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
Overview
PC-98 Era
The Touhou series of games started on 1996 where all games are released on the Japanese PC-98 series of computers and its first five entries are native to that platform; standard PC users are only capable of playing them through an emulator such as Anex 86. By that time, the PC-9801 series of computers was already on the decline when these games were released (Replaced mainly by Windows95). Because of this, they are not well known among players.
The group making these games was called "Amusement Makers".
Windows Era
After the fifth entry of the game (Mystic Square), the Touhou Project became inactive for four years while ZUN began to develop several music scores for the Seihou games. He then left the group and made Touhou games for Windows under the group name, Team Shanghai Alice. The gameplay for Touhou series has improved tremendously compared to their PC-98 counterparts. The series was caught on by the fans and became popular since then. Most doujin works derived from the Touhou series are centered on these games.
Gameplay
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.
