Board 8 > Can someone please explain Touhou to me

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I am now the proud "owner" of every single game in this series. The bullet hell visuals look very pretty, the music is great... but what the hell is going on with the story/lore? Why is this happening in a bullet-hell game?

Also stealth "what is the best Touhou game" topic

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ok, so theres this girl who hangs out in a bucket

thats as far as i got

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i think it's a game series about a fairly amusing youtube video a few years ago if i have my internet facts straight

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Imperishable Night and Subterranean Animism are my favorites

I also really liked Phantasmagoria of Flower View's multiplayer. (iirc newbie was better than me, but not that much better, so we were a good match. HGR just handed me my ass constantly lmao)
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The story is basically just dumb fun enhanced nearly to the point of infinity by various fanworks. You can easily ignore it if you just want to enjoy the games, which are excellent. Imperishable Night and Mountain of Faith are my personal favorites.

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I kind of fell out of playing sometime after Mountain of Faith was released only playing a couple games of Subterranean Animism and UFO.

I kind of think that the best place to start is probably somewhere between 6-8.

no one really cares about the pc 98 games.

Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil might be a bit harder to go back to after later games since it's sort of a transition game working out the kinks between the pc 98 and windows games and doesn't have a visible hit box but it's still pretty straightforward.

Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night are intended to be more beginner friendly - the border bonus point mechanic gives you a little extra breathing room since you can take a hit and just miss the bonus instead of losing a life in PCB, and the border team in IN has a pretty ridiculous death bombing window to counter getting hit. Also, PCB has both an easy and a hard extra stage, and you can unlock the IN extra stage on easy. (IN extra's the only one I've been able to beat)

after that I think the series gets a bit stricter with being able to tinker with starting lives/bombs in the option menu, and also started experimenting more with systems and bonus mechanics so a lot of the reactions I see seem to be a bit more divisive (although I admit I haven't really been keeping up with the series or fan reactions). Though you'd probably still be reasonably fine as long as it's not Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom since I guess that one has the unfortunate combination of having an unpopular gimmick combined with ridiculous difficulty.
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Most of what I could tell you about Touhou consists of the terabytes of music fans have created from the original tunes spanning practically every musical genre one might desire.

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Are the fighting spin-offs as good as the bullet hell games?

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So there's this guy named Owen, who works at the U.N., and in the big reveal, he turns out to be a she.

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immortal smoke reaches for the moon or something

idk i didnt play the game
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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Also stealth "what is the best Touhou game" topic

I like the weird fighting games
The newest one on Steam never ever goes on sale though
Literally never
https://steamdb.info/app/716710/

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Drakeryn posted...

Imperishable Night and Subterranean Animism are my favorites

I also really liked Phantasmagoria of Flower View's multiplayer. (iirc newbie was better than me, but not that much better, so we were a good match. HGR just handed me my ass constantly lmao)

I booted up an old hard drive recently and saw PoFV on there. I was terrible.

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touhou is about when lolis with hats go around creating problems and- very rarely- sometimes solving them

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they ruined our most powerful fictional fighter contests for like three years tbh

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Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism are the best in my opinion, as well as the game released around the same time. The "much" earlier games are a little too unpolished. Imperishable Night and Perfect Cherry Blossom are both pretty good, though. As for the newer games... Mm... It might be two factors at play.

You could say that after playing enough Touhou that it was going to be much harder for anything else to impress me. Like, every new game that comes out is essentially 'more of the same' but with some minor additions and tweaks. So if you've already played so much of the series, you stop being as impressed by it.

The other thing is that I think ZUN wants to avoid this feeling, and so he tends to add new "gimmicks" to each of the games as they go on. Maybe a totally new player would feel differently, but in my opinion the gimmicks almost always make the game less fun for me instead of more fun. That's why I prefer Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism. They have very straightforward gameplay.

The other thing to know about Touhou is that there is a ton of fan made material. Comics, drawings, videos, and even tons upon tons of fan made games. And I don't mean like fan games that are made in the touhou style. But rather, games of every single genre you can imagine, but featuring touhou characters. There's touhou mega man, castlevania, dungeon crawlers, puzzle games, strategy games. Just... everything.

There's actually tons and tons of people who either don't like the mainline touhou games because they are too difficult, or have just literally never played any of them, but are still huge fans because of the music and the fan works. So yeah, while I personally think the games are good, that's really just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to understanding the popularity of this franchise.

Oh, and memes. Obviously there's memes.


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Nelson_Mandela posted...

Are the fighting spin-offs as good as the bullet hell games?

Hisoutensoku is actually my favorite game in the series

As for what's the best mainline game shmup, probably IN or SA

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Nelson_Mandela posted...

I am now the proud "owner" of every single game in this series. The bullet hell visuals look very pretty, the music is great... but what the hell is going on with the story/lore? Why is this happening in a bullet-hell game?

Also stealth "what is the best Touhou game" topic

The most concise way I can put it is, the creator makes just enough story in-game so that fans can speculate the fuck out of it. There is an incident that kicks off a game, the first two stages usually involve browbeating otherwise innocent youkai for more information about it, the rest of the stages involve brute-forcing your way to the culprit and solving the incident... with various rates of success.

The extra stages are often a toss-up as to how related to the main story they are. Also, all the characters are girls because the creator of the game decided so. The only named guy in canon is a shop owner who distinctly cannot fight at all, and hes only in the supplementary materials.

My personal favorite game is Imperishable Night despite being the easiest one. Its most approachable, has the awesome spell card practice mode, and the story is a bit more self-contained than the others.

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There are no buses in Gensokyo

That's basically all I know.

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