The Japanese mega-franchise that’s Touhou has had fun on Steam recently, with the newest predominant recreation within the collection debuting to huge gross sales and user-reviews to match, and the most recent spinoff fighting game making a splash regardless of its Japanese-language-only launch.
What I wasn’t anticipating was for business Touhou fangames to make their presence recognized so quickly. Available now on Steam from Chinese indie crew MyACG Studio is The Disappearing Of Gensokyo, an action-RPG/twin-stick shooter hybrid starring the long-lasting forged of the shmup collection. And it’s in (patchy) English, too.
Thanks to unique developer Team Shanghai Alice’s ultra-permissive coverage on fan-works, Touhou by-product video games are an trade unto themselves. This isn’t the primary English-language fangame launch both, with the PS4/Vita roguelike Genso Wanderer being the primary on the block. What units The Disappearing Of Gensokyo aside (apart from being a primary on Steam) is that this appears to be a wholly self-published launch, which means that this might very properly be the primary of many Touhou launches, assuming no authorized troubles come up over the approaching days.
While the animation appears to be like somewhat stuff in locations, The Disappearing Of Gensokyo appears to be like to be a surprisingly genuine tackle the setting. Familiar characters, environments, enemies and bullet patterns recontextualized right into a extra aggressive twin-stick slugfest, with a variety of playable characters offering wildly totally different play-styles. Original protagonist Reimu will get essentially the most vanilla of all attack-sets, with a fundamental unfold shot, bullet-clearing smartbombs and a touch transfer, whereas doll-summoning mage Alice locations items across the battlefield and calls out targets to them for each ranged and melee assaults.
Surprisingly, the sport already affords a DLC character pack, including one other three playable protagonists if the preliminary choice aren’t fairly sufficient. The present English translation may be very a lot a second (or third) language manufacturing at current, however the developer is apparently working closely with the industrious Touhou fan-translation crew to get it polished up, and so they (fairly fairly) notice that the sport isn’t particularly story-focused so needs to be wonderful to dive into now.
It appears that The Disappearance of Gensokyo’s launch has adopted within the footsteps of the earlier two Steam Touhou releases. While the sport isn’t drowning in optimistic evaluations as shortly as Touhou 16, on the time of writing, the unofficial Steam Charts says there are almost 700 players online and having fun with the sport at current. A determine to not be sniffed at, contemplating the business fan-work nature of the sport.
The Disappearing of Gensokyo is available now on Steam for 15% off a $10/£8.29 RRP, and one other $three/£2.09 will get you the character DLC pack, together with mighty miniature Oni Suika, time-bending maid Sakuya and unpredictable dream-deity Koishi.
