Sandbox / Touhou Lost Branch Of Legend

Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend is a Deckbuilding Game heavily inspired by Slay the Spire and Magic: The Gathering.

Kaguya had her Branch of Hourai stolen, and the player characters are looking to get it back for her.

No relation to Touhou LostWord other than being Touhou.

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This game provides examples of:

• Anti-Frustration Features: Since there is colored mana, the game thankfully never rewards cards you cannot play. If a card costs a white and a blue and you don't have blue mana in your pool, it will never show up. This also means grabbing a Shining Exhibit that adds a new color opens up the ability to select new cards too!
• Anti-Wastage Features: Averted: Trying to draw cards into your hand when it's already at the limit, just doesn't do anything, instead of offering to discard a card to replace the newly drawn one or some other mechanic.
• Card Cycling: There's several ways to cycle cards, usually made to help improve your hand, and evade the end-of-turn negative effects of Statuses and Misfortunes, such as Refracted Sunlight dealing 5 damage; or trigger cards like Ship's Phantom(+), an unplayable card that rewards the player with two blue mana (and one Philospher's) for getting rid of it.
  • An Exhibit that lets you discard any number of cards from your opening hand and redraw
  • The Travel Preparation card lets you draw cards and discard the same amount drawn.
• Deck Clogger: The game has three types of cards that tend to clog up your deck:
  • Status cards are added to the player's deck during enemy encounters to shut down a draw. On the bright side, there are usually ways to remove them during a fight (some automatically remove themselves if they're in your hand at the end of your turn, some can be played at a cost to get rid of them), and they go away on their own at the end of combat.
  • Misfortune cards are undesirable cards that are put in the player's deck permanently if you make certain choices during events. They are all unplayable, and often have additional detrimental effects on top of that. A few of them are even unremovable, so you're stuck with them for the rest of the run (though they can at least be exiled until end of combat). One Request has you start with an unremovable card, and the "draft your starting deck instead of taking the underwhelming standard one" mode adds one of them to balance it out.
  • While the starting cards are essential in the early game, they are underwhelming compared to cards you pick up during the game. If you don't have any removable Misfortunes, you'll probably remove one of these when you visit Takane's shop.
• Extra Turn:
  • The game has many cards that end the player's current turn and start another one. They are always subject to a Uniqueness Rule to make them harder to loop indefinitely, and they tend to come with other bonuses (e.g. dealing damage before the extra turn) and/or drawbacks (several make spells more expensive on the extra turn, one prevents you from drawing cards outside the initial draw step, and so on). Time Master Sakuya in particular has a good number of these cards, and she even a card with an effect that requires extra turns to trigger.
  • Blue Sakuya's Spell Card ends the turn and starts an extra turn. It can be used in an emergency to get out of a bad draw, or just to get an extra turn to finish off enemies faster.
• Hand Limit: The starting limit of cards in hand is 10. Any cards that would be drawn after that just aren't.
• Interface Spoiler: Searching for cards in the Collection can hint at the names of unknown cards, such as "Walk" returning Time Walk and Walkman.
• Literal Wildcard: Philosopher's Mana can be used as any colour of mana, or even colourless. No character starts with this type of mana, but some Shining Exhibits can add it to their mana base, some cards can provide it, and Patchouli's event (a nod to her Philosopher's Stone Spell Card, which also combined five elements) can convert one normal mana to Philosopher's Mana.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • Battles against Doremi have the Nightmare status cards, where playing them Exiles them:
    When there are a total of 4 Nightmares in the hand, draw pile, and/or discard pile, the Player loses the game.
  • Events can kill the run, such as the "Insurance Fraud?" achievement:
    Die to Rumia's car in the Night Speeding incident.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The Bunbunmaru Newspaper is a Deck Clogger that charges you 2 mana to cast it and therefore remove it from your deck, and unleashing a crappy attack that deals one measly damage to a random enemy. However, all enemies that give you this status also like to give themselves Graze, each instance of which allows them to ignore one attack... and the Newspaper attack does count as an attack for Graze removal.
  • Artificial Jewelry is a terrible Skill sold to you during the Yorigami sisters' event (tellingly, you have to pay more if you want to pass on it). It amounts to a Deck Clogger, as all it does if you spend one mana on it is giving you a random mana, or a mana of your choice if this junk card somehow gets upgraded. Even if you want to filter your mana, it's an extremely unreliable waste of a card slot. It has one use case: if you have the Exhibit that discounts Skills, it's a free mana in exchange for a card. (Maths: I have to try taking it and see if, say, Sumireko wants to take it off the player's hands.)
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the exhibits is a book with "DEATH" on it, and its effect damages enemies with known names. It's a nod to the titular book of Death Note, which kills a person if you write their names on it. As a result, unnamed enemies can't be touched.
  • The game has a couple of nods to Magic: The Gathering:
    • The mana colors are called the same thing in both games: Black, White, Red, Blue and Green.
    • There is an Extra Turn spell named Time Walk after the iconic Magic spell. The upgraded version even replicates the original's effect of charging you 1 generic and 1 blue mana for an extra turn. However, it has one downside added to it: the strictest Uniqueness Rule in the game (not only exiling itself after use, but disabling any other copies of the cards until the end of combat) because it would otherwise be too powerful.
    • The iconic Black Lotus, which provides three mana of any one colour, shows up an as an exhibit. While the exhibit's effect is just to add 2 Black Mana on the first turn, its Flavor Text is:
      Wouldn't it be nice if it could add three mana of any one color?
  • The Sakuya card "Sure Gamble" is a nod to the similar card in Netrunner. Both cost 5 of a resource and give you 9 of it. Even the art is similar.
  • A Soulgem from Puella Magi Madoka Magica shows up as an exhibit, with Flavour Text about its danger:
    When it becomes cloudy, be careful.
  • The "Imposing Oil Painting" Shining Exhibit depicts Kaguya in the iconic pose Beatrice is painted in her potrait from Umineko: When They Cry.
  • Pretty much anything Seija hauls out with her spell card is a shoutout, she has the Scissor Blade, the Millenium Puzzle, the Infinity Gauntlet, the Holy Grail, and more.
• Time-Limit Boss: While many enemies will scale out of control sooner or later, special mentions include:
  • The Lovesick Girl might count as a normal fight, but she has a special type of time limit: if you take too long to kill her, she'll permanently add a Misfortune to your deck. Even bosses stop at temporary Status cards.
  • Yuyuko inflicts a Damage Over Time debuff that also prevents you from healing. The only way to survive it is to kill her before it kills you.
  • Sanae will regularly use a Spirit Drain Spell Card that saps your ability to block, effectively functioning as a timer.
  • The True Final Boss will flat-out kill you if the fight goes on for too long.
• Time Master: Sakuya's time manipulation abilities are represented mechanically with her Extra Turn mini-theme: she has the most of this type of card, a card that explicitly synergizes with extra turns, and one of her Spell Cards simply gives you an extra turn.
• True Final Boss: Seija Kijin is behind the theft, and she's not going to be easily caught or taken down. She has hits hard multiple times, causes you to take damage when you play a card, and can only take 300 damage a turn. She also has Spell Cards which is basically her hauling out a powerful item to buff herself, including either slapping 3 Vulnerable, Weak or Frail on you, calling in flunkies every turn, or just plain outright getting rid of non-shining exhibits. Safe to say, she's the Heart analogue in this game. Oh, and that flunky thing and more are available at higher difficulties.
• Uniqueness Rule:
  • Downplayed with Ability Cards: they can only be used once in the fight, then go away. This prevents you from doubling up on the effect without copying shenanigans or outright picking up one more of the card. Useful if you didn't want to apply the effect twice anyway (especially relevant if it's an expensive card), but annoying if it's an effect you want to stack.
  • Time Walk is an Extra Turn spell that only costs 2 mana with no downside except for the strict rules that make it impossible to use it more than once a fight. Even if you somehow get two of them (copying the card before using it, or just picking up a second one), playing the first copy shuts down any other card named Time Walk for the rest of the fight.
• Unspoken Retort:

Thoughts are in parentheses, since that's the Japanese style

• Depending some random factor, in the "Assistance from Eientei" event, where Reisen gives an item to assist the ones who are searching for her master's lost stuff, when the player character asks her why Reisen's not helping out on the search for her master's lost item, her thoughts indicate that it's the player character that's been suckered into the work:
  Reisen Udongien Inaba: Thank you for your hard work. Master told me to provide you some supplies.
  [Supply is chosen]
  Reimu: Thanks a lot. But why aren't you going after the culprit yourself?
  Reisen: Ahaha.
  (Why do you think you're here?)
• Part of a Chain of Deals that the player's doing. If it's Reimu who trades Yukari some eye cream for a Border Sensor because Yukari has eye bags from staying up late, after the trade, Reimu has Think in Text in parentheses about those non-sleeping habits:
  Reimu: (You'd better stop staying up late.)

YMMV

• Demonic Spiders: The moon rabbits in Phase 3 are widely hated due to their main mechanic: they have a permanent Flawless buff, reducing all damage done to them to 1 per hit, meaning that for decks that built to do massive bursts of single attack damage as well as stacking buffs like Firepower are rendered useless. What's worse is that the rabbits hit like a truck, heal 1 health per turn meaning that if you have bad RNG with getting attack cards, they can reset the work you put in to chip them down, the rabbits apply Purify which can prevent you from using defense cards when you need them, and can clog up your draw pile with unplayable cards. It's not uncommon for many players' successful runs to be abruptly stopped after encountering the rabbits, or for them to lose a lot of health and waste spell cards, meaning wasting a potential upgrade at the gap to heal, and often not healing enough to survive the Phase 3 boss. All because of two rabbits.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • All but one of the endgame bosses cleanse their debuffs every few turns, which makes stacking Poison or Lock On a lot more annoying. This is particularly painful for the Roukanken (the only Shining Exhibit that doesn't give a mana once per turn, instead making all your attacks apply Lock On and giving you two mana on turn 1), which didn't need yet another thing going against it.
  • The mechanics of Seija's Overdecorated Gold Cup are widely disliked: it takes away all your non-Shining Exhibits (except for the Ultramarine Orb Elixir), and it can be pulled out as early as turn 1. Not only is it unfun to suddenly be denied a lot of otherwise fun Exhibits, but the mere existence of the Cup discourages you from even going for them in the first place — you'll need a plan that can stand up to the True Final Boss and doesn't require the Exhibits either way, which makes having an Exhibit-based plan kind of a waste of time.

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