Start your adventure
The title we are going to talk about today, Touhou: Genso Wanderer , originally came to Japan in 2015 a
nd arrives on our market after a wait of about two years. Let’s start with the narrative premise of the title: the story, relatively simple, has the sole purpose of making us able to play: we will interpret the heroine of the series, Reimu Hakurei, who will witness a strange transformation of the human friend Rinnosuke after touching a curious golden sphere from which he did not want to break away. Curiously, in the version we tes
ted, the initial cutscene with which the story was introduced featured only Japanese subtitles: a lack of English language curiously curious by the translators, however unresolvable with a timely patch. Do not worry, however, because the events will be explained in the dialogues, this time entirely subtitled in English: a choice more consistent with the knowledge of the European public.
Less chatter, more action
As for the dialogues, as the custom of numerous Japanese productions, we must point out that there are enormous quantities throughout the introductory phase and even at certain levels of the game; unfortunately most of them are not inspired and hard to entertain the player during the adventure. We therefore find it opportune to
have made them leapable or, in any case, not useful for the final understanding of the plot. To make a comparison, also the Neptunia seriespresents a great deal of dialogues, but in that case the humor and the good general level of the scr
ipt can make them enjoyable enough. Other negative points on which we nose a little nose are the overly simplistic graphic style, the result of a cross-platform nature, which is especially noted in the version for Playstation 4, and also a soundtrack in our opinion too anonymous .
Dungeon mysterious
Concluding this necessary premise, we can focus on real gameplay analysis. As mentioned above, this is a roguelike, clearly inspired by series like
Mystery Dungeon or Shiren the Wanderer : we will have to try to cross the different dungeons from start to finish in one go, as long as we have to start over again, returning to level 1. As the game can be very punitive because the dungeons will be generated procedurally in every run of ours, and many deaths arise from situations (not anticipated) which can not be practically avoided; a minimum of frustration is therefore inevitable, especially if we had a “run” so far practically perfect.
Unlike other exponents of the genus, we must point out that Genso Wanderer tries not to overturn the player, allowing him to keep all the objects that have been collected so far; These include equipment, which can also gain levels during the dungeons and thus evolve parallel to what the player did.
Understand that in each of our runs we will always have a small advantage that will allow us to arrive easily beyond in the adventure: there is no way to do grinding, as the game will try to punish us if we stay more than normal in one level and we can only advance without accessing maps already faced. The only way to survive is therefore to
try to defeat as many enemies as possible during the natural stages of exploration in search of the access point at the nex
t level, always trying to keep a perfect inventory for every type of situation. In this game we will not only have the life bar, which can be refilled automatically or consumed objects, but also a “tummy” bar (literally, “belly”), which will need to be filled regularly with certain foods in order not to get it to the fateful “0”: If this is to happen
