Fantasy Maiden Wars - DREAM OF THE STRAY DREAMER -

I just finished the first arc after 20 hours as I'm writing this, and this might just be the best Touhou fangame I've ever played. It's basically a retelling of the stories from EoSD (Touhou 6) up until 12 (or so I've heard), and some from the books as well, and it does so by merging the timelines, making stories happen in the background while you're solving the main incident with your protagonist of choice. The story is written in a simple VN format with character portraits showing various facial expressions. It's short and entertaining and each character is portrayed exactly how they're supposed to. A byproduct of the stories overlapping is that some of them will appear earlier than they should (relative to the original games' chronology), which means you'll get to see interactions that you'd never see in the original games, and that's really fun. The story so far has definitely been the hook for me. The gameplay so far has been both fairly simple and pretty deep at the same time. Simple because, while it has plenty of stats and skills, at the end of the day it's pretty much just Advance Wars/Fire Emblem/SRW — you deal damage and take some in return, which is easy to understand, and the game is very generous with letting you quicksave whenever you want and reload from any past turn. It's also quite involved on higher difficulties, you can really feel the difference in both enemy behavior as well their stats. The game also gives you plenty of ways to build each of your characters by swapping their main passives arounds to change their playstyles and unlocking new ones; that, plus the sheer amount of characters (you'll be controlling around 15 by the end of the first act), makes for a lot of variety. The stages are really well designed, even if few drag a bit due to their size and having to spend a few turns doing nothing else other than moving, most of them will throw curveballs your way, forcing you to alter and rethink your strategy on the fly. The visuals are pretty simple during the strategy phase, small character sprites with pixel art backgrounds, but they do the job. I really like that it shows a big worldmap of Gensokyo when your cast is traveling around. The combat animations are great and varied, very faithful to the spellcards from the games. They all come with pre- and post-attack dialogue lines with A LOT of them being unique to the enemy, the phase, the type of attack, whether it's a finisher or not. You won't be bored watching them during crucial attacks. Finally, the music is amazing. Every character theme has been redone, and they play dynamically whenever a character is on fire while attacking. It creates this back-and-forth between you and the bosses that works really well to hype things up. I'm far from done with this game, but I can already say there is no bigger love letter to the franchise. Whether you're a Touhou fan, someone who's interested in getting into it, or a fan of the games I mentioned above, you owe it to yourself to give this game (or the demo) a try.

I am still in awe how a touhou fangame managed to get in my top games of all time list. Just finished NG, will be going for NG+ . Truly amazing game 10/10

Do you like Super Robot Wars? Do you like Touhou? Do you like Tactical RPGS? If your answer to any of these is yes. PLAY THIS ALREADY.

beautiful game 10/10 it made me like toes

EVERYTHING, from the gameplay, to the characters, to the writing, to the music, to the stories, to the LIBRARY was WONDERFULLY DONE. As someone who prior to starting this had little experience to the Touhou franchise properly (only played Ten Desires and Luna Nights, etc.) his game felt like the PERFECT introduction to the franchise. A lot of characters I had surface knowledge on were introduced and portrayed in a super digestable and appealing way. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BUY THIS GAME

这个游戏给我的震撼程度不亚于第一次起飞

敬我们的幻想乡