LABYRINTH OF TOUHOU - GENSOKYO AND THE HEAVEN-PIERCING TREE Reviews

Do not listen to all those BAKA tierlists, Cirno is top tier in this game

An excellent, demanding dungeon crawler, but hey... It's a touhou fan-game, if it's not complicated, it's not touhou!

Wiki feels kinda necessary because some of the tooltips aren't as descriptive as they could be Animations are fun, level exploration feels nice and the little puzzles are fun, bosses are interesting challenges Every item has an rpg-related joke which is very fun, even though I only get some of them Uses its large-party system very well, boss fights with them are interesting as your party gets picked off from lethal attacks Good game

Pretty good party building game. You keep getting new characters, each of which is in its own class, and with 12 party slots, unlimited free respecs, and well made menus, it's more fun to constantly experiment than in any other RPG I've played. That alone would be enough for the game to be decent, but we also have an ATB-like combat system, with lots of ways to manipulate timings, which makes executing the combat interesting in its own right. (It's worth pointing out that I did not enjoy ATB in other games I've tried that had it. It does not kill the pacing here and it doesn't make you menu in real time.) The challenge is high, though a lot of it is because of poor signaling. Some bosses will throw a berserk tantrum because you did something they didn't like, and you have to play detective to figure out what's their problem (or look it up on the wiki, the feds can't stop you). On top of that, skill descriptions don't show damage numbers, and the mitigation-heavy damage formulas will throw off your testing, which can be annoying. The above might sound like high praise, but we got flaws too. The exploration amounts to walking around on a grid with repetitive random encounters, which at least gives you an opportunity to test combat, but is still boring. The presentation is not great, most of the enemies are downright ugly (there's a reason the steam previews don't show any combat sprites), and the best parts of the experience are looking at a spreadsheet with a png of a touhou next to it. There's also some amount of grinding - especially if you want to unlock all the characters, which you probably do - which is unfortunate, but I can't say it's much worse than the typical amount of time you'll spend doing completionist filler in similar games.

Steam Deck nonfunctional. No idea how this is Verified for Deck, upon starting softlocks you into a startup control config screen. After extensive troubleshooting have not been able to get this game to work.