Best Starter?

[Sassy-Chibi-Seiga]

Firstly putting this here because it revolves around 1.5 and 1.8 starters as well and therefore has no place in their subtopics.

Touhoumon (in the official versions anyway) give you a choice of CReimu, CSakuya or CMarisa in the 1.5 version and the choice of CSanae, CAlice and CReisen. However, there's a somewhat good balance between these 6 so the choice is hard, and even knowing that the one you choose is the one you choose for the rest of the game while the others are let to rot (unless you find like a CSakuya in Mt. Moon but I'm not even sure if that's official). This topic is to bring your own opinion on who is your favorite/best starter for 1.5 and 1.8. Feel free to talk about other versions if you want to, like Ordinary or World Link or whatever.

[DoctorShanks]

Reisen = Glass Cannon
Alice = Bulky Attacker
Sanae = Wall

It all depends on one's play-style, but Reisen actually tends to get shit done in 1.8.

[SG-Sanae]

1.8:
Sanae's walling is completely shut down early on because there's so many Beast-Types around.
Didn't try the other ones, though, nor did I play very long.
1.5:
Reimu gets powerful STAB and a decent physical coverage with Razor Wind+Jump Kick, Sakuya has a lot of bulk and can utilise her ability for using inaccurate moves very well and also resists a lot with her Steel-Type, Marisa gets some decent special attacks later on, but lacks coverage to get past dragons and is terrible in the early game.

[Drewko]

Marisa in 1.5 have one AWESOME thing in early game- Pick Up.
Yeah, you can catch CNazrin or CLuna(?), but first just suck, and second is like underpowered version of Marisa xD

[EXSariel]

In 1.8, Alice is probably the best because she can have the best of both Reisen and Sanae if you raise her right. In game, walling tends to be a very poor tactic unless your team is really weak to a certain type that a powerful trainer uses a lot of, so Sanae isn't all that great. Reisen is fast and powerful, but Alice will typically be strong enough to get important kills but won't die nearly as easily as Reisen.

1.5? No question. Nothing else gets two of the best specially offensive types in the game on top of speed boost and a ridiculous Sp.Atk growth.

[Kurosaki666Tomoya]

In 1.8, I mostly stray towards Alice mainly for the fact that she evolves into Dark Alice. With her dark/reason STAB, she's a formidable ally. Unless of course you run into a mono heart type.

In 1.5, I'll admit I almost never chose Sanae. Reimu and Marisa fit my play style a whole lot more. (In other words, they help keep me alive when I do exceptionally bad. As seen in shoddy.)

[SG-Sanae]

Marisa is mostly lategame, but yeah, she's has decent STABs in a game where special coverage pretty much doesn't exist - physical sweepers always seem to get Fighting/Ground/Steel/Rock/Normal, whereas the only special coverage available is Ice Beam for waters, Surf for Iku and Fire/Ice/Electric for Normals. There's a reason Hidden Power exists as a move.