Touhou Luna Nights: Game Pass first impressions

By Luke Albigés,

I first saw Touhou Luna Nights when I caught a speedrun of the PC version at Awesome Games Done Quick way back in January, in the simpler age that existed before 2020 explosively soiled itself. It looked exactly like my kinda thing, but my knowledge of the Touhou series doesn't extend beyond the shooters so I honestly thought this was some extremely polished PC-only fan game that would never get a proper release. And alas, cool as it seemed, it quickly slipped my memory with so much other exciting (and very fast) gaming going on around it. Fast-forward some eight months, right into the middle of 2020's little 'accident,' and there it is again, this time staring at me from the Xbox Game Pass menu. Don't mind if I do, thanks. While the game downloaded, I thought I'd do a little research on the Touhou series to get up to speed. Skimming the wiki, I noticed one game described as "the 12.3rd game in the series," immediately turned off the computer, and went for a walk instead. That's not how that works. That's not how anything works.

First things first, don't be put off by the game's cover art. It might look like some kind of waifu-centric visual novel, but Luna Nights is actually a fast-paced action-platformer with heavy exploration and light RPG elements. So yeah, it's a Metroidvania game, basically. It's not too complicated on a basic level, but the tutorials are something else. "Attack with the [Attack Button] and jump with the [Jump button]," reads the first sign. Okay sweet, thanks for the top-secret expert playing tips! So if I remember this correctly, I press the jump button to... wait, what? Sakuya, the protagonist, doesn't jump. She attacks. Seriously, what kind of monster doesn't auto-assign jump to the A button? And, worse yet, puts attack there instead? Livid, I raced into the menus and, after working out where to go despite some frustratingly slow old-school airport departure board-style rollertext, customised the controls to what I'd typically expect to come as standard. A to jump, X to attack, other buttons to do other stuff I can't do yet. Much better. Let's crack on.

Several interesting mechanics reared their heads at once as soon as the first enemy appeared. For one, your basic attack (a barrage of blades) works off a finite resource, namely your MP bar. Spam the button mindlessly and you're left vulnerable until it recharges enough to attack again, although you can also reclaim some MP by picking your knives back up. The second mechanic works in tandem with this, is pulled straight out of the shooters on which this thing is loosely based, and is awesome. The Graze system rewards you for bold play, and proximity to enemies and their attacks will also sling some MP back your way (along with some time, another resource I'll get to in a moment) and even grants brief invulnerability windows when you earn enough, at the risk of getting smacked around by foes with little time to react to their moves. It's super satisfying even on basic enemies, and watching damage numbers, status conditions, Graze combos, and all kinds of other data pour off opponents as you lay into them evokes the same kind of screen-full-of-nonsense madness that is so prevalent in the core Touhou games. It even has the same kind of intense soundtrack and robotic announcer voice for the full 'shmup' experience, which is ace.

Then you get your first upgrade. I've played my fair share of Metroidvania-style games, so I was expecting probably a movement ability to be the first unlock, but no. Oh no. Sakuya's very first new ability is the power to freeze time. Eat that, Alucard. Suck it, Ori. Handily, I had already remapped this to B, since it's probably assigned to the brake pedal on a steering wheel controller or something by default. Time powers are apparently Sakuya's signature thing in the main games so it makes sense that they would come early, but it's as absurdly powerful an ability as it sounds, if finite in its use. While active, the time gauge at the top of the screen depletes as you move or attack (and attacks cost time instead of MP), and the effect ends either when the gauge depletes or when you manually disable it. The best part is how this interacts with objects. Water stops and becomes solid so you can walk on it (or be blocked by it, in the case of waterfalls), while knives flung while time is frozen hang in place until quantum normality is restored, letting you set up elaborate multi-kills like in that awesome Quicksilver scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past. There's also a much lower cap on how much Graze you can rack up per enemy in this state, just to stop you from being able to stand next to an enemy or projectile to top up your time and keep the world in perpetual stasis. That's probably fair enough.

Fighting my way through a bunch more rooms, I was slowly getting to grips with the systems and using the time stop thing more liberally, since you get it back way quicker than you think. Then came the next upgrade — a genre staple — and I was inevitably underwhelmed since I had already found the power to control time itself. Soon after came a key that just served as a shortcut to older areas... again, pretty standard in games like this, but I'll take it. Then came the first boss. Meiling's patterns are straightforward enough, but her projectiles hit kinda hard and she's super tanky compared to anything else you've faced up to this point. A combination of sloppy play and sheer greed (I am such a sucker for risk/reward mechanics like Graze and parrying in any game that has parrying and always overuse them, even when there's no need, because I am me) almost got me killed, but I managed to get my act together, survive her laughable 'ultimate' attack, and come out on top. Actually, thinking back, I just remembered that I was told about a shop before the boss battle but never bothered to visit it, so perhaps I did this on Accidental Self-Imposed Hard difficulty? Oh well, it's done now. With the first hurdle cleared, Luna Nights really feels like it opens up — it feels like there are more exploration options and the chaos ramps up very quickly, so it seems the training wheels come off at this point. Let's go.

Looking at the achievement list, I have to say that most of it seems pretty doable. Estimates I've read put a 100% playthrough of the game at around ten hours, and that alone would tick off well over half of the list. S Rank in Boss Rush mode (beat it within six minutes, basically) and a deathless completion will both take a bit of practice, I'm sure, and might trip up players who don't have too much experience with this kind of game. The only one I was worried about was the recycling one, since the cans seem to have minds of their own — I did manage to bin a couple, but the word 'all' in the description scared me. Looking it up, it seems like you only need to introduce drink can to trash can once per break room, and the bin rim turns green when you've done it, so that should actually be a simple clean-up job once the whole map is unlocked.

Summary

I've barely scratched the surface, but I can already tell that I'm really going to enjoy Touhou Luna Nights so it gets a FREE PASS from me. If you share my passion for games like Ori and Hollow Knight, or the classics like Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid, Luna Nights will definitely scratch the same itch. I understand it's pretty short but with a ton of stuff packed into its runtime, which works fine for me when most other games are threatening to steal entire weeks from me. Fans of the Touhou shooters get the added benefit of a bunch of extra lore and fan service (the Kingdom Hearts kind, not the Senran Kagura kind), although you need absolutely zero prior knowledge to be entertained by this vastly different spin-off — I know about as much about Touhou as I do about the digestive systems of the mangrove crab but I've still had a blast so far. And hopefully, I'll continue to do so.

Luke put a couple of hours into Touhou Luna Nights on Xbox One, grabbing the first three achievements in the process. He intends to invest a whole lot more time...

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Xbox Game Pass First Impressions

Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.