Touhou Pocket Wars Evolution

Neko Miko Reimu~

Touhou Pocket Wars Evolution is a strategic RPG based around collecting and levelling the various Gacha figurines themed after characters from the Touhou Project series. It is a sequel to Touhou Pocket Wars.

The game's premise is that of the player taking on the role of a Touhou obsessed fan wanting to try out the newly released Touhou themed hybrid figure-collecting card-battling game. You are later transported to Gensokyo itself and from there becomes something reminiscent of a fairly standard self insertion fanfic.

Touhou Pocket Wars Evolution Plus is an Expansion Pack that adds a follow-up story to the original, new characters and an entirely new battle mechanic in the form of UFO's.

This game currently has a 100% complete English patch making it playable even for those who don't speak Japanese.

For more information on the game and it's subsequent expansion please visit the English wiki page for it

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Tropes used in Touhou Pocket Wars Evolution include:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Each of your individual figurines (of which there are well over fourty) can be levelled up to Level 500. This in of itself doesn't take too long to reach but once this cap has been achieved, you can fight a tough battle in order to gain the right to play the "Reform" board game for a particular character in which that figurine levels back down to Level 1 but retains a percentage of the stats, there is theoretically no limit on how many times a player can do this. It is limited only by player willingness and skill at the Reform fights.
• AI Roulette: The only thing that makes certain fights possible without Level Grinding until you achieve a One-Hit Kill. Especially since many characters have limitless supplies of heal and null-damage abilities.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Reversed, in a way. Your reward for completing the fairly challenging "King's Game" is ability to make the girls wear less clothing in combat. It has no gameplay benefit and exists purely for Fan Service.
  • Played straight with the Quiz Battle which can reward you with different clothing sets.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You are only allowed to bring four figurines into a fight at any given time. This is justified in the fights in the Arcade where it can be safely assumed that these are the rules of the game within the game, but for the boss fights....not so much.
  • Lazy Backup: During a fight, only three figurines are actually in combat, the last one sits in reserve and provides an assist ability and can be tagged in and out with other figurines up to maximum of three times, a fight ends when all three in combat are dead, even though you still have a totally alive one in reserve.
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI will frequently use SP recovery skills when at full SP or attack you when their attack has a 0% chance to hit due to the enviroment.
• Auto Revive: Mokou has a skill which when used, gives her a 70% chance to recover with full HP upon being killed. This, unsurprisingly, makes her a pain in the ass to fight.
• Black Mage: Marisa is the first figurine that fits this archetype with high-damage spells. Yuuka is a similar example with later join time.
• Boss Battle
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Many of the bosses are immune to instant death, for obvious reasons.
  • Dual Boss: The first boss fight of the game is one of these.
  • Sequential Boss and Marathon Boss: The final stretch of the Evolution Plus story has you first fight a party of three, another party of three and finally the actual Final Boss.
  • That One Boss: The above mentioned fight is this, due to not being allowed to use the same figurine twice in this gauntlet, requiring no less than at least twelve highly levelled up figurines (who will probably have to gone through a Reform or two to stand a fighting chance)
  • "Wake-Up Call" Boss: Tenshi, who will likely kick your ass without having a solid number of levels under your belt and a decent understanding of the combat mechanics. Also, Ichirin for the Plus content, who will do the same thing if you jumped straight into to the Plus story without any grinding done before hand.
• But Thou Must!: No matter what dialogue options you choose the story remains more or less the same, barring some choosing who the Boss Battle will be against.
  • Ends up leading to a rather jarring conclusion to the Evolution Plus story in which you are presented with two sides of an argument and forced into one particular ideology, regardless of how much you agree with the supposed villain
• Combination Attack: Done in the form of "Union Spellcards" which require a certain combination of characters in the active fight to use, but are extremely powerful. As an added bonus, typically any character in the combo can use the attack.
• Curb Stomp Battle: What will likely happen when you fight Ran and Chen for the first time. Thankfully, losing this fight carries no penalty and the story will continue as normal.
• Damage Increasing Debuff: Holding the Red UFO will do this to you.
• Defeat Means Playable: True of Mima, who makes you fight her no less than three times, the last time with two other characters in tow, before finally becoming playable.
• Deus Ex Machina: A literal example of the trope, with a goddess literally descending from on high in order to sort out the conflict of the Evolution Plus story with basically no effort.
• Difficulty Spike: The jump between Extra and Phantasm level fights is enormous. Enemies in the Phantasm level have literally 20,000 more hitpoints and deal damage in the five digit range where they could only manage four digits if they were lucky. Clever usage of skills and hefty Level Grinding is basically required to squeak a win.
• Double Unlock: Even once you've unlocked a costume from the Quiz Battle, you can't actually use it until you have the required amount of affection.
• Dream Sequence: When the player falls asleep, you are given the option of starting a dream sequence where you play as a certain character going about their lives in Gensokyo. Your reward for completing these are points to upgrade your abilities.
• Evolving Attack: You can combine spellcards of the same type up to a maximum level of ten. Then the attack is considered "mastered" and from then on each time it is used, it has a chance of gaining additional bonuses up to its true limit.
• Expansion Pack: Touhou Pocket Wars Evolution Plus. Adding the characters from Touhou~ Undefined Fantastic Object and a story and new combat mechanic based around said game.
• Fanservice Costumes: Plenty of the costumes exist purely for this purpose.
  • The only point to the King's Game fights (besides being relatively challenging due to the Arbitrary Headcount Limit imposed) is to gain the ability to strip the main characters out of their clothes. Reisen's King's Game takes this one up to max, where completing hers will reward you with an alternative portrait... of her minus her skirt. Classy...
• Fan Translation: The game has fully completed and functional English patches for both Evolution and the Evolution Plus expansion.
• Final Boss: Shinki
• Final Boss, New Dimension: Makai
• Fetch Quest: The bafflingly anti-climactic way the Evolution Plus content ends, with a maze that requires you to go to a randomly chosen spot with Random Encounters all the way, just to retrieve some books. And you have to do this multiple times, the exact number varies, it can be as low as two or as high as six. Your reward for doing this is to make the Final Boss playable, but by this point the game is pretty much over.
• Game Breaker: Nitori's Optical Camouflage spellcard, which when fully maxed will provide an additional 88% chance to evade on top of your base chance to dodge for one attack. No prizes for guessing how this can shatter fights when you only have one opponent.
• Game Within a Game: How the plot kicks off and how you do combat with everything.
• Gotta Catch Em All: Collecting the various figurines is a large part of the game.
• Guide Dang It: Quite a lot of it, figuring out what combinations of crafting items work with what characters requires a lot of trial and error or five seconds on the wiki.
  • And even if you've worked out by sheer luck the combination to get the Infinity+1 Sword, how are you going to know that you must have tried crafting something else at least thirty times prior to crafting it otherwise you'll receive crappy equipment?
  • Unlocking Mima can be this, first it requires you to access an event which is not visible on the map requiring you to either look it up or just know where it is, and this event occurs randomly so it is not always there. Then you have to do this event twice in order to even talk to this particular character, who has a third dialogue option that none of the other characters have to initiate a fairly difficult fight after which you unlock her. But then you would have to know that her figurine only drops from the very first vending machine in the game, who's possibilities the average player would assume they exhausted long ago. Guide Dang It indeed.
  • Figuring out which girls like what presents can be this, but it is a milder example than the above because simple Trial and Error Gameplay will reveal the answers.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The levels first start at F and go all the way up to S. The next two levels up are called Extra and Phantasm.
• Infinity+1 Sword: The synthesis combination of two Blue UFO's followed by one Red UFO, which when crafted with the right girl after certain conditions have been met will provide a 25% boost to every stat and provide more and faster recovery of SP.
• Item Crafting: Done in the final two dungeons, allowing the player to collect three different colours of UFO, which when crafted in the right order and with the right girl can produce very good equipment.
• In-Universe Game Clock: More characters are unlocked for play as the in-game days pass and other events also revolve around the passage of time, such as tournaments which only run on certain days.
• Mini Game: The Quiz Battle, which can reward you with a Money Multiplier, additional clothing sets and bonuses to Experience Points gained and affection.
• Nintendo Hard: The Phantasm level fights. Do not enter without a ton of reforms under your belt.
• Level Up At Intimacy 5: Giving presents to a girl will increase your that girl's affection towards you, eventually culminating in a battle against a rival, if you fight this rival enough to deplete his affection to zero you gain the ability to reform that particular character, resulting in the potential for stronger characters.
  • More Friends, More Benefits: Obviously, the more characters you do this to, the better.
• Last Lousy Point: Obtaining all equipment will likely be the last achievement point you earn. It will also take the longest to get.
• Money Multiplier: One of the possible bonuses bestowed by doing well in the Quiz Battle mini-game.
• One-Hit Kill: Komachi and Yuyuko both have attacks that function this way, with a chance to instantly kill an enemy.
• One-Time Dungeon: The Hangar, which closes permanently upon completion of the above mentioned Fetch Quest.
• Power-Up: Introduced in the form of UFO's in the Plus expansion. One increases the damage you take, one heals your health if you don't get hit by the end of the turn and the other does the same but for SP. Additionally, attacking enemies (or going a turn without getting hit while holding them) who hold the powerups will allow you to "catch" them, filling up a gauge bestowing additional benefits when filled.
• Random Encounters: In the various mazes.
• Randomly Drops: Quite a few cases of this, after any fight there are six cards to pick from and depending on the fight this can be money, items to use in combat, gifts to give to the girls, equipment pieces, crafting ingredients, fixed dice rolls for usage in the reform board game or nothing at all.
• Relationship Values: A straight number determining what costumes you can use with that characters figurine depending on how high it is, it also has some bearing on events which lead to Level Up At Intimacy 5.
• Status Buff: Many characters possess stat buffs of the party-wide, single-target and self-target variety.
• Take Your Time: An especially egregious example in that each plot event will take a quarter of a day and at the end of the day, you're booted back to your house to sleep. At this point you are free to do what you want before coming back to click on the event icon and start the plot again. This leads to the very strange scenario in which plot events that are clearly intended to run one after the other can be spaced several in-game weeks apart from each other. Does everyone just stand around waiting for you to come back or something?
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Makai in the Evolution Plus story, it takes place inside a meteorite in the original story.
• Violation of Common Sense: Some of the dream events will require you to deliberately lose them in order to unlock more dream events for play or to unlock additional sets of clothing. This is never hinted or alluded to.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Cosmetic?: The achievements actually provide points which can be allocated to stats to give every character who has been used over 100 times a boost in that particular stat, or several stats.