izigame.me

I'm not sure what to say about -FORESIGHT-
I was a huge fan of Reloaded with over 700 hours in it, all of which felt like it breezed right by because its gameplay loop and customization that was paced so well and showed the player just how much the game keeps giving felt like it never stopped and was very well pieced together.
I'm 3 hours into the game and I noticed immediately that a bigger role in this is that you have permanent leveling, as opposed to your equipment leveling. I know theres a fusion feature to be unlocked, but this leaves much to be desired as for when you tackle the first boss and you think you're going to have to spam certain medicines to win stand a chance, as there is no substitute yet for ways to lets say put together seals like you would have in reloaded. I was hooked on Reloaded the first time I started it, and when I saw this game announced after deciding to skip the 'mess' that Lotus Labyrinth R looked like, you could imagine my excitement.
Part of that excitement if not a good majority of it has been deflated. I was looking forward to more of essentially a very well rounded sequel to Reloaded but I guess its not what I'm getting. Like another user has said, there are some very strange translation errors and the way text formatting can be. Which is very odd considering Reloaded's great translation.
What this game has going for me so far is really the story. It seems interesting. I'll forever miss the feeling of leveling up and evolving hundreds of different weapons and armors and seeing them transform or predicting what they might be. I'm not huge on the Izanagi link system, but I was very excited to see Misumaru finally appear in a fangame and have some sort of importance.
Overall, lets see... The equipment leveling seems to be gone. If I had to guess the Fusion is just that and eventually you can smash together seals. There is no evolving weaponry or leveling of it really. You're meant to abuse the Izanagi link system to minmax for tougher fights, as the fast travel has been upgraded even further now to let you warp straight to a boss battle. This makes sense gameplay wise when you factor in that your characters are permanently leveled and meant to do the heavy lifting, as opposed to Reloaded where you'll start in a dungeon and make sure you're leveled enough to keep on trekking forward while your awesome equipment did the lifting for you from start to finish, as you found and gathered all of what you wanted.
I don't know everything about the series, but I do know that there are three of these games total on steam now, with others that have gone completely under the radar and left as untranslated and on other platforms, and that its possible that this game is even just a slight remake/upgrade of one of their older games. This is just a sidenote after I did some research because I was curious how when looking for more genso wanderer, I found Lotus Labyrinth R and was turned off from it immediately, as its screenshots and video plainly depicted what most people reviewed it as - just something you want to stay away from if you wanted the Reloaded experience.
I hate steam's "yes or no" rating system. I loved Reloaded to bits and could play it endlessly, so I'm not sure if I should give this game a "Thumbs up" or a "Thumbs down" at the moment. I'm pretty 50/50 on it. One of the more miscellaneous things I would like to mention is that the game has been slowed down significantly, even when you set all of combat, player, and enemy speeds to max, it feels at most around what just the 'fast' mode felt like in Reloaded. Nowhere near 'faster' or 'fastest.' Which is a shame, because the feeling of blazing through dungeons and slicing your way through mobs was fantastic. I have very mixed thoughts on this game so far.
Edit: I'll preface this by saying 2 things.
1. At least 20 or more of my playtime on this game were from the game idling in the background as I did other things and it was left open. 2. Everything reviewed past here is after I completed everything in game, from the in game achievements, to completing every possible quest/dungeon, unlocking everything etc.
Most of my review still stands. I have a tough time describing the way I feel about this game but I'll just go off I suppose.
I personally think this game has a phenomenal story, by the end of it I was sad that so many of the answers you get were kind of dripped along the way but made you feel less included then you actually are. I won't spoil anything because I think its worth experiencing. Its hard to say if a game is 'worth' a certain amount of money, because 1. I'm not a game developer, and 2. money isn't a way to quantify an experience in a very objective manner. Like anything else created, games take time, manpower/team, and talent from every field imaginable to create. So I can't say yes or no to this game's pricing, but what I can say is that it is very short in all honesty. I knew this game was going to be short from a certain point when I realized the story they were telling was only going so far, and it started to reach a certain midway peak and I thought to myself that this is where its going to stop in a certain direction and head towards another. You'll know when you get there, type of thing. But it leaves you feeling a little depressed.
Because this game focuses its progress/gameplay completely towards the story, and not towards dungeons essentially, if I had to guess most players likely played it/used its mechanics in the very linear fashion that the customization was given to you in the order you got it/unlocked it. Most of that simply just being the Izanagi Link system, and re-linking it for when you were having trouble with a boss fight.
Spell cards, medicines, fusion capabilities, all gutted/limited. Things like Sake builds aren't really possible, because if the sake is in the game, I haven't found it yet after 40 hours of gameplay and beating literally everything up to level 99. I took off work purposely to play this game because I was very excited for it.
That feeling of Nito-Fusion insane creativity and excitement of 'what unholy god slaying weapon am I about to create if I get this, this, and this together' is gone. Literally just gone. Instead as you progress through the game you'll find higher tiers of varying characters weapon and armor/shield. You smash together seals and make your preferred weapon till you're forced to switch and break out a new weapon literally meant for the boss of that route/story progress, as you'll need its 100% slayer damage upgrade. Then from there you usually re-do your Izanagi link to match for it, since there aren't really ways to get creative with builds.
You can buy the all purpose spell card but it barely does any damage, even with Divintation, combined with the izanagi link buffs. They didn't want you clearing rooms anymore it seems. Reimu's fantasy seal spellcard can't be bought, and I think I found a total of maybe 13 through out my playthrough and still barely did any damage. The sleep card comes in handy alot and I highly recommend it for "certain fights" that people might have trouble with. Can't be bought though.
I loved the story but its linear progression is tied to the gameplay and vice versa. This makes it very hard to capture the feeling of the wanderer series that I know and loved, which is for me just -reloaded-. Maybe I'm the black sheep for only playing that one, but I saw the game after it and just kind of said 'no'. When I saw the trailer for this game and it showed it just being you and your partner I thought to myself holy crap its back this is gonna be freakin awesome. It didn't exactly turn out that way. I gunned through this game to not only get my moneys worth, but also genso wanderer charm in its characters and the way they capture gensokyo's residents perfectly like Reimu and others, but also because I wanted to squeeze every possible drip of entertainment.