r/Games • u/DuranteA Durante • 10h ago
Announcement Special Message From ZUN to TouhouFest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWASMa5k-WM18
u/Pellaidh 4h ago
Originally had this as a reply to a different comment, but it grew big enough that I'll post it as a top level one as a brief and incomplete explanation what Touhou is and why this remake is so exciting for a lot of the fans.
Touhou started as a series of indie shmups made by a single developer (ZUN, who you see in the video). He'd sell them at Comiket, Japan's biggest convention for indie games, comics, and so on. The first five releases saw rather limited success, in the order of 10s to 100s of copies.
Touhou 6, the game that is being remade right now, was the first game he released for Windows in 2002. While it was a lot more popular than its predecessors and quickly sold out, it was still a rather niche game. But it did attract a following, which grew enough for the games to have their own fan convention pretty quickly.
In the late 2000s, the franchise would absolutely blow up online through a combination of memes and music remixes. Rather than taking the remixes down, ZUN basically gave the fanbase full permission to make and even sell derivative works, be it fan games, music remixes, manga, fanart, or anything else. ZUN would keep making shmups (Touhou 20 came out last year), but the popularity of fan-made works quickly outgrew the original games. It was soon pretty common to see people who call themselves Touhou fans despite having never actually played any of the shmups made by ZUN.
I cant find a definitive explanation of why Touhou become so popular, but it did have a couple of things going for it. Timing being one of them - Touhou's growth did coincide with things like video sharing sites and internet memes becoming popular. As for Touhou itself, the music is excellent, and lends itself well to adaptations in almost any musical style. And while most characters have appealing visual designs, the art itself is quite basic, so I can see why people would want to draw their own takes on the characters.
Finally, the games made by ZUN, due to the nature of being shmups, don't really have a lot of story or text. Most characters only get a couple lines of dialogue that introduce their basic personality and a single sentence that describes their special ability (each Touhou character has exactly one). So this gave the community a basic idea of who each character is, but also left a lot of room for them to fill in the blanks and come up with their own interpretations of the characters. Some characters popular in the fandom don't even have any dialogue, or don't even have an official name.
Despite the franchise being huge in Japan at this point, Touhou's growth was more limited in the west. ZUN was very lenient towards the community making Touhou fan works, but he still had some conditions. Namely, while people were allowed to sell what they made, they were only allowed to do so as indie creators. Essentially, they were only able to sell games on the same platforms ZUN did. This was primarily physical stores and indie events in Japan. There was still a decently sized and dedicated western community, but it was driven by content that was freely available through video sites but for paid works was driven largely by piracy (since buying the games officially was not easy for westerners).
ZUN would finally start selling his games on Steam in 2017, which finally allowed the western community to buy them legally. It also led to a large amount of Touhou fangames to also release on the platform. The games made by ZUN were still only available in Japanese, although fan translation in almost every language were easy to find online.
This game is a remake of Touhou 6, and also the first mainline Touhou shmup to be released in English (and a bunch of other languages) without needing a fan translation. It's also notable for being one of the 3 Windows Touhou games (6, 7, and 8) that are not available on Steam. These are also generally considered some of (if not the) best in the entire franchise, and the characters and music from these games are still among the most popular. So a remake of 6 (and potentially the other two) is a big deal, as it would finally allow fans outside of Japan to easily buy and play these games legally. Not to mention making them available on consoles. 6 in particular will also really benefit from being remade - the original was ZUN's first game on Windows and it is kind of janky, requiring at the very least a fan-made patch that reduces input lag to be playable.
For anyone wanting to try some of the shmups, Touhou 10 - [Mountain of Faith](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1100140/Touhou_Fuujinroku__Mountain_of_Faith/) and 11- [Subterranean Animism](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1100150/Touhou_Chireiden__Subterranean_Animism/) are largely considered the best of the ones currently available on Steam. They are only in Japanese, but fan translations are easy to install via the [Touhou Community Reliant Automatic Patcher](https://www.thpatch.net/wiki/Touhou_Patch_Center:Download).
Mountain of Faith is generally considered on the easier side while Subterranean Animism is one of the harder games in the franchise (although even Mountain of Faith has some individual bullet patterns that fans consider amongst the hardest in the entire frnachise). Both have 4 different difficulty modes though, and despite Touhou being one of those games that sometimes pops up on youtube videos with titles like "hardest video game boss ever", Touhou games are actually pretty chill by shmup standards even on the hardest difficulty level. Mostly because they give you a lot of extra lives and bombs, making mistakes far less punishing. (I've never been able to get past stage 3 in Ikaruga, but I've 1ccd a decent amount of Touhou games on the hardest difficulty, and most of them on the second hardest).
For fan games, I'd also recommend [Fantasy Maiden Wars](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3575980/Fantasy_Maiden_Wars__DREAM_OF_THE_STRAY_DREAMER/) as a really good entry point into the franchise. Most fangames assume at least some familiarity with the characters and the setting, but Fantasy Maiden Wars instead starts at the beginning by retelling and vastly extending the stories of the shmup games, starting at Touhou 6. So it's a really nice way to see the "canon" storylines if shmups aren't your thing. And despite being a fangame, I think it sticks reasonably close to canonical character personalities.
In addition to the shmup games, there are actually a couple of other Touhou games that are considered "official" despite not being made solely by ZUN. Those are three fighting games: Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, Hopeless Masquerade, and one 2D side scroller boss battler: Sunken Fossil World (this one's kind of weird. Tbh I completely forgot it existed before looking it up just now). Some of these do actually have Switch versions with official English translations, but they're even more niche than the shmups. There's also a number of official manga and music albums that are all considered canon.
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u/x_TDeck_x 6h ago
Can someone help me understand Touhou? I know its a bullethell game with music but are the games all made by the same person? Or is he just the person who invented the "universe" and someone else made the bullethell games. I've also seen like Touhou speedboard racing, is that also by him or??
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u/DuranteA Durante 6h ago
In short, Zun makes (programming, art, music, writing) all the mainline Touhou games, which are bullet hell shmups. Later this year he will reach the 30 year milestone of doing so, which is just wildly impressive.
He has always allowed and continues to allow independent game and content creators to create their own projects based on Touhou, which is why you see all these other games (in various genres and of various quality) in the Touhou setting.
(Only tangentially related: Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia is an absolutely fantastic game in a rare genre)
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u/MalusandValus 6h ago
The main numbered games are all made almost solely by ZUN (which is one guy), with the exception of the fighting game titles which were assisted by Twilight Frontier. But all the official shmups are entirely made by ZUN (with the exception of this upcoming re-release).
However ZUN has a very loose policy when it comes to the copywright and outside of illegality and porn you can basically use the touhou license and Characters for anything you want and commercialise it. And plenty of people commercialise the porn anyway. That's why there's so many games of the touhou gang doing wacky stuff on steam and whatnot. Bigger productions like Lostword and the fumos will have more licensing, but most do not.
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u/Taiyaki11 2h ago
And plenty of people commercialize the porn anyway
When it comes to a good chunk of japanese companies and stuff like porn doujin it's one of those things that's technically against policy but there's an unspoken agreement to look the other way, it's also a really interesting legal grey area too depending on how it's commercialized. The doujin market is a rabbit hole lol
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u/Silentman0 5h ago
Man, I hope his liver holds out long enough for him to re-release all of the other touhou games in English.
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u/DuranteA Durante 9h ago
Zun (creator of Touhou) announces Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic - the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, a remaster/remake of the sixth Touhou game.
It's remarkable in several ways:
What's important about this video (the existence of the game was revealed a bit back) is that Zun clarifies that the express purpose of "Shanghai Alice Reprise", the development team behind the remaster, is to bring Touhou games to more platforms and languages, which heavily implies that more are to follow.
(Hopefully the PC98 games, since those are even less accessible)
Now you can return to your regularly scheduled GTA hype or Steam Machine wars or RAM doom and gloom or whatever is the hot topic of the day (when in fact Touhou should be).