TouHou Nil Soul Reviews

Rinnosuke is acknowledged 10/10

I like the remake of EoSD. I never would have thought a bullet hell would come to turn-based combat.

Strange Game to me. Not the best but good enough. If your Touhou Fan go for it. 7/10 Overall

Touhou Nil Soul is a boss rush RPG spanning 11 missions. It's always your group of girls moving on a grid against one powerful stationary foe. At the start of a fight, you have no ammunition (reiki) for your special skills, so you build that up through standard attacks. Enemy danmaku moves around the grid as well and healing and reiki pickups appear periodically, so movement and positioning does have a point. The whole system seems simple at first, but complexity increases to a satisfying degree as your roster grows and gains synergy. Next, I've found the loot system to be pretty exciting and motivating, reminding me of finding and gambling items back in my Diablo II days. No equipment is just given to you, everything is in the shop. You always know the type of item you're buying, but never its bonus stats. Items of higher rarity cost more and tend to have more bonus stats, but may even come with up to two stat deductions. There's always that risk that an orange (highest quality) gear piece may deduct something important like attack range or movement speed, turning it from a potential winner into something atrocious. Moving on to the probably biggest weakness: The story is so-so. It's mostly a retelling of Touhou 6, with the twist that through the Nil Soul relic, Reimu and Marisa can create puppet duplicates of who they beat in combat. A sensible idea, as most of the cast could hardly be logically persuaded to ally with them against Remilia. The English translation ranges from solid enough in most cases to pretty bad in some. Especially Sakuya's chapter stuck out to me as pretty butchered, which is a shame, particularly because the overall scenario (Reimu being angry at Sakuya for allying with youkai against humans) seemed to be among the more interesting plot-wise. Most gameplay tooltips are at least accurate and easy to understand. The majority of missions have a cute action-based minigame that is optional to play and will increase the money you gain after battle. If you don't do well on it, your team leader may start the bossfight on low hitpoints, so it might be smart to skip if you're not confident and the mission is particularly hard. If you're having trouble: I've had the impression that it's easier to anticipate the obstacles by ear rather than sight, as they all pop up with distinct noises. When it comes to size, the playtime isn't too huge here, but chunky enough if you can't get enough of it. If you only want to see how the story goes, it's over very quickly and quite easy. Folks have called the first playthrough a tutorial and I agree. With 5 difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard, Lunatic, Extra) that behave like a New Game + each time, the total of 55 distinct missions isn't too bad. Overall, Nil Soul is a pretty innovative and solid RPG. I've had a good time with it! Within the Touhou fandom, it isn't among the top dogs like Labyrinth or ADiA, but still places in the respectable league of something like Genso Yonbai Ken 2 or Three Fairies' Great Journey.

Easy mode is really easy. Then there's a big spike in difficulty when choosing normal mode. I'm ok with the game being easy, I just progress through the story more quickly. The idea of a round-based barrage dodging game is executed well in the game.

[h1] Gameplay [/h1] Touhou Nil Soul is a very interesting take on what could be defined as a turn based mixed rpg mixed bullet hell strategy game which surprisingly works pretty well in its design. The game especially for new players may be kinda tricky to grasp at first since you are given little tutorial vids but found to play the game to be more of a learning experience than what was shown. So you dont start with many characters at all, but then you gradually go stage by stage to earn more of them and sooner or later you end up having every single one you also defeated. Every stage comprises of a different boss fight and each with their own unique mechanics and ways of using their abilities defined by steps or phases which is indicated by the hp bar. Bosses on every consecutive turn are able to regain their shield to a certain limit or some (like patchouli especially) can regen it back fully no issue. The goal is to break the shield and try to lower the boss's hp bar down to zero to win the level. For the player characters (up to 4) you lack the ability to regen per turn however there are some character skills that do allow for life leech and shield leech upon using skills or normal attacks towards the boss like daiyosei's 4th ability. Bosses have quite a lot of skills, some may form up various roadblocks on the battlefield, or create trails of poison or flame that linger only to then follow up the following turn with a danmaku hail of their own sorts. Most bosses have the ability to summon a minion or 2 or even up to 4 that does play a role that does relate to the main boss design with their own small set of abilities. ice fairies for cirno, poison sprites for daiyosei, meilings spirit double, yin/yang for reimu, flandres multiple clones of herself etc. Ideally while navigating through all of these obstacles and planning out what abilities should be cast or which shall be waited upon and surviving, doing what you can to come out ahead in the long run. As these battles can go on for quite a while (at the time of writing this im working on extra/hardest difficulty). Each character you have also come with their own set of unique skills and abilities that can be used on battle not unlike the boss variants however slightly more limited. So theres plenty of ways to mix and match between characters to find certain techniques or combos that go well with one another or simply for the purpose of having fun trying all of them out. [h1] Difficulty [/h1] The deal with difficulty for those who've been going through each one of them will notice how much of a spike there is between each mode. from easy to normal it felt alot like going to hard mode, then afterwards with lunatic it seemed slightly more balanced of an increase. then extra essentially from lunatic most things become doubled in damage at least from starting with it here. Helpful note between difficulties is on every stage theres a part of the screen where it says collection. you can look at the 3 items you can acquire from it as in you still get the items listed even if you lose. ideally finding the rarer ones can save some trouble in building the characters you use and funny enough can lose your way to an eventual victory or farm them out to be able to take on the boss on the same difficulty. This can be both a positive and a negative thing with the game depending on the individual as it is true there can be ways of feeling locked out of progression unless you can acquire better gear or trying over and over again. In this review id say difficulty overall could use some tweaks but not to heavily as a way to make things a little more balanced and an slightly easier transition per difficulty. [h1] The Rpg Elements [/h1] In the game theres a decent amount of equipment, each with various properties dedicated to them, some more than others but also with their defaults being generally the same. weapons being about attack/reiki gain, armors being defense/shield, accessories being unique as each one has a different property (hp up/reiki/regen/movement) Weapons are specific to each character which are more or less not to different in what they do aside from it being built with the character and their corresponding ones in touhou. remilia's gungnir, patchoulis book, reimu's seal stick. Not to much can be said for equipment. the last thing would have to be the rarity system. theres normal, uncommon and rare. Rarer gear has an additional set of stats with it with oftentimes a small negative property to go with which may be based on chance for each added property individually. [h1] Final Thoughts [/h1] Theres alot that can be said about the game, going through its vast amount of characters/bosses but this is a general overview of it. Its a very fun game that can last for quite some time with the options given to its gameplay and style. Can give it a recommend for people who enjoy turn based games with a mix of a danamku mixed rpg challenge all in one.

Excellent small scale turn-based strategy game where you put your team of four distinct and unique units against a boss bombarding you with attacks. The Easy difficulty acts as a nice tutorial before tackling the proper and harder challenges. Interactions are the name of the game, no two units share a single skill. It won't take you long to select a team of favourite, despite any Toho fetish you may eventually hold, and as all characters progress together, you can swap them out as your heart wishes or the current challenge asks. Inane dialogues before and after scenarios can thankfully be skipped with a key press. I am a bit unsure about the progression system, as your squad levels up infrequently depending on the number of map you cleared, which locks down the higher difficulty as you simply cannot survive if you dont have the stats for it. The translation in Japanese has a lot of issues, and I am guessing the English one does as well, which makes figuring a few skills a trial and error affair as their description isn't useful. The loot system feels like an useless extra layer on the much more interesting distinct skills of the characters and just adds some unneeded out of battle micromanagement. But the interface is very serviceable - make sure to turn on the free camera in the options ! -, everything is tool tipped and all status affecting player and enemy characters are displayed transparently. The only slight issue is the bullets coming from off screen: I wished more of them were displayed. I stumbled upon this and bought this to try it, with little hope: what a pleasant surprise!

A truly amazing fangame. Now that it has been translated into english, it would be a shame to not give it a try if you like Touhou or turn-based tactics (or both!). Art is great : character sprites and models are well polished and nice to look at. Music, as in any Touhou games, official or not, is really important. The team behind this game made great effort to adapt our favorite TH6 : Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil into modern remixes and it really sounds great. I'd definitely get the soundtrack for my personal playlist if I could get my hand on it. It's that good (for those who played it, I'm talking "Fantastic Danmaku Festival" quality level in terms of music) Gameplay : now that's where the real gem is. I was curious how they could implement a silly idea such as "Danmaku battle, but turn based". Turns out it works wonder. Every battle is about battlefield control. In a standard Touhou game, you try to find the gap in danmalu through reflexes and memorizing pattern. In Nil Soul, you need to both find the gap and create them when you can't go around them. Each boss has its own skillset focusing on battlefield control in its own way. Reimu use straightforward, carpet bombing danmaku. Rumia use AoE, danmaku waves and also hides them in smoke to surprise you and force you to relocate. Daiyousei simply spread poison mist everywhere if you can't manage to not detonate her barrage. Cirno bombs the hell out of your team and force you to avoid barrage from all direction while at the same time escaping Icicle Fall tactical nuking. And there you stand, with your flimsy team of heroines (every character in TH6 : Scarlet Devil is playable, even though as of now the game only goes so far as Meiling) that each allow you to buff/debuff, attack, heal and destroy barrage to avoid getting crushed by the unrelenting waves of bullet that come your way every turn. I should mention this by now : the game is hard. Like, real hard. Sometimes it feels unfair hard. I'm well versed into turn based tactics game, but I've been defeated dozens of times even by the earliest bosses. It took me two hours to beat Daiyousei by the skin of my teeth, and I can't manage to beat Cirno (literally for once, the strongest boss in the game as of now) If you give the game a try, be prepared to be frustrated, and lose a lot. The boss have overall twice the combined HP of all your team, hit like a truck and get stronger the closer they are to defeat. Overall, a very unique game born from the unlikely pairing of turn based tactics and Touhou Danmaku. Full of fanservice too (I'm not talking about "physical" fanservice, but of dialogues and fandom references) It still needs polish, translation is a work in progress, but I'd recommend it any day to spend a few hours racking your brain to beat a fairy that you crushed in 30 seconds in the official Touhou game.