The Touhou franchise is a long-runner in the realm of gaming, sprouting from it's danmaku origins to cover a smorgasbord of genres so wide that if you can think of it, there's probably a Touhou version of it already. Team Ladybug has decided to throw their hat into the ring with Touhou Luna Nights, a 2D Metroidvania spinoff entry about time-stopping maid Sakuya exploring an other-worldly mansion.

In most games, the ability to manipulate time is usually reserved for either an exceptionally powerful character or an expensive late-game skill of some kind due to it's inherently overpowered nature, but in Luna Nights, the power to stop time is not only a core tenet of both combat and puzzle-solving, it's a borderline necessity for you to stand a chance against your opponents. Smart use of your limited time stop gauge is vital to your survival against the tougher foes you'll encounter in the mansion, and the ways the time stop mechanic is toyed with for use in both environmental puzzle solving and combat is nothing short of genius. It's an incredibly solid central mechanic where all the pieces for it fall right into place with nothing feeling 'off' or unnecessary.

The shift from danmaku to 2D metroidvania is a hard one to make while still keeping the charm of the original gameplay, but Team Ladybug managed to do it by carrying over one of Touhou's central mechanics: Grazing. By narrowly avoiding contact with enemies and projectiles (AKA, 'grazing' them), you will recover Health and Magic, and in a game like Luna Nights, where recovery items are hard to come by and Sakuya can barely take a hit, you're gonna have to learn to take full advantage of it. It encourages a do or die mentality and a playstyle all about living on the edge to survive, and it makes the moments of near-death all the more exhilarating when you manage to narrowly avoid a bullet and gain enough MP to deliver the killing blow in a grueling boss fight.

Overall, Luna Nights is the perfect bite-sized package: Its relatively short length, beautiful sprite work, phenomenal soundtrack, challenging difficulty and strong gameplay mechanics make it a worthwhile play for both veterans of the genre and newcomers looking to cut their teeth on a great entry point.

finally! super metroid for queer people!
on the real, luna nights is a fucking jam. while the lack of exploration beyond some quick secrets and a less intricate and generally more streamlined design may leave metroidvania buffs underwhelmed, luna nights more than makes up for these things with kickass boss fights, inventive mechanics, an incredible soundtrack with stellar arrangements of old-school touhou classics, and a truly top-class presentation that puts many other "retro" sprite-based indie platformers to shame. my only real complaints are the lack of clarity on the minimap regarding when rooms have been fully explored, and a general excess of rooms which exist only for "throw as many enemies in a row at sakuya just to fill out this pre-boss area", especially given the breezy pace. i actually don't think this game is too short at all - the bosses more than make up for the minimal pacing. seems a little weird rumia's the only one of the EOSD crew that didn't make it in? but oh well. plenty of love for that game here as is. shit, and if you're a pc-98 era touhou fan like me... they've even got you covered here too in a REALLY cool way i didn't see coming. pick this up, sale or otherwise. probably the best fangame i've ever played and a DAMN fun metroidvania even without being attached to one of my absolute favorite video game series.

The DIO game I always wanted.

Even if you don't know shit about Touhou like me, you won't be lost with the game's minimal story, so go for it if it looks interesting to you.
The mechanics are perfectly thought out and the levels and even some of the amazing bosses have time fuckery such as some enemies, projectiles or hazards moving only when time is stopped, or becoming reversed. The only problem is that strangely, this becomes less prevalent in the last and extra stages, and it left me wanting a boss that used all the time fuckery against you.

This took awhile for me to beat, not because of its length, but rather I kept being discouraged by the level design in the later stages of the game.
All in all, a very solid metroidvania with mediocre linear progression (especially compared to Metroid Fusion, which I think nailed Linear progression), but still functionable enough. What holds up the game is the fantastic bosses and mechanics. What I really loved was how the game emphasizes using the Slow Mo, Time Stop, and all of your abilities in fluidity and it is great fun! I just wish some areas were a bit more thought out, but the game is worth a play, Touhou fan or not.

touhou luna nights é um metroidvania ok, com design de fases decente (ocasionalmente meio sacana) e com boss battles espetaculares. algo que é engraçado, considerando a quantidade de jogos que gosto que são bons APESAR de seus encontros com chefes. acredito que isso é (parcialmente) um resultado da maneira que os elementos de shoot-em-up estabelecidos nos jogos principais de touhou são traduzidos para o gameplay de luna nights: passar de raspão dos ataques te dá bônus de vida e mp, o que te incentiva a tomar atitudes ousadas de alto risco. queria muito que mais jogos (fora do gênero shmup) utilizassem uma mecânica de graze! o único além de luna nights que faz isso (até onde eu sei) é deltarune.

enfim. um jogo bem bom. os arranjamentos de músicas clássicas de touhou são excelentes e atmosféricos e eu gosto muito dos visuais. as animações da sakuya tem uma finesse em um nível alucard em symphony of the night, o que eu aprecio MUITO. parar o tempo e pular em cima das próprias facas para chegar em lugares altos é uma solução TÃO mais elegante e prazerosa que os wall jumps e high jumps dos castlevanias de GBA (ainda não joguei o aria of sorrow, desconsidere ele nessa crítica).

pra finalizar queria mencionar que eu não gosto muito como fangames de touhou tendem a seguir a estrutura de embodiment of scarlet devil, mesmo com luna nights até executando isso de forma decente. eu sei que é o mais popular, mas eu sempre fico com mais vontade de ver as interpretações de fãs de inimigas como a yuyuko e a kaguya, que não são tão batidas quanto o combo "meiling - patchouli - sakuya - remilia - flandre". seria um sonho maravilhoso se o team ladybug fizesse uma sequência utilizando o elenco de perfect cherry blossom ou imperishable night. talvez um dia.

What a pleasant surprise this one was! I have no experience with Touhou, but I decided to try this game out before it left Game Pass and I'm glad I did. While the main Touhou games are shoot 'em ups, fanmade ones explore every genre out there and Luna Nights just so happens to be a Metroidvania. This is the hardest genre to stand out in, but Luna Nights manages to do so thanks to creative mechanics and a successful incorporation of bullet hell ideas like grazing.

The story follows Sakuya Izayoi the maid as she finds herself trapped in the mysterious world of Luna Nights with her powers mostly stripped away. While there's a bit of intrigue that comes from discovering what exactly Luna Nights is, the story is never the strongest driving force the game has to offer. Much of the dialogue is between characters who have past history with each other and the game doesn't have an interest in bringing newcomers up to speed. This honestly didn't bother me too much though, since the personality of each character still came through in their interactions. This is a fun batch of characters with weird quirks, chemistry or the lack thereof, and hidden agendas that inevitably clash.

The highlight of the game lies in its combat and boss fights. Sakuya is armed to the teeth with knives and is able to throw them in various ways and at various angles. You can't just throw willy nilly though, because a MP system enforces a limit upon how many knives you can throw. MP is a precious resource that's also required for powerful skills and you can't attack at all without it, but you're encouraged to stay in the fray thanks to the grazing mechanic, which awards you with HP and MP healing if you can narrowly dodge enemy projectiles. You can also manually reclaim knives in the ground or walls to get a bit of MP back. All of this encourages a gameplay loop in which you fight boldly, keeping up the offense while never forgetting your defense in order to ensure that you always have enough gas in your tank and it works extremely well, resulting in some of the most dynamic bosses the genre has seen. Bosses in this game are no joke and will expect you to get their patterns down - they have loads of health and can take Sakuya out in just a few hits, so you need to maximize your MP efficiency while avoiding their attacks the entire time.

Sakuya also has time stopping and slowing powers that can be used in combat and for solving puzzles. Stopping time is an easy way to set up stylish kills or avoid foes, but it too runs on a resource that slowly recharges over time, so you can't rely solely on it. Slowing time obviously isn't as drastic, but it is effective for dodging attacks that linger and for solving certain types of puzzles. Plus, it doesn't pull from the same pool as your time stop, encouraging regular use of it. This game might have some of the best implementation of time-altering mechanics I've ever seen because it immediately feels natural and balanced in a way that's powerful without feeling cheap or finicky.

Strangely, exploration is the area where Luna Nights falters the most, being something that's typically essential for success in the genre. While the individual areas are inoffensive, containing several ideas like castles and clock towers pulled straight out of Castlevania, none of them feel standout or particularly interesting. They're more linear than they look and not all of them contain traversal puzzles, so you end up finding many areas that are just straight lines. Metroidvanias typically love to shower you in hidden treasures and paths, but Luna Nights is also conservative in this regard. While you can find and buy upgrades for your time gauge and knife capacity, these upgrades rarely feel substantial and the map doesn't mark their locations even if you spotted them before you were able to get them. The mobility upgrades you get feel powerful but are widely spread out and not used particularly often, with one of them being reserved for a single instance in a post-game area. The ill-advised, borderline useless placement of teleporters plus the game's heavier reliance on skill-based play made it so I never felt excited about backtracking, which is a shame in a genre like this.

Luna Nights is a very short experience, clocking in somewhere between 5-10 hours depending on how much exploring and post-game content you do. While this worked out well for someone like me who was trying to finish it on a deadline, I also found it disappointing since I was having a great time and didn't want it to end so soon. It really feels like a game that could have used another area or two to let some of the exploratory abilities shine more, and I certainly wouldn't have said no to more boss fights either. It's a shame that it was taken off of Game Pass because it really is a perfect fit for the service. It's breezy, mechanically thrilling, and it has a killer soundtrack - all of these things make it an easy recommendation to anyone into the genre.

This game is very much Touhou distilled into a platformer and with it contains all the stuff I unfortunately dislike when it comes to Touhou in general. I've tried my hardest, I've beaten the third boss but I cannot bring myself to go on any further.

Part of it may be a design issue, the whole Touhou magic girls design trope stuff doesn't appeal to me in any way shape or form. I can handle it sometimes but it just means I don't really care all that much with the plot. I think I also just don't care for Touhou designs in particular given there was that period of time where almost every single Comiket doujin dev would just steal the designs wholesale because they had no imagination of their own to sell. Its boring skipping through 2/3rds of titles at a show because 'OH LOOK. ITS MARISA AGAIN'. Yawn.

Outside of that? Sure. I will give the game the boss fights. As per usual with Touhou type these are where the game shines thanks to frantic attack patterns and bullet showcases that never feel 'too' unfair while still being difficult and a joy to beat.

However also like Touhou games, the level design is shit. For a metroidvania I expect some sort of exploration but there's so little here. The game for the most part feels so linear and flat that its not interesting to go from point A to point B. That's what completely kills the game for me.

So yeah. Bosses good. Levels shit. Sounds like Touhou.

Finally playing a Touhou game feels like I've crossed some kind of cursed boundary I can't recover from. I guess time will tell if I've ended up in some deep dark abyss of my own making.

What time doesn't need to tell you is that I think this game is really good! Short but sweet metroidvania, cool time stuff, baller bosses, it's one of those games that's so focused on the gameplay that I kinda end up just listing the features in it because they're all rad. Well worth whatever nonsense I was spouting above.

A short metroidvania based on the Touhou Project (no prior knowledge required) with tight controls, phenomenal remixes of iconic series songs, and Team Ladybug's signature pixel-art style that might be the best in the business. Luna Nights' central mechanic, Sakuya's time stop ability, gets thoroughly explored while you're exploring the Scarlet Devil Mansion's many puzzle-platforming and combat rooms, where you'll challenge some really great boss fights, and maybe recycle some aluminum cans along the way.

Mechanically excellent but would've vastly benefitted from being a traditional platformer rather than a Metroidvania. Areas never connect to each other in any interesting or meaningful ways and half the upgrades are literal keys to locked doors (this happens five times and that's not even counting the upgrades that aren't keys but may as well be like the screw knives and the ice magatama), greatly diluting the exploration--the hidden upgrades help, but they only do so much.

The time stopping is fantastic and the game's existence is worth it for that alone, it's an idea that never gets old and the way it interacts with all the other systems is genius. It's put to many creative uses, but this is further reasoning for why I don't think the Metroidvania structure benefits it much. If the level design had been more focused I think even more mileage could've been squeezed out of this system since it could've justified more complex challenges in every room as you wouldn't be needing to backtrack through them multiple times. Both Guacamelee titles come to mind as games that are kind of open but regularly funnel you through linear gauntlets of platforming challenges that push your moveset to its absolute limit in an incredibly satisfying way that I think could've worked great for Luna Nights too.

In its current state it's difficult for me to not feel that Luna Nights has some major missed potential, but that shouldn't take away from the fact that the rest of it is still solid and contains a lot of clever systems that connect to each other in engaging ways. It's worth a playthrough, but it makes me sad thinking about what it could've been and how close Team Ladybug was to creating a masterpiece.

also the extra stage kind of sucks

Luna Nights is a game that's better than it has any right to be; brilliantly fusing the Touhou bullet-hell style gameplay into a metroidvania setting that incorporates time manipulation in a way that makes you feel utterly empowered, yet incredibly fragile in a balance rarely achieved.

I could go on for ages about how well it comes together as an excellent game with a great difficulty curve, so instead I'll bring up the main detractors that stop it from being a 5-star game.

First, the story. It's complete nonsense translated acceptably but not excellently into English, that seems to revolve entirely around prior knowledge of who all these random anime girls are, as the game makes no attempt to inform you the context to just about anything. Fortunately, the story doesn't take up much of the runtime and can be fast-forwarded at any point. It's a detractor, but not a huge one.

The level design itself might also be an issue to many - while metroidvanias pride themselves on huge maps, secrets, and backtracking, Luna Nights is borderline linear, only occasionally giving a reason to backtrack and not having a large map. Indeed, this game's runtime is barely 3 or 4 hours, less if you know what you're doing. There's additional free post-game content, but after giving it a go...I think I've had my fill.

It's rough around the edges, but for a small indie project baked in lore surrounding a niche sh'm'up franchise, it's surprisingly awesome.

Stumbled upon this game in Gamepass and absolutely loved it. There are a lot of really great ideas in this and it's just a ton of fun. Your main attack is throwing knives and doing so costs mana, but you can collect the knives to recover some mana, there is a "Graze" mechanic the encourages you to get close to danger where if you narrowly dodge an enemy or attack you get mana or HP boosts, and there is an extremely well-done time manipulation mechanic including time stop which allows you to use your knives as platforms and time slow which is beautifully utilized in one of my favorite boss fights in recent memory, possibly of any game I've played.
It's very short and you'll be able to finish it within a few hours probably, which is too bad, but you will enjoy every moment you spend on it.

Played on Gamepass.

decent game, but a lot of the game's disparate parts don't really fit together. the metroidvania elements not relating to the bosses most of the time (not including the final boss of the base game) is a huge hinderance. getting keys and not abilities is largely uninteresting. most of the game is quite easy until the last area hits a huge difficulty curve, and most enemies become bullet sponges. the game has great music and wonderful visuals yet the story and characters are incoherent without a basic understanding of what touhou is. not a bad thing on the last bit being that the name of the game is touhou but it meant i wasn't attached to anything going on. additionally, the characters didn't have enough dialogue to feel like anything other than the tropes they likely fall into in the original touhou games

Super lineal, which is the opposite I look for in a metroidvania. Has about 6 areas that you have to beat sequentially, needing to clear the boss before moving on. Map design offers the bare minimum, some connections here and there but most stuff is self contained and again, barely makes use of the metroidvania format. There's a few notable unlocks, but you get them all pretty early.

Combat is centered around the time stop / grazing mechanics it introduces, which are a nice gimmick in the beginning, but later become tedious because of how much the gameplay is dependent on them, and how little variety there is outside of it. Variations of how time stop affects enemies later in the game does not suffice to make it more interesting, but rather has the opposite effect of making it more convoluted.

Boss fights are the most serviceable part of the game, but it's not worth playing through just for them. Perhaps better to rid yourself of the metroidvania convictions despite the game's claims of "heavy emphasis on exploration" and think of it as a platformer, but it even accepting its linearity, it's still underwhelming to go through the maps and rooms.

Touhou Luna Nights is a mostly fun, but also at times very frustrating game. The game revolves around two main mechanics: time stopping/slowing to avoid attacks and enemies, and the graze mechanic from the mainline Touhou games in which you get as close as possible to enemies/projectiles without getting hit by them. Grazing gives you back magic and health, which is vital for the boss fights especially since you need magic just for your basic attacks.

Conceptually, the game is fantastic. The controls are great, the time mechanics and graze mechanic are implemented extremely well, and I assume the story is fun for fans of Touhou due to all the characters that appear (along with their themes of course) that I didn't understand because the only thing I know about Touhou is bullethell and cute girls in frilly dresses.

I say conceptually though, because while the skeleton of the game is good, the meat of it is a bit on the lackluster side. Level design is pretty basic and uninteresting, with the later levels just shoving annoying enemies and hazards everywhere. It's not terrible, but Super Metroid this is not.

The game shines with its boss fights, which are animated beautifully and have some really crazy looking attacks, but I can't help but feel like sometimes they were just too tanky. The final boss especially got tedious with how much health it had.

The game also features a level up system and a shop, but both of these are so inessential that it's easy to forget they're even there. I'm sure leveling up more and getting some more shop upgrades can make some bosses a bit easier, but hardly enough that it's worth the grind.

Overall it's a fun game, but probably not one I'll be returning to anytime soon. Best way to sum this up is really great mechanics that are unfortunately trapped in a decent-mediocre game.

I'd been meaning to beat this one for a while, and I finally did!'

What we have here is a very short, solid Metroidvania. I'm not that familiar with the Touhou world and lore, but the characters are cool and it doesn't really impact the enjoyment of playing the game. There's a mechanic where you can risk getting close to enemies in order to earn back health and mana. The cooler mechanic is the power to stop time, which gets a LOT of mileage throughout the short run-time. I believe mechanics work well when they have enough depth, but are only dragged on for as long as they need to be. Metroid's implanted that ideal into me of what a short, but rich and re-playable experience is, and I got that here.

Yes, would recommend.

ZA WAURDO! TOKI WO TOMARE! is literally this game's central mechanic and it's pretty fun. I know next to nothing about Touhou and it's characters apart from it being a bullet hell that spawned quite possibly the most fan-games out of any franchise, but it's not like you needed any prior knowledge of this series going into this.

Luna Nights injects some interesting mechanics into the Metroidvania formula. You have both the ability to stop time and slow it down. Basic gimmicks on paper but the game makes full use of these abilities. Platforms, obstacles and even enemies that will behave differently based on the flow of time and it allowed for some pretty neat level design. Then there's the Graze mechanic, which allows you to gain back MP and HP by brushing past enemies and projectiles. A lot of it is pretty fast so using the time slowdown to Graze became the central piece of a lot of boss fights. And of course, certain attacks can only be avoided by stopping time. All of this combined with well-designed controls and movement makes it a good game to play.

The presentation is some very good spritework but the real winner here is the absolute banger soundtrack, worthy of what i've heard about the series. Where the game falls short however is the map. The map actually tells you nothing. Like it'll tell you about facilities sure but part of the Metroidvania experience is exploring but there are no indicators for if a room has an item or not in this game. Even if you know it does because you saw it but can't get to it because you lack an upgrade, you still can't see it on the map. You just have to remember. For a game released in 2019, this is unacceptable tbh and this is only mitigated by the fact that the exploration kinda sucks. A lot of the upgrades are optional which leads the game to have rather poor pacing when it comes to upgrades. I don't even know if i found them all tbh. There's only like three upgrades you actually need to progress. The game is very short, it's one of the shortest in the genre (from what i've played) but even then, the poor upgrade pacing was felt.

Touhou's weird sandbox nature makes me unsure if i'll check out other games in the series. Because i wouldn't be opposed to it but it's done like every genre ever so i have to check and see what might interest me. But as my first Touhou game, this was very good.