Um, hello everyone.
I'm no regular here or anything, but does anyone here play more obscure fighting games, like the Touhou spinoffs or French Bread stuff or Arcana Heart? I admit I've been curious to give these games a try even if their community may have since moved on, just because I'm always looking for unique fun experiences. What can you guys tell me about these types of fighters, or if there are similar games with active scenes?
The only game I can really say I played to any huge extent are the various Melty Blood games. There's actually a small but active netplay scene for MBCC (the latest release) since there was a netplay hack that added rollbacks. Good luck finding a legit copy of the game, though. Woof. I've played a bit of UNIEL as well, and It's A Good Game (tm) but I hate playing that game online and I don't really have the time to grind that game offline.
Arcana Heart is one of those games that's really interesting but 90% of the people you show it to are immediately put off by its aesthetic, and the remaining 10% are weird... who am I kidding, we're all weird. It's a hard game to grok properly though, due to how different the movement is. There's also Aquapazza, which is actually around the speed and complexity for my old man hands, but the game also has some really silly stuff. The fact that the online was booty buttcheeks and it never got much play in the US didn't help, either.
As for the Touhou stuff, I played a lot of IaMP when it came out and my reaction to Scarlet Weather Rhaposdy was roughly that of a SSB Melee player's reaction to SSB Brawl. I thought the changes in the game were so awful I swore to never play it (which is a bit harsh, as Soku is almost certainly a better game than SSBB is).
As for random povert games... you really don't want to know how deep that rabbit hole goes, or you'll be drunk in a hotel room at 4 in the morning screaming at a TV over games of Suiko Enbu or Fighters' Masters. Oh, the things we did in our youth. D:
But yeah, if you're looking for scenes for anime games that aren't from ArcSys, you're going to be on the struggle bus unless you happen to live in a place like Cali (and even then, it's not like the community isn't huge). Then again, if we just wanted to play the games everyone else is playing we would all just play LoL anyway. -_-