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.