One would be forgiven for not knowing of Touhou Spell Bubble, Taito's Touhou x Puzzle Bobble x music game mashup: never-ending deluge of commercial Touhou side-games aside, the game has remained Switch-exclusive since its original Japanese release in early 2020, and the eventual global release was a very low-key, "we threw together an English build for Asia so we might as well release it worldwide"-type drop that garnered virtually no attention—off the top of my head, it's the only one of Taito's return-to-consoles games that they and their international publishing partner didn't milk to death with eight thousand pointless SKUs.
(It also had the misfortune of being a local-only versus game that released on the cusp of lockdown, but that would've been a demerit no matter what; they eventually patched in online ranked and private matches some eighteen months after the Japanese launch.)
Here's some footage from a rare offline tournament held at EVO Japan a few months back—click through for a systems breakdown, and my own befuddlement at the dev support this game continues to get, all these years later:
The game system is straightforward: each game is played in tandem with any one of the zillion selectable Touhou arrange tunes, and whenever a player chains enough bubbles, they momentarily enter a beat-matching state where pressing the button in time with the music determines the size of their attack; the size of your chain determines how long you have to match beats, and there's a scrolling chart display on the side of the screen to tip you off to the more intense sections of a song, so there's some strategy in timing your attacks to be able to add as many beats as possible. Unlike most other versus puzzle games, you're competing strictly for score/quota and the game will keep going if one player bottoms out—the game ends when the song does, so players are often able to stage last-minute comebacks, and the fact that games aren't determined in seconds means that the character abilities aren't necessarily as wildly annoying or decisive as they have been in other versus puzzle games.
There's also a Puyo Puyo Fever-style "awakening" mechanic that lets you temporarily access boards with pre-set bubble patterns to stage comebacks or counterattacks, and each selectable character has both a passive skill and an equippable spell card attack, so there's both a character meta and a BGM meta to consider. The raw beat-matching portions are very straightforward—basic quarter/eighth-note stuff that most people aren't going to struggle with, even at higher tempos—but the BPM also determines the speed of aiming, shooting and pretty much everything else, so the skill ceiling really lifts when those more challenging tunes are in play.
Now, all of those things are interesting to a dork like me, and the copious amounts of Touhou fanservice (character art from various well-known fan scene illustrators, loads of BGM arranges from popular scene artists, music game collaborators and Taito's in-house band Zuntata, voluminous story modes, etc) are undoubtedly appealing to some, but I don't see a ton of evidence to suggest the game sold all that well: the publisher hasn't celebrated any huge sales milestones, the competitive scene has been Discord-reliant since the moment they added online play, the surprisingly large Bubble Bobble RTA community mostly dismissed it for not having a traditional solo mode and, aside from VODs from whichever high-profile vtubers did sponsored launch streams, I don't see much activity on video/streaming sites, anywhere in the world.
Why, then, does this game have like $400 worth of DLC?1 Why did I get prompted for a version 4.0 update that adds yet more new features (an achievement system with title/icon unlocks) just a few days ago? Why do they continue to do streams running down balance updates that virtually nobody's watching? I mean, I could believe there are enough whales out there to justify the presumably small amount of effort it takes to offer new songs that they can blast through one time vs. the CPU, but they've continued to not just maintain but iterate on this game in earnest over the last 3+ years, with no real apparent payoff... most of the team got drafted into making the brand-new, just-released Puzzle Bobble Everybubble, too, so at what point do they cut the cord?
(here's the latest DLC trailer for Ran Yakumo, their eighth paid DLC character)
I'm not complaining (not that I intend to buy most of the DLC, mind) but it's a little odd to compare this game to, say, Tetris Effect, which was very shrewd in staggering its release across various platforms in order to subsidise all its updates and maintain a certain baseline price, or Sega's recent Puyo Puyo games, which were initially presented in a manner that implied long-term support that they absolutely did not deliver, and wonder how a game with a fraction of the audience and, one would imagine, a fraction of the potential for Monetization, is still doggedly getting updates. Who knows, maybe they'll finally add spectator support one of these days—neither this game nor Everybubble have it, and online tournaments are extremely impractical to run without it, so it might be the one thing they could add that'd stand a chance of bringing substantial attention back to either game.
Touhou Spell Bubble's 50% off right now (down from $55/¥5800), and there's a free demo—check it out if you like, and check in here if you end up buying it, I guess, because you might struggle to find matches otherwise:
(The Japanese version has the English text but the DLC isn't compatible between both versions; iirc there are a few DLC packs that aren't available globally and I forget whether they're translated but you may only be able to access them via the JP version)
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additional characters, additional song/challenge stage packs, additional story/side-story content, etc
