By all rights I should've expected what to find in Labyrinth of Touhou: Gensokyo and the Heaven-piercing Tree--the game itself and its predecessor were unfamiliar to me, but their source material is anything but; I'm about as literate in Touhou as in Etrian Odyssey, which this fan game is largely patterned after. It's a creative context common to many derivative fan works, in making use of something established as a baseline to interpretive elaborations, and that pedigree isn't difficult to discern here; it's practically invited by the game in all its gleeful permutations. At the same time, approaching Labyrinth mostly bereft of expectations beyond knowing what it was riffing on left me open to be captivated by its alterations--or swept off my feet entirely by the force of its design. Etrian may be the seed that begat the game its form, but a hollow imitation or plain substitute it is not, branching into something else altogether in the details that compound.
The narrative premise follows the episodic framing that official Touhou games have long since codified and which iterative works can freely follow: there is an incident, and it's up to Reimu, Marisa and company to investigate and solve it. Stories within the framework so established are unending and can serve any purpose at all despite the interchangeable introductions, and historically the strict adherence to a formula has been offset by the increasing maturation of the subject matter and thematic underpinnings explored, lending the series an air of aging gracefully and with dignity. But this is not an official game written by Zun, and embodies aptly the duality of Touhou in all its appeal and its strengths and weaknesses: the template is ready-made, but it doesn't mean all make equal use of it.
As a textual narrative of what happens, in which circumstances, and by whose doing, Labyrinth isn't particularly striking, and it has a slightly unpleasant tenor of unfiltered, unexamined sheer fandom to it in a pejorative sense; practically all of the game's lists of equipment consist of sly referentiality to other nerd objects of note, some more and some less identifiable at a glance depending on one's personal context, but all equally tiresome in their wink-and-nod drudgery. It's the bridge to the ugly past and where this game originally comes from, from the depths of 2012, when the Touhou boom had slowly begun to quiet down after years of peak proliferation and activity. Much good came from that era, but it was also characterized as being driven by excessively and insistently masculine and insular voices who mostly used the series as a vehicle for the same tired and sexist gags that popular media had lodged into their brains, perpetuating their own irrelevant inside lexicon as they did and erected a gatekeeping barrier around what the series could be in less myopic hands. That voice echoes in Labyrinth's writing to an extent, where exaggerated, reductive and needlessly sardonic interpretations of the cast and their relationships prosper, and as someone who has seen the fandom shift over time, with generations newer discover the material and find their own meaning in it, it does aptly and accurately recall those older, worse days.
The hoodwinking that occurs is all the more impressive in light of how banal the game can be as a written text, because for all that being the case, it was still a story that I enjoyed being told, as the means it has at its disposal aren't solely relegated to contextless dialogue scenes. Labyrinth's primary driving angle to the series it's part of and the other one it's looking toward for structural notes is leaning heavily on an ensemble cast of characters to define itself by: as a playable RPG cast, it is a giant of 46 individuals in the main narrative, 2 in the post-game coda, and 8 in the expansion for a staggering total of 56. Whether one is familiar with each from the source material, they exist as figures within the game world to be encountered along the way--sometimes as mandatory obstacles in bosses to overcome, sometimes as idle presences who have a request to fulfill, and others with more obscure conditions to draw them out. These interactions all inevitably and eventually conclude in recruiting the person for the party's disposal, at which point they are able to be discerned more closely as figures existing meaningfully within the game's narrative, as the mechanics accomplish what the writing cannot.
Each character is a set of passive skills and active spell cards (the latter always unique to the individual) that not only define them as cogs within the machinations of an effective party composition, but are able to portray the cast with nuance lacking elsewhere in the game. This is not an assessment I can project into a perspective that isn't already familiar with the cast from other material, but working from mine that is, I see the relationships and personal idiosyncracies that define the series characters interpersonally, as figures in their setting, and as mythological and folkloric subjects reflected in the language of the game's mechanics in every skill description and every status sheet numerical. It's an avenue of storytelling that's often underestimated in its capability to illustrate aspects of characters that more conventionally literary means aren't able to, and it's been a drawing attraction to me in how myth and religion is interpreted and adapted into an RPG ruleset in media like Megami Tensei, for instance. Touhou's usually operating within a different set of adaptive semiotics in its home genre, but these characters have never been limited to just that, and the sheer legibility with which their personages transfer to the grammar employed here served as a consistent delight and justification for the game's featuring of a cast this large to interact with through the entirety of its running time, and constantly surprised me by the mindfulness evident in how the material was handled and approached.
What do you actually do with forty, fifty-something characters? Even Suikoden doesn't have playable casts much more expansive than that. The game justifies the breadth with more than sufficient depth; should you be expecting ankle-deep waters, it's more likely to be submerged entirely, body and soul. A sense of dramatism is something to be indulged as I cannot honestly overstate how absolutely merciless Labyrinth is in the game systems it lives by. It borrows its dungeoneering framework from Etrian but shifts the balance to more closely resemble its home series, where the bosses are what rise to dominate the focus of the game's design and its imposing nature; the fodder or "popcorn", if you will, exist in the margins to facilitate the projected arcs of character growth but do not present a particular emphasis as sources of attrition or attention otherwise in the RPG dynamic that manifests. The bosses are tremendous walls that are made to be approached carefully and with preparation, and all conveniences are made to that end, with teleporters often directly next to them, an immediate retry function prompting after a defeat, and party wipes offering no punitive measures outside of a trip back to town in a second or two. The frustration and subsequent delight in overcoming the challenges posed by the big battles are customized as isolated, increasingly complicated riddles to solve, the answers to which broaden with time as more potential solutions are added to the party roster over time, the application of which grows ever more exacting.
Most RPGs do with four characters, and Etrian itself is sated with five; even the archetypical Dungeons & Dragons party is composed of six in all. The backbone of Labyrinth's battle system lies in its twelve-member active exploration parties, with four up front, and eight in reserve at a time. The unusual scale of it is difficult to internalize immediately, and maybe there's a dogged inclination to dig one's heels in out of habit: do I really need more than four people if that's still the size of a battle formation? It's not an immediate epiphany to the contrary, as the roster needs to be filled out over the beginning floors, but once there, the game is quick to strike down delusions of treating it as rotely as any other game in the genre. All its mechanics are tailored around making full use of as many people as you can bring with you at a time: a resource termed TP dwindles after every battle a character participates in, and more so if knocked out; if motivation so runs out, the character departs for town and must be replaced by someone else in the formation. HP recharges to full after every battle, but MP pools are small with characters typically having default parameters in the 9 to 20 range, and gaining a point maybe every fifteen to twenty levels--an end-game high total may border 50. Despite this, all meaningful actions expend MP--items don't exist, and the default attack command is largely ignorable outside of specific builds and skills dedicated to it, leaving characters dependent and utterly defined by their personal skills and spell cards. The back row exists as a place of respite and recovery for benched characters, where both HP and MP during battle are gradually restored, and where they cannot be attacked--an aspect that becomes paramount in facing the harder challenges as the tactic of switching formation rises to a key role in surviving bosses in a system where one-hit kills are frequent if a character is left exposed.
All of these aspects establish a rhythm to battles--the significant, boss-caliber ones anyway--where party positioning and timing of actions becomes the deciding factor in how things turn out. A game like Final Fantasy--the first one--would have an implicit feature to its mechanics evident in datamined coding and nowhere else, where the first slot in the party would be the attention of the most enemy attacks. Labyrinth makes a feature like this transparent and directly stated as something to actively strategize by from the beginning, with durable characters meant to sit up front absorbing hits, and in the game's party delineation several of its cast are designed for just this role (even within that niche, several unique flavours exist--HP tanks, defense tanks, evasion tanks, resurrection tanks, and so on). Anyone can perform the role, but a character in a largely passive and endurance-based role has their hands free often enough to handle the formation shifts that are inevitably needed, and more importantly they have the durability to stay on field to weather what others may not; the game further differentiates its characters archetypes according to their skills and stats as those who benefit more from staying in for multiple turns, and those who are better off employing hit-and-run tactics. These decisions play out according to a universal timing element where ATB-like bars fill out in an entirely turn-based context, and are further scrutinized with highly detailed numerical values illustrating the comparative actions, with 10,000 pips signaling a full bar. Every action in the game possesses its own delay value which determines at which starting value a turn begins to fill up again after it, with some being near-instant in the 8000s or more, and some dropping down to 1000 or below. Anticipating enemy actions according to these legible meters allows their active interception or avoidance, particularly in those moments when a character desperately needs to be swapped out for another, as revival during battle also doesn't exist (outside of very specialized exceptions). You are often forced to make decisions in which member of your lineup poses the least crucial loss as to your overall strategic needs and may need to swap people in for those calculated risks to mitigate total disaster to fight back better moments later.
That's ultimately the joy and hardships of Labyrinth as a set of systems as each boss requires a specialized approach from a specialized pool of characters where their operative synergy is up to the player to discern and put into action. The questions so asked are strict and severe partly on a fundamental level and partly because of the expansive scale the game operates in as a party-building exhibit; a real galaxy brain of compositions and roles. No mechanic is wasted, and no skill point irrelevant: all mechanics work as advertised and status ailments, buffs and debuffs are not only beneficial but absolutely crucial to playing the game, with clear communication as far as their application and effectiveness in battle; the game's large cast allows individuals to devote themselves solely to the application of poison, for instance, and because of the frequent formation changes, never feel like they're simply eating up space from someone else. No matter what kind of niche utility you may concoct for a character, they all have a place on the team as it congeals to any particular situation. Because the challenges are so diverse and the characters so fundamentally different, the lineup must also be flexible in who you take along, and so experience gain is universalized regardless of who's present. Bonus stat-ups gained upon leveling and skill points themselves can be freely reimbursed at no cost as many times as needed, further underlining the fluctuating needs of the party and the encouragement for experimentation. The only semi-permanent commitment in character growth is expending money into boosting core stats, but even that expended sum can be regained with the use of an item. I experienced more immediate, absurdly total trashings and down to the wire triumphs in this game than any other RPG I've played. It's a testament to the game's sense of design that I never felt like walking away from it even if I was so soundly schooled by it time and time again--I only wanted to figure out what piece of the puzzle I had overlooked, as that was the solution to every dilemma, without fail. At the same time, the battle system feels nowhere near static even if it is turn-based in every way; the presentation and interlocking mechanisms built around manipulating timing leave it feeling hectic and as if execution matters as tactilely as in a reflex-based game. It's so entertaining to try and get a handle on that I fought every boss at its associated recommended challenge level--below the boss's own, but granting additional rewards if defeated in this way, as deleveling characters is another service freely given by the game in its quest to prioritize personal customization.
Bosses arise as the game's focus in a way that does not rob the rest of it of its significance. The game does not exist in a void of contiguous battles after all, but houses them in a complicated strata megastructure of labyrinth floors, explored in familiar grid layout but from a distinct isometric viewpoint. The complexity of these layouts is beguiling and lulling from the outset, perhaps priming one for a relatively simple undertaking as opposed to its inspirations, and for a good while that remains true, but eventually the mask comes off and the game unleashes navigational terror on par with its other challenges. I would anticipate some to roll their eyes at the severity of the design exhibited in places, mostly borne out of minimal map notation, but I found the concepts and structures of later floors very pleasing in their bid to intimidate through sheer convolution and audacity. At the same time, most of the navigational excess is just that, and the primary path isn't quite so tangled as the optional corners, so it's up to anyone to make the decision whether the effort is worth it. It's not a direct lift from Etrian either in how exploration feels here, as that series began in emphasizing long treks and attritional design, while over time leaning more and more into shortcut-based expendiency and floor-by-floor segmentation, at worst at a cost to the principles of the surrounding systems. Labyrinth's generous placement of warp points at floor entrances and next to bosses or other juncture points does not leave it feeling as lacking confidence in its own structure, but observant of them: the dungeon is the means of conveying its atmosphere and play systems but not the focus of either, and so it is not allowed to interfere in the demanding process of undertaking the challenge of the bosses wherever they may appear.
As things stand, I've finished Labyrinth of Touhou as far as defeating its final boss goes, but the game immediately sets one off into the post-game, and beyond it, the massive Plus Disk expansion added to it in 2016, included by default in this current release. As with Etrian games, the play beyond the projected primary arc turns to such extremes in what it requires of the player that I don't think I have the stomach for it, but as there it's not something I hold against the game; I should in fact probably thank it for giving me the opportunity to recognize my limitations. As a game, its scope as far as length mirrors its model too, and as such is not an insignificant investment, and throughout it I tried to decide whether the game's individual merits or its ties to a series--both of them--I like were what endeared it to me, even in the moments where I found fault in those connective tissues. The answer's probably not mutually exclusive, but in the specifications that resulted from the mixture, I can say even with all the close resemblance to its blatant inspirations that I've never played anything like it before in how it executes on that shared material.
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This is actually the second game in a series, but as this one is considered much improved over the first go at the concept, and as it received console ports last year which this release is based on, the sequel number was dropped from its title. It's only been out on Steam for a few months, and the English release has been applied to it for scant weeks--it is in fact the prior fan translation, which the game's current publishers collaborated with the authors of to make it the official localization now that game is being sold worldwide. In that sense, the game is not "new", and some may have played it prior via that translation, but for larger audiences relative to a niche release like this, this is its wider debut as far as straightforward legitimate availability goes. Those console ports were on PS4 and Switch, so one may hope it may eventually turn up in English on those platforms too. It feels built for handheld play, especially.
