Touhou Shoujo Tale of Beautiful Memories

Genre: Turn-Based JRPG

Players: 1

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Review:

The Touhou Project franchise is a long-running franchise consisting mostly of Bullet Hell Shmup games and Fighting Games running all the way back to 1997, taking place in and around a remote Japanese village troubled by all manner of Japanese fairies, demons, spirits, and other supernatural forces, with the games’ heroines tending to come in the form of shrine maidens and their allies.

Touhou Shoujo Tale of Beautiful Memories, released in 2019 on PC, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, and to PlayStation 4 in 2024, is an unusual exception for the series in that it takes the form of a Turn-Based JRPG, with this game’s plot having franchise protagonist Reimu Hakurei responding to a sudden outbreak of fairies, as well as a strange barrier that has popped up around the town.

I’ll warn you now, if you are not already familiar with this franchise, this game’s plot will likely leave you scratching your head. Not only is it extremely poorly-localized with some really rough English, but it doesn’t make any real attempt to introduce players to the world and its characters. As a result, it’s hard to feel any sort of attachment or investment in them or this game’s story.

In terms of presentation, Tale of Beautiful Memories uses simple pixel art visuals depicted from an isometric overhead perspective, with the game’s locales seeming overly-large and bare. However, as bland as the visuals are, it’s far better than the sound, with many of this game’s background themes being extremely annoying (in particular, the standard battle theme is really bad).

When it comes to gameplay, this game seems to be trying really hard to copy the original Super Mario RPG (which only just last year received an excellent remake), not only mimicking that game’s isometric view, but also its timing-based combat system and even its map screen. However, as I often say, it’s not necessarily bad being a copycat if you’re a good copycat, and to this game’s credit it picked an excellent game to copy, as Super Mario RPG is still to this day one of the finest games in the genre.

The only issue is, Tale of Beautiful Memories doesn’t really do much beyond its inspiration, and in fact it lacks some of the subtle gameplay elements Super Mario RPG had, such as being able to get in some early damage by jumping on enemies you see wandering around to start the battle with them. What’s more, this game’s locales are visually-repetitive, and combat is frequent and also repetitive, making this game a bit of a slog.

In the end, fans of the Touhou Project franchise may get a kick out of Tale of Beautiful Memories taking characters from the series and putting them in a new context, but for newcomers the lack of any sort of introduction to the characters and world here is going to limit how much you’ll get into it. And no matter your familiarity with this franchise, the tedious and unimaginative gameplay makes this game a drag to play. The result is something that’s still playable, but that isn’t an especially enjoyable or noteworthy entry into the genre.

tl;dr – Touhou Shoujo Tale of Beautiful Memories is a fairly unique game in the Touhou Project franchise as it is a Turn-Based JRPG, with a plot about a shrine maiden investigating and stopping an attack on the local village. If you’re familiar with this franchise, you may be amused to see its world and characters in a JRPG, but if not you’ll be left feeling lost, and the gameplay copies elements from Super Mario RPG without adding anything interesting to the mix, only repetitive environments and tedious battles. Unless you’re a major series fan, skip this.

Grade: C

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