I'm not typically a fan of fighting games, but I simply adore this game. It's fun, fresh, and wacky.

The system of physical attacks, danmaku, and grazing is extremely fun and novel without feeling unpleasantly gimmicky. There's a pretty good selection of character, and not many that I outright hate the feel of when playing them. There's a lot of thought put into the move sets, which is both nice for touhou fans who are excited about the references within them, and for people who like cool looking attacks.

Though this game is not without it's flaws. It can feel a bit clunky at the best of times, comboing is not very intuitive at first [and there are no combo lists]. Some characters are just much, much more powerful than others [cough cough, yuyuko] and of course, some are much weaker.

I've also heard pretty mixed things about the actual community/competitive scene. But it's a fighting game, this is a given.

Overall, great time with friends. And, made even easier by it's highly accessible rollback netcode mod, alongside english translation. Definitely worth giving a try if you like fighting games, or even just like touhou and want a fun afternoon with friends.

This is an expansion to Scarlet Weather Rhapsody that adds some fan-favorite popular characters (One of which is returning from the first fighter) and a few extra story scenarios. They're all comedy bits that revolve around some of the characters seeing a giant shape and making wild assumptions about it.

This is the version to play but there's not much more to say about it compared to the original, except that Sanae owns because she sees a large, indistinct shape and her first reaction is "Damn that's probably a Gundam I'm going to steal it"

Hisoutensoku and SWR have special places in my heart for being the first fighting game I got to play online with a bunch of friends. This was back during the days of using VPNs and static IPs and other wacky nonsense to get the online running in the first place. Getting the game to work was like pulling teeth.

As far as fighters go, Hisoutensoku is an incredibly fascinating game. The core gameplay is effectively what if every character was a zoner (except Hong Meiling, my beloved) where the emphasis is around spamming projectiles with varying priority and just trying to get in on people to fuck them up. The roster has a wide variety of characters to make your flavor of zoner varied enough to be interesting.

The other cool mechanic was the deck system, where you burn cards for your supers, for various stat boosts, or to even replace your specials entirely. So on top of fighting game mechanics you had the metagame of playing a card game simultaneously trying to get good pulls while you're trying to not die.

I think this game probably still holds up. It's somewhere on my computer and I might boot it up again. Also it goes without saying that the music fucking rips.