Ultimately, Its slay the Spire with Touhou.

The game obviously has better presentation and music than Slay the Spire, but don't be expecting TOO much. Encounter Variety isn't as high as I would like, and build viability also is wildly fluctuating. The biggest strength of this game is basically stealing colored mana from MtG, which lets characters gain access to unique cards, and even cards that can belong to other characters, which makes for interesting synergy. It's not my favorite card based roguelike (That would be Chrono Ark), but I see this as an easy recommend if you like both 2hu and StS

TL;DR: God this game is good & based on the amount of reviews, underrated.

Note: I've bolded certain sentences for skimmers to pick up on some of the more unique elements of the game, not necessarily for conventional emphasis purposes. Also, some sections are very short because turns out there's a char limit to reviews and I wrote those last.


Wow. These tracks are BANGERS. I'm new to the touhou franchise but I heard they were known for their music, and now I know why. This is some of the most incredible, hype, compelling, and fun music I've ever heard in a video game (barring crazy orchestral tracks, maybe, but that's an entirely different genre that I wouldn't listen to on its own - I just woke up with one of the normal enemy fight tracks playing / stuck in my head). The game has ~37 tracks and they're all great, some really standing out as brain-meltingly awesome and others more subtly adding to the experience.

The music also really feels fitting for the atmosphere / world / task at hand - I'm not sure how to explain this. Kinda the same way you probably wouldn't play black metal to a cozy slice-of-life kinda game like Stardew Valley (I mean, probably not, not my kinda game but I can imagine lol), the music here really just "works" with the theme. It feels like it's helping to tell a story and make the game more immersive, which to be clear is not usually a strong suit of deck builders, but I get deeply engrossed in this one way beyond the usual mechanical analysis when I play StS or other top tier games of the genre, and I attribute a good chunk of that to the music.

Sound effects are perfectly fine. They don't stand out like the music does, but I've never heard an effect that made me go "lol wtf is that?" or that sounded bad or out of place; I've had 1 or two audio glitches which sounded like popping or bad audio balancing, but bad audio balancing on a single card isn't enough to detract from the 10 score, and I suspect the popping was my own equipment's issue.

The visuals are REALLY good. The sprites are great, the animations are smooth, the colors are bright and vivid but not gaudy or blinding - overall the game is a visual treat. The only reason it doesn't get a 10 is that a few of the animations for some of the most powerful cards are a little underwhelming. Not everything needs to be a lightshow, but considering how (I'll cover this next) most cards do a really great job of having animations that both match the card thematically [i[and[/i] communicate its power effectively, it can feel a bit lame to play a super powerful 5 mana card and get a little fiery animation under your feet or something. However that's a small minority of attacks.

The card art is also exceptional for most cards - some are a little less impressive, but still high quality (lets be real even a top quality chibi is never going to match a skillfull drawn, highly detailed character in a more realistic style). I've played *a lot* of deckbuilders, and this one may be the only one that I've actually sat there staring at the cards for any real length of time because they just looked so good. Most of them depict some kind of spell cast, skill use, or other combat sequence, but some are just really cute / wholesome (usually event cards or utility stuff), some are more unique settings and kinda feel like a glimpse into the game world outside of combat - it feels like there's some world building through the card art which is really awesome and not something I've ever noticed before in other games.

The game does a few things incredible well which relate to the above categories but don't quite fit in either.

The abilities *FEEL* appropriately poweful. This feels like an obvious requirement but very few games in the genre actually do this at all, let alone well. You can use a 5 energy card in StS or Monster Train and it doesn't "feel" any different other than 'number go up', even if it's got its own animation / sound effect. LBOL does this EXCEPTIONALLY well. Your weaker abilities aren't super impressive - they're well animated and they look good, but it feels like a cantrip. This scales up all the way to the crazy powerful ones that feel like an anime protagonist unleashing their strongest move.

This does so much for adding / retaining excitement for finding and playing powerful cards, because again it's not just 'number go up', you get to watch a killer animation of your character expressing that power in game. Combine that with the super intense music and dude... I feel like a kid again at 35 in some of these sequences, it's amazing. I haven't pogged out this hard at a video game in maybe a decade, and that's not an exaggeration..

Chars have 2 loadouts, each loadout can accomodate at least 2 wholly different archetypes within which there's a good aount of variety, so with 5 chars, there's a lot of variety!


The game has a lot of mechanics, and all of them are straightforward and clear enough not to turn the experience into a spreadsheet simulator trying to figure out interactions, but varied and individually different enough to provide depth and plenty of build variety. You've got all of your genre staples: Vuln, weaken, strength (firepower in this game), dex (spirit here), etc. plus a bunch which are, as far as I know, unique to LBOL: cold, divine favor, all out, burst - plenty more.

There are also a lot of interesting potential interaction amongst the cards and mechanics themselves. However, there's one thing that I don't love here (and I don't blame them because I think there are something like 600+ cards in the game) which is that sometimes you'll see cards that are effectively identical to something in a different game, usually Slay the Spire which it clearly takes *some* inspiration from. For example, so far, I've found Demon Form, Inflame, and at least a few others that I'm not currently remembering; The effects are identical, it's just the mana cost which has been adjusted for this game's mana system. With that many cards and some mechanics (like strength manipulation) being ubiquitous across games, I really don't think it's that big of a deal, but when I first came across these identical cards I kinda paused and side-eyed and went "Huh. Well, alright".

This has also happened to a lesser degree with relics, but for the most part the relics are pretty unique, sometimes quite creative, and very few duds, which is something the game does well; you rarely find a relic and groan, unlike StS or MT where it's really a toss-up if the thing is gonna be any good / relevant to your run.

Overall though, the mechanics and abilities are varied, interesting, fun to play with, and allow for a good variety of builds and overall strategies.

NOTE: I will come back and update this in the near future.
Game seems on the easier side so far, but I haven't unlocked all "ascension-style" difficulty increases, and apparently it does get very hard with everything activated, so it may redeem itself there. Cards are mostly well balanced, but some mid-tier attacks clearly outshine others pretty universally.

It's clean, doesn't get in the way, provides all required info, and mostly plays nice withthe newly implemented controller support, but there's a bit of room for improvement on that front.

Events: 7.5/10 - They're generally more beneficial to the player than similar games, but the writing can be a bit silly which I personally love (though some might not) and the range of potential rewards makes it hard to strategize around.

Map: 3/10 - Super uninspired and very little decision-making, feels like an afterthought, weakest part of the game by far. I hit the char limit