mystia's izakaya & fossilized wonders

17 Sep 2025 - digitalily

I found myself getting a pretty major Touhou kick earlier over the past year, which started with Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia, which is a retro dungeon crawler ala early Shin Megami Tensei (something to discuss more another time), fuelled further by going a bit too hard in a Minecraft server, and then getting really solidified by my decision to give Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya a try. I started back in April of this year, and finished it up in late August. I did have a few long sessions towards the end to wrap everything up, but this is the kind of game you could drip play for a long time.

Side character who has
2 lines of dialogue?
MC material, ship it.
The true Touhou way

Mystia’s Izakaya is one of the more prominent modern Touhou fangames, which centers on a relatively minor character, Mystia Lorelei, and the running of her food cart -> izakaya in an attempt to one day fulfill her dream of holding a concert. As far as Touhou fangame plots go, I don’t think there’s too much to really talk about here- the main premise of working hard to achieve your goals is fairly on point for a gathering/restaurant management sim, and these skills of course being the only skills that can save Gensokyo from total annihilation is a natural end result (though this is foreshadowed right at the start). I think really the main thing to this game is the vibe, which is running around Gensokyo by day doing quests and gathering ingredients, and running your izakaya by night.

Running the shop can be a bit hectic before having helpers, but nothing that ends up getting too difficult except for a few boss style encounters. Rare guests, i.e., actual Touhou characters, are the real event of the izakaya sections, and trying to figure out what dishes and bonus ingredients get a max rating every time is a fun process. It also definitely inspires one to take a look at more recipes to try out, which is hardly a bad thing. The total number of recipes is quite large, and I think it’s a little unfortunate that there isn’t huge reason to really rotate your menu, but it is what it is. Especially with the DLCs included, it just ends up being a lot.

Also included is a side rhythm game mode. Izakaya gameplay does feature a little of this, but most of the time you don’t have to engage with it since you get all the buffs successfully hitting the notes grant and are good for a couple minutes, but this gameplay is greatly expanded via some jukeboxes in the world. It’s a very simple minigame, with effectively two notes- you hit one kind using the buttons on the left of the controller, and the other with the buttons on the right. These can vary by being simple taps, tap and hold and let go and tap and hold. The songs can get kind of crazy though- I ended up getting a gold medal on all the songpacks, which required a score of A or higher on all the hard variants of the songs, and some of those were super rough, easily devolving into spam button presses to stay alive. I haven’t played a ton of rhythm games, but I think as far as they go, this really isn’t the greatest, but as a cute little side thing it’s fine.

Kyouko is the main side character

Finally, this game features some gorgeous pixel art, which for the sheer volume of characters Touhou has, is a very impressive feat. Every rare guest + many characters who don’t make it in as usual guests each have a fully detailed sprite, as well as several special CGs depicting celebratory scenes at the end of the DLCs or after completing major objectives. They also appear in a slideshow during the dedicated rhythm game mode sections, which was cool to see expand as I progressed.

All in all- a very fun and cute game, and an easy recommendation even for those unfamiliar with Touhou, as the izakaya management gameplay loop is very enjoyable all by itself!

Mystia’s Izakaya is not the only Touhou game I’ve been going through recently though.

the gohei integration with the title is pretty amazing tbh

This year’s summer Comiket marked the full release of Touhou Kinjoukyou ~ Fossilized Wonders., the 20th main title in the series, which is a milestone to be sure, and one reflected in the gameplay.

The core gimmick this time around is that we’re back to two playable characters- Reimu & Marisa as per tradition, but they each have 4 equipment slots. One which determines the story path you’re on & your hyper mode shot, one which determines your focused shot, one which determines your unfocused shot, and finally one which imparts a passive effect. There are 8 different stones that can be equipped into these slots, which are unlocked through various means while playing the game with one of them equipped as your story item. Prior to unlocking stones to equip there’s a blank stone which just copies whatever is in the story slots. This means that there are in the end 8^4 shot combinations, which is a lot, and partly what makes this game feel appropriate as the 20th title. You have your normal forward shots, your homing shots, your backwards shots, your super spread shots, your weird homing shots, your weird rotating shots, your hold in place shots, etc. It seems most major shot type gimmicks made it in in some form or another, bar some of the more other character specific type stuff like Youmu’s charged slashes or Sakuya’s knives.

The demo for this game was hard, with enemies consistently being very tanky and the wonder stones (the rotating pyramids guys with eyes) firing their shots during boss patterns, which was nightmarish. Things got toned down for the final game thankfully, and I am satisfied to report that I got a normal 1CC on my first run. Resources are very plentiful if you’re on top of taking down the wonder stones, and their screen clear effect is a life save in certain sections- the game is absolutely designed around taking advantage of this. A couple years ago I started going thru the games from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil on and doing hard mode clears with all shot types (+ extra with all shot types), but I ended up hitting a wall at Undefined Fantastic Object and haven’t really gone back to do that since. As such, I ended up just going for normal 1CCs with all 8 story types on Reimu, and clearing extra, which landed me just shy of 20 hours playtime, not too bad. The shot variety made each run unique, and while the traditional stage 4 boss variation hasn’t been a thing for quite a while, the pseudo branching path into the start of stage 4 was a cute idea.

you again

When the game was finally out on steam and I went to play it, I saw a spoiler screenshot right away, though my brain didn’t quite clock what I had seen. The first three stages have a progression of, go to the foot of the Youkai mountain to the edge of a sealed off sacred forest, go into the forest, scale the mountainside until you enter a hole to a cavern with a giant pyramid at the bottom, which is where the demo ended. Stage four naturally then is entering the pyramid, with the entrance you take informed by your story path stone and which changes the color and patterns of the first few enemy waves, eventually landing you at the boss at the center(?). In stage 5 you delve deeper and deeper into the pyramid until you’re met with an emergence onto a sea- but not just any sea- it is the only kind of sea from which you can see the Earth suspended over the horizon- a lunar sea.

It was at this point where my brain began to understand what I saw in that spoiler screenshot, which was set against the same stage background I was now seeing, right as the boss- Watatsuki no Toyohime entered the screen. I actually just screamed for a bit when I saw this. Like, at this point, ZUN misderecting isn’t a surprise. Oh there’s a super stereotypical pyramid guarded by someone in pharaoh’s garb? No mummies here only a connected pathway to the moon and a character that was introduced nearly 20 years ago in side print material, who was described as too powerful to be in the games, who tried to goad someone into investigating far enough to prove themselves able to handle the real cause of the problem being faced in Gensokyo (which, by the way, is that with the exception of our heroines, everyone else is experiencing a kind of groundhog day, and we noticed these funky stones leading to what ended up being this pyramid). The Watatsuki sisters (Yorhime being the other) are Lunarians- denizens of the moon, who in Touhou lore are exceptionally powerful and have no reason to abide by the ‘spell card rules’ most of the characters abide by. Touhou 15 was the first game that had us going to the moon, but even that game avoided bringing in either of the Watatsukis, so to see Toyohime here was incredibly unexpected. Even more so given that characters coming back as bosses in main numbered games is in and of itself quite rare.

The game ends by us being sent to the shrine of Iwanaga Ariya- a stone goddess who has the ability to halt change (thus the groundhog day shenanigans). She ended up being reawakened to stop the pyramid, which ended up being a data processing center for the Lunar Capital, from spewing out impurity (the moon dislikes this) caused via an influx of junk data from the Outside World, specifically what is implied to be a deluge of mis/disinformation from modern AI. The extra stage boss then is a youkai born from this sea of disinformation, whose attacks are all appropriately themed after conspiracy theories.

When the demo first came out, people quickly discovered that generative AI had been used in some textures, and when the demo was posted to Steam, it had a generative AI content disclaimer on it. This was surprising for a lot of people given some of ZUNs previous comments on the subject, particularly about generative AI not scratching the same itch creatively. After the controversy really started brewing, he addressed it by saying that AI was thematic to the game overall, and that he specifically wanted to “reduce it to nothing more than a tool.”, with a view that both fully entrusting your creativity to AI or outright refusing to use AI both constitute ‘losing’ to it. The tools he used are also trained on legally sourced materials, and while I think there’s a lot of improvement to be done in this space, as far as things go right now, that’s a proper way to go about it. I think having some skepticism is fair, though. Is it backgrounds today, bullet patterns tomorrow? I don’t particularly think so. ZUN has historically used assets from royalty free image packs pretty extensively, and it’s clear with his games that there are things he is concerned with exploring creatively- music, character art, and patterns, and other things less so- forest_background.jpg, nameless enemy sprites, etc. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on, though who’s to blame a man who finally gets a little burnt out of it after 20 main titles.

I’ve had a great time with Fossilized Wonders, in a way that I haven’t with Touhou for a little while, since Unconnected Marketeers came out in the middle of the pandemic. As always, who knows where the series will go from here? ZUN has mentioned that whenever he tries to breakaway from doing Touhou, whatever he ends up working on ends up being Touhou, so I think while 20 would be a fine place to call it quits (certainly from a gameplay perspective, it’s so full of variety it could last you a lifetime!), we haven’t seen the end of things yet. And even if we did, there are so many fangames out there to keep one busy for a while. I think Gensokyo and its characters have a unique allure that will keep a dedicated fanbase going for quite some time. On the note of fangames though, I’ll be next diving into Touhou Puppet Dance Performance: Shard of Dreams, aka Touhoumon. I’ve played the OG Touhou Pokemon FireRed & Emerald ROMhacks several times, but never TPDP, which is more of a thing unto itself, though it is still very Pokemon. It’ll likely be a bit before I can really focus on that though, what with Silksong just having been released, and Hades 2 & Silent Hill f on the horizon. From mid August on my video game schedule has gotten super packed, super quickly. Not the worst problem to have.

That’s all for now- ‘til next time!