Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle (PlayStation 4) Review

The story has the same cheekiness fans have come to expect from Touhou games as a new accident has occurred. This time rumours spread about the shrine maiden Reimu joining forces with the vampire Remilia Scarlet, which has led to diminishing donations towards her shrine. She has to get to the bottom of this mystery (and maybe get a snack at the Scarlet mansion while she is at it).

Fans will be more than a little familiar with the whimsical setting, and the well-known characters as the rooster in Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle is all but filled with popular faces, each one with a separate story mode to go with them. Each story is focused around the same event, but with the main character replaced with that specific girl, and the story rewritten to fit that. It is a charming way to make the plot having multiple angles while still keeping it fresh and interesting.

While the story lives up to the standards of the franchise with several adorable moments and the silly humour the franchise is known for, the gameplay does falter a lot. As a 3D fighter/shooter, everything is ridiculously slow-paced. From start to finish, Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle feels like it is in drenched in syrup, which would be OK if there was good reason for it to be so due to focus being on complexity.

Sadly, the gameplay is extremely simple, as the goal is to just shoot danmaku waves while dodging the opposing ones sent by the enemy. It sounds interesting, but it is very limited as the game lacks any kind of combo system which could really help making it feel more sophisticated and modern, and button-mashing will be more than enough to get through the story for most characters, save a couple of severely underpowered ones.

This is too slow, too simple, and simply extremely poorly balanced between characters. Some of them appear as goddesses compared to others, and the gameplay feels like something that could be found in some of the earlier 3D fighters when it comes to speed and complexity. The story and world is nice and feels very Touhou, and some hours of fun can be found discovering each character and reading their adorable stories, but overall it is too sloppy to have any lasting appeal as a fighting title.

While extremely cute, apart from Touhou fans, most are going to be hard pressed to find any reasons at all to buy this, and even fans might actually find it difficult to justify the price tag on this game because of the sloppy gameplay. It is regrettable to say, but Touhou Kobuto V: Burst Battle would most likely have been better off as a visual novel without the fighting sequences, despite the story being the bare minimum, but at least what is there is well-done and what fans expect.