Developer: Bar Holographic Otaku
Publisher: Bar Holographic Otaku
Platforms: PC
Price: £8.50 (purchased during 10% launch discount)
Everyone and their grandmother has played a Persona game by now. About .1% of people have actually played a Shin Megami Tensei game. About .0001% of people have played an SMT game from before Nocturne! Sadly, outside of a scant brush with Nocturne a few years ago, I've never put time into a Megami Tensei without the Persona name slapped on its box. They seem fine mechanically, but I think they never quite appealed to me in other departments.
But what DOES appeal to me in every department is Touhou! From lifting my authorial pseudonym from the 14th game to my shameless worship of Okuu, the 2hu games are near and dear to my heart. So when the developer behind a small but impressive game called Udongein X started showing off this cool looking mesh of Touhou and the old, first-person, dungeon crawly Megami Tensei games, I was immediately intrigued. Suddenly, sweettalking demons into joining your team is a lot more appealing when the end result is a team of all your favourite 2hus.
So when the game released last month it was a no-brainer, and I'm glad to report that it's more than worth the cost. Honestly, the price it's at borders on highway robbery. Let's get into why!
The story is simple and does its job. You're Sumireko Usami, you're dreaming about Gensokyo yet again except this time there's clones of everybody running around, called Sleepers. Nearly every Touhou character is accounted for, even the nameless and the men (all .4 of them), even Mizuchi from Foul Detective Satori shows up which threw me for a loop and reminded me I have a mountain of supplemental material to get through. That said, the clones aren't doing much aside from being a minor annoyance to everyone. Except you. They want to beat the shit out of you for reasons. There's also a big tower in the middle of Gensokyo that unlocks further levels as you take more selfies in iconic locations. That's what every teenage girl visits a nuclear furnace for, right? Obviously, it doesn't come without a narrative twist or two but for most of the game that's your motivation to explore the world and take new selfies. The dialogue is mostly functional with a few dated memes in there that are... honestly, more endearing than they should be. Feels like the game is cringing with you for once when Meiling hears "sus amogus" and thinks Sumi is actually trying to cast a spell on her.
Alright, enough story meandering, I wanna dive into the gameplay side of the... game.
Quite frankly, what we have here is a strong contender for game of the year based purely on how well everything just... works. It's not like this year has been barren for good games but I truly think this is the only game to have come out so far where every single part of it feels very well thought out compared to one another, like a grotesque Rube Goldberg machine of youkai sacrifice. It's Megami Tensei to the core, there's physical attacks, though they strangely cost MP rather than HP, there's magic attacks, solo and party variations for both, and elemental strengths and weaknesses to factor in. About all it's really missing are the non-spell skills like [x] Boost, [x] Amp and the like but as of writing those are planned to be implemented.
Where this gets really impressive is how the gameplay and the story mesh together; included among the clones are the actual bosses you will be facing, and so depending on how familiar you are with either the enemies themselves or Touhou lore, you can go into an area, get a good idea of who you're facing at its end and thus capture their clone for research and preparation. I've never seen a game so organically allow you to prepare for boss encounters, stomping them on their first try feels like a reward for doing my homework on the boss and the area rather than the game being too easy - it does NOT lack for challenge, I should add. Even then, the game does throw a few curveballs at you; the boss of an area won't always be who you expect but can still be found roaming around so you kinda have to dance around the rug as the game's pulling it from under you under threat of getting thrown back to your save point and losing some EXP.
About the only time the game cheats in this department is on the very final superboss, who is normally weak to Pierce and Thunder but then you reach the boss and she says "haha FUCK U Sumireko I resist EVERYTHING!". That being said, it is literally the last boss in the entire game so I'll let it slide.
There's been a bit of piss and whinery about the Danmaku sections for capturing your waifus but it's more than welcome, albeit a bit less cohesive than the rest of the game. Apparently the developer agrees as it will be reworked a bit in the near future so the following points are for the sake of retrospect and my own experience. Every pattern is based on one actually used by the respective Sleeper in their own game, save for ones who haven't actually shown up in the games, and so any seasoned Touhou player's knowledge will be very useful in capturing the more difficult Sleepers. I believe the Sleepers' health in these segments scale to Sumireko's level so it does make wandering into areas you're too weak for and bagging some Sleepers a challenge, but it's doable if you're already a veteran of these games. The world starts to open up a lot by the time Sumi reaches level 30, and it's more than possible to immediately break into Hell (the one with the animals, not to be mistaken for the 8 other Hells in Gensokyo) and grab some Sleepers with levels in the high 40s if you know how to deal with their Danmaku. Though this necessitates a tough boss battle with Kutaka so the game at least tries to bar you from doing such.
All well and good for feeding into the progression system, but there's a catch; the Hijack maneouver immediately ends whatever battle you're in, and you don't get the EXP/money for any enemies you already killed beforehand. So to progress evenly it necessitates this bizarre all or nothing approach where you spend a bunch of battles hijacking then spend a bunch actually playing the RPG. As stated however, this will be remedied in I believe the v1.2 update.
The Sleeper fusion also warrants a lot of praise; Persona 3 is among my all time favourite games, but about the only real grievance I have with it is that there's no way to take cool but weak demons and make them viable in the endgame. Most endgame teams are some very unique and never before seen combination of... *checks notes* Lucifer, Helel, Messiah, Satan and Metatron. So it made me giddy to see that both Skill Transfer and Sacrifice were present in ADiA. Does your waifu start at level 10 but you want to carry her to endgame despite her crippling weakness to Pierce which about 93847% of endgame enemies have at least one attack for? Just feed more powerful enemies' skills and EXP to her! I imagine every endgame team is going to look a lot different in this one based on personal preference. Okuu was of course a mainstay on my team all the way to Level 99, but I also got immense value out of Biten, Seiga, Zanmu, Raiko, Meira and Yuuka, well beyond the areas they're obtained. It's still worth going out of your way to collect the waifus you're not fond of and, heavens forbid, the men, as every Sleeper has unique strengths and resistances which Sumireko herself can assimilate. Certain Sleepers' affinities are objectively broken in combination with certain skills but I'll leave that purely for you to figure out.
That said, keeping your waifus around takes maintenance; Fusion isn't very useful at first but once you unlock the ability to fuse 5 or 10 levels above Sumi's level, it becomes much more viable. Combined with the exponential rise in EXP required to level up Sleepers, the game strongly incentivizes trying out new characters. I never expected Sariel to become a cornerstone of my endgame team, but what do you know?
There's so much I haven't even scratched the surface of, like the numerous side adventures dotted around Gensokyo with all sorts of cool rewards and new weapons/gear. By the time I had seen the game through to 100% completion, I had racked up 44 hours of Steam playtime. The price-value ratio is simply astronomical, especially when none of it feels bloated or like filler. For a measly £8.50, it's a more complete and compelling title than many games daring to sell themselves for £60. I find it hard to fault much of anything with the game, and it's been incredibly enjoyable for its entire duration. I imagine I'll be coming back for replays for a while to come, bringing my darling Okuu to level 99 each and every time.
