Touhou Kouryudou ~ Unconnected Marketeers.

Excellent SHMUP. The unique card system to this game is really fun, giving more of a reason to kill enemies beyond score once you've powered up. Being able to choose cards at the start of a run (once you've unlocked enough) makes it so you can always use your favorites, but the randomness of most of the other ones you get to pick means each run is a little different than the others, even beyond the characters. Each character is fun to play and does change how you play somewhat, between their different shots and their different bomb. Sanae ended up my favorite, but I see arguments for all of them being someone's favorite. The music, as always with ZUN, is amazing, as are the new character designs. I LOVE the Final Boss and her theme dearly, they're ingrained into my head at this point. If you want to get into Touhou, I would recommend this one first, honestly. It's a fair bit easier than many other I've tried, and the accessibility in steam is great. The one hurdle is installing thcrap to patch it to English.

Holy sh*t. Crazy stuff This is my first Touhou shmup game and i couldn't care less about the lore (apparently almost unlimited) but the gameplay... is INSANE. I can clearly understand why is so popular. I have played other shmups like the Space Moth saga. Unforgiving difficulty but this game...is off the charts. It has a "lunatic" difficulty that is hell since the first second...but easy mode is not much better xd Really crazy