/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>38894714
I've only played 3 so far. I have a backlog of ones I'd like to try later on, but I'll probably stick to the english translated ones for the time being. For the ones I've played:
>Hollow Song of Birds
It's my favourite one so far. Tons of replayability (4 characters with 9 shots each), top tier OST and great characters. The game is fairly easy, you get bombs up the ass and can cheese most of the dangerous parts with them, though there are 2 shots that restrict your bombs so those can balance out the difficulty. I'd consider hard difficulty in this game to be equivalent to normal in mainline games. The stages can get really long though, and the game does occassionally suffer from frame drops. If this was a mainline game and made on a proper engine, it'd easily be in my top 3 favourite Touhou games.
>Infinite Blade Pavilion
Also really good. It's probably got the best stage design I've seen in the series. Enemies can come from all sides and the game does pretty well to force you out of the bottom third of the screen. Reimu's shots can hit the sides and back which further stimulates you to move a lot. The game's skill system makes the different shots feel unique and does give that feeling of getting stronger the other games lack since danmakufu scripts seem to lack a power system, or just these games don't implement it. It's the hardest game of the 3 and does take some getting used to, especially Youmu since unlike in the main games she holds her charge if you let go of focus, so you have to consciously stop shooting to use the charge.
>Book of Star Mythology
I only started this a few days ago, so I've only cleared it 3 times. So far it's enjoyable, but insultingly easy, even more so than HSoB. The game shits bombs down your throat, you can have capped bombs by the end of stage 2 and without using them much that stack can last you until stage 5 at least. It doesn't seem to have a full english patch complete, but thankfully the one I found in some forums seems to be fully translated aside from the endings, the manual and some other textboxes.

All in all, fangames can be a nice diversion when you want to take a break from the mainline titles and try something more casual, or atleast HSoB and BoSM since they're on the easier side. The missing power system of the danmakufu games can make it an interesting experience, since you're more or less at max power from the start and the game doesn't need to tease you with 1-2 stages of fodder enemies until you power up.