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Touhou Project is a series of shmup games developed by one man: our lord and saviour ZUN! Well, the recent games anyways. The extremely early Touhou games (released through 199X) were made by Amusement Makers, a team of university students including ZUN. The very first game was released on (199X) as a breakout style game, however every entry onwards would follow a shmup game format. After the 5th game, Mystic Square, Amusement Makers would disband and ZUN would continue Touhou Project on his own, composing the music, creasting his own game engine, designing the bullet patterns, coding the game, and drawing the art.
Touhou Project has been a series that I've become quite fond of over these years. I first involved myself with the Touhou name in 201X. After recently finishing Hollow Knight (I think), I was looking for other games to play. I stumbled across Touhou Nil Soul, which was a game that claimed to combine turn based strategy with... bullet hell? It was a curious combination so I decided to give it a shot. It was... not bad. THe gameplay is pretty interesting, but the quality of the game as a whole is kind of eeeeeh... I still wanted to dig into these "Touhous" though, I think it was my first introduction to East-Asian related media (if you don't count Hatsune Miku). Not long after, I found a game that instantly became a hit with me.
Fantastic Danmaku Festival 1 (abbreviated to FDF1) was the first game I played that was a real shmup. As with any new Touhou player, I of course decided to try the Lunatic difficulty first. Humbled instantly, I went back to Normal mode, it took about a month(???) or so to get my first 1cc (short for "1 Coin Clear," think of it as not having to insert a second credit to continue at an arcade). Then I found out about the Extra stage, and boy was it something. I think I played it for probably another month or so solely challenging that stage, and the farthest I got was losing to Flan's final spellcard twice. At some point I gave up, it was juts within reach yet 1 month of failure had made its toll on me. So next, I went on to the mainline games.
Imperishable Night was my first mainline Touhou game. I'm not sure why I decided on this game, as it was the 8th entry in the series. Most players start with TH6, since it's the earlier entry available for Windows. But I'm glad I did, because this one has turned to be my favourite entry in the series. Difficulty is on the easier side for beginners, a unique game gimmick, incredible music, this was the one! Yet my first clears were on Easy mode because I still sucked. Funny, considering I did Normal difficulty clears for FDF1 lol.