Alternate timelines of Touhou

[CountVonNumenor]

A bit of a shorter opening presentation on my side today. Based on the idea of "Touhou Project, but if it came out 20 years later...", I stated thinking more and more about a series of alternate history scenarios:

• Touhou, but if the series never went past Mystic Square and ZUN just moved to another project
  
• What if ZUN never went to establish Team Shanghai Alice and get on his own project series
  
• What if Touhou ended with Imperishable Night, as it was initially envisioned
  
• What if ZUN actually decided that, instead of an indie series, he decided to profit of the great popularity of Touhou and decided to turn it into a commercial franchise?
  

Which one of these do you find to be more interesting, and what other possible alternate timelines would you think of? I was trying to think of scenarios that perhaps could have been possible to happen, but I would also like to find out what do you think would happen in any of the cases.

 

[Isaac]

Those are interesting scenarios that you came up with. I'll try to give my thoughts on a few of them now.

• Touhou, but if the series never went past Mystic Square and ZUN just moved to another project
  

If Touhou ended with Mystic Square, none of us here might've known about the series at all. Those games were still niche in Japan, so without any promotion like on social media or with public events like Reitaisai, the series would've been forgotten over time. The PC-98 era does have some memorable music and characters, but the amount of fanworks around then must've been tiny compared to after Eosd.

• What if Touhou ended with Imperishable Night, as it was initially envisioned 
  

I think touhou would've been somewhat popular today even if Eosd, PCB and IN were the only Windows games that released. These games have the most iconic themes in the series and UN Owen was her is probably how a lot of people discovered touhou music, including myself. The character designs are also iconic, so I think plenty of people still would've made artwork or other fan stuff related to them nowadays. Back in 2004 though, the touhou hype in Japan was exploding so much that when the first Reitaisai was held, there were over 100 groups participating!

• What if ZUN actually decided that, instead of an indie series, he decided to profit of the great popularity of Touhou and decided to turn it into a commercial franchise?
  

I love the way ZUN handles most of the offical touhou content on his own already. I wouldn't trust anyone else with the series other than him. If he decided to work with different companies though, they could help continue touhou for a long time and bring in more creative ideas. There is still the chance those companies could get greedy and ruin everything. We've seen this in gacha games like Lostword, where they're only focused on making as much money now, instead of respecting the fans and the series. This is usually how a lot of other indie franchises ended up being ruined too.

 

[Nekoko]

What if ZUN never went to establish Team Shanghai Alice and get on his own project series

Do you mean what if he has continued to work on Touhou with Amusment Makers ? 
 

What if ZUN actually decided that, instead of an indie series, he decided to profit of the great popularity of Touhou and decided to turn it into a commercial franchise?

It would end up just like Touhou Lost Word and we would often see the popular characters in each games. Maybe there would be DLC as well ? Or maybe he would have worked on Touhou games with a whole new concept of Danmaku where we would have to pay in order to unlock new abilities or shooting type

Btw what I’m gonna say is kinda off topic but I feel like Flandre in Touhou 17.5 was kinda like fan service ? I mean she has nothing special to do with the incident -_-   Or maybe I missed something in the scenario  

 

[CountVonNumenor]

Do you mean what if he has continued to work on Touhou with Amusment Makers ?

Honestly, I know pretty much nothing about Amusement Makers. Did they do anything after Mystic Square and after ZUN left the group? Are thy still around?

 

[Nekoko]

Honestly, I know pretty much nothing about Amusement Makers. Did they do anything after Mystic Square and after ZUN left the group? Are thy still around?

Yup they seems to still be around and they are making Touhou-like games O_O

Check it out !!

https://amusement-makers.org/catalog.php?id=23

I need to play it in order to have an idea of what Touhou would be like if ZUN was still with them. I remember in an interview that he said he wanted to make a "darker" game or add a more serious tone to the Touhou franchise that’s why he decided to continue it on his own, but I can’t remember where I read that

 

[TheM3ds]

Sometimes I would imagine an alternate timeline where Touhou was a niche series (In Japan) and only the Shump games existed. That's about it.

 

[Kozusumi Yakumo]

What if ZUN actually decided that, instead of an indie series, he decided to profit of the great popularity of Touhou and decided to turn it into a commercial franchise?

https://ohga-shrugs.fandom.com/wiki/Touhou_Project

Oh! This reminded me of this wiki page that I love to bits, it's apart of a larger AU where basically Playstation never existed because well, Ohga Shrugs.
So yeah, this is an AU for is Touhou was published by Rising Star Games