Let's play indie game #3: Touhou

All right, I guess I should finally sit down and write about the last out of three indie games I'm playing - I planned to write this earlier, but my schedule is quite packed lately (that, plus I was going for an anime-manga convention recently - might write that one later)

Anyway, we'll now look at the shoot em up indie game, Touhou.


Touhou is a danmaku game (aka bullet hell, aka curtain shooter) that is made for PC by Team Shanghai Alice, which consist solely of a person called ZUN (kinda similar story with Cave Story, really)

What makes Touhou so interesting is that there are already 12 (!) series of the game (6 of them for PC 98, and the rest for Windows), although if you count the other non-danmaku Touhou games, there'd be 16 (!!) of them (with the 17th one in the making).

When you consider that the series is developed mostly by this one guy (I said mostly, not all), you couldn't help but be impressed.

Now if you're like a certain someone who heard the phrase shoot em up for the first time, you might be thinking of a lot of things.

But does this image come to mind?

Screenshot from Touhou - can you see where's the character?

Yes, that's right: this game operate on the basis of shooting up enemy, collecting power ups and points, and trying your damn hardest to stay alive by dodging those barrage of bullets (hence the term 'bullet hell').

When I just started to get myself involved with the game, I hit the roof (figuratively speaking), biting my fingers due to the sheer difficulty of the game (and on easy mode, even!). At that time, I honestly thought that I wasn't going to play any further series of the game (I started with the 6th one)... and yet I've played all the way until the 11th series (I've yet to play the PC 98 version - I might play them, but I'll probably pass).

I'm still not sure what it is that really pull me into the game - sure, there's the fandom, but to be honest, I wasn't that much interested in these kind of games in the first place...

Well, if I wanted to put my finger on it, I'd say it has something to do with the characters and the music. If you wanted to look it another way, I guess I'm sort of addicted to the game (and the series in general, heh).

Anyway, here's a bit of video for an introduction to Touhou, if you're looking for something that is of much brief and clearer nature (but it doesn't have that personal view on the game like this post, hahaha)

By the way, if you're looking for the games, I'd suggest going to this blog (which also have some of the games's album and cover albums, which I would also recommend)


By the way, I've yet to talk about Touhou in details (oh yes, there's more to the series than just the games). I'll write it later when I have the time (yeah, we never seem to get enough time to do everything that we wanted, eh)

Till then, peace out~