Touhou Blooming Chaos 2 Reviews

This is a great arcade-style RPG action game with just a few glaring issues that are likely to make you go insane if you are a completionist. It's absolutely nothing like the first Blooming Chaos game. It looks like a surface level mix between a Squaresoft RPG like the Mana series and Maple Story, but it plays more like an older shoot 'em up like Pocky and Rocky on the SNES. The game is totally playable in English and even much of the humor of the original game translates well. The default game involves going through one of three dungeons, killing bosses and defeating the "final boss." There's no ending or credit sequence, which is disappointing, but there are so many extra modes that the game feels like it's never going to end. I suppose the fact that the combat is just addictive and fun is what kept me going at this. There are a ton of included characters and 16 extra that you can buy through the DLC that have no effect on the game or its achievements other than altering the playstyle. The only thing that makes the combat seem shallow is the fact that the characters all start with three abilities and their abilities always stay the same, even though the attack might become faster or more powerful. Some characters are overpowered, some are mid and a few (Especially on the DLC) are completely useless if you're going to finish the extra game modes. The default game is super easy since you can level up and stockpile healing potions to complete it at whatever pace you like. As you level, you can assign stat points to increase things like speed or evasion and what I like is that these have a dramatic impact on how the game is played. If you max out your speed your character will fly all over the map. I also like that the health system is limited to "hearts" like Zelda instead of traditional HP bars. This means that even at the later levels when you are overpowered you still have to be careful and avoid taking hits because you can take 20 at most before it's game over. I also absolutely adore the fact that this game is very much skill based when you get down to the overall mechanics. You have to kill every enemy when you enter a room, and knowing their attack patterns is the key to everything. There are bats, for example, who shoot rays of damage that instahit unless you predict and dodge them, but there are also projectiles and enemies that run at the player. Each mob encounter feels like its own thing and needs a careful approach to make sure you don't take damage. The boss fights are also totally skill-based. You can beat nearly every boss hitless if you are skilled enough and learn the attack patterns. There are some sinister design elements, like bosses that will lock your inventory so you can't heal or drop you to one health. There's one in particular who knocks your soul out of your body and incapacitates you until you manage to find where your unconscious body is and walk back into it. It's for things like this that I kept playing this game and it weirdly never felt repetitive even after 100 hours. There's also a lot of cryptic stuff. Characters can equip six "clothing cards" which is the equivalent of six outfits that boost stats. They come in different levels, and to upgrade them you have to combine two alike types of cards to bring them into one higher level card, but you have the opportunity to retain a vital stat of your choosing from the previous card like HP or ATK up. You need silver and gold coins to play the extra modes and unlock characters, but the gold coins have to be dropped from specific bosses. To play the extra modes you have to find a silver or gold coin and drop it in front of a machine to get its generic equivalent. This alone took me an hour to figure out but it was fun learning how it all worked. You can also complete "quests" for the golden boss coins and for clothing pieces needed during a horrible clothing collection quest that affects the achievements. The whole system of figuring out how all this stuff works was fun, and eventually I saw a logical path to fully complete the game. With that said, the extra modes are both the best part of the game and the source of incredible frustration. There are about ten extra game modes, from a super easy boss rush to a mid-tier gigantic enemy world. Then there are "near impossible" game modes like All Stars and Endless that will truly make you question your sanity. All Stars randomly shuffles the characters on each level, but they all start at level 1 while the enemies get harder. You have to become an expert on all 30 or so playable characters to pass this. One great thing is that if you open up the menu you will get a detailed description of how your attacks and buffs work so you can distribute your stat points accordingly. Endless is the other nightmarish mode because to get the achievement you have to play for many hours without dying, and the game scales in a way that if you don't know what's coming you will fail and die. At level 110 the game starts throwing gigantic enemies in rooms that also contain bosses, and then at level 140 the gigantic enemies and bosses will now be invisible while still retaining their ability to do things like drop the player down to 1 health or cause inventory lock paralysis. It's super hard and you actually have to know the game's design perfectly to pass this game mode. The music and graphics are just great, and I wish the DLC added more than just characters so I could keep playing it a bit more. Even though I spent 100 hours on this it didn't feel like enough and I still wish I could've played around with the other characters more and learned more thing about this game's cool design. It's certainly not a game for everyone, but if you like high skill arcade-style games that seem to respect the nature of classic JRPGs, then this is an amazing game and also probably the best Touhou game on Steam, if not the most accessible.