Leave your dancing shoes in the closet folks because Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet is a game you might want to sit out on.
Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet (PS4)
Reviewed on: PS4
Review Copy Provided by: NIS America
Developer: CUBETYPE
Publisher: NIS America
Release Date: September 6th, 2016
MSRP: $29.99
Originally released in japan markets only back in 2012 on PC, Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet brings a strange combination of both bullet hell style shooters and arena fighting games. On paper this combo deal sounded like it should work for me, I love both genres, I can picture a world were a good mix up like this could work, but sadly in Bullet Ballet the game just feels shallow. Let’s look at each category, shall we?
Story Mode –
Bullet Ballet comes with a standard anime fighter visual novel approach at the story mode. Fights are broken up between shots of the characters with dialogue to read through. I don’t mind this style at all I loved BlazBlues story mode and the different directions it went and the writing was spot on. In Bullet Ballet, however, the short bits of text were not enough to keep me interested in the multiple story modes I tried out. Each of the 10 characters (9 unlocked from the start and 1 $2.99 DLC character) has her own unique story, and while it’s nice they are all unique, each story mode is quite short especially with no difficulty option to be found anywhere.
The Story Mode should keep the average player busy for a few hours but without difficulty options, branching paths or even art assets you unlock, there is little to no reason to go back to story mode after completing each girls story.
Gameplay –
The gameplay on paper sounds actually very interesting and potentially fun. A top down arena fighter with a bullet hell twist, sure sign me up! The problem is the combat is very simplistic without a lot of room for depth. You have in your arsenal a main, sub, charge, and spell attack and each of the girls has their own unique attacks. Changing spray patterns and certain utilities (one girl summons little girls who shoot lasers at you, while another girl has orbs that block projectiles) is all well and good but it left some of the characters feeling extremely underpowered.
So a typical battle played out like this, The match starts and you fire bursts of projectiles at each other, mix it up with some charge attacks and sub attacks, maybe get close enough to do a 3 hit melee combo and rinse repeat until someone builds up enough power to do a Spell attack. These attacks feel more like a typical bullet hell game where it takes you to a different arena where the one who casts the spell attack is the “boss” and unloads a barrage of projectiles all over the screen while the other player does their best to defend against it. Killing the “boss” during this phase will just return you to the normal game mode depending on how much health they entered Spell attack with.
Battles are quick and do not feel rewarding at all when completed. They were just busy work essentially to draw out the length of the story mode. Now I talked about the difficulty in story mode and how it can not be adjusted and the game felt like I didn’t have to really try at all. I never lost a single round let alone fight and at no point was I ever in any real danger. Once you drift to the other game modes this game offers that all changes.
Arcade mode is a test to see how many battles you can win before running out of health. The enemies will get stronger the further you get. Around round 3 I noticed that the game’s difficulty ramped up so quickly that I was unable to keep up and I quickly died in stage 5. After several attempts at this, I figured either I was just bad at the game or the scaling was out of control. Either way, I was not having fun with it. So I then switched to Boss Rush, Same idea but instead of full fights it is a gauntlet of spell attack modes until you can’t take it anymore. Same problem, first 2 waves were eyes closed hold buttons easy and then instantly palm sweaty hard. There is a VS com option where you can set the enemy Ai level and train in that sense, but the gameplay just wasn’t there for me to want to explore that.
The game does offer online play with Ranked and Unranked lobbies. The only issue was I was never able to test this out because I just couldn’t find people to connect with. After half an hour of searching for opponent screen, I called it a night with online play.
Graphics and Sound –
The character models in the visual novel scenes look great the art is really nice and clean and even the hand-drawn scenes are nice to look at. Everything else though looks cheap. From the menus to buttons, the hud, attack animations, character models in the battle arena, it all looks like a flash game one would play in their browser.
Now this usually isn’t a big problem to me, I am not what one would call a “Graphics whore”, but when very little of the rest of your game is redeeming, it’s hard to keep my attention with a lack of polish like this.
The sound was good, The soundtrack is actually well done and is something I would listen to while driving. The main issue I have with the sound is there is no voice acting, not even a subtle “Oh” when characters express anything in the game. The in-game effects sound ok but in 2016 when I’m playing a visual novel style storytelling I would love some spoken words, even non-English with subtitles has more emotion then nothing at all.
Overall –
If you love the Touhou franchise and have been dying for this game to come to the west then I would buy it. With underwhelming gameplay, disappointing visuals, and a forgetful story, anyone else I would highly recommend waiting on this purchase or at least renting it. Even at the $29.99 price tag, this game does little to warrant a return visit.
Score – 4/10
(Four out of ten is below average, this is not the worst game in the world but it is hard to recommend anyone go out and buy it.)
Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet is out now on the Playstation 4 for $29.99
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