Now that I've watched this, and I have many things to talk about that I can't let pass (since Lost Word is literally the only game I play on my phone and I was so hyped for it when it came out). So I have some opinions and experiences on the game that I would like to share and that they agree with yours. I'm gonna go by points.
(geez this is gonna look more as a review...)
1) Story
>"you go through a long cut-scene explaining the story, then touch 1-2 buttons to order attacks, win battle, watch another cutscene then repeat."
>"long series of cutscenes with little battles"
You summarized very well what's the story for me now. The idea of the multiverse sounds cool and interesting, but it's very poor, annoying and boring in the gameplay. I know it's a free and a mobile game, so I get the animations and the cutscenes can't be the big deal; yet it's just the same artwork of the characters all the time (with their awkward postures...), a pair of bullet animations and long, long and long textboxs. The complexity of the story ends being pretty confusing (or I'm just stupid to understand it pretty well). The characters spits you a lot of information that, at the end, it's boring to read; so many people-including myself- only skip the custscenes.
The other point is that the progress of the story is deficient. I don't know the context in JP version, but the Chapter of the tiny Yuyuko and the Black Youmu has been extended unnecessarily (waiting for the next chapter...), which adds more complexity to the story that no one asked for. If the story is already deep; not adding a proper continuity to it will make the player to feel indifferent about it as well as turning the plot into an inconsistent one.
2) Characters
>"the creators have gone the following route(s) in order to not fully exhaust the cast..."
>"My biggest gripe is that they decided going for them as individual units instead of having them as skins. And skins in the game are already useless."
>"It is also impressive how quick they managed to exhaust such a large cast. "
I completely agree with you. They rushed the characters very quickly and now they've gotten this problem: "What do we add now?" I always say a joke toward these alt versions: "When you ran out of ideas: [alt version]". They give us new characters that are basically the same character but with a recolouring, lolified or with a ""new/old"" design. That's it. The biggest issue is that these units shadow the actual characters.
As you've said, instead of buffing some lame characters like Kanako or Byakuren, they decide to buff them into top tier S+ or EX by giving us a new character based on them. These could have perfectly worked as items or outfits that change their appearances into those new designs, recolours, etc. but giving them more power.
The point of LW is playing with a variety of characters, not getting into your team all the S+/EX tiers whose members are practically composed of these new alt versions. (How many Marisas we've got... For god sake...)
3) The JP and Global versions
This is very related to the prior point. While JP version has got the problem of having rushed all the characters up to the point of covering the entire cast-that now they have to depend on these alt versions- the Global version has also done very wrong at rushing so quickly to match the JP features. Like, we get tons of new stuff in every update in short amounts of times; we've even got characters that were also realeased in JP version at the same time-- lol what???
Global version will end soon as JP version did; until a point where they will probably have to stop releasing content and wait first for what JP version does; since JP version will have run out of it by that moment.
4) The gameplay and RPG mechanics; difficulty
>"you can just whale some money into it, get a meta character or card or whatever, and basically get yourself a "Press to win" button. "
>"it just turns into a farming simulator with Touhou characters, made even more so by recently added auto-farm feature. Just leave your phone in a corner."
>"You build a team, and can just put them auto-play the stages for you, without you having to do anything. It just turns into an auto-farm grind-fest, which after a while makes you feel it does not bring any achievement, and is just repetitive."
I can't stop sharing your thoughts about the game. First of all, I remember how a friend that started playing LW, in a matter of a week or two; the guy had already reached level 100 (and I was like in level 75 by just playing f2p since the release date). What did my friend do? The Press to win technique you mentioned. He just put money into it, and BOOM; he was the Alpha among the server. I'm not really complaining, he can perfectly do that; it's okay; yet I just want to proove that your first statement is hella right xDD.
Well, the gameplay is as brief as you wrote: put your phone in the corner, and put the autofarm while you're doing other thing. The game is quite boring and repetitive, I literally play LW for just 5 or 10 minutes per day for the daily missions and gifts. The feeling of success really fades when you reach high level in some of your units.
Sure, I admit the game can have a strategy part, but most of the time it's just put your 3 girlies at level 100 to battle everything. The only challengues are things like Scarlet Tower or MOON EX. And that's where the difficulty part enters.
I feel the game is kinda unbalanced: some battles are quite easy and others are ridiculously hard. There's no middle point; and for the hard fights, you really have to grind and spend many time getting the good cards and characters; trying-trying again the battle. I don't also get why you're forced to do the events first in normal mode; that helps to force the player to skip the story as well as begin to put auto-play mode.
5) The Gacha set-up
>"if you don't add new characters that are stronger and stronger, for challenges that become higher and higher to justify the acquisition of these new units, nobody will play your game."
>"t just feels like crap to hoard a lot of resources, then try your luck and get nothing useful out of your totally-not-gambling activity."
I feel like you... The exaggerated ways of powering-up the characters makes the game to have TONS of confusing items over a simple RPG gameplay; which is linked to the previous gameplay part: grinding, grinding and a constant autofarm = boring gameplay.
But, overall, I don't complain too much about the gacha set-up, I think the game doesn't force you to be a Pay To Win; I'm free to play, and I can say that I can get by in the harder battles; although the challengues such as S.Tower, might pressure you to pay for some things. But the game really rewards you with many blue cubes and items; and the game is now doing the same but with the pink cubes (which were quite scarce to get).
The prayer rates and costs can be sensed as unfair, and sometimes I've been Sunny Milk'd (tricked) by them; still, you can get many powerful characters from banners, daily prayers or the 300 SC recent one. Even so, because of that rushing-attitude that the game has adopted, we get many many banners and accumulate so much; which pressure the player to play more hours or to pay for items, so they can collect all of the touhou girlies.
6) The good stuff
This is simple, for being a free game, Touhou LW really offers a great quality in terms of artworks, effects, animations, music, etc. And, as I pointed in the point 5), the game awards you many times; all along with a Staff that keep in touch with the fans and hear their petitions and suggestions in the Discord Server; making some raffles.
Basically, the game is useful for promoting artists and music groups, while it also acts pretty close to the players-I remember when we were awarded with 100 cubes just because an error with some facebook accounts-.
7) My evolution of the experience
>"But again, you somehow get back to it, no matter how much you may end up despising it."
>" I do not have yet another Touhou fan-game to play and fill the gap. Lost Word fills most of the requirements for a game, and I do not know what else to play and have a bit of fun with. "
I'm in the same situation. At the beginning, I was so hyped; I was looking forward to LW release. It was almost summer, so I spent my vacations playing LW and enjoying the story, the gameplay and such. But, then, things got repetitive and lesser fulfilling; reaching a line where I skipped events, dialogues, stories, battles, and so on; all because of the reasons you and me have exposed in our posts. The last achievement that I was really proud of was beating Red Marisa on Lunatic; that truly was an example of a good battle based on strategy. The rest of my gameplay? Doing daily tasks and rushing events; while I care less about the main and Hifuu stories.
Again, we can't ask too much for a mobile game that is free; I've been critic with LW but, at the end, it's the only thing that fills the gap of Touhou mobile game.
I stated something to a friend during the first months of release: "Give whatever thing that has Touhou on it to Touhou fans and they will put it as a relic; no matter what". The lack of good touhou content on the West makes us to enjoy and overestimate products that could have been done better; such as Lost Word.
Maybe, Lost Word could have bet for a simpler, solid and constant story, linked to better missions and keeping the same fight system but with wearable items that boosts stats rather than Story Cards, Limit Breaking, Upgrading, Enhancing, Awaking and Reborning; everything to max and you're done with your character.
The game could have been more similar to a Kirby one called Team Clash Deluxe, which was a free game for 3Ds (not RPG); featuring missions, boss battles, armours, weapons... It's just the only game that came up to my mind, hehe.
Anyways, thank you for writing this; it was useful for clearing myself regarding to Lost Word.
Now that I've watched this, and I have many things to talk about that I can't let pass (since Lost Word is literally the only game I play on my phone and I was so hyped for it when it came out). So I have some opinions and experiences on the game that I would like to share and that they agree with yours. I'm gonna go by points. (geez this is gonna look more as a review...) 1) Story >"you go through a long cut-scene explaining the story, then touch 1-2 buttons to order attacks, win battle, watch another cutscene then repeat." >"long series of cutscenes with little battles" You summarized very well what's the story for me now. The idea of the multiverse sounds cool and interesting, but it's very poor, annoying and boring in the gameplay. I know it's a free and a mobile game, so I get the animations and the cutscenes can't be the big deal; yet it's just the same artwork of the characters all the time (with their awkward postures...), a pair of bullet animations and long, long and long textboxs. The complexity of the story ends being pretty confusing (or I'm just stupid to understand it pretty well). The characters spits you a lot of information that, at the end, it's boring to read; so many people-including myself- only skip the custscenes. The other point is that the progress of the story is deficient. I don't know the context in JP version, but the Chapter of the tiny Yuyuko and the Black Youmu has been extended unnecessarily (waiting for the next chapter...), which adds more complexity to the story that no one asked for. If the story is already deep; not adding a proper continuity to it will make the player to feel indifferent about it as well as turning the plot into an inconsistent one. 2) Characters >"the creators have gone the following route(s) in order to not fully exhaust the cast..." >"My biggest gripe is that they decided going for them as individual units instead of having them as skins. And skins in the game are already useless." >"It is also impressive how quick they managed to exhaust such a large cast. " I completely agree with you. They rushed the characters very quickly and now they've gotten this problem: "What do we add now?" I always say a joke toward these alt versions: "When you ran out of ideas: [alt version]". They give us new characters that are basically the same character but with a recolouring, lolified or with a ""new/old"" design. That's it. The biggest issue is that these units shadow the actual characters. As you've said, instead of buffing some lame characters like Kanako or Byakuren, they decide to buff them into top tier S+ or EX by giving us a new character based on them. These could have perfectly worked as items or outfits that change their appearances into those new designs, recolours, etc. but giving them more power. The point of LW is playing with a variety of characters, not getting into your team all the S+/EX tiers whose members are practically composed of these new alt versions. (How many Marisas we've got... For god sake...) 3) The JP and Global versions This is very related to the prior point. While JP version has got the problem of having rushed all the characters up to the point of covering the entire cast-that now they have to depend on these alt versions- the Global version has also done very wrong at rushing so quickly to match the JP features. Like, we get tons of new stuff in every update in short amounts of times; we've even got characters that were also realeased in JP version at the same time-- lol what??? Global version will end soon as JP version did; until a point where they will probably have to stop releasing content and wait first for what JP version does; since JP version will have run out of it by that moment. 4) The gameplay and RPG mechanics; difficulty >"you can just whale some money into it, get a meta character or card or whatever, and basically get yourself a "Press to win" button. " >"it just turns into a farming simulator with Touhou characters, made even more so by recently added auto-farm feature. Just leave your phone in a corner." >"You build a team, and can just put them auto-play the stages for you, without you having to do anything. It just turns into an auto-farm grind-fest, which after a while makes you feel it does not bring any achievement, and is just repetitive." I can't stop sharing your thoughts about the game. First of all, I remember how a friend that started playing LW, in a matter of a week or two; the guy had already reached level 100 (and I was like in level 75 by just playing f2p since the release date). What did my friend do? The Press to win technique you mentioned. He just put money into it, and BOOM; he was the Alpha among the server. I'm not really complaining, he can perfectly do that; it's okay; yet I just want to proove that your first statement is hella right xDD. Well, the gameplay is as brief as you wrote: put your phone in the corner, and put the autofarm while you're doing other thing. The game is quite boring and repetitive, I literally play LW for just 5 or 10 minutes per day for the daily missions and gifts. The feeling of success really fades when you reach high level in some of your units. Sure, I admit the game can have a strategy part, but most of the time it's just put your 3 girlies at level 100 to battle everything. The only challengues are things like Scarlet Tower or MOON EX. And that's where the difficulty part enters. I feel the game is kinda unbalanced: some battles are quite easy and others are ridiculously hard. There's no middle point; and for the hard fights, you really have to grind and spend many time getting the good cards and characters; trying-trying again the battle. I don't also get why you're forced to do the events first in normal mode; that helps to force the player to skip the story as well as begin to put auto-play mode. 5) The Gacha set-up >"if you don't add new characters that are stronger and stronger, for challenges that become higher and higher to justify the acquisition of these new units, nobody will play your game." >"t just feels like crap to hoard a lot of resources, then try your luck and get nothing useful out of your totally-not-gambling activity." I feel like you... The exaggerated ways of powering-up the characters makes the game to have TONS of confusing items over a simple RPG gameplay; which is linked to the previous gameplay part: grinding, grinding and a constant autofarm = boring gameplay. But, overall, I don't complain too much about the gacha set-up, I think the game doesn't force you to be a Pay To Win; I'm free to play, and I can say that I can get by in the harder battles; although the challengues such as S.Tower, might pressure you to pay for some things. But the game really rewards you with many blue cubes and items; and the game is now doing the same but with the pink cubes (which were quite scarce to get). The prayer rates and costs can be sensed as unfair, and sometimes I've been Sunny Milk'd (tricked) by them; still, you can get many powerful characters from banners, daily prayers or the 300 SC recent one. Even so, because of that rushing-attitude that the game has adopted, we get many many banners and accumulate so much; which pressure the player to play more hours or to pay for items, so they can collect all of the touhou girlies. 6) The good stuff This is simple, for being a free game, Touhou LW really offers a great quality in terms of artworks, effects, animations, music, etc. And, as I pointed in the point 5), the game awards you many times; all along with a Staff that keep in touch with the fans and hear their petitions and suggestions in the Discord Server; making some raffles. Basically, the game is useful for promoting artists and music groups, while it also acts pretty close to the players-I remember when we were awarded with 100 cubes just because an error with some facebook accounts-. 7) My evolution of the experience >"But again, you somehow get back to it, no matter how much you may end up despising it." >" I do not have yet another Touhou fan-game to play and fill the gap. Lost Word fills most of the requirements for a game, and I do not know what else to play and have a bit of fun with. " I'm in the same situation. At the beginning, I was so hyped; I was looking forward to LW release. It was almost summer, so I spent my vacations playing LW and enjoying the story, the gameplay and such. But, then, things got repetitive and lesser fulfilling; reaching a line where I skipped events, dialogues, stories, battles, and so on; all because of the reasons you and me have exposed in our posts. The last achievement that I was really proud of was beating Red Marisa on Lunatic; that truly was an example of a good battle based on strategy. The rest of my gameplay? Doing daily tasks and rushing events; while I care less about the main and Hifuu stories. Again, we can't ask too much for a mobile game that is free; I've been critic with LW but, at the end, it's the only thing that fills the gap of Touhou mobile game. I stated something to a friend during the first months of release: "Give whatever thing that has Touhou on it to Touhou fans and they will put it as a relic; no matter what". The lack of good touhou content on the West makes us to enjoy and overestimate products that could have been done better; such as Lost Word. Maybe, Lost Word could have bet for a simpler, solid and constant story, linked to better missions and keeping the same fight system but with wearable items that boosts stats rather than Story Cards, Limit Breaking, Upgrading, Enhancing, Awaking and Reborning; everything to max and you're done with your character. The game could have been more similar to a Kirby one called Team Clash Deluxe, which was a free game for 3Ds (not RPG); featuring missions, boss battles, armours, weapons... It's just the only game that came up to my mind, hehe. Anyways, thank you for writing this; it was useful for clearing myself regarding to Lost Word.
