Ever since I played Dragon Crystal for the Sega Game Gear, I’ve been a fan of dungeon crawlers. Even if runs often end up in failure more often than not, a good roguelike will simply keep me coming back for more. In the 20+ years since then the genre has evolved substantially, and the latest game to have players picking up items & battling a never ending supply of baddies inside a dungeon is Touhou Genso Wanderer.
Unlike a lot of dungeon crawlers, there’s a pretty big focus on story in Touhou Genso Wanderer. The game revolves around Reimu Hakurei, a shrine maiden that gets sucked into an adventure after accidentally triggering an object called the Golden Sphere. Nothing good comes from this, and now Reimu (with the help from some friends) has to set things right again. While the narrative starts off promising enough, the story quickly becomes a bore due to an overabundance of dialogue. I’ve rarely seen a game say so little with so many lines of dialogue that wasn’t a Neptunia title (although at least those have more personality in its writing). Instead of simply introducing a mechanic (such as the game’s crafting system), the player will instead have to sit through a long dialogue sequence filled with hundreds of words just to get to a point that could’ve been summed up in a sentence or two. It’s really too bad that the plot is overly wordy, as it slows down scenes to a slug’s pace, and made me dread seeing character...