Touhou Project
Touhou Project (Japanese: 東方Project, Hepburn: Tōhō Purojekuto), also known simply as Touhou (東方, meaning "Eastern" or "Oriental"), is a bullet hell shoot 'em up video game series created by independent Japanese doujin soft developer Team Shanghai Alice. The team's sole member, Jun'ya "ZUN" Ōta, has independently developed programming, graphics, writing, and music for the series, publishing 19 mainline games and 13 spin-offs since 1997. ZUN has also produced related print works and music albums, and collaborated with doujin developer Twilight Frontier on seven of the official spin-offs, six of which are fighting games.[1]
"Touhou" redirects here. For other uses, see Toho (disambiguation).Touhou Project
Team Shanghai Alice
Jun'ya Ōta ("ZUN")
Highly Responsive to Prayers
August 15, 1997 (C52)
Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost
August 13, 2023 (C102)
The Touhou Project is set in Gensokyo,[a] a land sealed from the outside world and primarily inhabited by humans and yōkai, legendary creatures from Japanese folklore that are personified in Touhou as bishōjo in an anthropomorphic moe style. Reimu Hakurei, the miko of the Hakurei Shrine and the main character of the series, is often tasked with resolving supernatural "incidents" caused in and around Gensokyo, she is joined by Marisa Kirisame after the second game.
The first five games were developed for the Japanese NEC PC-9800 computer series, with the first, Highly Responsive to Prayers, released in August 1997; the series' signature danmaku (弾幕, lit. 'bullet curtain') mechanics were introduced in the second game, Story of Eastern Wonderland (also 1997). The release of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil in August 2002 marked a shift to Microsoft Windows. Numerous sequels followed, including several spin-offs departing from the traditional bullet hell format.
Touhou Project has become more particularly notable as a prominent source of Japanese dōjin content, with the series spawning a vast body of fan-made works such as artwork, music, print works, video games, and Internet memes. Because of this, it has gained somewhat of a cult following outside of Japan. The popularity of the series and its derivative works has been attributed in part to the few restrictions placed by ZUN on the use of his content. Unofficial works are frequently sold at fan conventions, including Comiket, where the franchise has frequently held the record for circle participation, and the official convention Reitaisai, where trial versions of the official games are typically distributed prior to release.
Other media[edit]
Music CDs[edit]
Between 2002 and 2016, ten music CDs were released as part of "ZUN's Music Collection". They are numbered from Volume 1 to 9 by release date, with Unknown Flower, Mesmerizing Journey being numbered as 5.5 due to its small size. Each album contains arrangements of music from the games as well as new compositions:
Plot[edit]
Background[edit]
The plots of the Touhou Project revolve around the strange phenomena that occur in the fictional realm of Gensokyo (幻想郷, Gensōkyō, literally Fantasy Village or Fantasy Land), which ZUN designed as a human village in some remote mountain recesses in Japan. Originally, it was simply called "a remote separated land of a human village in an eastern country." Long before Touhou Project's story begins, many non-humans like yōkai lived with some humans in the area. After a few humans disappeared into Gensokyo, many humans became afraid of approaching this area, while others settled there to exterminate yōkai. However, as time went on, humans developed civilization and multiplied in number, and thus yōkai worried about how the balance between humans and yōkai would be affected. 500 years before Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (EoSD), the yōkai sage Yukari Yakumo developed the "boundary of phantasm and substance," which was favored by the yōkai and protected the balance. This was called the "Yōkai Expansion Project" and made Gensokyo a phantasmal world that automatically called out to the weakened yōkai of the outside world. Other things that disappear from the outside world, like extinct animals, lost tools, and architecture, appear in Gensokyo. Since Gensokyo was a plot of land in Japan that is separated by a barrier, it is Japan that is immediately outside of this barrier.
As a result of the seal, Gensokyo became inaccessible from the outside world, and similarly, those in Gensokyo were unable to leave. Gensokyo's existence could not be confirmed from the outside world, nor could the outside world be confirmed within Gensokyo. As a result, the isolated community developed its own civilization, separate from the outside world. Although separated by a barrier, it is a bordering world to its outside, as opposed to being in a parallel universe. There are no seas in Gensokyo, since it is landlocked. In Gensokyo, there are few humans, and various kinds of yōkai. Some species include magicians, beasts, therianthropes, vampires, bōrei, tengu, mermaids, kappa, and yōkai (a kind of miscellaneous group). There are others species that could be yōkai depending on definition, like fairies, spirits, yūrei, onryō, poltergeists, hermits, oni, and gods which are all portrayed in human female form.
In present Gensokyo, presented in all Touhou Project games since EoSD, magical and spiritual qualities prevail compared to the outside world where unscientific phenomena were dismissed as "superstition" around the time of the Meiji era. The only known gateway from the outside world into Gensokyo is the Hakurei Shrine on the border of Gensokyo. The spell card rules were also established to keep up the relationship between humans and yōkai in a mock style, which was necessary for the preservation of the balance of Gensokyo. The "Great Hakurei Barrier," managed by past Hakurei miko, was constructed several decades before EoSD, which is described as a "barrier of common sense," and is thus a strong logical barrier that not even yōkai can pass through. The yōkai opposed its construction at first before understanding its usefulness.
In-game events[edit]
In Gensokyo, events called "incidents" occur once in a while. An incident is an event that affects all of Gensokyo and is of unknown cause at the time it occurs.[44] Touhou mainly focuses on incidents that affects the entirety of Gensokyo in its stories, but there are also works like Mountain of Faith that are centered on lesser-scale events.
Frequently, incidents are due to a yōkai's whim or curiosity, and usually Reimu Hakurei would go to investigate it and find and chastise the perpetrator. While Reimu is usually the one to resolve incidents, there are cases where Marisa Kirisame and other characters would resolve them.[44] When a major incident occurs, the spirits and fairies are affected by the incident and experience an increase in power for the duration of the incident.[45]
Development[edit]
The Touhou Project is a one-man project by Jun'ya Ōta (usually under the pseudonym ZUN), who does all the graphics, music, and programming alone for the bullet hell games, with the exceptions of the portrait art in Fairy Wars, which was done by Makoto Hirasaka. The fighting games, Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, Touhou Hisōtensoku, Hopeless Masquerade, Urban Legend in Limbo, and Antinomy of Common Flowers, were dual efforts with Twilight Frontier, in which ZUN wrote the music and story, and Twilight Frontier created the art and gameplay.
ZUN's first interest in developing video games came during his high school years. While most shoot 'em up games utilise a military or science fiction theme, ZUN wanted a game with a miko main character, and a Shinto aesthetic.[46] ZUN was part of his school's orchestra club, and originally wanted to create music for video games. He went to college, hoping to compose music for fighting games, since they were popular at the time due to Street Fighter II. As he did not know anybody else who was making games that he could put his music in, he made his own games for this purpose, which led to the first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers, being released in 1996. The first game was originally intended as a practice in programming. Touhou only became a shooting game series from the second game onwards, because the popularity of shooting games had revived due to RayForce and ZUN had long been a fan of such games.[47] ZUN remarked how the general theme and direction of Touhou only started coming together in the sixth game, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.[48]
ZUN develops his games with Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop, and Cubase, according to his interview in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red.[49]