I can confidently call this the best fangame that I've ever played, and loved every moment of it.

I would describe it as a restaurant simulator with the art style of an anime-fied Stardew Valley with a cast of Touhou characters, set in the world of Touhou. It can get a little bit repetitive, but that's common with this style of game, and personally I'm fine with it, as in this case, it helps add to an already cosy atmosphere.

I'm a big fan of the restaurant gameplay, as it keeps you thinking throughout, without stressing you out too much as there isn't a constant ticking timer. The amazing relaxing OST in the background helps out with this too.

Running around collecting resources is also good too, as instead of an in-game time constantly ticking by, each action you choose to do brings the time forward by 30 minutes, giving you a set amount of actions. As someone with anxiety, I greatly prefer this, as it means I can think about what I want to do without being stressed out.

The dialogue is very well written (no ridiculous fanon interpretations like some other Touhou fangames) and it kept me invested in increasing bond levels after the novelty of it being a Touhou character I loved wore off.

I can also recommend the DLC packs, as for a cheap price they add a large amount of extra content to the game. That's super nice to see in a world where most companies are trying to rip off consumers with terrible overpriced DLC.

I'd recommend this to any Touhou fan, as well as any cosy game fan. For Touhou fans, you get a nice little experience surrounded by some beloved characters. I have to disclaim that I came into this game having been a Touhou fan for years with extensive knowledge of the lore, but I genuinely do believe you can play and get loads out of this game with no prior Touhou knowledge. So for someone new to the series, it's a great game with some sweet characters, and who knows? It might be your entry to the Touhou rabbit hole.

**This review will cover DLC 1 and 2 as well as base game since 2.5 isn’t translated yet(but I’ll edit this when it is since that seems like a pretty major update).

Stumbled on this game when I first got my Steam Deck, not sure why it came across my feed, but it was deck verified, had really pretty pixel art, and I had to double take at that price. At glance Mystia Izakaya is a cute extremely affordable Touhou fan game. I wouldn’t say I took a gamble, after skimming thru the steam reviews of all extremely positive reviews I could tell there was something special about that game, and naturally I had to see what that was.

The gameplay is one of the centerpieces to the puzzle that clicks together effortlessly building towards this comfort utopia of a game Mystia’s Izakaya has to offer. Mystia Izakaya released last year at the time of writing this(October 2021) and is still being actively supported between brand new DLC, updates that improve base game, and any and all bug fixes the community finds. During the day you have to decide between actions that will drain time from 30min+ to collect ingredients, interact & build friendships with Touhou characters, traveling between areas, cook prep before the night opening, and a couple other options. Between the time management you also have to be weary with the games currency you earn from your Izakaya earnings; if you don’t pay up you’ll probably get your kneecaps busted! During the night you’ll be setting up shop with the recipes you’ve learned from your NPC friends(rare customers)and serving em up to the locals and the friends of each areas. Depending on the level of your Izakaya you have to build up by giving Chen(loan shark who threatens to bust your kneecaps if you don’t pay up as mentioned above) dishes she requests and a building fee you have to choose between cookware you think will best benefit you. Cooking is pretty simple, each time you make something you have a chance for one of three buffs, once you get all three you enter hyper mode. There is a satisfaction meter for regular customers, special guests, and rare customers. Filling the satisfaction meter for regular customers will net you a higher tip, where the special guests and rare customers will getcha a spell card. Spells cards, taken from the mainline Touhou games give you a bonus that can do a number of things depending on the character you get it from. Some will give you rare ingredients, drinks, a buff, or even a rush of customers. When you cook before entering hyper mode you play a rhythm mini game where you have to time the notes synced with the music. When I started the game the mini game was actually a little different from what it is now, it updated when DLC 2.5 released and I’m not sure if it’s better but it’s definitely not bad. Honestly the only “issue” I really have with this game is how easy the mini game is. I do wish the rhythm mechanics were a lil more challenging but DLC 2.5 might fix that so I’m kinda holding back on critiquing that since that’s a whole rhythm game in itself.

The soundtrack oh my the glorious soundtrack! It’s really hard to pick my favorite track considering this game is filled with so many, and all of them are bangers. Each area theme pops and really fits the atmosphere on wherever the setting is, and the Izakaya theme’s that play are all vibrant tone setters that’ll get your head bobbing while you match with the mini game and chef it up. The boss themes are all fierce, bubbly, and intense to the core! If the gameplay is the foundation that forms its walls upon the tower of glory this game sets itself up to be, the soundtrack is the powerful base at the bottom that holds it all together.

The story is pretty lighthearted but still very interesting and wholesome. At first you’re preventing Chen from busting your kneecaps after our birdbrain protagonist Mystia keeps signing loan contracts ignorantly over and over. And then she realizes she has a dream; to preform at a concert with her best pal Kyouko. The main meat of this story is the characters you meet within the Touhou world and the impressions they make on Mystia throughout her journey in Gensokyo. I don’t have much knowledge on Touhou in general but I really enjoyed what each character had to offer and found them all really well written. There really wasn’t a single one I felt like I didn’t care about. Everyone has something to offer and really build up the lore this world has to offer. Each rare guest has an entry in your journal you can read that gets more descriptive as you build up their friendship that summarizes what Mystia has felt about the impression they gave her.

DLC 1 and 2 are also priced pretty cheap for what you get. Each pack provides 2 new areas, a bunch of new tracks, a new boss fight, some new recipes, rare customers, and new shops. DLC 1 is pretty much the same formula as the base game but it adds some pretty cool characters that I enjoyed. The boss at the end was actually a crazy wakeup call and proved pretty challenging. Both boss fights for the dlc are nothing like base game which I really appreciated because they’re a really cool part about the game. DLC2 is close to the same formula but it adds some new things. For one you unlock hot springs which going in spends time but also grants you and whatever partner(s) you select a movement buff. You’re also trying to earn letters of recommendation to participate in a cooking competition that is also a very unique boss fight compared to the others. Basically the price it’s asking for(and often goes on sale) you’re getting at least 10-20 hours of extra content so I’d say it’s more than worth it.


I feel like even with all the praise I’ve done I cannot stress enough how much of a bang for your buck this game is, I mean really! $6 and you get 60-70+ hours of content and for 5 more dollars you can get all of the dlc(including the ones untranslated at the moment) which will add another 20-40 hours AT LEAST(not sure how much 2.5 and 3 are but it’s probably more than 40 hours honestly). If you want something wholesome, lighthearted, fun, and unique be sure to give this game a shot. If any of this sounded like something you’d enjoy, I can’t see how you’d be disappointed.

It's cute, it's relaxing, it'll make Mystia one of your favourite Touhou characters. The base game is such a steal that I'd feel bad if I didn't buy the DLC packs as soon as they were translated.

The gameplay difficulty ranges depending on your settings at the start of each night: later areas and larger restaurants will be more hectic, but you get more employees (and better at optimizing the game) to offset this. Harder still are the bosses you can challenge at certain points in the story, but you're also free to put them off as long as you like.

The dialogue is a treat even if the translation is still a little off, the soundtrack is as amazing as you'd expect from Touhou fans, and the variety of in-game food will have you craving Chinese and Japanese barbecue after each play session. I still don't even know what a lamprey is and I want one on a stick.

cause of a fresh save i now have 106.5 hours in the game.
This game is so insanely comfy its unreal. I refused to play this any way except for tucked in and metaphorically sucking my thumb. Absolutely amazing, and super soulful. Because i knew what to shoot for as this was a fresh save, getting the 5 base areas down took a lot less time, and if i didnt do the 2 dlc1 locations id have been done with them by the time i needed to do the final boss anyways. I kinda ignored dlc2, and did those consecutively, but didnt really enjoy them because at that point of the game its just grinding friendships and i dont really like the SA cast beyond yamame.
The dlc1 boss has HANDS i was not prepared to tryhard a cooking game to beat her, and the dlc2 boss you just had to prepare during the first 2 phases, but i didnt know what was coming my first time. Overall, still extremely solid and all the changes made since i played last were definitely for the best.
Not gonna replay when dlc3 comes out and is translated, probably just going to do that on my current file. but i am really hoping its myouren temple and the palanquin ship (“waaah theyre the same building technically” shut up i want murasa)

Empecé este juego sin muchas expectativas, tan solo un juego "corto" y relajante mientras pensaba qué juego largo podría jugar en directo.

Como fallé en esa estimación y como me alegro en que lo hiciera. Este juego es muy simple en su loop de gameplay: recolectar ingredientes, hablar con personajes de Touhou y, por las noches, servir comida en el izakaya. Pero es ese simple gameplay loop que lo hace tan adictivo.

El juego es muy permisivo con el jugador, es facilísimo forrarse y llegar de sobras a todas las deudas (he acabado el juego con 60K yenes habiendo comprado todas las mejoras posibles y vigilando mis gastos, por ejemplo). El ambiente que forma es muy acogedor y, a pesar de un inglés un poco roto (que puedo perdonar porque, de nuevo, esto es un juego hecho por fans y traducido por fans del mismo juego), la escritura es fácilmente uno de sus aspectos más fuertes, por lo que nunca se siente como una tarea ardua y aburrida recolectar ingredientes.

Y, de nuevo, todo esto es un FANGAME.

Si bien voy a seguir jugando a sus DLCs, de momento quiero dejar esto por escrito por aquí, día 25 de Febrero, tras haber acabado la historia principal. Estaré esperando con ganas de ver qué nuevas historias me encuentro en el mundo de Gensokyo mientras servimos comidas y cambiamos vidas.

Fácilmente mi GOTY de este año de juegos que no han salido este año.

Very cozy game. All the stuff is simple but there's actually decent amount of skill expression if you plan on making the most money possible. Trying to time your special customers to match with others to combo for max money is very fun, and you can spend another hour optimizing the menu for each place, but then it stops being so cozy and nights can even take over an hour if you do that. Don't know any of these characters though and they're all one note. Other than that though it's still a very chill game and you can go at the pace you set. The music is also a banger. I usually dislike touhou music because of the sound font but the remixes here are pretty good.

Mystias Izakaya is a game i am unlikely to finish due to its large amount of content, but i feel satisfied with what i have played enough to write something up on it.

This game takes place in the touhou universe, where you play as Mystia running a travelling restaurant that stretches to various environments from several different mainline games. The core gameplay loop is managing your time to strategically purchase various ingredients and learn recipes in order to appeal to the guests at whatever area you are setting up in. In the second phase of the night, you focus mainly on cooking and waitressing until the end of the day where you get paid.

This loop certainly has a very addictive feeling to it, during my first few hours i really didnt want to put it down. It has the same appeal as certain flash cafe management games i played in my youth and i feel like it carried that feeling well throughout my playtime. There was something about the simplicity of what you had to do and the seemingly endless possibilities for improvement that motivated me to continue playing, for a while.

However i feel like it gets stale after a time. You hit a limit long, long before the story ends. Nights become challenging and very long, tiring. It starts feeling like something of an endless chore to get through.

The art is nice and leaves little room to be creepy but the story and writing in general is a huge miss. Im quite certain it is not a fault of the localization team, but there are several references to online popular culture that just completely take you out of it and makes you feel like youre playing a game made by weirdos, which you probably are at this point. In one line of inquiry Chen calls someone a NEET. An otaku NEET? something to do with NEETs but definitely very embarassing. There was an entire questline dedicated to giving a youkai a picture of Meiling's... "thicc" thighs. I also see recently there is dlc where Mystia is dressed up as Jotaro from jojo. So you can see why this game has become a problem for me.

Obviously the characters suffer from the same fate they do in other fan projects which is that theyre disgustingly one dimensional, completely overtaken by a fanon element and they will run that element into the ground. I dont like much seeing touhou done so dirty when this game and normal touhou are essentially two different beasts. I feel like it does little for the characters though it has so much emphasis on it, and it feels disgraceful somewhat. Marisa likes mushrooms! Meiling is lazy shes sooo lazy she sleeps all day Patchouli likes books and hates everyone else Remilia is a vampire Rumia darkness Sayori is sleepy blah blah blah.

The brevity of your encounters with characters is what makes the people in touhou shine the most, as well as their phsyical appearance and more importantly: their bullet patterns. When one of those things has already been established and you remove the other, youre missing a lot of nuance that comes with the rest of the elements. So its flat and completely cookie cutter characters. I feel like this game has a vast misunderstanding of the world of mainline touhou, and even if its irrelevant right now i also dont like the injection of men into the game. Touhou is special for that reason and its strange to revoke that reason with various nameless customers and villagers and whatnot. Who cares?

The dialogue is definitely the games largest flaw as well as how it protrays Gensokyo, but without that the gameplay feels somewhat meaningless and it all falls in on itself. For a good 30 hours its still quite fun to play and i will have good memories of it as it was gifted to me by a friend for my birthday. Im very happy i even got to play this at all and my friends definitely made my last birthday the best one ive ever had, so i feel somewhat bad about not liking the way it went, but its on the devs for talking about Hong Meiling's thighs so much. Pick it up if you like management games but do not expect a touhou fangame that lives up to actual touhou, for once.

I really goddamn hate rating this as I am. Perhaps it's my own fault I didn't enjoy my time with this game. From what I'd seen, I expected something relaxing, but I was greeted with a convoluted, over-indulgent, and bloated management game.

Why are there such heavy punishments for getting an order wrong? Why can you only choose a few recipes per day? Why must I carefully figure out which recipes to take with me, or else it be impossible to give every guest the order they want? Why is the UI such a mess? Why is everything paced so weirdly? I really tried to play through the game, but I just kept running into more problems.

This game looks incredibly cozy and fun, but the gameplay is naught but. Maybe I'll give it another go some time, perhaps I'll see something in it I don't see right now.

One of the most high quality Touhou fan games. It's cute and filled to the brim with love for the original series, the gameplay is engaging and fun, and the OST soothes the soul. This game is the pure definition of comfy and snug. Must-play for all Touhou fans.

... it reminds me, canonically Mystia's singing annoys humans but in every fan depiction including this game she has the ability to sing normally. I think it's the one thing that ZUN should make canon. It makes Mystia one of the cutest, fluffiest characters.

Going into this game, I knew very little about Touhou other than it being a bullet hell franchise about cute girls with silly hats. The only reason I even picked it up was I happened to see a friend playing it and I thought the pixel art was positively gorgeous, and the music was pretty comfy as well. What I did not expect was that I would be writing this review after ~35 hours of playtime, for what was (on sale) a $5 game.

Mystia's Izakaya is nothing short of a wonderful product of passion. The gameplay is simple - you spend each day running around, talking to characters and collecting ingredients, occasionally completing little delivery tasks. At night, you open your Izakaya to serve food to customers. If you have played games like Diner Dash or Overcooked, you have a pretty solid idea of what to expect here. Regular unnamed NPCs will show you their food and beverage orders, whereas named characters will tell you the kind of dish they want (e.g. "I want something sweet!") and you will have to infer what dish they want (or customize an existing one with appropriate ingredients) to get the best reception. Your journal keeps track of dishes and their tags, as well as each characters likes and dislikes. Make one of the named NPCs happy, and they'll grant you a spell card with a positive effect specific to them (maybe you'll get an assortment of ingredients, or maybe some gathering points get refreshed the next day). The reverse is also true - screw up their order and they'll mess with your operation as a penalty. Additionally, when preparing dishes you have the opportunity to do a brief rhythm game in time with the music to earn other temporary buffs like being able to throw dishes from any distance. It ends up getting pretty addicting as you become more and more familiar with customer preferences and set up your Izakaya in a way that makes sense to you.

The story itself is fairly straight forward - you make your way around Gensokyo, opening up new food carts and having X number of days to make up the yen for the loan repayment or else Chen will break your kneecaps. It culminates in a pretty challenging final mission and a very rewarding and cute finale. Ultimately it gets a smidge repetitive towards the end, especially if you are like me and wanted to grind out the last couple of character social links to be maxed out - but it definitely was worth it.

At the time of writing this, DLC 1 and 2 are translated so I am making my way through those. Each one adds two new areas to set up shop in with 6 characters to befriend and some new dishes and ingredients.

Overall, this is a tremendous game for the value. There are a couple of minor complaints like some weird UI hiccups and a bit of tedium towards the end, but if there was any game that was going to get me more interested in Touhou, this one has made a pretty compelling case. Except for Tewi - she is a blight.

Pure soul... This is probably the comfiest game I've ever played. The pixel art is gorgeous for the character portraits, conveying the right amounts of personality for each of the 2hu characters you meet. This game also has an unexpectedly amazing soundtrack, with tons of incredible remixes of classic 2hu themes such as Lunatic Princess, Maiden's Capriccio, EoSD's Stage 3 theme, and more.

The gameplay loop of gathering ingredients, talking to the 2hu's, and hosting your izakaya at night has not gotten old after 60+ hours. Simple at a first glance, going for max profit each night really tests your knowledge of the customers you get. The system of planning a unique meal for the 2hu's from a vague list of preferences they give you makes it lots of fun to decipher what dish would be most optimal for them based on their personalities alone. Giving a 2hu max satisfaction for their meal and watching their spell card animations play, accompanied by a usually helpful buff, never got old.

Playing this game can be fun on a casual level, but going the extra effort to optimize profit via checking customer's specific tags, spell cards, and planning out multiple spell card effects combo-ing into each other added so much to the experience for me. Before optimizing, I only made around 5-10k per night at my Level 3 izakaya, but now I make 30-40k on average after slowly learning how the game's mechanics worked. The pace of managing your Izakaya and serving customers can speed up drastically depending on the strategies you create. You can either carry the brunt of the management on your own via pre-cooking foods to preemptively feed incoming customers, or you can hire assistants to serve drinks and foods to lessen the workload for you. Your options are surprisingly expansive for the seemingly simple gameplay you are presented with within the first few hours.

The game's difficulty is centered moreso on creating strategies on how to get the most amount of money per day, as each workday comes with it's share of expenses on ingredients, paying worker salaries, and other features I won't spoil. The actual debt payments are only really an issue near the beginning when your options are much more limited compared to later on. The main story does have some tricky bosses later on, not even counting the new DLC bosses the two expansions added, so the game is definitely not a walk in the park.

The translation is a bit wonky, but the amount of content you get for only 6 bucks (???) + the DLC is insane. The main story took me 60+ hours to complete, and I haven't even touched the DLC content at all. An all time favorite now, and was honestly worth playing through the Touhou games just so I could immerse myself in this game even more.