Introduction
This section explains everything you’ll need to know to decide which of my character you might want to download, and how to play them.
Q : What are your goals in character making?
A : I’m aiming to create characters that are fun to play, have a fair, difficulty scaled AI, and are capable of providing enjoyment to newbie, casual or open-minded expert fighting game players.
Q : What traits or game mechanics are present in your characters?
-Easy to use commands. While fighting games are inevitably about your keyboard(or controller) skills, I believe that it shouldn’t be overemphasized like certain other games or characters do.
-Damage Dampening (All characters), which means that hits in combos do less and less damage after each additional hit. This is pretty much essential to make the game balanced. The dampener is displayed as a thin bar for most characters, but even if it’s not visible, the effect is present. This is called “Burden” in my Touhou characters.
-Danmaku Bar(About 2/3 of the characters). It’s a bar that limits how many projectile moves the character can use in a row. The bar refills if you stop using projectile moves. Most characters that can use projectiles in an efficient way, having access to a large amount of projectile attacks will have this. Note that this isn’t identical to the same bar in Touhou games, and ONLY limits projectile use. In the Touhou games, it also limited blocking and movement in air.
-Grazing (All characters, optional on some). Characters with this ability avoid being hit and taking damage from projectiles while running or super jumping, and the affected projectile is removed usually. This also originates from Touhou games but unlike them, in my characters, it does not work against most projectiles coming from Super Moves, specifically those that have the HP attack type.
-Difficulty scaled AI, properly adjusted for each level(All characters). This might sound a given but in Mugen, it’s unfortunately extremely rare. Older engine versions didn’t support the difficulty setting, and even if a character does support this, the difficulty is rarely spread out evenly between the levels.
-Intelligent AI that can recognize moves that require a special way to avoid. This obviously only works against other characters from me, and it covers things like the AI knowing when to block low, high, or is able to avoid attacking with a projectile against a barrier that reflects them. This ability is scaled both by the difficulty and my own ranking of the character’s expected intelligence.
-Balancing offensive and defensive gameplay. While some characters are equally effective at both, some are better at one or the other, however, my goal in the game as a whole, is that both should be viable in general. This is very much unlike what I observed in other fighting games where offensive play was usually move rewarding, and defensive characters were totally absent.
-Moves with unusual abilities or traits. I tried to add as many different abilities as I could come up to keep things interesting as long as possible. When it’s possible to add something without breaking the game balance, I add it.
-Strategy. While this does not apply to every character, the more advanced ones do offer a lot more different moves than usual, both specials and supers. Knowing your opponent and carefully selecting which of your moves to use against them and when is a key to victory on higher difficulties. This is especially true when using super moves that might be uninterruptable or have invincibility. In case of card system based characters, setting up your deck to match your playing style is also very important. These characters can often be played in a lot of different ways to succeed, but not every strategy works against every opponent.
-Card System. Only Touhou and CCS characters have one. A card system means that Super Moves are stored in cards and there is only one super move command for them all. Whichever card you selected before that, will be the super move you are going to use. This allows a character to have as many as 20+ different super moves without requiring the player to memorize a very long command and complicated input for all of them.
-Spell Chains.This is only available for Touhou characters. It allows players to cancel a spellcard into another at a lower than normal cost. Only a few, very specific chains are possible, usually between related/similar spells, for example Patchouli’s St.Elmo’s Pillar->Royal Flare->Solar Flare chain. Spell Chains might adjust the dampening bar between each spell to keep the damage fair where necessary.
Declaring cards. Touhou characters only. The player can declare exactly one spellcard for a cost and use it any amount of times at a reduced cost without requiring to hold an additional copy of the card itself. Declaring an already declared card again will level it up making the effect more powerful when used.
Skill cards. Touhou characters only. Using a Skill card will grant the character a passive bonus permanently (the effect carries over to the next round and match)
Stage cards. Touhou characters only. These cards can only be declared, but not used. They will generate some sort of an effect while declared, without needing further player input.

Q : What traits or game mechanics are NOT present in your characters?
-Commands that easily conflict with each other. Since you normally use forward, back, and down for movement, guarding and similar basic actions, I avoid having commands that only differ by adding one such element to the input. For example if there is a down,forward,x command then I won’t have back,down,forward,x nor forward,down,forward x because both can be activated by accident when doing down,forward,x after walking forward or blocking. Common fighting games tend to break this rule and use both DFx and FDFx moves, or DBx and BDBx ones, making the game hard to control for no apparent reason other than this being the “standard”, expected way. If you are a fan of the Dragon Punch input (FDFx) bad luck for you. You’ll have to settle for FDx instead on my characters.
-Simultaneous button presses especially as part of a longer command. These are unreliable because even if there is just a 1 ms time difference between the two buttons, the input will not register if the game advances a frame in between, which is entirely beyond your control. It also results in conflicting commands for the individual buttons involved, see above.
-AI cheating. In short, if the AI can do something, the human player can also do it under the exact same conditions. There are no AI only cancels, moves or advantages.

Q : So what should I download? I’m looking for characters that…
…use a lot of projectiles to overwhelm the opponent : Download characters that have a long blue (RANGE) bar below the download button.
…are more like a normal fighting game character : Look for characters that have short purple and blue bars (CONTROL and RANGE)
…have an offensive playstyle : Look for long red or blue (MELEE or RANGE) bars.
…have a defensive playstyle : Look for a long green or purple bar (TOUGHNESS and CONTROL)
…have a card system : Download the Touhou and Card Captor Sakura characters
…use super moves to overwhelm the opponent : Look for stuff with a long yellow (POWER) bar.
…are really hard to beat : Download characters marked “Final Boss” and set your difficulty to Hard 8.

Q : What are the tiers on the download page?
Those are how difficult it is to beat those characters when they are played by the AI. Generally, Boss and much more likely Final Boss characters might have slightly better moves than Normal characters, or they might have powerful abilities rarely given to a character. It is recommended to set bosses to appear later in your arcade mode. Note that higher tier characters are usually more powerful when played by a human player as well as the AI, but the outcome still highly depends on your skill at using the character and the matchup.

Q : What is “RC”,”Beta”,”Alpha”?
RC is short for Release Candidate. It’s a completed, but new character or update, which is still primarily intended for testing and feedback purposes but is already good enough to provide an enjoyable experience most of the time. It becomes a released character soon if no new ideas or problems arise meanwhile.
Contrast to “Beta” which is a new character that is also intended for testing purposes, but hasn’t been adequately tested yet, usually contains many bugs, isn’t balanced, and will become a Release Candidate after throughout testing only.
“Alpha” is an incomplete character that still needs more stuff to be added. I normally don’t release anything in this phase, because it’s basically unplayable.

Q : Do your characters use Touhou game mechanics? Are they IAMP/SWR or UNL accurate?
No.

Q : How do I configure the deck for characters using a card system?
A : Each character that has a card system, now also has a program to configure it by the name of CharacternameDeckConfig.exe
You can configure a different deck for each palette, and one default deck, which is used for all palettes not having a configured deck.
You can also configure a deck for the AI, which will be used whenever the AI is playing the character, regardless of the selected palette.

In the current versions, you also have to obey these rules :
-No deck may contain less than 4 different cards.
-No card can take up more than half of the deck.
-The deck must have a minimum of 5 cards.

Q : Your characters fire too many projectiles, I can’t even get close enough to hit them.
Keep blocking until they come closer instead. If you regularly use characters that have no way of dealing with projectiles, you might want to avoid characters on the download page that have a high “RANGE” rating paired with very low “MELEE”, as those might not initiate close range combat themselves.