It's like a party in my pocket

Personal rant incoming. Feel free to not click the button.

I do notice that I've mostly abandoned this blog. No, I don't mean to do it, like I did to my old Wordpress blog. I already put a disclaimer that this is a personal blog and that I don't pay attention to how I write here, so it's nothing like being ashamed about the blog's quality. It's just that I can't really find time to write, recently. I'd love to blame school and its ridiculous amounts of tasks and homeworks, but that's not it. I always find something else to fill my free time, none of which, unfortunately, have anything to do with the blog.

Yes, I do realize that nobody care, considering I never bother to care that this blog is even read. In any case, on to the rest of this post.

Touhou is like... some sort of creative magnet. It'll attract the most professional of artists to make fanarts, the most skilled of musicians to arrange its songs, the best of writers in all sorts of language to make fanfic for it. You just can't help it. Once you're into the fandom, or even just slightly in, it will tug on your creative strings.

Thanks to Japan's lax law about self-publishing and indie media, Touhou is also able to amass a kazillion of professional and professional-quality fangames. I already talked about Lion Heart's Mystical Chain before, an action-fighting-beat-em-'up game about the three magicians of Gensokyo which is definitely worth any gamer immune to seizure-inducing danmaku{aka: most Touhou players}'s time.

Tonight, I'll be serving something more fitting for those strategist whose eyes cannot stand seeing fireworks being sick.

Splash screen, because its presence is always overshadowed by the main menu.

This game's here is called Touhou Pocket Wars Evo+, a sequel {plus its expansion pack} to another game with the same title minus the "Evo+". I've never tried the first game, nor this game's sequel, but from what I can see you don't have to play one before or after the other.

Your room. You'll see this a lot.

To be frank, It's an RPG, with visual novel story-telling and menu based movements, putting heavy emphasis on battles.

In this game you're pretty much a normal person from the perfectly normal Outside World, who use gachas {action figurines} to fight and battle other perfectly normal gachas' players and less-than-normal Gensokyo folks. Story, or in some case, sense, isn't giving this game strong points, so I'll leave you with that.

The battles, its base gameplay, is where the game will bedazzle you. Let's see if I can somewhat describe the system for those who have never played the game.

When beginning one, you'll be asked to choose 4 gachas to fight with, the first being the Leader {theme song's chooser, and nothing else}, the fourth for Support {passive character, can be switched with the other three active battlers}. These four will be the four you'll be stuck with for the rest of this one battle, even though you will {most likely} have more in your stockpile.

The battle screen. Its system is impossible to describe without seeing one.

Yours at left, opponent's on the right. You will then have to position your chosen gachas in a 3x3 grid. Only one gacha can be put in a particular row and only one can be put in a particular column {this sentence will make sense if you're playing}. Placement is important. Each spellcards, that's the attacks/abilities you can use, have different damage for Close, Mid-range, and Far opponents. I'm not entirely sure about how many spaces there need to be for them to be in what range, but it's not hard to guess.

Marisa, whose lasers hit far and wide.

Some gachas are good at Close range, some Mid, some Far, some okay with all, some horrible at all but has great supports spellcards, and there's a lot of gachas to choose from. Unless you're fighting a story battle, where you can expect to fight few opponents with exact placement, it's highly advised to keep one of each kind and place them accordingly.

In the image above, my Koishi is a mid-attacker, Iku attacks close-up, and Eirin shoot arrows to your knee to far opponents. Flandre's just there for the experience. This is mostly influenced by the spellcards the character has, along with your own preference.

Some gachas can be highly customizable in what area that they excel. In addition to arranging which spellcards and how many of them you're going to use, it's the player which stat gets increased. Level increase each time you increase a stat, instead of the other way around, which you can do at anytime outside of battle and dialogues, provided said gacha has enough experience points {or "Affection," as the game calls it}. But unless you're some kind of level-grinding master, the game will still have some control over your customization. Some stats may require more or less Affection points than the others, a rule which you shouldn't follow religiously unless you're really lazy.

My main gachas. I have 5 more mains down the line.

So, as you can see, there's a great deal of strategizing, planning, and nitpicking in this game. And I haven't even get to stats, spellcard leveling, weather effects, hit/dodge annoyance, buffs/debuffs, and Mokou's magical ability to be immortal yet {no, seriously. I killed her three times in Story Battle and she's not dead yet}.

But despite all the things to pay attention to, this game is by no means complicated or hard to pick up. Its difficulty curve is fluid and not unpleasant. Figuring things out can be done in-game without some manual at hand.

If you're looking for a mon game with this creative-planning sort of specification, instead of who have the best equipment or who have the higher level, this game is definitely something to watch for. But it does require some level-grinding .A lot of them, in fact. But with the battle's balanced {assuming you don't get to fight crap gachas} and mind-based system {instead of level-based}, even that can be a lot of fun. And even otherwise, you can still plan ahead to minimize the grinds.

Be wary, however, that the AI is much dumber than is normal, but their stats do tend to get some boost, so this may or may not be a problem for you.

Download Link:
I highly suggest buying the original game if you like it. But for those who doesn't have the luxury of importing convenience, or money, here's some. Uploaded by Selphos.
http://www.mediafire.com/?rrt3l5l52eglc 

English Patch:
Just copy and paste the file you get to your game's directory.
http://www.mediafire.com/?mi434a7n0273k5k

More screenshots, for things that I don't get to describe:

This is how you get new Mons to your army.

The non-canon, but otherwise very nice, map of Gensokyo

Dialogues in Story Mode. Story ain't very fulfilling, though.