Touhou Luna Nights Review for Nintendo Switch

Touhou Luna Nights , by developer Team Ladybug and publisher  Phoenixx, is a 2D action platform game based on the content of Touhou Project.  There exists a huge group of people who are big fans of the Touhou series. Thus, most of time the game for Touhou Project stays at the fan-oriented level, and more or less relies on its fan group. Spreading the game to people with different backgrounds will be difficult because of the gameplay, the graphics, and even the basic content of the story. However, Touhou Luna Nights breaks all of these restrain, even people who don’t know anything about Touhou Project can also have fun.  

Talking about action platform games will always remind us of Castlevania, Touhou Luna Nights have some similarities compared with Castlevania; but Touhou Luna Nights creates some special gaming system that makes itself stand out to be a strong competitor. The specific different part for our main character Sakuya is the ability to slow down time.  

The time control ability is the core power of this game. At first, Sakuya can only slowing the time, but later on we will get a clock that can let us stop time completely. After that, you can see a big clock, which indicates the usage of the ability at the top center of the game. Many interesting parts of the game are designed based on this ability. Part of the innovation of Touhou Luna Nights is the way it combined time stop ability in map exploration. For example, some of the objects will continue to move when time stops, some will move in the opposite direction, even some will only move under time stops. The water becomes an impenetrable solid after time stops. With these settings, the puzzles part becomes more interesting. Furthermore, Sakuya can throw the flying knife and step on her knife when using the time stop.  This will allow the players to go some places that are hard to reach.

The game has some detailed settings that are also very interesting. For example, when the time stops, we can see the raindrops in the background also stop in the air. From these fine details, we can see the huge efforts of the production team. 

The other different design is a definition from Touhou project series called “Graze”, where Sakuya can recover her HP and MP when she dodges enemy attacks at a very short distance. The normal battle process has its own characteristics with the using of both time stop and Graze. The overall difficulty of Touhou Luna Nights is not very high, but still is challenging to the player. There are not many different attack ways of the bosses, and the damage is not that high. If we can use the grazing and time stop wisely, defeating each boss is not hard as hell. And just like many challenging games, the sense of accomplishment of defeating the boss after repeated failures is also better reflected in the process of playing in Touhou Luna Nights. 

Music is also a highlight of this game. A lot of original music from the East is used in the game, and the music is also very rich with the changes of scenes and battles, sometimes the switching may be a little blunt, which is a place worthy of improvement. 

If we want to talk about the biggest shortcoming of this game, it is the length of his game. A total of about 6 hours of game time gives us a feeling of unfulfilled intentions. 

There are so many high-quality action games today, Touhou Luna Nights can stand out among all of them definitely worth your time and money. It has outstanding performance in all aspects, even you are not a big fan of Touhou Project, you still can have a fun adventure from it.  

Check Out the Touhou Luna Nights Trailer:

Touhou Luna Nights is available for Nintendo Switch and for PC via Steam.

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