Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend

No one will read this anyway, but Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend is a good roguelike deck builder wrapped in Touhou goodness.
Pros:
- Mixing and matching different mana types creates a lot of deck variety and strategy
- Fun and rewarding characters with a couple of styles each to choose from
- Card variety and mana requirement variety to play them open up a lot of strategies to build your deck around
- Touhou music, characters, and art direction
Cons:
- The map is very straightforward
- Exhibits (items that buff your character during a run) can often feel rather inconsequential or boring
- Events offer choices that are often lack strategic variety or are too inconsequential
- Too little strategy requirement variety from battle to battle
- Lack of enemy variety from run to run
Slowly, the game is still being developed in meaningful ways, so there are opportunities for the game to become more polished in the future.

Ultimately, Its slay the Spire with Touhou.

The game obviously has better presentation and music than Slay the Spire, but don't be expecting TOO much. Encounter Variety isn't as high as I would like, and build viability also is wildly fluctuating. The biggest strength of this game is basically stealing colored mana from MtG, which lets characters gain access to unique cards, and even cards that can belong to other characters, which makes for interesting synergy. It's not my favorite card based roguelike (That would be Chrono Ark), but I see this as an easy recommend if you like both 2hu and StS

I would highly recommend this game over Slay the Spire 2.
The overall balancing is much more beginner friendly and there are a lot of interesting systems that allows the creation of more exciting builds.

From the outside looking in Lost Branch is going to come off as a Touhou clone of Slay the Spire, which to somewhat of an extent is true. It heavily leans into the deck building genre that STS pioneered. That being said, there's a lot more going on outside of Slay the Spire with a Touhou coat of paint. The added depth originates from the additional Magic the Gathering coloring system incorporated into the game design and card formula. I'd just like to preface this with the disclaimer that I have never played MtG before in my life and I was entirely new to this system, but I picked it up easily enough.

Cards in Lost Branch are tied to a specific color: Blue, Red, Green, White, Black, Grey. With that in mind each playable character (barring mod characters which could have more!) has two different decks focused on that color primarily as a primary color and the alternative as a secondary color which is showcased through their mana (energy) pools in order to play a card. If a card costs 1 red and 1 grey, and you have 2 white mana then you can't play that a card as you lack the mana to play that card. It's an added layer of complexity into deck building rather than associating a certain card coloring to a specific character. Coloring pools are tied to a character's starting exhibit (this game's rebranding of a relic) and further into a run boss exhibits. Characters having two different starting decks and coloring focus also pays homage to mainline Touhou with characters having different shot types in the bullet hell genre that Touhou is famous for. When you defeat the act 1 boss you get additional exhibits that not only expand your mana pool, but also more likely than not introduce the potential for off character mana card rewards if claimed which is a lot stronger than the STS equivalent of a prismatic shard. Off color character cards can be very strong even above the power curve than their base colors. This formula and game structure rewards experimentation and trying whacky decks you wouldn't think could work, but they certainly can and probably will, assuming the player is skilled enough to properly navigate the various card mana requirements that a mixed mana deck would require. Careful play and card order to not gimp yourself in a pivotal moment.


As you'd expect out of a Touhou game and with danmaku the animations are really pretty, I think almost every single attack has unique attack visuals which is simply just incredible amounts of effort and detail. The card art for the cards themselves are all excellent, character art is excellent both for the playables, characters depicted in events, and also for enemies. As you'd expect out of a Touhou fan game there's remixed tracks of various character themes for fights appropriate to them and also for the playable characters and they all sound great.

Outside of the MtG inspiration, the game has a slightly larger focus on deck building and leans a little away from Elite encounters snowballing a run with powerful relics. The shop node in this game is a very powerful tool as it's not only a location to remove (on top of shopping), but also a place to alternatively upgrade a card if desired. Shops are also the primary location to pick up a tool card, which is basically this game's equivalent of a potion. They show up in your deck, but have an added draw 1 effect when drawn so they don't brick a turn.

I previously hinted at at various points in this review, it has mod support, which is really awesome! Being able to play with additional characters outside the initial playable cast is awesome!

As far a criticisms for the game go, I have a few. The path to act 4 is sadly too linear. In StS act 4 offered the player some agency on when or where they collect the three keys to access act 4, but that isn't the case here. Instead the player has to undergo a trade chain at specific nodes across the first three acts and select specific exhibits and trade them when offered. The final trade in also occurs in act 3 at any Gap node (the equivalent of a rest site). The problem here is that the exhibit that you trade away has a passive health regen upon fight completion, so if you enter a Gap node early, you're forced into trading away that sustain Exhibit to reach Act 4. The player is never offered an opportunity to exchange it later into the act, and it really pigeonholes the player into going into the last possible gap node possible if they want to be optimal with their mandatory to acquire sustain exhibit or punish them if they want to enter a gap early for healing or upgrading a clutch card recently obtained.

This game also has an equivalent to Ascensions both through difficulty modifiers easy, normal, and hard, and lastly Lunatic, but additionally in the form of requests, which are toggles you throw on for make a challenge harder. Easy difficulty is very welcoming to beginners new to the genre and would want to dip their toes into the game and learn with training wheels on, but at the same time it also prevents the player from accessing act 4.

The equivalent of A20 (StS1) or A10 (StS2) is Lunatic 7 Requests, or also referred to as L7 which I can't exactly say I am a fan of the final toggle having played it myself. It adds what is effectively a curse in your opening hand which adds an additional mana cost for the first card played each fight and that cost increases as you get further into the run act by act. In my opinion it only really attempts to brick the opening first hand each combat and isn't a fun way to add difficulty. It also doesn't solve the issue which plagues the game at a high level, the fact that it is surprisingly easy to infinite in this game especially if the player is skilled and know what they are doing. The fact that the highest difficulty toggle and threshold in the game doesn't address one of the more problematic issues with the game is a bit of a head scratcher, although there is a mod out there that changes that toggle in a unique way that helps push against infinite degenerate gameplay set ups by only mana spiking the cost of your cards when overly cycling your draws and deck. I can't say I have experience using it, but briefly scoping it out and playing the current alternative in the game as it is, it seems like a major plus for the state of the game as it pushes back against more degenerative deck playstyles while not punishing more honest decks that the current toggle does.

I think an unfortunate thing about Lost Branch is the price tag. It's never gone below 20% off despite being in early access this entire time, and it's obvious competitor of Slay the Spire already had a plentiful amount of Touhou character mods and even a massive Touhou overhaul mod as well. It's really easy to go "wow Slay the Spire is more affordable and had Touhou mods so I'd just go for that!" It also has to compete with Slay the Spire 2 recently dropping which despite coming out more recently is still cheaper than Lost Branch. I feel like if the cost was cheaper Lost Branch would be a lot more appealing to people. It doesn't help that there isn't a demo of the game either maybe that's an early access limitation or what have you, but that doesn't help the entry point for people curious about the game either.

Ultimately I'd recommend Lost Branch to Touhou fans who were curious about deck builder games as a whole, but I think it may be a little too expensive for fanatics of the genre to pick it up, despite the game doing a fairly solid job of expanding the StS deck building foundation with MtG's coloring system.

Very very fun deckbuilding game inspired by Magic the Gathering and Slay the Spire.
I wasn't interested in either of those games and their kind, but a the power of the Touhou fangame is such that a great one like Touhou Luna Nights or Touhou Soccer can create an interest in a genre where there wasn't. This is one of them.
Each character's shot type starts with their own deck, health, money, mana-granting exhibit (special bonus), and on-demand spell card (bomb). They're mostly offered new cards at the end of battles, new exhibits at the end of major battles, and mana-adding exhibits after act (stage) bosses.
The strategic layer is to balance your resources between short-term probable enemies and the long term need for a deck that can win the late game. A big question in every run is what to do with mana: since you're offered only cards that can be played with your base mana, fewer coloured mana makes your rewards more consistent, but more of it opens up some useful possible additions.
As for the battles themselves, this is where it really gets fun. The combinations in this game get pretty long and very fun to play out. It's really cool to figure out what do to with each hand to play it most effectively. The more complicated decks will have cards that can be used, and built up to, in many ways. The range of the effects is very broad: drawing more cards, making temporary copies of cards, playing a card you've discarded, generating a choice of completely random cards to add to your hand, taking extra turns., and so on. This leads to many fun small victories like deck searching and finding the best card, or figuring out that it's better to attack an enemy even if it means not defending and taking damage.
Each enemy follows their own pattern of attacks-buff-debuff-defend. Since most of them keep improving their attack, it's important to try to win as fast as possible without taking too many hits doing it. In particular stage endings by default fully heal, so there's no reason to hold back anymore. There are no attack phases where they get new health bars and almost no opportunities to manipulate them. Instead you get a wide range of them and need to prepare for all sorts of stage enemy groups and potential boss battles, each of them requiring different strategies
The game is clearly well made. Cards are generally clear about what they do, their tooltips explain their mechanics, and the cards that reference others let you inspect those as well. You can restart individual encounters as much as you want to correct blunders. The difficulty settings build up well to let you learn the game until it feels like Lumatic is the base difficulty to add extra modifiers on (the random nature of the game means playing lower difficulties for score wouldn't be interesting). Almost all Windows-era touhous are in the game in at least one card art. There are keyboard shortcuts and controller support. And of course, the graphics and music are beautiful, including some alternate art cards.
It is still in early access and this does show. Some elite stage enemies have dialogue, but most bosses don't. The intro cutscene is good, but there is no ending one. A few of the cards could be described better.
Now the closest points of comparison for Lost Branch would be Slay the Spire with Touhou mods and Fairy Card Rogue, but I haven't played them so I don't know how these compare. I did enjoy Lost Branch a lot by itself.

This game is a masterpiece. A real masterpiece.
One of the very few turn based games that gets you absolutely excited and stressed for the final boss. A game where you absolutely have to think, there is no auto-pilot. A game where options continue to expand and your rational gets harder to determine.
Yes, this is a "Slay The Spire"-like game.
But they took the mana format, made it REALLY good, and really represented Touhou really well.
This game has complexities way beyond any of the card games on the market.
If you are a Card Game lover, this is a must buy. If you are a Touhou fan, you will ABSOLUTELY love this game.
I can only give my regards to a game I still go back and play all the time.
Please give this game an honest try.

Its so much fun
Gameplays is fun, Music is the perfect arrangement of the usual Songs that u know and love, Presentation anf Animations are very well done, Challanges are tough.
The only flaw is that I didnt bought it earlier, and and thats my fault!