Marukos

I'll share what I learned by just playing(I didn't read the manual): "Z" and "shift" behave as you would expect, "Z" for shooting and "shift" for slowing down. You can hold "X" to release your aura and charge your attack, you can use the power you collect(more on how to collect below) to charge up to 4 bars, bar 1 is just a weak special attack and bar 2 is a slightly more powerful version of the same attack, bar 3 releases you EX attack, which will unleash a danmaku on your enemy screen, and bar 4 releases a boss on your enemy screen for him to deal with. And finally "C" is just the bomb key, it will consume all your power, but can save you when you're trapped, try to use it when there are a lot of enemies on screen, so you can get higher combos. The ways I noticed to collect power are by shooting down enemies, pacifying beast spirits with your aura, and grazing bullets, but maybe there are more. The beast spirits can be reflected to your enemy screen by "pacifying" them using your aura(hold "X") and them shooting at them. There's no active cards like in Unconnected Marketeers and 100th Black Market, just passive or equipment cards. Meaning you don't need to think a lot about what cards you have, they will just give you a little bonus like more power or more projectiles. You can take 2 hits before losing a life, I will call it a shield, after being hit once you can unleash an EX attack(3 bars) or a boss attack(4 bars) to "recharge" your shield. At the climax of the battles there are times when your character will release an EX attack or a boss attack on its own, it doesn't consume bars, but I'm not sure what are the conditions for it happening, but I'm 95% sure that it only happens when you get combos around 100, that's why I recommend trying to use your bombs only when there are a lot of enemies on screen, that's how I got unbelievable combos above 300 Hope that can help you.

Yeah, competitive was not the right word, I meant that this game was made with online being the main aspect of it in mind, which would be the case if the online worked... I know, but this time feels different, it really felt like the start of a bigger plot, but again, I could be complete wrong and it will simply finish in a future Touhou 19.5.

I feel like this game demanded more effort to be done than recent previous titles, besides that, there's the server expenses, thus explaining the higher price. Unfortunately, the game is haunted by bad design choices and ZUN overall don't knowing what he's doing. He was so focused and providing a diverse gameplay and creating a competitive game that he forgot to put effort in making the game actually work. Story mode is dumb, as others have stated here, the split-screen is pointless if it's not an actual 1v1 battle, you just defeat the bosses IN YOUR SCREEN and you're good to go. Vs Mode is fine, is by far the one I'm playing the most, the CPU is pretty fun to play against, but it lacks very basic features like the option to choose the scenario and an Arcade Mode since story mode is a fake 1v1. I could say that the netplay makes the buy worth it if it at least worked, I couldn't play a single online match by now, most of the time it just fails, and when it doesn't fail, the FPS is always between 10 - 15, maybe there's not many people in my region that play the game, but damn, I don't think ZUN should ever touch a netcode again, at least not until he actually put the time to learn how to do it, he clearly didn't have a single clue of what he was doing. The worst part of it all is that there's no option for self-hosting, I'm hoping that ZUN or even the community will add this in a patch eventually, if there's never self-hosting I'm sure online will be unplayable very soon, since I don't think ZUN will keep paying the servers for more than a few years. Having said it all, yes, the game is bad, it's unfinished and broken, probably the worst mainline until now, BUT I will say that, besides all that, I'm still having fun, enough to already have put a few dozens of hours in it. But now, taking gameplay aside, I liked almost everything else in the game, the new characters, music, and I could be wrong, but I feel like ZUN is finally trying to create an ongoing plot for the series, instead of various separate stories for each game, not only the game makes references to past incidents, but also a lot of the endings are kinda of cliffhangers. If ZUN is really trying to write a bigger plot that will last for games to come, I'm totally for it.

I played the whole series in order, so yeah, HRTP