TouHou Nil Soul

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 bat…

[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…

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. I…

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

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.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥ is hella fun