The Beauty of Touhou 

This video took me way longer to make than I expected it to be. I've spent weeks playing Touhou as well as watching ZUN's interviews and watching a lot of game design videos in order to understand the game better and think of better words to say when writing my script. I hope you enjoyed the video and any feedback on how I can improve my videos is appreciated :) And again, if you want to get into Touhou, start with Touhou 10 store.steampowered.com/app/1100140/Touhou_Fuujinroku__Mountain_of_Faith/ Edit from 07/21/2023: Guys I fucked up, I've been informed that ZUN is actually pronounced 'zoon', my bad Edit from 08/08/2023: So it would seem like Toby Fox is going to be arranging UN Owen Was Her and ZUN is going to be arranging Battle Against A True Hero, and I am FUCKING EXCITED FOR IT!!!! Edit from 02/21/2024: Remember when I said that I plan on making a video about Touhou's secret bosses? Well change of plans, I plan on remaking this entire video, which would include games from Touhou 9-19, more research, making some corrections, and yes I'll talk about the secret bosses.

in touhou, you can choose to play with a variety of characters like marisa or the wrong ones

Welcome to the rabbit hole! It was interesting seeing a game designer's perspective on the series. One thing I always loved about the Touhou games is how well ZUN synchs the stages to the music, to the point where you can remember where certain enemies and patterns show up just by listening to the music. Speaking of the music, since you liked it so much, I'd like to mention that ZUN has released a few music CDs, which include remixes of character themes as well as songs that didn't make it into the games. I highly recommend checking those out, as they contain some of ZUN's best work imo. I'd recommend starting with: Girl's Sealing Club, G Free, Mary the Magician, Greenwich in the Sky, Kid's Festival ~ Innocent Treasures (Also known as ZUN's theme), and Eternal Shrine Maiden. The CDs also include short stories featuring the characteres Maribel and Renko and take place in the outside world (Touhou's version of our world). Also, Memories of Phantasm isn't the only Touhou fan-made anime that exists. As far as I know, there are 3 Touhou fan-made anime: Memories of Phantasm, A Summer Day's Dream, and Hifuu's Activity Record ~ The Sealed Esoteric History. A Summer Day's dream is an original story revolving around a series of misteries that happen in Gensoukyou. There are 4 episodes out so far, and the most interesting thing about it to me is how the animation gets progressively better with each episode (episode 4 looks amazing, especially compared to what came before). Hifuu's Activity Record is probably my favorite one, it features the aforementioned Maribel and Renko as the main characteres, and each episode tries to fill in some gaps in Touhou's lore and expand on the existing story. There are 3 episodes out so far, and the most impressive thing about it is the voice acting cast. It has some huge names, such as Kana Hanazawa and Ishikawa Yui, and I have no idea how they managed that.

I think this guy likes Necrofantasia a lot.

My only experience with this series has been the memes, but you definitely weren't lying about the music. This is some good shit. Those song titles though... Maybe that all that beer's got some side effects. Either that or Zun's a kingdom hearts fan.

Ah, a fellow appreciator of the music, along with everything else. Welcome to the fandom. As someone who likes the music, I'd also recommend looking into his Book CD Tracks. One favorite of mine is Kid's Festival, which is the theme for ZUN himself. Hope you enjoy!

Awesome to see a video with someone talking about the design of the games, also welcome to Touhou! I think the thing that makes the stages, and especially the bossfights, feel so good isn't just the music being fantastic, but the music being composed to actually sync up with the gameplay most of the time! If you start paying attention to it, you'll realize just how much of it syncs up (especially the stages) Not only can it help with memorization of the patterns, but i think it also strenghtens the story and atmosphere in a lot of moments. For example, how the music builds up right before it loops and goes back to being calm at the end of stage 4 in Perfect Cherry Blossom. The intense gameplay is brought to a stop and you see youre suddenly standing before this huge door in the sky, with the calm music giving it an almost ethereal vibe You mentioned that you'd only played the first 3 windows games, so i'd REALLY reccommend you play some of the newer games if you aren't already planning on it! Touhou 17, Wily Beast and Weakest Creature does the atmosphere of the music, visuals and bullets so well and has, IMO, the most epic and almost cinematic final boss in the series. Also have a good time with your touhou music addiction, you really cant stop coming back once youve heard it👍

Been looking forward to this one for a while and you delivered! Great video👍👍

3:30, here we go. (not covering games with decimal numbers) Touhou 9 gives you 16 characters to choose from since instead of there being one play field, there are 2, one that's yours and the other is your opponent's. Touhou 10 and 11 lets you play Reimu and Marisa only. Touhou 12 inserts Sanae(first appearance in TH10) as a playable character next to Reimu and Marisa. Touhou 13 gives you Reimu, Marisa, Sanae and Youmu(first appearance in TH7). Touhou 14 gives you Reimu, Marisa and Sakuya(first appearance in TH6 and first playable appearance in TH7). Touhou 15 shows Reimu, Marisa, Sanae and Reisen(first appearance in TH8). Touhou 16 mixes things up a little and hands you Reimu, Marisa, Cirno(first appearance TH6) and Aya(first appearance TH9). Touhou 17 gives Reimu, Marisa and Youmu. Touhou 18 gives Reimu, Marisa, Sanae and Sakuya. Touhou 19 will offer a large cast of playable characters (as of right now it's only a demo), we will be expecting 19 different playable characters as it runs off the same idea as TH9.

Turns out, you are correct. Sakuya IS a reference to Dio. That's another thing that I enjoy about the series. The references that ZUN makes with the characters. (...While drinking beer.) Even with the PC-98 Era, there were references to the Shin Megami Tensei series such as Alice's design from Mystic Square. My favorite reference has to be the Wriggle Kick. It's synonymous with Wriggle Nightbug as a character and has become its own thing on top of being a reference to Kamen Rider. A reference to a certain piece of media that also builds upon a character is one I enjoy seeing.

just wanted it to be known before this man goes viral i’ve been subscribed to this channel before 10k subs

12:00 The thing I love about the music is that you know it's made for the games even if they're amazing by themselves. When you listen to them you say "Holy crap this goes hard", but when you are fighting the bosses in the late stages and you reach the climax of the songs you can literally feel the epicness of the song while you are grazing bullets.

Wait till this guys learns about the Magical Astronomy version of Necreofantasia😊

Let's gooooo! I wanted such a video nice job!

Nice vid! Keep up the good work.

It has it's faults, but there being an easy mode is important. These games have a reputation for being difficult that can drive away less confident players. Having an easy mode gives them a way to try it and see why they may be interested in playing further and on the higher difficulties. Even if they decide it's not for them and don't want to play more they may find Touhou's music and art sides and get involved there. Even while recommending people to play on normal once they're comfortable, easy mode let more people get into Touhou and I don't feel that's deserving of mockery.

FINALLY A NEW VIDEO

Touhou, in my opinion, has the best designs of any modern franchise. The versatility, uniqueness, elegance, distinction and nostalgia all these characters exude is something most other series would hold in awe.

Touhou inspired undertale? Wow ya learn something everyday

I have the sudden urge to drink beer now Insane video tho keep it up!

0:15 Anti Weebs (aka Westoids) try not to call Touhou an "Anime" challange (IMPOSSIBLE)

5:20 you will also be rewarded with listening to Eastern Dream

0:38 Tbh, I have my own diffrences with how these guidelines are placed and formulated. They fail to see diffrences in real cases, so they define videorecordings in the same category(And thus disallows or at least discourages posting outside RU-vid), disallows duplicating ending scenes full stop meaning the fantranslation-dataarchive that is used for the translationpatches has to knowingly break these terms to include the full story.(Which is needed because Zun is never going to release official localizations, he trusts fans more than himself or anyone he could contract) And the weird differenciation where mobile games specifically cannot be paid for some reason, even tho the allowed F2P-model is actually predatory in comparison. On some level, it is great that so many freedoms are granted to begin with, especially with it being a japanese IP that are usually extra-restrictive, but there are certain cases where one has to go against the written wind just as much as with Big N or cases where simply disallowing stuff entirely instead of having a scuffed permission would actually raise the quality of fanworks. Like how people may have incentive to make subpar F2P games instead of passion projects because it is a money machine. Which in itself sorta fails its own mission statement of keeping the reputation of the IP high. 3:13 That's me. I only played 1 and 6 a few years ago and didn't beat 6(got to Meiling tho, which I am fine with. Successful gatekeeper) a few years ago. I plan to eventually play 10 and the other PC98 games(including the TH1-route I didn't play) when they are properly debugged by fans. 3:16 Easy modo!? No way!(Best meme) 6:15 Honestly one of these cases where the inspired does better than the inspiration. Undertale and Deltarune actually came up with reasons for Graze to matter in gameplay. Of course, one could say that it makes sense in TH regardless due to the high score-arcade aspect, but not every TH game even has a visible score value or would make sense to have a score. 11:05 Btw, there are unlock-codes for these games to get access to the extra stage right away and they are all drinking-related. And a collab-game he contributed to that is made in the TH engine(forked from 10, iirc?)that is about a drunk office lady fighting a bar because she is in debt with them. 10:43 What do you mean? This Sakuya is the best thing since sliced bread.

I really like how Touhou projects has so many great characters. And Sumireko.

I’m Puerto Rican, and I was absolutely impressed by ZUN’s works! The musics are just one of my favorites things to listen!

14:44 Yukkuri

nice vid

3:18 right on. I tried it on easy mode at first because “there’s no wrong way to play”, got bored and didn’t realize this series was awesome until a year later when I played it on normal.

your typical shmup (shoot em up) has 5 stages, however touhou has 6. on paper this sounds better cause more stages means more content, right? however it also means the game is longer which hurts replayability. it also doesn't help that ZUN, for whatever reason, puts all the effort into bosses and none of it into stages, resulting in plenty of moments where nothing happens for like five seconds. again, this may not sound like much, but these games are meant to be played over and over again, so even just five seconds of emptiness add up to become 5000 seconds or ~83 minutes of dead air over the course of 1000 attempts touhou stages are often very basic. usually you'll have enemies on the left, then on the right, then in the center, maybe side or rear enemies, and that's usually it. they require little memorisation or execution, essentially being loading screens that you have to sit through before you can get to the enjoyable part of the game: the bosses. if you hear of a "hard" touhou stage, it's typically due to having an extremely random section, e.g. green books in embodiment of scarlet devil's fourth stage. touhou is pretty much the polar opposite of other shmups which tend to have brutal stages but pathetically easy bosses that last no more than ten seconds. some may rather have good bosses over good stages, but personally i would call this a big issue of touhou's, that about half of it is meaningless touhou stages also lack ground enemies, which are ones that lack a hitbox, or to be more specific, scroll along with the background. you can stay on top of them to prevent them from shooting, which is known as "bullet sealing". the pc-98 games had them, but they disappeared from the windows games onwards, most likely due to ZUN being too lazy to design proper backgrounds to place ground enemies. this is not to say that a stage without ground enemies is a bad one: as an example, out of raiden fighters jet's 12 stages, 3 of them have absolutely none. this complete lack of ground enemies is what makes said 3 stages unique in the first place: you can't make use of bullet sealing and therefore you have to play differently. even if you don't care about this, having ground enemies makes the backgrounds feel more alive and relevant so back to the bosses. there is a big problem with spell cards, that being the existence of nons (non spells). i say this because for some reason, no touhou game allows you to practice them, and no, nons aren't easier than spell cards. many of the hardest patterns in the series also happen to be nons, mokou's final non being perhaps the most infamous. it also doesn't help that in later entries it seems like ZUN got lazy and made each successive non just have an extra layer on top. the pc-98 games lacked spell cards and thus nons, so the bosses there have much better pacing you mention replayability and yet you neglect to discuss the importance of scoring, the shmup equivalent to speedrunning. a shmup with a good scoring system accurately represents the player's skill level, promote competition, and dramatically increase the longevity of the game. unfortunately touhou games have, at least in my opinion, rather lacklusture scoring systems, due to nearly all of them having grazing. the existence of graze encourages you to milk every pattern for as long as possible, which makes score runs absurdly long and thus worsening replayability. a single score run of perfect cherry blossom takes like 50 minutes to complete it's funny you call touhou hard, because ZUN actually designed it for beginners to the genre in mind. source: embodiment of scarlet devil's afterword i know i've been pretty negative, but i can't deny that touhou is a great place to start with. these games gave birth to many of the greatest players such as jaimers, moglar, pazzy, etc. that said, i can only recommend sticking to touhou if you prefer bosses over stages or love grazing

YEAAHHHHH LETZ FUNKIN GOOOOOO- *vanish*

It's actually good that you censored the endings because zun asks that people don't show them. It's not like enforced or anything, but it's just like, courtesy.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!

00:30 It's pronounced 'zoon' 08:58 Not really. If you read Patchouli's dialogue in Reimu's route she says that there is someone who likes to play with space and time, this is a reference to Sakuya. You also learn one of her capabilities in one of the endings. 09:56 This fact is somewhat no longer true for the mainline games. During the development of Touhou 18 ZUN's wife helped him design the ability card's picture. In Touhou 19 another artist helped design new character sprites.

15:10 NEVER! thy ears have already been blessed with divine choir and now thou shall forever hear the voice of Hakurei, whether thee seeks it or not!

to solve your addiction listen to the gensokyo the gods loved and also tonight stars an easygoing egoist ~ egoistic flowers

man you really used all of my favourite touhou songs lol

One bad design kills all the fun: you lose your bombs when being hit. You either preemptively use all your bombs (which is very hard) or you die to some trivial bullets and restart. It drives players to practice mode for a long grind, and after some dedicated players come out prepared for the story mode, they bomb their way through spellcards and cannot appreciate the beauty of danmaku. This aspect of touhou existed for 20 years until very recently (th18.5 & th19). Modern games from 10 years ago already uses regenerative hp bar and abilities with cooldown, and they don't have a practice mode which is inherently anti-fun.

ZUN surely knew what he was doing even when he was drunk Touhou is just beautifull

coool

touhou 🤯

while drinking beer

Man the games are fukin hard, but beautiful.

11:49 Is that real?

Necrofantasia..... good pic my dude

2:09 Below the subscribe button it turns colorful :O

10:41 Poor Sakuya always gets made fun of for her sprite in EoSD, but I think it's beautiful. Art is subjective. 11:26 I was just thinking about this; I like Touhou because it gives me a break from chaotic games with a strong male protagonist as opposed to intentionally entrancing spellcards and characters you feel like you know as a person.

new vid

"Boys would ruin the balance of touhou" Someone has not heard of unzan and rinnosuke....

Welcome to peak gaming, where you're eternally a prisoner of Zun's drunken madness like the rest of us😎

UT a masterpiece? HA

WE ARE JAPANESE GOBLIN

Artist and very amateur musician here. I came in to this video extremely ready to disagree. The reason being that this video would most likely talk about the art (including modern art). Until I watched long enough til you said "I'll only be bla bla touhou 6, 7 and 8". I still believe not enough was said about the art. You only mentioned the coloration, which i feel absolutely undermines the genius in the amateurish quality of his art. Art that is leaning towards being described as "amateurish" gives this sense of feel that it "could be better". But really, it means it can have potential to be more expressive. Also, as you said, people have interpreted the characters, so I feel like the amateurish art also lets you feel in the gaps. But, what about the art itself is so special? Well. Imma be real wit'chu, not much. Here's one thing I noticed while thorroughly studying and inspecting ZUN's art from touhou 6 and 7 (for 7, beta portraits highlight this way better, and for 8 this doesn't apply at all since zun went in a specific standardized direction which I feel not only made the characters look goofy, but lose their charm). Eyes. Have you ever noticed how eye styles and less-so shapes vary from portrait of one character to portrait of another? (And I'm not talking about, for example, Reimu shapeshifting into a different person every portrait) You can draw (mentally) overlaps between the way the irises were drawn between similar characters. About eye shape, I feel like I noticed this when ZUN was experimenting even more, with Touhou 7. Specifically, Touhou 7 character *selection* portraits caught my eye. Take a look at them. Now tell me the characters' eye shapes doesn't perfectly describe the characters. It's due to the points I've mentioned before that the art is so great at accompanying the game. Now, the world would be all fine and dandy, until touhou 13. (cue horror screams and creepy music as camera pans to a descecrated home) Since touhou 13, ZUN's art has been less experimental and more of a little bit of the SAME DAMN THING? (Don't go straight to the reply section, I know that zun still tried to experiment somewhat with th 13, 14 and 15, but after that it's the same nothing recipe) This entry, is when ZUN stopped experimenting and focused on drawing portraits ASAP for release. People often say ZUN's art has "improved" or whatever, but I believe the modern art is a straight up downgrade to the old art. Not only does it majorly take away from the charm, just look at the modern art. Every character has the same type of cookie-cutter anime eye style. Characters are now drawn like a badly traced 3d model reference, same for the shading. Every face, smirk, is the SAME. They all look THE SAME. At this point, it's like background characters in anime. It gives no charm, no storytelling value, no jank to laugh at. IT'S JUST A NOTHINGBURGER. Sorry if this was written in a quite emotional manner, I'm just really distraught because of this. Also for a self taught artist, ZUN's music is actualy really impressive (but obviously not megagenius level, not to discredit zun in any way). I feel like you can actually hsear ZUN's music evolving in the PC98 era. Like, a lot. I'm not gonna get into it, because i'm a very amateur musician. You could see it become more and more somewhat polished.o Other than that, great video Mr. fellow Personalizes themself online as wearing psychopath glasses.

Jesus I didn’t realize this franchise is older then SpongeBob lol

wait TOUHOU?????

great video just one thing your speaking is sort of choppy at some times and is the only thing that throws me off from completely loving the video (no hate just some constructive criticism)

They look like memes lol

new indoctrinate bottom text

2 how

Tou hou

lmao

Thank gosh you didn't heard of Yukkuris! They're cute funny little round creatures...but, monsters make SICK GROSS DISGUSTING "ART" OF them!

First

69th 👍

I'm Italian and here basically no one know what touhou is, but I will keep loving this series, made by a very determined person, one time I was cosplaying as Reimu and a pair of grandparents ask me if they could take a picture 😆😆😆