Piece of advice: If you ever wander Gensokyo, bring a banana. No, I'm serious.
Touhou Genso Wanderer -Reloaded- is a Mystery Dungeon spinoff fangame of Touhou, a franchise with a massive following in Japan. The game was developed and published by AQUASTYLE.
The game originally came out in 2014 in Japan as “Mystery Gensokyo 3." The game later got updated and released digitally in 2016 in Japan and in North America in 2017 as Touhou Genso Wanderer. Touhou Genso Wanderer -Reloaded- came out in 2016 in Japan and 2018 in North America for Steam, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
I’ve personally only played four Touhou spinoff/fangames before this, those being Luna Nights, Touhou Fantasia, Sakuya Izayoi Gives You Advice and Dabs, and Senran Meisuishu Tactics. I know little about the Touhou world.
Story (E)
The story of Genso Wanderer -Reloaded- is about Reimu Hakurei, the main heroine of the Touhou series. While looking at some items for sale from the shopkeeper Rinnosuke, she takes interest in Rinnosuke’s prized possession, the Golden Sphere.
So much so, Reimu tries to grab the Golden Sphere in a hypnotic state, knocking it out of Rinnosuke’s hands. Rinnosuke becomes possessed when it falls to the ground.
So, the main story is to stop the possessed Rinnosuke. Along the way, Reimu runs into and gets help from Futo Mononobe, a sage in training who, no joke, gives you her entire backstory in your first meeting.
As a non-Touhou fan, it’s impressive that the game introduces the world of Touhou so well.
You get to converse with over 70 characters, get to see different landmarks like the Hakurei Shrine, Moriya Shrine, Lunar Capital and more. It really makes me want to learn more about the world then the game shows.
However, this story has massive flaws.
Most of the characters either lack screen time, are annoying or just bland. Reimu and Futo are the worst offenders.
Reimu is unlikable with her hypocrisy throughout the game, resorting to threats when things don’t go her way or if she finds others annoying, her attitude about resolving the incident, being greedy and so on. She’s unbearable, I dislike her so much.
Futo on the other hand can be aggravating with her jokes, since it can get old and head-ache inducing despite some great lines. Her presence in conversations make them feel longer than they should and jarring since she only ever appears in the middle of cutscenes in the main story.
The comedy is fine, but not much of it made me laugh, just wasn’t my thing. There are a couple of clever comedic bits though.
The game also gives exposition a lot, which is boring and follows a tell no show approach. With exposition being so slow and boring, it’s actually agonizing.
Despite over ten campaigns in the game, I only enjoyed one, that being the Fairy Kingdom campaign due to the interesting characters and kingdom. The rest of the campaigns I either dislike or don’t care for.
The conflicts as a whole aren't engaging, some of them are so non-existent, like finding a gift. Most of the campaign endings are either whatever or just anticlimactic.
Presentation (A)
Genso Wanderer Reloaded is a really pretty game, one of the prettiest games I’ve seen thanks to the amount of visual variety, artwork and extensive soundtrack.
The dungeons of the game have a lot of visual variety, from the streets of a city, to mansions, outside in the cherry blossoms, and many more. Dungeons transition from setting to setting as you progress, adding dungeon visual variety that many dungeon-crawling games I’ve played don’t do. The character sprites are also all 2D and look neat.
The art and portraits for the characters are all detailed and crisp.
There are also cut-ins for characters when they do special attacks or for special events, They’re all beautiful to look at, ironically making me want the enemies to activate their special attacks.
One problem I do have with the visuals is that most of the characters stick to one pose during conversations. Despite panning shots and the like, the lack of poses make conversations visually boring. Computer graphics and multiple poses should’ve been present more to add visual variety.
The sound design all around is great. The soundtrack has 152 songs. All of the songs are fantastic, featuring a perfect range of calming, beautiful and intense songs.
Sound effects are fitting and work well, although some of them can be ear-grating with specific weapons. The game also has voice-acting and while it’s hard to criticize since it’s in Japanese, the voices are fitting.
Gameplay (D)
Genso Wanderer Reloaded is a Mystery Dungeon game where you explore randomized dungeons on a grid system, every move by your or the enemy takes up a turn. You progress until through floors to the top to fight the boss.
You have a minimap so you don’t get lost and lots of equipment and money to pick up. You also have partner characters by your side to assist you.
It's important to keep your stomach full by eating food/edible weapons, if you don’t, you’ll gradually lose health each turn once your hunger reaches zero.
However, unlike other mystery dungeon games, your level always resets to level one when you die in/leave a dungeon. You don’t lose any equipment if you perish, just any currency you have on you.
I wasn’t a big fan of this though, since it removes a lot of the risk vs. reward element since you only lose currency and time.
When I lose all of my non-equipped items, I have the rush to try again to get them all back. When I don’t lose them, I just feel less incentive to try again.
Danmaku is collected to shoot magic spells, different for each character. You collect P points for your Danmaku as a pick-up that gets added to your Danmaku bar. These are useful for getting out of sticky situations.
Weapons and shields can be fused to increase their damage/defense and give more seals, which gives special effects like more damage to fairy enemies, because screw fairies.
These seals can be really handy, and with the right combination, you can dominate floors.
You can duel wield two weapons at once, striking an enemy twice in one turn. However, you're a glass cannon, so it's not recommended.
You can also mix ingredients to create equipment like potions or food too, which you unlock after the main story. Although, you need Nito Points, which enemies also drop, to make items. This was really neat and helped me in a pitch when I needed healing items and the like.
You have 30 slots for your inventory. You can get more inventory space thanks to Preserve Gaps that act as inventory extensions. There are other gap types, but I mainly used Preserve Gaps.
Like many Mystery Dungeon games in general, this game controls very well. It feels great to win fights and you can even find secret areas filled with useful items, which are always a treat.
Your enemies have different colours or size-difference to convey their rank. The game is filled with a lot of enemy variety with their own special attacks, which makes for a mostly great challenge.
If you feel bad, just imagine they're someone's cringy recoloured "OCs."
However, there is horrible execution in places.
It feels like progression is tied to your consumable items more than your weapon and shield. I never felt a noticeable difference when enhancing my equipment, even with +70 enhanced equipment.
Since these items are consumable, that means you can feel like you’re back to base one too many times when you use a lot of them or feel you haven’t progressed at all by getting the wrong consumables for certain bosses.
It’s frustrating, I never felt like I was getting stronger.
The game also has two easy exploits to make the progression easier, I’m surprised they’re here at all since it’s not hard to do them.
If you save and exit in a hub area with a shopkeeper, any items you bought from them will be restocked, letting you buy them again.
The second exploit lets you restart a floor/boss by quitting the game application before the game autosaves, which happens after you choose to retry the dungeon or not, letting you retry infinitely.
I cheated by using these two exploits a lot. It's not a surefire solution by any means, my butt still got kicked, but helps to balance the, at times, unfair difficulty.
There are a plethora of traps, ranging from ruining your food items, taking half your health and destroying any items/walls around you, making items unusable and more.
There are just far too many traps, they’re overwhelming to deal with and frustrating when you trigger a bunch in a row. You can thankfully swing your weapon to make a trap in front of you visible, but with so many, it can only help you so much.
Along with the traps are the enemies. Most of the enemies are fair, however, the highest ranked enemies drove me up the wall, especially in Futo’s campaign.
I love it when Marisa can shoot a projectile from across the map with no warning at all. I love it when Mokyuu can revive instantly three-four times, maybe more. I love it when a bunch of my items are cursed by Hina in one turn while she has ludicrous health.
My absolute favourite thing is when Tenshi attacks me from across the map and I have no clue where she is as she chips at my health repeatedly.
This is horrible game design.
There are the bosses. Which can be very fun to face, although most aren't designed with dual-weapons in mind. A couple of bosses can be cheap though.
For example, one boss can inflict a status ailment on you and your partner in their first turn. This can end the fight unless properly countered. However, there’s no warning ahead of time of this status ailment being present during the battle.
One final note to make is that some characters are behind day-one DLC, even Sakuya with her own campaign, to play as them. Up to CDN$59.38 when excluding DLC costumes and artbooks.
Most characters are restricted to just partners without paying extra.
The characters should’ve been playable in the base game, not behind a paywall. Especially given the DLC content was all finished up when the game was released.
Overall (F)
It honestly breaks my heart that I have to write a negative review for "Touhou: Genso Wanderer -Reloaded-."
While I don’t like the game, I could tell there was a lot of heart and care put into this game with its presentation alone. It also makes for a great look into the Touhou universe and I did enjoy some of the mechanics.
Unfortunately, for a non-Touhou fan it’s characters, story, comedy and campaigns are all egregious or lacking. Its gameplay made me want to pull my hair out, I legitimately hate this game.
With that said, I think people that do enjoy hard games, even if they’re unfair, might get a kick out of it. If you’re one of those people, this game might be for you, otherwise, stay away.
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