Touhou Luna Nights (Xbox One)
Sakuya Izayoi is a maid whose time-stopping powers seem like a perfect fit for her line of work, but while it could conceivably allow her to clean an entire mansion in what seems like an instant, her master and the other residents of the Scarlet Devil Mansion certainly complicate her work. Remilia Scarlet is the owner of the estate, the powerful but emotionally young vampire deciding one day to throw her maid into a world of her own making without warning. On top of this, Sakuya is mostly stripped of her usual abilities, and with Remilia populating the alternate world with plenty of mystical creatures and copies of magical characters from the Touhou series, Sakuya certainly ends up with her work cut out for her.
Touhou Luna Nights’s world is an interconnected 2D world that focuses on exploring the parallel version of the mansion. While Sakuya is at first dropped in the world with very few skills, over the adventure she’ll learn new abilities that allow her to return to previous areas and open up new paths or uncover hidden treasures. This Metroidvania game approach does hit on the satisfying feeling of a space gradually growing more and more open over the course of the adventure while motivating visiting old areas since you can gain new goodies with your new tricks, but traversal in Touhou Luna Nights can sometimes be a little cumbersome. The rooms are often designed to provide little puzzles or enemies who serve as decent threats while the teleportation points to cover the map more quickly and save points are spaced fairly far apart. The treks through familiar puzzles or interruptions from still dangerous foes can lessen the motivation to travel all the way back to an area to see if the excursion is even worth it, but overall the room designs and the challenge they pose definitely make progressing forward a challenging and interesting process even if they weaken the optional retreads.
In Touhou Luna Nights your main attack method are throwing daggers that can be hurled rather rapidly across the screen, but to limit their efficacy they draw on MP that is slow to naturally recover. If you go knife crazy in a fight you’ll soon find yourself unable to hurl any more daggers until you wait for some of the MP bar to replenish, but there is actually a fascinating mechanic at play that hearkens back to the Touhou bullet hell games called grazing. If you move Sakuya close to a foe or projectile attack but are able to just barely avoid it touching you, you will be rewarded with a graze. A successful graze will not only give you a burst of MP but it will restore some health too, so even in the simple encounters with basic enemies or stationary targets the combat is spiced up by the incentive to put yourself in danger. Enemies that might not be too dangerous otherwise can lure you in with the promise of an easy graze, but other foes who move quickly or launch swift and dangerous attacks can have their difficulty offset by being able to graze them to restore what you lose during the encounter. In a mansion filled with ghosts, fairies, chupacabras, kappas, and other mystical creatures, the damage a new foe poses makes them a risky first encounter but learning how to maneuver around them for a graze gives you a distinct reward for coming to understand their behavior.
Grazing isn’t the only interesting idea in Touhou Luna Nights’s pocket. Sakuya Izayoi may have much of her time-stopping power taken away at the start, but she gets two ways to influence time fairly early on in the adventure that color how you approach combat and puzzles in equal measure. Your first bit of time manipulation comes in making the world sluggish, the time slowing allowing you to slip through spinning blades or closing doors that would otherwise move too quickly to overcome. On top of its use in puzzles though, it can also slow down fights and give you time to set up your own attacks. In boss fights especially it can almost be used as a way to crank the difficulty back briefly as you try to learn what tricks they have in their bag, but slowing time does have one drawback. To activate it you must hold the attack button for a bit and then release it, so if you want to repeatedly use it against a boss that means you’re spending time not throwing daggers at them for damage.
The addition of outright time-stopping really starts to give Touhou Luna Nights its most unique mechanic though. Whenever you like you can bring the world to a halt, Sakuya able to move freely and even starting hurling daggers that will at first freeze in place but suddenly surge forward once the time flow returns to normal. Time stopping isn’t indefinite, gradually ticking down on top of certain actions like knife throwing reducing the time stop’s duration. The time stop can be useful for repositioning yourself away from the bosses’ sometimes enormous attacks and it helps with navigating certain traps or platforming challenges in the mansion, but the game isn’t content to just have everything come to a halt when the power is active. Some attacks and dangers only move when time is stopped while others might reverse their course when the time flow is altered, so some fights and rooms become about making sure you can balance the different behaviors of enemies and traps as you repeatedly stop and start time.
On top of the time stop impacting things differently, there are a few other limiters in place. If you try and graze something while time is stopped you instead simply get more time for the time stop so there’s no risk-free way to get your health and MP back. Certain things like water become completely solid when time is stopped so you can’t pass through it, but this is both used as a hindrance and a puzzle mechanic. Your own knives can even eventually serve as midair footholds to help you reach new areas when time is stopped. Sluggishness still remains useful since it allows for strategic grazing and doesn’t take time to refresh, although that time to regain your ability to stop time is a bit too limiting at parts. Some areas of the alternate mansion require your time stop powers, so if it didn’t work out or the game has demanded repeated uses of it, you’ll need to stand around and wait for your time stop power to recover so you can try again. This is another reason traversing familiar areas can drag since managing your meters slows down your trip to the actual area of interest. There is a shop in the game where you can buy things using the gems enemies drop, but it only has one actual location. You can buy tickets to shop from anywhere, but even then many of the items in the shop are one use restores of health, MP, or time powers that feel hard to justify using for anything besides a boss due to their price and the work put into even buying something in the first place.
A gradual level up system and pick-ups that increase your capabilities do mean certain areas of the mansion aren’t as hard to traverse since you can eventually kill the enemies in your path more easily, although provided your time powers aren’t in high demand they can sometimes trivialize certain rooms or foes as well. Most of the time the game tries to avoid letting you feel too powerful despite the time-manipulating tricks in your arsenal, but bosses feel like they manage to bring both incredible power themselves while providing some exhilarating chances to really make the most out of your powers. While your foes are often normal looking women with magical powers like the lazy librarian Patchouli or young witch Marisa, the powers they unleash in the fights can cover the screen with danger. Being quick on your feet and utilizing your tools is key to overcoming them and the attacks are specifically designed around the player squeezing through enormous attacks by way of their time powers. You aren’t even relegated to just throwing knives the same way the whole game as you can find special powers like throwing a chainsaw to add to your arsenal, these extra abilities having situational uses where they can potentially hit a foe more times or from different angles than your basic attack can. With the music during boss fights being a step up over an already nice soundtrack as well, these battles, as unfortunately few as there are, definitely give some bombastic highlights to a fairly good exploration-focused platformer.
THE VERDICT: When you’re heading forward in Touhou Luna Nights and exploring new places the game gets a lot of good use out of its special mechanics. Grazing for life and MP encourages moving in close and enemies are rarely pushovers so there truly is danger involved, but pulling it off is gratifying and easier to do once you get a feel for the game’s movement and your opponents. Slowing time or outright stopping it not only modifies how you can approach battles but sees repeated use in navigational puzzles, their design even evolving so they can take advantage of the altered time state to lead to more complex encounters. Exploring old areas with new abilities is hampered some by how rooms are designed to be so challenging regardless of your point in the game and options like the shop are limited far too much despite how little help they are, but the core action and the gimmicks surrounding it makes Touhou Luna Nights a blast when encountering new content.
And so, I give Touhou Luna Nights for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. The showstopper boss fights are definitely Touhou Luna Night at its best where all your time-manipulating options and attack methods come together in a fight aimed to truly challenge them, but the path to them is made interesting with the puzzles that also make good use of your abilities. The tight boss design might be why so few are present but upping their number might make it easier to overlook the slow moments of waiting for powers to restore or the sometimes weak exploration elements. Teleporting to a part of the map you already are familiar with and having to pass through multiple challenging rooms only to find the reward you can now access is a very minor health boost undermines some of the Metroidvania appeal, to the point I almost wonder if it would have been more successful as a mostly linear adventure. Individual areas could certainly have some backtracking, but if the game was focused on moving from one action hub to another then maybe the developers would realize the shop should be made more accessible and the navigational puzzles that are intriguing elements of forward progression don’t hamper trips back to earlier areas. That hardly means the overall adventure drags though, there still plenty of interesting things to discover and good stretches of consistent exciting forward progress between those rarer moments where things do slow down.
Stopping time, slowing time, and grazing all make Touhou Luna Nights a game with a good amount of ability depth and the battle and room designs certainly explore it while rarely having the delicate balance of strength and challenge go askew, so while the actual exploration of the map isn’t as rich, encountering new enemies, fighting over the top bosses, and seeing puzzles that test how you apply your tricks make the moments you’re moving ahead thrilling.