#touhou lostword event review

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I Need To Talk About Lostword Yuyuko

What started off as a rant about the recent LostWord Easter event has basically become a rant about LW’s portrayal of Yuyuko. [WARNING: This post will have spoilers for the ending of the Touhou manga, Silent Sinner in Blue]

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The recent Easter-themed Sword Festival event has only cemented LostWord Yuyuko as one of my least favorite portrayals of Yuyuko. While gluttonous portrayals of the Ghost Mistress are common, few border on the character assassination that is LostWord’s portrayal. Let me put it this way; if this version of Yuyuko was in Silent Sinner in Blue, she would have fucked up Yukari’s plan, probably for a food related reason.

I’ve had problems with LW Yuyuko, even before this event. In the prologue, they flanderize her hungry personality so much that she comes across as stupid. She even straight up says that her first thoughts after encountering the Crystal McGuffins were to wonder “what’s the best way to cook these? Boiling, steaming or frying them?” 

(This is basically how Yuyuko is introduced in LostWord)

I continued to have my doubts when I got to Chapter 3. Now, admittedly, the version of Yuyuko in Chapter 3 is not the “main” Yuyuko. But I still had my reservations about her because 1) Alter Yuyuko feels more like a plot device, used to develop Alter Youmu, rather than a character in her own right and 2) so far the only difference between main Yuyuko and alter Yuyuko (besides alter Yuyuko’s physical appearance) is their relationship to food. 

While I’ll get more in-depth about point 1 when I fully review Chaper 3, I am not even kidding when I say that alter Yuyuko’s job is to... cook food for the other characters. Imagine coming up with a premise that lets you do any sort of Touhou AU, and this is what you come up with. “She’s a Yuyuko that cooks food instead of eating it!” It’s especially disappointing because I know the writers of LostWord can do better.

This Easter event has only cemented my dislike of LW Yuyuko. Let’s go over the climax of the event:

Toyohime reveals that the Egg McGuffin was originally hers and it’s basically capable of generating Infinite Egg dishes (don’t ask why Toyohime would do such a thing. This isn’t even the first time one of Toyohime’s inventions ended up loose in Gensokyo in LostWord. The LW Lunar Capital is VERY sanitized)

Yuyuko refuses to give the invention back. She has no real justification, only “finders keepers” bullshit. Yuyuko refusing to return the invention is just straight up character assassination. While the Lunarians of LW are much chummier than the canon versions, this is still a Lunar Capital that’s supposed to have threatened Earth, specifically Gensokyo, during incidents like SSiB and Touhou 15. Yuyuko is basically putting the Earth in danger... because she REALLY wants to eat eggs. 

Even the story thinks Yuyuko doesn’t have the moral high ground here. Marisa thinks her excuse doesn’t hold up (because that rule “only applies to the Outside World, not to Gensokyo”) while Youmu thinks Yuyuko is just going too far. 

Despite Yuyuko’s iffy justification, she duels Toyohime, Toyohime loses, probably because the MC wasn’t on her side, and then Toyohime relents because...? I don’t know, she was really embarrassed? The whole idea of Toyohime accepting those terms at all is silly. The Lunarians could easily invade Gensokyo if they really needed the McGuffin back, but whatever, this isn’t a story about Yuyuko’s actions having consequences

Yuyuko finally has the McGuffin to herself. Remember how Toyohime just explained that the device can make infinite egg dishes? Well despite what Toyohime has just said, Yuyuko has decided she is just going to eat everything for herself.  

(This was my exact reaction to Yuyuko’s bullshit)

At this point in the story, I was in denial. I thought “Marisa and Youmu objected to Yuyuko’s selfish actions. Does this mean... that maybe... this whole event is supposed to be character development for Yuyuko, and that final battle is going to be about slapping some sense into Yuyuko?”

Yeah... no. Instead of forcing Yuyuko to realize how stupid she’s being, we instead side with Yuyuko to beat up all the other characters that want to eat too. It’d be one thing if the others wanted ownership of the egg but everyone was more than willing to share. Rumia word for word says “You can share some of it”. Yuyuko won’t even do that, and the other characters are forced to duel her for it.

At some point, the writers realize that “wait, isn’t Yuyuko basically the villain here?” so the scene right after has Marisa point out “it’s literally infinite egg dishes”. What is Yuyuko’s response? “I forgot lol”. It’s an obvious attempt to remove the blame from Yuyuko, they even have the characters respond by going “oh we thought you were just being really selfish”. But this is a weak excuse. She forgot? There was a span of, like, five minutes between Toyohime carefully explaining the infinite dishes and Yuyuko “forgetting”. Even if you were to accept Yuyuko “forgetting that she can create more dishes”, this still does not reflect well on Yuyuko, because now she seems like she doesn’t pay attention.

Summed up, LostWord Yuyuko:

Seemingly has no attention span

Is childishly stubborn about things she feels she’s owed, even when other characters point out that she’s wrong

Is unwilling to share, even if it’s for characters who deserve it (like Sakuya and Tenshi, who basically rescued the egg earlier in the event)

Is more than willing to put everyone in danger for her appetite

Like I said, if LostWord Yuyuko was inserted into Silent Sinner in Blue, she’d have fucked up Yukari’s plan. Now I keep bringing this up, but what do I mean by this? Despite what fan works (and even some official works) would have you believe, Yuyuko is actually fairly intelligent. 

She’s not a scheming mastermind like Eirin or Yukari, but in canon she is consistently portrayed to be smarter than she lets on. Silent Sinner in Blue is the primary example of this: she acts as Yukari’s partner in crime, without needing any sort of instructions from Yukari. Not only does Yuyuko execute Yukari’s plan perfectly, she even manages to troll Yukari a little. Yukari expects her to steal a treasure: 

Yuyuko steals... sake.

(Who was it that was supposed to be left speechless...?)

While she could probably be described as being high Wisdom (rather than high Intelligence like Eirin or Yukari), the point is Yuyuko usually knows more than she lets on. I’d almost say the constant eating is meant to distract you from that... at least in canon. I’m certain most fan works think eating is all there is to her personality. This leads to my main point: the food obsession isn’t the main problem. While I don’t like it, it’s also not something that was invented by fans. You can’t be anti-foodie Yuyuko because it’s something the official works themselves have leaned into.

You can characterize Yuyuko in so many ways while still keeping her food obsession. The problem with LostWord is that’s Yuyuko’s characterization and relationship with food comes at the expense of her actual character. 

You’re telling me... that this Yuyuko... a Yuyuko who puts her hunger over Gensokyo’s safety... is supposed to be the same Yuyuko who took her own life because she realized how dangerous her powers were?  I’m supposed to believe that this Yuyuko, who forgot that her Egg McGuffin could create more dishes for everybody after only five minutes, was also able to carry out a month long Moon Heist for Yukari without the need for any instructions at all?

I don’t buy it. LostWord Yuyuko is not Yuyuko. This version of Yuyuko is a womanchild who has no thoughts, only images of food in her head. You know you’ve messed up the writing when noted dork, Youmu, comes off as the mature character out of the two.

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Almost forgot to do a short review of the current LW event:

This Nemuno-centered event is pretty neat (and I’m not just saying that because I like Nemuno / the cast of Touhou 16)

The difference between this event and the previous one (the Social Club event) is like night and day. In the Social Club event, the writer was just throwing throwing everything at the wall (it’s a Hostess club with spell card duels! And advice! And uh... horror story retellings...). In this event, the writer seems to be having a lot of fun with the cooking theme. Sure, it might be because it’s an excuse for them to use character’s powers in ridiculous ways again, but it’s amusing since all this effort is JUST for a cooking contest.

I also found this event to be better, just because they put more effort into the character moments. The Social Club event didn’t have much in the way of character dynamics (probably because it was a very random selection of characters). Meanwhile, this event intentionally paired Nemuno with Reimu, Kasen and Tewi, and almost every round had one of Nemuno’s teammates play off against their rivals (e.g. the second round was against Reisen, who plays off against Tewi, the final round was against the Moriyas, who play off against Reimu etc.)

I have three very minor gripes:

I can’t help but feel that the process of deciding the event’s theme went like this: ”let’s have a cooking event” -> “Nemuno has a knife” -> “knives are for cooking” -> “cooking event featuring Nemuno”

I don’t really like that they made Kasen the “Chinese Cuisine expert” on Reimu’s team. As far as I know, the only type of food Kasen is canonically associated with is sweets. This bugs me a lot more than it should, because I recently finished Mystia’s Izakaya and that game ALSO forgot that Kasen’s preference is for sweets.

I understand why, but this event does compromise on Nemuno’s personality. It’s the same deal with how LostWord Yukari HAS to be less canon accurate (because if Yukari was how she was like in canon, she’d make the story worse). If we got an accurate Nemuno, she’d never actually interact with any of these characters.

I can’t complain too much about that last point, because Nemuno fans (lik eme) are starved for content. At the same time, I do think it was a misstep for the writers to use characters like Kasen and Nemuno (who aren’t normally associated with cooking) while consciously avoiding the characters who canonically do cook (specifically Mystia and Miyoi). 

Those two characters even get namedropped in this event but do not appear (probably because both characters weren’t playable in LostWord at the time this event first released)

In all, it’s definitely one of the better side events. 

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Just finished the second chapter of Touhou LastWord’s main campaign and it’s actually pretty good

I liked that the alternate Gensokyo was very different. Instead of being the main Gensokyo “but everyone is wearing school uniforms for reasons” it’s set in the far, far future.

It’s just a bummer that these alternate versions of characters didn’t get alternate costumes. 

I’m not a fan of the way the story is doled out (you get 1 short cutscene every five battles, and the story progresses an inch before immediately defaulting to “look out, we need to fight these fairies”) but the overall story is nice. The strongest aspect is probably the character writing, though I’m also impressed by how consistently good the writer is at using the powers of characters in interesting ways.

The story gets points for having a serious Meiling.

It also gets points for having a Scarlet Devil story where Remilia is just fucking dead. I was expecting her to pop up near the end but it never happened lmao

My only complaint might be the continuity errors that come up with the ending. At the start, it seems like it’s a Gensokyo 1000 years from the present (which is to say, it’s some point after Touhou 16), but the ending reveals the Lost Word incident in that world began during Touhou 6. That wouldn’t be a problem... except the Scarlet Crew mentioned getting help from the Moriyas (and I don’t think they were in Gensokyo yet). This is 100% just a nitpick though.

Not gonna spoil who it is, but if the culprit of this incident was meant to be a genuine mystery they did a bad job of making it one.

I was gonna say “they should do more than just recolor existing characters for alternate versions” but then I saw this garish Flandre variant for the Japanese version, and, yeah, I’ll happily take all the lazy recolors you can think, of thanks.

I don’t know that I’d call it “so good that you absolutely need to get into LostWord to experience it” but it is better than expected. I’d at least call it better than most fan works (but I also admit that’s kind of a low bar)

As for the Valetine’s Day Event:

Love that it’s an event with the oni, hate that it’s an event that puts the oni in maid outfits.

I begrudgingly respect the fact that Remilia is grouped together with the oni (one of the official books puts vampires in the same classification as oni, so this is consistent with canon). =

Remilia with her grandma-looking maid outfit makes me laugh.

It was a missed opportunity to have Mamizou in this event and NOT have her troll Kasen or reference the last time they interacted in WaHH

I like the idea of the Oni pushing for Valentine’s Day as an alternative to Setsubun in Gensokyo.

The writing is definitely not as good as the main campaign. But since the event also lets me beat up Clownpiece, I’ll allow it.

[evilisk]

Not gonna lie, I completely zoned out while playing this event. I think it has the same problem as the recent Fairy event where I’m not the target demographic. Like, this event is probably a decent explanation of what Halloween is for the Japanese playerbase but “the mysterious apocalyptic event” is so obviously Halloween to Western fans that it’s a bit boring.

Note that it’s not a bad event. I actually the interconnectedness of Gensokyo in this event. Because the incident involves spirits, Eiki sends in Komachi and Satori to help with the situation. Akyuu and Kosuzu go to Hina for help (who in turn gets Alice and Medicine to help due to their expertise with dolls). Because Clownpiece is an underling of a big-shot like Hecatia, she ends up knowing some crucial information etc. The writer is definitely getting to flex their familiarity of Gensokyo’s worldbuilding. The event is not bad and it’s not badly written, the main plot just wasn’t for me.

Here are some other random thoughts about the event:

You’d think that the SDM would be the stars of this event precisely because they’d know what Halloween is, but no, they’re just as clueless as everyone else, which is a bit weird

I don’t have any strong feelings on the characterizations of the SDM crew. Their portrayal is like your typical SDM doujin (Remilia is a bit of a kid, Sakuya is her hypercompetent sidekick, Flandre is a baby relative to Remilia and Meiling is sleepy guard who is scared of Sakuya’s knives). 

Koakuma gets to show a little more personality in this event. She’s shown to read stories to children (and child-like youkai), she does stuff that she wouldn’t actually want Remilia or Patchouli to know about (like stealing sweets from the Mansion) and basically acts like a complete nerd (but the upbeat, dorky type of nerd, rather than an anti-social one)

TBH I can’t nail down Patchouli’s personality all that well. The most I have is that her personality revolves around books (maintaining books, being upset that Marisa is always borrowing her books etc.). She’s actually starting to feel like an accessory to Marisa, because aside from alter Patchouli in the Main Campaign, I don’t think Patchouli has appeared in an event without Marisa being close by.

On Rumia... she’s whatever. She’s not the only character to have a personality revolving around eating (Yuyuko), hell she’s not even the only character to have a personality revolving around eating humans specifically (Yoshika also does that)

I’m gonna say it now: I think Rumia is extremely uninteresting 99% of the time. For me, Rumia only works if she gets to actually be a savage (but low level) man-eating grunt youkai. Works that don’t actually show the man-eating parts on screen just cannot have a good Rumia portrayal IMO and I do actually include the official works in this. Basically, I’m saying that the only good Rumia portrayal is Zounose’s version of Rumia.

The last thing I want to point out is that this event has Rumia and Koakuma cosplaying each other. And that’s... really weird, because the two characters have extremely similar costumes. The end result is “Rumia but now she has wings” and “Koakuma but with a different color tie”. Why is that even a thing? Did they run out of budget or what

[evilisk]

More Thoughts on Touhou LostWord

I got around to finishing the first chapter. As the first real chapter, it’s rather predictably just a an introduction to the whole “Lost Word” concept. 

I do like how it’s set in a apocalyptic Gensokyo where the only survivors are Gensokyo’s Sages... and also Cirno. Even then, Cirno has a reason for being there.

The whole start of the chapter is funny to me. The Sages bring the main versions of Reimu, Marisa and Gensokyo to try and fix the apocalypse. But because the Sages aren’t human, they don’t realize Reimu and co. need like food and water... and they just dropped those three in a version of Gensokyo that wouldn’t have any (bc you know, apocalypse).

The whole setup is a great excuse to have the Sages flex their power levels. Like, they solve the water problem by having Okina power up Cirno so she can make ice / clean water.

Speaking of excuses, there is so much pussyfooting with what type of AU this alternate Gensokyo is meant to be. In story, they make you think “oh it’s not actually a High School AU Gensokyo, it’s actually just like our Gensokyo, it’s just the apocalypse is happening... and it just so happens that Yukari and the Sages are just into wearing school uniforms now”. BUT THEN there’s actually an in-universe reason for it (Gensokyo is merging with its surroundings and it just so happens that a High School has merged with the Hakurei Shrine so Yukari was unconsciously responding to the Shrine becoming a School). And all I can think is “this is a really convoluted excuse for a High School AU Gensokyo” 

Like c’mon: we know this is just an excuse for Reimu, Yukari and co. too be in High School uniforms. They don’t even give this Yukari a different personality from the main one; literally the only differentiator between the two Yukari’s is that “one wears a uniform and the other one doesn’t”

Anyway: I do really like that the first real chapter is trying to introduce world building from the canon setting. I actually ended up thinking about “okay what could be causing this incident to occur / who could the culprit be / what characters have space manipulation powers”. While I was completely wrong with my guesses, it’s neat that the game actually made me think. I’d be pleasantly surprised if the second chapter wasn’t just diving headfirst into the SDM pandering, but I guess it was gonna happen at some point.

I haven’t actually progressed through Chapter 2, because I realized “the meta” / the best way to play this game is to actually just log in once day, claim your bonuses, clear your dailies, send characters on Errands and basically just hoard all the in-game resources / currencies without actually playing the game. 

If you just go straight through, you’ll eventually hit a level wall, but if you do all the other stuff, you still get EXP. Basically, I’m waiting (warmly) for the game to accumulate the resources and levels I need to actually clear the chapter.

I did play through some of the active events. So I need to make a correction: I thought there was one event with the Tsukumo’s. The Tsukumo’s are in the event but they’re not the focus. The event is actually about Siscons I mean the Sis-Con (which is a perfectly normal, and definitely not weird, name for a perfectly normal, and definitely not weird, contest about who has the best little sister). 

It needs to be said: the writing for this event was low effort garbage I was initially expecting the whole game to have. From what I can tell, the side events consistently have worse writing than the main campaign, and I can see it. If you played a drinking game and took a shot anytime the words “big sister” and “little sister” were said in that event, you would probably die of alcohol poisoning.

At least the Tsukumos got a decent interaction in the event. Most of the interactions were moe junk but they actually brought up the fact that the Tsukumo’s aren’t biological sisters so that’s nice.

The other event was about the Lunarians accidentally making a Mochi Golem that’s attacking Gensokyo. It’s about as silly as it sounds, though the 10 minute cutscene of like, almost every character in Gensokyo just reacting to Mochizilla got a laugh out of me. Really shows you how many dang characters there are just in Gensokyo.

I don’t have much words on the actual gameplay. It seems both shallow and very convoluted (did the elemental system really have to have such a convoluted UI?). But I’m still gonna keep playing, just because I am interested in the main campaign (and I can tolerate just logging in once a day, for 30 minutes)

For those curious, here’s who I rolled in order:

Youmu (I got her, even though she’s one of the defaults, so I ended up with two Youmu’s right at the start)

Sunny Milk (my first unique character. She’s moderately useful)

Nemuno (Youmu kind of does her job better, but I actually like Nemuno so she has a place on my team)

Medicine (she’s a reward for clearing Chapter 1, but I like Medicine so this totally works out for me)

Suika (got her while trying to roll for Kasen)

Alice, Akyuu and Cirno (I got 100 free rolls and ended up with those three)

Got Koakuma from a random roll

Finally got Kasen. I was trying to roll her event 150 times (because if you do that, you can just choose one of the three oni), realized I didn’t have the resources to roll that many times (I needed, at minimum, 750 seal crystals), then immediately got her in a random roll. Thanks universe

Got Chen via Ritual (which guarantees a random character)

As reward for logging in for a week straight, I got Sanae

With Sanae, I was able to round out my group of 18 characters (you know 18 characters to get the maximum number of rewards from Errands). I’ll post againonce I’m actually high enough level to clear Chapter 2

[evilisk]

Since LostWord has kinda gotten my attention again (apparently, certain PC-98 characters have started to appear in JP, also my laptop may have died in the past week and I may be stuck with only my phone for the next two weeks), I decided to actually sit through and watch all the cutscenes for the recent LW Event. 

Seems like they intend to make Halloween another event that’s “an excuse to put characters in fanservicey outfits” with the theme this time being “Nurse costumes”

Despite being an excuse to put the undead characters (and Eirin) in Nurse costumes, the writing feels like it’s (confusingly) aimed at kids again. I mean, Eirin’s constant lecturing about washing hands and gargling gives me big “kid’s edutainment” energy. They also use zombie fairies (and go out of their way to mention that it’s just fairies cosplaying as zombies, instead of using actual zombies)

Shouldn’t be a surprise, but people act out of character in this event. The biggest offender is Eirin; the “Brain of the Moon” can’t figure out obvious stuff and makes constant excuses to fight people (though if she was in character, there would be almost no event battles for players bc Eirin would have figured everything out in about ten minutes). 

The other egregious example was Eiki. Her portrayal is mostly fine (in fact, I like how her title comes with a black and white background), but at the very end she lets Seiga off the hook. There’s not even the popular fan trope of characters escaping as Eiki prepares to lecture everyone, just lets off Ms. Wicked Hermit get off scot-free.

I accept that their version of Seiga is pretty different from what I’d prefer. It’s clear they want to characterize her as Yoshika’s Mom. At least her attempt to have Yoshika make friends (by ‘creating’ more zombies) is definitely a Seiga move, it’s just done in a PG-13 way here.  

The story is about human diseases, yet the people that get sick are Hermits (beings that can subsists of mist), Hourai Immortals (who are supposed to be immune to diseases) and other non-humans. This is totally just a nitpick though, since there aren’t that many named Human characters.

The twist / actual explanation for the outbreak is silly, but in a good way

I rate this event a “if my laptop hadn’t melted and I had anything better to do, I’d rate it a 4/10, but since it did and I am very bored it’s a 5″ out of 10. 

[evilisk]

I don’t get who this event is for.

Let’s start with why I find this whole event to be weird: this event feels weird because it feels like it’s written for kids. The story is about the Fairies getting their own Shichi-Go-San and while it’s a cute premise, it’s hard to imagine that the scenarios (which include scenes like “Yukari and Okina explaining to the Fairies why they should eat their vegetables”) are interesting or insightful to anyone that’s not a literal child.

It’s especially weird because I could have sworn that the target demographic for LostWord was adults with disposable income. I mean I know the main character of LostWord is a little girl, and I know that Touhou is apparently popular with the kiddies in Japan but Touhou LostWord also has:

Touhou characters in bunny suits

Touhou characters in maid uniforms

Touhou characters in cheerleader outfits

There’s also the Fantasy Rebirth costumes for certain characters which are, uh, certainly interesting...

Like I said, I don’t know why this gacha RPG is talking down to its audience like they’re not full grown adults...

[evilisk]

I’m having mixed thoughts about the Seiga Social Club event in LostWord. You can really feel the writer struggling to make the “Touhou Hostesses” theme actually work with LostWord’s format. Seiga’s Club goes from “our main draw is you can watch our hostesses engage in spell card duels” to “our hostesses will do literally anything, up to and including serving food, telling creepy pastas, giving you life advice and playing this danmaku/shogi sport we literally just invented five seconds ago” 

It’s a pretty absurd event. I don’t mind absurd stories, in fact, the event actually gets pretty funny towards the end. I can also appreciate the love the event gives to side characters like Seiga, Letty and Jo’on. And it’s not just about getting more Letty and Seiga content, they actually get depth here.

At the same time, the main story is kind of underwhelming. The A-plot (with Sanae) is kind of weak while the B-plot (trying to be the best Social Club) just doesn’t really go anywhere. Like they present several rival clubs at one point, but there’s no real competition as the other clubs basically implode overnight. Jo’on decides to quit while she’s ahead, while the other club, the hilariously named “Buddhist Drinking Club” which is run by Byakuren’s crew (behind Byakuren’s back, of course) turns out how you’d expect.

If nothing else, the alts are really nice. Well, I think Junko’s costume is a little tacky but I’d totally buy Letty and Seiga’s costumes (if I had enough of the in-game currency... and also if Letty and Seiga were actually playable. Yes, I am still upset that Seiga, Yoshika and now Letty star in this event but still cannot be added to your party)

[evilisk]

Just finished going through the current event rerun in LostWord (it’s a mystery-themed event starring the three Witches, Kosuzu and Akyuu) and I have thoughts about it

The Good

As a big Forbidden Scrollery fan, I’m always up for Kosuzu and Akyuu shenanigans. We don’t get enough of them in fanworks tbh

Cool mystery theme. It’s much classier than some of the other events (which include “an excuse to put characters in maid outfits”, “an excuse to put characters in cheerleading outfits” and “a perfectly okay theme about all the sister groups in Touhou, presented in the weirdest way”)

Speaking of classy, god do Marisa, Alice and Patchouli’s costumes look good. If I ever save up enough of those God Crystals, I’m definitely getting Patchouli’s alt (mostly bc Patchouli’s default portrait is embarrassing...)

I like the "overprotective parents” characterization given to Kanako and Suwako... even if it’s not super accurate.

The Bad

The mystery writing kinda sucks. It starts off decently enough but it’s super obvious that the writers gave up halfway through because, while Alice and Patchouli do actual detective work for their portions of the story, Marisa’s “plan” is to get everyone in Gensokyo to accuse one another, and then to nab whoever didn’t get accused by other people. 

On the one hand, Marisa’s plan isn’t actually successful, so it’s not like the story condones her plan. But on the other hand, it’s a really stupid plan and I can’t believe Marisa actually followed through on it. Incredibly dumb plans like that are Reimu’s thing

The lackluster mystery wouldn’t be as disappointing if the main story wasn’t already so much like a mystery story with its structure TBH. Each story has you investigating each AU’s Lost Word like you’re looking for a killer and a motive. I definitely expected better.

Other

While it’s cute that the story begins with Yukari giving Akyuu and Kosuzu a license to participate in spellcard duels, I’m fairly certain there is no such license in canon. 

The general setup is nice and “realistic”. Akyuu has gone exclusively to Kosuzu for book-related matters, I also like the idea of Kosuzu enlisting Marisa and her Witch pals in a book search. What’s silly is the idea that someone would steal the Gensokyo Chronicle so they can “get the other hand on other characters”. The book isn’t an objective list of weaknesses (for example, it has information about shinigami and hermits we know to be untrue by other, more reliable sources in-universe). It’s disappearance wouldn’t cause an incident quite like the story suggests... this is a total nitpick though. It’s obvious they needed to up the stakes SOMEHOW.

The idea of a massive nerd like Kosuzu getting into any sort of action is, no offense, kind of laughable. We’re talking about someone who canonically fainted when (she was aware) that a youkai was within social distancing range of her.

tl;dr I think the event gets point for not being an excuse to put characters in weird costumes and for having Akyuu and Kosuzu in the forefront, but it also loses points for being a mystery-themed event with a less interesting mystery than any of the main game chapters