(Work in progress. Need better organization! Girls are preparing ... (sorry, in-joke))

Touhou Project is a series of independently-made Japanese computer games. Simultaneously surprisingly-popular and relatively obscure, the series has a wide following all over the world. The series is known for having unique and interesting character designs, well-recieved music, and the fact that the fact that the official works are almost entirely the sole work of one man, Jun'ya Ota, better known by his alias of ZUN.

The Games

The games belong to the "bullet hell" genre ("danmaku"* in Japanese): they are similar to games where you're playing as some sort of spaceship or airplane or witch or whatever, hovering around on the bottom of the screen and firing up at other spaceships or airplanes; the name is derived from the fact that, rather than simply firing straight back at you, the enemies launch slow-moving, dense, pretty patterns of "bullets" (which can be anything from simple orbs of light to stylized butterflies and knives) which aren't dodged so much as navigated; a single hit usually causes you to lose a life. Needless to say, the genre is known for being immensely difficult.

In the case of Touhou Project, "spaceships" and "airplanes" are replaced by "fairies" and "magicians" and "monsters in the form of young women." It is a "doujin" series, meaning it is made by an independent self-publisher; the term generally holds connotations of an amateur, working for love rather than money and perhaps even at a loss. The series takes its name from the fact that each game has a Japanese title and an English title, and the former invariably begins with "Touhou," meaning "Eastern" or "of the Orient."

The setting is the magical land of Gensokyo,* formerly a wild region filled with magic and youkai (a catchall term for any nonhuman, non-divine mythical creature in the setting, mostly but not always Japanese). After the Great Hakurei Barrier was erected in approximately 1884, it has functioned as a sort of nature-preserve for the supernatural, shielding itself from the increasingly-scientific Outside World (that's us). In this setting, "danmaku" is a type of magical duel, following rules to ensure that nobody is seriously injured or killed, using particularly elegant (i.e. difficult, from the player's perspective) danmaku-patterns called Spell Cards. The two primary heroines of the series are Reimu Hakurei, a lazy and perpetually impoverished shrine maiden who maintains the Hakurei Barrier; and her friend-and-rival Marisa Kirisame, a teenage Western-style witch and kleptomaniac tomboy who, through a supreme amount of effort and hard work, has perfected the ability to fire massive blasts of destructive light. From time to time, they are joined by other characters (generally former enemies from previous games). The plot of each game tends to be that they've detected something amiss or some sort of disruption in nature, such as a scarlet mist threatening to permanently blot out the sun, or a newly-formed geyser spewing out evil spirits. They spend the entire game faffing about as they try to track down the culprit of the current Incident, fighting everyone who gets in their way.

With a few exceptions, each game is divided into six relatively short levels, with a particularly-difficult "extra stage" unlocked as a reward for playing particularly well. Every level ends with a "boss battle" against a particular character, each duel more difficult and lengthy than the last. The bosses of the first few levels tend not to have anything to do with the Incident du jour; the third and fourth are where things generally reach the main plot. Of particular note is the fact that nearly every single character in the series, named or otherwise, is female.

A History of the Series

In the mid nineties, there was a student at Tokyo Denki University named Jun'ya Ota. He had been composing music since high school, and decided that he wanted to make music for video games. To get experience for this, he decided to cut out the middleman and actually create the games all by himself. His medium of choice was the NEC PC-9801 (or PC-98 for short), a DOS-like operating system which never really caught on in the West, and which used FM synthesis to produce most of its sounds. He chose the name "ZUN Soft," taken from the Taito Corporation's sound team Zuntata, and with the publisher listed as Amusement Makers, an unofficial group in Tokyo Denki University's Department of Science and Engineering, which consisted of student programmers who generally took the name and did whatever they wanted with it. To this day, he is still known by the moniker of "ZUN."

The PC-98 Era

These games were primarily characterized by the fact that ZUN did not really have a clear "plan"; the first four games mostly had entirely different gameplay styles from each other, for instance, and there was very little sense of continuity, or even that the games took place in the same setting. They were:

• Touhou Reiiden(literally "Wondrous Eastern Legend"): Highly Responsive to Prayers (1995), a "bounce a ball around and try to hit all the blocks" sort of game.
• Touhou Fuumaroku("Recorded Sealing of an Oriental Demon"): Story of Eastern Wonderand (1996), the first actual bullet hell shooter.
• Touhou Yumejikuu("Oriental Dream Dimensions"): Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream (1997), a two-player game in which each character fought in their own playing field, and indirectly caused each other trouble.
• Touhou Gensokyo("Fantastic Home Village of the East"): Lotus Land Story (1998), which more firmly established the bullet-hell nature of the series.
• Touhou Kaikidan("Fantastic Eastern Tales of Romance"): Mystic Square (1998), which helped solidify certain concepts which would subsequently appear in the rest of the series.

The Early Windows Era

After about four years, ZUN decided to move to the Windows operating system, and began using much more modern musical synthesizers -- chiefly the Edirol SD-90 Studio Canvas, which featured a particular trumpet-synthesizer which would become iconic in ZUN's musical works. Though he kept the numbers of the games (i.e. the first Windows game created was the "sixth" Touhou Project game), in all other respects it was effectively a reboot of the series, with very few references to the PC-98 games, nor indeed a whole lot of evidence that they actually happened in the new continuity.

• Touhou Koumakyou("Eastern Lands of the Scarlet Devil"): Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (2002) was the "baseline" Windows game, upon which the entire rest of the main series is based.
• Touhou Youyoumu("Bewitching Eastern Dream"): Perfect Cherry Blossom (2003) solidified the general stylistic appearance of the series, as well as most of the sound.
• Touhou Eiyashou("Eternal Night Vignette from the East"): Imperishable Night (2004), in which the player chose one of four "teams" consisting of a human and a youkai, and switched between them during gameplay.
• Touhou Kaeizuka("Oriental Flower Viewing Mound"): Phantasmagoria of Flower View (2005), another two-player indirect-duelling game.

In addition, ZUN released two books which covered information from an in-character perspective: Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red (2005), a collection of articles and interviews supposedly written by the character Aya Shameimaru, a crow-tengu who was known primarily for placing creativity and sensationalism above accuracy or timeliness, for a newspaper she created; and Perfect Memento in Strict Sense (2006), a cultural record written by a young, more-or-less-ordinary human historian named Hieda no Akyuu.*

There was also a manga series starring a trio of mischievous fairies, with the titles Eastern and Little Nature Deity (2005-2006), Strange and Bright Nature Deity (2006-2010), and Oriental Sacred Place (2009-present); he also started a short-story series called Curiosities of Lotus Asia (with a compilation released in 2010), starring an eccentric half-human shopkeeper named Rinnosuke Morichika, the first named male character to exist in the Windows era.

There were also two spinoff games:

• Touhou Suimusou("Gathering Dreams in the East"): Immaterial and Missing Power (2004), numbered "7.5" due to being set between Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night, was a two-player fighting game developed in conjunction with fellow independent-game-developers Twilight Frontier.
• Touhou Bunkachou("Oriental Cultural Album"): Shoot the Bullet (2005), numbered "9.5," a Bullet Hell game starring Aya as she snapped photographs of danmaku-patterns, rather than directly fighting her opponents.

The Middle Windows Era

After two years without any new games, the series underwent another shift, although not as great as the move from PC-98 to Windows. In addition to a subtle visual and auditory stylistic change, the second era was characterized by a continuity between the different games, with the events or characters of each game indirectly setting off the plot of the next.

• Touhou Fuujinroku("Eastern Wind God Chronicles"): Mountain of Faith (2007), the tenth main game, which introduced the Moriya Shrine, housing a pair of gods and their chief priestess, who arrived from the Outside World.
• Touhou Chireiden("Eastern Palace of the Earth Spirits"): Subterranean Animism (2008), which took place almost entirely underground, a hitherto unknown and unexplored region in the setting.
• Touhou Seirensen("Star-Lotus Ship of the East"): Undefined Fantastic Object (2009), the first game in which nearly every single character was directly connected to the main Incident, and which introduced a new faction, the Myouren Temple.
• Touhou Shinreibyou("Eastern Divine Spirit Mausoleum"): Ten Desires (2011), which introduced a rival faction to the Myouren Temple, the Taoists.

From 2008 to 2009, ZUN created a collaborative series which served as a sequel of sorts to Imperishable Night, called Touhou Bougetsushou(Ephemeral Moon Vignette from the East), which consisted of a series of short stories called Cage in Lunatic Runagate, and two manga series, Silent Sinner in Blue and Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth, which he created with with artists Aki Eda and Toshihira Arata respectively. In 2009, ZUN released The Grimoire of Marisa, another in-character work from Marisa Kirisame's perspective, examining various characters' Spell Cards. Starting 2010, he began another manga series called Touhou Ibarakasen("Eastern Thorned Great Poet"): Wild and Horned Hermit, introducing a new character named Kasen Ibaraki, who seemed to have a strange as-yet-unexplained connection with certain members of the cast.

• Touhou Hisouten(Eastern Sky of Scarlet Perception): Scarlet Weather Rhapsody (2008), numbered 10.5, another fighting game developed in conjunction with Twilight Frontier.
• Touhou Hisoutensoku* (2009), numbered 12.3, an expansion of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody; it had no English component, because "Hisou Tensoku" was the name of a character (sort of).
• Touhou Bunkachou: Double Spoiler (2010), numbered 12.5, a sequel to Shoot the Bullet, with which it shared the Japanese component of its title.
• Yousei Daisensou: Touhou Sangetsusei("Great Fairy Wars: Eastern Three Fairies") (2010), numbered 12.8, starring a popular ice-fairy from the main series named Cirno, and with the three fairies from the Nature Deity mangas as her opponents.
• Touhou Shinkirou("Eastern Tower of Heart Fabric"): Hopeless Masquerade (2013), another Twilight Frontier fighting game, this time with an entirely new system in which the characters actually mostly flew, concerning a rivalry between the Myouren Temple and the Taoist faction.

The Current Era

After the

• Touhou Kishinjou("Eastern Castle of Shining Needles"): Double Dealing Character (2013), with a plot revolving around the protagonists' weapons becoming possessed and going haywire, along with several youkai simultaneously and seemingly-independently deciding to rebel against humanity.
• Touhou Shinpiroku("Deep Secret Record"): Urban Legend in Limbo: (2014) Numbered 14.5, a Twilight Frontier fighting game resembling
• Touhou Kanjuden("Eastern Ultramarine Orb Tale"): Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom (2015), another storyline sequel to Imperishable Night, and a more direct sequel to Urban Legend in Limbo

The Fan Following

No description of Touhou Project would be complete without mentioning the highly dedicated and creative fans. There are massive amounts of fanworks: comics, music, videos,