Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded Critic Reviews

If you are a roguelike fan, then this is a lovely, charming, colourful and traditional take on the genre, and it's the first really good example of that on the Nintendo Switch to date. For that reason alone it's the superior version of one of the more fundamentally enjoyable roguelikes I've played in quite a few years now.

Touhou Genso Wanderer was a really good roguelike on the PS4 already and the added content and portability aspect of the Switch makes this the definitive version of Touhou Genso Wanderer by far. If you’ve been craving your Mystery Dungeon and Shiren fix on Switch, this is the game to get.

Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded is a fantastic interpretation of the Mystery Dungeon formula that genre fans are sure to love. However, if you already own the vanilla version and aren't a hardcore fan then you likely won't be impressed with this iteration.

It’s a Japanese roguelike influenced by Mystery Dungeon in the combats, but in the end falls short in meeting expectations.

It's an interesting and somewhat fun game. The story is good and it will please fans of the series and newcomers.

Touhou Genso Wanderer Reloaded adds to the Nintendo Switch catalogue a game that is based on dungeon crawling, slapped with a roguelike formula. If the exploration is very challenging, even merciless at times, and features quite a wealth of weapons and objects to catch, the difficulty can reach too high peaks. The most obvious collateral damage is that it will be mostly fans of the Touhou series who will dedicate themselves to the game, while newcomers will feel put off by the difficulty and rather repetitive combat. A decent formula but which could do more to reach out.

Overwhelming for newcomers and probably too generic for genre aficionados, Touhou Gensou Wanderer Reloaded is difficult to recommend to all but die-hard series fans. The beautiful hand-drawn presentation and high production values are hindered severely by a contrived and intrusive interface, unimportant dialogue with very little character development and derivative mechanics. It certainly looks the part, but there are more fun and interesting adventure roguelikes such as Crypt Of The Necrodancer on the eShop right now.

The roguelike procedural generation in Touhou: Genso Wanderer Reloaded often generates terrible flaws, horrible stages, and difficulty levels all over the shop - when the difficulty spikes, the challenging nature often just results in repetitive and frustrating grinding. There is far too much dialogue to read through, meaning huge gaps between actually being able to play… It's hard to find much to like here. It will certainly interest Touhou fans who get to enjoy some of their favourite characters, but for casual fans and those new to the series, all they are getting is a rather monotonous dungeon crawler.