Touhou LostWord is Good Smile Company’s new turn-based strategy RPG, that features the cute and colorful characters of the Touhou Project game series. Though the original franchise series belonged to the bullet hell shoot ‘em up genre of games, the popularity of the Touhou franchise has spawned various incarnations in other media and even led to the creations of games that take its cast of characters to other genres.
Touhou LostWord, however, is the first officially licensed game on mobile to bring the world of Gensokyo into life as a stage for a turn-based strategy RPG. Join Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame, Youmu Konpaku, and the rest of the legendary cast of characters as they take on an adventure unlike any they have encountered before.
Hardcore fans of the Touhou franchise may miss the projectile-filled levels and bosses of the shoot ‘em up that have become popular because of their insane difficulty levels but will surely appreciate the incarnation of each well-loved character in Touhou LostWord.
Touhou LostWord certainly isn’t just a treat for patrons of the franchise as anime and strategy RPG enthusiasts alike will certainly find something to behold in the entirety of what the game has to offer. Beyond the amazing artworks, stylish background music, and superb voice cast, Touhou Lostword’s gameplay reflects a perfect translation of each character’s shoot ‘em up abilities into turn-based RPG skills.
There are plenty of unique mechanics and elements in Touhou LostWord, making it appear overwhelming at first glance, especially for complete beginners. The tutorial session, however, makes it very easy to understand all the basic features and mechanics you need to learn to progress in the earlier challenges.
There are guides a well that pop up when new features and game modes are unlocked, ensuring a progressive understanding of Touhou LostWord’s contents from the most simple to the complex ones. Now, if you just dived into Touhou LostWord and got stuck in a rut, then read on as our Touhou LostWord beginner’s guide has everything you need to assemble a powerful team and beat every challenge in the game!
1. Reroll For The Best Characters
While there are plenty of free characters or friends you can have at the start of your journey in Touhou LostWord, the majority of acquiring new ones are from recruiting them using a gacha system. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of gacha especially in strategy RPGs, it means that securing additional units and such are covered by probabilities and the luck of draw, so to speak.
On one hand, there is fun and excitement in not knowing who or what you get from each gacha pull. On the other, having a specific target in mind and managing to get what you exactly want is at the very least an equally fulfilling experience. Beyond that, the efficiency of your performance from the start of your journey may very well depend on your pulls as well.
As much as developers are keen on balancing out playable characters in any game, it can’t be helped that some units simply stand out more than others, even if there are rarity grades involved that classify characters more accordingly. Suffice to say, some units may start out well enough but gradually lose their luster as you progress through your adventure. Some heroes, on the other hand, may not be at par with most at the start but then slowly begin to shine as you reach the mid or end game.
What most experienced and veteran players keep their eyes on are units that excel from start to finish, ensuring no wastage of time and resources invested into those characters. This makes it necessary for most players to subscribe to the idea of rerolling to ensure that they grab the best characters possible at the start of the adventure itself.
Whenever there is a gacha system, the idea of rerolling almost always follows. If you are new to the concept as well, rerolling is sort of an exploit, or cheat if you will, that lets you perform your first set of gacha pulls as many times as needed to pull the best characters. It is not necessary to do but it can tremendously boost your progression level and the time and effort you need to invest varies depending on your luck and intended results.
Rerolling in Touhou LostWord only takes a couple of minutes per attempt but if you are the type who would enjoy the entire adventure with whichever friend you start off with, then you can completely skip this part. Otherwise, you should make sure to start the game with a guest account and not link your game progress to any social media accounts until after you have obtained the best starting pull.
Touhou LostWord presents you with a set of cards to choose from at the start of your journey where you can choose a character among other choices. A couple of tutorial battles later and you will be led to perform your first 10x pull, where you are guaranteed to obtain 1 friend if you did not choose one early on.
Although we have yet to come up with our very own tier list for Touhou LostWord, Reimu Hakurei, Youmu Konpaku, and Remilia Scarlet are among are top picks. As part of Touhou LostWord’s welcome event, you will obtain Reimu Hakurei from the mail but going for an extra copy also serves you well as you need several copies of each character to fully perform all their limit breaks.
If you happen to obtain any of the above friends as your starting character, you can choose to already link your account to bind your progress on it and continue on with your adventure. Otherwise, you should exit out of the game, clear the app data from within your device’s setting and start over. For iOS devices, you need to uninstall and reinstall the game for each reroll attempt.
Alternatively, you can play for a bit longer after your first 10x pull and obtain more currencies to perform additional ones. You can certainly expect a heavy inflow of resources as rewards from achievements and events early on. Rerolling after the next couple of 10x pulls, however, requires a lot more patience and luck.
2. Prioritize Progression Through The Main Story
Touhou LostWord provides a ton of features to explore although some will require progression milestones to unlock. The quick tutorial session you need to go through before you are allowed to venture freely in the game actually forms part of the main story’s prologue, providing you with a good background of some characters and lore of Gensokyo and its human and hokai inhabitants.
Of course, the main story levels serve as the most basic challenges in your adventure, prepping you for the greater challenges ahead with a better understanding of the mechanics and your friends’ unique skills and abilities.
Beyond securing a firmer grasp of the game’s story along with all the basic mechanics, progressing through the main story serves as your key to unlocking the rest of Touhou LostWord’s contents. There are plenty of features in the game that let you earn resources and gain experience idly, which is why you would want to unlock everything at the soonest possible time. It is very easy to breeze through the initial chapters and levels of the main story, most especially once the auto mode becomes available.
Each battle you engage in as you progress through the main story grants experience points for all friends within your 6-unit team, and while there are other ways for them to earn EXP, taking them to battle is the most efficient way to do so. The most basic resources you need to enhance and upgrade your top units are generally dropped from story mode stages as well, making it your initial source of most resources you need. As every bit of progression also triggers the accomplishment of goals or event objectives, you will also likely earn a lot of extra rewards with each new story stage you conquer.
There are star ratings to be earned from story mode as well based on your overall performance that largely involves how many members of your team makes it all the way through to the end of the battle. Although some missions and accomplishments require that you secure a 3-star rating, you can proceed to the next stage even with 0 stars acquired. If such is the case, though, then chances are you will perform as poorly on the next stage, making it reasonable enough for you to take on other game modes and challenges.
There are recommended levels and strategies for each battle stage to take note of. As much as the starting levels will prove too easy for your team, you will quickly enough discover how much challenging latter levels can be, especially if you do not pay attention to strategy or need to work more on your team’s composition and synergy.
3. Assemble A Balanced Team
It’s no argument that a huge chunk of a strategy RPG’s fun factor often relates to its cast of characters. Most especially in the case of Touhou LostWord, where the cast of characters have already been hugely popular, many players familiar with the franchise would revel in the idea of mixing and matching their favorite characters to form their own sets of perfect teams.
While it can be immensely fun to build teams around the idea of mixing together characters that you like, efficiency dictates employing a more objective approach towards building your 6-character team. Even in the absence of a complete tier list as a guide, there are plenty of ways for players to build up a cohesive and synergistic team to take on challenges in general. Relative to tier lists, in addition, simply lumping together the characters deemed to be at the top tier will not necessarily lead to a balanced, efficiently functioning team.
Beyond each friend’s unique set of stats and abilities, each unit can be categorized in 2 ways, both of which are important to consider. The first category deals with each unit’s specific roles and there are 8 different roles available. These are ATK, Yin DEF, Yang DEF, DEST, HEAL, SPD, SUPP, and TEC. Despite hardly exhibiting noticeable variances in the characters’ individual stats, their unique abilities more or less fall within these categories.
Another point of consideration relates to the elemental affinities that each friend in Touhou LostWord belongs to. There are 8 distinct elements that largely work within the usual rock-paper-scissors mechanic of giving a bit of advantage when it comes to dealing and receiving damage. These elements are Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, Earth, and Star.
While the majority of characters in Touhou LostWord only exhibit 1 element, it is common to have friends that have multiple elemental affinities. Relative to both roles and elemental affinities, it is important to consider having a decent mix of roles and elemental affinities on your main team.
As we mentioned earlier, you can certainly stride across all of the early levels but will soon be faced with trying challenges that require strategy more than sheer power. Be sure to get used to peeking into the strategy tab of the pre-battle screen as you may want to make adjustments to your team’s roster based on what is recommended to be advantageous for the coming battle.
4. Enhance And Upgrade Friends Sparingly
Obtaining the best friends to get from prayers, given the random elements of pulling them successfully, leaves a deep sigh of satisfaction for every player. Having one of the many characters you want to recruit is a joyous moment already on its own but then you would naturally want a full squad of units in accordance to your concept of what your dream team ought to be comprised of.
Obtaining the friends you want is just part of the challenge to building your dream team, though, as each one has to undergo various enhancement and upgrade methods for their full potentials to be unlocked and realized.
Touhou LostWord certainly does not fall short when it comes to providing means to empower each friend in your collection. To start off, the most basic way to raise each friend’s stats is to level them up, which can primarily be gained by bringing them to battle. Even back row units who do not participate in the battle earn as many experience points, which means that you can carry newer, low level units to boost their growth. Once you unlock the school, you can train units passively to have them earn experience points idly.
Almost every battle you engage in earns you bits of resources you need to boost each friend’s individual stats. Under the enhance tab of the friends menu, which you can access via its icon from the lower side of your screen, you can consume items individually or simply hit the max button beside each stat attribute and click on the enhance button to raise your friend’s stats. The limitation to this is the character’s level but it will take a lot of resources just to max out enhancements for one unit.
Upgrading a character raises her rank and unlocks passive abilities and skills alternatingly with each upgrade. Upgrading requires the same materials but are needed in bulk. You need to taop on the “+” icon on the material portrait to add the items you need before clicking on the upgrade button. This will also consume coins, which is a basic but much needed currency in Touhou LostWord.
Be sure to have plenty of spare coins for other needs before expending it all on friend upgrades. You can expect as well that both material and currency requirements increase as the upgrade level rises.
Going for a 10x pull through prayer always comes with some high level of excitement. For one, you would want to obtain 1 character with every pull, although it does not always end that way. Having a different character to join your growing collection leads to more friends you can mix and match to arrive at a different team roster. This also means that you have more units you can send to errands to claim idle rewards.
For some reason, however, Touhou LostWord makes it important for you to obtain duplicate copies of the heroes you own. This is because duplicates are required for you to limit break each character. Limit breaking a character costs a lot of coins in addition to the duplicate card you need to initiate the upgrade.
Characters start off with a maximum level of 70 and limit breaking increases the level cap by 10. There is also a level requirement the unit needs to meet before they can limit break. In addition to increasing the level cap and raising stats tremendously, each limit break unlocks an additional spell for your character. Note that paper dolls can be used as a substitute for the friend’s copy for limit breaking. These are very rare items usually obtained through special events.
Each unit you recruit starts off with a grade of 1 star and this can be raised through the awaken feature. Awakening is perhaps even more challenging to pull that a limit break as you need tokens to do so and they are not easy to acquire. Beyond the huge stat increase, awakening raises the cost of the unit and increases the level of the unit’s spell card.
If you are wondering early on about the story cards that you collect from the prayers, along with friends, these cards are equipped on each unit. Every unit starts off being able to equip 2 cards but limit breaking them unlocks the additional spell slots. Clicking on the “suggested cards” button at the lower right side of the equip page makes it quick and convenient, but it is best to manually select the cards for your characters to build them in accordance to your preferences.
The story cards themselves can be enhanced and subjected to a limit break. As story cards provide additional stat boosts on their own, these stats can be increased with each enhancement on the card. Enhancement requires tiles and coins as well and have a limit. Limit breaking, which requires coins as well as duplicate copies of the cards, will increase the max enhancement cap of the story card. Once a card has reached limit break 4, a new passive boost will be unlocked for the card.
Considering all of these enhancement and upgrade options for each character, in tandem with the rate at which you can recruit additional friends, there is a constant inkling to upgrade each one you have. Given the amount of resources you need just for 1 unit, you will have a huge challenge ahead of you just to fully upgrade 1 unit and as you unlock new characters, it may happen that new favorites can lead to new investments, potentially wasting resources already invested in the benched units.
In this sense, it is best to enforce prudence with every resource invested in each character. Prioritize units and heavily invest in ones you are certain will always remain useful to you until the end game.
5. Take On Daily Quests And Event Quests
Tapping on the explore button at the lower right side of the main screen is your gateway towards numerous quests within the world of Touhou LostWord and the main quests are just a part of them. Once you have hit a roadblock in the story quests and find it impossible to progress further, it should be time to delve into both the daily quests and event quests.
The daily quests basically shuffle across 3 different types of battles that earn you specific rewards like books, tiles, and scrolls, with each area unlocked only on specific days of the week. You only have 3 attempts per area each day and you can take on different degrees of difficulty that offer different amounts of rewards. What’s good about this is that you do not necessarily have to take on the first stage before unlocking and taking on the next one so be sure to expend your precious attempts on the levels you can clear with your team.
Events are typically available for a limited period of time and there is a chance that the available event by the time you read this is different from what we have gone through. Event stages work very much like main story stages but offer unique currencies you can exchange for a variety of valuable resources. Just like the main story, there are different difficulty levels to conquer in the events and every bit of progress you make earns you additional rewards from the tasks feature.
For the current event which is the “Phantom Human Maid for a Day”, be wary of expending the special currency on the lottery. You should aim for the most expensive items in the exchange, the top 2 being a paper doll, which you can substitute as an ingredient for a limit break, and a card that guarantees a friend off of the prayer feature.
6. Invest In Services And Take On Errands
Touhou LostWord is a type of strategy RPG that is very free-to-play friendly and largely correlates your growth and progression with how much active time you spend on it. Engaging in main story battles along with daily and event battles can certainly earn you plenty of the resources you need to consistently power up your units. Touhou LostWord, however, still provides plenty of avenues for you to progress idly, ensuring that even players who do not have a lot of spare time can still make decent amounts of progression in their adventures.
The source of idle rewards in Touhou LostWord basically falls within 2 features. These are the services, which you can access through its icon at the bottom of the main screen, and errands through the button at the right side. The shrine and the offering box are available from the start and both constantly produce spirit power and coins over time, respectively.
You can upgrade each of these services using coins to increase the maximum amount they can hold and produce over time. Depending on your needs, which is probably more coins, invest as much as you can ensuring to save a bit for other emergency needs.
The school is where you can leave 2 of your friends to earn experience points over time. You need to put in food items for them to continue to earn experience points and although you only start off with 2 slots, additional ones can be unlocked using seal crystals. The dojo works very much like the scholl, except it increases the level of the character’s skill.
You need to use books for your friends to earn EXP for their chosen skill and using a book with a type that matches the unit’s type grants a 50% extra EXP. Just like the school as well, you can add more slots to the dojo by spending seal crystals.
Another simple and easy way to earn loads of resources is to send your friends out to do errands. Each day, there are numerous errands available for you to pursue. There are daily errands that refresh each day and then there are limited errands only available on specific times of the day. Both sets of errands offer numerous types of resources as rewards, can have up to 6 units to run them, and have level requirements as well as completion times.
Whatever resources you need the most, it is best to always take not of the errand completion times so you can collect the earned resources and send your friends out once again. Of course, you should save the 6-hour errands for when you are going to take a long break from the game. This is one of Touhou LostWord’s feature that would make you want to recruit as many friends as possible. The more people you send out for errands, the more resources you can earn.
Note that characters you send out for errands or deploy to either the dojo or school can still be used in all battles. The only limitation is that duplicate copies cannot be sent on any errand.
7. Expend As Much Energy As You Can
Having an energy system in any game sets the impression of it as a delimiting factor to how much time you can spend on your adventures in one go. For almost all instances of it, there will hardly be enough in-game stamina and players find themselves wanting more action after about an hour or less of gameplay.
Touhou LostWord does have a similar system in the form of spirit power, which is consumed with errands and battles you engage in. The unique part, however, is that you will have an overabundant supply of it, making it a pretty big challenge to expend you stocked up spirit power in a day. Of course, there is a lot of farming and grinding involved as you need vast amounts of resources to consistently enhance and upgrade your friends as well as their equipped story cards.
Although you can practically just farm blindly across both story stages and event stages, you can always refer to what your units specifically need to ensure that each battle is aimed towards a specific goal. EXP is always an important gain from battle so higher level stages will give you more of it.
Relative to the limited events, clearing some stages the first time should not be the end of it. Each day, there are random stages across different difficulty levels that can earn you 9x rewards for battling through them. Be sure to consider these stages as among your priorities especially if you have limited time for adventuring.
Some tasks related to these events also have objectives relating to stages you have already completed and are available only within the day. Accomplishing these feats will earn you additional event currencies that are important especially if there are still items in the exchange you long to have.
8. Align Activities With Completion Of Tasks
If you have already played a bit of Touhou LostWord at this point in time, then you should already know that the game does not fall short when it comes to letting you earn resources you need with every battle you engage in. The actual rewards you earn from each endeavor, along with the idle rewards from the services and errands features can be a huge boost towards strengthening your characters but then there is also a task system that grants you even more rewards for feats relative to your progression in your journey.
For the most part, the “tasks” button at the bottom of the main screen will almost always have an indicator on it, telling you of rewards awaiting to be claimed. There are daily tasks, weekly tasks, main tasks, sub tasks, and even event tasks. Each tab contains a long list of objectives you can accomplish and each one pays you off with handsome rewards as well.
The daily tasks are the easiest bunch of objectives you can clear and these tasks should form part of your daily routine early on. Weekly task objectives should be naturally cleared within a week especially if you engage in the usual activities you should pursue on a daily basis. Main quests are comparable to achievements in most other games, serving as your milestones across various aspects of progression in your adventure.
Some of these feats may take a while to accomplish but it is because some feats simply require a lot more time for you to even reach. Sub tasks are much like the main ones but do not necessarily progress in a more linear method. These are usually tasks you can accomplish at your own pace.
Due to the limited period of time associated with event quests, it is often best to prioritize them as far as tasks go as limited events often have much better rewards than regular quests. Some of these event tasks are only available for a day and additional tasks will only reveal themselves once you have completed the current ones. In any case these tasks should be easy enough if you play actively.
Considering each and every quest objective available, it is always best to browse through all of these lists and have them serve as your guide towards accomplishing the ones that are easier to do so and take note of those feats where you seem to lag behind in.
There are certainly a lot more we expect to be added to the already huge and remarkable world within Touhou LostWord, especially considering that the roster of friends in the Japanese version is much larger than the global one. We no longer delved much into the auto mode function, but be sure to consider mastering battles on manual mode as you will certainly perform much better with strategic freedom by your side.
That’s about all we have for you as far as our Touhou LostWord tips, tricks and strategies are concerned. We certainly hope that you learned a great deal from our collection of tips we shared in this article. If you happen to spend an awful lot of time immersing yourself in its world and uncovered something beyond what we have already shared, do not hesitate to tell us about it in the comments!