Higurashi When They Cry vs Touhou Universe 2 is the fourth entry into this long-running series of over a decade. As you may be able to garner from the title alone, it is a crossover of both franchises and pits them against each other in this 2D Fighting game. It is a Japanese exclusive that has not been translated into another language. That, in combination with my very limited knowledge of Touhou, whose last title I’ve played about 15 years ago, leads this to not be a review. Think of it more like some weirdo talking about random fighting games he’s played and ranting about ancient game engines as you try to focus on playing Tekken 7 or something.
The story seems to pick off after the last entry and sees both universes melded together once more. From what I can understand, the Higurashi peeps are angry that outsiders have entered Hinamizawa then decided to wreak havoc. At least, that is what I believe to be the case. Japanese to English translation programs are not perfect. Despite how many places I’ve run the story summary through, that was what I was able to take from it. This is just the intro. The linguistic barriers only get more complicated from here on out since most of the in-game text is baked in, meaning we have to take a screencap and translate the picture instead of being able to use the Textractor.
It is a shame that we can’t understand all of the dialogue as there is plenty of it throughout the Arcade mode. Most of it is victory text after winning a battle, with a bit being focused on the main plot regardless of what character you are. To get all the issues for those of us that don’t understand Japanese out of the way, let me mention that the game’s manual is an HTML file. All of the game’s mechanics are told via a series of pictures and not text, making the task of translating it that much more tedious. The same thing goes for the character roster’s individual moveset. None of them are found in-game. You’ll have to back out to the HTML file or play in windowed mode when using a fighter you are unfamiliar with.
Oh boy, this may sound like an awful lot of whining, especially since it is a Japanese exclusive title in the first place. This is just something I felt worth mentioning considering my audience is primarily outside of Japan. I’m making it sound a bit impregnable, yet it is actually simple to get in and start fighting. The main menu is entirely in English, and while the character roster isn’t, their appearance alone informs us of who they are. I highly suggest you read on how to play and look up your character’s move-set beforehand. There are no difficulty selections. It will start ramping up more and more as you continue winning matches in the Arcade mode, with random button-mashing only being able to carry us so far.
Once you are in a fight proper, you will discover why I even wanted to talk about this game despite possibly seeming like a clueless fool. It is a pretty decent fighting game. Each of the whopping 45 characters on offer here have their own styles of fighting, and this features a relatively in-depth battle system. It is quick, responsive, and surprisingly polished for what seems like a meme game. It is hardly the most balanced title out there with that massive roster, yet I found none of the roster to be downright useless. This does feature slightly fewer characters than the previous entry that has 56, but they are all more usable here. That being said, only six of the 45 are of the Higurashi series. It, in large part, feels like a Touhou fighter with some guest characters when not counting the story.
This is a four-button fighter with two macros for grabs and the other for your ultimate attack. Three of the buttons are for weak, medium, and strong attacks. The fourth is exclusive for a short dash move that briefly gives you invisibility frames. It is extremely handy for completely passing through powerful attacks rather than blocking it and suffering a bit of chip damage from it. Timing plays a crucial role in using it. One very well could dash right into an attack if you don’t have the length of the invisibility frames down. You can also dodge downwards to quickly get out of the air should the need arise. This button will see a lot of use and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities.
All of the matches will have the first person reaching two wins being declared the victor. These two rounds are made particularly intense considering that if we lose the match, that’s it; it is game over. There are no continues here. Whether you lose on your first match or on the final boss, you’ll be thrown back into the main menu. It is not an easy game, yet you should be fine if you have experience with the genre. Whether the final boss is Rika Furude or two Touhou characters at once is random. Neither will cause you too much trouble if you know what you’re doing and take it seriously. The actual final boss and the after-credits challenger, on the other hand… well, good luck with that chief. Knowing how to dodge is an absolute necessity as they both tend to spam powerful projectiles.
Even if you lose to the actual final boss, that still counts as a victory. You will receive the credits screen, a thanks for playing, and all that fanfare. I do find it unfortunate that we can not skip all of this, however. It takes a good while for it to finish, and we just have to set our controller down to do something else before we can play again after several minutes. After enough times of that, I just started shutting the game down then starting it up again to quickly get into another match. The first time watching it was charming, after the dozenth I was less than thrilled. Arcade mode is the only single-player option. Versus and Tag Battle are local coop exclusive. Versus has you both selecting a character and a stage. Tag Battle has you select a duo and play as a single character until she is knocked out in a round. There is no switching, and it is possible to never swap out to your second fighter if you win both rounds. It is still a cool addition that I wish had a single-player variant.
Supposedly there is a training mode that you activate while in battle. From the places I translated it at, this should be by ‘hold down + E’. Unfortunately, I could not get it to work for the life of me, so that may be an error on my part. Many things that I’ve said throughout this may be wrong. Once again, this is not a review. I’ve tried my best to make sense of it, but the language barrier is far too great to, in good conscious, offer valid criticism or judge it. I can judge the graphics to be 10/10, though. What’s not to love about having a digitized cast of cross-dressing males roleplay as Touhou and Higurashi characters. Seeing how Satoko Houjou was portrayed here is both the most cursed and funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.
What I will criticize is the jank ‘2d fighter maker’ engine. I will not go into too much detail as to what it is, but I will tell you what you can expect from most games made with this ancient engine. The first is being unable to enter fullscreen. You will either need to play it in a window or use a program like Lossless Scaling to force it into an emulated fullscreen. Your second issue will be if you have ever used more than one controller on your PC. It will cause it to flip out and randomly spam movement inputs by itself. To fix this, you’ll need to set your gamepad as a priority or uninstall your other controller’s drivers. Third, all of the movesets have to be shown via out-of-game means. And finally, you will have to switch the stage manually when playing Versus or Team Battle via the Options tab of the game’s window. The fact that there is no training mode on the main menu is the developer’s fault, however.
Getting back on the topic of the game itself, there is actually a lot to like about it. The silliness it conveys is still felt despite not knowing the Japanese language. There is just something about Rika Furude being a world-class shadow boxer that is hard not to grin at. That grin goes even further with the digitized fully-grown male actors who make the character roster. It would mean little if the gameplay wasn’t good, yet that is where it shines the brightest. Higurashi vs Touhou 2 won’t be replacing any of your established genre leaders, but it is both competently made and fun. With 45 unique characters to master, it is one you’ll be playing for a long time if it resonates with you. In addition to that, this contains 50 stage backgrounds, and a good amount of stellar music that I assume comes from Touhou titles. Its price of 1320 Yen or just over 11 US dollars makes it a good value.
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