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Touhou
alt title(s): Touhou Project
Caution: May cause estrogen poisoning.

Touhou Project is a series of Doujinshi scrolling shooter games in the "Bullet Hell" subgenre, developed by Team Shanghai Alice. It is notable for its high difficulty level, intricate bullet patterns, and the fact that every character in the series is a Little Miss Badass, Cute Monster Girl, or Cute Witch, and wears some degree of Elegant Gothic Lolita clothing. Much of the popularity of the series, however, comes from its large Doujinshi and Shipping community; this is unusual (but not quite unique) in that the community is creating doujinshi based on doujinshi. In the case of amateur music videos made with doujinshi arrangements of the in-game music tracks, this is taken to yet another level. Indeed, most of the characters are given only a framework personality in the games, traditionally leaving most of the details up to Fanon. However, the series creator has written quite a bit of manga, stories, and general information for it as well.

Nearly all the games in the series have a plot along these lines: In the land of Gensokyo (a Fantasy Kitchen Sink in Japan which exists halfway inside Another Dimension thanks to a powerful magical barrier), some Big Bad with a lot of Applied Phlebotinum on their hands has gotten bored and decided to mess with the laws of nature. Miko Reimu Hakurei or magician Marisa Kirisame, due to annoyance and greed respectively (occasionally with playable versions of bosses from previous games thrown in for kicks), must go out and fix the problem. They spend the first 2 levels wandering aimlessly, and defeating random monsters/people that have no relation to the Big Bad. The third boss, however, happens to know something about the incident and points them in the right direction. The fifth boss is the Big Bad's Battle Butler, and the sixth boss is the Big Bad herself. After defeating the Big Bad, the main character will have a tea party with the Big Bad and their Battle Butler, and then be asked to perform some task which involves defeating the Big Bad's Rival, which takes the form of the game's ultra-difficult Extra stage.

Like Cave Story, it's also outstanding in that the entirety of the games, including the sprite graphics, 3d graphics, character portraits, dialogue, story, music composition, programming, bullet-patterns, and concept is all done by one person (known as "ZUN").

NOTE: Only general tropes for the series as a whole should go here. For character-specific ones, check out the character sheet (under construction)
Related Tropes:

  • Amateur Photographer (The Gaiden Game Shoot the Bullet, where you play a reporter whose sole method of dealing with enemies and bosses is taking pictures of them.)
  • All There In The Manual (Touhou games do a great deal of storytelling in-game compared to most top-down shooters, but some of the details of the plot are only available from the additional material on the game CDs. Additionally, most of the information about Gensokyo in general comes from the add-on books released separately from the games.)
  • Alternate Character Interpretation (Since 80-90% of material related to the series is fan-created, this happens quite a bit.)
  • Amazon Brigade (The entire worldsetting (minus Rinnosuke, Youki, Genjii, and Unzan) is female, so any group of characters who fight together can qualify.)
  • Angst What Angst (There are a fair number of characters with grim or even tragic histories, and hints that a few others have their troubled sides, but very little angst occurs onscreen (with a few exceptions, mostly involving Mokou) and the tone of the series tends towards carefree. Honorable mention for Parsee, whose character concept essentially revolves around being unhappy, but that's played as comedy.)
  • Art Evolution (So much of it. SO much of it. Though it has produced some interesting Memetic Mutations such as Undead Zombie Reimu.)
    • Really, just look at Reimu's evolution alone
    • The most recent iteration, UFO, has been praised as ZUN's art improving.
  • Artists Are Not Architects (In particular, boss characters tend to look taller in cut-ins than they would logically seem to be based on their sprites or other aspects of their character - most fans depict Remilia as fairly short, but her cut-in makes her as tall as Reimu.
    • Similarily, Reisen's cut-in makes her look short. However, ZUN placed her lower so that her rabbit ears could be fully seen.
    "If their sizes appear to be different on the game screen than given above, it's because of some mystic force like perspective, so pay it no mind. :-)" — ZUN, after discussing some characters' heights in an e-mail
  • Awesome But Impractical ( Marisa's Half the shot-types in Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism, namely MoF's ReimuC and MarisaA, and SA's ReimuC and...all of Marisa's. Undefined Fantastic Object is actually pretty good with avoiding this, with all-around great shot-types...and MarisaB.)
  • A Wizard Did It (Pretty much the explanation for anything odd that happens. Gensokyo as a whole supposedly runs off the disbelief of the outside world so no level of weirdness is out of reach.)
  • Bad Powers Bad People (Played straight most of the time, but subverted with Yamame Kurodani and Hina Kagiyama)
    • There are no bad people in Gensokyo.
      • There are lots of powerful people and there are lots of bored people. Bad things happen when those categories overlap.
  • Battle Butler (Nearly every penultimate boss is at least directly employed by or a servant of the final boss. Slightly subverted in Subterranean Animism, though, in that the stage 5 and 6 bosses are actually the pets of the stage 4 boss.)
  • Beam Spam (Every single goddamn character)
    • A notable example is Shou in Undefined Fantastic Object, who... well, just see for yourself.
  • Berserk Button (The fandom has one in the question "What anime is this?". Largely justified, though.)
    • A number of 2D shooter fans don't take kindly to mentions of Touhou.
  • Bonus Boss (Every game has at least one EX boss...)
  • Bonus Dungeon (...and this is where they hang out.)
  • Bonus Level Of Hell (Not the Extra Stage, but rather the frequent trips to Makai, the Netherworld, etc.)
    • Ironically enough, the 11th game, Subterranean Animism, takes place underground in the former location of hell, and the game's Bonus Dungeon is the only stage to take place above ground.
    • More in line with the example is the 12th game, which does indeed end in Makai.
  • Boss Subtitles (Every boss and playable character gets one of these. If a character shows up in more than one game, she often gets a new subtitle for each appearance.)
    • Subverted by Reimu, who has kept her "Shrine Maiden of Paradise" title almost exclusively.
  • Breaking The Fourth Wall (Nearly the entire MAlice scenario does this in Subterranean Animism. This continues into the Extra, where after defeating the mid-boss, Alice says to Marisa, "Look, it's the extra dungeon for after you beat the game. Good luck!" Oddly enough, however, they're treating the game as an RPG.)
    • Also, in Imperishable Night there are occasional bits of dialogue that make it clear the characters are explicitly following Bullet Hell game tropes.
    • And in the Extra Stage in Perfect Cherry Blossom, Reimu refers to Chen as "just a Stage 2 boss" when talking to Ran.
    • In Undefined Fantastic Object, when Sanae is asked about a "secret treasure", she replies "Are you talking about those charms with 'P' and 'point' written on them?"
  • Bullet Hell (The Touhou games are the best known examples of the genre.)
  • Calling Your Attacks (Any Spell Card declaration results in the name of the card showing up at the top/bottom of the screen. Also, in the fighting game Immaterial and Missing Power, you choose one specific Spell Card out of three for each of your life bars, and cannot actually use them until you input a command to declare them.)
  • Carnivore Confusion (Gensokyo has a food chain. You're not at the top of it.)
  • Cast Herd (Given the enormous number of characters, it isn't surprising they tend to be split into distinct groups. Sometimes this is done per-game, but other times it's done based on location (Eientei/Moriya), based on intellect ("Team 9"), and so forth. Tends to be subverted over time as each group stars in works that elaborate on their members' characterization.)
  • Celestial Bureaucracy
  • Cherry Blossoms (Present in Perfect Cherry Blossom of course. They apparently contain the power of spring. Some of the bosses charge their spell cards by absorbing cherry blossoms.)
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe (The premise of Mountain of Faith (along with Gods Need Prayer Badly). Also somewhat inverted in the rest of the series: according to Rinnosuke, things such as magic, youkai, gods, etc. are able to exist in Gensokyo because people in the outside world actively disbelieve in them — for instance, he deduces that the crested ibis is becoming endangered or extinct in the outside world because of a sudden proliferation in Gensokyo, and in the tie-in manga Silent Sinner in Blue, he manages to find information on the moon landings because enough people have become convinced that they never happened.)
    • That theory has a number of holes in it due to of the appearance of things such as a Nintendo Gameboy in the side stories.
      • Items (and people) can also find their way into Gensokyo normally, especially in places where the border is affected such as the Hakurei shrine or Muenzuka. It's just that the more obscure and forgotten something is in the outside world, the more likely it is to turn up in Gensokyo, from disputed ideas to endangered birds to obsolete electronics.
      • Also, the Gameboy is pretty close to extinct these days, so you could argue that a lot of people "don't believe in it". Likewise with cameras that use film. No, if you really wanted to criticize the theory, you'd point out the iPod.
  • Clothing Damage (Apparently what happens when one loses a life.)
  • Clown Car Base (The Scarlet Devil Mansion. Hand Waved: Sakuya uses her time and space manipulation to cause the effect.)
  • The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard (Phantasmagoria of Flower View: Unless you're playing as either Medicine, Aya, or Shikieiki, you will almost never hit the computer until about two or three minutes into the match. Evidently, Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream was even worse.)
    • Also part of the premise of Extra Mode: The computer is given invincibility at the start of each match, which wears off after a certain amount of time, with the duration increasing with each successive stage. Thankfully, this is counterbalanced by the computer becoming much weaker, so it will usually die within a couple seconds of the timer hitting zero.
  • Conservation Of Competence
  • Continuity Creep (The plots of the games were originally largely standalone. Each game was largely self contained. However, starting with Mountain of Faith the series has gained continuity, the events happening in each game connected in various ways.)
    • ZUN has both stated that "Touhou is not a 'series'" and included the phrase "Touhou series" in manuals; this is pointed out at the top of the Japanese Wikipedia article for Touhou. So Yeah....
  • Continuity Reboot (The first 5 games were released between 1996 and 1998 on the Japan-only PC-98 computer. In 2002, the series continued on the Windows platform starting with Touhou 6, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Although the numbering scheme still includes the PC-98 games, most of the characters and events in these games have never been mentioned again in any canon materials, including Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, the official chronicle of every character, location, and major event seen in any Windows game up to Phantasmagoria of Flower View. The only exceptions are PC-98 characters who made reappearances in the Windows games: Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame, Alice Margatroid (looking much older than her appearance as a child in Mystic Square and with a different backstory), and Yuuka Kazami.)
  • Convection Shmonvection (There are many examples, but some notable ones involve flying through the Burning Hells and fighting a boss who throws miniature suns at you routinely.)
  • Cool Gate (The Hakurei Shrine serves as a gateway between our world and Gensokyo)
    • The gate at the Netherworld (Hakugyokurou) is an aversion, in which it is placed at the entrance to the Netherworld, but it doesn't open; there's also the entrance to the Scarlet Devil Mansion, which is guarded by a youkai martial artist; however, most of the times she's either sleeping during her work, or defeated by stronger invaders.
  • Crowning Music Of Awesome (Much of the popularity of the series in both Japanese and Western fandom is fueled by the game's music, as well as the ridiculously large catalog of remixes. This yields more than enough samples to make an entire page!)
  • Cute Em Up
  • Cute Monster Girl
  • David Versus Goliath (Averted. The playable characters are all depicted as being at least as powerful and competent as any of the boss characters, and are the same size as the boss characters. Especially unusual in 2D scrolling shooter games since most tend to have huge tanks and planes as bosses which are much bigger than the player character. The player characters even have their own special attacks comparable to boss characters' attacks... just not when you're controlling them.)
    • Note that most playable characters are stage 4 or 5 bosses. Imperishable Night, which has a good number of stage 6 bosses is one of the easier games (and it's easiest if you use the Phantasm boss). Of course, we really shouldn't judge character strength by stage number, so...
  • Death Takes A Holiday (Pretty much the main reason for the events of Phantasmagoria of Flower View)
  • Defeat Means Friendship (The ending to every game involves the main character having a tea party with the Big Bad, and Battle Butlers Sakuya Izayoi, Youmu Konpaku, Reisen Udongein Inaba, and even Marisa Kirisame and Alice Margatroid have become playable characters after getting defeated.)
  • Did We Just Have Tea With Cthulhu (Pretty much every game has an ending like this.)
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?
    • Or for specific examples...oh where to start? In the PC-98 games, you defeat the Angel of Death, 2 goddesses who created their own dream world, and The Goddess of Hell. In the Windows series, the protagonist stops the mistress of the Netherworld, the local Charon equivalent, one of the Judges of the dead, five gods, a hell raven who gains the power of nuclear fusion after devouring a dead sun god, and most recently, in perhaps the most Lovecraftian example, a being who has the power of making her true form unknown, and can also obscure what other things are. She's the EX-Stage Boss, making her extremely powerful and incomprehensible.
  • Dis Continuity (Borderline case for Silent Sinner in Blue. Mainly for introducing two Wesleys who defeated popular characters in ways that can be best described as either Deus Ex Machina or outright cheating.)
  • Drop In Character (Half the cast, to one degree or other, and into various locations - the most common being the Hakurei Shrine.)
  • Dragons Up The Yin Yang
  • Drunken Master (The creator of the games, ZUN, is a drinker, and Memetic Mutation has progressed it to the point where, much like Suika Ibuki, he is never sober)
    • This isn't too far from the truth. Practically every image of him seems to show a beer within arm's reach and ZUN himself admitted being drunk during some of Imperishable Night's development.
      • According to one joke danmaku game, created by ZUN and his drinking buddies, if you spend the whole night getting smashed like an oni, you can actually catch a glimpse of Gensokyo before you pass out. The manual suggests that if you can't beat the game, you don't have enough alcohol in your system.
  • Dummied Out (Rin Satsuki in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Isn't It Sad?)
    • Although one of Marisa's lines before her fight with Flandre in the Extra Stage can be taken to indicate she still exists in canon...
  • Dynamic Difficulty (Embodiment of Scarlet Devil's bullet patterns will get faster and thicker the longer you go without dying. Once you die, however, the game resets the difficulty back and starts increasing it again.)
  • Ear Worm (Both the games themselves and the fan works around them have some awesome music)
  • Elegant Gothic Lolita
  • Epileptic Trees (And lots of them. See the Touhou WMG page.)
  • Every Girl Without Nice Hats Is Cuter With Hair Decorations
  • Everyone Is A Super (From common fairies to even average Gensokyo humans, which have some magic powers, it is flat-out assumed everyone has some kind of special powers or danmaku powers here.)
  • Exactly What It Says On The Tin (If we were to tell you that kedama essentially means "fuzzball" in Japanese, could you guess what enemy it refers to?)
  • Expansion Pack (Unthinkable Natural Law, an addon to Scarlet Weather Rhapsody that introduces a new storyline and playable characters — including Meiling and Cirno.)
  • Expecting Someone Taller (Shou to Reimu in the ReimuA's scenario in Undefined Fantastic Object.)
    Shou: You're the human who gathered the flying treasure? You look a lot more scrawny than I imagined.
    Reimu: How rude.
    Shou: I'm sorry, you're quite right. I simply thought that if you'd made it this far, maybe you were some sort of ascetic scholar.
  • Eyes Of Gold (Red eyes are not a particularly rare thing in Gensokyo, as almost every youkai has them... however, golden eyes are a lot less common, and generally only sported by particularly powerful characters, such as Yukari.)
    • On the other hand, Marisa has them too, and she's the one ordinary human (training and personality aside) in the cast.
      • An ordinary human with some VERY powerful spellcards at her disposal...most famously the Master Spark, which used to be an attack used by Kazami Yuka, one of the most powerful youkai in Gensokyo.
  • Failure Is The Only Option (Any first completion of Imperishable Night.)
    • Or any first completion of most games period. To get the proper ending of most games, you must not use any continues or be on easy mode. Given the genre, this is borderline completely impossible.
    • Note that the first reason is storyline based, the second is just plain Nintendo Hard.
  • Fairy Tale (Imperishable Night's storyline is based around The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.)
  • Fake Difficulty (Probably unintentional. Undefined Fantastic Object's fifth stage clouds the screen with literally hundreds of Point and Power Items. Normally, this would be a great thing for scoring and power alike, but the Items can often cover the bullets onscreen, usually resulting in a "wtf just hit me?" reaction from the player.)
    • Also in UFO, MarisaA uses very shiny lasers to attack, which shoot from four options around Marisa. Almost all of Stage 5 uses very shiny bullets, approximately the same size as said options. It's not uncommon for a player to run into a bullet because they look almost exactly alike.
      • The fact that the red bullets can also blend into the red background makes it even worse.
    • The UFO Extra Stage is somehow even worse. It's very fond of completely random clumps of bullets and solid walls of bullets, all very dense, fast, and subject to the blending problem mentioned above.
      • The Extra boss, Nue, even has shields during many of her spellcards. Good luck getting through them when you reach her with 2.00 power and no lives due to the stage.
    • Subterranean Animism is also rather fond of Trial And Error Gameplay. Examples include the sine-wave bullets in stage 1, the wave of fairies immediately after the stage 2 midboss battle (which shoot aimed bullets that fly a considerable distance before slowing down to normal speed, effectively automatically killing you if you try to fly up to the top to auto-collect the items that Parsee drops), Parsee's second boss spell card, Yuugi's last spell card, and basically all of stage 5 (see the annotations for this video).
    • The PC-98 games also fall victim to this; odd hitbox detection and movement are bigger threats than the actual bullets. The Story of Eastern Wonderland is ridiculously bad with this. Mystic Square also has the Yuki/Mai battle, where you are expected to dodge patterns from two bosses at once that have nothing in common with each other. Expect bomb-spamming and multiple deaths.
  • Fan Disservice: The fan creation of Mannosuke, Rinnosuke's "manlier" counterpart. Just look up the two doujins "Another Dream" issues one and two...BYOBB (bring your own Brain Bleach)
  • Fan Dumb (Specifically, see "Elitism" and "Mad Bride". Often in the arguments over Alternative Character Interpretations, Super Weight, how canon one ending or another really is, and what difficulty level you have to beat without continues or how many of the games you must pay money to import (or, on the flip side, how many of the games you can get away with pirating) to be a "real fan", among an unending list of other things.)
  • Fanon (Extremely important to the franchise as a whole, and with enough sheer fanmaterial in it to make the average fan's head explode. Some of it has even been actually adopted into the canon by the author.)
  • Fantastic Racism (Especially in Undefined Fantastic Object, which brings up the question of whether it's youkai who are oppressing humans or the other way around.)
    • It should be noted that the cycle of Youkai terrorizing humans and being "exterminated" in turn is actually necessary for Gensokyo's survival. Not that that excuses some of the remarks our heroines make...
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink
  • Fan Vid(s) (Oh, so many of them. This one is a really nice example.)
  • Fanime:
  • Fetish Fuel (So much, to the point where it has its own page.)
  • Fighting Your Friend (Stage 4 of Lotus Land Story has you fighting whichever character (only Reimu and Marisa were playable at this point) you didn't choose. It was repeated in Stage 4 of Imperishable Night, which has you fighting either Reimu or Marisa, depending on the team you choose.)
  • Flandreization Flanderization: Fanon is particularly fond of this. Several characters are commonly reduced to a single character quirk which may or may not have been a major part of their character in the original games. Reimu is a lazy bum, Marisa is nothing but a thief, Alice is a lonely and creepy Yandere, Yuyuko eats everything in sight, Suika does nothing but drink, Cirno's ditziness reaches Ralph Wiggum levels, Suwako goes ribbit-ribbit, China Meiling is a lazy slacker...
  • Flying Saucers (Part of the system in Undefined Fantastic Object involves collecting small UFOs from certain enemies that carry them (Maybe those fairies are possessed somehow?), and upon collecting three of one color (from red, blue and green) or one of each, a large UFO appears, abducts all items onscreen, and tries to fly offscreen. The saucer drops rewards upon defeat (the loot varies on the UFO's color and how much it absorbed). Nue also uses some of the larger UFOs in her attacks in the extra stage.)
  • Fridge Brilliance (While generally Touhou sometimes lapses into Fridge Logic, ZUN's observation that Sakuya Izayoi must be able to control space as well as time makes perfect sense, even if his reasoning is highly suspect. Since her main power is freezing time, she'd have to be able to control space to do little things like move and breathe when time is stopped and everything else, including the air around her, is frozen in place. This also justifies her knife-filled Hammerspace.)
  • Full Contact Magic (At least in Immaterial and Missing Power and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, as well as in fanworks, the intense nature of spellcard duels is portrayed as having a fierce physical combat aspect, especially for the more physically-abled girls.)
  • Functional Magic (Inherent Gift, Theurgy, Device Magic, Alchemical Magic, Rule Magic, and Force Magic are all present.)
  • Fun With Acronyms (The games' names have both a Japanese portion and an English portion; the Western community refers to games by the acronyms of their English parts (Perfect Cherry Blossom - PCB, Imperishable Night - IN, etc.). One wonders if ZUN took notice: the 12th game's English name is Undefined Fantastic Object.)
  • Gaiden Game (Shoot The Bullet, and the fighting games by Twilight Frontier.)
  • Gameplay And Story Segregation (No matter what a character's stated powers are, they only manifest in the form of danmaku in-game. Further, there tends to be a disconnect in what a character's powers are said to be, and what they can actually do. For instance, Suika is supposed to control density, except in-game and in fanwork this usually manifests as the ability to change size and, inexplicably, split into many smaller Suika, rather than what you'd expect it to confer.) However, some attacks are merely represented by danmaku shots instead of new graphics, such as Suwako's iron rings.
    • One would expect someone who can control density to change size. Conservation of mass and all that.
    • Possibly justified, in that the spellcard rules require danmaku to be used to solve disputes.
  • Genre Savvy (Reimu and Marisa are this in particular. One particularly amusing example in Perfect Cherry Blossom was Reimu waiting around for a boss to arrive. With Sanae as a playable character in UFO, she is revealed as this too.)
    • Sanae might be more or less a special case as she's from the real world, thus probably knowing just about as much as any of us do. Her story mode for Unthinkable Natural Law is a good example, where she sees the giant mysterious figure and immediately thinks "Humongous Mecha".
  • Genre Shift (Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, and the new Unthinkable Nature Law are 2-D fighters.)
    • Technically, Touhou itself is a Genre Shift; the first game on the PC-98 was basically Alleyway with Reimu hitting a ball. The 2nd game was a shooter, but the danmaku really started with game four of the series.
    • The two Phantasmagorias may also count considering that the other games are single-player scrolling shooters whilst Dim.Dream and Flower View are Versus shooters.
  • Giant Space Flea From Nowhere Everyone who was expecting to fight a giant catfish, raise your hand.
  • Good All Along - As with Grey and Grey Morality below, nobody is (really) evil in Gensokyo, which helps facilitate Defeat Means Friendship. Actively noted by ZUN, who mentioned that the 'darker' plots of Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism (See Grey and Grey Morality below) would be shifted back to the lighter tone of the rest of the series in subsequent games, which was indeed the case of UFO, save for the aforementioned philosophising about the nature of Yokai and humans.
  • Good Bad Bugs (MAlice Cannon in IN, Marisa B(ugged) in Mountain of Faith.)
  • Grey And Gray Morality - None of the bosses are completely evil. Those who are good are apathetic to everything that doesn't screw up the barrier or the basic laws of nature (day and night, seasons, death, weather...) and so far, all of the Windows games and their spin-offs were about someone's selfish needs (Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Shoot the Bullet — sort of), someone's survival (Perfect Cherry Blossom, Imperishable Night, Mountain of Faith), someone sleeping at work (Phantasmagoria of Flower View), boredom (Scarlet Weather Rhapsody), TREASURE Unsealing Magical Martin Luther King Jr. (Undefined Fantastic Object), ambiguous (Unthinkable Natural Law) or even just trying to party (Immaterial and Missing Power). Although planning suddenly deciding to destroy the world out of power thirst abuse and insanity idiocy (Subterranean Animism) is way more dubious.)
    • The heroines themselves display a surprising lack of concern about the possibility of killing or injuring their opponents. Of course, the Spell Card system is supposed to prevent that. This can be hard to believe with all the knives and fireballs flying around, though.
    • A few of the characters are actually clearly evil, if you define "evil" as "tormenting, killing and/or eating humans just because you can/because you feel it'd part of the definition of being a Youkai". These are all stage one or two bosses, however, meaning they're the weakest characters in the series.
      • However, there is one who is rather powerful and comfirmed to be, but was sealed before the games took place. Preventing it's unsealing is part of Perfect Cherry Blossom's plot.
  • Hammerspace (Yukari Yakumo, especially in fanon. And yes, it does become a Hyperspace Arsenal at times, most recently having a train◊ added to it, to go with the traffic signs, tombstones, and whatever else.)
  • High Altitude Battle (Suwako's last boss spellcard in Unthinkable Natural Law has you fighting her in a timed battle while falling down to earth.)
  • Holding Back The Phlebotinum (Why the Spellcard system was created, and for VERY GOOD REASONS. And because the Yokai would have no other way to fight Reimu, as killing her would possibly result in the collapse of Gensokyo's barrier, what seperates it from our world.)
  • Hold The Line (Some of the bosses have spellcards that make them invulnerable, and you can't do anything other than dodge and wait for time to run out.)
  • Hype Backlash (Due to its popularization of Cute Em Ups, Touhou has been blamed for ruining shmups.)
  • I Believe I Can Fly (Pretty much everyone)
  • Image Board (Pooshlmer is a major English imageboard for most of your Touhou needs. Voile, not to be confused with Patchouli's library, is where people translate the fancomics.)
  • Immortality (All who drink the Hourai Elixir gain the resurrective type; Fairies have it by default. Magicians who become "complete" gain a maybe-partial undying type (They stop aging, but disease may or may not still kill them as they're probably still as fragile as humans).)
  • It's Popular, Now It Sucks (Part and parcel with Unpleasable Fanbase and Fan Dumb, a notable and extremely vocal minority of the fan base are concerned with the game becoming popular with people who are not "real fans".
  • It's Short, So It Sucks (Massively averted. Despite each game taking on average no more than 30 minutes to complete, the series has a very big following, especially for a shmup series.)
  • Kamehame Hadoken (Marisa's infamous Master Spark, Yuka's original use thereof, then her Double Spark attack, and of course, Mima's now-memetic Twilight Spark.)
  • Leitmotif (Each boss gets a unique song for their Boss Battle, which naturally becomes their Leitmotif in fanworks.)
  • Les Yay (With only one significant male character in the entire series, there's not many other options for Shippers.)
  • Let's You And Her Fight
  • Little Miss Badass
  • Loads And Loads Of Characters (Roughly 112 as of Touhou 12, Undefined Fantastic Object. Even if you cut that down to only characters that have appeared in Windows games, you still have nearly 60 characters. )
  • Lovely Angels (While the trope is somewhat followed by Reimu and Marisa in most games, Imperishable Night, the 8th game in the series, Ts this trope by the player playing a team of two characters, although most LA teams are a little bit more functional than they are in this game.)
  • The Magic Goes Away (The reason Gensokyo was created in the first place.)
  • Memetic Mutation (Many, MANY examples, a few of which have become actual canon.)
  • Mercy Mode (After running out of continues a few times in Imperishable Night, the game's options allow you to start with a few additional lives.)
    • "A few" ultimately resulting in a continue's worth of lives totaling 8, where most other games only let you have half as many. Perhaps another reason for Easy Mode Mockery specifically in IN.
  • Mirror Match (Sikieiki uses her special mirror to invoke this in Shoot the Bullet.)
  • Monster Mash (It's fairly commonplace in Gensokyo for miko, witches, vampires, ghosts, aliens, faeries, oni, goddesses, and all sorts of other youkai to have tea or sake together.)
  • More Dakka (And how!)
  • Multiple Endings
  • Mundane Utility (Touhou Soccer, where the girls use their massively destructive Spell Cards to play ''Soccer''.)
  • Nice Hat - The Touhou wiki, which lists 112 characters, has a special category called "Characters without hats"... with 8 names. ZUN, by the way, also has a Nice Hat.
    • However, even in Gensokyo, there are some who stand out for having particularly nice hats. Shikieiki and Keine are the most prominent, the first wearing a truly impressive ceremonial hat, and the other wearing what can only be described as a miniaturized pagoda on her head.
      • And how could you forget Suwako?◊
  • The Night That Never Ends (The plot of Imperishable Night plays with this.)
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot (A fair number of the characters, like the cute nuclear powered hell raven girl  *, or the knife throwing, time stopping maid  *.
  • Nintendo Hard (It's fairly easy to get to the end by arcade shmup standards, as it wasn't designed to take your money. Doesn't stop it from being frustrating for some players though. Especially on higher difficulties, getting a good ending is quite a feat.)
  • Non Lethal KO (The Spell Card rules mean the games follow this trope; there is very strong lampshading of this, and very good reasoning for characters not wanting to kill the human characters. Also, since most of the characters are youkai, odds are many of them can't be killed by physical damage anyway, while the fairies which provide most mook enemies are said to have very short lifespans but constantly revive, giving them little concept of mortality.)
  • Normally I Would Be Dead Now (An in-game feature in the Windows games gives you a very tiny window after you are hit to bomb, thereby preventing a loss of a life. The eighth game actually makes an entire gameplay feature based around this, although that instance is more of a Big Damn Heroes moment as the teammate of the one that was hit comes in and uses the bomb.)
  • Only Six Faces (Not only is ZUN susceptible to this with his famously crappy character art, but so are some of the official manga artists, such as Aki Eda (Silent Sinner in Blue) and Makoto Hirasaka (Touhou Sangetsusei).)
  • Onmyodo (Lots of characters use Ofuda as weapons; Yukari and Ran have Shikigami.)
  • Our Monsters Are Different (Very.)
  • Pacifist Run (The bosses' attacks are all on timers, and it's possible to beat them just by outlasting them. They'll even blow up at the end regardless of whether you fired any shots at them.)
  • Parental Abandonment (Here's a fun game: head over to the character page and, using your fingers, count the number of characters who have parents that are (a) confirmed in the canon and (b) not missing, dead, or otherwise out of the picture. Don't worry about how you're going to scroll down the page — you'll only need one hand.)
    • One hand? Try one finger,
  • Pettanko (Most of the cast tends to get this treatment, since series creator ZUN is apparently allergic to large breasts, having only depicted even a visible chest on, to this troper's knowledge, five characters in the entire Windows series. Fanart tends to "correct" this.)
    • It might also be the fact that ZUN isn't very good at perspective, and can't draw breasts.
    • The Fighting Game installments of the series have really muddied the waters here, as the art was (thankfully) done by someone else. That someone apparently couldn't resist a few upgrades here and there. Reimu and Marisa have escaped so far, though.
    • These fan depictions are strongly reinforced by the extremely popular Touhou music video "Tsurupettan" ("Smooth and Flat"), which implies that many of the characters fit the description.
      • That may be, but the original song was strictly about Suika Ibuki and her flat-chestedness—not anyone else's. Funny thing is, the early Zun-drawn concept artwork hinted at Suika having Boobs Of Steel, as seen here◊.
    • Particularly astute fans (with the emphasis on particularly) will note that Sanae in Undefined Fantastic Object does seem to have a chest. A sign of things to come?
  • Pink Bishoujo Ghetto (The entire in-game cast just happens to be female. (Now with the apparent exception of Unzan, although he's less of a person than an angry cloud.))
  • Power Perversion Potential (Given the broad nature of many stated powers, fandom runs wild with this for lots of characters, but especially Yukari and her "ability to manipulate borders," which normally manifests as combination Hammerspace/Instant Portal Picture To Anywhere. And looks suspiciously like a vagina.)
  • Red Shirt (The fairy maids that Remilia took with her on her lunar expedition in Silent Sinner in Blue fit the classic Star Trek redshirt archetype in that they accompanied the main characters onto an alien world and were completely useless when dealing with the native inhabitants.)
  • Red Sky Take Warning (The plot of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.)
    • Scarlet Weather Rhapsody as well.
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old (Most non-human characters.)
  • Scenery Porn (Next time you watch a replay of any game from Mountain of Faith onward, ignore the pretty bullets and look at the backgrounds. They're absolutely stunning.)
  • Schizo Tech (Officially, Rika from the second game drives various tanks in a period before they were significantly known to Japan. Justified in the contents of expansion character (and sole male) Rinnosuke Morichika's shop, Kourindou, which carries varied items from outside the barrier i.e. on Earth as we know it today.)
  • Schoolgirl Lesbians (Mostly in Fanon and the Expanded Universe; largely only implied in the games themselves, apart from Marisa suggesting to Flandre Scarlet that she get married to Reimu in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. ZUN has acknowledged the possibility of his characters having relationships though.)
  • Score Screen
  • Sealed Evil In A Can (The Saigyou Ayakashi of Perfect Cherry Blossom. One of the only bona fide evil things in Gensokyo, and the killer of an unknown but large number of humans in times past. Thankfully its seal wasn't broken.)
  • Self Fanservice (One important reason for Touhou's popularity is how ugly ZUN's original character art is, inspiring legions of fanartists to improve it. As alluded to elsewhere, he seems to have trouble drawing a girl who looks postpubescent, leaving fans to come to a consensus on what some characters should "really" look like. In a broader sense, the entire series itself has next to nothing resembling sexual or romantic content, but you would never guess that from the fandom...)
  • Shout Out: Stage 6 of UFO has rows of fairies that move in a zig-zag pattern and fire bullets straight downwards, as a reference to Space Invaders.
    • Many characters are also Shout Outs to one thing or another. Full details on all of them on the character page, but it should be noted that three different characters have references to the works of Agatha Christie.
    • Unthinkable Natural Law has Reimu's Fantasy/Dream Heaven in Arcade mode, which, upon being executed properly and in the third round (meaning that both players have one win each) delivers an unavoidable and unblockable barrage that does several times a full lifebar's worth of damage to the opponent, being a Shout Out to the PS 2 Hokuto No Ken game's Fatal KO system. Even the music changes to a Fatal KO-inspired arrange of one of Reimu's themes.
  • Slice Of Life (Very common in official written works, especially the manga Eastern and Little Deity/Strange and Bright Nature Deity/Oriental Sacred Place (yes, that's one series with title changes) and the short story serial Curiosities of Lotus Asia. This tends to put off some fans who are used to the combat-heavy games, though others enjoy the laid-back view of Gensokyo.)
  • Smart Bomb (Touhou uses a more stylish take on the Smart Bomb with the Spell Card system. The player and the boss attack each other with "spell cards". Spell cards are named Vancian style magic attacks. Whenever someone uses a spell card the screen goes to an abnormal background, a portrait of the character appears on the screen, the name of the spell card is shown in the corner, and a circle surrounds the user, getting smaller and smaller until the effect runs out. When a boss uses a spell card, a bullet pattern appears on the screen. When a player uses a spell card, they use a Smart Bomb.
    • In the 2-player Phantasmagoria of Flower View, the game uses a Split Screen approach in which using a spell card SmartBombs your side of the screen and puts bullets on your opponent's side of the screen.
    • It's also a notable source of Gameplay And Story Segregation since in Imperishable Night the playable characters become bosses and use their (previously) Smart Bomb attacks on you as bullet patterns which look nothing like each other. This is lampshaded in the in-game commentary where the author says "This is another spell card that doesn't look much like when the player uses it."
  • Sorting Algorithm Of Evil (the "new arc" issue, although arguably it's more the central cause getting "bigger" than an actual increasing threat; goes from vampires causing mischief in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, to a ghost trying to awaken a demonic cherry tree, as well as herself that had been sealed away in Perfect Cherry Blossom, to someone stealing the moon in Imperishable Night, to the discovery that someone has upended the process of life and death in Phantasmagoria of Flower View, to fighting a god whose plan to amass Gensokyo's faith threaten to upend Reimu Hakurei's ability to maintain the barriers that keep Gensokyo in existence in Mountain of Faith, to stopping a celestial being who has been toying with the weather and causing various natural disasters in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.)
    • Seemingly continued in Subterranean Animism, where the Final Boss, Utsuho, has the power of nuclear fusion and wants to use it to incinerate Gensokyo in all of its entirety.
    • ZUN has apparently noticed this trend, and stated that the next game (Undefined Fantastic Object) is more lighthearted (although he did leave an ominous "but..." at the end of that statement, so time will tell).
      • It is more lighthearted, in that the plot is innocent, the result of a prankster EX-Boss, but the exploration of Fantastic Racism serves to darken the atmosphere when brought up.
  • Spring Is Late (In Perfect Cherry Blossom)
  • Spoil At Your Own Risk (ZUN specifically requested that the endings to the games not be posted on the internet to avoid spoilers; fan sites have managed to follow this request, but once in a blue moon the content will pop up somewhere. This includes the English fansites, even though this is the only way fans who cannot understand Japanese can find out what's in the endings. The need to post the endings online is waning, though, since as of September 8th, 2009, every single game in the Windows series has an English patch.)
    • Although aside from Highly Responsive to Prayers, fans of the PC-98 games are still left in the dark.
      • Actually, it didn't translate the endings, and is said to have UNTRANSLATED the rest of the game!
  • Spot Of Tea (some of its endings)
  • Stalked By The Bell (Rarely occurs since Timing Out is a victory condition, but some Spellcards have an extra phase that usually begins when 30 seconds remain on said card. Yukari's second-to-last card "Boundary of Life and Death," Utsuho's final card "Subterranean Sun," and Gengetsu's aptly-named "Gengetsu Rape Time" all do this. Highly Responsive to Prayers does similarly, with random bullets shooting at you if the clock runs out on any stage.
    • Actually something of a common trait for extra stage bosses, who's final attack gets more difficult as they lose more health; it's more of a trick to prevent players from just timing the attacks out and staying on the easiest difficulty. The only exception is Mokou, who's last spellcard just gives less room to move around and more waves of bullets as the timer runs out anyway, regardless of health.
  • Story Arc (Sort of; so far, the series can be split into two arcs, with characters from the first unlikely to show up in the second. The first Arc represents the first five games, with Mima as a recurring villain-type even though she's only a primary opponent in the first two. The second Arc so far represents every version released for Windows, with a new villain every time.)
    • Also, games after Touhou 10 have a plot that is kick started by events in the game before.
  • Stupid Statement Dance Mix (''It Stops at the Affected Area and Immediately Dissolves ~ Lunatic Udongein'', best known for its Ear Worm (O-Over Dr-drive! O-O-Over Dr-Dr-Drive!) is a prime example, but quite a few of IOSYS' Touhou-inspired songs could easily count.)
  • Super Move Portrait Attack (The player's and the boss's spell cards. Utsuho's nuclear-based spell cards come with warning sirens and big yellow "CAUTION!!" tape on top of that.)
  • Synthesizeritis: Averted; ZUN works almost entirely with electronics, and while some of his songs arguably benefit from less cluttered remixes, few would dispute his skill with composition, and many of his original tracks are classics among fans and non-fans of the series alike.
  • That One Boss (Every game has at least one, without exception.)
    • Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has Patchouli on stage 4. The stage itself could also be considered That One Level.
    • Perfect Cherry Blossom has the Prismriver sisters on stage 4. Sakuya in particular has Merlin Prismriver, who fights with curved lasers.
    • Lily White pops up in Phantasmagoria of Flower View as that one recurring miniboss.
    • Subterranean Animism has Orin as the stage 5. Just... dear God. It's not bad enough that she pops up multiple times in the game, but she also gets her own rather hellish boss fight.
    • Undefined Fantastic Object has Shou at stage 5. I sure hope ZUN isn't planning on making all post-Mo F stage 5 bosses this hard.
    • And this isn't even counting the final or extra bosses, who had better be That One Boss.
  • Theme Naming (the Scarlet sisters, Hong Meiling, Patchouli Knowledge, Yuyuko Saigyouji, Lily White, Wriggle Nightbug, Mystia Lorelei.
  • They Changed It Now It Sucks: The tenth game Mountain of Faith generated discontent among fans because of the significant gameplay changes, such as linking the bomb system to weapon powerups, not having individualised bombs for each of the shot types and making the continues send you back to the beginning of the level. Most notable was the removal of the "graze" system, where one is rewarded for getting close to bullets as often as possible without getting hit. This was (thankfully) put back in for Subterranean Animism, where's it's actually the basis of the scoring system.
    • Undefined Fantastic Object heralds the return of more classic features such as the separate bomb bar and character-unique Spell Cards, but the UFO mechanic for this game proves annoying to many players - especially since using said mechanic is one of the few ways to gain more power, bombs, points, and lives. They even get used by the EX boss in her spellcards!
  • Title Drop: The final spell cards in Perfect Cherry Blossom, Imperishable Night, Mountain of Faith and the story mode of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody
  • To Serve Man: Supposedly, youkai are people-eaters; however, this is largely an Informed Attribute, even in one article of Perfect Memento in Strict Sense.
  • Unpleasable Fanbase (See Fan Dumb and It's Popular, Now It Sucks.)
  • Unreliable Narrator: The fanbook Perfect Memento in Strict Sense. Despite being a book of extra information about the characters and settings, it's written as if by someone collecting 2nd hand accounts and rumors.
  • Vancian Magic (the Spell Card system)
  • Vicious Cycle (The events of Phantasmagoria of Flower View happen every sixty years.)
  • Wave Motion Gun (Marisa's Master Spark, and all it's variants. In the words of ZUN: "Freaking huge magical laser.")
  • Weather Dissonance (Basically the premise of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.)
  • Whale Egg (Might be the case for some unexpected creatures. At one point in one of the manga, Marisa suggests that a mysterious egg may be from a cat youkai. It could just be her being weird, but Reimu doesn't object...)
  • What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome (Touhou Soccer. That is all.)
  • What Kind Of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway (Subverted. Pretty much every character has some Informed Ability that is nearly useless if taken at face value, and the ones that don't are basically triple-7's on the Superpower Lottery. Danmaku prowess is sometimes even completely exclusive to what power a character has, though more frequently the character's ability plays a role in their danmaku, to varying degrees such as Cirno's ice projectiles making up most but not all of her attacks. )
    • Hell, Reimu's ability is the power to fly, which every girl in the series is capable of doing already. That being said, she is one of the most powerful girls in Gensokyo, thanks to the divine power of the Hakurei Shrine.
    • To give an idea of the kind of exploiting of "useless" powers that routinely goes on in these games, example: Aforementioned Reimu's ability has been redefined as "the power to float in the sky" for more exactitude. Seems harmless, right? Except then you reach Fantasy Heaven. In-game description "Supreme Master-Art. With Reimu's ability to float, she floats away from physical reality and becomes invincible. If it wasn't just for play (with time limit), no one could beat her by any method." And yes, it's Exactly What It Says On The Tin - you can't hurt her, and the only way to win is to wait for her timer to run out while she's free to bombard you at her leisure. What the hell, Reimu?
    • Don't forget her power to eat sweets and never get fat!
  • Witch Species (Sort of. Magician is both a species and job description. Natural magicians are born able to use magic and don't need to eat, but are otherwise identical to humans. Human magicians need to learn a spell to replicate the bit about not eating. After that they can both learn spells to stop aging, at which point they're considered "complete" magicians. It's never actually stated that the magician species is the result of the "abandoning food" magic being inheritable, but it seems likely.
  • A World Half Full
  • Xanatos Gambit (The entirety of Silent Sinner in Blue.)
  • Yokai (Makes up a very large portion of the cast. Most are minor characters, however.)
    • Moe Anthropomorphism (A lot of the characters are actually humanoid representations of abstract concepts.)
    • Rubber Forehead Youkai (Most of the the monsters in this series are one or two features away from looking entirely human.)
  • You Gotta Have Blue Hair (Even excluding the youkai, there is the silver-haired Sakuya, Mokou, and Eirin (though the latter is from the Moon) and the green-haired Sanae. Even the blonde Marisa could be included since she isn't a foreigner. For actual blue-haired characters, Kogasa and Cirno count.)
    • Curious, since Sanae is explicitly identified as being from outside the boundary. Then again, even in our world, she's not exactly a normal human...
    • And by not exactly normal, we mean she's the descendant of a frog-themed god and lives in a shrine where the resident god has a snake motif. Suffice it to say, Sanae has a frog/snake motif herself...
  • Zigzag Paper Tassel — Reimu's haraegushi, Kanako's shimenawa, Sanae's haraegushi, and on shimenawa wrapped around Tenshi's rocks.
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