What is the best game to start a newcomer on?

It's not necessary to pick the simpliest game by gameplay mechanics. The question is whether they can play without heavy relying on gimmicks. For example:

  • PCB has cherry point system, barriers etc., and advanced players could activate the barrier almost any time they want, but it's OK for newcomer to achieve their first 1CC on Easy thinking that the barrier appears almost randomly.

  • IN has plenty of unique things such as youkai/human scale and time system, Last Words and bonus spellcards after each level, ability to select characters separately from their teams... But if you play first time, you don't care about that, reaching stage 6 at 4:00 AM. The first noticeable gimmicks start showing only on this stage, when you face "Hourai Elixir" spellcard and learn about stage 6B. The only thing that could make the experience worse in further games is non-standart deathbomb interval.

  • Faith points system in MoF was't noticeable for me when I played it on Easy. Maybe it is not the first game to begin with because of united firepower/bomb scale, but maybe the second? When the newcomer learn to play EoSD or PCB and got interested, I would recommend him MoF so he could get used to different bomb mechanics.

  • UFO and TD present the player an ability to gather resources through collecting special types of items - UFOs and spirits respectively. I wouldn't recommend anybody to achieve their first 1CC in UFO :) but TD is somewhat okay because Easy difficulty is definely easy and doable ever without single using Trance manually. Just collect those pink and green spirits and you'll be fine, and the difficulty to get 1UPs will be ever more useful to endure another games. But it will be a bit of trouble when novice learn to use Trance as just another 10s bomb...

TL;DR: EoSD, PCB, IN, TD (if you persuade them to remove C button from their keyboards before the start :D)

/r/touhou Thread