Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend

Y

Like Slay the Spire but 2hu + MTG

So put aside if you don't know the source material or not [Touhou is basically a free-use IP for other indies as long as ZUN is credited].

This game is in the same genre as Slay the Spire; and the base format of the game is similar. However, there are two massive differences:

1 - The Mana system; which is inspired by MTG. Each character starts with 2 colors of mana [favouring one color depending on which starter deck you take] As you progress, you'll gain relics which increase your mana pool, but different relics grant different colors of mana, which can add new cards to the card pool you can gain. There are some cards which you will only ever see by taking unusual mana combos [such as cards which need 3 different types of mana]

2 - The system with the Stage 1 boss. Halfway through the first stage, you'll get to choose which boss you fight, which will be one of the other selectable characters. When you defeat them, one of the relics you are offered will be one that gives you one of the two colors associated with that character of mana, AND allows you to find cards unique to that character's card pool. So you can hybridize decks. It's like if you were playing the Silent and after defeating the first boss, you could suddenly add Defect cards to your deck as well. This only takes up 1 relic option, if you don't want to hybridize, you can always select one of the two other choices as well and stay "pure".

It's worth noting you will never find a card you cannot use as well.

This makes this game similar to Slay the Spire in core concept, but with a lot more diversity in builds, experimentation and the ability to hybridize characters. If you like Slay the Spire; definitely try this game out!

There are also various difficulties; an Ascension-like system [Going up to 7 instead of 20, Lunatic7 being the hardest difficulty before challenge settings], and some addittional settings you can use on top of this to change the difficulty/add some weird mods as you please.

Touhou + Slay the spire = This banger ass game.

Brilliant game, must have for any strategy enjoying touhou fans.

you can play as marisa

If you like touhou and Slay the Spire this game is literally perfect for you, it has the depth and engaging gameplay of STS but with enough new and exciting mechanics to still be a fresh and fun experience.
Koishi my beloved

steam age, baby.

You can play as Reimu.

The store page hasn't been updated in awhile so don't be fooled by the early access sticker. The game as it stands now is well worth the pricetag. If you like StS and other roguelikes you'll find something to enjoy in this game. If you like to go zoom more easily than StS will allow you to, you might fall in love with the game like I have. Despite a generally higher power floor and ceiling for the player, the difficulty is well balanced to always give you enough of a challenge. In general the devs and artists have a lot of love for Touhou Project and it shows.
There's one more character left (at time of writing Koishi has become playable in beta) and a story mode before it'll be out of EA, but if my advice is worth anything I reckon you might as well pick it up now and enjoy the two free DLCs' worth of content as it comes out. There's plenty to do in the main game as it stands (I'm at 300 hrs and counting).

I shouldn't be allowed to play card games. You can play Reimu.

Slay the Spire but 2hu and super fun.

you can play as Reimu

Very fun deckbuilder rogue-like with some pretty visuals.

Great Hakurei Barrier, Dichromatic Lotus Butterfly, Barrier Slam.

This game is great, it became an instant favorite for a more casual Touhou fan like me.
The music is great and I often find myself sitting in the main menu and just listening to the theme.
The cards and balance feels good to play, the games is sometimes difficult but very rewarding if you learn it.
The artstyle is also great, it's fun to see your favorite characters on the cards. On some cards you can also change the artstyle for a more meme style or a more traditional style.
If you run out of content or just want to play a character that doesn't exist, you can mod the game to play as your favorite characters.

Love deck building games and this one sets out something unique compared to most. Not only are enemies vastly different but the amount of play styles you could make out each deck makes for more value to replay.

If you like Slay the Spire, or you like Touhou in general, you should give this game a try. If you like both of those things, you'll adore Lost Branch of Legend. While the inspiration it takes from Slay the Spire is very clear, it does put a meaningful twist on the genre via the MtG-inspired colored mana. The characters are fun and satisfying to play, and while the maximum difficulty is easier than ascension 20 in Slay the Spire, it's still a meaningful challenge. (For comparison, I was struggling to get past A15 as Defect in StS, and I can win somewhere around one in five or so L7 runs here.) I think this lowered difficulty also makes the game easier to get into, and if default difficulty is still too much, there's an easy mode available.

As for the theme side of things, the Touhou integration is well done. The little character interactions feel fun and natural, the visuals look great, I love the little descriptions tacked on to the various cards, and the boss themes are all fun remixes of the original character songs. The theming of the decks themselves is similarly fun; there's just something satisfying about picking Sakuya and obliterating someone with twelve throwing knives, or taking three turns in a row to finish off that last enemy. (Or Cirno freezing the field, or Marisa obliterating everyone with master spark... you get the idea.)

But yeah. Amazing game, and I actually prefer it to default Slay the Spire.

Slay the spire, but with funny 2hu characters and other fun mechanics. Lots of fun and variety! Every update so far has been great

I like it more than Slay the Spire tbh (not only because I like Touhou)

Fun Slay the Spire x Touhou game. Builds all feel quite different if not always balanced well.

Great foundation for a rougelike deckbuilder. Great soundtrack and fun encounters. Only criticism is that it needs an "Endless Mode" once resolving an incident.

Overall great game. As someone who has played a lot of Slay the Spire and other Roguelike Deckbuilders, this game is really fun, and it's also Touhou, so that's a plus for me. The soundtrack is also amazing, as is usual with Touhou games. All that said, the game is pretty unbalanced early on. It's manageable, but it generally prevents or makes it much harder to play into a certain type of deck, so you tend to end up building a deck of random cards. The early on difficulty also makes you end up mostly healing at the gaps, and most of the events have more negatives than positives, so I generally skip them. But, even with all those problems, the game is still only in early access, so problems are to be expected, and I'm sure it'll continue to improve over time. I'm definitely going to keep playing though, as I've had a lot of fun with it so far. (Also, please add Sanae as a playable character.)

i love touhou and silly card games!!! the gameplay with every character is unique and fun! really good artwork too! looking forward to the full release!!!

This game is wonderful and keeps getting frequent updates, please buy

rog lik

I'm on the fence with this one, especially since it's in early access, but it's just not there yet.

On the positive side, the core gameplay, mechanics, and flavor are great. If Slay the Spire and Magic: The Gathering had a baby and raised it on a steady diet of anime, this is what you'd get.

On the negative side, and this just beats out the positive, the balance is way, way off. Early battles are often too punishing, causing you to need to heal at the gaps, rather than upgrading or heading to the shop. Events are too often negative (and repetitive). Money income is low. Combined, you don't get to shape your deck enough to get those killer runs that you can with Slay the Spire or its best imitators.

Additionally, avoiding elite enemies, which give the equivalent of StS relics as rewards, seems to be the best strategy, especially given one of the abilties of the final boss.

Most rougelike deckbuilders simply feel like a copy of slay the spire and rarely/barely feel like they've evolved past it or experimented.
This is one of the few exceptions where the game took slay the spire and then actually managed to evolve slay the spire and create something special and unique while feeling familiar

For a game in early access, it has a lot going for it right now and is still getting updates, so I highly look forward to the full release. I didnt expect this games systems to make it so much harder to go back to slay the spire-likes when i could go back to this

"Erin, I am going into the Bamboo Forrest of the Lost, and I need your most unstable potions."

"My potions are too unstable for you, Marisa."

It’s literally Touhou but slay the spire with some extra spice thrown in while being fun af with a banger soundtrack attached

100% can recommend the game (also yes it’s in English despite what the screenshots show)

I quite like Slay The Spire, I quite like Magic The Gathering.
This is Slay The Spire, but it lets you have fun and play wild.
This is MTG, but it lets you build busted combo decks (and later, requires you to).
I have little knowledge of Touhou, but that doesn't affect how much I enjoy it.

If you like any of those things, you'll be down to clown.

I know next to nothing about Touhou, but thankfully for this deckbuilder you don't have too. If you like deckbuilding, you'll like this game. Someone else said it, but it takes what's good about Slay the Spire, and builds upon it.

It's very fun, and very replayable. One of my favourite deckbuilders of all time.

Excellent deck builder still getting new content. Very high effort from the devs and it shows.

Very good game with quality updates. Very impressed

peak

Slay the spire except instead of getting stabbed to death by thieves and magical women you instead get shot at by children. Also much harder.
10/10

If you enjoy Slay the Spire, I believe you’ll love this game. What’s more, it features elegantly designed character illustrations and Touhou’s uplifting music, which is sure to loop in your head.
However, one disappointment is that the controller support isn’t as good as in Slay the Spire. You’ll need to tweak the settings using Steam’s controller support.

Very poggers. Very fun, nice visuals, and animation, can't wait for story mode update! :D

sts but i can be cute and floaty and pretty effects tickle my brain and i cant stop.. ^u^

Magic + StS

very good card game, worth the money, even in EA

They made marisa fun to play

Really fun rougelike deckbuilder. With a lot of content in it alredy. And extremly beautifull vfx.

This is a deck builder that will be easy to pick up if you've played magic the gathering and slay the spire. Its got interesting mechanics, the ability to make broken builds, and cute art.

The card mechanics are really satisfying and a run is just the right length. The variety of card types and playstyles is pretty great after an initial few runs.

It keep finding myself drawn back to it when looking for a thing to do.

Took me a while to get used to the mechanics, but quite an enjoyable game. Building different decks for different play-styles was not intuitive, but once the goal was understood was a fun challenge to make. Cirno's superfriends deck is my favorite so far, but Marisa's near infinite bonkers potion deck is also great. Sakuya's decks are also great.

Game offers quite a few paths and choices, but near the start of the run there is an option for items which is not really a choice if you want to reach the end. Would be nice if that needed item was offered twice in the first act so you could have more of a choice. Only thing I can think of to improve.

this game is so good it singlehandedly ruined slay the spire for me, it has so many more mechanics like extra turns, graze, barrier vs block, teammates, etc. that it makes slay the spire feel overly simplistic by comparison. plus because each of the playable characters are also bosses, you can do really fun mix and match combos with certain pairs of characters which adds even more variety to the deckbuilding.
the mtg-style mana system adds another layer to the deckbuilding as there are a variety of cards that can only be accessed with specific mana color combinations, even on each character, that you'd really have to go out of your way to see them all.
since each color is related to a specific playstyle and card rewards are weighted based on the colors you have in your base mana, it allows you to more easily specialize into something rather than just being complete luck of the draw.
on a more subjective note, i think the aesthetics and music of this game are amazing, even aside from my bias of loving Touhou stuff. I genuinely don't know if slay the spire 2 will be able to compete with how good this game is, it's quickly becoming one of my favorite games of all time.

also it is truly insane to me that they have such amazing looking card art for the ~600 cards that exist in the game, contributed by a variety of artists. this game was very clearly made with a lot of passion for both touhou and its variety of inspirations.

For people who have played Slay the Spire in the past and enjoyed it, Lost Branch of Legend could be the perfect balance of additional complexity and content variety to add to the classic formula. It might initially seem that the base mechanics are almost a 1:1 replica of Slay the Spire, which they basically are, but the coloured mana system used in this game give an impressively elegant new dimension to both deckbuilding and playing out battles. The 5 currently playable characters alongside the huge number of neutral cards gives you a huge cardpool to work with, with card access carefully managed by choice of artifact pick-ups based on the mana colours you might want during a run. It fantastically gives the player a sense of selection agency with great run-to-run variation, and I think it is a real highlight of the game's core design.

If Lost Branch of Legend happens to be someone's first rougelike deck-builder, expect a relatively high learning curve, but keep in mind the strong basis of the tried and tested foundational systems built on the game's predecessors.

Overall pros:
Great character and build variety
Build execution usually remains quite engaging even when it gets convoluted, which it often does
High difficulty modes offers a decent challenge
touhou

Overall cons:
Still in early access and some elements, including full story mode, are unfinished
Derivative nature of gameplay concepts (from Slay the Spire, Magic: The Gathering) may put some people off, though it is my opinion that the implementation is acceptably innovative
Complexity of the game often leads to very long runs (>2 hours) due to long battle times (You can of course save in the middle)
(Subjectivity alert) Visually a little mediocre, the gameplay is definitely the highlight, a lot of the guest card art is really good though

The first deckbuilding game I played that I actually enjoy -- as a huge Touhou fan for over a decade, the themeing certainly helped me get into it. Thinking I'll have to try Slay the Spire and some other games of the genre later.

Anyways, it's Slay the Spire but Touhou, as far as I understand. Can't really review much of the gameplay given that I don't have much experience on the topic - but it feels great, plays great, and I have no issue with it so far. The cards are fun to play around with, with satisfying sound and visual effects, and most importantly: the various artists for the cards are doing a GREAT job - seriously, I would pay to get them irl. They're all beautiful and visually distinct, and really bring life to everything you're doing. I'm especially impressed by how distinct every attack feels and looks from the art and descriptions - not even taking into account the danmaku FX.
Another thing the game does well is the enemy designs, they're incredible and so far seem quite varied - yes you've got your typical anime girl youkai and kedama, but even among those, they're really really fun to look at and identify. Shoutout to the Lovesick Girl for a great design and a really fun gimmick that fits her and her inspiration.
The music is also very, very good - some of the best Touhou fangame remixes - especially for the boss fights, and Yukari's theme, which in my opinion, is one of the best remixes of Necrofantasia out there - the best "chill/calm" I've listened to, at least. I honestly often just pause on the Yukari screen just to indulge in the music and the beautiful art and background. (Helps that Yukari is my favourite character, if that's not made obvious by looking at my username, sure, but the music and vibe is that good.)

It's early access, so not very polished yet - one thing of note is that the translation/writing is... Not great. So far most of the events I've seen rely on many Touhou memes, so your mileage may vary on whether or not you find them funny - some of them I find unfunny, some are okay, but none really stood out to me as "good Touhou writing". The intro felt very... Eh? Like, it's a basic premise to get you going to beat up youkai - I doubt the game intends to have a deep story anyways. If you want a deep and intriguing story set in Gensokyo, there's other Touhou games out there for that.
Then again, the story is not complete, and I'm hoping a revamped translation might make everything feel better. There is an exception in the exhibits - they're usually fun to look at and read the description of, and figure out what they're referencing/coming from, even accounting for the frequent odd translation.

Overall, a really, really fun and competent card-based Touhou game! I would absolutely recommend it if you're a Touhou fan. If you're not, I'd recommend dipping your toes in the universe with other content that doesn't rely as much on you knowing about the characters and the themes - as well as old memes that you may or may not find funny. Even in early access, it's great fun. Wishing the best for the devs - I'm eager to see what else they have in store for us, and I'm hoping for the translation/writing to be refined - if not, it won't be such a big deal. Got it on sale, but I think it's definitely worth the full price.

Probably my favorite Slay the Spire-type game. It has well-communicated mechanics, supports a broad range of viable builds, and strikes a good balance where improving your strategy tends to be satisfactorily challenging: neither trivial nor obtusely counterintuitive.

A pretty fun spin on Slay the Spire. It adds a lot of depth and some of its variants of slay mechanics (like defect orbs becoming teammates) are probably superior to what Slay's versions were trying to do

Yeah okay maybe I'm a little addicted to this game...

Quite possibly one of the best rouge like deckbuilders out there. 5 characters all with 2 paths which gives completely different playstyles.
Each playstyle can be matched with the other characters making a crazy amount of replaybility. That on top of really fun boss fights, artwork and soundtrack yeah yeah I can't stop playing.

Well worth the price and it's only in early access so there's more to come!