What a little gem of a fangame

I've always been a pokemon fan, but more a fan of the strategic aspect of it and its difficulty, so for those last 10 years, I've mostly only played Showdown and romhacks.

With that said, Touhou Puppet Dance Performance and its modded expansion "SoD - Extended" really appealed to me in every way; training your puppets and making a team you like is a lot of fun.

Every "puppet" (touhou characters in pokemon form) can have 3 "style" which alters their stats, typing and ability.
Basically, one puppet can be 3 different puppet and that's amazing, making a lot of possibilities for team building and finding a sure ay to play your favorite in the form you like.

The game is very easy at the beginning, atlmost too easy but it allows you to learn the new type table at your ease, same with the moves, abilities and all.

From a touhou fan perspective, this game is everything you want aswell. You'll find almost every characters in the whole series, including PC-98 characters, the world is rich with famous locations from Gensokyo and the way it is built for you to be able to walk from almost any location to another is great.

The story works like a main touhou title, with a strange incident occuring and you'll have to discover who's behind it and try to solve it, except in this case you're not Reimu but an human from the outside world, making your way into gensokyu without knowing why you're here. It's quite simple but I liked it.

The game also has a great atmosphere, even for low budget game like this, it's easy to get immersed when first entering in an area because of how great the soundtrack is and how nicely they transcribed area from the maingames. My favorites are probably the Netherworld, Road of Reconsideration and Muenzuka.

Now for what I think could be a bit better :

The equivalent of the pokedex in this game is useless. You'll probably never check it more than once or twice, the reason is that informations about the puppets get registered ONLY when you catch them and not when you see them. As for the information there's almost nothing to see apart from their sprite and a little description. This could have been so much better, like :

- being able to see where you can catch them once you see them,
- see their available costumes because I didn't mention it, each puppet has 2 or 3 exclusive costumes, they're great
- maybe their stats, weaknesses, resistances, learnable moves and all would have been great

Now this bring me to my second point, because there is not much information actually given to you in-game, you'll absolutely need to check the wikia very often and this one is a bit laggy. So each time you want to check the typing of your opponent, you'll have to wait 3 seconds for the page to load.

it's really annoying and for a game that changes everything from pokemon (I'm talking about moves names, effects and typing) those QoL would have been great.

Lastly, the game is not grindy at all, you won't need to grind in the grass to catch up or anything, the opposite actually. You'll often have more levels than your opponent BUT from the midgame, trying to build up a new puppet is quite a long commitment, and in the end if the puppet isn't really what you wanted, you'll end up being disappointed for spending so much time on it.

The last thing I would say is that if you don't know anything about touhou, I'm not sure I would recommend the game, a big part of the fun is recognizing characters and interacting with them.

I'm personally in the middle of discovering the Touhou Series and I completed Touhou 10 not long ago, so while there are many characters I don't know anything about, it was still very fun to discover them in that fangame.

And that's it for the review, I had a lot of fun trying to do almost everything in the game, which took approximatively 45 hours, my thanks to the devs team for making such a passionate project and for my last final message :

Komachi is best girl

While I'm reviewing this page for the base game, I'm still going to talk about the expansions. The reason I'm putting it on this one is just because the icon looks prettier than either of the mod preview icons and nothing else LOL. The only thing you need to know is the base game has characters and references up to Touhou 12, Shard of Dreams is an official expansion that raises the cap to 15, and Shard of Dreams -Extended- is quite literally every major character up to current. For the sake of not explaining that over and over, just assume I'm talking about -Extended- which I think anyone interested in should be playing anyways!

This is a wonderful Pokemon inspired Touhou fangame that takes the combat and stats we all know and goes on to make a game that is quite honestly better than any mainline Pokemon game IMO. One of the main draws for me both when I was only a casual Touhou fan and now when I'm even more obsessed is the fact there's a puppet (pokemon) for every Touhou character as long as they aren't some of the really bizarre choices like Great Catfish or that unnamed merchant that dies in FS (I seriously don't know why the character sorter enables that one) then you'll find them. And the game understands the importance of letting you play with your favorite because immediately upon starting the game you are required to tell an NPC your favorite character and that determines the starting puppet you get, even if your favorite character is Shinki who has one of the highest BST in the game. I personally made a fun challenge for myself in the main game where I made it so I could only use one character from every 3 games chronologically, meaning if I chose Youmu for example I wouldn't be able to pick any other characters from Touhou 7-9 or any spinoffs/manga in that timeframe. The ending team ended up being Yumemi/Shinki/Youmu/Byakuren/Sagume/Saki if you were curious! Even if you know nothing about Touhou I still think this is a game worth playing because it could lead to you finding a character you like using or their role in the story and then use that as a gateway to getting into the series, or even if you just planned on making this your only foray into Touhou that's perfectly fine too!

To nerd out a bit I'm going to womansplain some game mechanics, if it doesn't interest you then skip this whole paragraph. This game does have IVs/EVs/Evolutions(kinda)/Learned Moves but I really like how all of them are handled! IVs are the most similar in which when you catch a puppet you get assigned 6 random values for all your stats with a grade from S-E, with S being perfect IVs and E being dogwater (your starter gets to start with perfect IVs), and you don't unlock your breeding replacement until postgame but if you learn the Reincarnation system it's quite easy to eventually start making plenty of puppets with perfect IVs. Next, when you beat other puppets in battle your entire team gets these little points that can go into multiple things. The first thing is EVs, which instead of being something you have to carefully monitor in Pokemon games you can just put points into whatever stats desired to custom make your own EVs per puppet. Learned Moves are unlocked by level up, but they all conveniently get put into a menu that costs the same type of points and forgotten moves are always put back meaning if you replace a move and then want it back it's a negligible fee to get it back. Finally evolution works a bit differently than actual Pokemon. At level 30 every single puppet can form shift to 1 of 3 different forms depending on who it is and it can change things like BSTs, Abilities, and movesets, to sometimes even changing the type of the puppet outright. As an example, Reimu is a Void/Illusion type normally, but if changed to Power Reimu she becomes a Fighting/Illusion, and if she becomes Extra Reimu she changes types drastically to becoming a Wind/Warped puppet. There's so much variety in each character that you can have the exact same team of 6 puppets but with different evolutions meaning both teams could have a completely different strategy/build.

Out of numbers hell, other things I really like about this game is how well the setting of Gensokyo actually fits into making a really good Pokemon map. You have Youkai mountain for the mountain region, Human Village for a central hub, Forest of Magic for a forest region, and even the Underworld/Makai for cavernous/icy areas. And some of the characters fit into their role with ease with Medicine being a great example for a rival team leader.

And before I'm done gushing about this game I have to compliment the typing chart they made for this game which has a good mix of elements already in pokemon and wholly original ones that add a lot of fun to learning the new type matchups. My personal favorite addition is Sound as a type which doesn't have any inherent resistances to any of its weaknesses which means it isn't a free switch in like a grass to a water type would be, but the types it covers are some of the more annoying ones to find good weaknesses for.

To make an extremely long story short this is a fantastic game for Touhou and Pokemon fans alike that's definitely worth checking out if you have a decent interest in one or both. Thanks for reading this mess if you did!