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story time!! |
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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 the 90s) were made by Amusement Makers, a team of university students including ZUN. The very first game was released in 1997 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. He is still hard at work to this very day!
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 2020. 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.
I've since gone through a fair few of the mainline games, including a 1cc on Touhou 6, 7, 10. I gave up on 11 because it was too hard, and tried my hardest at 12 for a few weeks before also throwing in the towel. During this time I dabble in a couple Non-Touhou games from my humiliating defeat.
At some point, I started browsing English Touhou communities. I was on and off the Yukkuricraft Discord server, a Minecraft server centered around Touhou fans. I had stumbled across a certain Taiyouh posting some clips of danmaku in Minecraft, which I thought was pretty impressive. I had actually tried a similar thing in the past, but only with command blocks because I can't do plugins. I joined his server, and that place was the most regular server I interact with on Discord, even to this day.
After becoming a bit of a regular, I had gotten approval to host a small community event. On March 3rd, 2024, the Touhou 16: Hidden Star in Four Seasons Scoring Challenge went live! Racking up a total of... 5... participants, I found the very few other Touhou fans who actually played the games: Holsri, who was a regular member in the server at the time, and Ragna, a previous lurker, and the victor of the challenge. Some months later, Holsri had left, leaving just me and Ragna grinding out the Touhou games.
Being a much better player than me, Ragna's completion chart was much more filled in than mine, and I wanted to change that. As the only other person serious about clearing the games, he was my main drive to becoming a better player. I quickly accumulated more blots on the chart, but no match for the speed and skill he cleared games at. Still though, I had steadily gotten better, now able to clear the difficult TH11/12 and even move on to playing on Hard difficulty for some of the easier games. One user, Reach, had also become part of the part of the grind, joining in on the games. At some point, we started streaming runs to each other, and I eventually worked up the courage to actually talk in VC lol. Made it infinitely better a time, even if I didn't speak that often.
One day, a certain Squirrelfart had joined the server, and blew all of us out of the park with insane feat of the fabled Lunatic "Pristine Danmaku Hell" capture, one of the hardest attacks in the game. Not long after, a Crazy4Pokemon had also made their way in, yet again topping everyone with the ability to not only clear Lunatic level runs with ease as well as 75fps gameplay. The prescence of what we call a "superplayer" definitely helped with the touhou discussion channel's activity. It also set my sights on my first Lunatic level game...
After many months of Normal and Hard clears, it was time, Lunatic time. Ragna had already some Lunatic clears up his sleeve, and I wanted a taste of that sweet sweet success. But not just any game, not Mountain of Faith, the game which we call "the most fair skillcheck," not Ten Desires, the game which we call "your easiest Lunatic 1cc," no, let us challenge Touhou 11: Subterranean Animism! This game has a bit of reputation for being quite a step up in terms of difficulty. Not as difficult as TH12 or Th15, but still difficult. I also chose it because it was a game Ragna hadn't L1cc'd yet lol.
April Fools! Haha... Actually, it was that very day which I got my first Lunatic clear, April 1st, 2025. After months of grinding out the game with the practice patch, getting half decent capture rates for most spellcards, and the power of deathbomb galore, I clear my first Touhou game on Lunatic with 2 and 3/5 lives to spare! Insane, I never would have thought I'd end up with extra lives. Riding the high, I go straight back into practice for the ReimuB shottype, and end up with a second Lunatic clear a couple months later, after dying to the penultimate attack live on stream and internally dying.
afterwards...