Touhou Project: From Fan-Made Games to Consoles

Whether you're new to the Touhou Project series or a veteran of bullet hell games, you might've seen games like Touhou Luna Nights and Touhou Genso Wanderer on digital storefronts. These aren't by ZUN, the creator of the series, though. How does that even happen? Let's take a look at the history of Touhou fan games.

Created across 1995 and 1996 by one-man developer ZUN and with 17 mainline games (and plenty of spin-offs) to its name, Touhou Project is one of the longest-standing doujin game series (games created by hobbyists and sold at events like Comiket). The games in the series are mostly vertically-scrolling shoot-em-ups (shmups for short) with a focus on beautiful, deadly bullet patterns that you can barely squeeze through and unique score mechanics in each installment for players to dig into. Beyond the games themselves, the series is known for fantastic soundtracks that fans will remix forever, a huge cast of charming characters living in the series' setting, Gensokyo—a haunted part of Japan sealed away in the 17th century—and yōkai looking to cause trouble, usually kept in check by resident shrine maiden Reimu Hakurei and her cheeky witch friend Marisa Kirisame.

An unusual aspect of the series is that ZUN has guidelines available on what fans can do with works based on his creation, and they're fairly relaxed. Quickly summarized, you need to get permission to sell commercial works on big digital storefronts, but you're free to sell games, merch, and anything else in smaller-scale forms at local doujin events. As a result, a notable doujin game series got fan games of its own. In the mid-to-late 2000s, many of these fan games took an established game, genre, or theme and gave it a Touhou makeover—take Sega's classic arcade game After Burner, replace the F-14 Tomcat with Marisa on a broomstick, and you've got Master Burner.

More esoteric examples include Touhou Soccer (based on the Captain Tsubasa RPGs), MariAri (an adaptation of mouse-based puzzler Mario & Wario), Splatter Faith (a parody of Namco's ultra-violent Splatterhouse)—the list is endless. Interestingly, these would often mix in game mechanics Touhou is known for, like the bullet patterns, grazing (brushing against bullets for points) and score items that drop out of enemies, to make each game its own unique experience.

One highlight is Hachimitsu Kumasan's Touhou Defense Force because of how strange yet effective the combination with Sandlot's intergalactic-space-bug-mashing Earth Defense Force games is. It's scaled back, of course—EDF's 3D presentation is replaced with an isometric style, making the game feel more like an arcade game akin to Smash T.V. or Alien Syndrome—but the spirit of both series is there, creating a fun arena shooter with a wide variety of characters and weapons to blast bugs with. As if self-aware of how absurd it is, the game's cover even has Reimu wielding a Lancer weapon from the Gears of War series.

This isn't to say that all Touhou fan games from this era adopted this formula—it's just that they're often the most eye-catching. You could find plenty of original works too: UTG Software's Suwako's Jumping Shooting Game is a great example of using the Touhou setting and characters for an original and unique shmup, with an isometric perspective and the ability to hop over the bullets instead of having to dodge them. For those more into RPGs, the Labyrinth of Touhou series has elements of other RPGs but with the colorful cast of the series as party members. Some developers even created Touhou fan games as a stepping stone towards their own original projects—Desunoya, developer of Tobari and the Night of the Curious Moon, started out with Touhou games like Spinning Suika and MariAli's Trap Tower. There are countless more inventive Touhou fan games out there to discover, but the guideline restrictions make finding physical copies of these games in the West difficult, especially now.

This changed in 2014 as Sony and Mediascape launched the Play,Doujin! initiative to port doujin PC works like Astebreed and Croixleur Sigma to the PS4 and PS Vita, with ZUN on board to allow fan-made Touhou games to come to those platforms too. The first of these is a nice bridge of sorts—Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet, developed by CUBETYPE, was originally a PC release based on G.rev's Senko no Ronde series that combined shooting action with versus play and a focus on outmaneuvering your opponent to defeat them, pitting two players against each other in an enclosed arena. G.rev themselves took notice, and came to an agreement with CUBETYPE to move the game over to PS4 with G.rev's license and blessing.

Since then, many more Touhou fan games have shown up on PS4, Switch and Steam, either from Play,Doujin! themselves or other publishers. They aren't as obvious about their inspiration, but they still mix and match genres with the Touhou world. There's platform-adventure with the likes of AQUA STYLE's Touhou Double Focus and Team Ladybug's Touhou Luna Nights, the Mystery Dungeon-style RPG Touhou Genso Wanderer also by AQUA STYLE, even top-down 3D action like Ankake Spa's Touhou Scarlet Curiosity. One of the most recent hops right over the definition of a fan game—Touhou Spell Bubble on Switch by '80s arcade juggernaut Taito combines their own Puzzle Bobble with a rhythm game set to famous Touhou remixes and even new ones by Taito's famous in-house band ZUNTATA. Even better, most of these have received localized Western releases, making them easier to play than ever before.

All this history might bring up a question: aside from the guidelines, why are there so many Touhou fan games? The large cast and world of the series is a factor—each mainline Touhou game introduces about six new bosses, meaning there's a huge swathe of characters for fans to get attached to, make memes out of and, for the more adventurous fan, make games about. It's also ideal for fans who love the lore but can't quite get into the shoot-em-up genre—even if you're no good at those kinds of games, there's a puzzle or a platformer Touhou game out there for you. For non-fans, these releases can serve as an easy way to dip their toes into the series, its world, and its cast of characters to see if it's for them (especially since the few official mainline Touhou releases in the West on Steam are untranslated). Give them a try, and maybe soon you too will find yourself lost in bullet hell.