The Mass Prolificity of the Touhou Project

The Touhou series is one of the oldest and most prolific indie games still being released today. Touhou is most notable for the amount of fan content its community has generated. The numbers of videos, novels, comics, games and other derivative works for this series is incredibly massive. Even if someone has never heard of the games, there’s still a fair chance that they’ve seen a music video or two. For example, several versions of Bad Apple!! have reached over 10 million views on Youtube, as well as other Japanese streaming sites, like Nico Nico Douga. Searching Touhou on Nico Nico will bring up over 260,000 videos! While some of these may have been reuploaded, it’s easy to see the impact Touhou has had on its fanbase. This essay will cover the historical background, its inspirations and what has made it so popular.

The first set of Touhou games were released in the late 1990s for the PC-98. These five games are considered separate from the mainline Windows games that released later. The PC-98 games were developed by a group called Amusement Makers, a student group at Tokyo Denki University, that Zun, the main creator of Touhou, was a part of. The first Touhou game they made is Highly Responsive to Prayers. While the other main Touhou games are bullet hells, this was a scrolless 2D action game, sort of akin to Breakout. In it, Reimu Hakurei, the main protagonist of the Touhou games, bounces the Yin-Yang ball around to hit enemies. The rest of the PC-98 games features the introduction of the series’ stable bullet hell mechanics. Such as Reimu’s tiny hitbox, and the bomb items that clear the screen of bullets.

Most of Touhou’s main influences came from early arcade shoot ’em ups, the first being Space Invaders, a highly successful title which formed the entire genre. After which, Galaxian, and its sequel, Galaga, further refined the genre with more complicated attack patterns and the wave-like enemy encounters. Over more years, there would be many different takes on the genre, with some being tube shooters, horizontal or vertical shooters, multidirectional shooters or the bullet hell genre in 1993, with the release of Batsugun. Batsugun introduced the idea of enemies creating a large number of bullets, and giving the player a very small hitbox relative to their sprite. However, while Batsugun influenced many of Touhou’s mechanics, the biggest influence on Touhou, stated by Zun, was Darius Gaiden. Darius Gaiden was influential for having long and memorable boss fights, where they would have specific attack patterns and unique designs¹.

The first mainline Touhou game created for Windows is called The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil which released in 2002. This was developed by Zun out of stress while he was working for Taito². Later installments of the series generally released yearly, which were and still are being developed on the side of Zun’s main job. In 2007, Zun quit to Taito and later became a programmer for a different company³. Even now, Touhou releases on a semi-regular basis.

Because Touhou isn’t a commercialized game, the games are mainly sold through Comiket, doujin shops, the Hakurei Shrine Reitaisai (a convention for hosting Touhou content), and very recently, Steam. Comiket, or Comic Market, was originally established in 1975 as a convention for creators of doujinshi, or indie/fanworks. The origins of Comiket and doujinshi have always been rooted in the freedom of expression. Comiket was first established when members of a doujinshi circle were dissatisfied with the Nihon Manga Taikai, or the Japan Manga Convention, treating doujinshi circles unfairly and being unable to take criticism, so they established their own self-run convention. In the beginning, Comiket started small and was mostly about exchanging doujinshi with other creators, but eventually, they established booths for the general public, which has caused them to continue to grow and grow ever since⁴. Comiket has a massive impact on the Japanese indie scene and is the largest source of distribution for the many kinds of doujinshi like manga/comics, games, novels and other types of merchandise. Twice a year, Comiket gets more than half a million visitors, and 35,000 circles distributing their creations. Back when Zun was first creating his games, he also sold them at Comiket. At that time, doujin software wasn’t easily distributed, so a game like Touhou being sold was stood out⁵. It’s likely that a part of Touhou’s popularity in doujinshi circles had stemmed from that and being relatively early in the history of Comiket. Specifically, Zun released the first and second games at Comiket 52 in 1997, and released the first Windows game, Embodiment and Scarlet Devil, at Comiket 62 in 2002. The first Touhou doujins were also said to have been released shortly after⁶. Ever since then, Touhou’s place in Comiket grew larger and larger, with it being the series with the highest number of circles creating content for it, at least until recently. Nowadays, Touhou is still getting well over a thousand circles every Comiket⁷ in addition to holding its own convention, the Hakurei Shrine Reitaisai.

Zun has also found success in being sold in doujin shops. In Nele Noopes’ thesis, The Cultural Economy of Fanwork in Japan: Dōjinshi Exchange As a Hybrid Economy of Open Source Cultural Goods, he describes doujin shops as “[…] physical or online stores that sell new and second-hand dōjinshi, other dōjin works, and often also new or second-hand commercial goods like manga, anime, figures and trading cards. Some dōjin shops are independent, but the largest and most famous dōjin shops are chain stores with outlets in many major Japanese cities”⁴. In an interview with Zun, he said “At first I didn’t feel like consigning the game to retail, but I did, and when I thought ‘ah, it’s stacked up in the store’ and checked, they weren’t there. They were sold out. So, when I decided to put it up for sale again, Akibahara immediately had signs like ‘For Sale Again!’ up”⁸.

Knowing that Touhou found great success around doujinshi circles and shops can help explain why it’s so popular, but it isn’t the singular reason why Touhou is so prolific.

Touhou’s prolificness comes from a large variety of factors, but arguably the most important of which is the game’s art. Some readers might be surprised when booting up a Touhou game, that the characters actually look pretty ugly, especially when compared to the fan art. Generally, Zun has improved over time, but in the earlier Windows games, the proportions were usually completely off, the characters generally look pudgy and strange and his general drawing skills were not very good. However, Zun’s saving grace was the fact that, while the art wasn’t very good, the character designs were interesting and memorable. Nearly all of the characters have unique clothing designs and accessories. In addition to this, Touhou has a lot of care put into the character’s personalities. Almost none of the characters in Touhou have bland personalities, meaning that if someone were to play enough of the games, chances are they would find somebody that they would like. Each boss in Touhou also has their own unique attacks and attack names which help reflect their personality.

Zun is also very lax on the conditions that doujin creators must meet in order to create works based on Touhou. Generally, Zun requires people to respect the original creation (don’t spoil, don’t use the name of the games, etc.), to ask for his permission to sell commercial goods and don’t slander other groups or people⁹. Since Touhou has recently released on Steam, Zun has made it okay for other Touhou doujinshi to also release there. Zun has a couple other guidelines but compared to copyright laws in the West, these are very lax, and definitely helped contribute to Touhou’s prolificity.

One aspect of Touhou’s prolificness that’s not often discussed is the gameplay. But before I get into that, I would like to say that many of the creators and consumers of Touhou-based media haven’t actually played the games, but I believe that Touhou’s gameplay has played a large factor in how it’s gotten so prolific. Compared to more modern games, Touhou’s difficulty is much more in line with the early arcade games, where the developers made the games deliberately very hard in order to have the players give more credits. One could probably beat Embodiment of Scarlet Devil in under 30 minutes on the hardest difficulty, but almost nobody is likely to do that on their first try. To do a one-credit clear on normal difficulty, the easiest way to see the true ending can take dozens and dozens of tries. It takes a lot of dedication and practice to reach that level, that’s not even talking about the harder levels of difficulty like Hard and Lunatic. It’s obvious that this style of gameplay can greatly appeal to a small section of more hardcore gamers. Touhou also features a replay system which makes it easy to share achievements and helps create discussion around the game. Appealing very strongly to a specific niche creates a much more dedicated fanbase than something with more mass appeal.

Touhou’s art, gameplay and being in the right place at the right time at the rise of doujinshi, all help explain why it resonates so strongly with its audience. Touhou is truly a unique social phenomenon for having such a large and dedicated fanbase and being an important part of the doujinshi market in Japan.

Works Cited

¹ Ota Jun’ya. Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red. Translated by the Touhou wiki, Ichijinsha, 2005. https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Bohemian_Archive_in_Japanese_Red/Interview

² “[Translation] Nikenme Radio 3D Event, and the Birth of EoS.” Shrinemaiden.org, www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php/topic,13935.0.html. (Interview no long available).

³ Ota, Jun’ya. “Swedish Player1 Magazine.” Swedish Player1 Magazine. Accessed at https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Interview_in_Swedish_Player1_Magazine.

⁴ Noppe, Nele. “PhD thesis 3: Introduction to the system of dōjinshi exchange” Unjapanologist’s dojinshi research. http://www.nelenoppe.net/dojinshi/PhD_thesis_3:_Introduction_to_the_system_of_d%C5%8Djinshi_exchange#1975-1980:_Comiket_and_the_expansion_of_d.C5.8Djinshi-based_fan_culture.

⁵ Ota, Jun’ya. “Interview with Touhou Project Founder and Creator, ZUN.” Tokyo Otaku Mode News, 27 Dec. 2013, otakumode.com/news/52adc1a3f21de80b0e000232/Interview-with-Touhou-Project-Founder-and-Creator-ZUN-Part-1. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019.

⁶ “Doujin Portal.” Touhou Wiki, en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Doujin_portal.

⁷ Loveridge, Lynzee. “Fate Series Holds the Dōjin Throne at Comiket 94.” Anime News Network, 3 Aug. 2018, www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2018-08-03/fate-series-holds-the-dojin-throne-at-comiket-94/.135012.

⁸ Ota, Jun’ya. “Doujin Barrier: The Work Called Touhou and the Fantasy of Game Creation.” Saturday Program. Nagoya, Toukai High School. https://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Doujin_Barrier:_The_Work_Called_Touhou_and_the_Fantasy_of_Game_Creation

⁹ Yukari-sama. “New Derived Content Guidelines Announced.” Gensokyo.org, 14 Feb. 2011, www.gensokyo.org/archives/1682.