不人气的大狸子
Tanuki
This article was written on June 13; please note that the information may be time-sensitive.
At 10:45 p.m. on June 9, 2026, Team Shanghai Alice’s official Bilibili account came back from the dead after a year of silence and dropped a major announcement: a remake of Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil would be released on September 10. I did not hear about it until somewhat later, which definitely had nothing to do with being hopelessly absorbed in Counter-Strike.
Since I am not particularly good at shoot ’em ups, I will not be offering an assessment of the gameplay itself. Still, the intense discussions among Touhou fans across so many platforms make it clear just how much this remake means to the community. In this article, I want to explore its potential impact from several angles.
Let me put my conclusion up front: I fully support the decision to remake Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (EoSD). But that support is not unconditional praise. It comes with a cautious, wait-and-see attitude. This is something worth looking forward to, and something worth examining seriously.
EoSD is the sixth Touhou game and the starting point of the Windows era, also known as the “new games” era. At a time when the PC-98 setting had largely been set aside and Gensokyo was still being built up from almost nothing, EoSD was unquestionably a milestone. Or, to borrow ZUN’s own description, it was “a twentieth-century danmaku STG for the twenty-first century.”
Its music and character designs were remarkably bold for their time. As for all those names readers already know by heart, please allow me to skip the introductions. One statistic gives some idea of how popular its cast remains: in the 21st Touhou Popularity Poll in 2025, nine of the eleven characters who debuted in EoSD placed in the top twenty. The remaining two, Daiyousei and Koakuma, both placed in the top sixty.
My own ability only gets me through EoSD on Normal. Compared with later entries, it lacks a visible hitbox marker, only allows automatic item collection above the point of collection at full power, does not let Easy players reach Stage 6, and suffers from a runaway-framerate bug — the infamous “1,000 FPS EoSD.” These are certainly shortcomings, but this is, after all, a twenty-four-year-old game. Some limitations are inevitable products of its time, and ZUN addressed these issues in subsequent mainline entries.
None of this diminishes EoSD’s place in Touhou history. In some respects, it has even come to represent Touhou itself, and commercial collaborations tend to center on its characters. Remaking a work like this is therefore not merely a technical undertaking. It raises the question of how Touhou chooses to revisit its own history.
Many newcomers have never entered Touhou through the original games. Some found it through doujin music; others through hand-drawn fan videos, MMD, fan art, character memes, doujinshi, game streams, Bilibili, Baidu Tieba, or THBWiki. This is especially true in the Chinese-speaking community. For many Chinese fans, “Touhou” is not first and foremost a series of STGs. It is an enormous subculture built from characters, music, fan works, lore, community, and memes.
That has a charm all its own. A large part of the reason Touhou has endured for thirty years is precisely that it is not a closed commercial franchise in which all content flows in one direction from the official creators to the audience. It is an open ecosystem sustained by both the original works and fan creations. Many anime-style games that proclaim themselves “the Touhou of today” have failed to grasp what makes Touhou’s doujin culture special. They seem to think that a high volume of Pixiv submissions, or a few officially organized offline events, is enough to make them the next “doujin miracle.” It is not.
But let us get back to Touhou. There are many ways into the fandom, and its threshold for belonging comes close to “faith alone”: consider yourself a Touhou fan, and you more or less are one. Becoming a “Touhou fan” is not especially difficult. The problem is that getting into it through the original games has long been a much less welcoming route.
Despite its immense historical significance as the beginning of the Windows era, EoSD is not always an ideal first encounter for a newcomer today. Its resolution, system compatibility, controls, and display experience are all some distance from what players expect of a modern STG. Veterans can draw on experience to work around these problems. Newcomers may not be willing to clear those hurdles.
This is where the remake matters: it can turn EoSD from an old game that requires some background knowledge to approach smoothly into an official entry point that players can simply buy, play, and understand.
Since roughly Hidden Star in Four Seasons, every new ZUN release has been accompanied by gloomy predictions across the forums. The familiar claims that he has “run out of ideas” and the recurring “folklore” argument are among the classics. Frankly, though, Touhou fans sometimes seem far too eager to put their own series down. This is not unique to the Chinese community; similar sentiments appear in Touhou communities around the world. ZUN has even come under fire from Western Touhou fans over suspicions that he used AI. (lol)
The EoSD remake will inevitably attract its share of doomposting. But honestly, it is still EoSD — unless Touhou fans’ tastes have changed so much that even EoSD is no longer good enough for them. I am glad to see the character portraits being redrawn while retaining their original character. ZUN’s art has become an inseparable part of Touhou’s identity.
The remake will bring higher resolution, clearer visuals, a more modern interface, reworked music, and a smoother experience on modern systems. Some veterans may argue that this strips EoSD of that distinctive “early Windows game atmosphere.” I cannot quite put it into words myself: perhaps sharp-edged, bare-bones, and unstable. I acknowledge that point. But Touhou needs to innovate.
Take the unlimited-lives mode, which is clearly welcoming to beginners. I am fond of a comment I saw on NetEase Cloud Music: “Some tracks need to be experienced alongside the gameplay and bullet patterns.” If most newcomers never make it past the first three stages, they will struggle to experience EoSD as a whole. Instead, the game becomes little more than a “Shanghai Teahouse ~ Chinese Tea” music player. Unlimited lives are not a replacement for the standard experience; they are a way to lower the barrier to a first encounter. They let newcomers through the door, after which the community can help them discover what makes STGs genuinely enjoyable.
Of course, this is directed at people who are more inclined to explore Touhou through its STGs. There are plenty of other ways to get to know EoSD. It has already stood the test of time.
Every article needs a hot take or two to catch the reader’s attention. I have enormous respect for EoSD’s place in Touhou history. But if the remake achieves meaningful success — and by “success” I mean not sales figures, but whether it brings more people to Touhou through the STGs — it may gradually take the original’s place in popular memory.
After all, cultural icons do not renew themselves through nostalgia alone.
That does not mean the original will disappear, or that it will cease to matter. Quite the opposite: the remake may bring the original’s historical value into even sharper focus. But for many new players, their first experience of EoSD’s visuals, music, systems, and difficulty structure may come from the remake rather than the original from twenty-four years ago. That shift in understanding between generations is itself evidence of cultural vitality. Just as a film does not lose its value by being digitally restored, a remake need not repudiate the past. It can give a classic room to breathe in the present.
Precisely for that reason, however, the community should be wary of a new form of gatekeeping. If the remake really does become many newcomers’ first encounter with EoSD, some will inevitably get to know the game through clearer visuals, a more modern interface, smoother performance, a more welcoming beginner mode, and an official Chinese translation. For them, the “EoSD” they carry in their minds will naturally be the remake, not the original from twenty-four years ago.
Veterans are certainly entitled to miss the original and to emphasize its distinctive historical texture. Its rough edges, simplicity, instability, and even the systems that now seem inconvenient are all part of what it is: an early Windows-era mainline Touhou game. But none of this should become a test of a fan’s credentials. We should not casually tell newcomers that they “do not understand Touhou” just because they have never played EoSD without a visible hitbox marker. If “you only played the remake” becomes another excuse to look down on people, the community itself will undermine the new entry point the remake provides. We will be back to another pointless struggle over who counts as a legitimate fan. That is not the Touhou community I want to see.
Now let us go a little deeper and touch a subject that apparently must never be touched: what the EoSD remake means for Touhou’s commercialization. Some readers may already want to tear me to shreds for bringing this up, but one thing needs to be said. Whether we acknowledge it or not, Touhou’s commercialization has clearly accelerated in recent years, and its forms have become increasingly complex. You can even see active encouragement from the official side. We are no longer talking only about innocuous products sold at doujin conventions, or about fumos and collaboration figures that have reached audiences beyond the fandom.
Anyone who makes even a modest effort to follow Touhou news can see the trend:
This means Touhou is no longer relying solely on ZUN’s continued creation of new works to drive the community’s organic growth. It is also beginning to reorganize, rerelease, and reinterpret its past works through official channels. That does not mean our esteemed ZUN can now sit back and enjoy a life of financial freedom. On the contrary, he remains Touhou’s central creator and will retain firm control over it for a long time to come, perhaps for the rest of his life. But his role may be expanding. Alongside making new works, he is beginning to revisit, organize, and interpret his older ones.
Bluntly calling this a necessary measure of commercialization would probably hurt quite a few feelings. So let us put it another way: this is a stage that mature franchises often reach. When a franchise is young, it relies primarily on new works to grow. Once it has accumulated a long enough history, enough classic characters, and enough shared community memories, it inevitably has to confront its past. How should older works be preserved? How should newcomers be introduced to them? What relationship should older and newer versions have? How should historical works be brought onto modern platforms? These questions inevitably arise. The EoSD remake is a sign that Touhou is beginning to address them systematically.
The Chinese Touhou community has greeted the remake with jubilation, and some people are already dreaming of remakes of Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night. But rather than endlessly debating whether Rin Satsuki will finally get her comeback — about as likely as Manchester United winning the Champions League again — perhaps we should discuss how the Chinese community ought to approach this remake with a watchful eye. No offense to Rin fans, of course. It is just that Touhou fans can sometimes be remarkably naive.
We have to acknowledge that the remake genuinely helps lower the barrier to getting into the original games. Its official Chinese translation also makes it more accessible to newcomers and can help extend the life of a franchise with thirty years of history.
But we should also examine it critically. It may change how people perceive the original, reshape community memory, create new hierarchies among fans, or encourage some players to consume only the characters and nostalgia without really understanding the source material.
Support and criticism are not mutually exclusive. A mature community should be capable of doing two things at once: welcoming new entry points, new fans, new platforms, and new localizations, while maintaining serious scrutiny of the work’s quality, text, value, and the limits of commercialization.
For the Chinese-speaking Touhou community, this remake is an especially valuable opportunity to broaden the discussion. It is not merely a piece of gaming news. It can also prompt the community to revisit some important questions:
Why did EoSD become the place where Touhou’s dream began?
Why have the characters who appeared in it proved so enduring?
How will an official Chinese translation change the ways Chinese fans first encounter Touhou?
What relationship should the remake and the original have?
Does commercialization necessarily harm doujin culture?
Must newcomers overcome the same barriers that veterans once did before they can be considered genuine Touhou fans?
These questions are far more important, and far more meaningful, than endlessly posting “My youth is back!”, “What year is it?”, or “How do I get into Touhou?” across every platform.
Yes, every article apparently needs a conclusion. But by this point, readers should have little trouble working out mine: remaking EoSD is a necessary, timely, and strategically significant step.
Its greatest value is not nostalgia. It is giving Touhou a modern entry point again. For a franchise with thirty years of history, that matters enormously. Touhou cannot exist only in veterans’ memories, nor can it exist only through fan works. It needs to let newcomers reconnect with the original works and understand how these characters, pieces of music, bullet patterns, and texts were first brought together.
At the same time, we must not treat the remake as sacred, as though its mere existence could somehow bring about a great Touhou revival. It still has to prove itself. Like recent new entries, it may face criticism from the community, along with the same old declarations that “Touhou is past its prime” and “ZUN has run out of ideas.”
If it turns out well, it could mark Touhou’s entry into a new phase: moving beyond relying solely on ZUN’s continued production of new works to also organizing, preserving, rereleasing, and reinterpreting its own classic history.
If it turns out merely average, it will at least still provide a modern entry point through which more newcomers can discover the original games.
If it turns out badly, it will remind us that classics cannot be brought back to life simply by giving them higher-resolution graphics and localization. A classic is a classic not only because of its content, but also because of its historical context and its place in the community’s memory.
The best response to the EoSD remake, then, is not to pick a side, but to watch how it develops. Neither retreat into a closed world of nostalgia nor surrender to uncritical celebration. Look forward to it, but keep your judgment intact.
Touhou has never made it this far through the official works alone, nor through fan creations alone. Its vitality comes from the long intertwining of original works, creators, community, music, characters, text, gameplay, and shared memories.
It is still too early to say exactly how the EoSD remake will affect that vitality. But one thing is clear: it has already reminded us that EoSD is not merely a work of the past. It continues to shape Touhou’s present, and it may yet change Touhou’s future.
At 10:45 p.m. on June 9, 2026, Team Shanghai Alice’s official Bilibili account came back from the dead after a year of silence and dropped a major announcement: a remake of Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil would be released on September 10. I did not hear about it until somewhat later, which definitely had nothing to do with being hopelessly absorbed in Counter-Strike.
Since I am not particularly good at shoot ’em ups, I will not be offering an assessment of the gameplay itself. Still, the intense discussions among Touhou fans across so many platforms make it clear just how much this remake means to the community. In this article, I want to explore its potential impact from several angles.
Let me put my conclusion up front: I fully support the decision to remake Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (EoSD). But that support is not unconditional praise. It comes with a cautious, wait-and-see attitude. This is something worth looking forward to, and something worth examining seriously.
EoSD is the sixth Touhou game and the starting point of the Windows era, also known as the “new games” era. At a time when the PC-98 setting had largely been set aside and Gensokyo was still being built up from almost nothing, EoSD was unquestionably a milestone. Or, to borrow ZUN’s own description, it was “a twentieth-century danmaku STG for the twenty-first century.”
Its music and character designs were remarkably bold for their time. As for all those names readers already know by heart, please allow me to skip the introductions. One statistic gives some idea of how popular its cast remains: in the 21st Touhou Popularity Poll in 2025, nine of the eleven characters who debuted in EoSD placed in the top twenty. The remaining two, Daiyousei and Koakuma, both placed in the top sixty.
My own ability only gets me through EoSD on Normal. Compared with later entries, it lacks a visible hitbox marker, only allows automatic item collection above the point of collection at full power, does not let Easy players reach Stage 6, and suffers from a runaway-framerate bug — the infamous “1,000 FPS EoSD.” These are certainly shortcomings, but this is, after all, a twenty-four-year-old game. Some limitations are inevitable products of its time, and ZUN addressed these issues in subsequent mainline entries.
None of this diminishes EoSD’s place in Touhou history. In some respects, it has even come to represent Touhou itself, and commercial collaborations tend to center on its characters. Remaking a work like this is therefore not merely a technical undertaking. It raises the question of how Touhou chooses to revisit its own history.
Many newcomers have never entered Touhou through the original games. Some found it through doujin music; others through hand-drawn fan videos, MMD, fan art, character memes, doujinshi, game streams, Bilibili, Baidu Tieba, or THBWiki. This is especially true in the Chinese-speaking community. For many Chinese fans, “Touhou” is not first and foremost a series of STGs. It is an enormous subculture built from characters, music, fan works, lore, community, and memes.
That has a charm all its own. A large part of the reason Touhou has endured for thirty years is precisely that it is not a closed commercial franchise in which all content flows in one direction from the official creators to the audience. It is an open ecosystem sustained by both the original works and fan creations. Many anime-style games that proclaim themselves “the Touhou of today” have failed to grasp what makes Touhou’s doujin culture special. They seem to think that a high volume of Pixiv submissions, or a few officially organized offline events, is enough to make them the next “doujin miracle.” It is not.
But let us get back to Touhou. There are many ways into the fandom, and its threshold for belonging comes close to “faith alone”: consider yourself a Touhou fan, and you more or less are one. Becoming a “Touhou fan” is not especially difficult. The problem is that getting into it through the original games has long been a much less welcoming route.
Despite its immense historical significance as the beginning of the Windows era, EoSD is not always an ideal first encounter for a newcomer today. Its resolution, system compatibility, controls, and display experience are all some distance from what players expect of a modern STG. Veterans can draw on experience to work around these problems. Newcomers may not be willing to clear those hurdles.
This is where the remake matters: it can turn EoSD from an old game that requires some background knowledge to approach smoothly into an official entry point that players can simply buy, play, and understand.
Since roughly Hidden Star in Four Seasons, every new ZUN release has been accompanied by gloomy predictions across the forums. The familiar claims that he has “run out of ideas” and the recurring “folklore” argument are among the classics. Frankly, though, Touhou fans sometimes seem far too eager to put their own series down. This is not unique to the Chinese community; similar sentiments appear in Touhou communities around the world. ZUN has even come under fire from Western Touhou fans over suspicions that he used AI. (lol)
The EoSD remake will inevitably attract its share of doomposting. But honestly, it is still EoSD — unless Touhou fans’ tastes have changed so much that even EoSD is no longer good enough for them. I am glad to see the character portraits being redrawn while retaining their original character. ZUN’s art has become an inseparable part of Touhou’s identity.
The remake will bring higher resolution, clearer visuals, a more modern interface, reworked music, and a smoother experience on modern systems. Some veterans may argue that this strips EoSD of that distinctive “early Windows game atmosphere.” I cannot quite put it into words myself: perhaps sharp-edged, bare-bones, and unstable. I acknowledge that point. But Touhou needs to innovate.
Take the unlimited-lives mode, which is clearly welcoming to beginners. I am fond of a comment I saw on NetEase Cloud Music: “Some tracks need to be experienced alongside the gameplay and bullet patterns.” If most newcomers never make it past the first three stages, they will struggle to experience EoSD as a whole. Instead, the game becomes little more than a “Shanghai Teahouse ~ Chinese Tea” music player. Unlimited lives are not a replacement for the standard experience; they are a way to lower the barrier to a first encounter. They let newcomers through the door, after which the community can help them discover what makes STGs genuinely enjoyable.
Of course, this is directed at people who are more inclined to explore Touhou through its STGs. There are plenty of other ways to get to know EoSD. It has already stood the test of time.
Every article needs a hot take or two to catch the reader’s attention. I have enormous respect for EoSD’s place in Touhou history. But if the remake achieves meaningful success — and by “success” I mean not sales figures, but whether it brings more people to Touhou through the STGs — it may gradually take the original’s place in popular memory.
After all, cultural icons do not renew themselves through nostalgia alone.
That does not mean the original will disappear, or that it will cease to matter. Quite the opposite: the remake may bring the original’s historical value into even sharper focus. But for many new players, their first experience of EoSD’s visuals, music, systems, and difficulty structure may come from the remake rather than the original from twenty-four years ago. That shift in understanding between generations is itself evidence of cultural vitality. Just as a film does not lose its value by being digitally restored, a remake need not repudiate the past. It can give a classic room to breathe in the present.
Precisely for that reason, however, the community should be wary of a new form of gatekeeping. If the remake really does become many newcomers’ first encounter with EoSD, some will inevitably get to know the game through clearer visuals, a more modern interface, smoother performance, a more welcoming beginner mode, and an official Chinese translation. For them, the “EoSD” they carry in their minds will naturally be the remake, not the original from twenty-four years ago.
Veterans are certainly entitled to miss the original and to emphasize its distinctive historical texture. Its rough edges, simplicity, instability, and even the systems that now seem inconvenient are all part of what it is: an early Windows-era mainline Touhou game. But none of this should become a test of a fan’s credentials. We should not casually tell newcomers that they “do not understand Touhou” just because they have never played EoSD without a visible hitbox marker. If “you only played the remake” becomes another excuse to look down on people, the community itself will undermine the new entry point the remake provides. We will be back to another pointless struggle over who counts as a legitimate fan. That is not the Touhou community I want to see.
Now let us go a little deeper and touch a subject that apparently must never be touched: what the EoSD remake means for Touhou’s commercialization. Some readers may already want to tear me to shreds for bringing this up, but one thing needs to be said. Whether we acknowledge it or not, Touhou’s commercialization has clearly accelerated in recent years, and its forms have become increasingly complex. You can even see active encouragement from the official side. We are no longer talking only about innocuous products sold at doujin conventions, or about fumos and collaboration figures that have reached audiences beyond the fandom.
Anyone who makes even a modest effort to follow Touhou news can see the trend:
- The official games continue to be released on Steam, lowering the barrier to purchasing them for overseas players and newcomers. I am not denying that Chinese download sites such as Liliyun still exist. But Team Shanghai Alice did directly order the closure of the largest Western Touhou download site.
- Although several officially licensed mobile games have shut down, their number continues to grow. As licensing becomes more permissive, we might even dare to predict that the long-awaited “official anime” could appear in the next few years — something that would once have seemed unthinkable.
- Offline events and franchise collaborations are becoming more frequent, bringing Touhou into a wider range of anime-related consumer spaces. In 2025, the number of offline Touhou events in China was almost on par with Japan’s. Collaborations involving cafes, theme parks, and other games have also been reaching new highs. There is little need to elaborate; the trend is there for everyone to see.
- The music is also moving onto streaming platforms — even to the point of using copyright takedowns against fan-uploaded compilations of the original soundtracks on YouTube so that the music can be released on platforms such as YouTube Music. The same applies to doujin albums.
- The official side is beginning to revisit and reorganize its older catalog. The EoSD remake is the clearest sign of this direction. Perhaps we really can look forward to the return of the PC-98 games.
This means Touhou is no longer relying solely on ZUN’s continued creation of new works to drive the community’s organic growth. It is also beginning to reorganize, rerelease, and reinterpret its past works through official channels. That does not mean our esteemed ZUN can now sit back and enjoy a life of financial freedom. On the contrary, he remains Touhou’s central creator and will retain firm control over it for a long time to come, perhaps for the rest of his life. But his role may be expanding. Alongside making new works, he is beginning to revisit, organize, and interpret his older ones.
Bluntly calling this a necessary measure of commercialization would probably hurt quite a few feelings. So let us put it another way: this is a stage that mature franchises often reach. When a franchise is young, it relies primarily on new works to grow. Once it has accumulated a long enough history, enough classic characters, and enough shared community memories, it inevitably has to confront its past. How should older works be preserved? How should newcomers be introduced to them? What relationship should older and newer versions have? How should historical works be brought onto modern platforms? These questions inevitably arise. The EoSD remake is a sign that Touhou is beginning to address them systematically.
The Chinese Touhou community has greeted the remake with jubilation, and some people are already dreaming of remakes of Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night. But rather than endlessly debating whether Rin Satsuki will finally get her comeback — about as likely as Manchester United winning the Champions League again — perhaps we should discuss how the Chinese community ought to approach this remake with a watchful eye. No offense to Rin fans, of course. It is just that Touhou fans can sometimes be remarkably naive.
We have to acknowledge that the remake genuinely helps lower the barrier to getting into the original games. Its official Chinese translation also makes it more accessible to newcomers and can help extend the life of a franchise with thirty years of history.
But we should also examine it critically. It may change how people perceive the original, reshape community memory, create new hierarchies among fans, or encourage some players to consume only the characters and nostalgia without really understanding the source material.
Support and criticism are not mutually exclusive. A mature community should be capable of doing two things at once: welcoming new entry points, new fans, new platforms, and new localizations, while maintaining serious scrutiny of the work’s quality, text, value, and the limits of commercialization.
For the Chinese-speaking Touhou community, this remake is an especially valuable opportunity to broaden the discussion. It is not merely a piece of gaming news. It can also prompt the community to revisit some important questions:
Why did EoSD become the place where Touhou’s dream began?
Why have the characters who appeared in it proved so enduring?
How will an official Chinese translation change the ways Chinese fans first encounter Touhou?
What relationship should the remake and the original have?
Does commercialization necessarily harm doujin culture?
Must newcomers overcome the same barriers that veterans once did before they can be considered genuine Touhou fans?
These questions are far more important, and far more meaningful, than endlessly posting “My youth is back!”, “What year is it?”, or “How do I get into Touhou?” across every platform.
Yes, every article apparently needs a conclusion. But by this point, readers should have little trouble working out mine: remaking EoSD is a necessary, timely, and strategically significant step.
Its greatest value is not nostalgia. It is giving Touhou a modern entry point again. For a franchise with thirty years of history, that matters enormously. Touhou cannot exist only in veterans’ memories, nor can it exist only through fan works. It needs to let newcomers reconnect with the original works and understand how these characters, pieces of music, bullet patterns, and texts were first brought together.
At the same time, we must not treat the remake as sacred, as though its mere existence could somehow bring about a great Touhou revival. It still has to prove itself. Like recent new entries, it may face criticism from the community, along with the same old declarations that “Touhou is past its prime” and “ZUN has run out of ideas.”
If it turns out well, it could mark Touhou’s entry into a new phase: moving beyond relying solely on ZUN’s continued production of new works to also organizing, preserving, rereleasing, and reinterpreting its own classic history.
If it turns out merely average, it will at least still provide a modern entry point through which more newcomers can discover the original games.
If it turns out badly, it will remind us that classics cannot be brought back to life simply by giving them higher-resolution graphics and localization. A classic is a classic not only because of its content, but also because of its historical context and its place in the community’s memory.
The best response to the EoSD remake, then, is not to pick a side, but to watch how it develops. Neither retreat into a closed world of nostalgia nor surrender to uncritical celebration. Look forward to it, but keep your judgment intact.
Touhou has never made it this far through the official works alone, nor through fan creations alone. Its vitality comes from the long intertwining of original works, creators, community, music, characters, text, gameplay, and shared memories.
It is still too early to say exactly how the EoSD remake will affect that vitality. But one thing is clear: it has already reminded us that EoSD is not merely a work of the past. It continues to shape Touhou’s present, and it may yet change Touhou’s future.
)
