-I’d like to begin with a simple introduction from you, if you don’t mind.

Thanks for having me! I’m 3peso, and I develop games (primarily RPGs) under my solo circle “Nise-Eikoku Studio,” AKA “N-E-Studio. “As you explained already, I just released my new Touhou fangame “Labyrinth of Touhou Tri.” Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d ever end up getting an article in Touhou Garakuta Magazine!

-How did you first learn about Touhou? What drew you to it?

My first exposure to Touhou was back in school. A friend said they had a cool game to show me, invited me over to their house, and had me play Perfect Cherry Blossom. Later on, I heard that Imperishable Night had released, so I bought a copy, and from that point I was walking the path of the doujin otaku.

As for what drew me to Touhou… Hmm, I guess it would be that I like the characters, but digging a little deeper, I think a big part of it is that the Spell Card system does such a great job of highlighting characters’ traits and what makes them so appealing.

When talking about traditional shmups, you’re left having to say things like “this one boss’s fourth pattern,” but Touhou’s special ability to let you say “Cirno’s Icicle Fall” or “Yuyuko’s Repository” makes it easier for players to share info. Spell Cards’ names and visual presentation also allow players to infer things about characters without even realizing, and the actual danmaku patterns themselves are all gorgeous and memorable. Furthermore, there’s the experience of listening to such awesome music while bosses use such big, flashy attacks on you…

It only stands to reason that something like that would really help you get absorbed in a game, right? I really love that feeling.

-What’s your favorite Touhou character?

Hmm… I think it’d come down to a battle between Ran and Tsukasa…?

-What’s your favorite official Touhou game?

I think it’d have to be Imperishable Night. Not only was it the first mainline game that I sunk a lot of time into, but the Spell Practice system not only made it easy to practice the game, but also offered enjoyment through filling out your captures bit by bit, each day. I was absorbed in the game pretty much every day.


Spell Practice disappeared for a while after Imperishable Night, but I was glad to see it make its eventual return. Last Words and Overdrive cards are really exciting, aren’t they?

-Why did you start creating Touhou fan content?

I’ve already explained what drew me to Touhou itself, but I’m also a big RPG fan. Back then, I would always find myself imagining the answers to questions like “if this character were in an RPG, what kind of kit would suit her best?”, and “if this Spell Card were an attack, what kind of attack would it be?”.

Before I knew it, I felt the desire to express those answers in RPGs myself, so I started making Touhou fangames… I remember the order of events going something like that. At the time, some of my biggest influences were Etrian Odyssey, Rance 6, and the RPGs created by the doujin circle “Hachimitsu Kumasan.”

-Do you have any Touhou fangames by other circles you’d recommend?

Hmmmm… If I had to recommend just a single one, it would be Touhou Souzinengi V -The Genius of Sappheiros-. If I were allowed to add on a couple more, I guess I’d suggest Fantasy Maiden Wars and Touhou Genso Wanderer -Reloaded-?

-What’s your favorite dungeon crawler/DRPG?

It would have to be Etrian Odyssey. Its design, balance, and many other factors made it serve as the clear de facto standard for modern DRPGs, and I imagine it was a real eye-opening title for plenty of people besides just me.

My personal favorites are EO1, EO2, and EO4. If I had to suggest a place for a new player to start, it would be EO3. EO3 received an HD remaster in 2023, making it really easy to play even on PC, so I’d suggest anyone reading this to give it a try if they haven’t yet! And I know I was asked for a single game, but some of my other favorites are Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk and Demon Gaze.

-What’s your favorite non-dungeon crawler RPG?

I’m a big fan of Hachimitsu Kumasan’s RPGs, “AirRPG,” “Romancing Kanon,” and “ToK,” but my favorite out of those would have to be Romancing Kanon. AirRPG is a high-difficulty RPG, yet it’s made in such a way that you can finish the game at the level you start at. That kind of game balance feels almost like a work of art to me.

ToK takes what makes RPGs exciting and condenses those elements into a game where you explore massive dungeons, search for equipment, learn abilities, and combine all your strengths to get overpowered and fight difficult bosses.

I like the different directions both the games take, but Romancing Kanon strikes a perfect middle ground. It doesn’t go overboard with its quantity of skills and equipment or the power they give you, allowing its bosses to be balanced perfectly, but it still offers depth in terms of party building and grinding for rare stuff. Overall, its difficulty, battle strategies, character improving, and so on are balanced just the way I like them.

-I think anyone who plays LoT can understand that you have a long history with RPGs, but the state surrounding RPGs and games in general has changed a lot from how it was back then. As both an RPG player and developer, what has changed for you?

Hmm, I’m not sure… I feel like things are still the same at the core.
I’m enjoying playing games and chugging away at making my own, same as always.

-What drives you to keep creating RPGs?

My drive is the inspiration and excitement I’ve received from the countless great games I’ve played, like the ones I’ve already mentioned.

…Not a very interesting answer, I know, but those reading this have experienced what it feels like to enjoy games as a child too, right? As a child, I would often play series like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, SaGa, and Metal Max with friends, and the freshness, excitement, inspiration, and sense of adventure I felt back then go beyond what I can properly describe. The emotions I felt back then were permanently etched into my brain, turning me into a man who just thinks about games all the time.

-How do you design your boss fights to be fun, challenging, and complex?

Typically, I start by deciding which moves, strategies, and gimmicks to use to represent the boss, then spread out from there and come up with a general movement pattern and stats,and then I write down two or three detailed strategies and parties to fight the boss with.I then test the boss against those strategies, and go through iterations of changing gimmicks, stats, attack order, and so on. Once I’m at the point where I’m satisfied with that testing, I narrow down the lowest level I’m able to defeat the boss at and adjust from there.

In Tri, Lunatic’s Challenge Levels are about 10~15% higher than that number, and Hard’s are about 20~33% higher.

-What kind of process do you go through when designing dungeon maps? Are there any ideas or gimmicks you ended up scrapping?

I start by choosing the theme if I want one, then make a complex map with somewhat difficult gimmicks based around it. Afterwards, I gradually simplify what I’ve made. That’s my typical balance process.

Unlike combat and general game balance, I don’t have any specific fixations or consistent habits when balancing maps, but I enjoy the experience you get in a lot of DRPGs where you map out a difficult, annoying floor to find the correct path, so if I’m unsure of what to do, I often tend to push map design a little toward the complex side.

As far as the biggest gimmick I ended up scrapping, I planned on doing things like letting strong characters break down certain walls, having certain character combinations freeze water tiles into ice so you could slide over them, and making it so Sanae allowed you to fly over one-tile -wide gaps.

Back when I began development, I actually planned on a totally different system for the game altogether. I wanted the game to have a “looping” system, with each loop taking anywhere from 3~15 hours. You would carry over your levels, allies, and equipment, gradually increasing them all as you kept looping. The intent was that as you got more characters, the things you could do would increase, letting you explore more of the dungeons you’d cleared before. The gimmick of having characters interact with the dungeon more aligned well with the looping system, but since that got scrapped, so did the dungeon gimmicks.

-Were there any characters you wanted to include in LoT2 but ended up unable to?

Plenty of them. The same goes for Tri, too. I’d like to include plenty more different characters if possible.

-Assuming time and effort weren’t a factor, if you could change one thing about LoT2, what would it be?

I think it’d be doubling the amount of characters available to recruit. It IS a fangame, after all. 

-Was Tri’s development different from its predecessors in any way?

Nothing immediately popped into my mind when I saw the question, so that means there probably aren’t any big differences. Tri’s development involved me trying to make a game catering to my own tastes as much as possible, all while suffering at the hands of my own ineptitude. I think Tri leans a little closer to my personal tastes than its predecessors, so it might not mesh well with some people, but I’m personally satisfied with it.

-What was the hardest part of developing Tri?

Hmm, I mean, pretty much ALL of it was hard for me… But I guess boss planning and balancing, writing the weird-tasting flavor text for equipment and items, character kits and skill planning, and spell effect creation were all pretty fun to work on, so if I had to say, “everything besides those things”…?

-What order did you write Tri’s story in? Were there any major rewrites?

I remember starting by thinking up a rough overall sequence of events, then figuring out the initial cause and how it would all end, and lastly, filling in the blanks. However, as development progressed, various parts of the whole story ended up getting changed.

At first, I planned on incorporating the Perfect Possession incident from Antinomy of Common Flowers into both the story and mechanics. (The number of bosses in dungeons, as well the relationship between the culprits of the incident were chosen with Perfect Possession in mind.)

Tri’s final dungeon and boss were actually intended for the final dungeon of the original concept’s “Normal Ending B”… There were plenty of things like that in Tri that sadly ended up being rewritten or omitted.

So far, I’ve never seen the scale of one of my games stay the same during development. Plenty of things always end up getting omitted or scaled down (I think game development usually works like that anyway), but I’d like if someday, I could put in the work to release a game that stayed exactly how I envisioned it.

-Tri’s story has a significantly different tone than its predecessors. What made you decide to write a different kind of story this time around?

In my prior games, I started with game balance, then decided on bosses and characters, then figured out the proper elements and gimmicks for bosses and dungeons, and then thought up a story after that. I decided on the story last, in other words. But this time, I wanted to try coming up with the story first. As a natural result of planning the story first, its tone ended up a little more serious than the older games’ stories.

I’m happy to see some people saying that the story was better than they expected it would be, but on the other hand, I also see people saying they preferred how the story was in the older games, and that they didn’t play Tri hoping to see a serious story to begin with… So I’m in a tough position now, aren’t I…! But regardless, I hope that I can keep improving my story planning and writing skills from here on out, allowing me to create better stories.

-How did you design character kits for Tri? What were some of your inspirations?

I think about things like “what would this character or ability be like if you dropped them into an RPG” on pretty much a daily basis. Usually, I turn those thoughts into messy notes on character kits and ideas for skills, then organize them bit by bit and dissect the skills before re-sorting them into skill trees. 

I also borrow things from all sorts of other games, like how certain jobs or classes fight, or other various gimmicks. For example, Nitori’s “Gadget Overheating” gimmick was based on Etrian Odyssey 4’s Imperial class, and Marisa’s “Mana Accumulation” was based on Eniripsa’s “Propagator” buff gimmick from Wakfu.

-Many of Tri’s characters have special requirements related to their turn counter or buff stacks that have to be met to use their spells. What made you decide to add this system?

I enjoy games with boss fights that always make me think about combat strategies and party setups, and I’ve noticed that if I’m able to come up with an all-purpose strategy that’ll probably beat most bosses, that’s the point where I’m most likely to lose interest. So I decided I’d make turns into a new type of combat resource in order to help reduce these “all-purpose strategies.”

I felt that in LoT2 (especially in its postgame), there were quite a lot of bosses you could delete in an instant with a properly-prepared group of high-damage attackers, so I integrated more setup behind some powerful moves and locked them behind storing up resources besides just MP. (The “High Damage Reduction” as well as the notorious “Fatality Guard” buffs were created for this reason as well.)

I think I balanced Tri quite close to my own personal tastes, but at the same time, a lot of players enjoy blasting bosses with overgrinded parties, and some of those players have expressed that they’d prefer I remove spell cooldowns, turn requirements, Fatality Guard, and so on. This is part of what makes game development so hard…!

Additionally, these gimmicks might be holding back how much fun some characters could be to simply play with, so in future updates and the Plus Disk, I plan on adjusting how these factors play into the balance and systems of the game, as well as whether they feel good to have there to begin with.

-Did any particularly interesting surprises come up during Tri’s playtesting?

I recall one of the testers finding a bug that let them duplicate Chen. Seeing their party full of mass-produced Chens made a lasting impression on me.

The other day, I also laughed a little when a tester also found an unexpected way to solve one of the dungeon’s puzzles that let them skip straight to the stairs. The solution required flexible thinking, and more importantly, it was interesting, so I’m thinking I’ll leave it in. 

-Were there any elements that were found to be significantly too weak or too strong during testing that ended up being changed before release?

There was a system where you could use Perfect Possession to have one character possess another and give them an extra skill tree, but it was too strong, too convenient, and too difficult to balance, not to mention it meant I needed to add extra skill trees for every character. It ended up being far too much time and effort to maintain, so I scrapped it.

-Tri has a lot of references to other games in its Sub Equipment, just like the previous entries. How do you decide which references to use? Have you played the majority of the games you’ve referenced?

As a general rule, if I include a reference, I’ve played the game. I write journal entries about the games I play as well as record notes on how to play better, so when brainstorming ideas for Sub Equipment, I often re-read what I’ve written and take ideas from there. I’ve borrowed a lot of things from some of my favorite games from the past, too.

When I was young, I would sometimes see games in gaming magazines or my friends’ strategy guides and think “I don’t really know what I’m looking at, but it sounds fun.” I wanted to make people feel what I felt back then with my Sub Equipment descriptions. …Did I pull it off? That, I can’t say for sure.

-With LoT1 and LoT2, you released a Plus Disk expansion later on that added various content such as new dungeons, characters, and bosses. Do you have any plans to release a Plus Disk for Tri as well?

I’ve already seen a lot of people asking whether or not I’ll make a Plus Disc. I’m really grateful for the interest! When I started work on Tri, I had no intention of making a big post-game DLC update, AKA a Plus Disk, but as I kept developing the game, I ended up with quite a lot of elements I wanted to include but couldn’t, and plenty of unused ideas for bosses and other things. So once I’ve finished the postgame update for Tri’s main game, I’m thinking I’d like to make a Plus Disk for Tri to incorporate the things I couldn’t include in the main game after all.

-Do you plan on adding any new characters in Tri’s postgame update?

I imagine I’ll add new characters in Tri’s Plus Disk, but as of right now, I don’t have any plans to add new playable characters in the main game’s postgame update, sorry.

-Do you have any plans to add some of the characters that were in LoT2, but didn’t make it into Tri?

I think it can be really sad when your favorite character from the last game didn’t make it into the sequel, so I’m thinking I’d like to prioritize such characters whenever possible when deciding who to add to Tri’s Plus Disk.

-Are you considering adding characters from more recent Touhou games (for example, HSiFS~FW) in the future?

Sometime around when I started planning Tri before I’d even begun development (around the end of 2019 or the start of 2020?), I decided that the story’s primary focus would be on Violet Detector’s incident and all the events that led up to it. As a result, I decided that for the time being, I’d only include characters up through Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom. As of right now, if I had to say one way or the other, I think my priority is to add more characters from the older games.

-Is there a possibility of Yorihime and/or Toyohime getting added as playable characters in Tri?

They’re certainly related to the story this time around, so they would make for neat additions.

-Out of the characters that haven’t appeared in LoT, which one’s your favorite? How do you think they would work if you were to implement them?

A few would be Matara Okina, Kudamaki Tsukasa, and Yomotsu Hisami. Out of those, I’m especially fond of Tsukasa. I like Ran and Orin a lot as well, and I’m glad that thanks to Tsukasa’s introduction, Ran has received more attention as well. I was really happy to see Ran, Rin, and Tsukasa all come back in Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost as well.

If I were to add my favorites that aren’t present, hmm, how WOULD they turn out… Going off of Tsukasa’s ability to “slip into places where one’s soul is weak,” she could have kuda-gitsune possess enemies to open up holes in their elemental and ailment resists, and going off Hisami’s ability to “never let anything slip from her grasp,” she could be the kind of character who stays out front and debuffs enemies to get stronger…? As for Okina… Well, she could probably do anything she wanted, huh. It might be neat if her kit highlighted her similarities with Yukari.

-Do you ever plan on bringing the original Labyrinth of Touhou or Arcanum Knights to Steam someday, or potentially remaking them?


I’ve never considered Steam releases or remakes for either of them. They’re quite the old games now and probably don’t run well on modern operating systems, and there’s also the problem of their small resolutions. So, I think it’d be difficult to put them on Steam. Updating their graphics and text, as well as modernizing their finer systems DOES sound like it could be fun, though.

However, my plate’s pretty full already, both with things I want to do and things I ought to do. I still have to finish Tri’s postgame and then its Plus Disk, and there are a lot of games I want to play, too. So, I don’t think remaking either of them is realistic for me, sorry!

-Are there any games you’ve been hooked on lately?

I’m hooked on Crystal Project at the moment. Up until recently, I was also pretty addicted to Aeruta, Ball x PIT, Dungeon Antique 2, Ember Knights, ELbab, Warm Snow, and Dungeon Warfare 3.

As far as games I played in 2025 that I found particularly interesting or got extra hooked on, some would be Rift Wizard 2, Classic Dungeon X3, Cladun X3, Yaoling: Mythical Journey, Siralim Ultimate, Spell Tonaeru, Dark Hunting Ground, Gnomes, The Slormancer, and Guidus Zero.

-Are there any games you look forward to playing once Tri’s development calms down and you have more free time?

During development, I’ve forbidden myself from playing ELDEN RING’s DLC and NIGHTREIN, Monster Hunter Wilds, PoE2, StS, and online games in general, so once things have finally calmed down, I’d like to finally sink a bunch of hours into them.

-What’s your favorite 12-character party to use in Tri?

I tried to use all sorts of characters when balancing the game, so there isn’t really a 12-character party that sticks out in my mind… I guess if we’re talking about characters I used more than others, it would be Renko, Mary, Aya, Patchouli, Keine, Marisa, Remilia, Rumia, and Tenshi?

Sorry I couldn’t list 12.

-What’s your favorite RPG class?

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but… Maybe tank classes like paladins? There are all sorts of different things you want to factor in when balancing and perfecting your build for one. Stats like HP, defense, and resistances, how you’ll protect your allies, self-buffs and recovery, how you deal damage…

What’s specifically required of them depends on whether you’re playing a party RPG, a solo RPG, a Diablo-like, an MMO with a group, or an MMO on your own, and so on. But in general, paladins need to factor in HP, defense, resistances, ways to protect their allies, self-buffs and healing, and their average damage, and the complexity of refining a build that balances all those factors really deepens my enjoyment of the class.

-What’s your favorite Rance game?

I love Sengoku Rance and Brutal King Rance, but my favorite would have to be Rance 10 by a longshot! It was an absolutely fantastic game.

-Is the URL for Arcanum Knights on your site “like that” on purpose…?

Of course it is.

I don’t have any plans to make a sequel to Arcanum Knights, but if I ever did, I’d call it “ANcient ALchemist.”

 

Labyrinth of Touhou Tri is now available on Steam!
Labyrinth of Touhou Tri Steam page :

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3067930/Labyrinth_of_Touhou_Tri_The_Dreaming_Girls__The_Mysterious_Orbs/

Fanza : https://www.dmm.co.jp/dc/doujin/-/detail/=/cid=d_441050/

DLSite : https://www.dlsite.com/home/work/=/product_id/RJ01252119.html