Touhou Mystia's Izakaya
is a casual restaurant management game by Dichromatic Purpilion based on the Touhou Project. Released on October 1, 2021, but receiving regular content updates in the form of DLC up through February of 2024, you play as Mystia Lorelei as she attempts to build a popular and successful restaurant business.
Mystia's Izakaya contains examples of the following:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The loans offered by the Yakumo family get progressively larger with each new location you expand your izakaya to.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: One of the three types of reward that you can receive for maxing out a character's bond level is a new outfit for Mystia to wear. They have no effect on gameplay, though the holiday-related ones that you can buy from Kourindou do come with a festive makeover for your izakaya.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Nuclear cooking stations have the highest cooking speed bonus in the game, but have a 40% chance to produce Dark Matter outside of Hyper Mode, and a 5% chance even when Hyper Mode is active.
- Big Eater: Yuyuko, as usual, though in this case it's Played for Drama.
- Bizarre Taste in Food: Medicine enjoys poisonous food, and is the only character that actually likes Dark Matter.
- Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: The strong capsaicin given to Mystia for her training in DLC 5. It's specially made with Lunarian technology, and is heavily implied to be hot enough to traumatize anyone who eats it. To set it apart from the existing "Spicy" tag, this stuff has the tag "Divine Punishment".
- Blush Sticker: Universal in this game's art style. Every single character has them, even in their low-detail chibi sprites which lack mouths.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall:
- If you actually manage to buy Reisen from her, Tewi will question whether you cheated the money in.
- While chatting with Marisa during a task in DLC 1, Mystia remarks how rare it is to see Marisa's dialogue for going over her budget.
- Commander Contrarian: Several characters actually dislike popular dishes and like enjoy ones that are unpopular. Among these include Cirno, Tenshi, and Seija.
- Conspicuous Consumption: Tenshi has a preference for expensive dishes. Kasen falls into this category to a lesser extent, as she dislikes economical dishes.
- Cooking Duel: DLCs 2 and 3 both feature one.
- Cooking Mechanics: Pretty much a given considering this is a game about running a restaurant. The main one in this game is modifying your recipes with extra ingredients in order to better satisfy your guests' tastes.
- Cordon Bleugh Chef: Some of the food combinations you're able to create when trying to satisfy a rare guest can venture into this territory. A particularly common example is mixing fish into a sweet dish like pudding.
- Cosplay Café: You can effectively turn your izakaya into one if you include Sakuya and Yumeko on your staff.
- Demoted to Extra: Most of the heads of Gensokyo's various factions don't actually appear in this game, or only appear briefly if they do.
- Discount Card: Getting the best rating from Rinnosuke results in him giving you a discount at Kourindou the next day.
- Does Not Like Spam: If you feed Koishi an Unconscious Youkai Mousse (which is modeled after her hat) she will always give the worst possible rating.
- An Entrepreneur Is You: The entire point of the game.
- Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: A few of the ingredients you can get for your dishes lean towards the fictional. One that you can't get however, the Fruit of Desire, is responsible for kicking off the game's entire plot when Yuyuko eats one and becomes insatiably hungry.
- Fishing Minigame: DLC 4 introduces one that allows you to fish for ingredients without spending money or time. After reaching max bond level with Kagerou and obtaining the quality fishing rod, you also gain the ability to fish up treasure chests which contain collectibles or non-aquatic ingredients.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- Mystia will still take out loans from Chen even if the player has enough money to cover the price of the loan up front. It's also impossible for the player to pay off the story loans before the deadline, no matter how much money you have in excess of the amount owed.
- The fairy maid selling leftovers comments that the reason she's selling ingredients at a discount is because they're about to go bad. However raw ingredients in the player's inventory never actually go bad, only unsold dishes at the end of each night.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: It's heavily implied that the few months during which the game takes place are repeating over and over until Mystia can successfully satisfy Yuyuko's ravenous appetite.
- Improbable Food Budget: Marisa inexplicably has one of the larger budgets in the game.
- Infinity +1 Sword: Most of the cooking stations unlocked by the DLC. They tend to have the highest cooking speed bonus of any station outside of the Nuclear cooking stations, while also having incredibly good secondary effects on top of that.
- An Interior Designer Is You: After befriending Flandre in DLC 4, she asks you to help her decorate her room.
- Is It Something You Eat?: In a conversation with Yorihime where she explains how Lunarians use science in their cooking, Mystia asks her if "science" is an ingredient that's only available in the Lunar Capital.
- Lethal Chef: If you attempt to add ingredients to a dish with tags that it's explicitly incompatible with, you'll produce an inedible blackened mess known as Dark Matter. Serving Dark Matter to a guest is a great way to earn their punishment spell card.
- Loan Shark: Chen tries to play this role, but as your bond level with her grows she becomes increasingly more conflicted about it.
- Meme Acknowledgement: Any time Cirno and Utsuho appear in the leaderboards in DLC 2.5, they always have a score of 9 and 6 respectively.
- Ms. Fanservice: Reisen is implied to be some form of this in-universe, as having her on your staff increases your tips by 20%.
- Never Learned to Read: Downplayed. It's mentioned several times that Mystia is illiterate when it comes to human languages, however she's perfectly literate in youkai runes and even keeps a journal where she writes down recipes and customer preferences.
- The Noseless: Almost as universal to this game's art style as the Blush Stickers mentioned above, though characters do occasionally get a few details hinting at a nose in the more detailed pixel art.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The first signs of the conflict of DLC 5 is Rumia and Meiling coming into your izakaya and asking for foods they normally dislike.
- Perpetual Poverty: Reimu, as per usual, here represented by being tied with Kogasa for the second-lowest budget range in the game, beaten only by Cirno. Unfortunately, donating to her shrine does not increase her budget if she visits your izakaya that night.
- Promoted to Playable: The relay format of DLC 3's cooking competition means you get to play as Kosuzu and Aunn in the kitchen (and also Kyouko on replays). They all have their own strengths and weaknesses unique from Mystia's.
- Rhythm Game:
- Mystia sings while cooking, and this is represented by playing a short rhythm game set to the background music whenever you prepare a dish. Completing it successfully has a chance to provide one of three temporary buffs that make the night easier. Earning all three at once activates "Hyper Mode" which lets you cook without needing to do the singing minigame for a while.
- DLC 2.5 adds a jukebox where the player can tackle songs from the game's soundtrack in a more traditional rhythm game fashion, complete with leaderboards with entries from the other Touhou characters in the game.
- Shout-Out: The game features numerous pop-culture references, usually in the form of a character mentioning some bit of trivia they heard about the outside world without realizing that it's from a work of fiction.
- When Mystia starts feeling nervous going into the final phase of Yuuma's boss fight, Nitori encourages her by telling her to "Believe in me who believes in you!"
- The outfit Seija gives you for maxing out her bond looks suspiciously like Jotaro Kujo's school uniform.
- Soup Is Medicine: Whenever Akyuu orders soup, it's accompanied by her coughing and saying she's feeling under the weather.
- Soup of Poverty: One of the cheapest items on your menu is seafood miso soup which doesn't even have any seafood in it. Later on in the game Mystia gets called out on this and ends up adding real seafood miso soup to her menu (it's even called that in-game) for about 7 times the price.
- Supreme Chef: Mystia becomes this over the course of the game.
- Suspicious Spending: Subverted. While Marisa's inexplicably high budget might lead players to believe that her money is somehow "borrowed", it's revealed in DLC 1 that she actually earned it from cultivating large amounts of the Fruit of Desire and selling them in bulk to the kappa.
- Sweet Tooth: A decent number of named Touhou characters have this to some degree, but special mention goes to Alice, Patchouli, and Satori whose dislike of meat and overall indifference towards aquatic food means that most of their orders will end up being sweets of some sort.
- Take Your Time: In stark contrast to every story event leading up to it, and despite Yuyuko's appetite supposedly being a danger to Gensokyo as a whole if left unaddressed, the player can put off tackling her final boss fight for as many in-game days as they want without any repercussions.
- Trademark Favorite Food:
- Remilia will always give a perfect rating for Scarlet Devil Cake (which looks like her hat), even if it isn't what she ordered. Though this may just be because she's a narcissist.
- Cucumbers for Nitori. Adding one to her food will guarantee a positive rating, though not necessarily a perfect one.
- Dark Matter for Medicine. Like Nitori, it will guarantee a positive rating, though not necessarily a perfect one.
- Work Off the Debt: The Yakumo family offers Mystia several loans through Chen, with the expectation that she'll pay back the loan on a given date.
