Project – Touhou

My current ideas:

invention-strategies-2.doc

Apparently, I’m supposed to sketch ideas on what I should be doing for my profile.

There’s a whole range of ideas. I’m just worried that I may not have enough information for some of the ideas I have.

Let’s start with the first one.

Now I’m sure none of you remember this, but I am a huge fan of music from the Touhou series.

I’m thinking I should be writing about the Touhou series for my profile. However, I’m a bit worried about being able to do this right. Let’s have a little test run for this idea, shall we?

By the way, Project Touhou is a play on words. Touhou project is a common name of the series.

Touhou is a series of Japanese doujin (original work) games created by what some people may know them as Team Shanghai Alice.(Click for the link to the official site.)

Not much is known about the team’s amount of members, but many believe that the series was mostly created by one person. He goes by the alias of ZUN. He is behind the game programming, art, and the music of the game. ZUN does not seem to do 100% of the work.

While the game’s native language is Japanese, number six, seven, and eight in the Touhou series have fan-made English patches that translate nearly 100% of the game, so those people who do not speak Japanese (like me) can enjoy everything the games have to offer.

I have beaten numbers six through ten of the game series (minus nine), and in the credits, while ZUN is mostly credited for most of the mechanics behind the game, there is always at least 1-2 different people that have helped him out with the creation of a Touhou game. Also in the credits, one of the people he thanks is the player of the game, simply labeled “YOU”.

The gameplay is a top-down, vertical shooter. Many people seem to be familiar with the game Space Invaders and Galaga. Picture the game like that.

Only instead of a flying ship that shoots missiles, you have a flying girl that shoots magic. One of the more popular aspects of this games are the complex bullet patterns.

Here is an example of one that is “not too hard”.

The bullet patterns can be very hard to get through at times. Fortunately your character’s hitbox (where the bullet has to hit) is marked as a small dot in the center of your character. If you have not changed the default controls, you may hold down the Shift Key to see your hitbox. Holding down the shift key slows down your character but makes your bullets more focused, thus dealing more damage to an enemy. Also, during a typical game the player may be too panicked trying not to get hit by a bullet that they may not remember where their hitbox is. That is where focusing (holding shift down) comes in. Many players utilize focus to do more damage, but most importantly, make precise dodges with the slow movement of the focus state, as normal movement can be rather unstable when trying to get through that one little gap in a complex bullet pattern.

I wonder if anyone understood what I typed just now.

The gameplay isn’t the most popular aspect of the Touhou series, surprisingly enough. Fans of the Touhou series usually adore this game more for its well composed music, and the interesting characters.

Touhou music has a very distinct feel to it, but ZUN made it so that the songs are catchy and easy to listen to.

Many fans complain about how ZUN’s music is very well composed, yet his choice of instruments to use in the songs are rather lacking.

The music of Touhou is so popular that there are many album covers for many of the songs. A recent torrent of Touhou music easily contained over 10 Gigabytes! Although there are only twelve games’ worth of songs, song remixes are very common due to its popularity.

The setting and characters of Touhou are also very popular. Their personalities tend to make them stand out, especially with their dialogue in the game. Many people find these personalities to be very amusing.

The cast of Touhou is very large. ZUN tends to introduce at least seven new characters in each game he produces.

The two main characters are Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame. They have appeared in nearly every game in the series as playable characters, along with others.

Touhou takes in the world of Gensokyo, literally translated as “Illusion Land”.

Gensokyo used to be a haunted region of Japan. Youkai, translated as demons or ghosts, would terrorize the land, and heroic humans would come battle them.

This war between the youkai and humans ended in 1884 A.D, when Gensokyo was sealed off from Japan with the creation of the Hakurei border. It is the strongest boundary of Gensokyo to keep it sealed off from Japan.

The boundary is located in Hakurei Shrine, where Reimu Hakurei resides.

Reimu Hakurei is a shrine maiden that takes care of her shrine. In popular doujinshi (fan comics) that depict her, she is often desperate for donations for her shrine. Her weapon of choice for battle are her Ying-Yang orbs. The unique thing about her orbs is that instead of black and white, her orbs are Red and White.

Did I mention Reimu is a very carefree person? She slacks off most of the time while on her duties as shrine maiden.

In the games her motivation for fighting is that there is usually a problem in Gensokyo that may cause a huge disturbance if it is not fixed. As she does not want anything bad to happen, she sets out to find the source of the problem and stop it.

Marisa Kirisame is a eastern-raised westerner. She flies around with a broom and wears a typical witch outfit with an apron. Unlike Reimu, she is a hard worker. Reimu was born with natural talent for battle. Marisa wanted to train and catch up with her powers. She also has a very straight-forward personality compared to Reimu’s carefree personality.

Ok, I’m over the limit and I am sounding like a history teacher so I should probably stop before I bore all of you even more.

~nyo