Touhou Project

The Touhou Project (Known in Japan as 東方Project, Touhou Purojekuto, lit. Eastern Project; or simply Touhou), is a Japanese doujin game series and franchise focused on bullet hell shooters created by the one-man developer Team Shanghai Alice, known as ZUN.

In pixiv, all works related to Touhou are tagged with either "東方Project", or "東方".

See also : Touhou

In Touhou, the game is played like most other shooting games where player's bullet power increases on a linear scale as the player collects power-ups dropped by enemies, and eventually maxes out. The player can also collect 'point' icons (shown in blue, with the kanji "点") to increase their hi-score. At earlier games, surpassing hi-scores at a certain point will gain you an extra life, which it is later replaced with collecting several amount of special items to raise an extra life. The player can use 'focus', the shift key by default, which slows down the player's movement, makes the collision box visible and focuses the player's attack to make it more powerful (though some characters are an exception). Touhou also focuses in the graze counter system (missing from Mountain of Faith and Story of Eastern Wonderland), which tracks how many bullets entered the character sprite but avoided the collision box, and rewards the player with a score bonus for living on the edge.

When cornered, the player can use a weapon called a 'spell card', which is similar to a 'bomb' in most other shooting games. When used, it makes the user temporarily invulnerable and uses a special magical attack that generally clears the screen, though limited in number. Each character possess two cards (or only one in some games) with different names and patterns. In additional to a normal spell card, the player can activate one during a short period after being hit by a bullet known as the 'border between life and death' to avoid loss of a life, although the consumption takes two bomb counter instead of the normal one. The amount of time the player has available to use the border is usually around 0.3 seconds. Bosses also have spell cards, but with bosses the term applies to a prolonged pattern of movements and shots that lasts until the player depletes the health bar by a certain amount or the time runs out, instead of a one-shot attack.

Each individual game of the main series after Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has their own unique, different gameplay or system. For example, Perfect Cherry Blossom has "cherry points", which are used mostly in scoring, but can grant temporary invulnerability (known as 'supernatural border'); Imperishable Night has "time points", which are essential to advancing to later stages, and also determine if the player gets to challenge a boss's 'final spell' on normal or higher difficulties; Mountain of Faith has 'faith' points, which help tabulate the score the player receives upon gathering point items and bonuses for clearing spell cards without dying or using a spell card; games like Shoot The Bullet and Double Spoiler does not play like any normal shooter games but instead emulates camera capture system to clear bullets and snap photos of your opponent to clear the stage; while games like Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody is a 1 on 1 fighting game which utilizes spell cards for additional attacks, combos and stat raising.

Each Touhou game has four difficulty levels—easy, normal, hard, and lunatic—with each one being harder than the previous one. Regardless of difficulty choice, there are six stages in each game and each one is harder than the previous.

In addition to the four main difficulties, there is also an extra stage after clearing all main 6 stages on at least normal difficulty (except Perfect Cherry Bloosom and Imperishable Night) without continue. Extra stages are usually long and extremely difficult which players must play through hordes of enemies, bullets, and bosses. In Perfect Cherry Blossom, there is also a phantasm extra stage which the stage itself is far more difficult than the Extra stage.

The whole idea and concept, settings, programming, gameplay, music, and the characters for the franchise are created by ZUN. With the exception of Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, and Touhou Hisoutensoku, which is created with the association of Tasogare Frontier. Fairy Wars is the only game where ZUN did not involve in the illustration of the characters (The illustrations are drawn by Makoto Hirasaka).

The idea of Touhou first came to ZUN during his high school years when shrine maiden-themed games were in the minority. He thought it would be nice to make shrine maiden based games and often imagined the music that would go with it. Soon he went to college in hope of composing music for fighting games due to the popularity of Street Fighter II. However, he decided that it would be easier to make his own game to go with the music that he's trying to put his music into, thus the first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers, was released in 1996. Initially the first game was originally intended as a practice in programming, Touhou only became a shooting game series starting from the second game onwards due to the popularity of shooting games had revived at that time and ZUN had long been a fan of such games (As a reminder, While ZUN has worked for Taito before, he was not involved in the production for Raystorm games). ZUN remarked how the general theme and direction of Touhou only started coming together in the sixth game, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.

ZUN develops his games with Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop, and Cubase SX, according to his interview in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red.

Due to the extensive amount of games and their related franchise released, and still having its doujin status maintained, it has been labelled as the Most Prolific Fan-Made Shooter Series by Guinness World Record.

東方Project