Kokoro's Gensokyo Journey: The Lost Masks

It's an alright Rabi-Ribi fangame that's relatively easy to complete a normal run and get 100% achievements for. I'd only recommend this if you've played Rabi-Ribi before, as you'll appreciate the various callbacks to it in this game. In fact, almost every character sprite has the same eyes as Erina! It's light-hearted, which is a good thing considering the other games of this genre that aren't. The overall margin of difficulty is somewhat small in both ways; I couldn't facetank nearly as much damage as I'd expect in Casual and Normal, though Lunatic didn't feel much harder afterwards. The early bosses are very 'nothing', while the more interesting ones can be found towards the end and in the short post-game. The attack pattern aesthetics are pretty basic. Play Rabi-Ribi instead if you haven't yet, though if you already have, I'd say that this is a short and cute game to play if you want more Rabi-Ribi, but also, I'm pretty this game has never gone on discount before, which makes it even harder to recommend it. Regardless, I hope that this developer continues to work on more games in the future, would like to see more from them.

Its a short game that has a lot of Rabi-Ribi DNA built in.

I don't think I can add more to what the reviews here already said, so I'm gonna try to keep it short. The game is a Rabi-Ribi inspired Touhou fangame, with excellent level and boss design. Don't let the simplicity of the graphics fool you, the game was made with a lot of effort. You can see it in how much care there went to the mechanics of the game. A small example is how enemies don't deal contact damage if you melee them first, which is something that might seem small but does wonders for the flow of the battle. I think the game's ONLY disadvantage is that it's a bit short, but if you are one of those people that go for 100% completion, the in-game achievements will keep you busy for quite a while, probably for dozens of hours. Shoutouts to the game dev for making such an amazing game!

Kokoro's Gensokyo Journey might not make the best first impression due to fairly low production value. As in: It seems comparable in art and sprite work to some flash games of the 2000nds. I like to joke to myself that most of the budget went to the banner artwork of its Steam storepage. When you get beyond looks and presentation though, this is a very competent and compact Metroidvania. The flow of the game is swift and there's very little sequencing to limit your freedom of exploration. Secrets are cleverly but not frustratingly hidden. The boss patterns are well designed and decently challenging, and it's nice that the bosses level up depending on your progress. I'm usually not a fan of "scaling", but it's welcome if it's tied to story progression like here instead of unavoidable character level ups. Playtime may be much shorter than a lot of other Metroidvanias, but I appreciate these deliberately small and dense worlds, as other fangames like Luna Nights and Double Focus have them as well. Kokoro's Gensokyo Journey also has very few rooms that feel like unnecessary padding, so it never gets close to overstaying its welcome.

Tiny but fun game. Its very clearly inspired by Rabi-ribi, but thats not a bad thing. And you play as Kokoro, so thats a huge + for me.

It's fun.