You’ve probably never heard of the Touhou Project series. Even if you have, there’s a good chance you haven’t played any of the games. Although the series has always been stuck in the confines of its cult classic status, Touhou has played a monumental role in shaping the modern gaming landscape, and many of your favorite games wouldn’t exist without it.
What Is Touhou?
Touhou Project—better known as just “Touhou“—is an indie bullet hell series created by solo-developer Jun’ya Ōta (known to fans as “ZUN”). The series originally debuted in 1997 on PC-98 systems with Touhou Reiiden ~ The Highly Responsive to Prayers, a mostly bog-standard Breakout clone with a few creative gameplay twists inspired by retro shoot ’em ups. It wasn’t until the second game—Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland—that the series’ identity truly began to take shape.
Beginning with the Story of Eastern Wonderland, most Touhou games have been frantically fast-paced and immensely difficult bullet hell shooters. Each entry has you flying through a series of challenging stages, shooting down waves of airborne enemies and narrowly avoiding bullets until you reach a boss fight at the end of each level.
While you’re dodging bullets, you’ll also strengthen your own magical projectiles by gathering power-ups from defeated enemies. Fully-upgrading your firepower can turn some stages into a breeze, but it’s never enough to make any of Touhou‘s boss battles feel like pushovers. Every boss attacks with uniquely tricky bullet patterns that will test your reflexes and memorization. At various points during their fights, boss characters can also activate “spell cards,” special attacks that flood the screen with a continuous stream of bullets.
Thankfully, you can also strike back with your own spell cards to obliterate a large chunk of their health bars. Later Touhou games introduced the “graze” mechanic, which allows you to raise your score by narrowly avoiding—or “grazing”—enemy projectiles. Some of the sequels have shaken up this formula with the additions of new playable characters and creative gimmicks, but you can always expect to find the same style of bullet hell goodness in each entry.
Unlike many earlier bullet hell games, Touhou places its world and characters at the forefront of each game. Every Touhou story takes place in the mystical land of Gensokyo, where humans and mythological creatures known as “youkai” live together in harmony… at least, for the most part. While the series features multiple protagonists, most Touhou games follow a powerful human shrine maiden named Reimu Hakurei, who frequently finds herself being dragged into various incidents to stop the youkai from stirring up trouble.
Touhou‘s stories rarely take themselves seriously and often fit into a very formulaic structure: Reimu faces off against a roster of new characters and familiar faces in a series of bullet hell battles, occasionally drops blatant death threats (especially in the early entries; PC-98 Reimu was oddly bloodthirsty), and beats some sense into the big-bad at the very end.
Despite their simplicity, the series’ eccentric cast of characters and endlessly imaginative conflicts are always a joy to experience. Whether you’re following Reimu (or one of the other playable protags) as she stops a family of vampires from trapping Gensokyo in an endless night, investigates the sudden appearance of a mysterious UFO, or interferes in a war between an army of fairies and a secret society living on the moon, it’s surprisingly easy to get invested in the lighthearted adventures of Touhou.
Over the years, the Touhou franchise has expanded into fighting games, rhythm games, and even a few photography-themed spinoffs. There’s a lot more to Touhou beyond the original bullet hell shooters, but its influence on gaming as a whole begins with the franchise’s earliest entries.
Touhou Was the Original Face of Indie Games
The late 90s and early 2000s marked a rough time for indie studios and solo developers. In contrast to the 80s and early 90s—which saw many small studios build themselves up through shareware and moderate successes—the rise of game consoles and rapid commercialization of the gaming industry allowed AAA releases to easily eclipse lower-budget titles.
During this time, indie game development began to seem less viable as a career. At best, self-published games were a potential gateway to being hired at a larger studio, but many solo devs pursued indie game development as a hobby, first and foremost. This was also the case for ZUN, who developed Highly Responsive to Prayers as a way to practice his programming and music composition skills while attending college. The series’ PC-98 titles were only sold at Comiket Market—a Tokyo-based convention where independent creators can sell self-published works—with the first two games selling less than 100 copies, combined.
However, Touhou quickly attracted a small fanbase with each new installment. Over the course of the series’ PC-98 games, all five of which were released between 1997 and ’98, the series’ climbed from tens to hundreds of copies being sold per game. After a brief hiatus, during which ZUN graduated from college and began working at Taito, he returned to the series in 2002 with Touhou Koumakyou ~ The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.
Besides being the first game released for Windows, the sixth game is also where ZUN refined Touhou into a masterclass in bullet hell design. Many fan-favorite levels, characters, songs, and game mechanics were introduced in The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. The game went on to sell thousands of copies and helped cement the Touhou series as a true cult classic.
Touhou certainly wasn’t the first indie game to see this type of success, though most of those other successes—at least in Japan—were dating sims or other types of visual novels. Touhou was an obvious outlier, which made it all the more surprising when it single-handedly revitalized the bullet hell genre, inspiring many games that modeled themselves after the series’ unique mechanics and cutesy anime aesthetic.
In many ways, Touhou was the underdog story that indie developers needed during the early 2000s. While it was far from a mainstream hit, the Touhou series proved to be much more successful than anyone would have expected from a solo-developed bullet hell shooter. A few years after The Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, we started to see more games created by small teams and solo developers, such as Cave Story in 2004, Darwinia in 2005, and Dwarf Fortress in 2006. Between these releases, there were also hundreds of lesser-known indie games that never received the same level of attention as Touhou, but still showed that the series had inspired independent creators to break out of their shells.
To be fair, Touhou wasn’t the only thing that helped spark the indie game resurgence. Around the same time, Valve launched Steam—everyone’s favorite PC storefront—and Flash games had just begun to populate the web. However, Touhou was the first major indie release of the 2000s to prove that passionate creators were still capable of making a name for themselves without the help of a larger studio.
Touhou‘s Journey from Indie Fame to Internet Icon
It’s not hard to understand why the Touhou series attracted a cult following in Japan, but the series’ evolution into a global success is a lot more bizarre. None of the Touhou games were ever officially released outside of Japan, and most fans of the series have never even tried its games. That may sound confusing at first, but Touhou‘s popularity begins to make more sense when you consider the era of its release.
Touhou owes much of its success to the rise of internet fandoms. Ever since The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the Touhou series has been a magnet for fan art, song covers, online videos, and just about every other type of fanwork imaginable. As Touhou‘s online influence became more widespread, people unfamiliar with the series were drawn into the Touhou fandom thanks to the series’ iconic characters and amazing soundtracks.
It didn’t matter if they even knew about the original games; many early internet denizens were exposed to the series through its inescapable presence on forums and video-sharing sites like YouTube or Nico Nico Douga. In those days, it wasn’t rare for videos or songs you found online to somehow be connected to the Touhou fanbase. Personally, a video of someone playing “Night of Nights” (a boss theme from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil) on their phone’s keypad ended up being my gateway into bullet hell.
Touhou is one of the rare cases of a series’ fanbase eclipsing the official releases. There are countless unofficial games, comics, anime adaptations, merchandise, and fan conventions dedicated to the Touhou series. Unless you are already familiar with the mainline series, you probably wouldn’t even realize that nearly all the most popular works associated with Touhou are entirely fanmade. Even Touhou games that received international console ports and videos with millions of views are usually made by fans.
While it often overshadows ZUN’s work, Touhou‘s fanbase is the series’ greatest strength. It has brought more people into the series than the original games could have ever reached on their own, and allowed Touhou to explore all sorts of genres and different mediums. That’s not to disregard the official games—they’re still going strong with the 20th mainline entry arriving later this month—but much of Touhou‘s current identity and cultural relevance stems from its community. Today, Touhou embodies far more than a niche series of bullet hell games, and that wouldn’t have ever happened without its devout fanbase.
Touhou’s Influence Extends Beyond Its Fanbase
In the same way that Touhou once represented what indie games could be, it’s also become a shining example of what more game series should be. Part of the reason Touhou‘s fan community blossomed the way it did was largely due to its creator’s willingness to support fan projects. Unlike many modern game companies—especially those whose names start with “Nin” and end with “Tendo”—ZUN has always embraced the Touhou fanbase’s creativity, even allowing indie creators to monetize their fanmade projects based on the series.
Because of this, fans have been able to reimagine Touhou in other genres and concepts that the official releases probably never would. It’s also allowed other creators to turn their love for the series into original works unashamedly inspired by Touhou, including the massively popular Undertale and Deltarune.
Today, many gaming companies are more protective of their IPs than ever before, even when it’s detrimental to the rest of the gaming industry. While it makes sense for them not to encourage cheap knock-offs or blatant bootlegs, it’s obvious that companies aren’t solely interested in protecting their reputation when they start attacking fan remakes like AM2R, competitors like Palworld, or entire fangame archives on websites like Gamejolt.
Meanwhile, Touhou‘s fangames include everything from kart racers, Metroidvanias, strategy games, dungeon crawlers, and light gun shooters, among many other genres. Many of these unofficial games have introduced new fans to the series, and it’s likely that Touhou would never have exploded in popularity if ZUN had adopted the same hostility towards his fanbase as Nintendo seemingly holds for its own. Fortunately, not everyone in the industry is as stubborn as Nintendo, and studios such as Bethesda and Valve have (mostly) supported mods and fangames such as Skyblivion and Black Mesa.
Touhou Is a Testament to Indie Greatness
Today, indie games are thriving like never before thanks to all the amazing releases that have replaced Touhou as the face of indie gaming. Likewise, fan games and heartfelt homages to specific series are still common, despite Nintendo and other companies’ recent attempts to change that. But even after all these years, Touhou remains one of gaming’s most important series, even if it doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.
Thankfully, the Touhou series has become more accessible in recent years. The latest entries are all available on Steam, and most of the older games have received fan translations. Even if you’re not a hardcore bullet-hell fan, it’s worth trying out Touhou just to experience one of the most underrated series in gaming history.