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Who is worst character in touhou in terms of design?

YUUGI
WORST EVER SKIRT FUKIN HARD TO DRAW I CRY
well yes it look simple, but even so it's not visually appealing
and what even with the transparency i cant understand

also th18 chars
Misumaru first
weird pattern, unharmonized colours, and to much going on with the magatamas
nice forehead tho

and Momoyo
again weird pattern, and again too much going on with the chains

hot take!
Chimata!
all 7 colours fight each other, there's a reason why colour harmony is invented
although artists still found ways to draw her nicely
problems mostly arise when you oversaturate the colours

 
I probably put way more time and thought into this than I needed to, but this is a legitimately hard question to answer. ZUN may not have much prestige as an artist, but making a cast of well over 100 characters with unique appearances that are easily told apart from each other is a really impressive feat in its own. ZUN deserves mad respect as a character designer.

Full disclosure, I'm not super knowledgeable on everything Touhou. I haven't played every Touhou game, I've never touched anything from the PC-98 era, and I don't know Japanese mythology and folklore well enough to understand how a character's design is representative of the yokai they're modelled after. I see a character; I associate it with a name, theme, maybe its music. If I can remember it, I feel confident chalking it up to good character design. So, just to elaborate on what criteria I gave myself looking over the character roster:

  1. I'm sticking to Windows era games only for this, and recurring major characters from the official manga.
  2. I won't count characters as being badly designed just for being too similar in appearance to already existing characters. Not really a special reason for this; I just think the case of "It's x, but painted blue" is really boring. Don't worry, they'll get their 15 minutes of fame, but I'd rather focus on characters I find "originally bland."
  3. Memorability > Attractiveness. I'm no artist. I couldn't tell anyone what makes a character design objectively good or bad. But if I have to look at a character and say "Who?" there's nothing to put there in terms of design. I'd happily take an ugly character that sticks with me over a gorgeous character that doesn't.

So, after an unhealthy amount of time looking at character portraits, I boiled it down to 3.

  • Letty Whiterock (PCB Stage 1): The literal "Who?" character from the first generation of Window's games. Man, 1st Stage bosses have it rough. It's hard to be genuinely memorable when your entire purpose is to be beginner-fodder to ease people into the game. Stage 1 bosses are almost universally less appealing than their late-stage counterparts, but more others at least have the advantage of having an original attribute or theme to set themselves apart. 2nd game into the Windows era, and we already have a thematic repeat of one of the best designed Touhou characters, Cirno. Her design is just... boring. She doesn't have any extremities or features that really make her stand out, and her color scheme is just a bland purple and white. I want to have more to say, but there's just nothing there. She's just a girl, with a winter-y color scheme.
  • Eika Ebisu (WBaWC Stage 1): Oh goddamn it, not again. Alright; second verse, same as the first. Stage 1 bosses have it hard, blah blah blah... Honestly, I think the rocks in her character portrait are more interesting than Eika is. If somebody earnestly told me that this was their favorite Touhou character, I would pat them on the head and go out to buy them their favorite flavor of ice cream: water. There's nothing on her body or in her posing or expression to guage any kind of personality from her. For crying out loud, her ability is Stacking stones well. Stacking. Stones. Well. And the only thing that sets her apart from most other portraits, is that she's seated instead of standing. This. This is p e a k vanilla for character design.
  • Misumaru Tamatsukuri (UM Stage 4): I dunno how much off a hot take this is in the wider Touhou sphere, but I think UM has some of the worst character designs in the entire series. Not everything is bad: I ADORE Tsukasa- I think her purposefully plain design leans in well to her being an unassuming manipulator- and I like Mike and Chimata well enough. But we got green Nitori, smoker Yorihime, and b l u e A y a, showcasing a genuine concern I have with ZUN constantly making new characters at the expense of old ones. And then we've got... this. So like, I don't mind Chimata's wild color scheme, and the goofy rainbow dress. It's not great, but at least it doesn't assault my senses like whatever the hell Misumaru's wearing. These colors are just so unappealing to look at, and the rainbow or magatama attached to every piece of her clothing just stacks colors everywhere and it's just... ugh, it's gross. And even then, I still need to remind myself that she's there. If the other two on the list were the results of being too plain, this is the result of being way, WAY too busy. Honestly, if it wasn't for that one Perldrop video where he points out that Misumaru vaguely looks like the queen from Shrek, I would've completely forgotten she existed, and my brain would've thanked me for it.
 
I haven't played all of the games but I'm inclined to agree with SoundOfRayne that Eika is the worst one based on the fact that I literally played WBaWC two days ago, enjoyed it a lot, and still could not for the life of me remember who the stage 1 boss for that game was until I looked it up

 
from all of the ones ive played, i would have to say letty. probably the only character that has never really stood out to me in any form, strange as she is the first touhou boss ive ever fought. her memorability was not helped with the sstrange (maybe) translation of marisas route, i couldnt really nail down her character at all compared to everyone else.

 
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