Project Touhou It’s a series that I’ve always watched passionately. It has been around for an unbelievably long time, is largely produced by a single developer, and is still very popular. Personally, I’ve never played a single game, because I’ve never been particularly good at shmup. This helplessness only gets worse with games where the screen is usually a picture of the Magic Eye made of bullets. However, I understand the appeal of Touhou, and I always have the deepest respect for those who strive to do it well. This is why Touhou: New Worldat first glance, feels like Touhou game for me.
Touhou: New World is an action game, not a shooter, so it’s more than that in my garage. One of many fangames based on ZUN’s work, this is the second Touhou action RPG from developer Ankake Spa. first is Touhou: Scarlet Curiositystarring Remilia and Sakuya, and now it’s time for TouhouThe main character, Reimu Hakurei, takes the lead role. Marisa Kirisame joins her as the second playable character.
Screenshot of Siliconera
the story of Touhou: New World Then simple. Both Reimu and Marisa experience strange events in Gensokyo and find themselves mysteriously teleported to the Outer Worlds. An encounter with a person named Sumireko results in the outsider returning to Gensokyo with them. However, Sumireko’s presence threatened to upset the balance between the two worlds. Now the character you choose must figure out how to fix this and save both worlds.
gameplay in Touhou: New World viewed from a top-down perspective, similar to many classic RPGs. Combat consists of a basic combo attack, three special moves that have a cooldown after cast, and a screen-breaking bomb attack that takes a long time to cool down. You venture through a series of levels as Reimu or Marisa, battling hordes of enemies before a final encounter with a boss at the end.
It’s simple stuff and it’s easy to see Touhou DNA in all of it. Especially in boss battles, where your opponent likes to fill the screen with a dizzying barrage of bullets and possess a speed that other enemies can’t see. Many of these battles are fun, as they keep you constantly trying. There’s even a fight against a giant enemy crab, which is one of the more memorable battles in the game.
Screenshot of Siliconera
It’s a pity that the fun of boss battles is diminished by the rest of the game. While bosses offer a fair amount of challenge and variety, the same cannot be said for the generic mobs you encounter on your way there. There are a small number of types of enemies that can appear comically, and they do appear everywhere. They barely even correspond to the places where you find them. You are as likely to encounter an army of fairies in a snow-capped mountain as you are in an enchanted forest.
This repetitive enemy design does little to expose flaws in the combat system. Action RPGs like these often live or die depending on how satisfying their combat feels and Touhou: New World there is no satisfying fight. There’s not much weight behind many of your attacks and enemy attacks have even less impact. There have been so many times that I barely knew I was hit until I looked at my health bar and realized that enough stray bullets had quietly hit me from offscreen that I needed to heal. Everything just feels a little limp.
The only attacks that seem to be holding you back are the barrage of attacks from enemies, sending you to the floor. However, this only makes you wait for a few seconds while your character slowly dusts off and stands up. The enemy will even have the power to step back for a while while you do this, making this pointless as well as tedious. If this kill status causes the enemy to attack you for free, I would consider these attacks something to be more wary of and try to dodge. In reality, however, these attacks only exist to slow the flow of battle each time they occur.
Screenshot of Siliconera
This makes the battle difficulty of Touhou: New World strangely unbalanced. Struggling to play the game as both Touhou and an action RPG can lead to a lot of people dying from the wrong bullets in the first place. However, once you’ve grasped this uncanny balance, much of the combat becomes too easy. The problem with recycling too many enemies is that their attack patterns become too familiar too quickly. They also don’t seem to scale with your levels and upgrades, making later levels feel easier than the early ones. I absolutely want to get tougher with progression in an RPG, but that doesn’t mean I want to limit myself to stomping on every regular wasp early in the game at every late game level.
Speaking of upgrades, this is an issue that discourages exploration. While there are a lot of chests and dropouts in each level, almost all of the rewards are variations of the same three types of gear. You will collect countless sticks, clothes and bracelets, all of which have incremental changes in stats and nothing else. I find myself only changing this gear every few stages when the stat changes are significant enough to make it worth the change. You can sell excess gear, but this gives you a pile of cash that you can use to spend on… more of the same bars, clothes, and bracelets. OH.
Screenshot of Siliconera
Presentation wasn’t much better. Too many menus and dialogs feel like placeholders until the UI design is actually done. While the character artwork is generally great, sometimes certain characters take inappropriate low-poly models to represent them. There are also an alarming number of story sequences without any sound at all. You simply watch the text scroll through in awkward silence, wondering if the game is broken. It does Touhou: New World feel unfinished. Still, at least the music is excellent, almost as if the composer worked so hard to cover up presentational shortcomings elsewhere.
To the end, Touhou: New World is an experiment in trying to create a combination of bullet hell and action RPG that fits both sides of that equation. The boss battles can be a bit of a hit, but they’re not worth the rest of the tedium that makes up everything else. Players like Scarlet Curiosity You can find something to love here. However, the challenge is not there to recommend it to the fans Touhouits difficulty level and it’s designed as an action RPG to the point that I can’t recommend it to fans of the genre either.
Touhou: New World Now available for Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and PS5.
