Hello. I would like to introduce you to this lovely little game called Touhou LostWord that I’ve been playing for close to a year. It’s an officially licensed game…not a fangame, not a bootleg…based on the now very massive danmaku series Touhou. There’s way too much to put in one little post, of course, but here’s a good place to start. Basically it’s a land ruled by various tremendously beautiful and powerful female beings, the majority of them based on the yokai of Japanese folklore. (This’ll help! 
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So what happens in LostWord? Well…fighting. That’s pretty much it. (There’s a side games area, but there’s only one game in it so far, and it’s been like that for months.) There are a variety of upgrades, boosts, equippable items, etc. to make your battle dames (known as “Friends”) more effective, and during downtime you can restore their condition, send them out on money- and item-earning tasks, and teach them skills. As with numerous games of its ilk, success begets success: the Friends conquer earlier challenges, gain the experience and items to grow stronger, conquer greater challenges, and so on.
So what’s so fantastic about it? Simple. You can play any stage you want… easy, hard, common enemies, boss, it doesn’t matter… with whatever Friends you want. In other words, if you want to bring overwhelming firepower to ensure victory, carefully match strengths against weaknesses, or even trash a weak boss over and over to rack up wins, you can! At no point does the game ever force you to take on a “challenge” or play “honorably” or make things “fair” (which about 99.999% of the time in actual practice means making everything horribly difficult or frustrating). You take on the battles you’re willing to take on when you want, and not a bullet more. And you know what the best part is? All the super-challenging or painful tasks, including the Tower and Arena (the ones you see in videos a lot), are 100% optional. They were designed for the truly iron-willed glass-chewing blood and guts god slayers, so if you’re not an iron-willed glass-chewing blood and guts god slayer, you can give it a pass and it doesn’t hurt you at all! Well, you do miss out on a few ultra-rare items, but unless you were shooting the moon to begin with, you won’t miss them.
Goddesses… 
I didn’t think anyone dared make these kind of games anymore. No enforced crushing difficulty, no byzantine skill trees, no endlessly sprawling labyrinths, no pages and pages of information to keep track of, no hour-long boss battles. Just tons of beautiful ladies and quirky, lighthearted stories. (Did I also mention that it’s completely free to play with minimal intrusions? 
) Needless to say, this is now completely my jam, and I’m going to keep at it for as long as GoodSmile’s creative juices can keep it going. Which, given how big Gensokyo is now, could be quite a while.