YMMV / Touhou LostWord

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The manga "A Slice of Touhou: Legend of the Basin" has a two-part chapter named "An Appetite for Books", which reveals that people training in the dojo who can't read are instead given cakes shaped like books that achieve the same effect when eaten. While it seems outlandish and silly in the context of the manga, cakes shaped like books are an actual thing.
• Awesome Music: Membrane, the theme that plays during the fight against the Lost Word incident mastermind, perfectly fits with the surprise and intensity of the confrontation.
• Better Off Sold: A tier list exists for story cards, with the lowest tier housing cards that many deem useless and can be safely sold. Common traits for cards in this tier are conditional damage reductions, crit evasion/defense up, evasion up, and either minuscule or no sought after card effects.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The developers keep track of what units and story cards are being used in EX battles. While the units used are commonly high tiered with the appropriate elemental breaks (plus the occasional B2 Junko), there's a consistent use of SP-granting story cards, from the well-coveted and farmable "Witch of Scarlet Dreams" to the easy-to-summon "It's Spring!" and "Midnight Tea".
• Creator's Pet: The developers obviously favor Sakuya, up to having the player character develop an admiration for her, but the fact that in events she often scolds other characters for minor slights or even disproportionately punishes them (in a way more in line with how she is in fanon), while also getting away with morally dubious actions herself, means that to a lot of players she comes off as unlikeable.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Kutaka, the god of chickens who wishes to elevate the status of chickens, has a winter quote in which she casually asks what "roast chicken" and "fried chicken" are due to rumors she heard regarding their significance to the season.
• Difficulty Spike: Eternal Battlefront Act 2 really ramps up the difficulty, to the point where a full Level 100 team can't just brute force its way through a stage, and bosses routinely have three HP bars. It's almost like you're starting the Scenario on Lunatic difficulty.
• Escapist Character: The player character is one if you've ever wanted to live in Gensokyo. You get to live with Reimu at the Hakurei Shrine and befriend various Gensokyo residents, with even figures like Remilia and Yukari taking a liking to you. In the "Happy Prism Parade!" event, Raiko even reveals that you become famous!
• Fan Nickname:
  • B3 Yorihime's is known within the fandom as Heart-Throbbing Yorihime or KKHTA Yorihime, due to both versions of the character wearing eyepatches.
  • The R2 variant of Yuyuko and the B2 variant of Junko are commonly called "Loli Yuyuko" and "Loli Junko" respectively, due to both variants looking drastically younger than their regular counterparts.
  • Mysterious Sword Master Youmu is often just called "Black Youmu", which is a naming convention used by several other franchises to denote alternate versions of characters that have a darker color scheme.
  • B3 Eirin is known as "Blind Eirin" because her eyes are covered by a blindfold. Though "Eternal Battlefront Act 4" clarifies that the blindfold actually contains a set of screens that allow her to monitor the Capital.
  • The F1 versions of Reimu and Sanae are nicknamed Blue Reimu (or Bluemu) and Red Sanae, respectively.
  • The C3 versions of characters are collectively known as "Beach Units", due to them all sharing a summer theme.
  • "Lossie" and "Lossy" have become popular names when referring to the protagonist, both of which come from throwaway lines in the story. The Secret Sealing Club nicknames the protagonist "Lossie" during the Hiffu side stories, and is used infrequently throughout. "Lossy" comes from a line spoken by Yukari in chapter 4, who decided to nickname the protagonist that on a whim, but it's only used that one exact time. "Lossy" was eventually acknowledged in the Gensokyo Tales of Fantasy series "A Slice of Touhou", where it's the name chosen for the protagonist in said mangas.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With the canon ZUN-made branch of Touhou games. Fans of the main-series games, mainly older players, see this game as a cheap cash-grab upon a well-respected brand name with simplified gameplay and a story that frequently features beloved characters behaving starkly out-of-character for cheap jokes. Meanwhile, fans of this game prefer it for being easily accessible and find the main games to be too nigh-impenetrable to get into.
  • It also has one with Touhou Fantasy Eclipse, another Touhou fangame for mobile. Fans of Fantasy Eclipse generally aren't very keen on LostWord for how heavy its gacha elements are and the liberties it takes with how it portrays the cast of Touhou, whereas Fantasy Eclipse does as best as possible to stick to Touhou canon.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Anomaly Barrier Breaks - using a status effect on a barrier, then firing an attack that breaks barriers with that status effect applied, which can bypass the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system entirely. Applying enough anomalies then breaking them will almost guarantee a Full Break, which will stun the enemies for two turns and deactivate anything boosting their defenses, including any debuffs applied to your team, allowing a back row of nukers to swap in and completely destroy them... unless one of your enemies carries immunities to an anomaly or to anomaly breaking in general.
  • As the game's first Epic Unit, Blue Reimu takes this concept and runs wild with it. It's not just that her kit is loaded to the brim with buffs on literally everything, but she also takes extreme advantage of anomaly breaks in a way no other character can ever hope to match. Her second Spell card inflicts 3 Paralyse Barriers to a single target and breaks them in the same attack at 2 power (And she also breaks any Burn barriers they're inflicted with). This can be boosted even further if she's paired with teammates who can inflict Burn and Paralysis barriers on enemies (such as PCB Alice, Loli Junko and Iku) and even her one weakness, her inflicting ailments on her teammates with her first two skills, can be turned to the team's advantage (i.e. inflicting Freeze on Loli Yuyuko or Hunter-Hunting Flandre, or Burn on Yellow Reisen or Mokou).
• Genius Bonus:
  • The Witch of Scarlet Dreams being Marisa Kirisame makes sense, being that it was Marisa's title in Shuusou Gyoku (and had similar titles in third and fourth games). This was also the game that implied Marisa became a youkai magician, given she sports a very obvious set of wings that no normal human would possess. This can be a Captain Obvious Reveal, though, depending on one's knowledge of Touhou lore. This is made even more poignant in the Code Bm3 scenario where, when you meet the PC-98 versions of Reimu and Marisa, PC-98 Marisa's title is, indeed, "Being of Magic and Scarlet Dreams".
  • Watatsuki no Toyohime's Last Word in this game is summoning a gigantic water dragon to attack her opponents. Her namesake is based on Toyotama-hime, the descendant of Watatsumi (who is also called Ryuujin the Sea Dragon God from Japanese mythology... which is also one name sometimes used for the Great Dragon that helped Yukari create Gensokyo).
  • The names of the kaiju and kaijin are largely references to Chinese history and mythology correlating to the individual character.
    • The Tenshi kaiju is referred to as Qi Tian Da Sheng, which is a story from Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, meaning "The Great Sage, Heaven's Equal".
  • In "Night-Splitting Light", Marisa's vision of Mima has a background of some sort of planetoid with what appears to be Saturn in the distance. They're on "Mimas", one of Saturn's moons.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A criticism towards God-Summoning Shaman Reimu in her summoning trailer involves recycling animations for her Last Word, including one from Suika Ibuki (L1). When she's finally available to summon, examining her ability reveals that a sacrifice was made for her new power. The sacrificed individual in question? Suika Ibuki.
  • "Gensokyo Delivery Service Supportmates" kicks off as many of Gensokyo's denizens picked up on teleworking being the latest craze. In the outside world, a global pandemic was the main cause of the surge of people working from home.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In one of the battles for "Seiga Nyan Nyan's Social Club", Keine has a blurb that has her want to see Mokou in a dress. Mokou does get a dress via Fantasy Rebirth some time after the event's initial release.
  • In the "Capsule Crazy Gensokyo" event, Sanae invokes Pokémon's infamous "Trainers' Eyes Meet" mechanic. Later, Kanako reveals Sanae made that rule up, and brings up how ridiculous it is. Come Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, and the mechanic is removed entirely, with one of the first trainers in the game Lampshading this.
• Les Yay: The main character develops a noticeable crush on Sakuya over the course of the main story. She often has internal thoughts about how cool and beautiful Sakuya is, blushes when Sakuya offers to keep her safe, and gets flustered when Sakuya Bridal Carries her from place to place, since she can't fly. The fact that she doesn't react this way when Youmu carries her in Chapter 3 further cements this.
• Like You Would Really Do It: In the Code Name: Picara ~Five Tails~ event, Youmu seemingly dies under a collapsing Hakugyokurou. She makes an Unexplained Recovery not long after, to the surprise of almost no one, as there's no way the writers would kill off such a popular character. Even if the event takes place in a simulation.
• Low-Tier Letdown: While there are many characters that suffer this, there are a few prominent examples:
  • First and foremost is Sunny Milk (L1), who has three primary problems:
    • She has very poor damage, since she lacks Attack buffs or Defense debuffs, and her Last Word, Solar Storm, has relatively low power and poor elemental distribution.
    • She's also heavily lacking in utility. She focuses on lowering accuracy, which isn't very good as a niche, and even though she can inflict Blind barriers there are far better units at it than her, such as Rumia, A9 Aya and A8 Reisen (to say nothing about the fact that she can't actually break blind barriers, unlike the aforementioned three units).
    • Lastly, her elemental distribution is awful. Her only attacks that have more than one Elemental Break are her first spell card, Sun Sign: Aggressive Light, and her Last Word, Solar Storm, which are both Solo Target- and she only deals in Sun element with that. Worse still, she needs to use AT LEAST 2 power to get more than one elemental break, and while she does have Sun Breaks on her Focus and Spread Shots, these require 3 power to get a single break.
    • Due to these three factors, there is virtually no situation where Sunny is worth using even as a standalone unit, let alone compared to L1 Reimu, who every player gets for free. While Reimu faces similar issues with poor elemental breaks, she has utility as a tank thanks to her high number of Focus Buffs and ability to restore her own barriers, and deals decent damage with her Last Word, Fantasy Nature, via its Hard Scaling and her defense buffs, plus has a single spammable Sun break in her Focus Shot, which has one break with at 0 power. The only stages worth using Sunny in are her own Fantasy Rebirth stages- and that's only because you're forced to use Sunny in those stages. This has made pulling her on banners a meme in and of itself.
  • Lily White is another example due to one particular change. Originally, the Focus stat merely increased or decreased the chance of Solo-Target attacks being aimed at the user. After a rework, however, Focus also affects the damage of All-Target attacks aimed at the allied team, with Increased Focus making the user take more damage, but their teammates take less, and vice-versa. This proved to be an absolute death sentence to Lily's viability, as, due to the fact that most of her abilities reduce her focus, she actively and significantly increases the damage the rest of her team takes. This defeats the point of bringing Lily to begin with, because, as a healer, Lily's job is to keep her team alive. Prior to the rework, she was a decently competent healer, but the Focus Rework completely ruined her by making her Spell Cards and second skill not just useless, but an active liability that works to get the rest of the team shot down.
  • For a Destroy unit, Rei'sen is ill fitting for many situations. She carries no means of breaking barriers, and while she carries a spread shot and a spell card that is effective against anyone from Gensokyo, all her attacks are low damage and solo target. She does provide buffs, but they are short lived, only lasting 2 turns at most. Lastly, her Last Word is an Aid card that grants immense buffs and a heal to her allies...at the cost of making her defenses paper thin for three turns. It's extremely telling when players were relieved when her Peacekeeper (B3) version is shown to be more viable and more focused on her Support specialty. And if all of that weren't enough, she doesn't have a Leitmotif.
• Memetic Troll: While the game expectedly has some low tier units, Sunny Milk is one with this reputation for spooking players who try to summon for other friends. Jokes about her have circulated, to the point where summoning her means the player got Sunny Milked. The dev team has noticed this, and during the first anniversary, they showed the number of times players summoned her.
• The Scrappy: L1 Sakuya, for being a relatively weak unit in terms of gameplay and for her characterization leaning more in favor of her fanon portrayal at the expense of her canon personality. In events she is repeatedly shown cruelly punishing others for minor slights, including assaulting Meiling with knives for sleeping on the job and forcing the player to beat up Okuu, Orin and Koakuma after they make a mess in the kitchen, yet also gets away with things like outright cheating in the Little Sister Event.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The maximum number of coins and Spirit Points one can store isn't exactly a cap. The player can still obtain more through tasks and errands, but going over the limit only prevents them from emptying the Shrine and Offering Box. The problem is that two daily tasks require the player to do this at least once, making it less of a Freemium Timer, and more of an inconvenience. It's especially bad with Spirit Points, as it's easier to max out on them than it is to run out. And since they're commonly a login bonus, often the first thing players do immediately after logging in is go to the school, and spend Spirit Points on massive amounts of food just to make sure they don't go over the limit.
  • Most festival banners tend to have a Pity System in which after summoning on the same banner enough times, you would then have enough points to exchange for one of the units on the banner. Epic Festival banners do not have such a safety net, meaning that obtaining any Epic units is a purely Luck-Based Mission, even with copious amounts of whaling. To make matters worse, these EFes units are considered among the best units in the game, with some certain stages recommending, if not requiring, at least one in your party. The speed at which these units have been released has also drawn the ire of some players. Eventually, Epic Units were given a pity system, though restricted compared to other prayer types, as it is only possible to acquire an Epic unit via exchange points once per banner.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The entirety of the Hifuu storyline, Code B3 - You of the End, is a procession of these. Everyone except the loyalist and insane Lunarians have lost their powers and are trapped on the moon attempting to protect you, all while a brutal, deadly war rages around you. Nearly the entire cast is dead as a result of the Lost Word. Relying on reverse-engineered technology to fight, Sakuya, Sanae, Youmu, Reisen, Marisa and Reimu seemingly give themselves up to buy you time to find the Lost Word, Magic...only for it to be theorized by the Secret Sealing Club that you failed.
  • The first interlude gives some insight on Blue!Reimu's timeline. She ends up crashing in the main timeline after a jump gone wrong, and when she sees Suika messing around at the Hakurei shrine, she immediately goes to hug her with tears in her eyes. Given the reveal about her Last Word listed above...
  • The end of Kaguya's Fantasy Rebirth costume story. At first she jokes about how Yukari is going around giving costumes to everyone, until she notices her costume is a traditional wedding dress. She then burst into tears, reminiscing about her adoptive parents and how they wanted to see her become a bride. Given the reveal in Kaguya's Moonlit Festival that Eirin murdered them so that nobody would know about Kaguya's whereabout makes it sadder.
  • The second part of "Code L?" gets rather dark, as it's revealed that Sanae has been committing Self-Harm for years as part of a ritual, and even nearly commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, believing she's an angel, and can fly. Fortunately, Kanako and Suwako save her at the last minute, but still.
• That One Boss:
  • The final boss of Chapter 2: Witch of Scarlet Dreams Marisa. She's a huge step up in difficulty compared to everything else you've dealt with thus far. She has a lot of defense, drops burns on your barriers repeatedly, and has a high damage output. Her Lunatic difficulty version will very likely be the first fight you won't be able to brute force your way past. You'll need a strategy to deal with her high defense and take advantage of her weaknesses if you want to have any chance of winning this. Dev Letter 16 noted the amount of times she has defeated players, with a grand total of 197,794 times.
  • The Conflux Battle Stage featuring Youmu in her three variants will catch you off guard. When the battle starts, your Focus shots, skills, and the ability to graze for your front units will be sealed. Taking out the first gauge of each Youmu will also seal switching, boosting, and spell cards. So, going through it too quickly without swapping will render you only able to use Spread shots and being rendered defenseless against the Youmus' spell cards.
  • The fight against the Prismriver Sisters in Chapter 4 Episode 4. Each of them has three health bars and a different element they're weak against, and their attacks are capable of one-shotting your units if your barriers aren't up.
• That One Level: Chapter 4 Episode 2 has a battle in Part 2 that will roadblock those that are unprepared. The second wave of the fight is the biggest hurdle on Lunatic, with binds placed on Boosting and switching, and one of the fairies will restore up to two broken barriers, forcing stall tactics. Once you reach the third wave, there are fairies that not only have multiple health gauges, but they will also change their elemental affinities after a Gauge Burst.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Fans have been critical of certain L1 characters like Aya and Sakuya acting out of character or flat out behaving in ways contradictory to their personalities in the canon games, as L1 is supposed to be the world correlating with canon Touhou.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Among the A universe cast, which typically consisted of characters who appeared in the represented games, the most unexpected of them is Sunny Milk (Scarlet), given that Sunny did not exist until Touhou Sangetsusei started, about two and a half years after the release of The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.
  • As far as characters from C3 were concerned, very few were expecting Miyoi Okunoda to have a playable version from that universe. Her standard version was not even summonable at the time her C3 version was revealed in Dev Letter 21, adding to the confusion.
  • Before the release of Marisa (Cz1), an alt of an existing alt was unheard of. While Marisa already has a C-universe alt of her own, this one is based on her Witch of Scarlet Dreams self. A lot of players were not only surprised, but also were wondering if other alt characters will get the same treatment.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • Usually, costumes are well-received. However, one that's got plenty of questionable reactions was Kutaka's "Crispy Chicken Delivery" costume. While it's by no means objectionable by itself, fans feel it's ill-suited for a god of chickens who wants to elevate chickens from being just food. Even the description has a Furry Reminder!
  • For Fantasy Rebirths, the outfit that drew some disappointment was Mokou's. Fans were expecting a tuxedo to show off her tomboyish nature, but instead she's donning a dress like everyone else. Caroline and Phantasma, the presenters of the localization's Dev Letters, did mention this criticism in the 15th installment, where they noted that Mokou reached the top 5 for rebirths during the few months prior to the presentation despite the criticism.
• The Woobie: While those hailing from universe L80 have it rough, having come from Just Before the End, Satori (L80) has it worst. A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read when people's thoughts contain fears of The End of the World as We Know It, and that's when she's already beyond her breaking point. The animosity that satori youkai experience from humans and other youkai seem tame in comparison.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Despite the fact that the event "The Rebellious Mini-Fantasia" is a homage to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Margatroid does not appear anywhere in the event. A few have pointed this out as a missed opportunity, since she's based on and even named after the book's main character.
• Woolseyism: Implied. The English localization sometimes adds in pop culture references that likely weren't in the Japanese script. These include Kokoro Waxing Lyrical to Eminem's "Lose Yourself", Eika quoting Thanos' famous line, and Eternity referencing The Joy of Painting when entering a painting competition. While it's unclear as to what was made up and what wasn't, players are okay with this. Given the multitude of other references that are in the game, these don't seem too out of place anyway.