As a Touhou fan, the cult classic fan project Mystia's Izakaya was a game I had my eye on for a while. I originally intended to get it on my computer, but when I found out that it was getting a Switch port in 2024 with all the DLC included, I decided to wait and experience the game as a complete package on my system of choice. I'm wouldn't say I'm a die-hard fan of these kinds of restaurant simulators, but as someone who grew up on Papa's Pizzaria games, holds up Mystia as one of their favorite Touhou characters, and adores the rhythm game genre, there's definitely still a lot that I ended up loving.
Keep in mind that Mystia's Izakaya is a pretty long game. It's meant to be a calming game you can sink hours upon hours into, and with the whopping five DLC campaigns included, it would take a very long time for me to put out a review if I did all of that content. So, this review is more going to be a summary of my early impressions after putting a few hours into the game. Thankfully, these impressions are mostly quite positive.
Mystia's Izakaya is a game about Mystia Lorelei, a night sparrow youkai who runs a small scale food stand near where she lives. When her friend, Kyouko Kasodani, almost gets her kneecaps broken for not paying her debt, Mystia decides to pay them off for her, all the while growing her business and unknowingly preparing to satisfy a customer so ravenous she can destroy the world. On a story level, Mystia's Izakaya is really everything I could've wanted. Mystia is one of my favorite Touhou characters because she has a life outside of being the second boss of Touhou 8. She has a business, she starts a rock band, and with a character from a completely different game to boot. Mystia's Izakaya digs into that life outside of the mainline games, showing how Mystia grew her restaraunt and how she and Kyouko started up their punk rock band, and it's really charmingly written throughout.
The game is split into two distinct halves, the day and night segments. In the day, you can explore pretty much the entirety of Gensokyo to gather up ingredients and do quests for characters. The sheer scope of the Mystia's Izakaya's overworld is truly impressive, I don't think I've ever played another game where it felt like I really got to just roam around Touhou's iconic main setting. During these sections, a truly impressive amount of Touhou characters show up and get little arcs and storylines that persist throughout each campaign, and they're all written just as wonderfully as Mystia is. Touhou as a series can feel a bit narrow in its vision, with such a large cast but media so short-form that not too many of them can be super developed, so it's really great to see Mystia's Izakaya work to try to give pretty much every character a time in the spotlight. That's not to discount the gameplay though. While the game slowly opens up with increasingly larger areas so you don't feel super overwhelmed right off the bat, you'll eventually be flooded with options for what you want to do each day, which leads to some really engaging time management.
The night segments are what you spend the day preparing for. While the day has you racing the clock, the night has you outlasting the clock as you need to run your izakaya for the night. This plays out more along the lines of a cooking game like Papa's Pizzaria or Overcooked. You get orders from customers and you need to give them the right one before they get bored. There's a lot of depth and mechanics here, though, and Mystia's Izakaya strikes the perfect balance between easing the player into everything while still amping up the complexity hours into the game. There's Rare Guests who trust you to give them what you think you'll like, brief rhythm segments while you cook that can give you buffs, recruitable helpers who you can level up, and I still feel like there's stuff I haven't learned about yet. These night segments can get pretty stressful, but thankfully, the game remains reasonably generous on a casual level, saving the toughest cooking challenges for the DLC. The debts you need to pay are generally fairly lax given where you are in the game, you can pause whenever you want to analyze your stock without risking running the timer, and you can't burn your food, thank goodness.
As I mentioned above, Mystia's Izakaya is a pretty massive game, easily some of the most bang for your buck I've seen in a while. The main campaign alone is fairly beefy for a $25 dollar game, boasting achievements, leveling up and bonding systems, five major areas to clear, unlockable costumes, and a ridiculous amount of recipes to find, but we also got five similarly large DLC campaigns bundled in with the Switch version. On top of that, Mystia's Izakaya also includes an entire built-in rhythm game with 60+ songs and a ranking system, not too dissimilar from Squid Beatz in Splatoon 2. It's a very fun rhythm game too, I honestly think I could sink more time into it than the actual game. On top of all that, Mystia's Izakaya is just really polished. The game boasts some beautiful pixelart with some lush backgrounds and adorable character artwork, and the soundtrack contains a ton of calming remixes of Touhou music. It's a beautiful testament to just how dedicated the Touhou fandom is, that they can create a fangame that's able to compete with AAA releases in terms of scope and production values at half the price.
So this has all been incredibly positive, but do I have any issues with Mystia's Izakaya? I'd say my biggest problem with the game is that it can jump between iyashikei levels of calm and ridiculously stressful at a moment's notice. It's very easy to find yourself into a nice groove only for things to spiral completely out of control with a single error. But even that feels a bit subjective. Frankly, I think Mystia's Izakaya does what it's trying to do damn near perfectly, but as much as I've been enjoying it, I can't say it's really my thing. I tend to prefer tight, concise experiences with a defined endpoint, but Izakaya is obviously a game you're meant to sink a ton of time into and chip away at slowly. And with a few examples, those are the kinds of games I tend to bounce off of at one point or another. So far, Mystia's Izakaya has been addicting, it gives me that "one more night" feeling every time I play, but I just know I'm going to fall off it eventually, possibly before I even finish the main campaign.
But maybe that's okay, because regardless of when I stop, the time I have been and will be spending with Mystia's Izakaya has been immensely charming and enjoyable. And with the sheer amount of content, mechanical depth, top-notch Touhou writing, and general production values, I can definitely say that it was worth the plunge. It's definitely one of the best Touhou fangames out there.
4/5 Stars
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