Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded

Not Recommended

Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded is a remake of a Touhou doujin Mystery Dungeon style roguelike game (The Japanese flavor, I.e. Shiren or PMD. If you don't know what any of that means this may not be the game for you.) mixed in with about 6 or so expansions to THAT game, which is why the story ends, keeps going, ends, keeps going, lets you play as three other sets of characters with unrelated stories, and keeps going. This is all in the base package mind you. Only one expansion to the game is paid DLC at this point with a smattering of extra characters.

The mystery dungeon flavors of roguelikes are very elegant and video gamey: Stats are small, gear traits are almost musou style upgrades that help cover all the game's little cheap tricks, etc, and this one is no different. All the items are Touhou themed and all the enemies are Touhou girls. You have a lengthy monsterpedia and itempedia if you aren't as adept in Touhou lore and forget whether Yukari or Youmu is more likely to mess with your gaps and if Yuyuko or Momiji are going to attack your food items, or if you're a toohoo boomer and need help understanding what the hell all these characters from the games after SA are.

The one most clever thing this game does is allow fusion to happen at any time in a menu. In Shiren, you had to fight, trick, steal, and otherwise abuse the game to get vital fusions on your main gear, but Touhou gives it to you basically for free. At any time you can spend fusion points to merge gear together to transfer upgrades and seals (For instance, mixing together the "prevent stealing" and "immune to hypnosis" gear items to make a gear that does both in the same equip slot.), and later items let you manipulate the seals directly as items. Shiren would KILL for that level of power, and it's an interesting system that keeps expanding as you play the game, allowing you to craft items out of thin air mid-dungeon and eventually, like 30 hours in most story routes clear level eventually, start breaking limits and grinding up Disgaea style nonsense +9999 weapons.

The problem is the game is absolutely bloated on every level. It's no longer elegant and quick and nasty like Shiren was. You have dozens of trash items that you have to break down into fusion points (Menu, tap, tap, tap, select, tap, annoying fanfare that interrupts the otherwise excellent Touhou music, an absolutely dreadful bit of design but it's optimal to do this 3 or 4 times a room every time you find garbage loot you don't want to hoard or use.) and a lot of dungeons get gimmicky and just refuse to drop anything even slightly good. The dungeons keep dragging on and on. Piles of story dungeons, side dungeons, literal dozens of extra dungeons that let you use all those DLC characters or anyone else you have unlocked, almost all devoid of interesting gimmicks. When you can just craft items out of nowhere out of garbage, why does a "no items identified" style classic roguelike experience sound interesting? When the game is balanced around the crafting, is "no identified items, no crafting" going to be fun? There's no other way to fuse/upgrade weapons, mind you outside of rare scrolls.

For the first 15-20 hours I was having a blast exploring all these systems but I'm not even halfway through all the story content on offer and it's all become so endlessly repetitive. Level after tedious level of a 40 floor dungeon full of enemies I two-shot, completely trivial crap, stuff I have to constantly vacuum up and tap tap tap fanfare to melt into fusion points, all the way up to a stupid boss that is immune to every single interesting roguelike trick/effect and is just a test of the heal potions you collected or can craft (Or in one case a boss that just kills you if you didn't have a hard counter accessory that DOES NOT EVEN DROP IN THE DUNGEON SHE IS THE BOSS OF.). The game piles on so much stuff that it loses the elegance that makes Mystery Dungeon tolerable and it just feels like every other indie roguelike where you bump into things and grind forever combined with that awful fusion point melting (If it were just ONE button on the inventory to auto-trash or a sell-box like in ToME the game would be infinitely improved but it is not.).

I enjoyed a good chunk of my time with Genso Wanderer. The art is great, the music is great, the Touhou character writing is all wonderful, capturing how snappy and catty most of the Touhou girls are except for Utsuho who is a GOOD GIRL. The fusion system is full of interesting ideas that I don't think have ever been experimented with so directly in a roguelike so far. (Heck, the fusion system was, at first, the most compelling thing about the game to me.) It's also interesting to see all in one package a fan game that has been expanded probably about 6 or so times from the initial release, which explains quite well the bloat. But it just stops being fun after a while as it doesn't play all that well as a classic style roguelike and doing 20 hours of just building up the same gear on the same char over and over makes the game completely a trivial and overlong hack and slash.

(FYI every single DLC item on the list adds something that is NOT in the main game. I.e. Utsuho unlocks as a partner in the main game, but you can't PLAY as her unless you pony up the cash. The game is not short for content or characters though so you don't need the DLC at all.)