vanyk

Thank you for your opinion. I am grad to see criticism of my post. I understand that we may not to care about the state of Touhou and just watch what will happen next. I understand that internet and fandoms are just part (a small one) of our real lives. I understand that if something bad happens to franchise we can move to next one. I understand that this site is not that big and not many people visit forums here. But for some reason Touhou became something important for me. And it would be sad for me if this series would die. I am a little guy, and literally noname outside of this forum. I cannot do anything big alone, but I thought that doing a small step for changing the situation for better is better than doing nothing at lot. I hope that this discussion won't just stay in this "little circle" and would go upper (but for now it is just hope). Yes, I understand that I cannot change the situation alone greatly. I made some purposes which aren't too realistic, the others are somewhat more achievable. What is it? I still cannot describe it. Maybe a hope that after this little step there would be more bigger steps. Maybe stupidity. Maybe I am just overthinking everything. Who knows? And again, thank you for your reply, I really appreciate it.

Thank you for your reply. Mostly agree with you. I understand that each series has its rises and falls, and that we probably will never have the second golden age (still hoping for seeing the silver age). Touhou is far from death now, but the problem that Touhou is slowly losing its main Japanese fanbase. I wonder if there are a lot of successors? I can only name Len'en, Undertale and BA. I thought about comparing Touhou and Doom community. From what I know, there are still new records in old games, hardcore fans still are trying to beat the impossible challenges, Classic Doom community creates around 30 WADs a week, while Chinese LusSTG community creates around 15 scripts a week. But the problem here is that John Romero and other developers don't impose new strange restrictions, while ZUN and Ruw do. Thank you for your interesting thoughts.

Thank you for your reply. I am grad you liked this post and and I would be grad for your analysis. I have read most of your threads before I created an account here. You really made great analysis there. Thank you for your reply. I agree that uniting all the fans nearly impossible now. So I purposed a little more realistic solutuon (only unite creators). I didn't thought about a language factor, a really good point (but from what I know that is not that big problem in other fandoms. Mostly agree. I hope correctly understood the second part. I don't think the age is not a serious problem I think, because if the series is really good there would be fans even after 50 years. But yes, newer Touhou games are very different from older ones (not everyone likes it, but for me it is okey if they are made well). Also kind of ironic that ZUN wanted to create a shmup for PC98 which had way more bullets than Caves shmups. Agree with everything. Agree with everything. Yes, it is a big problem. That is one of the main reasons why fans leave the fandom. Yes, you are right. He also knows about Chinese community, because he visited China and met Touhou fans there. (Am I the only one who has strange feelings about this video? Agree with all. And that is a problem that they are that used to gachas. I thought that was obvious: mostly thwiki.cc Comiket: https://thwiki.cc/Comic_Market Reitaisai: https://thwiki.cc/Reitaisai Kouroumu: https://thwiki.cc/东方红楼梦 Meikasai: https://thwiki.cc/东方名华祭 Autumn Reitaisai: https://thwiki.cc/博丽神社秋季例大祭 Hakudenkai 2022: https://extra.hakudenkai.games Hakudenkai 2023: https://hakudenkai.games/ Again, thank you for your interesting thoughts.

Thank you for your reply. Yes, Touhou fandom has not fallen yet, and the more people will be aware of those problems the more chances we have to make Touhou fandom blooming again. Sadly, yes. Because this is a pirate site, and after DMCA /r/touhou and Touhou Wiki decided to support Ruw's decision. There is even a group who wrote doujin circles to help them with DMCA. They even created hakureishrine.org (it is just redirect to Steam, and yes they still pay for this domain just for joke). Thank you too, for your reply. You understood it correctly. Just one more detail, there were dramas between main Touhou websites even between main websites. Not only that but also some strange limitations from ZUN and Ruw. You understood it correctly. Somewhat yes. The first solution also include forgetting about dramas at least between creators, so they could work together. Those are just my proposals and they maybe not ideal. I want to bring up this topic for discussion to find the best solution from realistic ones. Thank you for your reply. I also think that persuading ZUN now is nearly impossible. Touhou is mostly made for Japanese fans and ZUN mostly listen only to them, so without their help it would be impossible to do it. I understand it, but I don't have better solutions for now, I am sorry.

I think we should have a good talk about this topic. I have had a lot of thinking about this topic for a long time. Recent twits by nmlgc and aggressive2hu inspired me to do more research to finally build a full picture. I understood that we should act now until it is too late. The more info I found for this post, the worse the situation became. And it is not just about Touhou, problems are much more serious, but mostly I will talk about Touhou because I really love Touhou and I hope to change situation for better at least for Touhou. The goal of this post is not to bring hate towards anybody in the fandom or ZUN, but to help people understand the roots of the problems to resolve them. CAUTION!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!! If you still want to believe that there are no serious problems in Touhou fandom, and still want to believe in Touhou and doujin magic, well this post may bring you down. You have been warned. CAUTION!! CAUTION!! CAUTION!! Before we start, I hope to see criticism which will explain where I am right and where I am wrong, because this topic is rarely discussed. Thank you. Have you noticed that something is not right? Have you noticed that there are much less new Touhou fangames, doujinshi and doujin music than for example 8 years ago? Have you noticed that a lot of new fan content is nearly unnoticed? Have you noticed that fandom is not united and split? Have you noticed that last Touhou games are rushed and story is less well-written? Doujin events examples: I suppose that everyone noticed at least some of those problems but I am surprised that nearly nobody tried to analyse why these have happened. Well, there are two main causes of the problems: the fandom and the franchise itself. Fandom: But there are other problems that may make people haters of not just fandom, but of Touhou itself. Franchise: But what I can say for sure if this topic is unnoticed and left undiscussed we won't be able to change the situation for better. I thought that Touhou was an islet of safety in current sea of crisis of mass culture, but alas it is already under the water. But wait, let's be clever and take a step further (unlike those haters): what about non-Touhou doujin scene, what is happening there? (Spoiler: the situation is similar there): But everything is not lost! We can change the situation for better if we will stop being scattered and will work together. The worst thing now is just giving up. Thank you for reading this. I would be really glad to receive criticism, corrections and proposals. I know this topic is controversial, but I think that it must be discussed. I just want Touhou fandom to become better. If you have any good ideas how to change the whole situation for better feel free to share them. Also feel free to share this post. There are also some other related thoughts about this topic: Afterwords: If after reading this post you want to hate ZUN or anybody else then I think you didn't understand this post. This post shows that hate didn't change the situation for better and only made it worse. We don't need to hate, We need to act. For the fans who are Still with us.

Thank you very much! Already added.

Hello. Thank you very much for this finding. I have already updated information about it. This thread is somewhat alive, but I haven't had a lot of free time lately, so I rarely search for the lost media.

This sounds interesting. Some circles often send DMCAs, so I can only offer to reupload them here or on a mirror account, but I'm not sure it will 100% help. We can only hope that all the arranges are in TLMC.

A small but intersting update (which I somehow missed) The Comiket trial version of RMI was recently found and you can download it using this link: https://mega.nz/file/VFBSGAoa#xkdKRcaswJ0RXEaX2Q-lDX8FmzDpCYYl1O2r7h-kuzc There is also a full playthrough by Nightmare Taxation:

Hello again. I was not active for some time, but now I have some new lost media. There is an update about 無窮動の大図書館　～ Perpetual Witches. Now you can download this game for free: https://sites.google.com/view/omu-touhou/頒布物情報#h.pkucp59i3y6l ( https://mega.nz/file/4bF3hJZK#q6I0oRhAtydrS3g0cpcpO7sDCWnRrDlQ1EZq2xSeZWg ) This game is something like Impossible Spell Card but with ability cards. Recently, I found a Korean RPG fangame but this game is abandoned. Creator's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMr7hCq69G0_IANiUtyNOvg Also there is some info about 秘封ぼうえんきょう / Hifuu Bouenkyu. There was an archive version of this game, but it is lost: https://vntouhouff.forumvi.com/t124-topic Original topic: But there are also some good news. Recently I have found an enormous video archive from different Touhou events. Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGh55yf0Wi_VW-nuUatsKrw/videos That is all for now. At the end, I would like to say that, in my opinion, it would be great if there were some latest fangames on Moriya Shrine such as Abyss Soul Lotus, Treasure Castle Labyrinth, Ultimate Vitality of imagination and Little Doll Queen. But alas!

If you are talking about Artificial Dream in Arcadia, this fangame is really successful and managed to get a lot of attention. This game is really good. If you are interested the 2 fangames I was talking about are 鈴集無名の丘 ～ Little Doll Queen (good game, with beautiful patterns (but mostly they are not hard) and cute artstyle) and 東方宝天京　～ Treasure Castle Labyrinth (also a good game). Both games were released on August 11. Yes, they are shmups (maybe it is the reason why they were unnoticed). It seems like most Western fans watch only Asprey (I have nothing against him, he makes good videos). But there are a lot of other videomakers and streamers, for example PigeonVoyageur, Horrible Tales, williewillus, CrisdaOff (funny highlights). Alas, they are also not popular. I agree with you.

Thank you, for your reply. I agree with you, I am sorry, if my post was too offensive. ZUN said that he didn't expected Touhou to be popular in the West. In his view, fan translations would be better than official translations (he is not wrong, especially if you remember the official translations of fightings). Japanese auditory is his main target. You can compair views on different Touhou remix music channels and see that there are less views than several years agree. I agree that listening to the same tune is boring, but for this situation Touhou style music exists (the last somewhat well-known albums are IBP and CoUD but more new ones are less well-known). But the problem is that Touhou remixes popularised Touhou greatly. Most devs use Twitter for announces, but most of such announces are left unnoticed. Creators of one of those two games tried to popularize their game via youtube (mostly the game's ost was uploaded), but it didn't help. Some playthroughs of those two games had more than 1000 view, so I hope you know the names of those two games. To be honest, I noticed that something is going wrong when ASL was nearly unnoticed in Western Community (this great game has been in development for 5 years), while WWW and DLW got much more attention in the Western Community. About "passive" fans, again nothing was made to make them more active. And don't say it is because Touhou games are hard, then why there are a lot of Geometry Dash fans? Also there are a lot of fangames in different genres, so everyone can play what they want. I am bad in phychology, so I don't know how make them more active. Yes, the community could make a great "Phantasmagoria", but sadly, nobody makes it. Soku fans didn't wait, they just created Soku 2. There were some good attempts to create a new "Phantasmagoria": TH09x (my most favourite, because it add a lot of new characters), 幻想戦劇夢 ～ Wonderful Battle Dreamer (good), FRI (not bad). But those projects are not well-known. And because the community us passive now, I am not sure the new ones will appear. I agree with you. I wish he would make patches like in old days. (and mods are very stable nowadays even if they turn Touhou into another game) From what I know, just a little bit better. They wrote a lot of mails to ZUN (and posdibly BeatMARIO), but ZUN's reply was something like "yes I know about the problems, I could fix them if they realy bother you". Also there was a tournament, where nearly everyone played as Chiyary, and ZUN saw the process. So, nothing really changed. The only active community now, is Chinese one. Oh, there is a new game with new characters, the next weekend there will be scripts with more patterns for them. Oh there is bad netcode, we will fix it. At least Western Community fixed bugs and balance. Here you are. I would be glad if more people knew about Touhou modding.

My opinion may be controversial about this topic. I just wanted to share my thoughts. I don't want to repeat others' thoughts, because everyone here gave good points about this game. UDoALG is not as good as we thought it would be and could be. It looks like the game was made in 4-5 months (for example, Chen's spinning animation had been done 5 hours before the game was sent to print). And we don't know whether most problems will be fixed. Let's hope BeatMARIO or somebody else would persuade ZUN to work more on Touhou 20 (BeatMARIO successfully persuaded him to add multiplayer in UDoALG and has already told ZUN about the problems with UDoALG recently). What actually surprised me is the community reaction. I'm used to traditional "it is over, Touhou is dead" (because people have been regularly saying that since TD) and "I buy games to give ZUN money for beer". And... that's all. Most fans just wasted their breath, but nothing changed. Some fans say: "ZUN does not listen the fans", have you tried to talk with him or send him a letter about the problems? There are cases when small Touhou doujin circles ask him to write music for their games and he agrees (so we have official Shinki theme remixes (not only in AUS) and more Rinosuke related music). And when they get such questions, what do they reply most often? "I haven't tried, but I am sure he won't listen to me". And it seems like most fans think in such way, because ZUN has no idea what is happening in fandom. He gets invitations to Reitaisai and different meetings so he might think that everything is okay. And he rarely watches Touhou-related fan content himself (I don't know why), so he doesn't have the complete picture. Well, let's imagine that ZUN is that bad that he doesn't want to hear his fans and makes Touhou only worse. But there is a problem: the fanbase is the one who creates Touhou. I offen hear the point that Touhou has enormous amount of fanmade content (especially in Touhou introductions), but there is the same problem: that's all, again. Most people just say that there is a lot of stuff, but it seem like nobody is interested in it or knows about it (and it is really a big problem, that fanbase doesn't know about the content it creates). Touhou remixes aren't popular now, Touhou style music is still not that known. Have anyone noticed those 2 good fangames which were released a few days before UDoALG's release? Anyone? I do not say that "anyone must create at least one fan works", but I'd like to see at least good advertising of the fanmade content (I can't call 3-4 playthroughs a good advertisment of those 2 games). So people would know about alternatives. This reminds me a similar situation in TBoI community. There were times (before Afterbirth+ release) when this game didn't have any good modding instruments and mods like Godmode were one of the best, but you could see that they are just fanworks. Then Antibirth was released and this mod looked like original TBoI but better and with more content. A few weeks after Antibirth the official DLC was out and it was not that good in compair with Antibirth. So Edmund (the creator of TBoI) had to fix everything and he cooperated with Antibirth developers. And after that the next DLC was actually good. What lessons can we learn from this situation? The community had the alternative and most of the community KNEW about it. The creator also knew what was hannening in fandom. And they didn't even need to make a new game, they modified the original one. A lot of old Touhou fans say that they would like to see Touhou 8 remake. Well, why won't they create the one themselves modifying the original game? Wait, modify original Touhou games, is it possible? Yes, it is for a long time, there are already a lot of good mods (for example loddk (th15, thcrap), umalt (th18, thcrap), subhatred (th11 (only extra), thcrap), DDDDDDDDDDDD (th14, standalone), epro (th17, thcrap)), which don't just change textures, text, music, but also change patterns and add new spells or mechanichs. There are already several guides and instruments to make the modding process simplier. But still a lot of fans avoid this part of community and it is still not that popular (Yomi tried to popularize it. His most popular video about Touhou mods has 61K views, but you see the actual result). So we returned to the same problem: Touhou community knows nearly nothing about itself. And after that the question arises: why the community of the game which does not rely on fanworks could fix the problems, while the community which is based on fanworks doesn't even want to try? This situation is quite sad and disappointing. Western Touhou community is very passive and we should improve the situation. I hope this post is not for nothing. GOOD NEWS for the ones who still play UDoALG or want to play it. There are already several modifications that can make your game process much better. All these mods you can install using thcrap (if you want to use the mods that changes gameplay in multiplayer, both players must have the same mods, otherwise 100% desync): Th19BugFixes (Fixes most bugs and crashes. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) lang_en (English patch, the game is mostly translated, but if you know Spanish or Chinese I would more recommend using lang_es or lang_zh-hans, because they are translated more than lang_en) Th19StoryBGMChange (Proper music for story mod (read ReadMe.txt in "alt" directory in the mod's directory for more info)) Th19Balance (Characters are much balanced. Also big nerf of Chiyary, and Rin fix. Read ReadMe.txt for more info. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19StoryBalance (Story mod is much more balanced. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19FixOrinLV2 (Fix Orin LV2 bug (included in Th19BugFixes). DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19BigPortraits (Changes portraits for attack animations (customizable, only boss attack animations with big portraits by default. More info in ReadMe.txt in the mod's folder)) Th19ExAttackResAnimFix (Fix some extra attack animations (included in Th19BugFixes)) th19pofvui (UI is like in POFV) visuals (Player's shots are less distracting) th19gohei (Reimu's player sprite is with gohei) th19oldspr (Changes some boss sprites to old ones) alphes (Alphes styled character portraits) BetterSoundClue (Changes some sound effects) SakuyaTouhou19 (Adds Sakuya) TESMgoofs (Meme, but with good boss attacks. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) Th19Chaos (Unstoppable waves. DON'T USE IN RANDOM MULTIPLAYER MATCHES) AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the netpatch for better p2p matches: https://github.com/RUEEE/th19p2vp

The 8th part of Questionnaire ("When did you discover Touhou?") is really surprising. If the statistic is true (most of the participants answered honestly), a big percent of fans who knew about Touhou since PC-98 remained, but most of the fans from the Golden Age (PCB-UFO) didn't participate in voting. Did they move to other fandoms? But still characters and soundtracks from EoSD-SA are most highly ranked, Most of voters discovered Touhou in the period from 2015 to 2020. So it might explain, why for several years in each voting around one third of participants had not voted before (this year again). But it can't explain some strange results from previous years. There are some other interesting moments. Around half of the fans have not played most of the mainline games. In "Touhou original game competitions" (question 11) there are UDoALG (the latest "Phantasmagoria" (which is not a "Phantasmagoria")) and Soku, but no AoCF. More than one third of participants discovered Touhou via Youtube, so it maybe the best instrument for popularization. Less than half of the fans likes Touhou Fandom (IMO, it is a problem), even Touhou games are more loved.