I’d like to first inform everyone that, despite my intense fixation on this series, I am not actually a very good player of the games. I can’t reliably finish any of them, and I have never really worried about high scores before. I haven’t even played most of them, actually. These games have a surprisingly rich, history behind them, too, and I have an intense feeling someone is going to notice I don’t know the original Japanese names of the games and tear me a new one for expressing my opinion.
Alright, let’s cover some facts first. The mainstay of the Touhou games are vertical bullet-hell shooters. Compared to a lot of other vertical shmups, the mechanics are really simple. There are no missiles or beam weapons to upgrade. The pickups are actually only divided into three universal categories: main attack power-up, bomb stock, and point items, all of which are extremely self-explanatory. Simple controls, too: shoot, bomb, and move. You kill enemies, fight bosses, and bomb to save yourself from a bad situation. Six stages, twelve boss encounters, and an extra stage unlocked when the arcade mode is completed. Sure, there are some variations from game to game, but this is the familiar formula that the Touhou games follow.
Sounds boring? Meh, you might be right. Okay then, please dodge this.
Touhou is, specifically, a bullet-hell type shooter. As opposed to avoiding being blind-sided by the less-frequent and quick bullets of, say, Raiden or 1942, you must deal with a barrage of attacks, sometimes taking up almost all the space on the screen. There is a little memorization involved, as knowing what the patterns will look like is a definite advantage, but the generation of attacks is usually unique to every play-through, usually relative to the player’s position on the screen. To survive, the player must carefully weave through the intricate patterns, usually making use of the concentrated movement function present in the more recent games, which slows the character significantly for better control.
However, all this is still really not the trademark of the Touhou series. What does differentiate this game series from its counterparts is the emphasis it puts on its characters. Spread across eleven official games over the course of twelve years, there has been a staggering amount of characters created for the universe, each with their own personality and affiliation with the others. Barely any of this is present in the official games, though. Actually, the only hint of character development in the official series is the brief conversations during boss fights and the short ending sequences unearthed when beating the game. That’s hardly enough time to generate the sheer amount of content now available about the series.
What perpetuates all of that is actually the fandom itself. Around these simple interactions, fans have built the characters’ traits, preferences, habits, friends, and enemies. More popular characters have quite a number of fans behind them, their legion-esque care for their favorite almost a determinant for personality. Of course, this detail might further alienate people new to the series or shmups in general, as they do not already have an attachment to the characters. However, that only means that the fan-base is tightly knit and rabidly loyal.
Touhou is a game series, of course, but to anyone with the patience and interest to become involved, it is its own culture. A developed, detailed universe inhabited by a gigantic cast of individuals, Touhou crap offers a lot more than just a thirty minute lesson in how low your dexterity is. However, you will probably see a lot less Kaguya/Mokou guro if it is kept at just that.
