東方幻想魔録W ～ The Devil of Decline

Hard ass RPG but SUPER FUN

this is the pinnacle of Touhou RPG. so much expansion from the first pc release. this is more of a gensoukyou experience; the music, the art, the story, it will create a sense of fulfillment, without even leveraging ''play with your touhou waifus''.

like i said this is the top of the line for Touhou, and will stay so until Zun approves franchise. I played this back in 2010-ish when it first released, for like 2 or 3 runs, then again when its ps4 released for a complete run, no death, 100% collections, so you can imagine how long that took. but it was still worth it.

Best JRPG I've ever played, no contest

Not a thumbs up or a thumbs down, but a underwhelming "Meh".

I'm really hoping something happens soon b/c after the whole intro section I've been wandering around aimlessly for a few hours with no idea where to go to progress the story forward. It's starting to frustrate me a great deal. I don't want to cheat and resort to a guide, but if I cant figure this out soon I may have no choice but to.

It has the three fairies of light so instant 10/10

baller RPG from the golden age of touhou

Played back in the day when there was no English translation, basically progressing through trial and error. Game is hard but not unfair. Time to grind another 200 hours.

The Devil of Decline is a surprisingly well-made mechanics-first JRPG inspired by the SaGa series and Persona.

The story is your usual goofy Touhou world-threatening incident, but serves its purpose in moving you forward and delivering a few chuckles. Many of the inhabitants of Genoskyo have been spirited away, disappearing entirely or being lift in a weakened spirit form. Worse yet, the entire world has shifted and rearranged itself into a chaotic three stratum nightmare. The Disgaea series is a good frame of reference for those not familiar with Touhou. It's nothing special, but it is certainly fun.

The music and art are fairly standard 2010s indie game fare. They get the job done.

Game mechanics is where Devil of Decline really shines. At its core, you have a standard 5 person command-based JRPG set up. Buffs, debuffs, status ailments, and so on are all extremely important here. You return to full health after each battle, with only MP and limited-use Spell Cards being expended. If you lose a battle, you simply return to the last healing point, which is generally just the Hakurei Shrine. That sounds generous, but even standard enemies can be deadly, with AoE afflictions, high damage, and instant-death spells being regular threats.

Boss fights start to become difficult fairly early in the game and only get harder as time goes on, outside of a couple of exceptions. Most every boss will require you to use everything in your arsenal to barely squeak by, with many even requiring build changes to deal with their particular mechanics. I've played a lot of JRPGs over the years, and only a small handful offer as consistently rewarding boss fights as Devil of Decline.

The game allows for rather open exploration for the majority of its runtime, so if a boss is proving too difficult you can almost always explore elsewhere first and return when prepared, perhaps having changed up your characters builds in the meantime.

That of course raises the question of what character customization looks like. There are about 20 characters to recruit to your team, each having their own stat growths, a limit-break-esque Last Word, and a limited-use-per-heal Spell Card. The Last Words and Spell Cards can be damage, mitigation, healing, or really anything. From there, customization is largely up to the player. You can equip swords, spears, or striking weapons, each of which has its own skill level that raises over time and a large number of weapon techniques learnable based on the equipped weapon, much like many SaGa games. Additionally, each character can equip three shikigami which function much like Personas, providing stat boosts, passives, and active spells and abilities. There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 170 shikigami, which, combined with weapon and character selection allows for a huge amount of customization. There are a handful of other mechanics borrowed from SaGa games like elemental field levels and party formations as in Romancing SaGa 3.

If you like hard, tactical battles and lots of character customization in your JRPGs, it doesn't get much better than Devil of Decline.

I am a big fan of Genius of Sappheiros, Strawberry Bose's previous game (I speedran it quite a bit actually :3 ), and I cannot express how happy I was that Devil of Decline finally got an official english translation patch! Just finished 100% of my first playthrough, and it sure was a ride. While I didn't find the same things I expected from GoS, it was still incredibly fun to play through, and it probably won't be my last playthrough too, as I want to enjoy other MCs, parties or different play styles.

Following up on the masterpiece that was Genius of Sappheiros, Devil of Decline decided to reuse a lot of the features of the predecessor, while dropping a few. Namely, formations are back, Enemy weaknesses and resistances, slay damage multipliers, Divine Shield (this time actually properly explained!!) Spell cards limitations, buffs and debuffs are all very much the same as before. No more commanders, no more Elemental buff on physical attacks, and with the Shinigami system, Physical is not the way to go anymore! Lives are gone too, as well as personal weapon types, and most importantly, the Power system completly disappeared, making the game a lot more simpler.

And overall, the big thing with this entry is how much easier it got compared to GoS. A lot of the boss fights in Sappheiros were about figuring out a specific strategy you kind of had to go for in order to beat the boss, with different party members, formations, skill selections, equipment and power distribution. In this game however, pretty much everything is determined by your Shinigami selection, and bosses don't really have specific gimmicks that requires you to figure out a way to deal with them, as the game gives you pretty easily some over the top damage dealing abilities. Still, the difficulty is more than enough to be enjoyable, just don't expect to constantly game over or retry like you did in GoS; it will happen from time to time, but not 20 times throughout a stage (looking at you stage 20!).

Talking about stages, they are also completly gone in this game, and it feels really nice, as you just seamlessly go from one area to another, whether it's Makai wasteland or places we all know from Touhou. It also is a complete open world too, allowing to clear the third big dungeon first. The music is once again a jam everywhere we go, and there is A LOT MORE battle themes in this, all absolutly fantastic. Big enfluence from PC98 on the soundtrack too. The only bad one I can think of is Korindou (which is a shame considering how often I checked out that place!)

I talked about it earlier, but the shinigami system is the core part of the game. Every character gets to equip up to 3 shinigamis, who each gives stats, passive skills and active abilities. It is basically the replacement for the Power system, and it does work wonder. While we lose a lot of customization ability on our party, having presets already ready makes things a lot more simpler, and while the abilities should progress in power as you go through the game... it doesn't quite do that, and gives you some INCREDIBLY broken stuff very fast. Will you be able to spot them as well as I did?
Back on the topic, the more you progress the more options there is, and it gets really fun trying to mess around and choose your party, and get more and more options for it. Sure, everything joins at level 1, but it never takes long for anything to get back to the levels of everything else.

My only real big gripe is that I feel the overworld character design is a downgrade compared to GoS. The sprites was what appealed me to play Genius back in the days, and they all feel really sad now. The artwork of every character does make up a bit for it, and upon seeing a bit of GoS again, the enemy spritework is a lot better in this, as a lot of enemy sprites are coming
back, and I have to say, good job to Strawberry Bose, as I doubt a lot of people would notice it.

All in all, DoD is a fantastic game, that I would recommend to anyone wanting to enjoy some Touhou RPG with their favorite Touhous (they are basically all here up to Great Fairy War, whether as Humans or Shinigamis). It is not so hard to repel non RPG experts too, and can be cleared very fast for the main game. The music is fantastic, the combat system is really cool, the characters are lovable, and the game is brimming with content. Sure, it is not as good as Genius of Sappheiros on a few aspects, but it's different enough that it is still very much enjoyable. Honestly can't wait to see a translated remaster of Nightmare of Rebellion now!

This artist "ink" was chosen by the very heavens themselves

Having played through what I feel is a reasonable chunk of the game, I sadly have to say that this game is a bust. The shikigami system, while amusing at first glance, being able to equip a bunch of girls onto your main characters, are basically just levelable equipment. The only distinct difference between "main" characters are the spellcards they have, which have few uses, and they're otherwise a slurry of shikigami skills, indistinguishable from one another. It's basically a dull unlockathon, which I'm especially disappointed by due to how unique the characters felt in Genius of Sappheiros, their previous entry.

Basically, an extremely flexible RPG about learning and exploiting its own mechanics. Every character can equip any shikigami to use any skill at variable degrees of effectiveness, leading to many viable strategies that can be used to take down any tough enemy, and basic stats affect a lot so buffs and debuffs play a big part in the game.

Easily one of my favorite games of all time and also the one I've replayed the most across all its past releases, it feels amazing finally being able to play its definitive version in English after about 13 years.