This Week in Anime
Touhou Fever Forever

by Christopher Farris & Sylvia Jones,

This week in anime, Chris and Sylvia discuss the long lasting impact of Touhou on the gaming world, manga world, and beyond.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

@RiderStrike @BWProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Chris
TWIA writers do their best and are preparing. Please wait warmly until it is ready.
chris01
© ZUN, Team Shanghai Alice, All Rights Reserved
Sylvia
We originally had a cool column for Pride lined up, but dastardly forces outside of our control have forced us to punt that idea down the road. Hopefully, we can return to it next week. In the meantime, we've been racking our brains for an appropriately gay substitute topic, and after much pondering and warmly waiting, we've arrived at a magical place full of women with toxic personalities and silly hats.
sylvia01
© 2002,2026 Team Shanghai Alice © 2026 Team Shanghai Alice/Shanghai Alice Reprise
Welcome to Gensokyo, Chris.
No matter what we do or how far we come, like the Comiket trends, we always wind up back with the Touhou girls.
chris02
© Team Shanghai Alice ©Ankake Spa. Licensed to and published by XSEED Games / Marvelous USA, Inc.
Besides, it's not like this is a totally random pull on our part. Last week only saw a reveal of a whole-ass remake of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the very first Windows game in the Touhou Project cycle. As far as the franchise itself is concerned, it's absolutely Pride-Month-Approved!

At least as far as the Japanese Nintendo Direct anyway. Man, we were robbed over here on the Western side. I wanted to hear everyone's favorite chipper English-language Direct announcer describing all this.

It's fine, I can hear the timbre of him pronouncing "Reimu" with perfect clarity in my mind's ear. As far as I'm concerned, that's real.

What still feels unreal to me is the existence of this remake in the first place, let alone a remake that's receiving an official English translation available on all of the important contemporary video game platforms. Such a thing would have been unthinkable to me back when I grazed my first bullet—back when I was but a wee lass (in college).

Between this and the Haruhi Suzumiya column, our Weeb Origins are coming up uncomfortably regularly in this column for us. An inevitability of age, I suppose. Regardless, my first bullet-curtain brush with Touhou also came in college. Melty Blood opened up the door to doujin fighters for me, so I also checked out works from Twilight Frontier, including their Key-infused Eternal Fighter Zero and their Touhou spin-off, Immaterial and Missing Power.
chris03
© 2004 Twilight Frontier, Team Shanghai Alice, All Rights Reserved
Of course, I think I knew that Touhou was primarily a shooter by that point and had maybe seen the characters around before, but it really speaks to the ubiquity of these frilly fillies on the otaku web by that point that I can't be 100% sure where I first figured that.
I'm fuzzy on the "how" and "why" of my intro to Touhou. I mean, I've mentioned before that I was a peruser of 4chan at the time, and when the /jp/ board started, Touhou was a daily fixture on the site. Fanart. Music. Game talk. If I had to guess, all that osmosis is what pulled me down the rabbit hole. And I know for a fact that Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the first game I played shortly thereafter, so I'm eagerly waiting to revisit it almost 20 years later.
sylvia02
© 2002,2026 Team Shanghai Alice © 2026 Team Shanghai Alice/Shanghai Alice Reprise
For those keeping score, this is the 6th Touhou game in the main series. The prior five came out on PC-98, so you didn't see nearly as much of them back in those days. EoSD, on the other hand, was easily playable on PC (once you fiddled with your locale in Windows, but you already did that if you were playing visual novels [which I was]).
Yeah, visual novels, that's totally why I'd fiddled with my PC's locale, to play the Japanese visual novels.
chris04
But yeah, similar to the aforementioned Melty Blood, Touhou's relative ease of access was almost certainly part of its rise among young otaku who'd already spent most of their disposable income on four-episode DVDs of Mai-Hime at Suncoast. I mentioned I started with the fighting game, but I too found my way back to Scarlet Devil, plus its follow-up, Perfect Cherry Blossom.
chris05
© ZUN, Team Shanghai Alice, All Rights Reserved
I had to at least try the one where I could play as Sakuya, my court-mandated favorite Touhou girl (everyone has one).
Gosh, there are so many good Touhou girls. Reimu is a beast. Flandre has Christmas ornaments on her wings. Aya stars in some neat spin-offs where you have to take photos of bullet patterns, not just dodge them. Utsuho is a nuclear weapon crow who throws suns at you. Chen was the star of all those classic bkub comics. But I think I have to crown Patchouli Knowledge as my personal favorite. Check out this low-res PNG. She looks so comfy.
sylvia03
© 2002 ZUN, Team Shanghai Alice
I'm honestly shocked you didn't pick drunk oni Suika, but at least Patchouli does get a Modelo every now and then.
People think she's gloomy, but she still listens to hip hop and stuff.

With 20 mainline games, a bunch of official spinoffs from ZUN himself, and a veritable ton of fangames and other doujin content, there's a Touhou for everybody. If you don't have one, you just haven't found her yet.

By the way, I loved seeing ZUN in the latest announcement, looking exactly like ZUN has always looked. Same hat. Same beer. All's right with the world.

sylvia04
© 2026 Team Shanghai Alice/Shanghai Alice Reprise
Looking incredible for a man who's basically made all these games solo for so many decades. Between him and the aforementioned Suika, consider this an addendum to the previous anime drinking column.
chris06
© KADOKAWA, Mizutaki, ZUN
And going back to the aforementioned, you dropping a reference to Chen and her immortalization by bkub makes clear how finding a favorite Touhou doesn't necessarily require playing the games. As alluded to (and why we're talking about this instead of leaving it all to Jean-Karlo in This Week In Games), Touhou hasn't just been a game series in ages. It's steeped in the background radiation of anime-and-manga-lovin' subculture.
chris07
Image via bkub
I feel like Touhou is one of the most important pillars for modern anime/manga fandom, yet receives a disproportionately small amount of ink in official/professional channels abroad. But it makes sense given that it's a unique phenomenon driven almost wholly by fan culture. ZUN built the scaffolding, but Touhou in totality is a labyrinthine amalgam of unofficial doujin works made, shared, and exchanged between a large swathe of creative, like-minded weirdos. Like bkub.
There are at least a few of these in the timeline, but it really is plausible that we wouldn't have Pop Team Epic if not for Touhou, which is wild to think about.
chris08
© 大川ぶくぶ/竹書房・キングレコード
But yeah, this is maybe why it was hard to talk about Touhou in the professional anime publication sphere of yesteryear, since so much of it was tied up in fanworks. These defined not just the series, but also fandom platforms of the time, like Niconico Douga. I'm pretty sure that before I was even entirely sure that Touhou was a video game where girls shot lots and lots of lasers, one of the first things I heard about it was "There's a fan-made music video where this girl Alice realizes she's in love with this witch named Marisa."

Again: Happy Pride.

A yuri urtext. I remember watching that music video in Flash. Remember Flash? IOSYS did a bunch of these, and they emerged as one of the biggest doujin music producers of that era, but "Marisa Stole the Precious Thing" broke containment. Moreover, Touhou is so influential that it spawned a bunch of memes that people digested without ever knowing it had anything to do with Touhou. That "Ronald McDonald insanity" video that was everywhere 18 years ago?

That's a remix of "U.N. Owen was Her?", Flandre's theme from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Coming soon to Switch 2!

These songs showed up in everything from "Futae no Kiwami" remixes (holy crap, remember that one) to those custom autoplay Mario videos that made the rounds.
chris09
© 2020 DONUTS Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
I am glad that the increased presence and awareness of Touhou in the West means the original songs are getting their due context. You could even play "U.N. Owen was Her?" in the English version of D4DJ, alongside a host of other Touhou songs, including...a remix of "Cirno's Perfect Math Class", another IOSYS joint. We are through the looking glass on fan stuff, which is a real embodiment of ZUN's laid-back approach to fandom works and how their propagation has propelled Touhou.
chris10
© 2020 DONUTS Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Yeah, ZUN certainly didn't have to be as ridiculously permissive with doujin works as he has been throughout his career, but Touhou and the wider world are both much richer for it. I remember trawling the /jp/ Touhou music threads and being overwhelmed by how much music had already been made, and how much continued to be made with each subsequent convention in Japan. There's some very esoteric and very interesting stuff out there. My personal favorite comes from the circle Fragile Online, who did several remix albums reimagining Touhou tracks in the style of Utena's duel choruses by J. A. Seazer.

Who could this possibly be made for besides me? Yet that's the beauty of Touhou. It's there for everyone to blend with their particular special interests.

That's why I got into it via fighting games! And why I'm now here for it, crossing over with my mobile anime rhythm games! It wasn't even the more esoteric options of D4DJ, even my big-name BanG Dream! girls covered "Bad Apple!"
chris11
© BanG Dream! Project ©Bushiroad
God, "Bad Apple!!" Talk about impact, it takes a special kind of fan-made music video to go on to become its own format.
And it's still an active format at that! I do not want to link to it for obvious reasons, but when looking up "Bad Apple" on YouTube earlier today, one of the top results I got was a video titled "Bad Apple, But It's the Epstein Files." Do with that information what you will.
Pretty sure spreading that information is the intent there. Go on, girls, change history again as you have so many times before. Shadow-puppet music videos aren't even the only format Touhou's arguably responsible for. FumoFumo, the inimitable marketable plushie now applied to tons of anime-adjacent characters, got popularized by Touhou too!
chris12
© 上海アリス幻樂団
Upset I missed out on the Patchouli Fumo, but not upset enough to buy one on the secondary market. On a similar but more obscure aesthetic note, the Yukkuri phenomenon feels like one of the more inexplicable tendrils of the Touhou leviathan. I'm not entirely sure myself why funny ASCII art of Marisa and Reimu telling us to "take it easy!!" became a meme, and I was there when it happened.
sylvia05
© Team Shanghai Alice
I remember starting freaked out by the rotund, disembodied Yukkuri heads, only to loop around to appreciating the weird charms they stood for in this corner of the web.
chris13
That's the other thing with Touhou's propelling fan-works and just how out there they could get. Both of the inexplicable weird and NSFW weird variety. I remember catching some positively filthy music videos featuring Sakuya with her vampiric masters on early YouTube back in the day, which doesn't even touch everything doujin artists had these girls doing to each other in the Comiket aisles. I think this is also emblematic of the series' ubiquity in this arena. Much like someone could've heard a Touhou tune in another context without being aware of its origins, someone could have seen a rude Touhou doujin on AerisDies before they knew what series these characters were from.
That's a huge topic in itself. We've already touched on bkub, but there are several successful mangaka who cut their teeth in the Touhou doujinshi mines. Nio Nakatani may be renowned for her work on Bloom Into You, but she refined her yuri mastery in the lesbian playground that is the world of Touhou manga. Which is obvious when you look at her Pixiv.

And just for you, here's some excellent RemiSaku from her from 2009.

Bless. I'd say I'm hoping for the Scarlet Devil remake to prompt a resurgence of fan art for Sakuya and others, but it never really stopped. Other series like Kan Colle and Blue Archive topping Touhou for the fanworks crown only to lose it later is a recurring story in itself. It's inescapable. It shows up in class lectures for TobyFox...and a reminder that Undertale and Deltarune are more things we might not have if not, at least partially, for Touhou.

Creators cutting their teeth on Touhou works and otherwise being inspired by it makes it apparent that, for all the goofy formative memery surrounding the series, it does mean a lot for a lot of people. Hell, you and I have described multiple corners of our own paths that led us here that were informed by Touhou, and I think that's valuable to appraise alongside all the funny references.

Nowadays, whenever I think of the phrase "Touhou Project", I pronounce it in my head the same way Toby Fox does. That's almost as important as Undertale is to me.

And I know we've gotten deep in the fandom weeds already, but it's worth emphasizing that the games themselves are really good! ZUN is a savant when it comes to designing the Spell Cards (i.e., the bullet patterns for each enemy's attack), and the bullet hell gameplay is very satisfying to learn and master. He's also a talented composer, as evidenced by the surfeit of fan arrangements we've touched upon. And even his art, while not as technically refined, has plenty of charm. It's a mark of the doujin spirit that drives him—that it's okay to be an "amateur" and still follow through on your passions and vision.

sylvia06
© 2008 ZUN, Team Shanghai Alice
One of my favorite figures in my collection is this Reimu that's accurate to ZUN's style. She's the cutest.
sylvia07
© Team Shanghai Alice
ZUN's original Touhou game art really is a testament to the creative doujin spirit the series runs parallel to. These goofy sandwich people captured the hearts of a whole generation of nerds and led to the propagation of works we've discussed here. That's the power of passion.
chris14
© ZUN, Team Shanghai Alice, All Rights Reserved
It does mean I was more than a little disappointed in ZUN using generative AI for some of the spell card backgrounds in last year's Touhou Kinjoukyou: Fossilized Wonders, and I really hope the response has gotten him to reflect and walk that sort of thing back.

There's no AI disclosure section on the Scarlet Devil remake's Steam page at this point, so that's an encouraging sign, at least.

Ditto. I mean, he's hardly the only artist being headass about AI nowadays, but I hope most people can see how anathema that is to everything we've been talking about. No AI is going to come up with Yukkuri.

And speaking of Steam, there's an already-robust collection of Touhou fangames available for purchase on there if bullet hells aren't your thing. Touhou sports. Touhou fighting games. Touhou roguelikes. Touhou visual novels. Touhou Metroidvanias. Touhou RPGs. A Touhou in every pot.

sylvia08
© Team Shanghai Alice © 2019-2020 team ladybug / Why So Serious?
And you can actually buy most of ZUN's games on there too. I've done it. I legally own Subterranean Animism. But they don't have official English patches, which, to be clear, doesn't really impede your enjoyment. Bullet hell is a universal language. And that language is "how the heck am I supposed to dodge all of this????"
Thank you for reminding me that Koumajou Remilia: Scarlet Symphony has been on my to-play list ever since I had this art as my desktop wallpaper back in the day.
chris15
© Team Shanghai Alice ©2022 Frontier Aja All Rights Reserved. Published by CFK.
I do wonder if Embodiment of Scarlet Devil getting an official English-language release will prompt yet another new wave of anime nerds falling into the Touhou trappings. As you said, the fangames have had a strong presence already. You could buy physical copies of some of those on Switch in Target, which I gotta say is a very surreal space for a 2000s-raised weeb to turn and see Reimu staring back.
chris16
© Team Shanghai Alice ©Ankake Spa. Licensed to and published by XSEED Games / Marvelous USA, Inc.
Yeah, it's funny that, in America, it is currently easier to find and get into any one of these fangames than the originals. I'm sure they have plenty of fans who know nothing of Touhou's origins. But that also feels true to the spirit we've been returning to. That's what makes Touhou Touhou. It's a franchise made by a doujin sicko, for doujin sickos. And while spaces like Vocaloid and gacha games possess similarly prolific fans, Touhou's original quintessence stands alone.
That's why I'm glad that even all these years later, Gensokyo's influence is still finding new realms to reach into. It's regularly referenced, but never recreated, and that's why even a remake can be big news to discuss over tea.
chris17
© ESPN Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. Original art by DeviantArt user Daemoniken
Every generation deserves to see these girls fighting. And kissing. And more. In every conceivable format and venue, into eternity. As long as a single weeb draws breath, there will be Touhou.
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