CountVonNumenor
Onshi
Oh boy, it's been a long time since I last tackled one of these....
Recently, and in preparation for a thread I will try writing tomorrow, I stumbled upon this funny document thanks to a post on r/touhou. This time, instead of me writing a lot about each of the paragraphs/chapters (it took me about 6 hours debating the topic of TheOVJM and his video). Therefore, I will post first what the person had to say, then link the original file and write some of my conclusions below (it is a 42 pages long document, not even I would be enough of a masochist to go through all that). Therefore, let's go:
With all this in mind, let's come to some conclusions, or at least appearances brought by the sheer quantity of text and its content (or maybe I should take them as some common themes through the whole text?):
This was literally a "guy A like game, guy B writes a while 42 pages long article why guy A's opinion is wrong". And it all started just because some guy liked Touhou 18.5... Becuase that is where it all started from, the whole 42 pages being a build-up towards the fact that 100th Black Marker it the crowning achievement of ZUN's downfall as a creator. And that the series is beyond any redemption...
I have initially read the whole thing, and left an answer to the poor guy left in confusion:
"I have unironically read this whole thing (I know, what am I doing with my life?!). The conclusion I got to is that it caters a lot towards the more elitist side of the fandom. Some of the analysis on game mechanics and bullet patterns is interesting (even if I am mostly unfamiliar with it), but I am not very sure how much I agree with some of the opinions towards the community, reception and people playing the more recent games in the series. Might have lost a few braincells here and there, but I guess it was worth it?"
Besides me, u/Akyuuposting also made an interesting point about the whole idea of this file, and probably quite a good conclusion:
Recently, and in preparation for a thread I will try writing tomorrow, I stumbled upon this funny document thanks to a post on r/touhou. This time, instead of me writing a lot about each of the paragraphs/chapters (it took me about 6 hours debating the topic of TheOVJM and his video). Therefore, I will post first what the person had to say, then link the original file and write some of my conclusions below (it is a 42 pages long document, not even I would be enough of a masochist to go through all that). Therefore, let's go:
The dissection of a generation-long rise and fall. Introduction.
A common video essay topic in the Touhou fandom is taking a look at where the series started and how it “evolved” (which is misusing the word “evolve”, but we might as well omit that little detail for the sake of creative liberty)
You start out here, in a pixelated game for a some abandonware (only remembered because of the series, other PC-98 games are almost never looked at… for a good reason, the amount of eroge games is overwhelming) and then arrive at the shiny peaks of the modern day, slowly traversing the path the series went through, while being told fables of how kind and good-willed the developer, ZUN, is, and how great everything about Touhou is, starting from the games themselves, and ending with fanmade creations. Usually this brings quite some views and likes, alongside positive comments and overall channel activity. Because why yes, it is indeed quite the sight – transitioning from 1997 to 2022 is bound to look interesting. The fandom, despite being already pretty big and even semi-mainstream, pretty similar to JJBA – being just one step below mainstream, still likes to think of itself as “obscure” – and, just like in any obscure community, the creator will be praised as a hero, bringing some “much needed attention of the public''. Flaws and errors will be often overlooked, while positive moments, and even the very existance of the video, will be hyperfocused.
However, that is not quite what I’m going to talk about. My tale is different, and it is of how we got here. From all the great games, to this. To this disappointment of a game, the new rock bottom of shmup design. Looks fancy, you may ask? Then you are probably unfamiliar with what it is…
Of course, one cannot describe a fall without first describing the rise and the peak itself – that kind of perspective would be flawed and one-sided.
Before we start though – a few things require clarification. I will try to include any and all slang words in a little dictionary at the very end, just in case, as well as a few extra ones. If a word is written in bold the first time it appears – it will be clarified there. Secondly, Touhou was never a real competitor to many games in terms of quality, but it does have quite some strong sides and is overall not a bad product. At least before the descent… Lastly, yes, I did play those (all of them, except 18.5 and the new fighters). Not too well, enough to clear most lunatics and do a bit of other fancy stuff, but that’s about it.
Chapter 1. The dawn.
It all started with a college project, two games, an arkanoid and a shmup, made by a group of college students known as Amusement Makers. The arkanoid, The Highly Responsive to Prayers, included some interesting mechanics, but was wonky and required learning, as well as buggy and crashing sometimes. The shmup is much less notable, being a clunky template-ish shmup with all the mandatory features of the genre and nothing more. Glitches and inconveniences are common, as well as noticeable input lag without a good emulator – which is a big issue, since many reviews and guides tend to recommend neko project 21, a pretty bad emulator. Or, rather, should I say, accurate? It lags as much as a real machine would, but you are not looking for that kind of experience. The public’s reception was nonexistent – not even a hundred copies were sold.
Yet, there was one noticeable thing in those two games, the music. A student named Jun’ya Ota (ZUN) used the project as a vessel for his music to be served to the public. And was he a musical genius even back then – one thing the reviews never get wrong is the quality of the music.
The next installment didn’t take long – a Twinkle Star Sprites inspired game, Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream. Much like its source of inspiration, it’s a dueling shmup about canceling bullets (this is not like TSS, however) on your screen and sending them to your opponent’s screen, as well as scoring combos to send extra attacks and even bosses (which can also be done via charging). The music is notably better, as well as the overall quality. Additionally, because of what I believe to be a chain of coincidences and mirrored design choices, the game works extremely well, especially in the scoring department.
Lotus Land Story and Mystic Square were released on the next year. Those two installments had defined a trajectory for the rest of the series – and it was both inspired and somewhat unique. A big part of the formula was taken from arcades, the games, which almost the whole fandom, up until 2020-2021, despised and thought to be stupidly difficult games that were difficult for extorting credits out of people. That, frankly speaking, foolish and baseless belief was formed by a few reviewers who would justify the lack of research about “other shmups” by coming up with this absolutely idiotic idea. It'd also compliment the whole “ZUN is different, ZUN is kind-hearted and genuinely good, much unlike the other developers”. Not to put any shame on ZUN from that time, but the disrespect for other developers is staggering. I apologize for the little deviation, but it had to be done. It’s an example of one of the common misconceptions which cloud the view a lot. Early Touhou games would deviate from certain arcade standards, such as having six stages, and having graze being a major (in the PC-98 era due to grazecaps, not that major*) source of score.
The public’s reception was, once again, abysmal, only a few hundred copies were sold. ZUN had decided to stop working on PC-98 and wanted to experiment on the growing in popularity Windows platform – and he was right about it having a future.
He had been experimenting for the following four years…
Chapter 2. The conception of a philosophy.
It’s been four years since MS, which was all but completely forgotten. ZUN didn’t waste that time though – he graduated and learnt how to code on Windows, which resulted in the first non-PC98 installment – the game itself, the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. No matter how popular it is now, back in 2002 without a series to back it up, it went pretty much unnoticed, just another shmup with noteworthy music. Although its popularity was an order of magnitude higher than MS…
The game brought some of the long-lasting issues that are here to stay, however.
For once, the game was pretty buggy on release, and ZUN released a patch to fix it. The patch broke all replays that were recorded before it, resulting in what I call “ZUN’s childhood trauma” – he would never release a patch more than a week after release, fearing the same might happen. That would go on to be one of his initial downfalls – a paranoidal fear of mistakes, and form quite some flaws…
ZUN was also pretty lazy with pattern design, and often would let randomness do the job for him – some people would call it fun, but it’s objectively lazy pattern design, and just overall not a good decision. That caused another problem – the scattershot difficulty progression, which would just absolutely not follow the normal “later=harder” path and had a lot of spikes and pitfalls – for instance, the whole fourth stage is pretty boring, and consists of just streaming, while a single section is responsible for most of its challenge. A random, unfair and straight up bad section.
Poorly made extend thresholds is yet another one. All extends are reachable in a pure survival run that sometimes collects items and makes no efforts at scoring whatever – the theme is there to persist whenever a system with a fixed amount of extends is introduced with some exceptions. Even an average Hard/Lunatic run would score double the final extend threshold at the end (120 million). This is just a lazy way of balancing a proper resource system, once again, a poor design choice.
And, of course, mainly poor stage design with boring or random stages with next to no interesting elements or real learning.
But, enough of that. All those are just beginner mistakes which should get fixed later on.
An interesting upside of the game is that the scoring system worked… well… against the developer’s intentions and in a way he didn’t expect. Yet it worked pretty well.
In a year, the world saw the seventh installment, Perfect Cherry Blossom, which improved many things, including slightly alleviating the issues covered above, as well as improving a lot of technical aspects of the game, sound quality, sprite quality, et cetera. The amount of content was greatly increased compared to its predecessors. It also featured an actually impactful system that was rather well-thought out, which didn’t work against the developer’s intention this time, and actually behaved as intended. Extend threshold issue was alleviated by technically (of course there is a hard cap, but still) endless item-based extends, which would reward active item collection with extra 1-3 lives compared to a defensive run. Stages were made slightly more interesting, barring a certain two, which are still snoozefests, and randomness was toned down, albeit not by much. The game is also a lot less troublesome to get running on a modern device, which is an extreme technical issue of its prequel.
“To truly balance a shmup, one would have to make stage performance irrelevant and give everyone the same bomb (as if we won’t see it happen)”. That doesn’t cancel a major balance issue that came with PCB, however. ZUN thought it was a good idea to have varied bomb counts per character, as well as having two bombs per character – with one of them being almost always inferior to the other. The decision was extremely poor, and ZUN decided to never do it again without proper balancing. Kind of…
And another issue rose with this game… The last game had an extremely powerful shotgunning shot – so how did ZUN react? That’s right, by introducing a damage cap and prolonging superarmour periods on spellcards to punish playing aggressively and speedkilling, as well as nerfing all further shotguns into the ground. At least the bombs were exempt from the cap, for now. An extremely poor move, caused by the same fear of mistakes. Even more childhood trauma for our subject.
The public’s reception was different. ZUN has now become a prominent figure in the (still niche) doujin community, and this is the time when fanworks actually began being produced. He felt that power, and aspired to make a change.
Which he described really well in the Afterword of the next game, Imperishable Night. There is a lot to talk about here, but the Afterword is the biggest part of the “Conception of a philosophy”. ZUN sees patterns as the main way of telling the story, and everything else, from cover art to gameplay, is but a way to supplement them, to have them not simply exist in an abstract void. He wanted his game to be… an artwork. Not a “mode to unlock practice”, which he was strongly against, and adding spell practice in IN was a really hard decision for him, as he feared it might not complement his vision of what a shmup made by him must be. He mentioned how he is making games for one person – himself, and he doesn’t think introducing quality of life mechanics as the audience demands is required – that’d reduce art to a technical game, just like many shmups already are. His persistence was admirable, as well as his policy regarding fanmade content and piracy – he didn’t care, as long as no blatant asset theft is performed. This is where I see his birth as a philosopher, this is where ZUN became that benevolent entity praised so frequently – and he deserved every one of those. The Afterword is truly touching and must be read by anyone looking into the death of the series, as death is just the conclusion of a life cycle, and cannot be understood without understanding the birth and the adolescence.
IN was… a really good one. It would almost outright fix the randomness issue, make a lot more interesting stage segments, fix the difficulty progression (not completely), and add a ton of content, such as basically two distinct routes, 12 shottypes, a really good scoring system, a lot of polish, technical fixes (no more two extra frames of input delay
because reasons), visual enhancements, and… balancing. It was the start of ZUN’s prime, rookie mistakes were eliminated, a philosophy was attained, a visual style and worldbuilding was set as well, the music was good as usual.
It was at that time, in 2004, that the interest of the doujin community peaked, and the popularity had to expand somewhere…
A year later, due to the amount of art and fanworks, what would later be known as the first popularity boom took place. Touhou suddendly started spreading in the West, and with it came translation patches and overall performance issue fixes (for EoSD). Imageboards and forums hosted most of its activity, which was still rudimentary, compared to the modern day. Some of the well-known memes of the community have originated from the following few years, and lured a lot of people in, resulting in quite the community. Yet, the next game released while this was still accelerating, and as such, its scale didn’t yet reflect it. ZUN wanted to take a step back, and release a “PoDD: Definitive Edition”, also known as Phantasmagoria of Flower View. It was a polished and improved version of PoDD (inferior in some ways, but still). ZUN admittedly spent a long time playtesting it, and it’s quite evident. The public didn’t like it, however. It was different, and required much more than just dodging – something the 2005 “purists” didn’t take kindly, with their profound hatred for cancels. It’s still a divisive topic even nowadays, although it is treated a lot less harshly.
The netcode is indeed of extremely poor quality, but that’s because it was a community effort… for a game that didn’t really intend to expand past playing via LAN. It’s being worked on… has been, for years, to no avail.
The same year, another game saw the light of day. A spinoff game made for just a single character, a scene game, which means basically a giant spell practice menu. An interesting camera mechanic was introduced, as the player couldn’t shoot and had to… shoot. The title reflects that with a pun, Shoot the Bullet. Often overlooked, but important for our purposes. Spells were original, often containing references, were heavily balanced around camera usage and rewarding risky approach quite a lot. It was
a genuinely made game, that was, however, disliked by many due to the learning required and the difficulty.
As mentioned above, a cult was forming, the so-called “purists” who despised many things and advocated for an image of “pure” Touhou. As extreme as their beliefs were, they had a point. A point which was overlooked and antagonised due to how extreme they were in enforcing it… The general public failed to understand and listen, as it always does.
It was that time that many false beliefs originated from. For once, “fanon=canon” was referring to the fact that ZUN would sometimes accept publically accepted headcannons if there was nothing to contradict that in pre-established canon. It is no longer the case, hasn’t been in a long time. The community would see itself as “niche” specifically at that time, and for some reason, that belief would stay until the modern day. While back then, it used to be true, now this is no longer the case, and it seems the myth is here to stay. The arcade misconception covered earlier might have had begun here, although I cannot say for sure – the roots of it seem incredibly elusive. There was a time when Touhou was just another shmup – and then that belief just randomly popped into existance, and there was no real transition. ZUN’s philosophy and policy regarding piracy from that time for some reason have gotten engrained into the minds of everyone, and most people still think ZUN is the person he was specifically during those years.
So not only is it a period when ZUN’s philosophy came into existance, it was also the time when most things the fandom believes were true. However, ZUN would prove a lot more capable of changing than the community… And, for a time, this would lead to the so-called “golden age”. The peak will be reached. Of course, the saddest part about the peak is that it’s only down from there, but trust me, the golden age is worth it.
Chapter 3. The golden days.
In almost any franchise, there is that distinct “golden age” where the popularity is at its highest, and so is the quality. With Touhou, there is next to no doubt about this particular era being “golden”. Let’s see why is that so.
As mentioned above, ZUN wanted a soft reboot to the series – in two years from the ninth game, he made a new title, which had a lot of differences compared to the other games. Meet Mountain of Faith – the start of “modern 1”. Sprites, previously made for PoFV, were still used in that game and became a standard – to this day, they are still used in all titles. The new power system, having four power tiers (five, if you count power 0 and six, if you count power 5, which didn’t affect the shot at all), with each tier simply adding a new familiar to the base shot would stay as well – and so would almost all the UI changes The powerbombing system, which removed bombs and let the player bomb at the cost of a power level wouldn’t stay for long though – it was extremely breakable and would allow for 2-3 times more bombs than any of the other titles. Lazy and easily reachable score extend thresholds were back and just as bad as in EoSD. Lastly, it would increase the hitbox differences dramatically, with Reimu having a 4*4 square and Marisa having an atrocious 7*7. But what about the actual gameplay?
First of all, the game would break the difficulty progression back to PCB levels, with occasional randomness being 90% of the game’s difficulty, and the rest being a snoozefest. The scoring system was actually interesting, encouraging chaining and not missing – except it was also extremely easy to approach the theoretical cap, and current WR improvements are extremely miniscule (due to the removal of grazing), consisting of using extremely risky strategies or grinding for good boss movement – which was randomised as well, for some reason. Before MoF, the boss would always follow the player, now it has a 25% chance to move the opposite direction in an instance of moving. That would stay as well, somehow…
Bombs were also changed to be the same for each shottype – just a big damaging circle, a bit smaller and more damaging for Marisa, and that was the only difference. It was an attempt to balance the game, but…
Balance is not something this game did either. Two of Marisa’s shots were bugged – one would deal 10x more damage at a certain power level (due to a typo), the other one would deal much less damage than intended – it was meant to be the highest-damage shot in the game, and it ended up being much worse than even homing (which was incredibly overpowered). While the former was quickly fixed by a fanmade patch with ease, the latter was a fundamentally broken damage calculation mechanism, and a fix never came. That also shows the poor quality of playtesting the games – if what ZUN called the higest damaging shot in the game did such poor damage, the testers must have had some questions and concerns – they either didn’t or were ignored. I cannot say for sure if it was caused by ZUN choosing to not listen or the testers being incredibly incompetent, but both of those are alarming, to say the least.
ZUN obviously learnt about the bugs – and instead of fixing them, he’d introduce an even harsher DPS cap for the new era and all games to come. Once again, childhood trauma kicking in, preventing him from actually addressing the issue and instead introducing crutches which would harm the games’ quality. Indeed, the quality would take a decline compared to what IN established, but it definitely had potential for improvement – and that improvement did come.
It wouldn’t come in the form of the next title, however. While Subterranean Animism did a lot of things definitively better than its predecessor, it’s not much of an upgrade.
The powerbombing system would stay. Effort was made to ensure it’s more balanced, but due to bombs being different once again, it would still not be – certain shots were able to melt bosses by chaining a bomb after a bomb, while also receiving power items to bomb even more. Extend thresholds were gone, but the new system looked like a placeholder you’d see in an alpha – complete a boss attack without getting hit to receive a fifth of a life. As for the new systems – now you could graze to autocollect all items on the screen, in addition to the whole thing being close to MoF, but now with grazing and some other changes.
Onto some upsides, though. The game almost entirely eliminated run-defining randomness, apart from a certain stage 1 issue, it introduced a pity mechanic to prevent bullets killing the player right after spawning, half the shottypes had really interesting mechanics, probably the best ZUN’s attempt at shottypes to this day and even though I scolded the power system earlier, it’s a definitive improvement over the last game.
The public’s reception was really positive, apart from some people scolding it for being too hard on the normal difficulty. ZUN, however, thought it wasn’t hard enough, and was too breakable, some change was really needed… He questioned the powerbombing system, fixing it didn’t seem viable, so he went back to the usual bomb counter.
It was a step in the right direction, with a lot of improvements and realisations – the step would then turn into a march towards the peak. Undefined Fantastic Object would double down on improving the formula, and it’s one of the best maingames from a technical perspective. The boring resource system was thrown out of the window and was replaced with a vastly superior UFO system, which required planning and knowing the game – and it would provide lots of lives and some much-needed stage cancels if done right. Bombs were back, which was a welcome change as well. Stage design was pretty good even on its own, and it worked wonderfully alongside UFO collection mechanics. The shot balance was… not great again, but the best shot no longer breaks
the game and makes it trivial, unlike all the modern games starting from PCB. The scoring system played alongside UFOs pretty well, despite a minor bug that caused the score counter to be wrong after a certain value (fixed by a fanmade patch as well). Randomness was back, but the difficulty progression was finally proper, with only a few occasional peaks.
The public’s reception was really negative due to the difficulty and all the learning required, but that’s only natural – especially after the last few games being cheesable into oblivion…
On the issues however. This game introduced a very harsh power loss system – which, in 2009 was already being abolished in many games, and ZUN just randomly decided to make it much worse – the player loses a full power level on death, and there is a staggering difference between level 3 and 4. It’s highly unlikely to mess a regular run up, but two deaths in a succession (for any reason) invoke some Gradius-level panic… It also kept the bad character hitboxes of MoF – including a 6 by 6 square for Sanae as well.
It was a well-made game, a really well-made one, still with some flaws, but nothing is perfect. Yet, it wasn’t the peak yet.
Neither was the next spinoff game, Double Spoiler, also known as 12.5. Some people would say it’s better than StB, some would say it’s worse, but generally, it’s really close to StB, and a worthy successor to it. Not much to say about the actual game though, just StB, but with two playable characters, new spells and new bosses, which were still creative and heavily revolving around camera usage. It would even fix some of the atrocities of the last game, taking the most infamous spell from 9.5 and reworking it to be actually decent, and overall not having really “bad” spells (such as taking 500+ tries), unlike the other game.
However, it also introduced even more shot balance issues. The other playable character has a notably different camera – she can charge it much quicker, but cannot take long range shots and cannot charge the orientation of the scope. On paper that’s a good tradeoff, but in the actual game it trivialises a heavy chunk of the spells and many feel simply not balanced for a different camera. This should show how even slight changes may break a scene game’s balance, and how experimentation is not always a positive thing.
The next game is nothing short of excitement though. Yet another spinoff, this time taking 8/10 as its decimal, Great Fairy Wars, and that “great” truly belongs there. At a first glance, nothing special – one plain shottype and three stages (with six routes). The life counter is replaced with a %-based healthbar, with every hit subtracting 100%, and the bar capping at 1000%, and bombs working identically, except that they cap at 300%. Most of the UI text was also reworked – silly difficulty names, motivation, and perfect freeze replacing lives and bombs.
But… doesn’t it all sound like simple UI changes? It would indeed be just a shallow retexture without the keystone of GFW’s creation – the freeze mechanic. Chargeable exactly like the camera in the other spinoffs, it lets the player plant an ice shard at their location. Any bullet touching the ice shard will freeze, becoming harmless and increasing the size of the frozen territory – which could escalate really quickly into covering the whole screen. The more you cover – the more score and bomb percentage you gain, as well as the more charge on the spot. You can also gain it by grazing and charging manually. In addition, once the ice expires, it explodes, damaging everything nearby, which can cause really heavy damage on the bosses. The loathsome power system was removed outright, now power is an accumulating % gained for… freezing, of course. That % cannot be lost through means other than restarting the run. Bombs instantly cover the whole screen in ice and provide iframes. Additionally, they are capable of freezing the unfreezable bullets.
The scoring system is… an odd one. Some would say grazestalling makes IN too long – but this just takes stalling to a completely new level. On one hand, it sounds boring, on the other one – the player has to find ways to freeze a lot of the screen (and survive while doing so) without killing the boss, which gets pretty interesting, considering the game doesn’t mind being near-impossible (without freezes) at times. Definitely an interesting one, and definitely not for everyone.
The stage and boss design is finally of proper quality, with a lot of learning, even more (significantly more) than what UFO had. At a first glance, having such a busted system should make the game a breeze – but it’s finely crafted to be still really interesting (and
hard for a first clear). It also had some bullets (fireballs) that resisted freezing and some bullets (needles, a.k.a. lasers), which would break the ice into shards that can potentially be hazardous. That is a crutch, of course, but it’s not overdone and doesn’t spoil the game that much. Many cancel-based games can fare really well even without uncancellable bullets, it’s often viewn to be lazy. Revenge bullets from dead enemies are also back, and it makes them all the more interesting.
The public’s reception was extremely poor, and it still is, to that day... But still, this, this is the peak that we’ve been approaching. Sadly, it’s only down from here…
Not to be too upset with that though, not yet. The next game is still of high quality, and it’s still a good title. Ten Desires is yet another experimental game, and it’s a worthy spiritual successor to UFO, albeit a step down from the last game.
It changed many things – such as the UI and hitboxes, which are now circular and much bigger (as well as fixing the atrocious hitbox differences), and both of these changes were to stay. The system that wouldn’t stay though, is dynamic extend requirements.
Before, you’d need 5 or 3 pieces for a life in SA and UFO respectively, now you need 8 pieces for the first life, 10 for the second one, and so on. Sounds like a lot – and it is, reaching full lives in this game is quite the challenge, even without taking deaths into account. Just like in UFO, however, the system for obtaining them is really interesting and encourages learning, and the game is made around the trance gauge. Due to the amount of spirits increasing drastically if the player is close enough to the enemy, the game revolves heavily around pointblanking. It’s complimented by two of the characters being proximity-based as well – Marisa’s damage is pretty weak at the bottom and really good close up, and Youmu is that, but even more polarised – the slash will not damage the boss at all if cast from the bottom and is the strongest shot at medium/close range. That makes her one of the most interesting shottypes in the series, and one of the strongest as well.
Interestingly enough, the game also had a pretty good progression, and not much randomness/artificial difficulty. The powerloss system was nerfed as well – so ZUN definitely knew what he was doing
Even though graze=PIV is still a thing in TD, grazing is entirely irrelevant, and scoring resembles speedrunning more than anything. The system is liked quite a lot, and many people find it to be the best one in the series.
The game, however, has a flaw – the awesome resource system might as well not exist for a casual survival run, as many people tend to ignore it. Considering the game has a pretty relaxed shottype (Reimu) and is overall relaxing pattern-wise, it’s not hard to beat it while ignoring the system completely, and using the trance as a backup bomb. That is something ZUN will be guilty of countless times in the future as well, but more on that later.
The public’s reception was much unlike any other game before. Commercially, it was a large success, and many people found this break from the last few games to be great. But this was the title that made some people speak about “the death of Touhou”. Even though many like it, a lot of people placed the series’ gravestone on this game. Perhaps due to how sleep-inducing the Normal difficulty is, or perhaps due to all the changes. Or perhaps some people foresaw what was to come?
Despite that, many people were excited for what the new era has to show – the visuals were a lot better, and ZUN had showed quite a level of skill in designing actually interesting systems. It was also at that time that fangames started being made in much larger quantities, although many of them were still primitive, really underwhelming even compared to the official games (and sometimes just bad, looking at Len’en…). The popularity of the series may have slightly gone down compared to 2009-2012, but not by much. One could say, the series entered its “cruise flight” after the takeoff and the peak. It was also slowly shifting out of the relative obscurity, before it was something almost every non-Japanese advanced internet user knew, after that it would start slowly drifting into the masses, with some of the memes and videos receiving a lot of traction.
It seemed as if everything was going perfectly well – and the “purists” are nothing but a group of rambling conservatives that reject any and all chance. It was so simple back then – ZUN is a hero, Touhou is a charming rabbit hole which you’d never want to leave and the future shines brightly.
Chapter 4. The golden days?
Oh, had it all been so simple…
Between UFO and TD, some changes have happened, however. Gift, the company that was making nendoroids (one of them, at least) have asked ZUN to license the production of Touhou-related nendoroids, also known as fumos. After a bit of thinking, ZUN realised the commercial potential the series had, and agreed to a pretty good (for him) deal, which was the cause for the high price those had. That, of course, changed a long time ago, now their price is high simply because people will buy them anyway. That serves as a milestone for the beginning of an end – now ZUN started seeing the series as something that can be commercialised.
That transferred into TD as well. Remember when ZUN said no more spell practice and IN had it just as a cautious experiment? TD has it as well, because the fans have been asking for a long time. Remember when ZUN said he is making the games for himself?
TD Afterword contains apologies for the last few games and openly states that this game is watered down specifically to address the outcry. It is one thing to respond to criticism and nerf, say, a bad power system or another poorly designed aspect of the game… but responding to “game too hard dont wanna learn pls make easy” is something else entirely.
It was now that ZUN realised the power of having a game include two completely different ways to play it, one for the casual audience, the other one for everyone else. This way he could avoid outcries, still design good systems and appeal to good players, as well as reaching quite the financial success. Sounds like a win-win…
And the next game was almost a win-win, if not for a two enormous issues. DDC tried to split those playstyles by having three easy shottypes and three hard shottypes. Now an issue with that is that the three easy shottypes are way too easy, allowing for infinite life duplication, overall an extremely easy run with zero memorisation or learning required or just a really strong shottype. Meanwhile on the other side there’s a plain shottype that is outperformed in DPS by the homing ones, a flamethrower-type weapon in a game that aggressively punishes any attempts at meleeing and a shottype that trades everything for score potential. The gap is absolutely colossal, and there is no middle ground. What makes it worse is that most of the bosses are designed extremely poorly, which is why DDC is often regarded as the most random game in the series, with how it makes “vomit” its main pattern type.
Messing with the player’s controls is a dirty trick as well, but what makes it even dirtier is that the invertion system is clunky and sometimes just fails to properly work. For the final boss, ZUN seems to be forgetting that he cranked up the hitbox sizes, and still imagines the bullets to be modern 1-sized. Ten Desires would go along that change and make the patterns notably more sparse to compensate for that – and DDC just doesn’t care.
Enough with the downsides, however. The game features a really plain resource system that looks boring at the first glance, but the stages are wonderfully made to utilise that system fully. Playing without using it is heavily discouraged, since, much unlike the last game, knowing what to do makes a world of difference. It’s really interesting and rewarding to learn, ZUN managed to make yet another great system once again.
As for scoring – the game features a good system for obtaining resources and a functional system for exchanging those for PIV, making it pretty good. MarisaB is, of course, something else entirely, yet another one of the unintentionally good systems, like PoDD or EoSD.
The game was received rather well, although some more people found the series to be “dying”. I sincerely believe that most of them were repulsed by unfamiliarity, cancels (which are a painful topic) and poor balance, and I cannot judge them. Some, however, had a point…
As for ZUN – noticing the success of the “toned down” games, he made a toned down spinoff game. It would feature much more equipment than all games before it, including some semi-original things, and the cards which were designed around finding the right item – no more grinding, The Impossible Spellcard resembled a puzzle game more than anything.
Of course, it wouldn’t be ZUN without screwing something up – this time, it was two of the items being much more powerful than the others. “Who would’ve thought giving the player 12 seconds of iframes wasn’t good for the overall balance of the game?”. (That also raises the question of how the testers approved that). As such, these two items result in the majority of the cards being overly easy. Without them, however, the whole puzzle shtick is still upheld, the cards are decently creative and fair. Not for the no item clears, however, but this is not the intended way to play, and is more of a joke. A point could be made about the achievement, however, not all achievements reflect the proper way to play the game – if a game includes an achievement for not getting hit once, it doesn’t mean that this is the intended experience, and it doesn’t mean the game will be fair and balanced for a no damage run.
The public’s reception was overall positive, it was just a neat little game to give the fans an easier time compared to the camera games. The balance was lacking, and it was perhaps too easy, but overall, it wasn’t a bad game.
However, ZUN further saw the power of catering to the casual audience – and this time, the division was unlike anything before – last time it was about the shottypes, in Ten Desires it was most likely unintentional, and now ZUN decided to straight up split the game in two game modes… with the second one including checkpoints and powerloss per death, as well as no lives. The mode definitely worked and most definitely fulfilled its purpose, but it’s more of an exotic practice mode than anything. The Legacy mode is quite well-made, however. It features a seemingly simple system, just like in DDC, and it flows with the game just as well. The only major issue is that it scales with the amount of bullets, and as such, would almost always grant a life piece on Lunatic. Additionally, it would provide the player with a bit too many lives, allowing for a rather relaxed run once the player learns what to do. Speaking of relaxations, two shottypes absolutely decimate it while two others are just regular ones. While Sanae’s grazebomb abuse was likely not intentional, there is no way that ZUN, seeing what a shield bomb did in the last game, would implement a triple (almost permanent as well) shield bomb and think it’ll work as any other. Yes, the balance was as good as none.
The public’s reception was interesting – the game was instantly flagged as the hardest in the series, but also really liked, and the only criticism it faced was regarding the difficulty. Sadly, ZUN would comply… instead of addressing some of the actual issues the game had, mainly balance and broken progression, which made difficulty stay almost consistent throughout the game, except for some peaks and the final boss.
In the scoring department the game would have been rather lacking, without any interesting mechanics and just grazing, if not for Reisen and her bomb increasing the size of the grazebox, as well as every broken shield autocollecting all items for maximal value (except for the last*). Still, it’s nothing exciting and surely, it’s just a misstep…
That’s what many people thought, until the next game. ZUN had listened to the wrong side of criticism too much, and thought the casual side of LoLK may have not been casual enough. So HSiFS would go on to feature the most broken system to that day – season releases. While they may remind you a lot of GFW freezes, there is a crucial issue here – GFW is a game entirely made around freezing, and everything is balanced from the perspective of the player optimally freezing the bullets. HSiFS is just an average Touhou game with that system slapped on top of it. It’s just there to make the game easy and breakable, the game isn’t designed around the player using it, it even feels like an afterthought. A point could be made around there being four different seasonal attacks, and balancing the game around all four would be tough. However, three of them are just circles with varying sizes and DPS. Additionally, in the Extra stage, the player is limited to one seasonal weapon, yet balance is nowhere to be seen.
The final nail to the coffin is the final spell, the epitome of bad mechanic design – usually, in a game with a special mechanic, the player is tested at how well they can use it at the end. This is not the case, and instead, the player is given a spell that lasts 60-70 seconds even if the player attempts to kill it as fast as possible, mainly includes a lot of random things (depending on the season) and sets the player’s power to zero, turning it into a really long and sometimes unfair spell… in an attempt to balance the system being broken, I presume, for there isn’t a better explanation.
What this game did well however, is finally equalising all character hitboxes – no more silly advantage for one character, and having actually solid score extends – the average run that doesn’t use releases much cannot grab the last 3-5 extends, and that is how it should be. Lastly, shottype balance is pretty solid, if you ignore seasonal weapons, where there is a clear hierarchy from the best to the worst. Funnily enough, the strongest release also scores the best by a giant margin.
Speaking of scoring, however. The system itself is pretty solid, but it’s definitely out of sync with the game, and the only boss that feels like it was specifically made for releases is the first one – all others are the usual bosses being milked into oblivion.
The game was received fairly well – and that sealed ZUN’s fate in a downward spiral, because this was the game in which he completely neglected experienced player experience in favour of making the game fun for the more casual audience – something he was once so afraid of doing. Meet the new ZUN, he is here to stay.
HSiFS would also be the first game to be put on Steam, which would then lead to all other games being put there – at the time of writing this, PoFV is the last one to be ported. Was it to make it more accessible? Or was it to make more money?
As ZUN fell, the community saw a rise in quality of the fangames. While an average fangame was still pretty bad (I even had the unfortunate experience of meeting a person playtesting some of them. They couldn’t care less for design issues and balance issues, and would approve the game as long as it’s at least fun for the casual perspective and has no major crashes or glitches. Their actions were met with criticism from certain people, and… they would essentially cancel whoever called out their testing for being of extremely poor quality), some gems were getting made – they would be far better than almost any official game, featuring original and extremely interesting systems, and being much more balanced. Sadly, the community forgot names like Phantasmagoria Trues, Magical Singular Day, EIoS, Blue Devil (this one’s recent), Infinite Blade Pavillion, IKUSAAAAAAAN, and plays exclusively poor-quality graphic-oriented fangames such as FDF or extremely bad games that have zero intent to be even remotely balanced, fair or well-designed, like the Len’en series.
But not to rush ahead of time, the experienced community still saw HSiFS as a slipup. It’ll get better, surely it will.
Chapter 5. The end.
The next game would indeed make things better… Now everyone had an incredibly poor-quality product and HSiFS looked pretty decent next to it. Meet Violet Detector, the undisputed worst Touhou game at that point (that would change as well, but later…). It was a camera game, the third one. People were fairly hyped for it, and still hoping for ZUN’s redemption, which could come at anytime – he couldn’t not have noticed, there was no way. Well… the hype was all for nothing, to say the least. The first stages are at most decent, albeit extremely guilty of reuse. The teleportation controls are garbage, ZUN’s phobia of introducing new buttons at its finest. But it all would have been acceptable, had ZUN not chosen to paste two spells at once for each scene of the lategame. This was unbalanced and at times, downright idiotic.
The reception was incredibly negative, the game was flamed. ZUN once again likely misinterpreted it and decided that the complaints were about camera games as a whole – so instead of fixing the actual issues, he’d simply make his next scene game different.
I unfortunately fail to see the reasoning behind VD’s design – it doesn’t seem to appeal to either audience, and doesn’t seem inspired by anyhing, so it remains an enigma. There was simply nothing to be achieved, unless ZUN aimed for a middle ground of sorts. If so, that would go on to show him that a middle ground is a terrible solution, worse than siding with anyone specifically. So he’d have to make a choice, and, if that wasn’t obvious enough, he’d choose the “casuls”.
Ten main games ago, ZUN realised how much harm varied bomb count can do. A good realisation and a rookie mistake, so what would he do as a head of a pretty big brand? That is right, bring that stuff back! Indeed, meet WBaWC. This title is ridden with issues and poor design choices, for example, almost all stage sections are as boring as PCB stage 4 – pure streaming for minutes. Speaking of stage 4, it suffers from extreme visibility issues, although it’s not like the whole game doesn’t – “fancy” player shot effects obstruct bullets a lot of the time. Having a flaming aura doesn’t help either, although it’s not like the player needs to see the bullets to rhythmically tap. Youmu’s slash is back, but this time, it’s outclassed by a simple forward-focus shot that doesn’t require close range shenanigans or charging, rendering it obsolete. Not to mention it being copied from TD with zero changes – except for the Wolf shottype adding an extra slash on top, making it even more silly, as it effectively negated the only downside. Although who even cares about it when there is a shottype that allows to triple bomb effects, obtain one more bomb per life and have prolonged otter hyper shields that shred most patterns, which absolutely don’t feel like they were designed for that.
But what about the resource system? This time, ZUN was somewhat creative and let midbosses drop additional life/bomb pieces if certain conditions are met… some of which are pretty silly and some are trivial. Not to mention that it would at best give an extra life or two compared to a usual run and literally all other life/bomb pieces are static drops.
The scoring isn’t any better – just like the last game, a single shottype type (Otter) has an immense advantage over all others, except it’s even worse now. The whole scoring system feels like an afterthought, “what if we made otters generate PIV when cancelling bullets… and removed graze, I guess, who even needs it”. While other hypers can generate PIV by dealing damage, this isn’t even remotely close to otters. Simply adjusting the numbers would’ve been so easy (it wouldn’t fix the system as a whole but would definitely make it better) – yet ZUN chose not to. Of course, there are some people (who am I kidding – one person. I hope you are not reading this) that like that kind of thing, but the reason they like it is due to all the improvisation required – since, unlike UFO tokens, beasts are randomised…
Yet, the game saw immense commercial success, and around the time of its release, the second popularity boom went off, and by 2022, Touhou almost became mainstream. Many popular videos doubled their viewer count, and, for instance, Bad Apple saw a quadruple increase since 2019. This moment signified the loss of hope – ZUN is now motivated by commercial success and aims for the casual audience, he no longer cares for experienced players or replay value, he no longer cares for quality, the games are rushed, raw and unoptimised. WBaWC has issues with pretty bad lag during cancel animations on low-end devices – all because of decade-long code reuse (more often than not, assets wouldn’t even be deleted and hastily covered up. This is evident through some unlock codes still working in later games, spritesheets including unnecessary sprites and many, many other things) and overall poor optimisation.
The public’s reception was just like with HSiFS, praised by many and despised by a select few, although the latter have increased in numbers and reinforced their beliefs even further. Yet, not many people even among them were truly hopeless – perhaps the next game will be better?
The next game was unlike anything before… Astonishingly… bad. A really poorly made game which aimed to add replay value via a cards system, but became probably the least replayable one to that day. Now, what made it so bad? All the issues that WBaWC had found their way into this game. The stage design has now been almost fully ruined with generic circles and a staggering overdose of streaming. For the first time since PoFV, there was a bullet which had its hitbox extend beyond the sprite. UFO powerloss was back and even worse, now that all shots are relatively much weaker than before (compared to boss healthbars). Unique shots were gone as a whole, Sakuya’s one only encourages shooting straight ahead for the absolute majority of the time, SA ReimuC and IN Youmu (both relied on the same mechanic) were completely different.
The biggest strawman savior the game has are the cards… cards, while they did have some fun combos (zero hardcoded interactions too), they were easily broken and all the cool combinations were so numbered that people found them all on day 1. Even better, ZUN refused to balance any cards, because he “didn’t have enough time”… with a team of testers. Family may weigh him down, but his testers are on an actual paid job, and the simplest two-card breaks anyone reading the wikipage can think of are still in the game. Speaking of day 1, people also managed to counterstop the game on the second day. WBaWC’s counter was considered to be a poor decision since it was counterstopped in mere months, but this was on a whole new level. Lastly, the hardest boss in the game bases her whole difficulty around clippy bullets with enormous hitboxes and circles, instead of being creative or doing literally anything else.
Additionally, graze was removed… Despite particles and sounds still being generated and the value still being kept track of – that should be a testament to how “well” ZUN clears up the assets when creating a new game on top of the old one. This (of course, not just the graze system, but the poor optimisation) led to the game having a lot of performance issues on low-end devices, and many average PCs experience lag during cancels, especially if recording software is used.
WBaWC’s issue with having all the scoring tied to a single hyper type with barely any PIV gain for others (in comparison)… persisted. Or, should I say, became infinitely worse. Now all the scoring is tied to 1.5 items (the hand literally just passively increases gold gain) and all the serious scoring is tied to 1 character – if you are not using the mallet with Sakuya, you get next to nothing. While in some of the more recent games PIV caps were an annoyance (kicking in around stage 5-6, or stage 3-4 in HSiFS), UM allows to reach the cap on the first boss.
Now that was a disaster… or was it? Its commercial success was far greater than that of WBaWC, and its Steam purchases amount (days after release) was greater than EoSD’s downloads on Moriya Shrine – so more people were willing to pay for it in the first week since release than download the most popular Touhou game from the “Pirate bay” (unfortunately, not anymore) of the Touhou games. This rushed atrocity of a game got much more downloads than anything else in the series.
A few years ago, a joke prophecy was told. “ZUN’s last game is going to be BPoHC, but worse. How is it possible? Only ZUN will know”. Now, what is BPoHC? For the unaware, that’s a textbook example of a euroshmup. A euroshmup is defined as a shmup which has roguelite elements incorporated by a developer (usually a corporation) who thought this would be a good idea. Usually they include healthbars, randomly generated levels, intercredit progression (this one is a telltale sign of a euroshmup), poorly designed patterns, oftentimes unfair and made to be tanked through, difficulties nearly impossible without upgrades, and of course, a currency and a shop to spend it in. BPoHC popularised the belief “shmup with healthbars = euroshmup”, but it’s perfectly possible to have a normal shmup with a healthbar system (see GFW, this one is essentially a healthbar) or have a euroshmup without those. It’s just that healthbars are a cheap way of “balancing” unfair patterns and randomness.
BPoHC was guilty of all of those, which should have made for a terrible game – and sure thing, the game is terrible from a normal shmup perspective. Yet, much unlike UM, it had some redeeming qualities – hundreds of various upgrades allowed to plan a broken build in dozens of ways, and that would indeed add replay value – searching for ridiculous combos and ways to break the game, with new ones being found months after release (in comparison, the last way to break UM was found out on day 1, because all of them are incredibly obvious just from reading the wikipage). Additionally, BPoHC included thousands of lines of dialogue, which was for every team interacting with every boss, as well as endings and prologues. In comparison, UM’s entire plot (with every line being written out fully, and nothing being shortened or left out) can probably fit on 2 A4 pages. Lastly, the attacks, no matter how unfair, still had flair. They still represented the boss really well, and while stage design is surely not Jynx’ thing, I can most assuredly say – there aren’t any “generic” boss attacks.
None of that saves the game from being horrible, unfair and poorly designed, of course. But they serve to make the game at least not straight up bad.
Which is not true for the next ZUN’s game. The prophecy has come true! The new scene game, 100th Black Market, is the very rock bottom of ZUN’s shmup design. UM card system was reworked… for the worse. Many cards have been swapped out for boring numeric stat upgrades, and the others are either cancelling bullets in some form (which are a simple cooldown move, so no interesting plays or anything remotely learnable), blocking familiars, THE CARD THAT CLEARS THE WHOLE STAGE, resources or equipment, none of which is original, all borrowed from UM and the phantasmagorias. Score is removed, but… It’s still clearly calculated in the background, once again showing the laziness. But now, UM’s only redeeming quality is gone – all the abuse combos have been reduced to simply “haha 3 -33% to cooldown cards allow to spam the circle with zero cooldown” or other stat-related builds instead of any sort of creative ways to break the game. The difficulty is improper - Overdrive is around the usual Hard. Bosses are bullet sponges, and stages are all incredibly boring, randomised and sometimes unfair. The amount of dialogue is miniscule, and there are no routes and next to no secrets, making it literally a direct downgrade of BPoHC. Replay value is just nonexistant – two secrets, collecting all cards and completing all stages takes 5-7 hours, and there is literally nothing to do after that – stages are nothing, the bosses are overly easy and uninspired, and all the remotely interesting combos were likely already found during those 5-7 hours due to how few of them exist.
Scoring is… removed. For the first time in 25 years, a game made by ZUN didn’t include any form of score. Even though score is still calculated in the background via the same system as UM, as well as the graze particles still appearing, which should serve as a really nice demonstration of how lazy ZUN’s approach to new games is – and it’s getting progressively worse.
Yet, the public liked that game, against all odds… Because of Marisa and her bare feet on the title screen, of course, people aren’t even ashamed to admit it. Steam reviews serve as a nice piece of evidence, literally 80% of positive ones look like the one shown below. Of course, the more experienced players absolutely flamed the game, it was the new VD, except even worse this time (note the amount of hours played, as well as the awards)
It should come as no surprise that the next game is highly unlikely to be even half decent, seeing how relentless ZUN is on his downward spiral. Touhou 19 is planned to be released around the early summer of 2023, while the beta will be published in spring, so there isn’t much time left to wait – and perhaps ZUN will start working on it just around now.
However, Touhou was never just the shmups. Fighters present an interesting rise and fall of an initially small doujin circle, and other licensed projects offer some insight about ZUN’s current goals. The printworks which I’m not too familiar with provide even more concerns, and so do CD’s. Of course, none are nearly as interesting as the maingames or even the fighting games, but they most assuredly deserve a mention.
And, most assuredly, the biggest offender will not go without a mention…
Chapter 6. Tasofro, printworks, Lost Word, CDs and Cave.
Back in the days of PC-98, ZUN wanted to make a fighting game. Yet, issues arose – the character roster was rather lacking, and the coding was too complex for one person to handle, let alone a college student.
After the release of PCB, however, ZUN became a prominent figure in the doujin community and a circle, Twilight Frontier (a.k.a. Tasogare Frontier, Tasofro or Kusofro) offered help – ZUN would write the plot and the new music tracks, while they would remix some of the old ones and do all the coding for a fighting game. A year later, (slightly later than IN, but still 7.5) Immaterial and Missing Power was released. Now, “missing” is an understatement – the game was lacking, raw, clunky and rushed. The balance issues would go far beyond the usual fighting game power tiers with weak and strong characters, some would decimate the story mode while some would get destroyed themselves. The controls were pretty bad and often faulty, which resulted in most people just mashing their way through the game. The continue system attempted to be “quirky”, but ended up being weird and silly, and to this day, many people don’t understand it.
Yes, the game was bad, and nearly universally disliked, however… For an inexperienced doujin circle being tasked with making a fighting game from scratch in under a year, it was acceptable.
Three years later, the world saw Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. As visually similar to IaMP as it may be, there is a world of difference between the two. For instance, the combos were reworked, and now were a lot more consistent, mashing is no longer a viable tactic for story mode, PvP is actually functional (nobody plays SWR PvP, the reason will be specified later), some new characters were added, the spellcard system was reworked and made much more interesting and some of the more extreme edges of the IaMP balance ladder were curbed, resulting in overall better experience. The game is also interesting to learn, and I mean for both combos and the story mode, the spellcards get really creative (to the point of messing with altitude) and it doesn’t crash as much.
This game was perceived a lot better than the last one, and it was far from undeserved. However, it still had issues – mainly PvP, and it was missing a lot of the recent characters. As such, Touhou 12.3, also known as Hisoutensoku or Unthinkable Natural Law was made to fix that. It wasn’t technically a game, simply a DLC for SWR with a few more characters and a bit of story mode. It also doubled down on all the changes SWR made, fixed a lot of balance issues and finally made PvP actually decent – which
made Soku one of the two most popular Touhou games for tournaments (it’s impossible to compare it to PoFV due to the tournaments involving vastly different parts of the fandom). To this day, Soku is loved and praised… and just like how ZUN peaked between 12 and 13, so did Tasofro. It’s their magnum opus, and it’s only down from here.
However, many people found SWR to be overly difficult. That was not the case, the game was simply learning-heavy, and, well, not much different from normal fighting games. The combo system was getting a lot of hate from the casual players too, so, just like ZUN, Tasofro turned their attention to the casual audience. Meet Hopeless Masquerade, the game with no hope of redemption. Combos were removed, the spellcard system was greatly nerfed, and now the games revolve around mashing. In addition, the story mode would just include the same scenario being fought over and over again, with the same three fights at the end, which nobody liked. The popularity system didn’t do much either. The difficulty was, of course, much less than before, and “Lunatic” wouldn’t compare to SWR Normal.
It's worth noting that this game must not receive the same level of pitying as IaMP – it had roughly the same amount of production time as SWR, and the team was much more experienced than back in 2004.
In two years, a direct improvement for the game would be released, Urban Legends in Limbo. While it certainly improved the story mode (and the balls lines get a laugh out of me as well) and made some mechanical improvements, it was pretty much HM in every way. Really not much to say about this one.
And there isn’t much to say about Antinomy of Common Flowers either. It doubled down on what ULiL did, had a lot of creative storylines and improved PvP – which is why it’s the second most played fighter. Still, it mainly revolved around mashing.... The difficulty was still rather casual, and the spellcard system wasn’t as good as in SWR/Soku either.
Additionally, the game was rather divisive – people that loved UNL would refuse to invest time into AoCF, and people that played AoCF wouldn’t even touch Soku because of its relative complexity. Yet, for now Tasofro remained mediocre at worst, their newest games were a disappointment, but nothing fatal or anti-fanbase. However…
In October, 2019, they’ve announced a new game, which, just like HM, was made with a completely new engine and included a total overhaul. They presented some footage, and promised a beta in just a few days. The beta was, as all betas are, somewhat clunky and unbalanced, but it certainly had a charm to it. So they’ve announced the full game to be released next summer, and there was a fair amount of anticipation.
The release date drew near, and Tasofro announced a delay, due to COVID-19, as well as clarifying that the game is nearly finished. Just a few months later, they would be ready to deliver the product. Or not, once the new release date came, it was postponed again, this time by a month. And again. And again. And again. And so, it was drawn a year away from the initial release date. Reasonable, one might say? Absolutely not. If in July 2021 they claimed it was almost ready and 3 months was enough even with COVID regulations, why did it take them a full year to complete the game? There was definitively something shady about all those delays – and the fact that the game didn’t even have all the playable characters (all other Touhou fighters and TSS-esque games had all the opponents be playable with their own storylines, unless the opponent was a bizarre enemy, like the catfish), crashed quite a lot, was still clunky and felt raw. If SHoSS was nearing completion in the summer of 2020, how come it released unfinished a year later?
Yet the fanbase was pleased – why? The game included quite some characters that haven’t received proper screen time in a while, and many people were excited about their favourites, absolutely ignoring the game and all the issues in process. That awfully resembles some of the ugliest strategies gacha game companies use…
Speaking of gacha, the irony… A company named Goodsmile released a highly predatory carrion eater of a game that fed on all the popularity the series had amassed, and sank its teeth into the secondaries’ time and wallets. Granted, it wasn’t just the secondaries, but they were the target audience.
Yes, indeed, the next subject is Lost Word. While there was a fair amount of fanmade Touhou gachas, they mainly went unnoticed with mediocre to decent player bases, and many shut down over the years, this one really stands out. The creators bought a license for the game to be made from ZUN himself, and offered him a cut of the earnings, in exchange for the game to be advertised by ZUN himself on various Touhou events, Reitaisai, as well as the ability to advertise it under the brand as well.
The game itself feels predatory in every aspect – the gameplay is rather mediocre compared to some of the actually decent gacha games, the characters and their dialogue is tailored for fanservice, made to appeal to the secondary fans and just people obsessed over their waifus in general, the plot is specifically able to be stretched
indefinitively while introducing practically any character without any damage to the narrative (not like people would care anyway), fanon personalities are all the game has to offer, and the writers clearly don’t know the lore of the series, aside from some quick references to “”obscure”” things here and there. And, of course, lootboxes, microtransactions, grinding, time-limited offers – you name it, usual gacha business. As well as stolen music which makes people frequently praise the game’s OST (even though almost all the praised tracks are stolen).
Licensing a gacha game marketed for teenagers (people that don’t know the value of money, love their waifus and spend a lot of time online) is an action the legalty of which is questioned in many countries, and the moral aspect of the decision is deeply rotten as well – so what made ZUN do it? Money? Unless it’s greed for the sake of greed, it’s unrealistic – just from the Steam sales alone ZUN made at least 600 thousand dollars over the last 2-3 years, and that is without taking any other form of income he has into account, selling CDs, printworks, taking a chunk of the profits of Tasofro, Gift and Reitasai (and other conventions) – his income likely exceeds a million dollars a year, which is perfectly enough for a family to live extremely well, with a lot of money saved up for retirement. ZUN is anything but short for money – so then what is the reason? A pattern is forming… Additionally, a lot of content creators (Yumemey, BEATMario and others) have been sponsored by LW to promote it. I cannot blame them, at least not as much – their deed is like signing a deal with the devil compared to licensing the devil to sell those in the first place.
The degradation of printworks and CDs isn’t something I was too familiar with, so I’ll keep it brief. CDs used to include a lot of both remixed and original tracks, and were released pretty often… Until a pretty large break that lasted almost a decade, and the CD that came after it featured one original track and two remixes. Yeah, Rainbow Coloured Septentrion was a disappointment. The printworks used to include a lot of humour, but also with a lot of actual worldbuilding and some philosophical/existential discussions. Now it all has been thrown out of the window in favour of even more fanon y jokes and just “cute girls doing things” – my best guess is that it all started from Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth being rather liked.
ZUN also tried expanding into arcades – and sold Exa-Arcadia a license to port FDF II to arcades. Even though Exa Label usually comes with some improvements, I do not think it was the right choice – the game is still mediocre, graphics-oriented and overall boring, which is really not what people want when they visit the arcade. There are dozens of games that would fit that perfectly – yet he chose the one that was simply popular among the casual fans for looking fancy.
So, is all hope lost? Perhaps not, for ZUN has sold Cave a license to make a fangame as well. However, considering ZUN has been out of touch with the shmup industry since at least 2012 (probably much earlier), he may not even be aware of Gothic wa Mahou Otome. And Cave pretty much confirmed that the game will be a mobile gacha game, the only thing we can hope for is for it to at least be a shmup.
ZUN started out as a developer trying to project his ideas onto the world. In the middle of his career, he learnt how dangerous not catering to the casual audience is – so he decided to always include some form of a casual “mode” in his games – easy shottypes at first, which was alright, a completely different mode afterwards… and completely dismissing the non-casual audience later on. Perhaps he sought money, perhaps he sought appreciation, perhaps both.
He started realising just how profitable the series and everything surrounding it can be, and, of course, took advantage of it. At the end, he decided to create something for each type of audience with at least some representation (sorry printwork fans, you are left out of the equation, as well as CD enjoyers), maingames catering towards the more casual and relaxed people (as well as spinoffs), LW being an option for non-shmup fans, and Cave’s new game… perhaps he thought it’d still be a good shmup game to please the demographic he stopped catering long ago, due to him being completely out of touch with the world. As charming as he may have been, now he is but an average developer seeking profits (not above all else, but there is no more art or passion left).
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”
Chapter 7. Omake.txt.
The conclusion has been reached, yet there are some things that went unspoken. For once, scrapped materials.
Dictionary
Special thanks:
A common video essay topic in the Touhou fandom is taking a look at where the series started and how it “evolved” (which is misusing the word “evolve”, but we might as well omit that little detail for the sake of creative liberty)
You start out here, in a pixelated game for a some abandonware (only remembered because of the series, other PC-98 games are almost never looked at… for a good reason, the amount of eroge games is overwhelming) and then arrive at the shiny peaks of the modern day, slowly traversing the path the series went through, while being told fables of how kind and good-willed the developer, ZUN, is, and how great everything about Touhou is, starting from the games themselves, and ending with fanmade creations. Usually this brings quite some views and likes, alongside positive comments and overall channel activity. Because why yes, it is indeed quite the sight – transitioning from 1997 to 2022 is bound to look interesting. The fandom, despite being already pretty big and even semi-mainstream, pretty similar to JJBA – being just one step below mainstream, still likes to think of itself as “obscure” – and, just like in any obscure community, the creator will be praised as a hero, bringing some “much needed attention of the public''. Flaws and errors will be often overlooked, while positive moments, and even the very existance of the video, will be hyperfocused.
However, that is not quite what I’m going to talk about. My tale is different, and it is of how we got here. From all the great games, to this. To this disappointment of a game, the new rock bottom of shmup design. Looks fancy, you may ask? Then you are probably unfamiliar with what it is…
Of course, one cannot describe a fall without first describing the rise and the peak itself – that kind of perspective would be flawed and one-sided.
Before we start though – a few things require clarification. I will try to include any and all slang words in a little dictionary at the very end, just in case, as well as a few extra ones. If a word is written in bold the first time it appears – it will be clarified there. Secondly, Touhou was never a real competitor to many games in terms of quality, but it does have quite some strong sides and is overall not a bad product. At least before the descent… Lastly, yes, I did play those (all of them, except 18.5 and the new fighters). Not too well, enough to clear most lunatics and do a bit of other fancy stuff, but that’s about it.
Chapter 1. The dawn.
It all started with a college project, two games, an arkanoid and a shmup, made by a group of college students known as Amusement Makers. The arkanoid, The Highly Responsive to Prayers, included some interesting mechanics, but was wonky and required learning, as well as buggy and crashing sometimes. The shmup is much less notable, being a clunky template-ish shmup with all the mandatory features of the genre and nothing more. Glitches and inconveniences are common, as well as noticeable input lag without a good emulator – which is a big issue, since many reviews and guides tend to recommend neko project 21, a pretty bad emulator. Or, rather, should I say, accurate? It lags as much as a real machine would, but you are not looking for that kind of experience. The public’s reception was nonexistent – not even a hundred copies were sold.
Yet, there was one noticeable thing in those two games, the music. A student named Jun’ya Ota (ZUN) used the project as a vessel for his music to be served to the public. And was he a musical genius even back then – one thing the reviews never get wrong is the quality of the music.
The next installment didn’t take long – a Twinkle Star Sprites inspired game, Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dream. Much like its source of inspiration, it’s a dueling shmup about canceling bullets (this is not like TSS, however) on your screen and sending them to your opponent’s screen, as well as scoring combos to send extra attacks and even bosses (which can also be done via charging). The music is notably better, as well as the overall quality. Additionally, because of what I believe to be a chain of coincidences and mirrored design choices, the game works extremely well, especially in the scoring department.
Lotus Land Story and Mystic Square were released on the next year. Those two installments had defined a trajectory for the rest of the series – and it was both inspired and somewhat unique. A big part of the formula was taken from arcades, the games, which almost the whole fandom, up until 2020-2021, despised and thought to be stupidly difficult games that were difficult for extorting credits out of people. That, frankly speaking, foolish and baseless belief was formed by a few reviewers who would justify the lack of research about “other shmups” by coming up with this absolutely idiotic idea. It'd also compliment the whole “ZUN is different, ZUN is kind-hearted and genuinely good, much unlike the other developers”. Not to put any shame on ZUN from that time, but the disrespect for other developers is staggering. I apologize for the little deviation, but it had to be done. It’s an example of one of the common misconceptions which cloud the view a lot. Early Touhou games would deviate from certain arcade standards, such as having six stages, and having graze being a major (in the PC-98 era due to grazecaps, not that major*) source of score.
The public’s reception was, once again, abysmal, only a few hundred copies were sold. ZUN had decided to stop working on PC-98 and wanted to experiment on the growing in popularity Windows platform – and he was right about it having a future.
He had been experimenting for the following four years…
Chapter 2. The conception of a philosophy.
It’s been four years since MS, which was all but completely forgotten. ZUN didn’t waste that time though – he graduated and learnt how to code on Windows, which resulted in the first non-PC98 installment – the game itself, the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. No matter how popular it is now, back in 2002 without a series to back it up, it went pretty much unnoticed, just another shmup with noteworthy music. Although its popularity was an order of magnitude higher than MS…
The game brought some of the long-lasting issues that are here to stay, however.
For once, the game was pretty buggy on release, and ZUN released a patch to fix it. The patch broke all replays that were recorded before it, resulting in what I call “ZUN’s childhood trauma” – he would never release a patch more than a week after release, fearing the same might happen. That would go on to be one of his initial downfalls – a paranoidal fear of mistakes, and form quite some flaws…
ZUN was also pretty lazy with pattern design, and often would let randomness do the job for him – some people would call it fun, but it’s objectively lazy pattern design, and just overall not a good decision. That caused another problem – the scattershot difficulty progression, which would just absolutely not follow the normal “later=harder” path and had a lot of spikes and pitfalls – for instance, the whole fourth stage is pretty boring, and consists of just streaming, while a single section is responsible for most of its challenge. A random, unfair and straight up bad section.
Poorly made extend thresholds is yet another one. All extends are reachable in a pure survival run that sometimes collects items and makes no efforts at scoring whatever – the theme is there to persist whenever a system with a fixed amount of extends is introduced with some exceptions. Even an average Hard/Lunatic run would score double the final extend threshold at the end (120 million). This is just a lazy way of balancing a proper resource system, once again, a poor design choice.
And, of course, mainly poor stage design with boring or random stages with next to no interesting elements or real learning.
But, enough of that. All those are just beginner mistakes which should get fixed later on.
An interesting upside of the game is that the scoring system worked… well… against the developer’s intentions and in a way he didn’t expect. Yet it worked pretty well.
In a year, the world saw the seventh installment, Perfect Cherry Blossom, which improved many things, including slightly alleviating the issues covered above, as well as improving a lot of technical aspects of the game, sound quality, sprite quality, et cetera. The amount of content was greatly increased compared to its predecessors. It also featured an actually impactful system that was rather well-thought out, which didn’t work against the developer’s intention this time, and actually behaved as intended. Extend threshold issue was alleviated by technically (of course there is a hard cap, but still) endless item-based extends, which would reward active item collection with extra 1-3 lives compared to a defensive run. Stages were made slightly more interesting, barring a certain two, which are still snoozefests, and randomness was toned down, albeit not by much. The game is also a lot less troublesome to get running on a modern device, which is an extreme technical issue of its prequel.
“To truly balance a shmup, one would have to make stage performance irrelevant and give everyone the same bomb (as if we won’t see it happen)”. That doesn’t cancel a major balance issue that came with PCB, however. ZUN thought it was a good idea to have varied bomb counts per character, as well as having two bombs per character – with one of them being almost always inferior to the other. The decision was extremely poor, and ZUN decided to never do it again without proper balancing. Kind of…
And another issue rose with this game… The last game had an extremely powerful shotgunning shot – so how did ZUN react? That’s right, by introducing a damage cap and prolonging superarmour periods on spellcards to punish playing aggressively and speedkilling, as well as nerfing all further shotguns into the ground. At least the bombs were exempt from the cap, for now. An extremely poor move, caused by the same fear of mistakes. Even more childhood trauma for our subject.
The public’s reception was different. ZUN has now become a prominent figure in the (still niche) doujin community, and this is the time when fanworks actually began being produced. He felt that power, and aspired to make a change.
Which he described really well in the Afterword of the next game, Imperishable Night. There is a lot to talk about here, but the Afterword is the biggest part of the “Conception of a philosophy”. ZUN sees patterns as the main way of telling the story, and everything else, from cover art to gameplay, is but a way to supplement them, to have them not simply exist in an abstract void. He wanted his game to be… an artwork. Not a “mode to unlock practice”, which he was strongly against, and adding spell practice in IN was a really hard decision for him, as he feared it might not complement his vision of what a shmup made by him must be. He mentioned how he is making games for one person – himself, and he doesn’t think introducing quality of life mechanics as the audience demands is required – that’d reduce art to a technical game, just like many shmups already are. His persistence was admirable, as well as his policy regarding fanmade content and piracy – he didn’t care, as long as no blatant asset theft is performed. This is where I see his birth as a philosopher, this is where ZUN became that benevolent entity praised so frequently – and he deserved every one of those. The Afterword is truly touching and must be read by anyone looking into the death of the series, as death is just the conclusion of a life cycle, and cannot be understood without understanding the birth and the adolescence.
IN was… a really good one. It would almost outright fix the randomness issue, make a lot more interesting stage segments, fix the difficulty progression (not completely), and add a ton of content, such as basically two distinct routes, 12 shottypes, a really good scoring system, a lot of polish, technical fixes (no more two extra frames of input delay
because reasons), visual enhancements, and… balancing. It was the start of ZUN’s prime, rookie mistakes were eliminated, a philosophy was attained, a visual style and worldbuilding was set as well, the music was good as usual.
It was at that time, in 2004, that the interest of the doujin community peaked, and the popularity had to expand somewhere…
A year later, due to the amount of art and fanworks, what would later be known as the first popularity boom took place. Touhou suddendly started spreading in the West, and with it came translation patches and overall performance issue fixes (for EoSD). Imageboards and forums hosted most of its activity, which was still rudimentary, compared to the modern day. Some of the well-known memes of the community have originated from the following few years, and lured a lot of people in, resulting in quite the community. Yet, the next game released while this was still accelerating, and as such, its scale didn’t yet reflect it. ZUN wanted to take a step back, and release a “PoDD: Definitive Edition”, also known as Phantasmagoria of Flower View. It was a polished and improved version of PoDD (inferior in some ways, but still). ZUN admittedly spent a long time playtesting it, and it’s quite evident. The public didn’t like it, however. It was different, and required much more than just dodging – something the 2005 “purists” didn’t take kindly, with their profound hatred for cancels. It’s still a divisive topic even nowadays, although it is treated a lot less harshly.
The netcode is indeed of extremely poor quality, but that’s because it was a community effort… for a game that didn’t really intend to expand past playing via LAN. It’s being worked on… has been, for years, to no avail.
The same year, another game saw the light of day. A spinoff game made for just a single character, a scene game, which means basically a giant spell practice menu. An interesting camera mechanic was introduced, as the player couldn’t shoot and had to… shoot. The title reflects that with a pun, Shoot the Bullet. Often overlooked, but important for our purposes. Spells were original, often containing references, were heavily balanced around camera usage and rewarding risky approach quite a lot. It was
a genuinely made game, that was, however, disliked by many due to the learning required and the difficulty.
As mentioned above, a cult was forming, the so-called “purists” who despised many things and advocated for an image of “pure” Touhou. As extreme as their beliefs were, they had a point. A point which was overlooked and antagonised due to how extreme they were in enforcing it… The general public failed to understand and listen, as it always does.
It was that time that many false beliefs originated from. For once, “fanon=canon” was referring to the fact that ZUN would sometimes accept publically accepted headcannons if there was nothing to contradict that in pre-established canon. It is no longer the case, hasn’t been in a long time. The community would see itself as “niche” specifically at that time, and for some reason, that belief would stay until the modern day. While back then, it used to be true, now this is no longer the case, and it seems the myth is here to stay. The arcade misconception covered earlier might have had begun here, although I cannot say for sure – the roots of it seem incredibly elusive. There was a time when Touhou was just another shmup – and then that belief just randomly popped into existance, and there was no real transition. ZUN’s philosophy and policy regarding piracy from that time for some reason have gotten engrained into the minds of everyone, and most people still think ZUN is the person he was specifically during those years.
So not only is it a period when ZUN’s philosophy came into existance, it was also the time when most things the fandom believes were true. However, ZUN would prove a lot more capable of changing than the community… And, for a time, this would lead to the so-called “golden age”. The peak will be reached. Of course, the saddest part about the peak is that it’s only down from there, but trust me, the golden age is worth it.
Chapter 3. The golden days.
In almost any franchise, there is that distinct “golden age” where the popularity is at its highest, and so is the quality. With Touhou, there is next to no doubt about this particular era being “golden”. Let’s see why is that so.
As mentioned above, ZUN wanted a soft reboot to the series – in two years from the ninth game, he made a new title, which had a lot of differences compared to the other games. Meet Mountain of Faith – the start of “modern 1”. Sprites, previously made for PoFV, were still used in that game and became a standard – to this day, they are still used in all titles. The new power system, having four power tiers (five, if you count power 0 and six, if you count power 5, which didn’t affect the shot at all), with each tier simply adding a new familiar to the base shot would stay as well – and so would almost all the UI changes The powerbombing system, which removed bombs and let the player bomb at the cost of a power level wouldn’t stay for long though – it was extremely breakable and would allow for 2-3 times more bombs than any of the other titles. Lazy and easily reachable score extend thresholds were back and just as bad as in EoSD. Lastly, it would increase the hitbox differences dramatically, with Reimu having a 4*4 square and Marisa having an atrocious 7*7. But what about the actual gameplay?
First of all, the game would break the difficulty progression back to PCB levels, with occasional randomness being 90% of the game’s difficulty, and the rest being a snoozefest. The scoring system was actually interesting, encouraging chaining and not missing – except it was also extremely easy to approach the theoretical cap, and current WR improvements are extremely miniscule (due to the removal of grazing), consisting of using extremely risky strategies or grinding for good boss movement – which was randomised as well, for some reason. Before MoF, the boss would always follow the player, now it has a 25% chance to move the opposite direction in an instance of moving. That would stay as well, somehow…
Bombs were also changed to be the same for each shottype – just a big damaging circle, a bit smaller and more damaging for Marisa, and that was the only difference. It was an attempt to balance the game, but…
Balance is not something this game did either. Two of Marisa’s shots were bugged – one would deal 10x more damage at a certain power level (due to a typo), the other one would deal much less damage than intended – it was meant to be the highest-damage shot in the game, and it ended up being much worse than even homing (which was incredibly overpowered). While the former was quickly fixed by a fanmade patch with ease, the latter was a fundamentally broken damage calculation mechanism, and a fix never came. That also shows the poor quality of playtesting the games – if what ZUN called the higest damaging shot in the game did such poor damage, the testers must have had some questions and concerns – they either didn’t or were ignored. I cannot say for sure if it was caused by ZUN choosing to not listen or the testers being incredibly incompetent, but both of those are alarming, to say the least.
ZUN obviously learnt about the bugs – and instead of fixing them, he’d introduce an even harsher DPS cap for the new era and all games to come. Once again, childhood trauma kicking in, preventing him from actually addressing the issue and instead introducing crutches which would harm the games’ quality. Indeed, the quality would take a decline compared to what IN established, but it definitely had potential for improvement – and that improvement did come.
It wouldn’t come in the form of the next title, however. While Subterranean Animism did a lot of things definitively better than its predecessor, it’s not much of an upgrade.
The powerbombing system would stay. Effort was made to ensure it’s more balanced, but due to bombs being different once again, it would still not be – certain shots were able to melt bosses by chaining a bomb after a bomb, while also receiving power items to bomb even more. Extend thresholds were gone, but the new system looked like a placeholder you’d see in an alpha – complete a boss attack without getting hit to receive a fifth of a life. As for the new systems – now you could graze to autocollect all items on the screen, in addition to the whole thing being close to MoF, but now with grazing and some other changes.
Onto some upsides, though. The game almost entirely eliminated run-defining randomness, apart from a certain stage 1 issue, it introduced a pity mechanic to prevent bullets killing the player right after spawning, half the shottypes had really interesting mechanics, probably the best ZUN’s attempt at shottypes to this day and even though I scolded the power system earlier, it’s a definitive improvement over the last game.
The public’s reception was really positive, apart from some people scolding it for being too hard on the normal difficulty. ZUN, however, thought it wasn’t hard enough, and was too breakable, some change was really needed… He questioned the powerbombing system, fixing it didn’t seem viable, so he went back to the usual bomb counter.
It was a step in the right direction, with a lot of improvements and realisations – the step would then turn into a march towards the peak. Undefined Fantastic Object would double down on improving the formula, and it’s one of the best maingames from a technical perspective. The boring resource system was thrown out of the window and was replaced with a vastly superior UFO system, which required planning and knowing the game – and it would provide lots of lives and some much-needed stage cancels if done right. Bombs were back, which was a welcome change as well. Stage design was pretty good even on its own, and it worked wonderfully alongside UFO collection mechanics. The shot balance was… not great again, but the best shot no longer breaks
the game and makes it trivial, unlike all the modern games starting from PCB. The scoring system played alongside UFOs pretty well, despite a minor bug that caused the score counter to be wrong after a certain value (fixed by a fanmade patch as well). Randomness was back, but the difficulty progression was finally proper, with only a few occasional peaks.
The public’s reception was really negative due to the difficulty and all the learning required, but that’s only natural – especially after the last few games being cheesable into oblivion…
On the issues however. This game introduced a very harsh power loss system – which, in 2009 was already being abolished in many games, and ZUN just randomly decided to make it much worse – the player loses a full power level on death, and there is a staggering difference between level 3 and 4. It’s highly unlikely to mess a regular run up, but two deaths in a succession (for any reason) invoke some Gradius-level panic… It also kept the bad character hitboxes of MoF – including a 6 by 6 square for Sanae as well.
It was a well-made game, a really well-made one, still with some flaws, but nothing is perfect. Yet, it wasn’t the peak yet.
Neither was the next spinoff game, Double Spoiler, also known as 12.5. Some people would say it’s better than StB, some would say it’s worse, but generally, it’s really close to StB, and a worthy successor to it. Not much to say about the actual game though, just StB, but with two playable characters, new spells and new bosses, which were still creative and heavily revolving around camera usage. It would even fix some of the atrocities of the last game, taking the most infamous spell from 9.5 and reworking it to be actually decent, and overall not having really “bad” spells (such as taking 500+ tries), unlike the other game.
However, it also introduced even more shot balance issues. The other playable character has a notably different camera – she can charge it much quicker, but cannot take long range shots and cannot charge the orientation of the scope. On paper that’s a good tradeoff, but in the actual game it trivialises a heavy chunk of the spells and many feel simply not balanced for a different camera. This should show how even slight changes may break a scene game’s balance, and how experimentation is not always a positive thing.
The next game is nothing short of excitement though. Yet another spinoff, this time taking 8/10 as its decimal, Great Fairy Wars, and that “great” truly belongs there. At a first glance, nothing special – one plain shottype and three stages (with six routes). The life counter is replaced with a %-based healthbar, with every hit subtracting 100%, and the bar capping at 1000%, and bombs working identically, except that they cap at 300%. Most of the UI text was also reworked – silly difficulty names, motivation, and perfect freeze replacing lives and bombs.
But… doesn’t it all sound like simple UI changes? It would indeed be just a shallow retexture without the keystone of GFW’s creation – the freeze mechanic. Chargeable exactly like the camera in the other spinoffs, it lets the player plant an ice shard at their location. Any bullet touching the ice shard will freeze, becoming harmless and increasing the size of the frozen territory – which could escalate really quickly into covering the whole screen. The more you cover – the more score and bomb percentage you gain, as well as the more charge on the spot. You can also gain it by grazing and charging manually. In addition, once the ice expires, it explodes, damaging everything nearby, which can cause really heavy damage on the bosses. The loathsome power system was removed outright, now power is an accumulating % gained for… freezing, of course. That % cannot be lost through means other than restarting the run. Bombs instantly cover the whole screen in ice and provide iframes. Additionally, they are capable of freezing the unfreezable bullets.
The scoring system is… an odd one. Some would say grazestalling makes IN too long – but this just takes stalling to a completely new level. On one hand, it sounds boring, on the other one – the player has to find ways to freeze a lot of the screen (and survive while doing so) without killing the boss, which gets pretty interesting, considering the game doesn’t mind being near-impossible (without freezes) at times. Definitely an interesting one, and definitely not for everyone.
The stage and boss design is finally of proper quality, with a lot of learning, even more (significantly more) than what UFO had. At a first glance, having such a busted system should make the game a breeze – but it’s finely crafted to be still really interesting (and
hard for a first clear). It also had some bullets (fireballs) that resisted freezing and some bullets (needles, a.k.a. lasers), which would break the ice into shards that can potentially be hazardous. That is a crutch, of course, but it’s not overdone and doesn’t spoil the game that much. Many cancel-based games can fare really well even without uncancellable bullets, it’s often viewn to be lazy. Revenge bullets from dead enemies are also back, and it makes them all the more interesting.
The public’s reception was extremely poor, and it still is, to that day... But still, this, this is the peak that we’ve been approaching. Sadly, it’s only down from here…
Not to be too upset with that though, not yet. The next game is still of high quality, and it’s still a good title. Ten Desires is yet another experimental game, and it’s a worthy spiritual successor to UFO, albeit a step down from the last game.
It changed many things – such as the UI and hitboxes, which are now circular and much bigger (as well as fixing the atrocious hitbox differences), and both of these changes were to stay. The system that wouldn’t stay though, is dynamic extend requirements.
Before, you’d need 5 or 3 pieces for a life in SA and UFO respectively, now you need 8 pieces for the first life, 10 for the second one, and so on. Sounds like a lot – and it is, reaching full lives in this game is quite the challenge, even without taking deaths into account. Just like in UFO, however, the system for obtaining them is really interesting and encourages learning, and the game is made around the trance gauge. Due to the amount of spirits increasing drastically if the player is close enough to the enemy, the game revolves heavily around pointblanking. It’s complimented by two of the characters being proximity-based as well – Marisa’s damage is pretty weak at the bottom and really good close up, and Youmu is that, but even more polarised – the slash will not damage the boss at all if cast from the bottom and is the strongest shot at medium/close range. That makes her one of the most interesting shottypes in the series, and one of the strongest as well.
Interestingly enough, the game also had a pretty good progression, and not much randomness/artificial difficulty. The powerloss system was nerfed as well – so ZUN definitely knew what he was doing
Even though graze=PIV is still a thing in TD, grazing is entirely irrelevant, and scoring resembles speedrunning more than anything. The system is liked quite a lot, and many people find it to be the best one in the series.
The game, however, has a flaw – the awesome resource system might as well not exist for a casual survival run, as many people tend to ignore it. Considering the game has a pretty relaxed shottype (Reimu) and is overall relaxing pattern-wise, it’s not hard to beat it while ignoring the system completely, and using the trance as a backup bomb. That is something ZUN will be guilty of countless times in the future as well, but more on that later.
The public’s reception was much unlike any other game before. Commercially, it was a large success, and many people found this break from the last few games to be great. But this was the title that made some people speak about “the death of Touhou”. Even though many like it, a lot of people placed the series’ gravestone on this game. Perhaps due to how sleep-inducing the Normal difficulty is, or perhaps due to all the changes. Or perhaps some people foresaw what was to come?
Despite that, many people were excited for what the new era has to show – the visuals were a lot better, and ZUN had showed quite a level of skill in designing actually interesting systems. It was also at that time that fangames started being made in much larger quantities, although many of them were still primitive, really underwhelming even compared to the official games (and sometimes just bad, looking at Len’en…). The popularity of the series may have slightly gone down compared to 2009-2012, but not by much. One could say, the series entered its “cruise flight” after the takeoff and the peak. It was also slowly shifting out of the relative obscurity, before it was something almost every non-Japanese advanced internet user knew, after that it would start slowly drifting into the masses, with some of the memes and videos receiving a lot of traction.
It seemed as if everything was going perfectly well – and the “purists” are nothing but a group of rambling conservatives that reject any and all chance. It was so simple back then – ZUN is a hero, Touhou is a charming rabbit hole which you’d never want to leave and the future shines brightly.
Chapter 4. The golden days?
Oh, had it all been so simple…
Between UFO and TD, some changes have happened, however. Gift, the company that was making nendoroids (one of them, at least) have asked ZUN to license the production of Touhou-related nendoroids, also known as fumos. After a bit of thinking, ZUN realised the commercial potential the series had, and agreed to a pretty good (for him) deal, which was the cause for the high price those had. That, of course, changed a long time ago, now their price is high simply because people will buy them anyway. That serves as a milestone for the beginning of an end – now ZUN started seeing the series as something that can be commercialised.
That transferred into TD as well. Remember when ZUN said no more spell practice and IN had it just as a cautious experiment? TD has it as well, because the fans have been asking for a long time. Remember when ZUN said he is making the games for himself?
TD Afterword contains apologies for the last few games and openly states that this game is watered down specifically to address the outcry. It is one thing to respond to criticism and nerf, say, a bad power system or another poorly designed aspect of the game… but responding to “game too hard dont wanna learn pls make easy” is something else entirely.
It was now that ZUN realised the power of having a game include two completely different ways to play it, one for the casual audience, the other one for everyone else. This way he could avoid outcries, still design good systems and appeal to good players, as well as reaching quite the financial success. Sounds like a win-win…
And the next game was almost a win-win, if not for a two enormous issues. DDC tried to split those playstyles by having three easy shottypes and three hard shottypes. Now an issue with that is that the three easy shottypes are way too easy, allowing for infinite life duplication, overall an extremely easy run with zero memorisation or learning required or just a really strong shottype. Meanwhile on the other side there’s a plain shottype that is outperformed in DPS by the homing ones, a flamethrower-type weapon in a game that aggressively punishes any attempts at meleeing and a shottype that trades everything for score potential. The gap is absolutely colossal, and there is no middle ground. What makes it worse is that most of the bosses are designed extremely poorly, which is why DDC is often regarded as the most random game in the series, with how it makes “vomit” its main pattern type.
Messing with the player’s controls is a dirty trick as well, but what makes it even dirtier is that the invertion system is clunky and sometimes just fails to properly work. For the final boss, ZUN seems to be forgetting that he cranked up the hitbox sizes, and still imagines the bullets to be modern 1-sized. Ten Desires would go along that change and make the patterns notably more sparse to compensate for that – and DDC just doesn’t care.
Enough with the downsides, however. The game features a really plain resource system that looks boring at the first glance, but the stages are wonderfully made to utilise that system fully. Playing without using it is heavily discouraged, since, much unlike the last game, knowing what to do makes a world of difference. It’s really interesting and rewarding to learn, ZUN managed to make yet another great system once again.
As for scoring – the game features a good system for obtaining resources and a functional system for exchanging those for PIV, making it pretty good. MarisaB is, of course, something else entirely, yet another one of the unintentionally good systems, like PoDD or EoSD.
The game was received rather well, although some more people found the series to be “dying”. I sincerely believe that most of them were repulsed by unfamiliarity, cancels (which are a painful topic) and poor balance, and I cannot judge them. Some, however, had a point…
As for ZUN – noticing the success of the “toned down” games, he made a toned down spinoff game. It would feature much more equipment than all games before it, including some semi-original things, and the cards which were designed around finding the right item – no more grinding, The Impossible Spellcard resembled a puzzle game more than anything.
Of course, it wouldn’t be ZUN without screwing something up – this time, it was two of the items being much more powerful than the others. “Who would’ve thought giving the player 12 seconds of iframes wasn’t good for the overall balance of the game?”. (That also raises the question of how the testers approved that). As such, these two items result in the majority of the cards being overly easy. Without them, however, the whole puzzle shtick is still upheld, the cards are decently creative and fair. Not for the no item clears, however, but this is not the intended way to play, and is more of a joke. A point could be made about the achievement, however, not all achievements reflect the proper way to play the game – if a game includes an achievement for not getting hit once, it doesn’t mean that this is the intended experience, and it doesn’t mean the game will be fair and balanced for a no damage run.
The public’s reception was overall positive, it was just a neat little game to give the fans an easier time compared to the camera games. The balance was lacking, and it was perhaps too easy, but overall, it wasn’t a bad game.
However, ZUN further saw the power of catering to the casual audience – and this time, the division was unlike anything before – last time it was about the shottypes, in Ten Desires it was most likely unintentional, and now ZUN decided to straight up split the game in two game modes… with the second one including checkpoints and powerloss per death, as well as no lives. The mode definitely worked and most definitely fulfilled its purpose, but it’s more of an exotic practice mode than anything. The Legacy mode is quite well-made, however. It features a seemingly simple system, just like in DDC, and it flows with the game just as well. The only major issue is that it scales with the amount of bullets, and as such, would almost always grant a life piece on Lunatic. Additionally, it would provide the player with a bit too many lives, allowing for a rather relaxed run once the player learns what to do. Speaking of relaxations, two shottypes absolutely decimate it while two others are just regular ones. While Sanae’s grazebomb abuse was likely not intentional, there is no way that ZUN, seeing what a shield bomb did in the last game, would implement a triple (almost permanent as well) shield bomb and think it’ll work as any other. Yes, the balance was as good as none.
The public’s reception was interesting – the game was instantly flagged as the hardest in the series, but also really liked, and the only criticism it faced was regarding the difficulty. Sadly, ZUN would comply… instead of addressing some of the actual issues the game had, mainly balance and broken progression, which made difficulty stay almost consistent throughout the game, except for some peaks and the final boss.
In the scoring department the game would have been rather lacking, without any interesting mechanics and just grazing, if not for Reisen and her bomb increasing the size of the grazebox, as well as every broken shield autocollecting all items for maximal value (except for the last*). Still, it’s nothing exciting and surely, it’s just a misstep…
That’s what many people thought, until the next game. ZUN had listened to the wrong side of criticism too much, and thought the casual side of LoLK may have not been casual enough. So HSiFS would go on to feature the most broken system to that day – season releases. While they may remind you a lot of GFW freezes, there is a crucial issue here – GFW is a game entirely made around freezing, and everything is balanced from the perspective of the player optimally freezing the bullets. HSiFS is just an average Touhou game with that system slapped on top of it. It’s just there to make the game easy and breakable, the game isn’t designed around the player using it, it even feels like an afterthought. A point could be made around there being four different seasonal attacks, and balancing the game around all four would be tough. However, three of them are just circles with varying sizes and DPS. Additionally, in the Extra stage, the player is limited to one seasonal weapon, yet balance is nowhere to be seen.
The final nail to the coffin is the final spell, the epitome of bad mechanic design – usually, in a game with a special mechanic, the player is tested at how well they can use it at the end. This is not the case, and instead, the player is given a spell that lasts 60-70 seconds even if the player attempts to kill it as fast as possible, mainly includes a lot of random things (depending on the season) and sets the player’s power to zero, turning it into a really long and sometimes unfair spell… in an attempt to balance the system being broken, I presume, for there isn’t a better explanation.
What this game did well however, is finally equalising all character hitboxes – no more silly advantage for one character, and having actually solid score extends – the average run that doesn’t use releases much cannot grab the last 3-5 extends, and that is how it should be. Lastly, shottype balance is pretty solid, if you ignore seasonal weapons, where there is a clear hierarchy from the best to the worst. Funnily enough, the strongest release also scores the best by a giant margin.
Speaking of scoring, however. The system itself is pretty solid, but it’s definitely out of sync with the game, and the only boss that feels like it was specifically made for releases is the first one – all others are the usual bosses being milked into oblivion.
The game was received fairly well – and that sealed ZUN’s fate in a downward spiral, because this was the game in which he completely neglected experienced player experience in favour of making the game fun for the more casual audience – something he was once so afraid of doing. Meet the new ZUN, he is here to stay.
HSiFS would also be the first game to be put on Steam, which would then lead to all other games being put there – at the time of writing this, PoFV is the last one to be ported. Was it to make it more accessible? Or was it to make more money?
As ZUN fell, the community saw a rise in quality of the fangames. While an average fangame was still pretty bad (I even had the unfortunate experience of meeting a person playtesting some of them. They couldn’t care less for design issues and balance issues, and would approve the game as long as it’s at least fun for the casual perspective and has no major crashes or glitches. Their actions were met with criticism from certain people, and… they would essentially cancel whoever called out their testing for being of extremely poor quality), some gems were getting made – they would be far better than almost any official game, featuring original and extremely interesting systems, and being much more balanced. Sadly, the community forgot names like Phantasmagoria Trues, Magical Singular Day, EIoS, Blue Devil (this one’s recent), Infinite Blade Pavillion, IKUSAAAAAAAN, and plays exclusively poor-quality graphic-oriented fangames such as FDF or extremely bad games that have zero intent to be even remotely balanced, fair or well-designed, like the Len’en series.
But not to rush ahead of time, the experienced community still saw HSiFS as a slipup. It’ll get better, surely it will.
Chapter 5. The end.
The next game would indeed make things better… Now everyone had an incredibly poor-quality product and HSiFS looked pretty decent next to it. Meet Violet Detector, the undisputed worst Touhou game at that point (that would change as well, but later…). It was a camera game, the third one. People were fairly hyped for it, and still hoping for ZUN’s redemption, which could come at anytime – he couldn’t not have noticed, there was no way. Well… the hype was all for nothing, to say the least. The first stages are at most decent, albeit extremely guilty of reuse. The teleportation controls are garbage, ZUN’s phobia of introducing new buttons at its finest. But it all would have been acceptable, had ZUN not chosen to paste two spells at once for each scene of the lategame. This was unbalanced and at times, downright idiotic.
The reception was incredibly negative, the game was flamed. ZUN once again likely misinterpreted it and decided that the complaints were about camera games as a whole – so instead of fixing the actual issues, he’d simply make his next scene game different.
I unfortunately fail to see the reasoning behind VD’s design – it doesn’t seem to appeal to either audience, and doesn’t seem inspired by anyhing, so it remains an enigma. There was simply nothing to be achieved, unless ZUN aimed for a middle ground of sorts. If so, that would go on to show him that a middle ground is a terrible solution, worse than siding with anyone specifically. So he’d have to make a choice, and, if that wasn’t obvious enough, he’d choose the “casuls”.
Ten main games ago, ZUN realised how much harm varied bomb count can do. A good realisation and a rookie mistake, so what would he do as a head of a pretty big brand? That is right, bring that stuff back! Indeed, meet WBaWC. This title is ridden with issues and poor design choices, for example, almost all stage sections are as boring as PCB stage 4 – pure streaming for minutes. Speaking of stage 4, it suffers from extreme visibility issues, although it’s not like the whole game doesn’t – “fancy” player shot effects obstruct bullets a lot of the time. Having a flaming aura doesn’t help either, although it’s not like the player needs to see the bullets to rhythmically tap. Youmu’s slash is back, but this time, it’s outclassed by a simple forward-focus shot that doesn’t require close range shenanigans or charging, rendering it obsolete. Not to mention it being copied from TD with zero changes – except for the Wolf shottype adding an extra slash on top, making it even more silly, as it effectively negated the only downside. Although who even cares about it when there is a shottype that allows to triple bomb effects, obtain one more bomb per life and have prolonged otter hyper shields that shred most patterns, which absolutely don’t feel like they were designed for that.
But what about the resource system? This time, ZUN was somewhat creative and let midbosses drop additional life/bomb pieces if certain conditions are met… some of which are pretty silly and some are trivial. Not to mention that it would at best give an extra life or two compared to a usual run and literally all other life/bomb pieces are static drops.
The scoring isn’t any better – just like the last game, a single shottype type (Otter) has an immense advantage over all others, except it’s even worse now. The whole scoring system feels like an afterthought, “what if we made otters generate PIV when cancelling bullets… and removed graze, I guess, who even needs it”. While other hypers can generate PIV by dealing damage, this isn’t even remotely close to otters. Simply adjusting the numbers would’ve been so easy (it wouldn’t fix the system as a whole but would definitely make it better) – yet ZUN chose not to. Of course, there are some people (who am I kidding – one person. I hope you are not reading this) that like that kind of thing, but the reason they like it is due to all the improvisation required – since, unlike UFO tokens, beasts are randomised…
Yet, the game saw immense commercial success, and around the time of its release, the second popularity boom went off, and by 2022, Touhou almost became mainstream. Many popular videos doubled their viewer count, and, for instance, Bad Apple saw a quadruple increase since 2019. This moment signified the loss of hope – ZUN is now motivated by commercial success and aims for the casual audience, he no longer cares for experienced players or replay value, he no longer cares for quality, the games are rushed, raw and unoptimised. WBaWC has issues with pretty bad lag during cancel animations on low-end devices – all because of decade-long code reuse (more often than not, assets wouldn’t even be deleted and hastily covered up. This is evident through some unlock codes still working in later games, spritesheets including unnecessary sprites and many, many other things) and overall poor optimisation.
The public’s reception was just like with HSiFS, praised by many and despised by a select few, although the latter have increased in numbers and reinforced their beliefs even further. Yet, not many people even among them were truly hopeless – perhaps the next game will be better?
The next game was unlike anything before… Astonishingly… bad. A really poorly made game which aimed to add replay value via a cards system, but became probably the least replayable one to that day. Now, what made it so bad? All the issues that WBaWC had found their way into this game. The stage design has now been almost fully ruined with generic circles and a staggering overdose of streaming. For the first time since PoFV, there was a bullet which had its hitbox extend beyond the sprite. UFO powerloss was back and even worse, now that all shots are relatively much weaker than before (compared to boss healthbars). Unique shots were gone as a whole, Sakuya’s one only encourages shooting straight ahead for the absolute majority of the time, SA ReimuC and IN Youmu (both relied on the same mechanic) were completely different.
The biggest strawman savior the game has are the cards… cards, while they did have some fun combos (zero hardcoded interactions too), they were easily broken and all the cool combinations were so numbered that people found them all on day 1. Even better, ZUN refused to balance any cards, because he “didn’t have enough time”… with a team of testers. Family may weigh him down, but his testers are on an actual paid job, and the simplest two-card breaks anyone reading the wikipage can think of are still in the game. Speaking of day 1, people also managed to counterstop the game on the second day. WBaWC’s counter was considered to be a poor decision since it was counterstopped in mere months, but this was on a whole new level. Lastly, the hardest boss in the game bases her whole difficulty around clippy bullets with enormous hitboxes and circles, instead of being creative or doing literally anything else.
Additionally, graze was removed… Despite particles and sounds still being generated and the value still being kept track of – that should be a testament to how “well” ZUN clears up the assets when creating a new game on top of the old one. This (of course, not just the graze system, but the poor optimisation) led to the game having a lot of performance issues on low-end devices, and many average PCs experience lag during cancels, especially if recording software is used.
WBaWC’s issue with having all the scoring tied to a single hyper type with barely any PIV gain for others (in comparison)… persisted. Or, should I say, became infinitely worse. Now all the scoring is tied to 1.5 items (the hand literally just passively increases gold gain) and all the serious scoring is tied to 1 character – if you are not using the mallet with Sakuya, you get next to nothing. While in some of the more recent games PIV caps were an annoyance (kicking in around stage 5-6, or stage 3-4 in HSiFS), UM allows to reach the cap on the first boss.
Now that was a disaster… or was it? Its commercial success was far greater than that of WBaWC, and its Steam purchases amount (days after release) was greater than EoSD’s downloads on Moriya Shrine – so more people were willing to pay for it in the first week since release than download the most popular Touhou game from the “Pirate bay” (unfortunately, not anymore) of the Touhou games. This rushed atrocity of a game got much more downloads than anything else in the series.
A few years ago, a joke prophecy was told. “ZUN’s last game is going to be BPoHC, but worse. How is it possible? Only ZUN will know”. Now, what is BPoHC? For the unaware, that’s a textbook example of a euroshmup. A euroshmup is defined as a shmup which has roguelite elements incorporated by a developer (usually a corporation) who thought this would be a good idea. Usually they include healthbars, randomly generated levels, intercredit progression (this one is a telltale sign of a euroshmup), poorly designed patterns, oftentimes unfair and made to be tanked through, difficulties nearly impossible without upgrades, and of course, a currency and a shop to spend it in. BPoHC popularised the belief “shmup with healthbars = euroshmup”, but it’s perfectly possible to have a normal shmup with a healthbar system (see GFW, this one is essentially a healthbar) or have a euroshmup without those. It’s just that healthbars are a cheap way of “balancing” unfair patterns and randomness.
BPoHC was guilty of all of those, which should have made for a terrible game – and sure thing, the game is terrible from a normal shmup perspective. Yet, much unlike UM, it had some redeeming qualities – hundreds of various upgrades allowed to plan a broken build in dozens of ways, and that would indeed add replay value – searching for ridiculous combos and ways to break the game, with new ones being found months after release (in comparison, the last way to break UM was found out on day 1, because all of them are incredibly obvious just from reading the wikipage). Additionally, BPoHC included thousands of lines of dialogue, which was for every team interacting with every boss, as well as endings and prologues. In comparison, UM’s entire plot (with every line being written out fully, and nothing being shortened or left out) can probably fit on 2 A4 pages. Lastly, the attacks, no matter how unfair, still had flair. They still represented the boss really well, and while stage design is surely not Jynx’ thing, I can most assuredly say – there aren’t any “generic” boss attacks.
None of that saves the game from being horrible, unfair and poorly designed, of course. But they serve to make the game at least not straight up bad.
Which is not true for the next ZUN’s game. The prophecy has come true! The new scene game, 100th Black Market, is the very rock bottom of ZUN’s shmup design. UM card system was reworked… for the worse. Many cards have been swapped out for boring numeric stat upgrades, and the others are either cancelling bullets in some form (which are a simple cooldown move, so no interesting plays or anything remotely learnable), blocking familiars, THE CARD THAT CLEARS THE WHOLE STAGE, resources or equipment, none of which is original, all borrowed from UM and the phantasmagorias. Score is removed, but… It’s still clearly calculated in the background, once again showing the laziness. But now, UM’s only redeeming quality is gone – all the abuse combos have been reduced to simply “haha 3 -33% to cooldown cards allow to spam the circle with zero cooldown” or other stat-related builds instead of any sort of creative ways to break the game. The difficulty is improper - Overdrive is around the usual Hard. Bosses are bullet sponges, and stages are all incredibly boring, randomised and sometimes unfair. The amount of dialogue is miniscule, and there are no routes and next to no secrets, making it literally a direct downgrade of BPoHC. Replay value is just nonexistant – two secrets, collecting all cards and completing all stages takes 5-7 hours, and there is literally nothing to do after that – stages are nothing, the bosses are overly easy and uninspired, and all the remotely interesting combos were likely already found during those 5-7 hours due to how few of them exist.
Scoring is… removed. For the first time in 25 years, a game made by ZUN didn’t include any form of score. Even though score is still calculated in the background via the same system as UM, as well as the graze particles still appearing, which should serve as a really nice demonstration of how lazy ZUN’s approach to new games is – and it’s getting progressively worse.
Yet, the public liked that game, against all odds… Because of Marisa and her bare feet on the title screen, of course, people aren’t even ashamed to admit it. Steam reviews serve as a nice piece of evidence, literally 80% of positive ones look like the one shown below. Of course, the more experienced players absolutely flamed the game, it was the new VD, except even worse this time (note the amount of hours played, as well as the awards)
It should come as no surprise that the next game is highly unlikely to be even half decent, seeing how relentless ZUN is on his downward spiral. Touhou 19 is planned to be released around the early summer of 2023, while the beta will be published in spring, so there isn’t much time left to wait – and perhaps ZUN will start working on it just around now.
However, Touhou was never just the shmups. Fighters present an interesting rise and fall of an initially small doujin circle, and other licensed projects offer some insight about ZUN’s current goals. The printworks which I’m not too familiar with provide even more concerns, and so do CD’s. Of course, none are nearly as interesting as the maingames or even the fighting games, but they most assuredly deserve a mention.
And, most assuredly, the biggest offender will not go without a mention…
Chapter 6. Tasofro, printworks, Lost Word, CDs and Cave.
Back in the days of PC-98, ZUN wanted to make a fighting game. Yet, issues arose – the character roster was rather lacking, and the coding was too complex for one person to handle, let alone a college student.
After the release of PCB, however, ZUN became a prominent figure in the doujin community and a circle, Twilight Frontier (a.k.a. Tasogare Frontier, Tasofro or Kusofro) offered help – ZUN would write the plot and the new music tracks, while they would remix some of the old ones and do all the coding for a fighting game. A year later, (slightly later than IN, but still 7.5) Immaterial and Missing Power was released. Now, “missing” is an understatement – the game was lacking, raw, clunky and rushed. The balance issues would go far beyond the usual fighting game power tiers with weak and strong characters, some would decimate the story mode while some would get destroyed themselves. The controls were pretty bad and often faulty, which resulted in most people just mashing their way through the game. The continue system attempted to be “quirky”, but ended up being weird and silly, and to this day, many people don’t understand it.
Yes, the game was bad, and nearly universally disliked, however… For an inexperienced doujin circle being tasked with making a fighting game from scratch in under a year, it was acceptable.
Three years later, the world saw Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. As visually similar to IaMP as it may be, there is a world of difference between the two. For instance, the combos were reworked, and now were a lot more consistent, mashing is no longer a viable tactic for story mode, PvP is actually functional (nobody plays SWR PvP, the reason will be specified later), some new characters were added, the spellcard system was reworked and made much more interesting and some of the more extreme edges of the IaMP balance ladder were curbed, resulting in overall better experience. The game is also interesting to learn, and I mean for both combos and the story mode, the spellcards get really creative (to the point of messing with altitude) and it doesn’t crash as much.
This game was perceived a lot better than the last one, and it was far from undeserved. However, it still had issues – mainly PvP, and it was missing a lot of the recent characters. As such, Touhou 12.3, also known as Hisoutensoku or Unthinkable Natural Law was made to fix that. It wasn’t technically a game, simply a DLC for SWR with a few more characters and a bit of story mode. It also doubled down on all the changes SWR made, fixed a lot of balance issues and finally made PvP actually decent – which
made Soku one of the two most popular Touhou games for tournaments (it’s impossible to compare it to PoFV due to the tournaments involving vastly different parts of the fandom). To this day, Soku is loved and praised… and just like how ZUN peaked between 12 and 13, so did Tasofro. It’s their magnum opus, and it’s only down from here.
However, many people found SWR to be overly difficult. That was not the case, the game was simply learning-heavy, and, well, not much different from normal fighting games. The combo system was getting a lot of hate from the casual players too, so, just like ZUN, Tasofro turned their attention to the casual audience. Meet Hopeless Masquerade, the game with no hope of redemption. Combos were removed, the spellcard system was greatly nerfed, and now the games revolve around mashing. In addition, the story mode would just include the same scenario being fought over and over again, with the same three fights at the end, which nobody liked. The popularity system didn’t do much either. The difficulty was, of course, much less than before, and “Lunatic” wouldn’t compare to SWR Normal.
It's worth noting that this game must not receive the same level of pitying as IaMP – it had roughly the same amount of production time as SWR, and the team was much more experienced than back in 2004.
In two years, a direct improvement for the game would be released, Urban Legends in Limbo. While it certainly improved the story mode (and the balls lines get a laugh out of me as well) and made some mechanical improvements, it was pretty much HM in every way. Really not much to say about this one.
And there isn’t much to say about Antinomy of Common Flowers either. It doubled down on what ULiL did, had a lot of creative storylines and improved PvP – which is why it’s the second most played fighter. Still, it mainly revolved around mashing.... The difficulty was still rather casual, and the spellcard system wasn’t as good as in SWR/Soku either.
Additionally, the game was rather divisive – people that loved UNL would refuse to invest time into AoCF, and people that played AoCF wouldn’t even touch Soku because of its relative complexity. Yet, for now Tasofro remained mediocre at worst, their newest games were a disappointment, but nothing fatal or anti-fanbase. However…
In October, 2019, they’ve announced a new game, which, just like HM, was made with a completely new engine and included a total overhaul. They presented some footage, and promised a beta in just a few days. The beta was, as all betas are, somewhat clunky and unbalanced, but it certainly had a charm to it. So they’ve announced the full game to be released next summer, and there was a fair amount of anticipation.
The release date drew near, and Tasofro announced a delay, due to COVID-19, as well as clarifying that the game is nearly finished. Just a few months later, they would be ready to deliver the product. Or not, once the new release date came, it was postponed again, this time by a month. And again. And again. And again. And so, it was drawn a year away from the initial release date. Reasonable, one might say? Absolutely not. If in July 2021 they claimed it was almost ready and 3 months was enough even with COVID regulations, why did it take them a full year to complete the game? There was definitively something shady about all those delays – and the fact that the game didn’t even have all the playable characters (all other Touhou fighters and TSS-esque games had all the opponents be playable with their own storylines, unless the opponent was a bizarre enemy, like the catfish), crashed quite a lot, was still clunky and felt raw. If SHoSS was nearing completion in the summer of 2020, how come it released unfinished a year later?
Yet the fanbase was pleased – why? The game included quite some characters that haven’t received proper screen time in a while, and many people were excited about their favourites, absolutely ignoring the game and all the issues in process. That awfully resembles some of the ugliest strategies gacha game companies use…
Speaking of gacha, the irony… A company named Goodsmile released a highly predatory carrion eater of a game that fed on all the popularity the series had amassed, and sank its teeth into the secondaries’ time and wallets. Granted, it wasn’t just the secondaries, but they were the target audience.
Yes, indeed, the next subject is Lost Word. While there was a fair amount of fanmade Touhou gachas, they mainly went unnoticed with mediocre to decent player bases, and many shut down over the years, this one really stands out. The creators bought a license for the game to be made from ZUN himself, and offered him a cut of the earnings, in exchange for the game to be advertised by ZUN himself on various Touhou events, Reitaisai, as well as the ability to advertise it under the brand as well.
The game itself feels predatory in every aspect – the gameplay is rather mediocre compared to some of the actually decent gacha games, the characters and their dialogue is tailored for fanservice, made to appeal to the secondary fans and just people obsessed over their waifus in general, the plot is specifically able to be stretched
indefinitively while introducing practically any character without any damage to the narrative (not like people would care anyway), fanon personalities are all the game has to offer, and the writers clearly don’t know the lore of the series, aside from some quick references to “”obscure”” things here and there. And, of course, lootboxes, microtransactions, grinding, time-limited offers – you name it, usual gacha business. As well as stolen music which makes people frequently praise the game’s OST (even though almost all the praised tracks are stolen).
Licensing a gacha game marketed for teenagers (people that don’t know the value of money, love their waifus and spend a lot of time online) is an action the legalty of which is questioned in many countries, and the moral aspect of the decision is deeply rotten as well – so what made ZUN do it? Money? Unless it’s greed for the sake of greed, it’s unrealistic – just from the Steam sales alone ZUN made at least 600 thousand dollars over the last 2-3 years, and that is without taking any other form of income he has into account, selling CDs, printworks, taking a chunk of the profits of Tasofro, Gift and Reitasai (and other conventions) – his income likely exceeds a million dollars a year, which is perfectly enough for a family to live extremely well, with a lot of money saved up for retirement. ZUN is anything but short for money – so then what is the reason? A pattern is forming… Additionally, a lot of content creators (Yumemey, BEATMario and others) have been sponsored by LW to promote it. I cannot blame them, at least not as much – their deed is like signing a deal with the devil compared to licensing the devil to sell those in the first place.
The degradation of printworks and CDs isn’t something I was too familiar with, so I’ll keep it brief. CDs used to include a lot of both remixed and original tracks, and were released pretty often… Until a pretty large break that lasted almost a decade, and the CD that came after it featured one original track and two remixes. Yeah, Rainbow Coloured Septentrion was a disappointment. The printworks used to include a lot of humour, but also with a lot of actual worldbuilding and some philosophical/existential discussions. Now it all has been thrown out of the window in favour of even more fanon y jokes and just “cute girls doing things” – my best guess is that it all started from Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth being rather liked.
ZUN also tried expanding into arcades – and sold Exa-Arcadia a license to port FDF II to arcades. Even though Exa Label usually comes with some improvements, I do not think it was the right choice – the game is still mediocre, graphics-oriented and overall boring, which is really not what people want when they visit the arcade. There are dozens of games that would fit that perfectly – yet he chose the one that was simply popular among the casual fans for looking fancy.
So, is all hope lost? Perhaps not, for ZUN has sold Cave a license to make a fangame as well. However, considering ZUN has been out of touch with the shmup industry since at least 2012 (probably much earlier), he may not even be aware of Gothic wa Mahou Otome. And Cave pretty much confirmed that the game will be a mobile gacha game, the only thing we can hope for is for it to at least be a shmup.
ZUN started out as a developer trying to project his ideas onto the world. In the middle of his career, he learnt how dangerous not catering to the casual audience is – so he decided to always include some form of a casual “mode” in his games – easy shottypes at first, which was alright, a completely different mode afterwards… and completely dismissing the non-casual audience later on. Perhaps he sought money, perhaps he sought appreciation, perhaps both.
He started realising just how profitable the series and everything surrounding it can be, and, of course, took advantage of it. At the end, he decided to create something for each type of audience with at least some representation (sorry printwork fans, you are left out of the equation, as well as CD enjoyers), maingames catering towards the more casual and relaxed people (as well as spinoffs), LW being an option for non-shmup fans, and Cave’s new game… perhaps he thought it’d still be a good shmup game to please the demographic he stopped catering long ago, due to him being completely out of touch with the world. As charming as he may have been, now he is but an average developer seeking profits (not above all else, but there is no more art or passion left).
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”
Chapter 7. Omake.txt.
The conclusion has been reached, yet there are some things that went unspoken. For once, scrapped materials.
- A more thorough analysis of the printworks and their degradation. Deemed unnecessary and subjective.
- A bit more detail about the first two games. Charming and interesting as they may be, they were written off as unimportant, nothing but rookie mistakes that didn’t affect ZUN’s career much.
- An analysis of the community, specifically of the community leaders, poor moderation, hypocrisy and many other things. Too many personal gripes, and I simply couldn’t write anything on that without either being too brief or too emotional.
- “Better alternatives”. Resembled cheap advertising too much, and wasn’t a part of the series’ downfall.
- Many jokes. While I can let one or two slip every once in a while, I’d rather keep them out.
- Gold Rush, even though it could serve as a nice foreshadowing for 18.5, is not canon and too insignificant to cover.
Dictionary
- PC-9801(21) - NEC is a pretty old Japanese computer (abandonware), used mainly for eroge games.
- Shmup or shoot’em up, a term referring to vertical or horizontal autoscroller shooter games (the term STG means roughly the same).
- Arkanoid is one of the first video games, a game about using a platform to keep a ball in the air while making it hit cards.
- Twinkle Star Sprites – a 1997 dueling STG by ADK, the predecessor of PoDD/FV.
- Graze – a term for having a bullet fly a certain distance away from the hitbox, usually affecting score.
- Extend – an extra life.
- Resource system – a system responsible for giving the player lives, bombs and other resources (in Touhou, ice charge, trance charge, season charge, et cetera).
- Streaming – dodging aimed bullets by rhythmically moving in one direction.
- Stage performance – a shottype’s ability to clear stages, the less effort the better the performance.
- Super(or Hyper-) armour – a period at the start of every attack where the enemy takes reduced damage.
- Shotgunning – attacking at close range with a spread shot (same as pointblanking). Cancelling – same as destroying a bullet.
- PIV – Point Item Value, the value that is added to score if a point item is collected on top of the screen.
- Classic era – EoSD through StB.
- Modern 1 – MoF through DS.
- Modern 2 – GFW onwards.
- Iframes – invincibility frames.
- DPS – Damage Per Second.
- Counterstop – a certain score value after which the score counter is stuck displaying the same value infinitely.
- Clippy – with uncomfortably big hitboxes.
- Intercredit – between runs (credits).
- Bullet sponge – a boss/enemy whose HP pool is disproportionately huge compared to the player’s expected damage, a cheap way of inflating the difficulty.
- Reitaisai – Touhou’s own festival for fanworks, merch, games, printworks and cosplay.
- Gothic wa Mahou Otome – a mobile shmup gacha game by Cave, including thousands of skins and hundreds of characters. Their only continuation of their shmup games ever since SDOJ.
- Secondaries – fans (that call themselves fans) who don’t play games or read printworks. They want you to believe this word is insulting and/or controversial, but only a secondary would say that.
- Touhoomer – initially, a person who does silly restricted runs in Touhou (or fangames). The term was invented to mock the stupidity of “LNN” runs and other things the touhoomers would engage in. However, later on, it would be expanded to include pretty much any fallacy a notable part of the fandom falls victim to (first expansion). Then it would even be expanded even further to include doing certain things in other shmups… (second expansion) They want you to believe this word is insulting and/or controversial, but only a touhoomer would say that.
Special thanks:
- SsjacsS – graphical design (a textbook touhoomer of both first, second and third order)
- VoidWrath – proofreading (kind of a textbook secondary/touhoomer of the second order)
- Juanca – Len’en assistant (a very textbook len’en-leaning touhoomer)
- And me – writing (a textbook touhoomer of the third order, and the core reason for the second expansion of the definition of a touhoomer)
With all this in mind, let's come to some conclusions, or at least appearances brought by the sheer quantity of text and its content (or maybe I should take them as some common themes through the whole text?):
- this text seems to be written by one of the tryhards, something that GensouChronicle has called a "cryptid species" among the Touhou community; those who are so into the games that they will complain if something is too easy; maybe a little bit of a canon purist as well
- Ten Desires was the last good Touhou game
- ZUN always had a lot of flaws in his games
- ZUN did the greatest mistake in listening to the wrong public with the recent games; instead of listening to those who were always playing his games of hardest difficulties and for scores, he listened to casual side of the community (seen as the plague of everything wrong with modern Touhou) and made the games too easy and stupid; because obviously a game casual fans can enjoy = bad game
- the latest games are a sheer dumpster fire
- Tasofro should no longer be allowed to make Touhou spin-off games
- ZUN has become greedy, and is adopting soulless corporation tactics by allowing stuff like LostWord, Arcadia Record and the most likely upcoming gacha game from CAVE even exist (to be fair, if sources are reliable, apparently ZUN is earning 600K US dollars a year from Steam, and if we add up stuff like DanKagu, LostWord, Arcadia Record, the upcoming CAVE game and other similar stuff he licensed, the sum could go up to a million dollars a year
- "secondaries" are the bane of Touhou, they are not really true fans
This was literally a "guy A like game, guy B writes a while 42 pages long article why guy A's opinion is wrong". And it all started just because some guy liked Touhou 18.5... Becuase that is where it all started from, the whole 42 pages being a build-up towards the fact that 100th Black Marker it the crowning achievement of ZUN's downfall as a creator. And that the series is beyond any redemption...
I have initially read the whole thing, and left an answer to the poor guy left in confusion:
"I have unironically read this whole thing (I know, what am I doing with my life?!). The conclusion I got to is that it caters a lot towards the more elitist side of the fandom. Some of the analysis on game mechanics and bullet patterns is interesting (even if I am mostly unfamiliar with it), but I am not very sure how much I agree with some of the opinions towards the community, reception and people playing the more recent games in the series. Might have lost a few braincells here and there, but I guess it was worth it?"
Besides me, u/Akyuuposting also made an interesting point about the whole idea of this file, and probably quite a good conclusion:
Like always, I will link the source material, so that people can enjoy it at their own pace. The original Google document (it also has shiny pictures, yay https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MA3MNSHSFK2mXJzpNXG-ep6fMisA-Eeo/view)
Fans are fans, no matter which parts of the fandom they decide to make their home.
