What a little gem of a fangame
I've always been a pokemon fan, but more a fan of the strategic aspect of it and its difficulty, so for those last 10 years, I've mostly only played Showdown and romhacks.
With that said, Touhou Puppet Dance Performance and its modded expansion "SoD - Extended" really appealed to me in every way; training your puppets and making a team you like is a lot of fun.
Every "puppet" (touhou characters in pokemon form) can have 3 "style" which alters their stats, typing and ability.
Basically, one puppet can be 3 different puppet and that's amazing, making a lot of possibilities for team building and finding a sure ay to play your favorite in the form you like.
The game is very easy at the beginning, atlmost too easy but it allows you to learn the new type table at your ease, same with the moves, abilities and all.
From a touhou fan perspective, this game is everything you want aswell. You'll find almost every characters in the whole series, including PC-98 characters, the world is rich with famous locations from Gensokyo and the way it is built for you to be able to walk from almost any location to another is great.
The story works like a main touhou title, with a strange incident occuring and you'll have to discover who's behind it and try to solve it, except in this case you're not Reimu but an human from the outside world, making your way into gensokyu without knowing why you're here. It's quite simple but I liked it.
The game also has a great atmosphere, even for low budget game like this, it's easy to get immersed when first entering in an area because of how great the soundtrack is and how nicely they transcribed area from the maingames. My favorites are probably the Netherworld, Road of Reconsideration and Muenzuka.
Now for what I think could be a bit better :
The equivalent of the pokedex in this game is useless. You'll probably never check it more than once or twice, the reason is that informations about the puppets get registered ONLY when you catch them and not when you see them. As for the information there's almost nothing to see apart from their sprite and a little description. This could have been so much better, like :
- being able to see where you can catch them once you see them,
- see their available costumes because I didn't mention it, each puppet has 2 or 3 exclusive costumes, they're great
- maybe their stats, weaknesses, resistances, learnable moves and all would have been great
Now this bring me to my second point, because there is not much information actually given to you in-game, you'll absolutely need to check the wikia very often and this one is a bit laggy. So each time you want to check the typing of your opponent, you'll have to wait 3 seconds for the page to load.
it's really annoying and for a game that changes everything from pokemon (I'm talking about moves names, effects and typing) those QoL would have been great.
Lastly, the game is not grindy at all, you won't need to grind in the grass to catch up or anything, the opposite actually. You'll often have more levels than your opponent BUT from the midgame, trying to build up a new puppet is quite a long commitment, and in the end if the puppet isn't really what you wanted, you'll end up being disappointed for spending so much time on it.
The last thing I would say is that if you don't know anything about touhou, I'm not sure I would recommend the game, a big part of the fun is recognizing characters and interacting with them.
I'm personally in the middle of discovering the Touhou Series and I completed Touhou 10 not long ago, so while there are many characters I don't know anything about, it was still very fun to discover them in that fangame.
And that's it for the review, I had a lot of fun trying to do almost everything in the game, which took approximatively 45 hours, my thanks to the devs team for making such a passionate project and for my last final message :
Komachi is best girl
I've always been a pokemon fan, but more a fan of the strategic aspect of it and its difficulty, so for those last 10 years, I've mostly only played Showdown and romhacks.
With that said, Touhou Puppet Dance Performance and its modded expansion "SoD - Extended" really appealed to me in every way; training your puppets and making a team you like is a lot of fun.
Every "puppet" (touhou characters in pokemon form) can have 3 "style" which alters their stats, typing and ability.
Basically, one puppet can be 3 different puppet and that's amazing, making a lot of possibilities for team building and finding a sure ay to play your favorite in the form you like.
The game is very easy at the beginning, atlmost too easy but it allows you to learn the new type table at your ease, same with the moves, abilities and all.
From a touhou fan perspective, this game is everything you want aswell. You'll find almost every characters in the whole series, including PC-98 characters, the world is rich with famous locations from Gensokyo and the way it is built for you to be able to walk from almost any location to another is great.
The story works like a main touhou title, with a strange incident occuring and you'll have to discover who's behind it and try to solve it, except in this case you're not Reimu but an human from the outside world, making your way into gensokyu without knowing why you're here. It's quite simple but I liked it.
The game also has a great atmosphere, even for low budget game like this, it's easy to get immersed when first entering in an area because of how great the soundtrack is and how nicely they transcribed area from the maingames. My favorites are probably the Netherworld, Road of Reconsideration and Muenzuka.
Now for what I think could be a bit better :
The equivalent of the pokedex in this game is useless. You'll probably never check it more than once or twice, the reason is that informations about the puppets get registered ONLY when you catch them and not when you see them. As for the information there's almost nothing to see apart from their sprite and a little description. This could have been so much better, like :
- being able to see where you can catch them once you see them,
- see their available costumes because I didn't mention it, each puppet has 2 or 3 exclusive costumes, they're great
- maybe their stats, weaknesses, resistances, learnable moves and all would have been great
Now this bring me to my second point, because there is not much information actually given to you in-game, you'll absolutely need to check the wikia very often and this one is a bit laggy. So each time you want to check the typing of your opponent, you'll have to wait 3 seconds for the page to load.
it's really annoying and for a game that changes everything from pokemon (I'm talking about moves names, effects and typing) those QoL would have been great.
Lastly, the game is not grindy at all, you won't need to grind in the grass to catch up or anything, the opposite actually. You'll often have more levels than your opponent BUT from the midgame, trying to build up a new puppet is quite a long commitment, and in the end if the puppet isn't really what you wanted, you'll end up being disappointed for spending so much time on it.
The last thing I would say is that if you don't know anything about touhou, I'm not sure I would recommend the game, a big part of the fun is recognizing characters and interacting with them.
I'm personally in the middle of discovering the Touhou Series and I completed Touhou 10 not long ago, so while there are many characters I don't know anything about, it was still very fun to discover them in that fangame.
And that's it for the review, I had a lot of fun trying to do almost everything in the game, which took approximatively 45 hours, my thanks to the devs team for making such a passionate project and for my last final message :
Komachi is best girl