Review: Touhou: New World Is a Disappointing Blend of Genres

Touhou Project is a series I’ve always looked at with fascination. It’s been going for an impossibly long time, largely produced by a single developer, and still commands immense popularity. I’ve never personally played one, because I’ve never been particularly good at shmups. This inability only gets worse with ones where the screen is often a Magic Eye painting made of bullets. However, I understand the appeal of Touhou, and I’ve always had the deepest respect for those who manage to get good at it. This is why Touhou: New World, at first glance, feels like the Touhou game for me.

Touhou: New World is an action game, not a shooter, so it is much more in my wheelhouse. One of the many fangames based on ZUN’s work, this is the second Touhou action-RPG hybrid from developer Ankake Spa. The first was Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, starring Remilia and Sakuya, and now it’s time for Touhou’s main protagonist, Reimu Hakurei, to take the lead. Marisa Kirisame joins her as a second playable character.

Screenshot by Siliconera

The story of Touhou: New World is simple. Both Reimu and Marisa experience strange happenings in Gensokyo and find themselves mysteriously warped to the Outside World. An encounter with a human named Sumireko results in the outsider returning to Gensokyo with them. However, Sumireko’s presence threatens to destabilize the balance between the two worlds. Now your chosen character must figure out how to fix this and save both worlds.

Gameplay in Touhou: New World is viewed from a top-down perspective, similar to many classic RPGs. Combat consists of a basic attack combo, three special moves which have cooldowns after use, and a screen-clearing Bomb attack that takes a long time to recharge. You venture through a series of levels as either Reimu or Marisa, fighting off hordes of enemies before a final encounter against a boss at the end.

It’s simple stuff, and it’s easy to see the Touhou DNA within all of it. Especially during boss fights, where your opponents like to fill the screen with a dizzying array of projectiles and possess a speed not seen in other enemies. Many of these fights are a lot of fun, as they keep you constantly on your toes. There’s even a fight against a giant enemy crab which is one of the more memorable fights in the game.

Screenshot by Siliconera

It’s a shame that the fun of the boss fights is undermined by the rest of the game. While bosses offer a decent level of challenge and variety, the same cannot be said for the generic mobs you encounter on the way there. There is a comically small number of enemy types that can pop up, and they re-appear everywhere. They barely even correspond to the locations you find them in. You’re just as likely to encounter an army of fairies in a snow-capped mountain as you are in an enchanted forest.

It doesn’t help that this repetitive enemy design exposes the flaws in the combat system. Action RPGs like this often live or die on how satisfying their combat feels, and Touhou: New World does not have satisfying combat. There’s not a lot of weight behind many of your attacks, and enemy attacks feel even less impactful. There were too many times when I could barely tell I’d been hit until I looked at my health bar and realised that enough stray projectiles had quietly bumped into me from off screen that I needed to heal. Everything just feels a bit limp.

The only attacks that feel like they’re hindering you are large charge attacks from enemies, which knock you to the floor. However, this only serves to make you wait for a couple of seconds while your character slowly dusts herself off and gets back up. Enemies will even have the decency to back off for a moment while you do this, making this feel pointless as well as tedious. If this knockdown state gave enemies free hits on you, I’d see these attacks as something to be wary of and work harder to avoid. In reality, though, these attacks only exist to slam the brakes on the flow of combat every time they happen.

Screenshot by Siliconera

This makes the combat difficulty of Touhou: New World feel weirdly unbalanced. Wrangling your brain to play the game as both Touhou and an action RPG can lead to a lot of dying to errant projectiles early on. However, once you’ve grasped this weird balance, combat for the most part becomes a little too easy. The problem with recycling so many enemies is that their attack patterns become too familiar too quickly. They also don’t appear to scale up with your levels and upgrades, making later levels feel easier than those at the start. I’m all for getting tougher with progress in an RPG, but that doesn’t mean I want to curb stomp every generic wasp from the start of the game in every endgame level.

Speaking of upgrades, this was a problem that discouraged exploration. While there are an abundance of chests and item drops throughout each level, almost all of the rewards are variants on the same three pieces of equipment. You’ll collect countless rods, clothing items and bracelets, all of them with incremental changes in stats, and nothing else. I found myself only changing this equipment every few stages when the stat changes were significant enough to make it worth the switch. You can sell the excess equipment, but this hands you a bunch of cash you can use to spend on…more of the same rods, clothing and bracelets. Oh.

Screenshot by Siliconera

The presentation isn’t much better. Far too many of the menus and dialogue boxes feel like placeholders until the real UI design got finished. While character artwork is generally great, there are times when certain characters get out-of-place low-poly models to represent them instead. There were also an alarming number of story sequences without any audio. You just get to watch text scroll by in awkward silence, wondering if the game has broken. It makes Touhou: New World feel unfinished. At least the music is excellent though, almost like the composer was working extra hard to cover up presentation deficiencies elsewhere.

In the end, Touhou: New World is an experiment in trying to create a mixture of bullet hell and action RPG that undercooks both sides of that equation. The boss fights may have some charm, but they’re not worth the rest of the tedium that makes up everything else. Players who enjoyed Scarlet Curiosity might find something to love here. However, the challenge isn’t there to recommend it for fans of Touhou’s difficulty and it’s so under-designed as an action RPG that I can’t recommend it to fans of the genre either.

Touhou: New World is out now for Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and PS5.