(After receiving a developer response about the listed issues, this review will undergo periodic editing as I go through the game and update with what has been addressed. Beyond the initial warning, you can find a review of my experience in the game thus far. If you are interested only in the checklist of corrections made, please see the end of the review.)

This is an extremely short "review" because I'm just putting the word out that the text formatting and data tables for the game (item/equipment descriptions, one of Reimu's Spell Cards has had its name replaced with the unrelated text string "Ready-made meal ticket", etc.) are absolutely CHUNKED in places. There's incomprehensible gibberish in some descriptions, the font is sometimes smashed flat and/or interspersed with sudden and unnecessary linebreaks, text in some of the dialogue runs behind UI elements and cuts off, some tutorial text and phrasing reads like it was just machine translated or is outright erroneous (the tutorial for Izanagi Links refers to a character as "Fushiri", which isn't remotely her name). The game's absolutely playable despite the raw spots, the main script and most NPC dialogue seems fine, but there's no reason for it to be in such an inconsistent state.

I never once saw anything so bizarre in Gensou Wanderer Reloaded, but for this title, somebody localizing into English, at least, made a real mess that rears up almost the instant you start the game. While I'm hoping this will be looked after quickly, BUYER BEWARE.

The Review

Cutting right to the heart of the matter, Foresight is not what you might be expecting if you were a devoted fan of Gensou Wanderer Reloaded, as it would be more accurate to describe it as a "Mystery Dungeon" for people just dipping their toes into concepts of the genre with a greater focus on more standard RPG mechanics/conveniences. There are dungeons in the game that force empty inventories however, so "Skin Diving" isn't entirely out of the equation. Player advancement is more tied to steady improvement through management of the Izanagi Links system (which is mostly like fairly straight-forward "skill trees") and putting together situational gear depending on the dungeon being tackled, though without equipment evolution and crafting to consider, equipment development and discovery is much simplified compared to prior entries in the GW series. There are no material items to gather(hoard) and combinations to discover that will let you make sudden and hilarious leaps in power, unfortunately. All Izanagi Merging appears to do is slap equipment and items together and transfer their bonus values and non-fixed seals over to the resulting (that is, the first item chosen) equipment; it is very basic. "Mission Points", MP, are earned by clearing dungeons and are used to fuel the Merging process, which seems to cost 100 points per use universally.

Unlike other Mystery Dungeon games, character levels carry over and are not reset (at any point, at least from what I've seen thus far) and there's nothing to concern oneself about when it comes to a game over; not only are items retained, but you can simply fast travel back to any checkpoint in the dungeon you may have reached, which tend to be every six floors or so in my experience. In fact, the Hakurei Shrine can even be renovated with money earned to increase the inventory limit and, inconceivably; the Offertory Box will passively generate income (that's how you know it's not canon; the money being there, not Reimu stealing it) up to a certain limit, which can also be expanded. Other renovations can have Takane and Rinnosuke set up shop at the Shrine as well, but I didn't find that to be particularly useful (their inventories are extremely basic and despite advertising that you can sell items directly from storage to Rinnosuke, this doesn't actually seem possible) compared to investing in the Torii Gate for bonus EXP.

While the graphics and music are all fine and will be familiar enough if you're a fan of the other Aquastyle titles, I do find that the screen real estate is FAR too cramped in this game with no options to address it. The size of UI elements during dungeon exploration and the combat log taking up the entire lower half of the screen while visible will, if you are anything like me, make you feel positively claustrophobic. I also don't know why there still isn't a soft reset or "Retry Floor" feature in this game despite Lotus Labyrinth receiving that Quality of Life change in its Steam release. I'd like to see an update for those gripes, but there are plenty of other fish to fry in these particular waters already.

I would recommend this game only if A.) You're ready for the translation issues already indicated, whether they're resolved or no, and B.) If you found Gensou Wanderer Reloaded (and perhaps other Mystery Dungeon games) to be a little too daunting in the challenge and/or commitment (read: grinding for Seals in 80 ~ 100 foor dungeons, etc. in GWR) department and would like to play something vaguely similar but more lenient.

Update Status

- FIXED: Reimu's Spell Card corrected from "Ready-made meal ticket"
- Text formatting in item descriptions still riddled with multiple linebreaks
- Dialogue advance Yin-Yang Orb icon still obscures text during conversation if it runs on too long
- Peculiar phrasing still present in descriptions, eg. "A piece of wood that had fallen around"
- Some nonsense item descriptions still linger, but the Origami Toy Sword example has been "fixed" (It now shows perfectly intelligible text... for the Origami Shield)
- Items that tell you they do the opposite of their intended effect (eg. Izakaya Tray's description tells you that it makes you hungrier, when the actual effect of its Seal is to make you LESS hungry)
- Items have had their descriptions swapped (Weapons with Defensive equipment, but not vice-versa)
- NPCs speak the dialogue of other characters entirely or repeat a single piece of dialogue across multiple NPCs
- Dialogue in non-story critical segments (tutorials, sub-events) veers wildly between "intelligible enough" and "total nonsense" (eg. Sunny Milk asking why Cirno froze a saw, which would keep it from being able to cut anything, then immediately saying "Why didn't you just freeze the saw completely?". I don't like that the established stupidity of faeries is making me feel like I'm being gaslit here)

This is a tough review.

The short version: This game is lacking in many ways from previous installments, is a major step back for the franchise, and is blatantly unfinished with major padding. My actual playtime would be about ~10 hours, anything past that was forced grinding due to stat walls.

The long version: I was a fan of the last two genso wanderer games both, and was looking forward to Foresight a lot. But unfortunately it's lacking in so many ways, from big to small. I won't be touching on the translation issues, but it is very rough right now - the plot is perfectly fine, but item flavor text ranges from "odd" to "completely incoherent."

Let's start with the little things. There's no trap list, no seal list, no bestiary, no character catalog. The number of cut-ins is a fraction of what it used to be, reduced to a meager 15. The achievement list is tiny. Cosmetically changing your weapon and armor's appearance is gone. These are are little things, but they're all sorely missed.

Then, the gameplay. Enemy diversity is a fraction of what it was in previous games, both in quantity (having only *some* of the cast of EoSD through IN) and quality (enemies simply only have one, maybe two gimmicks now). I understand this was in part due to them making new sprites, but they made a lot of HQ sprites for LLR as well. To simply throw those all out is odd.

There's also only one playable character this time, Reimu. She's...fine, but the lack of diversity from previous game is keenly missed.

The Izanagi system is bad. Flat out. They didn't put enough thought or care into who gives what benefits (why does Miyoi give human slayer? Why does Takane give Lunar slayer? Why doesn't Sannyo, the gambler, get any crit?) or even the progression of benefits (A damage bonus while floating is one of the first things you get, but you have no way of obtaining float until the postgame). I understand they wanted metaprogression in this, but it's just so bad, so bland, the benefits don't fit the links flavor wise, and it takes way too long to max things out unless you grind in a cheesy way (letting your partner Explore and kill everything offscreen because that is WAY faster than you, yourself, doing it).

The Izanagi system also cannibalized other areas of the game. Seals are much less varied now, and have been reduced to just the slayers & guards and a smattering of other effects like crit and avoid. Resonance seals are also gone. Crafting is gone. Weapons no longer level up or transform. There's also far fewer spell cards, talismans, and medicine - there are numerous entries in the item codex that were never discovered by me which suggest they might exist, but if they exist at all it's in such vanishingly small quantities I did not discover over half of them in my hours of grinding. This makes bare handed (aka "skin dives") dungeons also, by extension, feel a lot more RNG and less interesting as you simply have far, far less control. This isn't as big of a issue as you might think as there are only two, very short bare handed dungeons in the entire game.

The final dungeon exaggerates all of this. Up until that point you could do some maybe light grinding to get the extra edge you needed to get past a troublesome boss I suppose, but you wind up hitting *hard* stat walls you simply cannot outplay. You need a nearly filled out set of Izanagi links to get past, which is going to take grinding. Over half my playtime was grinding Izanagi links for the final dungeon, and that was with optimal weapons/armor/charm/medicine.

The postgame is not much better. Refights against all the story bosses with some mandatory grind (for most, one is kind of a joke), no new abilities, and right after forcing you to refight them all again in the story is extremely padding. That is it, there are no extra dungeons like previous entries, not even a old hakurei well dungeon or the like. There is absolutely nothing wrong with reusing content, but they way they do it is an absolute slog. In the past, fleshed out postgames for these games were the domain of expansion packs, but we're in 2024 and they're charging 40$, standards are higher. It is also unfinished - there is mention of a post-incident party, but nothing of the sort ever happens, and there is a icon for "unidentified items" dungeon which goes completley unused as there are no dungeons with unidentified items. If there was a warning and they had told us post-release content was coming, perhaps this might have been acceptable, but as it stands this game is about -10ish hours of actual gameplay and cutscenes with about 15 to 20 hours of padding, mandatory grind (or more if you don't do cheese).

The plot is nonsensical. To keep spoilers to a minimum - the first half of the game is a tremendously abridged version of the first three windows games, to the point of cutting out numerous characters (poor prismrivers do show up but dont even get any lines) and being nearly nonsensical. This is all in service of a plot twist (as alluded to on the store page) that, to put it simply, makes little sense and they don't try to handle the numerous plot holes. If it was a silly story that'd be fine, but it wants to be taken seriously and falters immensely, for a whelming payoff that doesn't make the tired and stale EoSD, PCB, and IN pandering worth it.

Outside of the main plot, numerous characters from Unconnected Marketeers show up in extremely brief segments that would barely qualify as cameos. I'm not even sure why they're here outside of a "hey, we exist," it just spreads the game's already quite limtied screentime way too thin.

This game is not worth your 40$ as it stands. Get it together, Aquastyle. It's completely unacceptable to release a unfinished game (without warnings!) in the era of early access, and the game has many issues that could have been avoided if the developers had enough Foresight.

It genuinely kills me to do this because I adore this series and I know it doesn't tend to sell super well in english countries, but the translation is... really in poor shape. The plot scenes are generally fine, but the descriptions of items range from "acceptable" to "completely incorrect on every level" to "utter nonsense that reads like a machine translation". Luckily, the descriptions on most seals are correct, and thank god for that - it's playable, it absolutely is! But it's clear little to no proofreading was done on any of the UI/gameplay elements, and it hugely drags down the moment to moment experience as a result.

While I'm generally pretty forgiving of janky translations, especially on niche games, having item descriptions stating the opposite of their actual effect just isn't acceptable. They really need to do a quality pass on the english localization, that's just all there is to it.