#in case anyone wanted to hear me babble on about the Touhou casts

[crystalelemental]

A bit of talk about my favorite casts overall in Touhou, because I'm kinda fixated on it today:

MoF: My favorite cast.  Sanae, Kanako, and Suwako would carry this team on their own, but then you get Aya who is great, the Aki sisters who I really love despite them not having a ton going on, Hina who is interesting to me, and even Nitori who I've come around to liking through repeated exposure.  The only real detriment to the team is Momiji, who hasn't done anything wrong, I'm just constantly pissed at how unreasonably popular she is.  How the hell did this character with no dialogue ever manage to break top 20?  How did people decide she was a top favorite, much less a stronger character than Kanako and Suwako?   To each their own opinions, and I'm not about to fight anyone over it, but this is the single most confusing thing about fan perceptions to me.

SA: If anyone were to say that my pick for best cast is dumb and that it's obviously the SA crew, I'd probably concede immediately.  I can't think of a character in this game that isn't great.  Chireiden is especially fantastic, bringing in some of my favorites overall.  Half the cast typically places around top 20 for me, and I think that alone shows how great they are.  The only truly low-ranking one is Kisume, who just...doesn't have anything to work with, really.

TD: I love the TD cast.  I wish I could fully articulate why, I just appreciate them. Seiga is delightfully wicked, Miko is awesome, Futo is a lot of fun, and even Tojiko has just enough presence that I want to know more about what her deal is.  Yoshika and Kyouko are a bit lower for me, but are still solid enough characters.  Then there's Mamizou, my third favorite character overall.  In the game, she seems pretty good, but it's another situation where the more I see of her, the more I love her character.  It's a shame the extra stage is so frustrating to me.   If I sat down and actually applied myself, I might be able to clear it...

PCB: Prismrivers are A+ characters, I don't care what anyone else says!  This game also brought in Alice, who is top-tier, as well as general fan-favorites in Yukari, Yuyuko, and Youmu.  This is one situation, at least, where I agree with fan perceptions.  All of these characters are great.  The only one I don't have strong opinions on is Letty, which is a shame because she's a Yuki-Onna, and those are awesome creatures.  I guess they can't all be winners.

LoLK: I just feel like this is where they should go.  I love Junko, Clownpiece is great (especially in the manga), Sagume and Hecatia are fascinating, and I really like Doremy.  If anything really holds them back, it's the game itself, with its kind of awkward resource collection system, and the ridiculous difficulty set up by the PointDevice mode (which I really dislike).  There are some really great characters floating around, but I just can't get as attached to them.  Maybe it's because they mostly will never show up again.  Maybe it's because the game is such a pain that I can't be asked to experience the characters again by playing it.  Whatever the case, I think "above average" is a decent designation for the cast as a whole.

HSiFS: Tentatively putting them here.  May wind up going above PCB, but I'd be surprised if I wind up feeling that positively toward the whole cast.   Really, I think this is where they'd belong.  Close to average, but a little above, largely based on the few standouts and some personal attachments.  Eternity and Narumi are the two big standouts, while Satono and Mai are the ones I have personal attachment to, for reasons involving wanting to see more of their history.  Okina's also incredibly lore-significant, which is hard to ignore, even if I'm not her biggest fan right now.  They're a good cast.

UFO: And now we come to by benchmark average.  UFO is not a cast I am particularly enamored with.  I really like Kogasa, and despite never directly meeting her in-game, I love Nue's concept.  Byakuren and Nazrin are also particularly good, but the mid-game cast of Ichirin, Murasa, and Shou don't really appeal to me much.  They kind of all even out to a solid average cast.  By contrast...

IN: this cast is mostly just average.  There's really only two standouts, but both are standouts because of subsequent games and manga.  Those two being Kaguya and Mokou.  I feel almost nothing toward the rest of this cast.  Kaguya manages to be one of my overall favorites, based on her presentation largely in Inaba of the Moon/Earth, and Mokou jumped significantly based on her interactions with Futo and Sumireko in ULiL.  Reisen is also growing on me, though I wouldn't call her a favorite.  I think what keeps this one below UFO is just that the majority of the cast feels very bland to me.

EoSD: "Steve, you fucking hypocrite, they're not even last place."  Look buddy, I have only ever stated dislike for this cast based on my inherent contrarianism, and I think we all know this.  So, to kinda make my case, we're going to factor out fanon, because I could complain about fanon interpretations of this crew being the absolute worst for literal hours.  I'm serious, I've done it before. Anyway, on their own, the cast is not bad, I just have virtually no interest in them. Flandre, by all accounts, should be one of my favorites.  I love that archetype. But for some reason, she just doesn't resonate as much with me as she ought to, and I often wonder if that's because I can't separate out my contempt for fanon interpretations coupled with how high-ranked she always is.  Patchouli is excellent, and I largely adore her because of her association with elemental magic, which is a favorite of mine, though she still ranks below other magicians because she's kinda plain in that regard (Alice's dolls are way more interesting conceptually, and Marisa is far more organic in her application of magic).  And that's where the positives stop.  Remilia and Sakuya can have some good moments, but I ultimately don't appreciate them as much.  Cirno is a character I have long not liked, who is only recently starting to be appreciated with manga appearances (as a side character) and her role in HSiFS.  The rest of the cast ranges from complete disinterest to disdain.  Meiling and Rumia just aren't interesting, Koakuma gets a few points entirely because Koishi's Heart-Throbbing Adventure made her best villain, and Daiyousei is in eternal contempt for doing nothing ever yet outranking excellent characters like Kanako and Mamizou somehow.  They're a mix of disinterest, dislike, and not as interesting as they should be, which leads to a particularly low ranking.

DDC: Of course, if we're being fair, the EoSD cast is not my least-favorite. Fanon certainly makes them the group I complain about the hardest, but my most disinterested feelings go to DDC.  I struggle to think of a single character in this game that stands out at all.  Let's get this out of the way: Seija is a fascinating character, but I don't like her.  I mentioned this with Okina in another post, but I can find a lot of characters interesting while still disliking how they are.  And that's the big issue.  Seija's usually the one that would pull this team for people, and she has, hysterically, the opposite effect on me.  Sukuna is similarly not that engaging, and unlike most characters added to the fighting games, her presence in ULiL did nothing for me.  The first three stage bosses are all just smallfry who show up ready to fight with the social upheaval thing going on, but ultimately fail to have particularly unique traits, and...honestly, a mermaid and werewolf are a bit too western for me?  I have the same kind of issue with EoSD, where the western stuff feels a bit too familiar, so I can't appreciate the novelty of a character's species if there's nothing else to go off of.   Which means that the Tsukumos kinda get the favorites spot (I told you about the contrarianism). They're associated with music and storms, and you fight them in the middle of a thunderstorm.  As far as coolness factor goes, they win, hands down.  I also just like their designs best.  I know everyone else in the world seems to like them least, but I think they're the strongest entries.  You know, despite still being somewhat bland overall.  They're no Prismrivers, that's for sure.