her pets, and pretty much maintains that tenor throughout. And this is not an isolated incident! This game has some kind of fucked-up child abuse fetish- there's a significant number of child characters and all of them are physically assaulted by the nearest authority figure within seconds of being introduced. And it's not a problem, or even a theme- it's just a thing that happens all the time, practically as a gag. Also used as a funny gag: sexual assault! Wow! I couldn't stomach it!

PowerWash Simulator

This game seems like a giant shitpost- and to be clear, it absolutely is a giant shitpost- but it's shockingly cathartic and satisfying. There's just you, some levels implausibly caked in a ridiculous amount of grime, and a power-washer with various nozzles and soaps you use to hose off every inch of the place. There's something about it that just feels so nice! Objects flash and go ding when you fully clean them, there's a checklist of stuff and how clean it is, there's lots of fun little details in the levels...

...and it has a story campaign, which is very silly. You start off taking normal jobs washing normal things, but as you accrue Fame, you unlock weirder and weirder clients that wanted bigger and stranger things powerwashed. Without spoiling anything, it gets pretty wacky towards the end.

It's a fun game to play in the background when you're watching a show or listening to a podcast or something and want something mindless for your hands to do. (At least, at first. Some of the later levels are multi-hour behemoths, and it never feels good to stop in the middle.)

-

I still have... fourteen more games to write about. It's like they say...... the work of a gamer.......... is never done.......................

[1] - 2 - [3] - [4]

[blueberry-lemon]

Love this game so far. Just got my first win.

I love Slay the Spire and it taught me everything I needed to learn about deckbuilders, but I think this game, Monster Train, and Touhou Lost Branch of Legend have surpassed it as my favorites.

[pokemonxhyperfixation]

I wanna play koishi in lost branch (she supposedly came out the other day), but my game refuses to update so fuck me i guess…

[freshfreshsalad]

[dizzybelle]

Here, hold this.

[carpetedkitch]

OH

OH SHIT

Well the original slay the spire sucks ass compared to the bevy of options nowadays regardless and I haven't seen gameplay here that shows it's gonna be anything other than reiterating on its very simple premise, so.

As an avid deckbuilder player for a few years you either like em or you don't, it's just one of those genres sadly. Lost branch is really nice tho, I'd pick it up on sale

you will tell me deckbuilders will fix me and ascend me to heaven and make me cum uncontrollably and who knows maybe i'll be proven wrong some day but i just don't believe you im happy for you though

[card-of-the-day]

Today's Card Is: Fairy Intelect

[loreweaver-universe]

Yesterday's stream of Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend is up on Youtube!

[vmlowell]

don't have many of my own posts but have GOT TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT TOUHOU LOST BRANCH OF LEGEND

infact wrote up a whole review here:

[solrin]

Improvisation

Cost: 1 of any color, 1 Black

Card Text: Draw 3 (upgraded: 4) cards. If the Player is in <Burst>, gain 1 Black (upgraded: Philosopher's) mana.

Flavor Text: "Trust me, I have a plan."

from Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend

[videogametako]

playing touhou lost branch of legend, died to true final boss in this run (somehow?? i didn't catch it). it's lunatic though so i'll take what i can get. thinking of writing about this eventually

[tunnels-end]

I guess card battlers are what's gonna finally get me into Touhou

[sukimas]

what touhou fanworks do you actually like.. like what would you recommend with little to no caveat

Most doujinshi by Hisona and Ashiyama Bungaku, Flatscreen and The World, Upside Down by UnmovingGreatLibrary, a large amount of Torii Sumi's stuff. The Shinigami's Rowing Her Boat Again by Azuma Aya. Almost all of RD-Sounds' lyrical arranges.

I would not recommend most of my own works without caveat (though I would in fact recommend them)- I don't think that much of my prose has aged well, though it's certainly better than quite a large number of works out there, and they cater to specific audiences. (I'm DraconicHex on Ao3, for those not in the know.) And I think Zounose's stuff generally butchers characterization, but is a really good sort of thing to read if you enjoy Touhou philosophy. It captures big ideas well.

With minor caveats, I would recommend all of UnmovingGreatLibrary's works and Azuma Aya's. There's some stuff I'm not personally fond of in there, but both are excellent writers. I'd also recommend Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia, if you like games. Some characterization is off but it's not to the extent that it'll make you come away with massive misconceptions generally speaking, and it's very fun.

If you want something solely for gameplay, Komajou Densetsu II, Labyrinth of Touhou 2, and Lost Branch of Legend are also good. I haven't played Spell Bubble but I've heard it's fun as well.

Most of what I feel about Touhou fanworks is that you should enjoy absolutely whatever you want (up to and including fantastically out of character explicit doujinshi) as long as you don't take them as gospel- these are just some of my own personally enjoyed works.

[yuzu-adagio]

These may or may not show up on stream, a lot of them are not great stream games but they'd be top of the backlog and I don't have a lot of slots opening up offline >_>