Mystias Izakaya is a game i am unlikely to finish due to its large amount of content, but i feel satisfied with what i have played enough to write something up on it.

This game takes place in the touhou universe, where you play as Mystia running a travelling restaurant that stretches to various environments from several different mainline games. The core gameplay loop is managing your time to strategically purchase various ingredients and learn recipes in order to appeal to the guests at whatever area you are setting up in. In the second phase of the night, you focus mainly on cooking and waitressing until the end of the day where you get paid.

This loop certainly has a very addictive feeling to it, during my first few hours i really didnt want to put it down. It has the same appeal as certain flash cafe management games i played in my youth and i feel like it carried that feeling well throughout my playtime. There was something about the simplicity of what you had to do and the seemingly endless possibilities for improvement that motivated me to continue playing, for a while.

However i feel like it gets stale after a time. You hit a limit long, long before the story ends. Nights become challenging and very long, tiring. It starts feeling like something of an endless chore to get through.

The art is nice and leaves little room to be creepy but the story and writing in general is a huge miss. Im quite certain it is not a fault of the localization team, but there are several references to online popular culture that just completely take you out of it and makes you feel like youre playing a game made by weirdos, which you probably are at this point. In one line of inquiry Chen calls someone a NEET. An otaku NEET? something to do with NEETs but definitely very embarassing. There was an entire questline dedicated to giving a youkai a picture of Meiling's... "thicc" thighs. I also see recently there is dlc where Mystia is dressed up as Jotaro from jojo. So you can see why this game has become a problem for me.

Obviously the characters suffer from the same fate they do in other fan projects which is that theyre disgustingly one dimensional, completely overtaken by a fanon element and they will run that element into the ground. I dont like much seeing touhou done so dirty when this game and normal touhou are essentially two different beasts. I feel like it does little for the characters though it has so much emphasis on it, and it feels disgraceful somewhat. Marisa likes mushrooms! Meiling is lazy shes sooo lazy she sleeps all day Patchouli likes books and hates everyone else Remilia is a vampire Rumia darkness Sayori is sleepy blah blah blah.

The brevity of your encounters with characters is what makes the people in touhou shine the most, as well as their phsyical appearance and more importantly: their bullet patterns. When one of those things has already been established and you remove the other, youre missing a lot of nuance that comes with the rest of the elements. So its flat and completely cookie cutter characters. I feel like this game has a vast misunderstanding of the world of mainline touhou, and even if its irrelevant right now i also dont like the injection of men into the game. Touhou is special for that reason and its strange to revoke that reason with various nameless customers and villagers and whatnot. Who cares?

The dialogue is definitely the games largest flaw as well as how it protrays Gensokyo, but without that the gameplay feels somewhat meaningless and it all falls in on itself. For a good 30 hours its still quite fun to play and i will have good memories of it as it was gifted to me by a friend for my birthday. Im very happy i even got to play this at all and my friends definitely made my last birthday the best one ive ever had, so i feel somewhat bad about not liking the way it went, but its on the devs for talking about Hong Meiling's thighs so much. Pick it up if you like management games but do not expect a touhou fangame that lives up to actual touhou, for once.

I really goddamn hate rating this as I am. Perhaps it's my own fault I didn't enjoy my time with this game. From what I'd seen, I expected something relaxing, but I was greeted with a convoluted, over-indulgent, and bloated management game.

Why are there such heavy punishments for getting an order wrong? Why can you only choose a few recipes per day? Why must I carefully figure out which recipes to take with me, or else it be impossible to give every guest the order they want? Why is the UI such a mess? Why is everything paced so weirdly? I really tried to play through the game, but I just kept running into more problems.

This game looks incredibly cozy and fun, but the gameplay is naught but. Maybe I'll give it another go some time, perhaps I'll see something in it I don't see right now.

This was a really fun time spender. I will say I did buy all the dlcs which added a lot of content so my view is including what I got with those up to the end of the base game. On some ways this is just a surface level item gather and then dine n dash cook game. The reason this game gets higher phase in my opinion is the Tohou art and characters really make the game shine further then it would otherwise. If you do not like Tohou at all? Yeah this game would not be for you but honestly I enjoyed greatly the over 100 hours I somehow spent in it.

Empecé este juego sin muchas expectativas, tan solo un juego "corto" y relajante mientras pensaba qué juego largo podría jugar en directo.

Como fallé en esa estimación y como me alegro en que lo hiciera. Este juego es muy simple en su loop de gameplay: recolectar ingredientes, hablar con personajes de Touhou y, por las noches, servir comida en el izakaya. Pero es ese simple gameplay loop que lo hace tan adictivo.

El juego es muy permisivo con el jugador, es facilísimo forrarse y llegar de sobras a todas las deudas (he acabado el juego con 60K yenes habiendo comprado todas las mejoras posibles y vigilando mis gastos, por ejemplo). El ambiente que forma es muy acogedor y, a pesar de un inglés un poco roto (que puedo perdonar porque, de nuevo, esto es un juego hecho por fans y traducido por fans del mismo juego), la escritura es fácilmente uno de sus aspectos más fuertes, por lo que nunca se siente como una tarea ardua y aburrida recolectar ingredientes.

Y, de nuevo, todo esto es un FANGAME.

Si bien voy a seguir jugando a sus DLCs, de momento quiero dejar esto por escrito por aquí, día 25 de Febrero, tras haber acabado la historia principal. Estaré esperando con ganas de ver qué nuevas historias me encuentro en el mundo de Gensokyo mientras servimos comidas y cambiamos vidas.

Fácilmente mi GOTY de este año de juegos que no han salido este año.

I can confidently call this the best fangame that I've ever played, and loved every moment of it.

I would describe it as a restaurant simulator with the art style of an anime-fied Stardew Valley with a cast of Touhou characters, set in the world of Touhou. It can get a little bit repetitive, but that's common with this style of game, and personally I'm fine with it, as in this case, it helps add to an already cosy atmosphere.

I'm a big fan of the restaurant gameplay, as it keeps you thinking throughout, without stressing you out too much as there isn't a constant ticking timer. The amazing relaxing OST in the background helps out with this too.

Running around collecting resources is also good too, as instead of an in-game time constantly ticking by, each action you choose to do brings the time forward by 30 minutes, giving you a set amount of actions. As someone with anxiety, I greatly prefer this, as it means I can think about what I want to do without being stressed out.

The dialogue is very well written (no ridiculous fanon interpretations like some other Touhou fangames) and it kept me invested in increasing bond levels after the novelty of it being a Touhou character I loved wore off.

I can also recommend the DLC packs, as for a cheap price they add a large amount of extra content to the game. That's super nice to see in a world where most companies are trying to rip off consumers with terrible overpriced DLC.

I'd recommend this to any Touhou fan, as well as any cosy game fan. For Touhou fans, you get a nice little experience surrounded by some beloved characters. I have to disclaim that I came into this game having been a Touhou fan for years with extensive knowledge of the lore, but I genuinely do believe you can play and get loads out of this game with no prior Touhou knowledge. So for someone new to the series, it's a great game with some sweet characters, and who knows? It might be your entry to the Touhou rabbit hole.