Going into this game, I knew very little about Touhou other than it being a bullet hell franchise about cute girls with silly hats. The only reason I even picked it up was I happened to see a friend playing it and I thought the pixel art was positively gorgeous, and the music was pretty comfy as well. What I did not expect was that I would be writing this review after ~35 hours of playtime, for what was (on sale) a $5 game.
Mystia's Izakaya is nothing short of a wonderful product of passion. The gameplay is simple - you spend each day running around, talking to characters and collecting ingredients, occasionally completing little delivery tasks. At night, you open your Izakaya to serve food to customers. If you have played games like Diner Dash or Overcooked, you have a pretty solid idea of what to expect here. Regular unnamed NPCs will show you their food and beverage orders, whereas named characters will tell you the kind of dish they want (e.g. "I want something sweet!") and you will have to infer what dish they want (or customize an existing one with appropriate ingredients) to get the best reception. Your journal keeps track of dishes and their tags, as well as each characters likes and dislikes. Make one of the named NPCs happy, and they'll grant you a spell card with a positive effect specific to them (maybe you'll get an assortment of ingredients, or maybe some gathering points get refreshed the next day). The reverse is also true - screw up their order and they'll mess with your operation as a penalty. Additionally, when preparing dishes you have the opportunity to do a brief rhythm game in time with the music to earn other temporary buffs like being able to throw dishes from any distance. It ends up getting pretty addicting as you become more and more familiar with customer preferences and set up your Izakaya in a way that makes sense to you.
The story itself is fairly straight forward - you make your way around Gensokyo, opening up new food carts and having X number of days to make up the yen for the loan repayment or else Chen will break your kneecaps. It culminates in a pretty challenging final mission and a very rewarding and cute finale. Ultimately it gets a smidge repetitive towards the end, especially if you are like me and wanted to grind out the last couple of character social links to be maxed out - but it definitely was worth it.
At the time of writing this, DLC 1 and 2 are translated so I am making my way through those. Each one adds two new areas to set up shop in with 6 characters to befriend and some new dishes and ingredients.
Overall, this is a tremendous game for the value. There are a couple of minor complaints like some weird UI hiccups and a bit of tedium towards the end, but if there was any game that was going to get me more interested in Touhou, this one has made a pretty compelling case. Except for Tewi - she is a blight.
Mystia's Izakaya is nothing short of a wonderful product of passion. The gameplay is simple - you spend each day running around, talking to characters and collecting ingredients, occasionally completing little delivery tasks. At night, you open your Izakaya to serve food to customers. If you have played games like Diner Dash or Overcooked, you have a pretty solid idea of what to expect here. Regular unnamed NPCs will show you their food and beverage orders, whereas named characters will tell you the kind of dish they want (e.g. "I want something sweet!") and you will have to infer what dish they want (or customize an existing one with appropriate ingredients) to get the best reception. Your journal keeps track of dishes and their tags, as well as each characters likes and dislikes. Make one of the named NPCs happy, and they'll grant you a spell card with a positive effect specific to them (maybe you'll get an assortment of ingredients, or maybe some gathering points get refreshed the next day). The reverse is also true - screw up their order and they'll mess with your operation as a penalty. Additionally, when preparing dishes you have the opportunity to do a brief rhythm game in time with the music to earn other temporary buffs like being able to throw dishes from any distance. It ends up getting pretty addicting as you become more and more familiar with customer preferences and set up your Izakaya in a way that makes sense to you.
The story itself is fairly straight forward - you make your way around Gensokyo, opening up new food carts and having X number of days to make up the yen for the loan repayment or else Chen will break your kneecaps. It culminates in a pretty challenging final mission and a very rewarding and cute finale. Ultimately it gets a smidge repetitive towards the end, especially if you are like me and wanted to grind out the last couple of character social links to be maxed out - but it definitely was worth it.
At the time of writing this, DLC 1 and 2 are translated so I am making my way through those. Each one adds two new areas to set up shop in with 6 characters to befriend and some new dishes and ingredients.
Overall, this is a tremendous game for the value. There are a couple of minor complaints like some weird UI hiccups and a bit of tedium towards the end, but if there was any game that was going to get me more interested in Touhou, this one has made a pretty compelling case. Except for Tewi - she is a blight.