Durazno: So what would be a good way to construct a Touhou RPG with a larger playable cast? I was thinking more of a Final Fantasy style, but then it'd be hard to pick an engine that half the fanbase doesn't hate. Maybe it just shouldn't emulate a particular game?
Hylarn: There's that Labyrinth of Touhou game... But some sort of SRPG would probably be best, so you could have a lot of characters actually active.
SuperDimensionMan: A Touhou/Disgaea crossover fangame would probably be the worst possible way to go about that, since if it was any good, I would disappear up the game's asshole, never to be seen again. I'd still like to see someone try, though!
Clarste: That's actually... terrifying. Disgaea would be perfect, with some relevant modifications to the game systems.
Durazno: I agree that Disgaea would be pretty interesting. Would that make Yukari the Overlord of Gensokyo (metaphysically, if not politically?) Would Youkai essentially be the same thing as Demons and Angels? Would some of the Touhou girls be monster type characters? What generic classes would come from Gensokyou? The mind boggles...
SuperDimensionMan: It would make for an interesting thought experiment in game design, if nothing else. Do you move Disgaea more toward a bullet hell game by giving everyone flight and a lot of movement points, and give all the special attacks large but weirdly-shaped hitboxes, or go in a different direction?
Durazno: Ooh, that would kind of make it like chess, wouldn't it? You'd have to carefully arrange your doods so that not too many of them can get hit at any given time, but sometimes your opponent would surprise you with devastating moves you didn't see until it's too late! (And vice-versa, of course.) The only problem is that the AI would probably either suck at it or be way too good.
Clarste: If it's anything like Disgaea, all your guys are going to die no matter what you do anyway so you might as well go all out and try to kill them before they finish you off.
SuperDimensionMan: Right. Even in the main campaign of Disgaea 3, individual conflicts tend to quick and brutal, even if each map can take a while, which is true to the feel of a shoot-em-up, in some ways. Depending on one's design goals, that may or may not be important.
Durazno: I think it would really hurt, though, with huge, weirdly shaped attack areas. If you screw up, a lucky enemy'd be able to wipe out a third of your force! I think it would be better to make our hypothetical Distouha characters a little sturdier.
SuperDimensionMan: That would be one way of handling it. If most of your characters had enough HP to take few hits before going down, it would be more tolerable. It could get interesting if healing magic had an unusual area of effect too. Another way could be to make all the maps with very uneven terrain, give everyone unlimited or very high jump height and make most attacks long, wide and flat, with a few long, narrow and tall or short, wide and tall. In any case, you would probably want to exclude friendly fire, too. Having to dodge your own attacks in addition to the enemy's would just be painful. Then again, at that point, you're starting to depart pretty dramatically from what makes Disgaea Disgaea. It would be kind of odd no matter what you did, though, since there are so few melee or pseudo-melee specialists in Touhou.
Hylarn: Honestly, I wouldn't want to use Disgaea's engine. It's sort of built around melee attacks, while near every Touhou character is ranged. And multihit attacks either have all hits connect or miss, which is the opposite of what I'd want if I'm to transfer danmaku to it.
SuperDimensionMan: The Disgaea engine as-is is probably not very well suited for the task, yeah. I would want to build one very much like it but otherwise unrelated, for copyright as well as gameplay reasons. It's true that the game systems of Disgaea are pretty fundamentally weapon-based, though, but maybe there's a way around that.