https://spaztron64.github.io/th98tuc_site/

The best way to get into touhou is to not engage with touhou at all (whether it be actually playing the games like a total schmuck or otherwise) and instead play, well, literally anything else. Trust me you don't want to know how bad things really are.

For STGs (shmups for you shmucks), even if you're not willing to pirate, there are like a gazillion of them on Steam (like Hellsinker, Crimzon Clover, ESP.Ra.De, Battle Garegga, but not the pretentious as fuck ZeroRanger tho) nowadays, though a bunch of the more modern Steam releases are either re-releases/ports of decade-old doujin game or otherwise uninspired as fuck at this point unfortunately.

There's also a bunch of STGs on Arcade Archives if you have a PS4 or Switch. There's Thunder Dragon 2 for a good STG from there.

If you want elaborate lore in your franchise, the Souls games are in that direction. Probably less contradicting and serves to have more of a point than what we got here.

If you want lore in an STG franchise specifically, R-Type kinda fills that itch if you count R-Type Final 1&2 (and probably Tactics/Command 1&2) maybe, and while I have lots of issues with those despite being an R-Type apologist myself (despite ZeroRanger and ESPECIALLY Touhou Mother's best efforts to make me hate R-Type, they at least make me consider the death penalty for using the R-9 Arrowhead or any other R-Type thing in vain), I'd rather deal with those stupid unlockable ship roster trees and other shit than whatever we got here.

If you want good grandiose music in your STG, Taito and a lot of their STG stuff featuring music from the based ZUNTATA (foolish ZUN for taking his moniker from ZUNTATA as if he can even hope to compare to them) are available in a bunch of places nowadays. The soundtracks for a bunch of Cave's STGs range from baller (Dodonpachi, Dangun Feveron) to perfect (Dodonpachi Daioujou and to a somewhat lesser extent Ketsui fit the bill), though they may be too difficult for most people unless you play the respective baby/novice mode of whatever console/PC port you may find if any.

If you want to play as a shrine maiden murdering things, The KiKi KaiKai / Pocky&Rocky games, whether they be the arcade original, the SFC/SNES games, or the 2022 remake are there for that. Reimu is basically confirmed to be the Santiago to Pocky/Sayo-chan's Sonic at this point. It's even more apparent if you've played Touhou 1 as that Reimu's moveset is basically just SFC Sayo-chan's.

If you want to play something like Touhou 1 (aside from the KiKi KaiKai games above if they count), Demon Slayer Akagi is right here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1551230/Demon_Slayer_Akagi/

If you want something that takes ideas from Taito but does something semi-unique on its own, there's the Alltynex trilogy (Kamui, RefleX, Alltynex Second) you could easily find on Steam which seems inspired despite taking its overall initial ideas from Taito's Ray'z trilogy (RayForce, RayStorm, and RayCrisis), with Kamui being just Rayforce but easier with redundant hit points per life IIRC but RefleX being where the series comes to its own entirely.

If you want a franchise that has established a bunch of characters over a bunch of yearly installments and 3/4 arcs each with their own little background and a universe that gets more and more established somewhat, there's the King of Fighters series. At least with them you got at least a couple of games (KOF 98 and KOF 2002 UM) that people care about on a deeper/competitive level without any disclaimer or exception, whereas with Touhou the best more experienced STG people can think of as actually 'good' games in the STG side when are Touhou 12 and Touhou 12.8 (Unidentified Fantastic Object and Great Fairy Wars respectively), and even then people end up preferring Phantasmagoria Trues touhou fangame over them and PT doesn't even have a fucking background beyond just fog for most of its stages, and even that isn't as interesting to the STG base as Cave games and Battle Garegga at this point since the STG genre is basically 'solved' at this point. At least KOF mainly calmed down on the releases after the whole pachinko thing following KOF 13 for the most part, so at least it's stagnating less frequently than Touhou.

If you want a bunch of cute girls doing dumb things, we already have plenty of gacha shit and vtubers on the internet, and a bunch of the larger vtuber groups and a bunch of girl collectathon gacha already have elaborate lore and shit in their settings and character backgrounds on top of that themselves. If you can control yourself, money wise, and not splurge like $1000 on crap, I'd actually rather you play some gacha of this ilk than touch Touhou, which is something I did not see myself saying but here we are.

I'd like to preserve the r-word to those like nmlgc recommending the Len'en series as some sort of "Touhou done right and also FREE :)", especially to those who already pirated the original Touhou shit already, considering how hard it was to buy the official Touhou games first-hand overseas until Toby Fox coaxed ZUN to release them digitally on Steam only to stop porting games entirely when ZUN's lawyer got mad online over criticism and coaxed ZUN to DMCA strike a bunch of shit on a huff and probably give up entirely on the Steam ports for the first 3 Windows Touhou games, 6-8, that normies actually care about. No it's not the "no source code preserved :(" rumor because Touhou 9 of all things got ported to Steam and all the Touhou Steam releases are just the original executable binaries wrapped around Steam DRM.

As for Len'en proper, outside of Len'en 4, it doesn't really improve on the Touhou formula except for the aesthetics, the soundfont and overall music (of which still doesn't even hold a candle to say Phantasmagoria Trues whose soundtrack is mostly taken from SENTIVE's royalty-free music library for god's sake), and the concept and implications behind the true last 'boss' of Len'en 2 which ZeroRanger stole from. In fact its level and boss pattern design are overall worse and oftentimes wants you to know and kill as much as you can ASAP otherwise you'd often get fucked by its level/boss design. Len'en's only real advantage over Touhou mostly has ended for the most part whereas Touhou is an eternally stagnating zombie at this point, but you're still better off playing basically anything else at this point.

When JynX decided to significantly deviate from the Touhou formula beyond the aesthetics and level/boss design philosophy, we ended up with Len'en 4: Beautiful Pagoda or Haze Castle, which ended up screwing itself over to justify its own gimmick of pulling a Smash Ultimate-esque "Everyone is here". It has every boss from the previous 3 Len'en games to fight as well as two Touhou games worth of new characters as bosses. Unfortunately to fit those in it has to screw its level structure. It basically did the whole "randomized enemy waves from a global-ish pool" shit that Touhou 18.5 will later do, and added in a weird branching path system where you move left or right in a grid by staying in that relative portion of the game screen long enough for each random wave, and you either move left a stage or right a stage if you are left or right enough on the grid after beating the main stage boss, or basically play the same 'stage' again but longer (except for the last stage which is like 5 waves without any grid movement before the boss). Repeat for 5 more stages with a longer grid of enemy waves to deal with each time. You mainly encounter Len'en 4's newcomers by staying on the right/left 'paths' up to end of the game (the titular Beautiful Pagoda or Haze Castle routes), otherwise you end up facing randomized bosses from the previous 3 games.

To compensate for the boredom of fighting repeat waves (which can happen even in a single playthrough) is random effects per wave encounter like turning all the bullets/danmaku black which can screw you over or do nothing relevant depending on stage background, add in a blindness/darkness effect on the screen ala Mystia from Touhou 8, give you a one-up if you beat the wave without dying or bombing, make the enemy wave stronger or weaker, or just drain your powerups very quickly if you dare shoot the enemies in the current wave, making you plan to pacifist-run each wave. You could also instead of a random enemy wave fight a random boss with a single danmaku pattern to deal with, IIRC also beholden to the same random effects that can screw you over with normal random waves.

To compensate for the BS that can happen (especially in the very long Extra stage where all these aspects are at their worst), not only does the game give you a health bar per life so that usually you don't die when you get hit once for the most part (unless you toggle an option for normal STG one death per hit behavior), but also an 'armor' bar that also takes hits for your actual health bar while not empty (ala Gungrave or Timesplitters or Goldeneye) and recharges occasionally on top of that.

Even among the playerbase this is not enough for most people for Extra mode (and especially the harder Absurdly Extra mode exclusive to Len'en games), so JynX added in a fucking elaborate upgrade progression shop system between playthroughs where you can buy up to shitton of upgrades for not only your health and armor bars but also a bunch of other shit after getting levels/skill points from repeat playthroughs. It can go up to 5375 levels/points to get/maximize all the upgrades, at which point things get absurd and you become basically unkillable and can beat Absurdly Extra with the true final boss encounter even as a STG scrub and you get fucking speedruns (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYahw1exV1g) for how fast you can game over after spending maximum # of points on all the upgrades you can get. (It took almost 11 minutes to game over in that linked video while deliberately trying to game over due to how hardy you get with all upgrades equipped, by the way).

This is also probably why unlocking the Extra stage for Len'en 4 (usually unlocked by beating the main game without continuing and at least Normal mode) requires a lotta playthroughs, requiring you to beat all eight(?) potential final bosses of the main game (including the 2 newcomer final bosses), which means not using the best/most normal-ish playable character 'team' for at least 3 playthroughs as all 3 characters in that team are all potential final bosses themselves in the main game funnily enough and you can't fight against anyone in your current team you're playing as in a playthrough, and then do one playthrough to find and fight the true final boss of the main game to unlock the Extra stage for each of the four(?) normal playable teams. By that point you're supposed to have enough points to deal with the Extra stage BS.

Despite all the compromises in order to accomplish the goal of "everyone is here" while kinda sorta still keeping the Touhou formula as much as possible intact (6 STG Stages and 1 extra stage), Len'en 4 still is less worse than Touhou 18.5 because at least the former has effort and ambition, even if said ambition was just to add a bunch of crap into a grap to its detriment. Also Len'en probably saved itself from stagnation accidentally by making Len'en 4 as it is, not only from introducing a certain character and ended up making the all of Len'en revolve around them with a bunch of unforunate implications for the franchise, but from making Len'en 4 hard to top in terms of effort that I don't really know if JynX really wants to bother continuing on seriously. The only real game JynX released for Len'en since 4 is some idle cafe RPG thing that probably hasn't even officially finished development.

All those touhou fangames that aren't just STGs in the vein of the originals with are mostly just shittier versions of other official games, like they really want to make fangames but are afraid of getting nuked by the corps.

Fantasy Maiden Wars is just worse Super Robot Wars without the crossover aspect that SRW basically lives on and just basically repeats the plots of a bunch of the official games for the first 3 out of 4 FMW games anyways unlike say the SRW OG games which at least have their own unique plotlines for those without enough mecha experience to appreciate the proper SRW games.

There's that one recent Touhou fangame that I'm sure is just shittier Zone of the Enders for those unlucky enough to know. I think its name is like Valkyrie of Phantasm or some shit.

There's motherfucking Touhou Mother which is basically the worst game of all time, which is basically a cornucopia of random videogame memes (mostly of the Jojo, Nintendo and Gradius/R-Type variety) and melodrama whose message is that Gensokyo's soul is weighed down by gravity so fucking hard that your average Nintendo character can kick their asses EZ.

There's like 2 different Touhou-flavored Megaman Battle Network / Rockman.EXE games, 3 different Touhou-flavored Megaman X games, and also Megamari and like a gazillion Touhou-flavored Megaman classic games made by the dude behind Rockman R: Dr. Wily's Counterattack, his original actual/proper Megaman fangame, featuring the Air Man stage from hell (https://youtu.be/8DaPVp79luY), ballsy enough to want to be sold for money before Capcom stepped in to fix that travesty.

Pretty sure all of those touhou-man fangames would make you apologize to whatever Megaman games you currently hate (common examples like MM&Bass, Battle Network 4, X6, maybe X7) if you were to play them due to their sheer badness.

There's that Touhou fangame that's just Kirby Dreamland 1 but with touhous who only stands on its own due to big tits and a giant skeleton Mokou who you don't even get to fight (and is probably just a wimpy New Super Mario Bros Wii final boss Giant Bowser reference), even though we already got three different official Kirby Dream Land 1s: the original Kirby Dream Land 1, Spring Breeze from Super Star(&Ultra), and Revenge of the King from Super Star Ultra.

There's that Touhou RPG that's just Super Mario RPG but with a much weaker artstyle and some horniness to cover the soullessness (like all the characters having giant tits, Doremy carrying a pink dildo, a giant Hecatia boss fight with giant tits that I hope to god that you can actually target and hit individually as that would at least be something semi-inspired).

All these fangames feel like that they are built for people who funnily fit the "touhou fan NOT excited to play the official games for the first time" and the "won't play anything that isn't touhou", but instead tell me to not bother with touhou and play other things that these fangames copy from. Play either Zone of the Enders game (except for maybe ZOE2 on hard mode?) instead of that one recent touhou fangame. Play any Megaman and not any of these touhou posers attempting to steal their flair. Play any official Mother or hell any game other than fucking Touhou Mother.

Play Super Robot Wars OG games (or the normal Super Robot Wars games if you're already a big mecha fan to appreciate) instead of Fantasy Maiden Wars. Or play any Front Mission if you want a mecha turn based strategy game that's actually good. Or play Fire Emblem or the dozens of turn based strategy games available even if you outright hate mecha.

I guess in a way that official Touhou (especially more recently) is a shittier version of other things. At the very least it basically made itself known as a shittier Dodonpachi (or the shittier side of the danmaku pond) at this point. Antimony of Common Flowers is a shittier Persona 4 with the concept of the Shado-I mean 'DREAM' incarnations of the cast, Seija and Shimmyoumaru are shittier versions of Ghetsis and N from Pokemon Black and White. The whole animal yakuza thing from Touhou 17 is apparently 'inspired' by the Kemono Friends 2, which I though pretty much everybody hated for a variety of reasons, so I'm guess

The Ultramarine Orb Elixir from Touhou 15 is basically the Zero System from Gundam Wing but an elixir you drink instead of the Zero System being a helmet and floppy disk connected to a computer in that they both experience potential futures over and over and let you pick the best one ASAP. Unfortunately, the elixir is just a shitty desperate attempt to capture the 'restart at checkpoint' mechanics of earlier STGs like R-Type and whatnot that got retconned for being too problematic for the status quo.

On the other hand, the Zero System at least was part of Gundam Wing's attempt (alongside the unmanned AI-controlled mecha Mobile Dolls) at tackling the difficult question of how would artificial intelligence affect war and humanity's place in war and whether it ruins the point and nature of war of humans fighting each other. While Gundam Wing, perpetually confused to what it wants to be and say, ended up scrapping that question and moving on to something about foolish tryhard pacifism in war or something before turning into Char's Counterattack (Wing Edition) for the ending of the base anime with the message of "I guess at the very least tragic wars lead to proper peace for a while once people figure out how bad war is I guess" before the Gundam Wing Endless Waltz OVA put a muck in that peace because Gundam Wing can't make up its mind.

It still is a far better excuse for using such a plot device than Touhou's equivalent elixir being a desperate attempt at capturing the good old days of "restart at checkpoint upon death" STGs probably for the wrong American/western crowd which were probably more inclined to credit feed whereas the Japanese arcade crowd basically followed an honor system of "1 credit per playthrough, period" so that people waiting in line can actually play the arcade machine after you instead of waiting for you to spend 8 hours on a single stage.

Touhou and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. It basically ate the doujin scene somehow, and it made STGs worse by helping push the modern STG scene to being comprised of mostly Dodonpachi/Cave-likes and Touhou-likes made primarily to spite/own ZUN half the time nowadays, with some people being daring enough to make Gradius-likes who can't wait to show you how totally Gradius-like they are. It's basically one big reason why I became, or more accurately, stayed an R-Type apologist after my tastes gotten more refined over the years.

ZUN basically accidentally put a target on his head by being inexplicitly popular enough to make the same game like twenty times with minor gimmicks per game ala Pokemon and less overall soul as time goes on, the later games only being made in a matter of weeks and months each out of obligation mostly while ZUN spents the rest of each year going to conventions and kinda sorta babysitting random mangaka making too many fucking shitty aimless official canonical-ish works for him.

Seems like a lot of fangames basically end up hating ZUN at the end despite making shit off of his own property, which makes me almost pity him. Almost.

There's Fantasy Maiden Wars whose 4th game apparently goes into "ZUN and/or canon-purists are bad :(" after spending 3 games bascically going through the checklist of plotlines of the official touhou games from 6 to 11 inclusive (except for maybe 9) with some PC-98 stuff sprinkled in, with the main OC villain wanting everything to be exactly like the official games in terms of canonically and not whatever the fuck the developers of FMW were going for, which is basically only the Myouren dweebs from Touhou UFO really matter, both in fighting ability and in plot functionality, in the long run, because they have a big flying ship that can stand in as a typical SRW warship where everybody hangs out in, most likely. Everything else, aside from Reimu and Yorihime (probably meant to be the Thunder God Cids of FMW meant for easier play, Yorihime especially, Reimu does get some development bones but not much aside from special moves and shit over the games), Marisa and Alice paired together (because le epic Malice Cannon meme which makes you rather play instead Contra 3/Spirits to abuse a similar exploit or Alien Solider where such a exploit can't happen), Daiyousei for being le epic healer, and basically everything else either becomes worthless when the Myourens come around or starts off worthless due to one reason or another (Shinki and Yatagarasu-Utsuho not being pairable with anybody for one, Remilia for being nerfed from her boss form when she joins and would probably not fare well even if she had Scarlet Gensokyo from her boss form, etc).

There's danmaq who probably made the Danmakufu engine he used undesirable to Japan by declaring that his game, Concealed the Conclusion, is superior to ZUN's work, which is kinda true, in at least that it signifies an end to the series rather than an eternal cycle of stagnation, which leads to the modern day of China being the main country of the Touhou fangame scene nowadays with the LuaSTG engine much to the stagnating Japan Touhou fanbase's chagrin probably, and they probably see ZUN in a less than favorable light anyways themselves.

There's this weird obsession with Marisa, to the point where people like Zounose has people like Byakuren and Hecatia obsessing over Marisa for being the most important (and probably strongest) person ever when the (at least) original intent of Marisa is that she's supposed to be the most normal and everyman of the cast, who is at best barely stronger than Cirno. Marisa apparently BTFOs Hecatia so fucking hard the latter gets dril corn-cobbed by the moment and as a coping mechanism has dreams where she has a bunch of the weaker youkai characters stop the evil magician trio (Marisa, Alice, and Patchouli) from enslaving Gensokyo or some shit, and dreams so goddamn hard that said youkai start sleepwalking and stealing mochi hammers from Eientei at night for the purpose of said dream. Marisa is like the last person to live in someone's head rent-free, but probably because of the funny overpowering glitches with the Touhou 10 and the funny Contra 3 swap bug for Touhou 8, Marisa is achtually the strongest and most imporant person ever. Only Concealed the Conclusion really handled the "Marisa is important actually" thing semi-well, and it's more because it's a more mild "passing the torch from one main character to another" than "most important person because lol glitches like we're the Pokemon fandom at the time when Missingno and Glitch City were the source of many horror fanfic stuff".

There's this weird obsession with Marisa, to the point where people like Zounose has people like Byakuren and Hecatia obsessing over Marisa for being the most important (and probably strongest) person ever when the (at least) original intent of Marisa is that she's supposed to be the most normal and everyman of the cast, who is at best barely stronger than Cirno. Marisa apparently BTFOs Hecatia so fucking hard the latter gets dril corn-cobbed by the moment and as a coping mechanism has dreams where she has a bunch of the weaker youkai characters stop the evil magician trio (Marisa, Alice, and Patchouli) from enslaving Gensokyo or some shit, and dreams so goddamn hard that said youkai start sleepwalking and stealing mochi hammers from Eientei at night for the purpose of said dream. Marisa is like the last person to live in someone's head rent-free, but probably because of the funny overpowering glitches with the Touhou 10 and the funny Contra 3 swap bug for Touhou 8, Marisa is achtually the strongest and most imporant person ever. Only Concealed the Conclusion really handled the "Marisa is important actually" thing semi-well, and it's more because it's a more mild "passing the torch from one main character to another" than "most important person because lol glitches like we're the Pokemon fandom at the time when Missingno and Glitch City were the source of many horror fanfic stuff".

There's Touhou Mother who basically goes "Gensokyo is bad, and its inhabitants base their lives spouting and owning memes based on other popular intellectual properties", which can be seen as an accidental indictment of Touhou as a whole, a nightmare franchise that lives as a copy of other franchises.

It seems that touhou can only really be enjoyed on a superficial/secondary level, attempting to genuinely care about in on a primary level, beyond than just posting touhou-flavored memes and fumos, makes you hate it and spend your live spiting it instead, like for example nmlgc who stared too deep into the Touhou abyss to say the least and decided to spend his last years with Touhou reverse engineering the PC-98 games, not out of love but instead probably to spite ZUN with whatever bugs and code he could find being stolen from other doujin-makers at the time. I know that ZUN is indeed scum, but any fandom whose apparently most involved members hate the creator of the franchise they're obsessed with is definitely cancerous.

Not sure why the group that spends time rightfully sneering at people making content for IPs and genres that they hate and want to subvert/spite (like Taneem's DMC: Devil May Cry, Rooster Teeth's Gen:Lock, and also Legendary Defender Voltron apparently) should give Touhou a pass at this point since it's basically filled at its core of people that either hate it or no longer genuinely cares about it on a deep level other than money I guess (ZUN probably fits the latter to a T at this point).

Also by design Touhou is basically seeped way too deep into full on Death of the Author territory by its own fandom, both japanese and otherwise, so I dunno why the "Death of the Audience" gang would give Touhou a pass despite being purists in that the only interpretation/analysis of a thing must be based on what the author says explicitly and interpretation based on assumptions or contradicting what the authors have said (like the Final Fantasy 8's Rinoa=Ultimecia theory confirmed to contradict the word of god at some point) is considered bad and grooming, probably to avoid cases like Moe Sucks saying that Kill la Kill is Marxist because poor people are on the side of the good guys or Hbomberguy saying that Kill la Kill is feminist because uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Ever since ZUN basically confirmed that his shit is basically no longer official canon, and thus his works have no internal merit by being made by the fucking creator (kinda) of the fucking franchise compared to everyone else, his only true purpose at this point is to shit out more official characters in any way he can for the rabble and assholes to make shitty headcanons and interpretations in any way they see fit at this point, like saying that Donald Trum- I mean Miko is trans because they mentioned getting a new body in their backstory when it's likely that they're intended to be basically Touhou's version of Arturia Penndragon from Fate/Stay Night in that they were born and were always female but history wrote them as male, or that Cirno is Reimu's daughter in some form because Cirno and the fairies are like one of few weak (or somewhat sympathetic to the weak) people Reimu doesn't outright hate somehow basically, or that Reimu is autistic because a so-called solo developer somehow has too many conflicting writers in his wing that Reimu's character at this point is a disasterpiece of epic proportions and is probably a former racist that eventually now secretly just hates the weak despite being weak and worthless herself because funny hypocrisy is cool for a main character, basically a proto Infinite from Sonic Forces but with no Phantom Ruby to save her, or Silver from Pokemon Gold/Silver but more stupidly written somehow, or basically she's the embodiment of this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/834895801851183165/1032121990506631209/unknown.png

ZUN is basically Japanese Lowtax, in both being perpetually drunk and also barely 'ruling' over an empire of dirt that made things worse for everyone else overall. I expect the equivalent divorce proceedings and the suicide to about if twitter and by proxy touhou disintegrate at some point.

In the end, ZUN is the cuck that can't.

A cuck that can't code, especially not now since all he does is just add and remove gimmicks from the code randomly for each game now, and likely still has that fucking game manual stack overflow bug which acts as one of Touhou's many eerie parallels to Final Fantasy 4 of all things, namely similar to FF4's Zemus's fucking deadly stair traps speedrunners used to skip to and cheese Ze(ro)mus via some funky RAM manipulation shenanigans, though in Touhou is much less useful unfortunately aside from like one screenshot of an Extra stage played in Normal mode with a corrupted score beyond the counterstop limit or something, which only makes people upset that they had to patch the recent games for any meaningful scoring play at this point since ZUN long dropped the ball on scoring mechanics by now.

A cuck that can't do soundfonts well and is mainly a Squidward playing the wrong notes (which technically sounds more original only for a bunch of doujin stuff to show him how to play the right notes and then kindly fuck off.

The main problem with Touhou music is that it's very one note generic uninspired bombastic for the most part. ZUN is basically like Motoi Sakuraba, whose only main emotions in his songs are "calm and BATTLE ZONE", in that ZUN makes like three types of songs total in his own career, especially for his games: 'stage' songs , 'boss' songs, and some 'melancholy' stuff relegated to the main menus and endings of each game that usually share the same funny Touhou letmotif. You could easily swap the music of one stage with that of most other stages in official Touhou and nobody will bat an eye. You could almost similarly swap boss music without people batting an eye, especially if you swap an early stage boss song with another early stage boss song or a final boss song with another final boss song.

One of the few (if only) notable exceptions to the Touhou rule is the Stage 6 stage for Touhou 15, which should've continued as is for the actual Junko boss fight instead of another generic final boss song with the dumb electric guitar of obnoxiousness since the former better fits someone who is supposd to be greatly calmed down due to standing in the fucking ocean of the Lunarian moon for two fucking years waiting for Chang'e and/or Lunarians to come to her after being used and abandoned by the funny hell goddess and her funny american flag hell fairy as a weapon to get back at the moon only to be later be accused by the hell fairy of crystalizing fairies at the end of the fairy manga so casually sorry you dumb HecatiaXJunko r-turds. But I guess ZUN is so afraid of stepping on Taito's shoes copyright-wise that he's afraid of using proper theming and symbolism for songs now, similar to ZUN not letting Reimu use her gohei for anything aside from a mechanic gimmick in Touhou 14 for fear of the whole Sayo-chan comparison, up to ditching the gohei entirely in her player sprite for Touhou 15 on since Touhou 14 provided an excuse for to make a proper gohei-less sprite to use forever and leaving the gohei literally just there to look funny in title screens, the funny gohei that gets longer per game and that's its only purpose.

This and the whole shitty soundfont thing is why I reserve the funny r-word to people who think ZUN's music is hot stuff comparable to any videogame OST greats, whether it be stuff like pretty much any Final Fantasy OST from 4 on (except for like FF5, the Gilgamesh big battle bridge song is overrated and the rest of FF5's OST is mostly mid and has soundfont issues, still better than Touhou stuff tho), or Chrono Trigger and Cross, or any ZUNTATA OST, or most/all Wild Arms OSTs, or Manabu Namiki's work at CAVE and elsewhere, or Einhander, or Chain Dive, or Donkey Kong Country 2, or even fucking Gaia Seed and Threads of Fate for the PS1. And yet this shit led to people ruining their careers to turn the doujin scene into a fucking shittier OCRemix that only fixates on one fucking franchise to own a person's wrong notes?! While you could argue that OCRemix only really focuses on remixes of SNES/SFC stuff over other consoles, at least it's more than one fucking franchise and thus more overall variety of music to work with.

It makes things funny when people want to use Touhou music for their MMDs or fan videos of some sort or another and only use like the three songs total from the Tasofro Touhou fighters over and over and over and OVER again as those are the only songs that come close to fitting average casual scenes that make up most Touhou fan content in general. Because every other official Touhou song is for action or adventuring and we know Touhou fans and the videos they shit out can't handle action or adventuring or any suspense in general for a wide vareity of reasons.

A cuck that can't write, whether by himself or when working with other people. He probably doesn't even work with people, just lets them do whatever and take the credit himself like a stooge, which is why he eventually admits that canon and characterization are just a suggestion and that he's nothing more than a official character factory compared to the rest of the fanon.

The ironic thing about ZUN hiring a bunch of mangaka to write for him for what constitutes most of the official Touhou franchise, aside from the fact that he still is considered as this epic single developer, is that most of them (aside from like the fairy manga series), the only thing that isn't complete shit) basically become the same thing: A bunch of random shit happens because of a big mystery or culprit. The cast never gets around to solving the case or mystery themselves properly until the ending happens in which relevant things start actually happening and the answer is basically given upfront basically out of fucking pity. Basically, nothing happens until the ending happens ala something like Lufia 2. The phenomenon is basically an excuse for stupid shit and the details of said phenomenon are probably not even fully realized by ZUN up until he and/or the mangaka decide to end their respective manga and are basically an excuse for otherwise unrelated shit to happen.

Take the Kasen manga, which basically just exists to tell us that Kasen and by proxy Komachi are the only good touhous and everybody else is a worthless r-word psychopath achtually that acts as antagonists to her, especially Reimu. This is basically what started the whole thing of "you're supposed to hate the whole touhou cast entirely aside from whatever ZUN decides to shill at the moment for certain viewbases like Sumireko for isekai-obsessed zoomers or Clownpiece for Americans and they're all worthless assholes with all bark and no bite and the only really main difference between them is job description like Reimu is the worst cop ever (because American cops r bad) or Aya is the worst journalist ever that cancel cultures people for no reason other than because 'murican journalists r bad :(".

It eventually ends with the whole 'fight between Reimu and Kasen's original evil half walking around hell' that ZUN apparently planned since the beginning (or at least a Reimu vs Kasen fight in general, Touhou 13 apparently was supposed to end the series with a Kasen extra stage boss fight but the whole shitty manga thing probably put a wrench in that plan and left the series to eternal stagnation) but isn't really connected to the whole "Kasen is the bestest eva and everybody else is a shitstain" that the whole fucking manga paraded around up to that point. Of course, since Reimu is nerfed to a bitch by then, unlike the Silent Sinner is Blue thing where Reimu 'loses' according to the JP fandom by going to a draw by threatening to yell slurs or jack off against Yorihime who is basically meant to be to Reimu what Metal Sonic is to Sonic or what Mandark is to Dexter or w/e (basically "I'm you but evil and 1000x better except for a weakness here or there"), Reimu just uses Fantasy Seal at evil(er) Kasen (fused with the 'good' Kasen at this point) unsuccessfully, gives up only for Tenshi to tell her exactly what to do that 'good' Kasen either probably foolishly thought Reimu would figure out on her own or thought so little of her that she probably told Tenshi off-screen what to do before joining to fuse with 'evil' Kasen so that Reimu could chop her right arm off and basically revert 'evil' Kasen to said right arm. Then after this reveal we don't even get to see the end of the fight, we just cut to after the battle with 'evil' Kasen as a right arm again dancing in a box for 'good' Kasen to watch over. The end.

Then there's Forbidden Scrollery, the Kosuzu manga, which is really just the "Reimu is bad" manga part two, electric boogaloo. A bunch of dumb shit happens that we learn at the end is connected to one specific cursed book hiding in Kosuzu's book store thanks to Yukari in a stupid plan to stop the youkai trying to exploit the human village by causing a bunch of stupid shit for the humans to blame the youkai on, which probably doesn't even solve the problem of Mamizou and Aya grooming Kosuzu and attempting to exploit the human village overall for their own ends since the latter two disguise themselves as humans in the first place, kinda ruining the overall intent of Yukari's plan in the first place. Reimu and Marisa and the gang never get around to solving this before the ending where the reveal throws the answer at us. Instead it's basically showcasing how dumb and stupid they are at their job, like Reimu who will gleefully kill off a random npc for daring to turn into a youkai and would probably have killed Kosuzu for being posessed by the cursed book if Yukari didn't intervene to plot dump at the reader and give up. but Mamizou and Aya grooming Kosuzu for nefarious ends that's okay apparently since Yukari is bad :( and the manga ends with them partying as if nothing is wrong. If I want a manga/anime where we get child grooming left unquestioned I'd rather go with Dragon Maid (or preferably Cardcaptor Sakura but I dunno if THAT particular 'romance' plot is similar enough to this or Dragon Maid's cases) at this point because there it's probably more as a joke or fetish material at worst than whatever the fuck is going on in Forbidden Scrollery.

Then there's the Detective Satori manga which is basically the "memberberries" manga where it just and goes through the motions, basically going through the cast of each "windows-era" game in order, having the culprit of the plot put people to sleep through her funny possession shenanigans to avoid having to write certain characters ZUN and/or the mangaka don't have the heart to touch for fear of angering people like Alice. Mainly it's just Reimu and Marisa fucking up and getting captured by the main players of each windows-era game up to at least 8. Eventually it just gives up on the mystery and gives us the identity of the culprit straight up. All these shitty excuses of mysteries make fucking Scooby Doo look like high art. Then it has Reimu go on a mental breakdown about how worthless she is, and unfortunately this is basically ZUN and the mangaka mocking her at this point rather than a tragedic moment. We're supposed basically respond with "STOP FUCKING CRYING BITCH! WAH! WAH! WAH! I DON'T WANT TO FUCKING HEAR IT!"

Even the fairy manga side of things, the least shitty of the main manga over the years, isn't really immune to this, though it at least wasn't holding off dealing with a big mystery in a reasonable fashion up until its own ending. It still has the whole problem of the issue of the final arc being solved by like one person and the rest of the active cast in that arc being unable to do the things that they should for whatever, which is unfortunately more apparent here. Why doesn't Reimu or Marisa bother to go at least investigate what's crystalizing the fairies of Gensokyo? Why do they both have to just stay at the shrine with their collection of fairy crystals instead of one staying and potentially fighting hellspawn that want to eat the fairy crystals while the other tries to solve the issue? Is this to better justify the one-sided fight between the fairies and Okina? Considering how nerfed Reimu is in the modern incarnation of touhou, being just "bad american cop", I very much doubt that she (or Marisa for that matter) could do much to turn the tide on the fairies' battle against Okina (it's probably implied that the season mechanics in Touhou 16 are the only reason that Reimu and Cirno stood a chance against Okina in the first place).

And even if Reimu could turn the tide, she can probably be too late to actually participate in the actual battle before Okina figures out that Clownpiece is not trying to fuck up Gensokyo or figure out that it's the side effect of Okina's shenanigans in Touhou 16 crystalizing the fairies despite being established in the Kasen manga earlier that she knows about Okina in whatever the fuck the 'canon' is supposed to be, which kinda shows how stupid having multiple mangaka work on separate manga for a single franchise at once really is since it's unclear whether they have the same idea of what the canon even is (particularly how Touhou 16 happened officially and who actually bothered to deal with the incident there) since I doubt ZUN has an official bible of how things are supposed to work as he should.

Also why is Okina in a wheelchair? I know that Touhou 16 was supposed to have a goddess of disabilities sitting on a wheelchair as the final boss at one point, but I doubt that original idea is that much similar enough to what eventually became Okina in the final release to warrant giving Okina a wheelchair, and it makes it look like ZUN or whatever wanted to feel meta or whatever by jangling in beta elements in our faces.

The touhou mangas after Silent Sinner in Blue (except for the fairy manga somewhat) illustrates and emphasizes the big problem with touhou is that it's the most insincere thing ever. The worst of the manga are mean-spirited as fuck with the active cast being either miserable assholes with no purpose in life than being assholes without explanation (with Reimu, Aya being the worst) or those like Miyoi and Kosuzu who instead get bullied by said miserable assholes. Nobody gets to grow or punished for their direct actions. All their actions end up not mattering other than a reinforcement of nihilism and negativity. It feels like a tragedy of dunces that treats itself as a comedy, as if the general miserableness of the setting itself is the joke. The one (most intended) message that goes through is this fucking attitude of "Heh, IMAGINE caring about anything here in Gensokyo, you fool." All they are, really, are just tools/skins to pair with each other, whether it be fanart bait and/or making dumb quips. Which especially doesn't gell with the fact that ZUN spends way more time on the manga that's meant to further characterize the cast than the games which by design can't really do more than quips per battle and some omake stuff.

It makes me ask how much of this shit is ZUN's idea (directly at least) and how much of it is the mangaka's idea to make a mockery of the franchise like this. I don't see ZUN as a storyboard guy, so I dunno how he would convey to the mangaka each chapter to be written. But he probably just gave each mangaka a rough draft of events for the manga, probably some bullet points and the mangaka wrote the rest with ZUN taking what the mangaka shits out as canon for himself kinda. If a lot of these stupid elements were ZUN's idea, then the fandom probably has much sway in him that they are probably dumb-headed responses to whatever the fandom is treating Touhou, whether taking their ideas (like Reimu being an r-word from people saying she is for not beating Yorihime fairly in SSiB, Kasen being basically the original idea for Fantasy Maiden Wars' Keine and Touhou 15 being basically the original draft for Fantasy Maiden Wars 4 apparently) or spiting the fanbase (The whole trump manga thing to own 2ch Trumpists and/or dumb americans or something, Seija just being evil for evil's sake to avoid being shipped with other people only for people to ship her anyways because fanon does not care what ZUN things).

The most pessimistic reasoning I can think of for why the touhou psyop that decided to make touhou popular in the first place, wherever it may have came from, was a thing in the first place, is to strike down the doujin scene by making someone like ZUN that was never actually a doujinist in the first place the main face of the doujin scene. He's basically an Anakin of doujinists: He made PC-98 games, but he isn't fit to the council of doujinists due to breaking many of the traits of doujinists himself. And he got Palpatine'd into his role somehow and those who tried to fit into the new Touhou normal end up failing horribly over the years because Touhou was never meant to be as big as it got and it showed. It could also be that the rest of the doujin scene was as bad as ZUN (but were never popular enough for their skeletons in their respective closets to start showing) I dunno, and this was actually a mercy killing, but eh.

On the other hand, the more optimistic reasoning I can guess is that it was an attempt to allow fangames in a larger and more 'legal' level to avoid trouble with the corps that went completely astray, which probably explains why 99% of touhou fangames are shittier versions of other games that mock the touhou IP they're mixing awkwardly with the gameplay of a much better IP.

Which makes me say that we should give up on the modern trend of trying to make ultra-elaborate legally-distinct copies of games we liked as children that still end up missing the point of the original products in the first place. Whether it's modern boomer shooters whose enemy roster aren't quite as formidable and memorable as Doom 2's enemy roster, "wow so retro" stuff that have too many QoL stuff and cheating to actually fit their retro graphics and are just using said retro graphics as a crutch for good art, games like Signalis that really love to signal (heh) what exactly they're based on to the point of parody, and what have you.

Earlier fan stuff may have proper danmaku-ish combat occasionally, but eventually that got dropped for more melodrama and nihilism and casual stuff. ZUN could have just made and played bullet patterns in-engine and took a screenshot and used that to represent danmaku combat like he did for Grimoire of Marisa/Usami if he were to do all the manga work himself, and I wouldn't blame him for doing that. I mean there's Yuke and JynX and others who made whole mini touhou games not to be played publically but as a basis for a video to be watched, so it's not entirely a foreign concept at this point. Instead we basically got "What if Yu-Gi-Oh but there's no card games being played or games in general and it's just the characters reacting to phenomenon without doing anything really to stop it because games are too intensive to draw :(". The whole spellcard rules thing mandating that everything be done via danmaku combat kinda also put a wrinkle in things actually happening in the manga side as well.

ZUN is a cuck who can't draw, but that's the least of his problems at this point. In fact, he should've drawn his own manga series if he wanted to make Touhou a multimedia empire and isn't willing to spend more of his time making his own actual games. It worked for ONE with One-Punch Man, which turned from a manga not really more artistically complex from ZUN's ending art (which is probably what a ZUN-drawn manga or webseries would look like), to a huge Japan-wide phenomenon and probably at least popular in America if not other parts of the western world. Instead he has to depend on the ideas of others when he got other mangaka to write for him, instead of letting his art stand out on its own.

It's like he wants to be this weird combination of a popular manga guy as well as a humble doujinist and ending up neither instead. The art of the mangaka he employs weren't worth sacrificing one's individually and setting for at the end of the day. They aren't really interesting on their own. Closest is Moe Harukawa with Forbidden Scrollery, but even that isn't particularly amazing on its own to justify "Reimu bad cop" beaten to our heads over and over like a sledgehammer. And Moe Harukawa's portraits in the HD Tasofro games (Urban Legend in Limbo and Antimony of Common Flowers) are mostly shit and air-brushed to hell and back with the only good portrait being Koishi of all things somehow.

The big problem with making a fucking manga series for a danmaku STG franchise, much less like 10 of them over 20 years, is that you can't really translate danmaku gameplay outside of a video-game where you don't have to draw every bullet manually on pen or tablet or whatever. Doing that in a manga basically leads to Toriyama Cell (from Dragon Ball Z) syndrome but instead of drawing the spots in a single character, you'd basically have to draw whole panels and pages filled with spots, which probably gave people nightmares thinking about doing that for Touhou manga.

For level design, despite making like around twenty games in around twenty years, ZUN overcomplicates things when it comes to level design probably by necessity of having too many fucking games to work with.

Unlike most other games in general, STG or otherwise, Touhou doesn't really have enemy 'types' so to speak, rather it's more behavior scripts randomly attached to a small set of enemy sprites (fairies, yinyang orbs, flames, spinning F.O.E things). In say DOOM 2, an Archvile in one level will act completely the same as an Archvile in another level and they both act completely the same as an Archvile in a separate user-made level WAD.

At best the behavior script of an enemy type can be influenced by params passed to individual enemies of the same type to differentiate enemies of the same type from each other to a usually small bit, or the behavior script can be modified by whatever stage the enemy is in or whatever rank/difficulty the game is set at the current moment, like for example the small tanks in (especially earlier) DoDonpachi games being influenced by how high the rank/difficulty system is at, and by proxy mostly influenced by how far into the game session you are. Battle Garegga's enemies are an even bigger example if mainly due to how esoteric Garegga's difficulty/rank system is in comparison to Dodonpachi's. But despite all this enemies of the same type are still bound to the same behavior script for the most part.

In Touhou, though, each individual enemy or small set of enemies in each individual stage have their own completely original behavior script not signified by any unique enemy graphic. A fairy in one part of the level may just fire bullets straight at you while a fairy with the same exact graphic in another part of the same level will instead be a mid-boss with elaborate danmaku patterns and lots of health, and yet they'll both be different from yet another fairy of the same graphic in the same level somehow.

This may seem to increase enemy uniqueness by not really reusing enemies unlike other games, but it doesn't really allow you to use enemies to their full potential (as modern DOOM wads and to a lesser extent Super Mario World hacks can) and have be able to have behavior patterns for multiple potential situations, since they're going to be used once or twice in a single level at best and then put away never to be used again, so their behavior patterns become static and/or simple and you can't really use your knowledge of enemy types to deal with future uses of said enemy types.

It also makes developing levels much harder since you basically have to have hundreds of enemy 'types' for each individual game, which is a problem when you design games as a 'somewhat' one-man team from start to finish in a matter of weeks to months each (Impossible Spell Card took like 3 weeks tops to develop, for one), and also 4 difficulty levels per game to design around on top of that, so you can't really polish anything at all.

I guess it's a necessity if you're going to have around twenty games using similar engines in around twenty years and are desperately trying to make them not seem like level packs or DLC of each other that you're selling for like 20 dollars each, on top of having a couple of gimmicky mechanics per game, but it really damns the practice of having around twenty fucking games in around twenty fucking years if you have to sacrifice so much in level design to justify such a goal.

As for the bosses, the problem with Touhou bosses is not really exclusive to touhou but more generally to danmaku STGs in general where the bosses barely move and aren't really dynamic and the challenge of most of them is to align yourself horizontally with them to do more damage and make the danmaku patterns end quicker, making sure not to move too much from the boss's vertical axis because that often gets you killed.

Touhou is more egregious in this regard in that the bosses are all barely bigger than your player sprite, which gives them less excuse to do more than just sway along the screen occasionally. Makes all the bosses feel samey when the boss isn't going all gimmick on your ass with a funny survival pattern or w/e. I think the few official touhou bosses I remember having elaborate movement that can sufficiently stay away from your vertical axis is like the Stage 2 boss (Chen) from PCB and that's more of a gimmick than anything. So basically the only real movement you have to do is put yourself in level of the boss and just shoot lol, making sure to avoid

Compare this with say the Stage 3 boss of R-Type 2 which is like more than half the size of the fucking screen and moves around all over the place more than most touhou bosses ever do and to kill it you have to fire on and destroy the blue pods floating around and also flying all over the place that also like to fire lasers on you when they get level with you and like to hide inside the boss itself in the top part guarded by a rotating turret wall that, while destructible, also fires quick lasers when you're level with it to fuck you over, and I actually think the boss has a timeout phase where he can just run you over if you dilly dally (at least it feels like it, though the boss may actually be mobile enough that I could just be mistaken), so you either spend more time looking for more sure openings and risk getting run over or you rush and also risk dying to a random laser you can't really see coming. Either way you're never really staying in one place at any point for long and is mostly moving all over the place.

Nowadays modern STGs all end up being either a danmaku thing with some combination of Cave, Yagawa, and Touhou elements or a "lol just X game again that you liked but shit now" like all those JP Gradius clones (which makes me respect Gradius 5 for trying to innovate somewhat and bucking at least a couple of trends despite still finding it overrated myself) or that R-Type Leo wannabe dragon STG thing I saw in a stream once that I forgot the name of.

No matter how elaborate the scoring system of your 2010s and later STG is, most people are going to focus on scoring like a handful of STGs at best (and one game at worst), which are going to be mostly just the CAVE stuff and Battle Garegga at this point with like a handful of people each for other STGs just to feel unique. Most other STGs aside from CAVE stuff and Garegga (and maybe Ikaruga?), whether made before or after those, are only really played for the novelty factor up to an 1CC (One-Credit-Clear) for a youtube video of some sort and them dumped forever.

Since STGs popular for scoring exist, there's no more reason to make anymore since people will flock to the STGs popular for scoring and will never really expand to whatever people decide to make nowadays. For Touhou games (especially Touhou STG fangames nowadays) it's an extra insult since all those pump-and-dump 1CC clears you see on youtube all are just Lunatic NMNBNC (No Miss, No Bomb, No C Button) or equivalent clears that outright ignore the gimmicky mechanics of the game being NMNBNC'd as much as possible, which makes everything feel even more samey.

The problem with these danmaku STG games is that they're basically one-note that applies to like all of them. The same general strategies you could apply to one danmaku STG basically apply to all of them at once. You play one of them, especially one of the harder ones like Daioujou to a 1CC? You're basically set for all of them. All there is aside from the general ways of dealing with danmaku is rote memorization for things you can't really dodge on your first try. At best gimmicky mechanics per STG just add something to do alongside the usual motions for scoring or getting more resources for survival or whatever.

Ironically fucking user-made DOOM level wads have more unique level design variety over the like 3 decades that OG DOOM 2 has been around than all those damn danmaku STG games do combined. Probably because OG DOOM is a more complex game overall than one-note danmaku stuff (despite DOOM technically having less enemy variety than most STGs, whether the latter go full touhou "unique behavior script for every fucking enemy" or not) and thus have more mechanics to work around, but simple enough for joe schmoe to get into making Doom levels of some form.

DOOM level pack wads (especially more modern ones) already share some of the general strategies of dodging 'normal' projectiles as danmaku STGs do, but simply because of extra mechanics like ammo management, more variety of things to worry about like hitscan enemies, Revenants' homing projectiles, and most importantly ACTUAL FUCKING LEVEL GEOMETRY, you can have a variety of encounters with unique solutions aside from a generic use of circle-strafing for everything ever. If you're not a scoring person (and I am definitely not) and you're looking for a fresh difficult game genre to work with, you'd be better off buying and trying Doom 1 and/or 2 as well as TNT and Plutonia from Final Doom and then looking at or watching MtPain's "Dean of Doom" videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/MtPain27/videos) to some extent for good DOOM leve pack wads to play around with like Strife 2, Eviternity, Alien Vendetta, Ancient Aliens, Heartland or whatever. You'd probably have a better time overall with DOOM at this point and it's all with basically just level mods for one fucking game.

Previously, prior to the overall danmaku-ization of the STG genre (probably partly or mostly caused by Touhou and/or Cave STGs), STGs were of course more varied. Even if you discount western stuff like Xenon 1/2 or Tyrian and limit yourself to just Japanese STGs, you can find plenty of variety earlier on, at least between different game companies for one. You could see Thunder Cross as similar to Gradius, I guess, both being made by Konami, but Gradius, Battle Garegga, R-Type, Raiden, Raiden Fighters, Darius, Tatsuijin/Truxton, Thunder Force 3/4/5/6, Thunder Dragon 1, Thunder Dragon 2, Hacha Mecha Fighter, R-Type Leo, Ikaruga, Radiant Silvergun, Scramble, Steel Empire, Rayforce, Raycrisis, RefleX, Hellsinker, all feel more different from each other than two modern danmaku STGs like Touhou stuff and Cave stuff (especially from 2010s on) do without outright deviating from the STG formula to an unrecognizable degree for people to count.

ZUN is just a leech that leeches off of others despite purporting as a single individual creator, whether leeching off of Tasofro for anything not a STG until they're left with just like 2-3 people period and obviously can't really finish even what is basically just Sonic but with just bosses lol in a timely fashion and had to finish it later with DLC even after multiple delays. Leech off the fanbase for ideas, trying to either appease them or spite them depending on how he's feeling after his morning beer. Leeching off of the many mangaka he worked with until either or ZUN give up and end each individual manga more abruptly and stupidly than most manga endings more prominent manga critics in Youtube or whatever would call the worst ending ever or w/e.

Touhou as a whole is basically a virus deep within its bowels, tainting those who go on too deep until they get corrupted beyond repair, like the aforementioned Tasofro going from the niche but decent Eternal Fighter Zero to the Touhou fighters that mainly exist to make MUGEN cheapies for AI Bilibili/Spriteclub cockfights off of or are basically worse Melee at best (Hisotensoku), the latter that has to be patched to be properly enjoyed without the weather system gutting things up, and Tasofro ending up with 2-3 people left in the company total at the end of it all. The Memories of Phantasm people turning into Japanese MAGA Trumpists somehow. The Japanese MMD community consuming itself after Nicovideo's reign waned and largely replaced by the Chinese (and otherwise) on that front. That one company making the earlier Touhouvanias (not Luna Nights) eventually going bankrupt shortly after. Etc etc etc.

Touhou hates itself. Touhou is a series that can only be enjoyed superficially or ironically. You either 'like' it for the fun knee girls that are always shown wanting to fuck each other in 99% of fan art or fan anything really and never bothering to go deeper than that for your own sanity, or you go deeper into it and finding yourself a 'fan' that fucking hates everything about it and wanting to 'fix' or expose everything about it ever to 'own' ZUN and/or everybody that still 'cares' about it. Like all those Fire Emblem fans that 'like' it but hate the anime/japanese parts of it for being too problematic or whatever and think the games are too EZ or whatever but don't want to expand their horizons to other turn-based stuff.

Or the people who make stuff like Shovel Knight who want to wear the retro aesthetic but don't want to commit to being retro entirely and sees its premise as a quirky "shovel knight" gimmick for the memes and for some funny dialogue than genuine care, probably because its developers are NES Scenesters who can only play EZ Capcom Disney NES games for babies like Rescue Rangers and Ducktales which Shovel Knight seems to takes its cues from and sees anything BARELY harder like NES Contra as literally impossible without the Konami code for thirty lives. After dabbling in arcade titles via MAME and playing games outside of the NES and SNES, my mind is broken away from the whole "NES is nintendo hardcore" mindset people had back in the day. Unfortunately this means that people unfairly treat the NES like worthless outdated shit due to no longer having that whole "nintendo hard" appeal it once had before our horizons were expanded. But to expand on that tangent is for another day. I guess the reason for Shovel Knight piggybacking on the retro asthetic is because sadly it's hard to make good and unique art nowadays unfortunately, it's easier to make good retro art than it is to make good non-retro game art since there's less colors to deal with for a NES, especially if you don't want to fully commit to NES limitations.


The group of people that have come the closest to genuinely enjoying touhou are JP artists, probably. Problem is that even then their work don't really attempt to care about canon events or characterization for the most part or have a naive-level knowledge of such things, probably because Touhou never really had canon or characterization despite the higher ups insisting that there was (up until recently when ZUN indirectly admitted that he had no idea what he was doing in the first place with the whole 'no canon or characterization' thing, anyways), and also because Japan is way more paranoid about piracy than the rest of the world and doesn't even have a proper wiki (unlike fucking the NicoNico MUGEN or MMD scenes) or an online archive/encyclopedia attempting to explain Touhou in any semi-reasonable capacity, so their more accessible avenue for Touhou knowledge is through other people who mischaracterize (usually accidentally) the characters in one way or another.

The fact that their work doesn't really care what the Touhou world is actually supposed to be is probably for the best, kinda. If there's more thought to figure out and utilize the 'best' interpretation of the 'canon' and 'setting' of the Touhou universe, then we'd have more random spite drawing of the characters raping and brutally murdering each other over minor incidents and going full emo on a regular basis rather than what we got now with the nothingburger stuff that at best/worst ends up as random yuri pairing shit of characters of various levels of lewd based on the most naive and/or base-level of character interpretations or just because.

The issue of this open-ended interpretation we got here is that basically said interpretation is completely different from person to person, and reading/playing fan-shit with their own interpretation that are completeley different from one another sometimes even from the same author can easily give you fucking whiplash if you try to foolishly dig deep into touhou stuff. If we are to assume to not bother with whatever the fuck the official people are saying, than that means that the characters are ironically just skins of humanoid beings at the end of the day, not really proper characters, and basically just fodder for Gift's fumofumo merchandising in terms of actually making people money, outlasting all the other touhou plush/figurine makers which basically died almost entirely around Touhou 12 leaving Gift's fumos and like a couple other plush/figurine makers left for those who were excited from that one touhou figurine twitter.

You can probably easily imitate/replace the average touhou fanart more than most other art with AI art programs out there, because of this. Can't really have any action shots in your art because of how hard it is to draw danmaku and the touhou universe established danmaku as an actual thing people do there and not a gameplay abstraction of epic spells without doing Berserk-levels of work and detail for so little purpose.

Which is probably on reason why I end up recently seeing Puyo Puyo art (https://twitter.com/87_hana356/status/1594230269044609025) (https://mobile.twitter.com/87_hana356/status/1591279574838837251) of all things that go harder than pretty much anything I saw of the Touhou art side of the tracks, both JP and otherwise, have ever done, especially recently. Which is ironic in that Touhou is originally meant to be mainly a franchise of girls flying around lobbing lots of magical shit at each other in 'epic' battles while Puyo Puyo is from very early on a franchise mainly a game where you fill and clear your corner of the screen filled with different colored blobs in specific ways so you can make the game overfill your opponent's corner.

Most of the establishment of Touhou's lore and setting that is already there (and not bloat the setting with new shit with base-level explanations that leave things for people to misinterpret) is not actually in the like 10 or more official manga but in random printed material like interviews or whatever that are pretty much impossible to find of course without a proper archive that a wiki can provide such things without trying your luck in JP Yahoo Auctions or other random stores. Seems like the only official Touhou material that actually gets perpetually reprinted up to now as far as I can tell are the Touhou games (even Touhou 6), ironically the portion of the Touhou multimedia empire (of dirt) that ZUN spends the least effort on nowadays. China and to a lesser extent the west have wikis attempting to fill that gap for the everyman who don't want to spend loads of money and time looking for official sources, but not really for Japan's side of the internet sphere.

Touhou is worthless. And because it's worthless there's no reason to bother with it since your time is better spent elsewhere if the 'fans' all fucking hate its official form in some way or another and hide in some brand of fanon.

Lament the death of the doujin scene from this stupid psyop and move on.

In a way I kinda wish Elon Musk would kill twitter due to his incompetence, because Twitter is basically Touhou's home for the most part since most other places like Nicovideo and 2ch don't really care about touhou at this point (and probably never did in the first place, and mainly giving up on pretending when other gacha games and games with lots of marketable gimmick girls came around like Uma Musume or Kancolle or whatever) and Pixiv is killed off by AI art spam and westernization mucking things up there, mainly filled with touhou artists from japan and otherwise (the JP artist crowd and those who follow them and some people who care about the gachas probably being touhou's only real JP demographics at this point), people defending anything japanese from dumb western prudes, boring twitmong cloutmen, shitposters, fumo fanatics, and try-hard moral-OCD dweebs afraid of anything or any opinion remotely problematic to an obnoxious degree.

Without twitter, Touhou would probably disintegrate at this point, which is probably for the best. It probably won't restore the doujin industry, or the Japanese games industry's former glory days by proxy, but eh.

Turns out Phil Fish and Keiji Inafune were right to say that the Japanese games industry is dead, they were just years too early probably. Without the doujin industry training up and coming people, we're left with an industry subsisting on memberberries or pandering to the angloids that don't genuinely care much for Japan, with everything that isn't fucking Tengo Project or Hamster (the latter now of Arcade Archives fame) being completely worthless either failing to make new things like with Sonic Frontiers and Balan Wonderworld (the latter despite Yuji Naka's persistence) or failing to remake old things and capture the magic, whether by making shitty Unity ports with worse input lag worse than the fucking OUYA controller somehow or remake things for the new generation but failing to get how said things worked in the first place. Repeatedly. Forever.