Played through 17.5 and 19 recently.
Touhou 17.5: Sunken Fossil World
I figured I would like this since I'm really into the fighting games, and yeah, really fun, really challenging game. I liked it a lot. The boss fights do a great job of using the character's abilities, the playable characters all feel surprisingly unique, the art is sick, the remixes are great, and I love Toutetsu. I played it on Switch and am also happy that unlike with AoCF, the official translation actually feels competent here and the writing is pretty funny. Also it brought back Joon and Shion who were already hilarious so it gets big points for that.
The biggest problem I had with it was the lack of a jump button, which really hampered some characters' movement. Some characters can jump instead of dash, which was fine, but then you look at Murasa who can only move quickly and graze by using her anchor to move set distances. She's really fun to play, but without a jump button some boss patterns simply do not work for her. Considering not every button on the controller is even used I don't understand why this isn't a thing. The other complaint I have is more minor but it is weird that Reimu and Flandre don't get more spells for when they show up as stage 5 bosses in the later character routes.
Other than that though, I really enjoyed the game, enough to go for a hard 1cc with Flandre and a greedy challenge clear (on normal, shit's difficult) with Reimu. Comparing it to story modes of the fighting games, it's not my favorite (SWR is king) but it's on par with the next best like Hisoutensoku and AoCF. Great game.
Touhou 19: Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost
I'm not super into the vs games so I was mostly here for the story/dialogue, and it was actually pretty solid this time around. The structure of the story is more similar to the better fighting games, making each route a piece of the story revealing more info rather than just a different perspective on the same events. Piecing together what's actually going on with Zanmu here was pretty cool. I don't love Zanmu as a character though because she's kinda..mary sue-ish? She's this ultimate calculating mastermind where no matter what happens, it's all according to keikaku for her, and it happens so often it becomes funny. That being said she serves well as an antagonist since with her working on so many fronts at once it's difficult to get a read on her real intentions.
There's also a lot about Zanmu's powers which seems to be intentionally left vague which I found interesting. All that is explicitly stated is that she has the power to "manipulate nothingness", but that doesn't really mean anything so I can only go off her actions to guess what she actually does with that. The main things I noticed is that pretty much everyone lost their motivation to do anything about the incident after fighting her, which made me think she might have some kind of power to pacify or demotivate people? That would make her using a trap to summon people to her forcefully make more sense, and also line up with her in-game ability to pacify all spirits and fairies on screen at once. The "palm of her hand stuff" was also mentioned so often I wondered if it had to do with an actual ability of hers to have some kind of foresight into peoples actions, which would be enhanced after having met her and made an impression ("leaving a shadow of herself in them") or if it's just a metaphor for how absurdly calculating she is.
On a gameplay level, I liked the change to end fights by defeating boss summons instead of waiting for an arbitrary timer, and that spell cards here are somewhat more traditional than in pofv. Also finally having an in-game manual for one of these games meant I could actually understand all the mechanics going on here which are usually unclear in vs games, which was nice. The character balance is pretty silly though, some like Reimu and Chiyari are crazy OP, but most suck with no bullet clearing and/or poor damage, and a few are just irredeemably bad (what the hell was ZUN thinking with Nazrin???). This also plays into the difficulty in a weird way, with Reimu's story being the easiest lunatic in the series--after someone showed me that her level 2 just insta-nukes bosses I went ahead and tried it myself and got the lunatic 1cc in a few attempts. But try lunatic on a character that isn't stupid OP and fights either Chiyari or Zanmu and it's pure misery.
Overall I enjoyed the game more than I expected, probably my favorite of the 3 vs games, though not by much. New character themes were also good like always.
