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cosmicspearDespite this being mostly a retread of something I'd just played, I still had a lot of fun with it.
Tuhou Puppet Dance Performance: Shard of Dreams occupies an...interesting space. It's effectively filling the "third version" role for the original game, though you still need to have the original installed to run it. This does mean that a lot of the game is stuff I've already covered in my last review, so I'll just link you to that one now. And yet at the same time it's also a massive addition to the base game, more so than anything Nintendo ever did with the proper Pokemon games.
The plot mostly follows the same beats as the original, naturally. There's a fair number of new events, though, mostly placed in areas that in the original looked suspiciously like they were meant to have something in them—the door under the Myouren Temple cemetery, for instance. There's also a game-spanning event where you find books for Kosuzu, which turn out to look suspiciously like an account of the plot as it went originally. The big addition plot-wise, though, is a proper postgame campaign leading into a new final battle, which is very nice on the whole. The story's still not winning any awards, but it has enough additions to be worth another look.
The new plot additions are hardly the only thing Shard of Dreams adds, though.
First in terms of new gameplay additions: new puppets! The original went up to DDC, but now we've got the casts of Urban Legend in Limbo and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom to play with. What's that, you say? That doesn't sound like a particularly large addition, even with the multiple styles? Well, FocasLens also added a fourth style to every puppet. Extra style is something of a wild card, having no specific mechanical focus but tending to give radically different typing from the other style options or some more unique effects—like giving Rika separate attack and defense modes in the vein of Aegislash, or letting Kosuzu change her type and statistical focus by equipping specific books.
What's important about Extra style as an addition, though, is that between it and the newcomers the total number of final team options, discounting normal style, has risen from 236 to 378. I hope you can appreciate just how ridiculous that is, especially when the typical increase in the actual Pokemon third versions is a big fat zero.
There's also a new type, Warped, which is largely sprinkled around in various Extra forms for the pretty blatant purpose of doing to wind what fairy did to dragon in Pokemon. Additionally, Dream is now a real type that puppets can have, albeit an extremely rare one that still has no good moves.
I should also bring up the changes to the level curve. Because there's a real postgame this time around instead of just a bunch of storyless bonus fights, the main story now operates on lower levels in general. It's also better at keeping you at the levels it wants out of you, speaking somewhat to the developers having learned from the original where you tend to overlevel almost everything without really trying. The general level gulf between low-cost puppets (who take less experience to level up) and high-cost ones is a lot lower now, too—the experience requirements for the highest and lowest costs varied from the middle by 30% above or below in the original, but now the variance is only 15% in either direction. This means low-cost puppets don't end up 10 or more levels ahead of everything else like they used to, and in general it's easier to keep party levels relatively even.
Equally worth mentioning is that enemy teams are a lot better on the high end than they used to be. In the original you'd generally just see your opponents throw out whatever move had the highest damage against your current puppet, but now they'll more frequently use buffs, entry hazards, and switch out to counter what you've brought in. The puppets you're up against also get a lot stronger and more varied in the late game, with an increased focus on synergy within teams. By the end of it this led me to, for the first time in my Pokemon-playing career, actually use a dedicated entry hazard setter after spending most of my life thinking those things were only good for competitive play. I genuinely hadn't expected to need anything like that!
Overall, Shard of Dreams is a wonderful expansion to an already very good game, and is the version I'd recommend playing. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone looking for a well-built, quality Pokemon-like.
Tuhou Puppet Dance Performance: Shard of Dreams occupies an...interesting space. It's effectively filling the "third version" role for the original game, though you still need to have the original installed to run it. This does mean that a lot of the game is stuff I've already covered in my last review, so I'll just link you to that one now. And yet at the same time it's also a massive addition to the base game, more so than anything Nintendo ever did with the proper Pokemon games.
The plot mostly follows the same beats as the original, naturally. There's a fair number of new events, though, mostly placed in areas that in the original looked suspiciously like they were meant to have something in them—the door under the Myouren Temple cemetery, for instance. There's also a game-spanning event where you find books for Kosuzu, which turn out to look suspiciously like an account of the plot as it went originally. The big addition plot-wise, though, is a proper postgame campaign leading into a new final battle, which is very nice on the whole. The story's still not winning any awards, but it has enough additions to be worth another look.
The new plot additions are hardly the only thing Shard of Dreams adds, though.
First in terms of new gameplay additions: new puppets! The original went up to DDC, but now we've got the casts of Urban Legend in Limbo and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom to play with. What's that, you say? That doesn't sound like a particularly large addition, even with the multiple styles? Well, FocasLens also added a fourth style to every puppet. Extra style is something of a wild card, having no specific mechanical focus but tending to give radically different typing from the other style options or some more unique effects—like giving Rika separate attack and defense modes in the vein of Aegislash, or letting Kosuzu change her type and statistical focus by equipping specific books.
What's important about Extra style as an addition, though, is that between it and the newcomers the total number of final team options, discounting normal style, has risen from 236 to 378. I hope you can appreciate just how ridiculous that is, especially when the typical increase in the actual Pokemon third versions is a big fat zero.
There's also a new type, Warped, which is largely sprinkled around in various Extra forms for the pretty blatant purpose of doing to wind what fairy did to dragon in Pokemon. Additionally, Dream is now a real type that puppets can have, albeit an extremely rare one that still has no good moves.
I should also bring up the changes to the level curve. Because there's a real postgame this time around instead of just a bunch of storyless bonus fights, the main story now operates on lower levels in general. It's also better at keeping you at the levels it wants out of you, speaking somewhat to the developers having learned from the original where you tend to overlevel almost everything without really trying. The general level gulf between low-cost puppets (who take less experience to level up) and high-cost ones is a lot lower now, too—the experience requirements for the highest and lowest costs varied from the middle by 30% above or below in the original, but now the variance is only 15% in either direction. This means low-cost puppets don't end up 10 or more levels ahead of everything else like they used to, and in general it's easier to keep party levels relatively even.
Equally worth mentioning is that enemy teams are a lot better on the high end than they used to be. In the original you'd generally just see your opponents throw out whatever move had the highest damage against your current puppet, but now they'll more frequently use buffs, entry hazards, and switch out to counter what you've brought in. The puppets you're up against also get a lot stronger and more varied in the late game, with an increased focus on synergy within teams. By the end of it this led me to, for the first time in my Pokemon-playing career, actually use a dedicated entry hazard setter after spending most of my life thinking those things were only good for competitive play. I genuinely hadn't expected to need anything like that!
Overall, Shard of Dreams is a wonderful expansion to an already very good game, and is the version I'd recommend playing. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone looking for a well-built, quality Pokemon-like.
