buskerdog

Some of these threads with lots of posts on now have a sidebar showing certain information. This shrinks the width of everything else. Now when I try to add a new post to these threads, I less have less options along the top of the text editor - specifically, the spoiler tab is gone, and I quite need that one.

My own If I had to pick just one... well, I can't remember the name exactly, but there was this one thread called "unexpected Touhou" or something like that which was filled with strange instances of the Touhou franchise appearing (like with Touhou hijacks) or with other cases of Touhou being applied to something extremely highly specific. The thing is, this thread was created a user called GarrisonDeCrick, who deleted their account, and all of his content was cast into the abyss along with it. A big shame, he had a strong and humorous personality, and made a number of interesting or entertaining threads. There are probably more threads by him that could contend as an answer for this question that I'm unable to recall. And before you ask; no one knows why he left, or why he erased all other traces of his presence across the internet. Trust me, I went looking. I just hope that whatever the reason was, he's doing alright... ...welp, that might have gone a little darker than intended, and it's only the first question. *sigh* CVN, you're ever one to ask the easy questions, aren't you?

Have AMA's recently become some kind of silly trend on this forum? Yes, yes they have. But whatever, it gives me something to discuss about, and having been here a long time I'd like to think I'm an interesting enough person for people to have questions about me. So, if there's anything you want to know about me, this is your opportunity to say it! It doesn't have to relate to Touhou in any way, you can ask me literally any question you want - although I am not obliged to answer, so I recommend keeping things tasteful if you actually want to be taken seriously. Other than that there's nothing else to say about restrictions, so ask away!

It's that time of year again. You know the one. This time, I've not got any particularly elaborate joke to make, just some high quality rips to keep you entertained. The first one has a bit of meme material in there, but for the second one I think the joke is mostly just the title... it does also slap tho. ...oh, maybe worth looking in the descriptions for both these videos too. I think that's where the real april fools joke is. Well now I guess I wait, since I'm looking forward to watching the annual Rivals Direct later. There's no announcement of one, but it always happens this time of year, so hopefully...

Why does this hypothetical situation interest me way more than it should? Well, for clarity let me just point out that I'm mainly focusing on the "bonus question" part here. OK, lemme start by laying some ground assumptions: A) Since we are rewinding the clock on Touhou's origin by 20 years, I will also assume ZUN to be 20 years younger and experience a more modern upbringing. However, I will assume his experiences and early course of life to be generally the same. B) I will also assume "the hypothetic Touhou released in 2022" to not be ZUN's first game. After all, he had the 5 PC-98 titles as practices for what would eventually become EoSD, which seems to be the game we are comparing to here. However, although I will say ZUN has made games before this, I will also say that were not distributed at Comiket, mostly because the scenario for this thread is what if touhou "started" 20 years after the actual release of EoSD. These hypothetical warm-up projects may have, at most, been distributed by ZUN at his college between his friends; otherwise assume that these projects are simply unfinished/unreleased. C) Finally, something I think most people here have overlooked, but I will also make the very important assumption that ZUN remains a solo dev. This variable could actually change everything, and I think that if Touhou did come out 20 years later, there actually is a pretty significant chance that ZUN might work with other people, since a lot more people practice gamedev nowadays. However, it is true that ZUN has always liked doing things "his own way", and I also think that the general idea behind the question is that ZUN is still working by himself, so I will assume that ZUN remains a solo dev. Alright, with that out of the way, lets go over how I think Touhou would look in this scenario. To keep this brief I'll simply split into the things I think would be the same and things I think would be different. Firstly, these things stay the same: Touhou would definitely still be a game about moe-ified folk legends that incorporate both Eastern and Western elements. I don't think ZUN's fascination for folk stories would be changed at all by the time period of Touhou's creation; after all, the original stories are timeless and still very much present in Japanese society, and ZUN has also said that he used the first 5 games to figure out what exactly he wanted to do with Touhou Project; with the hypothetic practice games that ZUN has made in this scenario, I still think he would end up in the same place regarding what he wants Touhou to be. There's also the fact that ZUN decided to make his main character a shrine maiden because "there weren't many games like that at the time". You still don't see many games about shrine maidens. Touhou would still very much be a "doujin" game. Although he would hopefully adopt online distribution much quicker, I still expect that ZUN's preferred distribution method would be Comiket, and I still 100% believe that ZUN would be as open to fan use of his IP as he is now. These are the things I could see changing: Touhou's genre could very likely take on a different form. ZUN makes bullet hells because he used to play a lot of them, and it's something he really likes, but 20 years later? The exposure to bullet hells would surely be much less, so he might decide to make a different genre of game instead. However, Touhou being a bullet hell is still possible; if he really likes the genre, then he only needs to find one or two games like that to decide that's what he wants to make. In fact, the unusualness of the genre can be a factor to encourage making a game like that. But even if it was still a bullet hell, it would surely look very different; likely pulling influence from a lot of other genres. On a similar note, the technology and methods ZUN would have learned to use for development would also look significantly different, and this would probably have a knock on effect on the actual design of the game; most likely for the better when you also take into account he would have been inspired by less primitive games. When it comes to portraits, ZUN art will still be ZUN art, but as for the rest of the game's graphics, the difference in technology may have an impact on them. Who knows what kind of wizardry he might try with shaders and particles? This might also be a controversial one, but I'm gonna say it: face it, ZUN's music would just not sound the same. The tools ZUN uses for his instruments are old. He would have completely different technology for making his music which means the sounds would just not be the same at all, and exposure to different inspirations would also probably have an effect on his composition style, although I dare still it would still retain a little bit of that signature ZUN-ness about it, if you know what I mean. Lastly, to address the question of popularity, I find it very unlikely that ZUN's project he sells at Comiket would become a runaway success; there's just too much competition now, and the bar has been raised dramatically. The several year backbone of Touhou fan content is not present in this scenario. However, I think he would make something good enough to garner a few fans, especially seeing as one of his motivations for entering Comiket was that he thought he could make something "way more fun that what was here", so if he keeps at that competitive spirit, I think slowly over multiple Comiket releases he might start building a fandom out for himself. This does depend on how well he can give his fans more content though; if his games have a higher complexity is this scenario, that's also gonna make them take longer to develop. The question is how much does his original release give his players to do, and can he strike a balance between finish projects in a sound amount of time and making each game substantial enough?

Almost forgot. Here's round 6.

Noun: "crossing, intersection". It's not a common kanji, however. Also, "crossing-wind" would not quite be the right translation because 辻風 is a single word - what you're looking for is "Whirlwind".

It's @Tenkko... I'll post the new round tomorrow hopefully

Which game are you currently playing? But yeah, the stage 4 difficulty spike is pretty real in most of them. What I recommend is keep getting better at the first three levels so you can take more lives to stage 4, and use your bombs actively when you don't know what to do. When you don't have to worry about the start of the game so much, you'll be able to focus more on how to dodge the patterns later in the game. Having more lives gives you more room for error, so you can experiment and make mistakes and try your best to dodge each time, eventually you'll figure out a way to do it consistently and get used to general techniques for avoiding bullets. Oh yeah, one more thing. There are four directions you can move in. Use them. Don't just sit at the bottom and wiggle left and right for the entire game, that's a trap.

I've been meaning to make this post for a while now. At one point I was gonna wait until the remix tournament had concluded for this, but uh, that doesn't seem so wise at the moment. So, what is this post exactly? Well, I've been on this forum for (almost) 4 years now. And a lot has changed in those 4 years, both in this virtual space and the real world. So, I wanted to take a moment to step back and reflect the changes within me, and how I fit into the context of this place. Things are changing about the way I use this forum - actually no, it's been evident for a while now, things have already changed about the way I use this forum. Back when I first arrived here, there was not much activity. But, I was excited to be able to share my time with other Touhou fans, and there were signs of life here, including from some moderators who had been with the site for a long time, so I made a lot of effort to show my face and drive up activity. Whenever a new post was made in the introductions section, I always made a point of welcoming members to give them the sign that there was indeed activity here. And with help from others who chose to stick around, a small but energetic ecosystem did begin to grow. Sometimes things got a bit lax, I didn't always have something to make a new thread on, but what I did have was a lot of time to be on the forum and interact with various topics of interest (not least of all the Musical Discoveries thread that cropped up after a year or two). Not everyone from those times has stuck around. Some only appear infrequently now, others have disappeared completely. However in more recent times, there has been an influx of new users. For me personally, the circumstances of my life have changed, what with me now studying Japan and Japanese at university. These are changes for the better! In fact, this is the best step in my life yet. However, it also means I no longer have the surplus of time for this forum that I used to. I'm content with that though; back then, I felt I needed to be active in order to keep the forum alive. But now, I see the forum in an exceptionally healthy state compared to what was here when I started. So, my input is no longer required. This isn't an "I'm going" post. My input is no longer required. Doesn't mean I'm about to quit inputting. However, I am reaching a stage in my life where I'm starting to distance myself from this forum. You may not see me as regularly as in the past. Don't get me wrong, I still love Touhou, but I'm also not quite as hyperfixated as I used to be, what with no longer being on the rush of experiencing all the games as new and fresh, back to back. Whenever a new game comes out though, I think you can expect to see me back here with something new to say. I'm also going to have the opportunity to spend a year in Japan at some point during my course, and when I do I absolutely intend to indulge myself in the Touhou experience, so if there's anything interesting I learn (or anything people want me to go and find out), I'll surely share it when the time comes! So in the meantime, just know that I'm still looking out for what goes on here, even if I don't post much. It's likely that from time to time, I'll still have something interesting to show or tell ya, and I'll still see discussions I want to take part in. But I've got places I want to go in life, and distancing myself from this website is something I'm ready to do, and thanks to the upsurge in users, something I feel comfortable doing.

I didn't know that い extended え sounds only in certain cases. I did of course know how the chorus of Neko Miko Reimu goes, but I notice that many Japanese songs emphasise individual kana that wouldn't normally be pronounced in conversational speak (for example, separating an おう sound into お and う), so generally I wouldn't go to music as a pronunciation guide. However, I can pick out the い of her name being sounded in doujin anime. Did you mean vowel sounds? But tbh, this. Double vowel sounds are very much a matter of subtlety. I'm not doubting your information, but would you like me to ask some Japanese people about it? Edit: after doing some research myself I can't find any evidence to suggest what you say is a grammatical rule, and apparently Touhou Lostword itself uses the pronunciation "Reemu". However I can't be asked to keep discussing it so imma just stop here.

^ This Also, although this doesn't bother me at all, it is funny how much our side of the fandom mispronounces Reimu's name. れ(re)＋い(i)＝long れ(re) sound. The "i" is silent. That's right, "Raymoo" is no more.

I have some news to deliver. @Shionne Imeris has informed they need to drop out of the tournament. I'm... not really sure what to do about this, we've never had a situation like this before. I will be keeping their music submissions within the tourney, though. Speaking of which, we've made it to round 5! I've accidentally used a quote box instead of a spoiler box, but oh well.

Casually found 6 minutes of my new favourite Septette remix. SOUND HOLIC - Septuor de écarlate

This is such a based thread. also, strawberries.

I haven't been active in this thread lately, which is something I hope to change in the future, however for the moment now just isn't the time. I really should though, because @Ken Hisuag that Demetori was absolutely beautiful Anyway, I'm just dropping by to say that I've been relistening to some Yuuhei Satellite and forgot how brilliant this song was. In fact, I think this might be the first Yuuhei Satellite song I ever listened to, although back then I didn't look up the lyrics. But now that I have, I realise that I actually really like the lyrical content as well as the music.

If anything, this forum has actually been getting more active in recent times. Just have a check around for recent thread activity. Occasionally there are periods of slack, but there are quite a few active users here. My question is what's your favourite thing about Touhou?

Admittedly not my clearest explanation, but I'll try breaking it down: "look like generic anime" - just that, artwork of characters in most fanworks - whether it be games, music PVs, or just standalone art - is drawn in an almost paint-by-numbers replication of the anime or manga style (which I don't have a problem with, but it's very unoriginal). "seeing as it's what the official material does" - manga style of artwork is (understandably) used in the Touhou manga, as well as in the fighting games; and ZUN art is clearly inspired by the anime look with characteristics like the large eyes and light skin (the resemblance is especially clear in PC-98 art imo). "everything that isn't in anime style still use white skin for all the characters anyway" - fanart in a more painterly style or more realistically proportioned still makes the characters look like westerners. "why do I never see Touhou characters that look Asian?" - skin tone, eye shape etc; look I'm not someone who combs through dozens of Touhou fanarts every day, but I have yet to see an image circulate past me where a Touhou character looks like a Japanese person. By the way I didn't mean to challenge your point of view about name pronunciation at all, just express my own.

Something I've started doing with university friends is going to karaoke nights. However that's not something you can go to to sing obscure doujin songs, so I've recently been tapping back into the music I "grew up" with, and thought I'd share some of it here. I put "grew up" in inverted commas because it's not necessarily music from my time; most of this stuff was introduced to me by my family. Mike Oldfield is my favourite British musician, famous for Tubular Bells. His absolute best stuff is instrumentals, however, you can't really just listen to the songs by themselves on YouTube, because he makes albums where each track is essentially one movement of single giant performance, and it's meant to be listened to together, so you can't do with having any loading time in between tracks. Listening to one of these albums (for me particularly Tubular Bells II and Music of the Spheres) is like a journey and an absolutely beautiful experience, but for the reasons I mentioned, I can't share it here. So instead, I'm sharing some of his songs with guest vocalists, which are still pretty banging. Scissor Sisters are an American band, but I believe they found more success in the UK. The lyrical content of their songs is a strange mix, because you get some songs by them with incredibly wholesome lyrics and then others that are super innuendo heavy or even just explicit (in fact, the band name itself is innuendo). They could definitely be called contraversial, but overall I do have to say I like them. They're upbeat, yet also capable of making songs that are emotional or thought provoking. The Corrs are a band of multiinstrumentalist Irish siblings. Also known as "Ireland's 3 most beautiful women (and their brother)". They're notable for combining pop-rock with traditional Irish musical style and instrumentation, and it's seriously banging stuff.

I find this post very interesting from the perspective of a game designer; my thing has always more been designing game mechanics and systems, but good stories undoubtedly make games that much better. One character I'd really like to explore is Mokou, as I find her whole backstory and revenge motivation against Kaguya extremely compelling and something quite different from what is seen in the rest of the cast. Also being someone who lives in the Bamboo Forest of the Lost and one of the only people who can navigate it is an interesting idea to think about - what does her daily life in the forest look like? What kind of skills has she learned from being in such an environment for so long? How did she learn to navigate it so well? Reimu, being my number one favourite character, is also someone I'd like to tell a story about. Her responsibility as the Hakurei Shrine Maiden - and her tendency to shirk that responsibility - are particularly notable things about her to explore. She always acts for the greater good, but her motivations are usually self-interested. She's an incredibly important person - and yet, she doesn't seem to recognise that importance, or take it seriously. This is actually one of the reasons why she became my favourite character - I find her fascinating as the series' main protagonist because although in fights she is powerful, as a person she's so incredibly flawed. But at the end the day, she'll still solve incidents time and time again, without so much as a "thank you" in return - it always feels like she's teetering on the edge of giving up her job entirely, yet there's something in her that motivates her be selfless. Unrelated to all that, but the fact she knows pretty much everyone also means that there's lots of room to explore her relationships with other characters.

Interesting takes, there are some I absolutely agree with and others I really don't (particularly the one about music haha), but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see that in a thread about hot takes. I think the most notable one I want to give my point of view on is the one about pronunciation. I personally care about pronouncing names the right way (partly because I am learning Japanese) and have actively changed the way I pronounce some names since I first found the series if I learn later that I haven't been pronouncing them right, but I don't mind other people pronouncing the same syllables with a different accent that sounds more natural to them. I also understand that although I don't get too irked by changing the way I pronounce a character's name, other people probably get attached to whatever their first impression was. However, I hate it when people pronounce a character's name with the wrong syllables entirely. "Sir-no" is criminal to me... As I said above I have absolutely no problem with anyone saying Marisa's name like this, but reading this did just make me feel the obligation to point that although it is intended to sound western, Marisa's name is written with kanji. Not an obscure fact I know, but I feel like I have to say it. When I first saw this thread I was struggling to think what hot takes I have, since, well, I'd say most of my criticisms aren't hot takes, but now I've realised I absolutely do have a hot take, and I think it's a particularly spicy one too. I wish Touhou characters were depicted as more Asian. Sure the main material has that anime-inspired look to it, and I'm fine with that, it's probably best for the core franchise. But considering how much fan content Touhou has? I'm tired to see nearly everything look like generic anime, and everything that isn't in anime art style still use white skin for all the characters anyway. It makes sense why these anime-like styles crop up everywhere, seeing as it's what the official material does, but again, considering that it's an Asian series set in Asia with characters who are Asian all about Asian mythology - why do I never see Touhou characters that look Asian? I think not only would it be an interesting direction to explore and a novel way to see these characters who have looked like whitewashed dolls since forever, I also think that if you wanted to tell a more serious story with the Touhou project setting, it would make that depiction of the universe feel that much more grounded. And even if you didn't want to do that - I still think it would make things feel more genuine.

Has anyone seen @Tenkko recently? If anyone has a a way to contact them, that would be appreciated. Anyway, time for round 4:

These are cool!

They made a mod that does all that? The Soku community is a different breed I swear

I have a convenient slot of time right now so I'll post round 3. @Gou the frog come and fill in your reviews for the backlog when you have the time, I understand that the reason this happened is because you are very busy.