>>50605790
Dead internet theory is real.

>>50605845
No it's not, wtf are you talking about schizo?

New decimal fightan fucking when (Floatans need not apply)?

>>50605790
Grandpa Youmu. He's gonna be my grandpa in law

>>50607458
What is Tasofro even doing

File: MathRemi.jpg (414.9 KB)

414.9 KB JPG

I am now reminded of some schizo's theory about a pattern with ZUN's music albums and fightans releases.
Allegedly we might get one between 20 and 21.

File: 1688220096948011.gif (1.2 MB)

1.2 MB GIF

>>50605790
Rumia. Just a big fan really

>>50608015
I assume they've quietly disbanded. Their website hasn't updated since 2023. 17.5 took forever to come out. 17.5 either killed them or took so long because they were already on their last legs.

>>50605790
Give me Sanae

>>50605790
which ones are top tier?

>>50611570
The DLC ones :^)

>>50608145
Did their games just get worse and worse as they went along? I appreciate the creativity but they got kinda wacky because they threw away so many core fighting game ideas.

>>50612064
Seems like they tried to gradually make their own kind of fighting game.
It didn't work out, apparently.

>>50605790
I'll go random select

>>50608055
I love her

>>50612064
They made Hopeless Masquerade which was complete garbage.
>Extremely broken launch with missing content (Ex. Kokoro not even having a proper moveset)
>Patches introduce just as many game breaking bugs as they fix
>Absolutely broken netplay (Somehow worse than the base netcode the older fighting games had)
>Controls are completely fucked, most notably characters wiggle and wobble whenever you move up or down
>Gamebalance is absolutely atrocious

And then for some reason instead of just dumping the game, they basically tried to fix Hopeless Masquerade by releasing Hopeless Masquerade 2 (Urban Legend in Limbo). Which is admittedly a much better game but still ass. The problem is everyone gave up on the floaty fighter formula and it performed even worse commercially.
Then for some reason instead of giving up on the formula and just making something good they double downed and made Antimony of Common Flowers, which performed even worse.

As someone who is pretty passionate about fighting games, everything about the "Floaty Fighters" disturbs me on every level. It's not just that they were trying to make a unique game, but everything about them feels like a personal attack on anyone who enjoyed Hisoutensoku. The games are filled with purposeful design decisions that exist to make playing the games competitively worse, to the detriment of the base game.
You know how everyone complains about Super Smash Bros Brawl having tripping because it's just a malicious mechanic that exists because the developers hate part of their audience? The floaty fighters have those in droves.

File: 1741755184528402.gif (36.2 KB)

36.2 KB GIF

>>50615625
Can you talk about some of those malicious mechanics? Back in the day my friends and I were huge Hisoutensoku fans and would play together about once a week. We completely missed Hopeless Masquerade but we did check out Limbo when it came out. We didn't like it nearly as much as soku but we still would have casual fun with it every once in while. It's just that none of us ever felt the desire to learn the game on any deep level whatsoever. Perhaps you can enlighten me on why that might've been?

File: China 194.jpg (861 KB)

861 KB JPG

>>50605790

>>50605790
Who's that between Kourin and Orin?

File: 1739913875671165.png (4.5 KB)

4.5 KB PNG

>>50623732
I think that's Kotohime

>>50612064
Simply put the issue was that they bit off more than they could chew. It was cool they wanted to completely innovate, but in reality that meant
>Having to account for way more design variables you're not familiar with
>Needing to create all new assets for everything, from the ground-up, now in higher definition
>Keeping up in a genre that, at the time, was coming around to its second renaissance, meaning fighting game enthusiasts already had priority releases

So they had to appeal to either the existing Touhou fg base, or to general Touhou fans. There was no way they were doing the former with the high bar set over years developing Soku. The latter wanted their favorite characters, and the roster had too many characters who hadn't yet cemented enough legacy and staying power

Either way, from a design standpoint, the gameplay loop needed to feel exciting with a low bar for entry. They had the presentation and the kinesthesia down, but there wasn't a real challenge loop, and thus not much a clear learning curve, which made it less memorable than the past fgs, for both casuals and competitors

Also fanmade rollback support for Soku was long established by then which just made building a playerbase for later titles much harder

The way I see it, if they focused less on new mechanics, and more on how new mechanics expand the options you can have at a time, they would've had a much more clear path to fail upward

>>50625360
Huh now I see it

>>50605790
Always pick top tier
Fuck fun I'm playing to WIN

reimu always, her little kicks and flips are awesome

>>50641713
Top tier sucks ass

File: 8e862cdddd85aec2e4d2e801404b0272.jpg (272 KB)

272 KB JPG

>>50605790
YUUGI MAIN

>>50615751
Oh yeah plenty of the design choices of the floaty fighters were basically the devs disliking how people played Soku on a competitive level. Mostly this is in regards to HM or ULiL because by AoCF they actually realized they were fucking the game over and tried to back pedal.

>Combo game is completely gutted, basically every combo is heavily based around just doing dial A
>Hopeless Masquerade demo actually had players fighting cool combo routes, the devs went out of their way to remove them, showing the devs were actively looking to remove any sort of combo skill from the games

>Soku notably did not have a timer, Hopeless Masquerade added the worst timer mechanic in existence (Which was notably so bad that you could win via time out even if you were afk the whole match, which could actually happen vs AI)

>SWR/Soku has always been infamous for its weather mechanic, which appears to just be an RNG gimmick. However if you get good at the game you learn that weather is actually pretty controllable and reasonable to play around (Which is why the competitive scene doesn't just mod weather out)
>ULiL completely fucks this over by not just adding weather back as mystery spots, but actually just straight up making it totally random. They took the part that actually made weather bearable in Soku and removed it so it's just plain instead

Also just a lot of very specific general changes that you could argue were just because of the change in gameplay but are still worth mentioning:
>Killing any form of interesting airdash/flight based movement despite being a game all about flying
>Completely gutting the pressure system but not adding a real throw until AoCF (This resulted in many characters either being literally incapable of getting through someone's guard or having inescapable blockstrings, often depending on the specific patch)
>Gutting the skill card system (One of the best parts of Soku) into something completely barebones in comparison

>>50645575
God I'm way too tired, I have like fifty typos in this post. Or maybe I'm just mad trying to bring back my memory of how fucked these games were.

Make a ten character roster for 20.5. Must include Reimu, Marisa, and at least one character from FW. Hard mode: write a plot outline
>Reimu
>Marisa
>Sanae
>Rumia
>Kogasa
>Kagerou
>Tsukasa
>Biten
>Nareko
>New gal

>>50645665
Yuugi hosts the Queen of the Iron Fist tournament in former hell and the grand prize is some ancient magical doodad that would be dangerous in the wrong hands. All the major players in Gensokyo want it and either personally join or send someone to join on their behalf while less influential youkai hope to beat the odds and turn their fortunes around with it.