Touhou LostWord is a gacha RPG that has been published by Good Smile Company for Android and iOS. If you don’t know much about the Touhou franchise, be sure to look at our review where we go a bit in-depth into its cast and history. Even without much knowledge of the franchise, with how diverse the cast is, one is almost guaranteed to find someone you’re fond of. At the start of the game, the Lostword incident hits the player with a lot of new information. Although it has a tutorial for combat, many mechanics are not thoroughly explored. In this beginners guide of Touhou LostWord, we will include various tips and tricks around the gacha game and discuss everything in detail, which one needs to know while starting.
Unit Collection and Progression
In Touhou LostWord, there are a total of two summon categories, one is the ‘Friends’ and the other is ‘Story Cards’. The latter plays a part in buffing ‘Friends’. One can essentially just summon for either Units or Weapons if it helps you to think of it as such.
If you’ve played a Gacha game before, then this system should start to seem familiar. You have limit break mechanics where you can fuse copies of cards to level up your unit’s maximum level.
Lastly, some tokens can be collected after clearing stages, these tokens can be spent to increase your units’ stats. These stats which we will be explaining are particularly important for beginners and would guide you in clearing missions in Touhou: LostWord.
Friend Stats and Mechanics
Friends are split into roles to give the player an idea of what they do:
- Defense: Protects the party and utilizes abilities to draw the enemy’s attacks.
- Support: Buffs the party to make your party stronger.
- Heal: Restores lost party member health.
- Debuff: Debuffs the enemy and creates opportunities to get through enemy defenses.
- Attack: The team damage dealer.
- Technical: This is a specialist unit; it shines when conditions are favourable for their abilities.
- Speed: High agility, takes turns first typically.
- Destroy: Breaks things in one shot, this type of unit usually need a bit of setup, but can be dangerous when used properly.
Friends have several stats which are concerned with:
- HP: Hitpoints – self-explanatory, but this hits zero, your Friend is gone for the level.
- Agility: The higher this stat is, the sooner the Friend takes their turn.
- Cost: How much spirit energy it costs to deploy this Friend in a level
- Yang Attack / Defense: Increases / Decreases how much Yang damage this Friend deals / suffers.
- Yin Attack / Defense: Increases / Decreases how much Yin damage this Friend deals / suffer.
- Temperament: This is elemental affinity. There are eight Phases: Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, Earth and Star. Each Friend is weak to some Phases, while being resistant to others. Using Alice Margatroid as an example, her Temperament is Hyou [Wood]. This does make her weak to Metal and Star but strong vs Sun and Water.
Each friend will also have two attacks. Each ability is affected primarily by either one’s Yin or Yang stat. Taking Alice Margatroid again as an example, we can see that her abilities can both use her Yin to calculate the damage. As one gains more P items during battle, he would notice that the abilities can modify and have more effects.
To build a proper team, one must first be able to see which stat each unit uses and what roles they would play in the team. Next up, the focus should be laid to balance temperaments. This is to maintain the fact that your team don’t all share weaknesses. Then, one can finally check each units’ passives as some passives can boost Temperaments and stats.
Combat Breakdown
The combat screen has a lot going on that can be a little overwhelming for first-time players. The image below shows what the game looks like in combat. The enemies are on the left and the right has your friends. Your party is split into frontline and backline with 3 team members in each, totalling 6 members. You can switch your units at any time so you can always change out a poor matchup, however, once you switch you would have a cooldown before switching your units again.
Directly below the enemy portrait would be their spell bar, when this bar fills up the enemy can use a powerful spell, so be prepared to counter this with your barrier. Below that is the enemy Weak and Resist. This is as it says what the enemy is weak and resistant to. On the bottom half of the screen, from left to right, you see a lot of information.
Spell Card
Every Friend has two spell cards, to begin with. This comes with an additional three being unlocked as you rank your Friend up. Spell Cards can only be used once per level. It typically comes with a high assortment of damage or effects. One can replenish the spell cards by occasionally coming across an S item. These items drop randomly from enemies.
Last Word
Last Word Spell Cards are your character’s ultimate techniques. These typically do heavy amounts of damage or come with game-winning buffs or debuffs. There is a drawback though, the Last Word is used, you are unable to use spells for the rest of the level.
Spread Shot and Focus Shot
These are your primary attacks. Spread Shot is equivalent to a light attack, which generates a lot of P items. Focus Shot is equivalent to a heavy attack and typically focuses on dealing increased damage, at the expense of finding fewer P items. Solo attacks are against a single target, while All attacks hit multiple enemies as an AOE. CP is combat power, which is essentially how much damage the attack is going to do on average.
Temperament modifiers
The bullets above the attacks are the Temperament modifiers. Using the example of Alice Margatroid as above, we can see that Spectrum Mystery has no Phase associated with it, along with the Shanghai Doll, which also has no phase associated with it.
Boost
Whenever you strike an enemy P, items flow out of them which your characters can collect. Players can spend them by tapping on the boost button. Each whole number indicates one level of Boost, which deals increased damage and effects on your abilities. The skill menu indicates all the buffs given by the Boost and one can boost an ability up to 3 levels. The same is applicable for the spells as well.
Graze
These are the shields. By Grazing, you can nullify an attack once. However, one must expend one Barrier Token per Graze. You can Graze up to three times per turn, a maximum of four times per level.
You may see five Barrier Tokens, but you cannot spend your last Barrier Token. If you are hit by a super-effective attack, it will break a Barrier Token. Get all of your Barrier Tokens broken and your Friend will enter the Full Break status. This means that your Friend cannot attack and takes increased damage from all sources.
Barrier Tokens can be replenished randomly from B item drops in a level.
Skill
Each Friend comes with some skills attached, one innately and two unlocked via upgrades. These skills can be activated during your turn and typically buff, debuff, or otherwise change the status of the playing field. Moreover, it comes with a high cooldown cost.
For starters, the game has a lot of systems to get into. With this beginners guide for Touhou LostWord, we have just barely scratched the surface of what the game is about. Explore Gensokyo to resolve the incident with Reimu, Marisa, and the huge cast from Touhou Project!
Did you find our Touhou LostWord beginners guide useful? Do let us know in the comments below!
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