Touhou Project ("Touhou", 東方, meaning Eastern or Oriental, pronounced "Toh Hoh") is a series of doujin scrolling shooter games in the "Bullet Hell" subgenre, developed by Team Shanghai Alice. It is most famous for its high difficulty level involving intricatebullet patterns, and the fact that instead of having spaceships and warfare vehicles, it has girls in frilly dresses: nearly every character is a Little Miss Badass, Cute Monster Girl, or Cute Witch, and wears some degree of Lolita clothing. Much of its popularity, however, comes from its enormous Doujinshi and Shipping community, and the equally enormous amounts of amateur musical arrangements and remixes of the games' music. 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.The basic plot of each of the games is that the isolated land of Gensokyo, a Fantasy Kitchen Sink hidden in the mountains of Japan and separated from reality by a magical barrier, faces some sort of "incident", which local Miko Reimu and her best friend Cute Witch Marisa feel compelled to resolve for their own reasons,*
reluctant duty and greed, respectively
sometimes joined by bosses from previous games. What qualifies as an "incident" can range from globally life threatening like the endless winter of Perfect Cherry Blossom to harmless curiosities like the flying boat of Undefined Fantastic Object. After beating up some random bystanders in the early stages, they eventually discover the Anti-Villain behind the disturbance and beat them up, along with some of their friends and/or Battle Butlers. Afterward, they make peace with the villains (often figuratively and literally "drinking tea" with them), and get sent on a tangentially related quest to beat up someone else related to the villain, but not to the incident, in a Bonus Dungeon.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 are all done by one guy, known only as"ZUN".note His real name is Jun'ya Ota. Some fans call him Kannushi (Head Priest)See also the extensive wiki about the game series.Not to be confused with Toho, a company mainly responsible for the tokusatsu genre.The official games in chronological order: note Almost always, the games are referred to by the Japanese-speaking fans only by the Japanese part of the title, and by the English-speaking fans only by the English part of the title. Some fans also do this for the songs that have both Japanese and English titles, but we'll save that for the Awesome Music pages.
The long list
PC 98 era — note Most characters and stories from this era have been retconned or otherwise ignored by the series' canon. Only four characters from this age have re-appeared in the Windows era and not without significant changes to them.
TH 01 Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to PrayersTranslation Eastern Strange Spirit Legend ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers
TH 02 Touhou Fuumaroku ~ the Story of Eastern WonderlandTranslation Eastern Sealed Demon Chronicle ~ the Story of Eastern Wonderland
TH 03 Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. DreamTranslation Eastern Dream Dimension ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream
TH 04 Touhou Gensokyo ~ Lotus Land StoryTranslation Eastern Fantasy Land ~ Lotus Land Story
Windows era — note Even though the numbering system continues from the PC 98 era, the sixth game is considered the beginning of the series' main canon.
TH 06 Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet DevilTranslation Eastern Scarlet Devil Land ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
TH 12.3 Touhou Hisoutensoku ~ Choudokyuu Ginyoru no Nazo wo OeTranslation Eastern Lacking Perception of Natural Laws ~ Chase the Enigma of the Gargantuan Guignolnote Originally referred to as Unthinkable Natural Law by English-speaking fans, it was soon superseded by simply Hisoutensoku. There are still people who refer to it as Unthinkable Natural Law.
TH 12.5 Double Spoiler ~ Touhou BunkachouTranslation Double Spoiler ~ Eastern Cultural Album
TH 12.8 Yousei Daisensou ~ Touhou SangetsuseiTranslation Great Fairy Wars ~ Eastern Three Fairiesnote Referred to by English-speaking fans as Great Fairy Wars or simply Fairy Wars.
TH 13 Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten DesiresTranslation Eastern Divine Spirit Mausoleum ~ Ten Desires
TH 13.5 Touhou Shinkirou ~ Hopeless MasqueradeTranslation Eastern Tower of Beautiful Mind ~ Hopeless Masqueradenote While written with different kanji, the Japanese title is pronounced the same way as the Japanese word for 'mirage'.
ZUN's Music CDs — A series of Touhou remixes and new music by ZUN, they also include stories. The first one is quite odd and likely not canon anymore. The rest follow two girls in the future outside world.
Touhou Kourindou ~ Curiosities of Lotus AsiaTranslation Eastern Hall of Perfumed Rain ~ Curiositis of Lotus Asia — A series of Slice of Life short stories written by ZUN from Rinnosuke's perspective.
Touhou SangetsuseiTranslation Eastern Three Moon Elementals — A Slice of Life manga focusing on the various misadventures of the three fairies of light as well as, usually, Reimu and Marisa. Consists of:
Eastern and Little Nature Deity
Strange and Bright Nature Deity
Oriental Sacred Place
A Flower Blooming Fragrant Violet Every Sixty Years is a short story contained in the otherwise non-canon fanbook Seasonal Dream Vision. From Yukari's perspective, it explains a bit more of just what the hell was going on in Phantasmagoria of Flower View.
Touhou BougetsushouTranslation Eastern Ephemeral Moon Vignette — A group of stories concerning Remilia invading the moon.
Silent Sinner in Blue — The main story.
Cage in Lunatic Runagate — Mostly character-focused side stories. Also contains most of the backstory and the ending.
Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth — A gag comedy set around the same time, starring the Eientei crew. Unlike the other manga, where ZUN is credited with the scenario, here he's credited with characters and setting, putting it on a lower tier of canon than everything else.
Touhou Ibarakasen ~ Wild and Horned HermitTranslation Eastern Thorned Poet Hermit ~ Wild and Horned Hermit — A manga focusing on Kasen Ibaraki, and her interactions with Reimu and Marisa.
Touhou Suzunaan ~ Forbidden ScrolleryTranslation Eastern Suzuna's Hut ~ Forbidden Scrollery — A manga focusing on Kosuzu Motoori, a girl who works at her family's book rental shop in the human village.
Artbooks:
Touhou Bunkachou ~ Bohemian Archive in Japanese RedTranslation Eastern Cultural Album ~ Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red — A book presenting articles from Aya's newspaper. Most are focused on individual characters from EoSD through IN with accompanying interviews, but there are also editorials on major locations and Aya's perspective of what happened in the games. The book also included some music commentary from ZUN, an interview, a one-shot official manga, and several fan-made doujinshi.
Touhou Gumon Shiki ~ Perfect Memento in Strict SenseTranslation Eastern Histories by Hieda ~ Perfect Memento in Strict Sense — Part of the Gensokyo Chronicles, as written by the ninth child of Miare, Hieda no Akyuu. Like BAiJR, many of the articles are focused on characters up through PoFV, but there's also some general setting background information and expands on powers and relationships. It too has an associated one-shot manga, but less other goodies.
The Grimoire of Marisa — Marisa's comments on characters' spell cards.
Touhou Gumon Kujo ~ Symposium of Post-MysticismTranslation Eastern Oral Talks by Hieda ~ Symposium of Post-Mysticism — A sequel of sorts to Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, covering most of the characters introduced since. In lieu of the non-character encyclopedia entries it has a number of newspaper articles and a transcript of the titular symposium between Byakuren, Kanako, Miko and Marisa.
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Tropes in the games' gameplay
Air Jousting: Marisa's broom charge attacks in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
All Monks Know Kung-Fu: Not only do the Buddhist monk characters in Hopeless Masquerade specialize in martial arts, Buddhism itself is associated with melee attacks as a game mechanic.
Ambidextrous Sprite: In the fighting games, characters' sprites are mirrored for movement, resulting in oddities such as Utsuho's arm cannon and asymmetrical legs switching places if she moves left.
Artificial Stupidity: The fighting games. Highlights include not particularly understanding if the character is melee or range oriented, using moves that can't possibly hit, virtually never using cards,note Arcade mode only. Story mode AI doesn't have cards to use. and difficulty selection in arcade mode doing nothing. This was bad enough for people to start work on an AI hack but the project seems to have died since.
Awesome, but Impractical / Difficult, But Awesome: Pretty much all of the experimental shot types (ie, not spread, homing, forward concentration, or piercing) fall under one or the other, depending on who you ask.
Marisa's Master Spark bomb in Undefined Fantastic Object on definitely falls under Awesome But Impractical, at least during stages. The massive speed penalty it saddles her with makes it nearly impossible to collect anything.
Death bombing introduced in the fifth game on. When your character gets hit, you have a fraction of a second to press the bomb button to save yourself. The timing varies with each game, but is rarely enough for the average player to do so as a reaction. You basically need to predict your own death in order to use it.
Last Words in Hopeless Masquerade; super-powerful spellcards that can only be used at max popularity, but drop your popularity to zero when used. The problem is that timeout victories are decided by popularity, making this a major risk, and gaining that much popularity likely requires you to be fairly decisively winning in the first place, making it an unnecessary risk.
Battle Intro: New footage shows that Hopeless Masquerade will be the first of the fighting games to feature this.
Bonus Boss: Every game except Highly Responsive to Prayers, the versus shooters and the fighters has at least one extra boss. Perfect Cherry Blossom also has the phantasm boss, a Bonus Bossto the Bonus Boss. In the phantasm stage, the extra boss reappears as a Mid Boss.
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.
Boss Subtitles: Everybody gets these. Even most of the side material includes them. They're known to change, too. Head over to the Touhou Wiki for the full list.
Boss Warning Siren: In Subterranean Animism, Utsuho Reiuji, the nuclear-poweredHell raven girl and final boss of the game, has the distinction of prefixing each of her spell cards with klaxons while the text '☢ Caution !!☢' flares on-screen.
Breaking Out: Highly Responsive To Prayers has many elements of this.
Brutal Bonus Level: Extra Stages. And the (so far) only Phantasm stage in Perfect Cherry Blossom.
Bullet Hell: The Touhou games are a well known example of the genre, quite possibly even moreso than Cave's shooters, at least outside of Japan. Mind you, Cave shooters are commercial, while Touhou is doujinshi.
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 you cannot actually use them until you input a command to declare them.
Cherry Tapping: Hopeless Masquerade include special animations if someone lost due to this.
Clothing Damage: If there is a dialogue after a boss fight, the loser often has her clothing damaged. Downplayed, since the damage includes dusty hair, torn sleeves and ribbons, and everything else perfectly fine.
One interesting case is the dialogue after you beat Marisa in Fairy Wars, where it's Cirno who has her clothing damaged instead of Marisa.
Computers Are Fast: Not present in the normal Shoot Em Up games, but have fun beating Lunatic AI in the two-player games.
Cosmetic Award: Clearing a scene with a high enough score in Shoot the Bullet or Double Spoiler unlocks commentary from Aya or Hatate. Score has no other purpose.
Dead Character Walking: Certain versions of Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom has Merlin Prismriver continue attacking even after the Prismriver sisters are supposed to be defeated, potentially killing your character. So much for sisterly solidarity. This bug has been mercilessly ridiculed by doujin artists.
Defeat Equals Explosion: For bosses in the shooting games. Characters can also explode in the fighting game Hopeless Masquerade, depending on how they are defeated. Note that danmaku fights are non-lethal - the player character often has a chat with the boss after defeating her - so the explosion is presumably just a showy special effect.
Desolation Shot: In Mystic Square, the Amazing Technicolor Battlefield disappears when you dispel Shinki's penultimate spell and blast her wings off. The background of the battle's final phase is a slow pan down over Makai, which is now on fire as a result of the fight.
Difficulty Spike: Most games seem to have one, usually around stage 4.
Most final bosses' and extra bosses' final spell cards start out fairly simple, even elementary... then it gets faster, or stacks more components simultaneously over time/damage. By the end, the spell is an all-out nightmarish mess that fills the screen or moves very quickly, or both.
Dual Boss: Several examples, sometimes with three bosses instead of two:
Yuki and Mai in Mystic Square.
The Prismriver sisters in Perfect Cherry Blossom.
Sunny Milk, Luna Child and Star Sapphire in Fairy Wars.
Seiga and Yoshika in Ten Desires.
Miko, Tojiko and Futo for one of the former's spellcards in the same game — although Miko does not do a single thing during it.
Reimu, Miko and Byakuren in Kokoro's Hopeless Masquerade story mode. Reimu fights by herself, but during spellcards, in the first spell, Miko joins in the attack. In the second spell, Byakuren does tag with Reimu. Third and fourth spells? The religious trinity itself. Reimu is assisted by Miko and Byakuren.
Dynamic Difficulty: 4-6 have a system where the bullets become faster and denser over time. In the case of 4 and 5, it's somewhat tied to how well you're doing, but in 6 it just keeps going up until you die, which resets it.
Touhou Hisoutensoku, an add-on to Scarlet Weather Rhapsody that introduces a new storyline and playable characters, including Meiling and Cirno.
Double Spoiler can be considered this for Shoot the Bullet, which was originally meant to be updated as new characters appeared.
Failure Is the Only Option: Any first completion of most games. To get the proper ending, you must not use any continues and, in some cases, not be on easy mode. Given the genre, this is borderline impossible. And in the case of Imperishable Night it's completely impossible, since you have to get the normal ending before the good one.
It's arguable that all of the Touhou games suffer from this, due to the ambiguity of the hitboxes on the bullets requiring more a ton of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, although that really comes with the Bullet Hell territory. Story of Eastern Wonderland was the worst about it though, as your hitbox was rather large, and if you died it would offset slightly — enough to make some previous safe spots no longer safe.
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, 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. This problem is present in Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism as well, though to a lesser extent.
Fighting Game: Three and a half fighting game spinoffs: Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody and it's Expansion PackTouhou Hisoutensoku, and Hopeless Masquerade.
Stage 4 of Lotus Land Story has you fighting whichever character you didn't choose. Only Reimu and Marisa were playable at this point.
It was repeated in stage 4 of Imperishable Night, which has you fighting either Reimu or Marisa, depending on the team you choose.
Much of the story of Immaterial and Missing Power, Phantasmagoria of Flower View, and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
Hopeless Masquerade plays it straight and averts it at times. Reimu and Marisa fight each other in their own routes (they're probably used to it by now), but the buddhists and taoists never fight amongst themselves (except for stage 5 in Ichirin's and Futo's routes, but that's Mamizou in disguise both times). And then there's Koishi, who, while not being a part of the Myouren crew, still is a freshly converted buddhist, so her fighting against either Ichirin or Byakuren may or may not count.
Bullet Heaven, a sort of 'westernized' Touhou game—the achievements have shoutouts to Imperishable Night and Ten Desires.
Project Nite Festival combines the bomb-power system from Mountain of Faith with a gameplay similar to Imperishable Night, custom characters and spellcards.
Capturing spell cards, which requires wiping the spell card's corresponding Life Meter segment or, in the case of a survival card, surviving it without losing any lives or bombs.
Fairy Wars gives golden medals for capturing cards without dying, bombing or freezing any bullets. That was probably ZUN's idea of a joke.
Flying Saucer: Part of the system in Undefined Fantastic Object involves collecting small UFOs from certain enemies that carry them. Upon collecting a red, blue and green one or three of the same color, a large UFO appears, abducts all items onscreen, and tries to fly offscreen. The saucer drops rewards upon defeat - the loot varies depending on the UFO's color and how much it absorbed.
The first game on the PC-98 was basically Alleyway with Reimu hitting a ball.
The second game was a shooter, but the closest one can get to the modern gameplay is with Mystic Square, incidentally, the last PC-98 game.
The two Phantasmagorias also count, considering that the other games are single-player scrolling shooters whilst Dim. Dream and Flower View are versus shooters.
Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, Hisoutensoku and Hopeless Masquerade are 2-D fighters.
Nobody is entirely sure what to call Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler.
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: In Hisoutensoku there was a giant catfish from nowhere as the final boss for Meiling's route.
Ten Desires adds Overdrive. It's an extra difficulty added to specific spellcards (one for each non-cameo character) that's unlocked by capturing that spellcard on all other difficulties. They range from being the next logical step up after the lunatic version to being much, much worse.
Hitbox Dissonance: Intentional, as the games are quite impossible until you learn to exploit it to the fullest. The radius of the hitboxes of large bullets are smaller than the radius of the sprites, so it is typically possible to move the player's hitbox into the very edge of the bullet's sprite and not die. In addition, the boss' hitboxes are usually purposefully larger than their sprites in order to make it easy to shoot the boss.
Hit Stop: Some high-power spellcards in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody and Hisoutensoku, like Komachi's "Unpitiable Pitiable Life", Suwako's "Mishaguji-sama" and Meiling's "Light Lotus Palm" use this effect.
Hold the Line: Some of the bosses have spell cards that make them invulnerable, and you can't do anything other than dodge and wait for time to run out. Those are commonly known as "Survival" or "Time-Out" Spellcards.
in Phantasmagoria of Flower Viewing, every single battle in Extra Stages as Komachi or Shikieki are this. The enemy is invulnerable for a set ammount of time and you must survive until their time is up, at which they often screw up on purpose.
Kaizo Trap: After beating bosses, it takes a second before the projectiles turn into tokens. So if you aren't careful, you can win, but still die.
This can cause a glitch in games that use the second version of the engine(Mountain of Faith to Undefined Fantastic Object, Shoot the Bullet uses that engine as well, but this glitch doesn't occur because of different stage mechanic). Basically if this happens at the end of third stage, and you'll respawn after the "Stage Complete" message, you'll be stuck in that stage. You'll still have full control of the character, but some people reported being unable of alt-tabbing out of the game in fullscreen mode.
Last Spells are often this. When you think you have defeated the enemy, you rush to the top of the screen to trigger the auto-collect and the enemy respawns right on you, giving no reaction time.
Lethal Lava Land: Subterranian Animism stages 5 and 6, which take place in the former Hell of Blazing Fires, further warmed by an underground STAR.
Made of Explodium: Frogs. There's a shot-type and four seperate spellcards based on them blowing up.
Artful Sacrifice. Yes, Alice uses gunpowder as filling for her dolls. And it results in a hilarious dialogue between Alice and Marisa in Subterranean Animism.
Marathon Boss: By shmup standards, anyway. Each game has a Bonus Boss which typically takes 8-10 minutes to defeat.
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. Somewhat played with - continuing after a certain point gets you a bad end and the inability to continue.
Mickey Mousing: Some levels try to perfectly synchronize themselves with their music, to the extent where you get bonus enemies to destroy if you kill the midboss quickly, and perhaps even skip a pattern if you kill the first few too slowly.
More Dakka: And how! Taking your time in some of Imperishable Night's last words will eventually result in the bosses reaching the bullet limit, causing some of the patterns to glitch up. This is just about the closest you can get to having enough dakka.
If you don't have enough, try Touhou Ultra. It has so much more it can screw up patterns completely.
Multiple Endings: At the very least, each shottype gets its own ending. Beyond that, specifics vary:
Most games give you a character-specific bad ending for beating the game after using a continue. The Phantasmagoria games don't care, and Fairy Wars just doesn't give you an ending if you continue. Mountain of Faith also gives you one regardless of continues if you played on easy.
The games that have route selections give you an ending based on which route you take.
Imperishable Night combines the two above into something odd. You get a Bad Ending for running out of continues. You get a normal ending for facing Eirin as the final boss, who you'll be locked into fighting if it's your first time playing with that character or if you continued.
Ten Desires gives you a 'Parallel Ending' if you beat the game on normal or higher with at least three bombs in stock (bombs from unused lives don't count).
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.
Games 10 through 12 made things worse by having continues send you back to the beginning of the stage (thankfully reverted back in Fairy Wars) and removing the option to increase your base lives above three (this one still stands).
God help you if, for some weird reason, you want to beat the extra stage. Even its in-game description is something to the effect of "Are you out of your mind?"
ZUN: Next episode! Look forward to "tears of blood in the extra stage!" (Er, I mean good luck.)
And if that's not challenging enough for you, PCB has the lovely phantasm stage after the extra and IN has the last word spell card section. Even unlocking these is next to impossible. Actually beating them requires more effort than the rest of the game combined.
All of the above are put to complete and utter shame by the Gaiden GameShoot the Bullet, which is 11 levels of the most sadistic, multi-layered spell cards in the whole series. Unlike any of the other games, you have no extra lives, no bombs, you lose when you time out, your only weapon is a camera that needs to be charged and manually aimed for long distance attacks, and some bosses are only vulnerable for a fraction of a second. Lastly, the difficulty is not adjustable at all. You do take on each spell card individually and have infinite retries, but the incredible difficulty makes clearing it impossible for most people.
The sequel, Double Spoiler, is somewhat better thanks to improved camera controls and a new unlockable character that makes most cards easier to beat. It's still harder than the normal Touhou games, though. ZUN even had this on his blog.
Warning: Compared to the other works in the series, the difficulty level of this game in terms of full completion is rather high, so be prepared.
How hard is the extra stage of Fairy Wars? Imagine having an initial bomb stock of zero, and cliptastic bullet patterns so intricate that you cannot dodge without a freeze counter at around 80%. It’s certain death if you don’t have enough ice power or you can’t trigger the ice shield in time.
Hell, even fan-made crossover games fall into this, probably a direct result of putting danmaku in genres where you're actually affected by gravity and don't have a tiny hitbox.
And of course for the really crazy people, there's Ultra mode hacks, or cranking up the framerate to play at 150% speed...
Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: An in-game feature later 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 mechanic 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.
The final card of the final boss is immune to bombs, though they still clear the bullets away (though usually with some diminished effect, like a smaller radius or only getting half of them or somesuch). You'll have to grind down their health the normal way.
The only exception to the rule is Utsuho Reiuji, the final boss in Subterranean Animism, which gains an armor instead, in other words, you can continue doing reduced damage to her with a bomb, but this comes with the cost that the bombs doesn't clean the bullets in the screen.
All extra and phantasm stage bosses have this effect for all spellcards, except in Fairy Wars. In the versus shooters they are completely invincible for certain period of time.
Obvious Beta: Hopeless Masquerade was likely rushed for the convention it was released in. It is playable, but there are random crashes (particularly around Koishi) and the final boss is only playable in Story Mode despite a slot for her on the character select screen. That's probably because she has no special moves or Spellcards implemented.
Off Model: ZUN's artistic capabilities are... inconsistent. Alphes was generally much better about this, but the Hopeless Masquerade art is rife with anatomy issues.
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. Since this requires inhuman dodging skills on some of the harder attacks, it has become a favorite Self-Imposed Challenge for Touhou gamers. Given the difficulty of the games to begin with, this kind of challenge is usually considered another sign that Touhou players are insane.
Most of the extra bosses actually have a secret difficulty on their last (or second-to-last, in Yukari's case) spell card, triggered by attempting to go pacifist. Normally, those spell cards start off easy, but get harder as the boss loses HP. To prevent cheesing the game and trivializing what should be a climactic end by just waiting, the spell card will have an extremely hard pattern, even harder than the normal final pattern, starting at 30 seconds left if the boss has not lost enough HP.
Parabolic Power Curve: It's generally accepted that the stage 5 boss will be harder than the final boss, or at least as hard. The reason for this is that stage 5 bosses tend to have more experimental or random patterns, with fewer bullets but much trickier dodging. Final bosses are all about large quantities of bullets at all times, but because they're fired in easily predicted patterns, they're not nearly as challenging for experienced players, even if it's their first time fighting that particular boss.
Pinball Scoring: Typical scores after beating the game are in the millions. Highscores are in the billions.
Taken to the extreme where you can score more points on the final level than the rest of the game. Combined.
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.
Schizophrenic Difficulty: Significantly more the case in the photography games, which have things like Double Spoiler's 11th level being easier than its 8th level, and the bizarrely difficult 3rd level of Shoot The Bullet. Great Fairy Wars is also infamous for its difficulty spike, even for a Touhou game.
Schmuck Bait: About the upper quarter of the screen is an area called Point of Collection, or POC. If you're in this area in general, or if you have maximum power, all items that enemies drop will float towards your character. This is essential to racking up points. Except... it's highly recommended you stay away from the POC area unless you know you can sweep around. Sometimes it's too tempting to grab up all the items and then enemies suddenly come out to take a life.
Serial Escalation: The whole series could be characterized as "And here, ZUN thought if you can win after 20 tries, the game is too easy".
Smart Bomb: Touhou uses a more stylish take on the Smart Bomb, and it depends on the player selected.
"Spell cards" are namedVancian 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 Smart Bombs 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 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."
Sprite Polygon Mix: All of the windows era main series games uses this. Hopeless Masquerade will be the first of the fighters to incorporate this.
Highly Responsive to Prayers does similarly, with random bullets shooting at you if the clock runs out on any stage.
Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler technically play it straight, but the setup all but ensures you will either defeat the boss or perish long before you time out.
Step Into The Blinding Fight: Rumia the youkai of darkness can create spheres of darkness around herself so as to blind enemies. Too bad she can't see in the dark either...
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.
When Mima flashes in Story of Eastern Wonderland it means she's about to ram you. Moving to the side is recommended.
Yuuka has an attack more or less guaranteed to kill you the first time you see them in both fights in Lotus Land Story. In her first fight, there's her so-called "Master Spark"; it's very obvious that she's about to do something, but there's no indication that you need to be on the side of the screen to survive. In the second fight she has an attack that places a shrinking circle under the player: Gamer instinct is to get as far away as possible... and the attack hits everywhere ''except'' in the circle.
The fourth stage of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has certain enemies that will cancel all bullets on screen when they die. The stage is much more passable if you know about them, but a first-time player won't.
In the same game, the normal bullet pattern Remilia uses after her second spell card is essentially a cheap shot against anyone not expecting it/not being careful enough, because it comes out WICKED fast.
Mokou's Forgiveness "Honest Man's Death" has a gimmick that's completely unique in the entire series: The laser won't kill you if you move towards it when it's firing. Most people have to get help with this one online. - it is actually the case that the laser's hitbox only activates when it passes through your position at the point in time when it was originally fired: moving towards the laser's point of origin at any point after this will save you. Of course, this still requires some trial and error to figure out alone.
Yuugi's Four Devas Arcanum "Knock Out In Three Steps" is basically impossible to capture the first time you see it. It relies on being in the right place before the bullets start moving.
And of course, there's several instances in the ENTIRE series where memorizing where enemies come from at which point in each stage and destroying them as soon as possible greatly reduces the amount of bullets you have to dodge. It's safe to say that it is virtually impossible to not be subject to this when playing these games.
Almost all the the spell cards in Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler, as you take successful shots.
This appears to be what those spell cards would look like from Easy mode to Lunatic difficulty.
Inverted in the main series, where some spell cards will speed up if the player isn't damaging the boss fast enough.
Units Not To Scale: With the exception of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, bosses are markedly larger than the player, regardless of how large they're supposed to actually be. This is also lampshaded by ZUN. Occasionally, fan art makes jokes based on how large the hitbox of a boss is.
Tropes that pertain to the story, fanon, fandom, or other non-gameplay elements
Aesop Amnesia: Each of the character's storylines in Phantasmagoria of Flower View ends with them learning An Aesop. If you play as Eiki, however, which takes place after all of the others, it turns out that everyone forgot or misunderstood what they were supposed to learn.
At least every other picture of ZUN shows him drinking alcohol, with several bottles of it at his side, or both.
In the series canon, oni are the heaviest drinkers out of everyone, followed closely by the tengu, and the cast really loves their alcohol in any shape or form in the Expanded Universe.
All There in the Manual: See that list of side materials up above? That's where the vast majority of the world-building is. On a smaller scale, a considerable amount of any given game's story is in it's prologue and character profiles.
Already Done For You: Perspective Inverted in Ten Desires. Mamizou found out that the heroines have already defeated Miko, the person whom she's called for by Nue to defeat. Doesn't stop her from fighting said heroines, just because. Considering Mamizou'spower, perhaps the heroines should just stay at home.
Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Palanquin Ship. A ship that is still intact long after it has been buried, and more or less is capable of sailing? No such thing is possible in Real Life, right?
Amazon Brigade: Almost all characters are female powerhouses. In contrast, the few living male characters aren't known to be fighters.
Animesque: It is a Japanese property with anime-style art, but fan art, Fan Vids, and other such things are very prone to making it look like an anime series rather than a game, to the point it's a Running Gag that people will ask "What anime is this from?" almost constantly on Youtube. There's a reason why there's a Fan Vid page.
Arc Welding: According to an interview with ZUN for Ten Desires, this was said game's intention: to connect the new trilogy, also known as "Moriya Shrine conspiracy", (Mountain of Faith, Subterranean Animism, and Undefined Fantastic Object) to the older trilogy (Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, and Imperishable Night). Due to a certain fan theory, Ten Desires may have been able to connect to every Windows game in one go.
Art Evolution: SO much of it getting zigzagged, leading to Memetic Mutations such as Undead Zombie Reimu (her appearance in Mountain of Faith, which was notoriously bad, even for ZUN's art). The 12th Touhou game, UFO, has been praised for ZUN's art improving.
Autobots, Rock Out!: Two songs, "A Tiny, Tiny Clever Commander" and "Nuclear Fusion", are uniquely in the rock genre by default, the former practically a synthtar, the latter is simply epic. The latter is the final boss theme of SA, while the former is the first boss theme of UFO.
Also the remix of one of Reimu's themes used in Hopeless Masquerade named "Colorful Path".
All three boss themes in the DDC demo are very much rocking.
Beauty of danmaku is total nonsense for the bosses. If they really have the intent to kill someone, they won't even need 1/10 of those bullets.
Battle Butler: Many penultimate bosses are a servant of the final boss and have very unlikely job descriptions for someone of their combat abilities.
In Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream Chiyuri is Yumemi's research assistant in "comparative physics".
Mystic Square and The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil both have Ninja Maids in the form of Yumeko and Sakuya, the latter being by far one of the most popular characters of the franchise.
Perfect Cherry Blossom introduces samurai gardener Youmu. You wouldn't recognize her as such from the fanbase, though.
Eirin and Reisen from Imperishable Night both fit the part, being Kaguya's pharmacist and pet respectively. However, Word Of God states that Eirin is actually stronger than Kaguya and limits her power out of respect for the princess.
Komachi from Phantasmagoria of Flower View also counts, since her official job is to be The Ferry Man of the Sanzu River.
In Mountain of Faith Sanae is the priestess of both the final and extra boss, who are both gods.
Subterranean Animism reverses this trend by having the Big Bad and the stage 5 boss be the pets of the stage 4 boss.
Ran Yakumo :I am leagues different from Chen. Leagues, columns, digits, and colours.
Bare Your Midriff: Fanart often shows the blouses worn by characters such as Reimu, Marisa, Flandre or Sanae riding up when they raise their arms.
Barred From The Afterlife: We have Yuyuko Saigyouji, the princess of the Netherworld, the place where souls wait for their Reincarnation. However, because her body is being used to seal the Saigyou Ayakashi she cannot enter the cycle of reincarnation and is stuck forever as a ghost. She seems to be enjoying it, though.
Beneath the Earth: Subterranean Animism introduces a society of "hated" youkai living underground; surface youkai are forbidden from entering their realm due to an ancient treaty, but the opposite is not true. This realm includes the former site of Hell - it was relocated due to overcrowding, but some of the workers and evil spirits are still around.
Berserk Button: The fandom has one in the question "What anime is this?" as well as when someone on YouTube claims that Touhoustole fromthe McRoll. For the uninitiated, the McRoll is based on Flandre's theme, not the other way around. Western fandom is also beginning to detest old memes (pads, etc.).
Similar to the Mc Roll question, some members of the fandom will get annoyed if you try to call Flandre's Theme "Death Waltz".
May the Lord have mercy on you if you tell Reimu she has awful night vision.
Boobs of Steel: Because ZUN almost never draws boobs on any of the characters, their bust sizes in fanon are the result of mass Memetic Mutation among fanartists. The most mature-seeming characters will usually be drawn with the largest breasts. See Self Fanservice.
Bootstrapped Leitmotif: A character's Leitmotif usually ends up being the music from their boss fight, but this trope happens a few times. Meiling, Alice and Youmu all get their stage themes as Leitmotifs (along with their boss themes); Suika gets her pre-battle theme (again, along with her boss theme).
Boss in Mook Clothing: Every game has at least one "death fairy"/"doom fairy" — a seemingly normal fairy that has attacks and health comparable to most bosses. They always come from the top-center of the screen, and, like bosses, have abnormally elaborate bullet patterns.
Broke The Rating Scale: The Grimoire Of Marisa includes a star rating for each spell card, but several are passed over for being too weak or too strong for the rating to matter, and others get silly ones, such as "Mega-Disgusting Score" for Wriggle's bug attacks.
Butterfly of Doom: Just about every game starting with Mountain of Faith (barring the Gaiden Games), which some fans call the "Moriya Shrine conspiracy". It starts out with an incident caused by a group of newcomers (the Moriya Shrine) arriving in Gensokyo. They then try to give Genokyo nuclear power, which causes another incident. That incident then sets free the followers of a sealed youkai priestess, starting yet another incident. And then the sealed youkai and her followers come into conflict with the subject of the next incident, a resurrected ruler from ancient Japan and her own followers. The latest Touhou game sounds like there will be some sort of religious war breaking out in Gensokyo between the two groups. All because the Moriya Shrine was trying to modernize the place. Thanks, Kanako.
The Cameo: Wild and Horned Hermit is absolutely covered in these. The story hasn't used many characters yet, but Azuma Aya seems to want to draw as many as possible.
Hopeless Masquerade features almost every character from the windows games (and the supplementary material), if not as a player character, then as a spectator in the background. Notable exceptions are Akyuu, the Watatsuki sisters, Kasen, Meiling, and Flandre.
Carnivore Confusion: Gensokyo has a food chain. You're not at the top of it, since most non-human characters will attempt to eat helpless humans away from the protection of a village. The youkai cast often threatens to eat the player character, but they're empty threats - none of the youkai eat humans anymore. Per usual, fanon jacks this up to insane levels.
According to Yukari in Wild and Hornet Hermit, the youkai are still getting their fill of food, just not from the human village.
Celestial Bureaucracy: Used repeatedly, given how many of the settings have to do with the afterlife. One recurring gag is that the Ministry of Right and Wrong (ie: Hell), is constantly running into budget problems and has to either downsize, come up with alternate sources of income like publishing guidebooks, or whatever else the story requires.
Chekhov's Gun/Foreshadowing: A meta version for the reader/player. Perfect Memento in Strict Sense was released in 2006 before the game Mountain of Faith. With that in mind, look through some of the articles and realize just how much of Perfect Memento became used in future games.
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.
Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Most of the characters that appeared in the PC-98 games (read: every character except Reimu, Marisa, Alice, and Yuuka) have not made any more appearances outside of the game they originally appeared in. Compare that to the cast members of the games since Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, who make appearances in multiple games and source material.
City With No Name: The Human Village (somewhat justified in that there seems to be only the one), and the Former District of Hell (also called the Ancient City or the Subterranean City). Makai and Higan could be aversions if they contain actual cities. There's also a Tengu City somewhere up Youkai Mountain (ugh...) and a Lunar Capital on the Moon, but they may just be a product of people only talking about it indirectly (popular petnames).
The only properly named city in the whole series is Mayohiga.
If Rinnosuke's theories are correct, the entire realm of Gensokyo inverts this. According to him, 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, in the tie-in manga Silent Sinner in Blue, he manages to find information on the Moon landings because, as he claims, enough people have become convinced that they never happened. There is also evidence to the contrary (what with him being a Know-Nothing Know-It-All), so this is hardly conclusive proof.
In general, this is how youkai and gods come into being. The belief of them makes them stronger, while forgetting them causes them to ether disappear (Youkais) or return to being a nameless Divine Spirit (God). Gods, however are shaped by their Myths, which allows them to change their titles and powers due to their followers believing in them. Yasaka was orginally a Storm god before she became a Mountain god, for example. The real reason for Gensokyo is to seperate the Youkai from human imagiation, allowing them to shape themselves. This trope is played straight, subverted, and inverted all at the same time.
Continuity Creep: The plots of the games were originally largely standalone. Each game was generally self-contained. However, starting with Mountain of Faith, the series has gained continuity, the events happening in each game becoming connected in various ways. ZUN has both stated that "Touhou is not a series" and included the phrase "Touhou series" in manuals.
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 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. Fans still argue if the rest of the PC-98s are canon and if Alice's new backstory can compliment hers in Mystic Square.
Contrived Coincidence: Wild Mass Guessing spawned from Rin Satsuki has either seemingly manifested in another game, or was too good to be true. Among a few of them are how the Japanese fandom believed she was a Taoist, due to her carrying an erhu, and being assumed a Qilin (sometimes romanized as "Kirin", which supports the romanization of her name, Satsuki Rin), which is primarily represented as a Chinese deity excelling in healing. Cue Imperishable Night and Ten Desires, with their focus on a nurse (HELP ME, EIRIN!) and Taoism, respectively, and her popularity has reignited.
Convection Schmonvection: 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. Some of this can be justified by Gameplay and Story Segregation, but the player characters should have really died well before reaching Utsuho.
Reimu does comment on how incredibly hot it is and that she's feeling like she's about to get roasted. She (and probably Marisa too) is most likely only saved by her very powerful magic shielding her.
The Hakurei Shrine serves as a gateway between our world and Gensokyo, and has a traditional Japanese arch.
The gate at the Netherworld (Hakugyokurou) is an subversion, in that it is placed at the entrance to the Netherworld, but it doesn't open. People just fly over it instead.
Cowboy Bebop At His Computer: Special mention to CNN, who covered the Shadow Art PV for Alstroemeria's "Bad Apple!!" with little to no idea about what they were actually talking about. They even went as far as to say that the stop-motion version was the origin of the entire thing, making this a Critical Research Failure. This incident led a number of Touhou fans to refer to CNN as the "Cirno News Network".
Crossover: "If it exists, there's a crossover with Touhou" is almost an internet rule. Seriously, it even has its own page.
Curtains Match the Window: All of the PC-98 characters have a same eye color as their hair (given that they're in their regular outfit). There is a fair share of Windows characters with this as well.
Cut-and-Paste Translation: There is at least one instance wherein the English translators just made stuff up, namely the "only a stage 2 boss".
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 rules of danmaku, which every character follows, make sure that everyone has a chance of winning despite their difference in sheer power. The player characters even have their own special attacks comparable to boss characters' attacks... just not when you're controlling them.
Defeat Means Friendship: At least one ending to every game involves the main character having a tea party with the Big Bad, and dragons Sakuya Izayoi, Youmu Konpaku, Sanae Kochiya, and even Marisa Kirisame have become playable characters after getting defeated.
Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In the PC-98 games, you defeat the Angel of Death, two goddesses who created their own dream world (just because your player character was bored), and The Goddess of Hell. In the Windows series, the protagonist stops the mistress of the Netherworld with the power to invoke death in mortals, the local Charon equivalent, one of the Judges of the dead (who is implied to be more powerful than anything in Gensokyo), five gods, a hell raven who gains the power of nuclear fusion after devouring a dead sun god, and a vampire that can destroy anything she sees, not to mention the reality-warping youkai who may have created Gensokyo itself. This is one of the purposes behind the spell card system - it allows even weak humans and youkai a chance at fighting stronger opponents to settle accounts, without needless, one-sided bloodshed.
Do Not Spoil This Ending: ZUN has requested that the fanbase keep the endings of the games secret and, for the most part, the fanbase complies (although you can find all of them if you know where to look). Given that request, and the fact that, to get a good ending, one has to 1 credit clear the game, seeing the good ending of a game is a great accomplishment, indeed.
Dragons Up the Yin Yang: Dragons are almost never mentioned or seen, but they are said to be in the highest class of beings in Gensokyo. One dragon spoken of in canon is worshiped as a god by human and youkai alike for his power to create or destroy anything. It's said that he appeared in the sky on the day the Great Hakurei Border was erected.
At one point in Wild and Horned Hermit, Nitori mentions a water dragon "Lord Suiryuu" as being the only thing she can think of powerful enough to create the waterspout that was the focus of the chapter. Although it turns out it was a Kishin.
Dream Land: The later stages of Story of Eastern Wonderland and the extra stage of Lotus Land Story.
Drop-In Character: Half the cast, to one degree or other, and into various locations, the most common being the Hakurei Shrine.
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.
Dummied Out: Rin Satsuki in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Needless to say, she's prime OC Stand In bait.
Empty Quiver: According to many doujinshis, Kanako gives Utsuho nuclear fusion via Yatagarasu because she believes Utsuho would be beneficial to the Moriya Shrine. This ends up backfiring when Utsuho decides to use it for herself, and to turn Gensokyo into a living hell. Her status in later games have diluted to what can be classified as "Bent Spear" (we know the bomb is there, but it's not a priority) and "FadedGiant" (an event that involves a nuclear reactor that's currently in use by the military, e.g. Moriya Shrine).
Endless Winter: In the game Perfect Cherry Blossom, Yuyuko steals spring to feed a giant monstrous cherry tree in the ghost world, causing perpetual winter in the land of Gensoukyo.
Everyone Is A Super: From common fairies to even average Gensokyo humans, who have some magic powers, it is flat-out assumed everyone has some kind of special powers or danmaku powers here. So, when Sanae first came to Gensokyou, she was unhappy at this fact, as she's not special anymore.
Everyone Has A Special Move: However, the spellcards each character have in stock help themselves become distinct, like their hats. They tell stories, they reference user's power, and even the shapes of the bullets used in the spellcards can become a special trait for a character.
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?
Hopeless Masquerade is actually a love letter to Noh theatre.
Excuse Plot: Progressively less as the series progresses, but the PC-98 games in particular had very flimsy plots.
Kotohime: Has a visual resemblance to an unnamed Story of Eastern Wonderland midboss.
Hong Meiling: Possibly of Orange, due to similar appearances.
Sakuya: Probably of Yumeko, as both are Knife Nuts, Ninja Maids, and have a similar appearance. Alternatively, Muse, who looks near identical to her.
Kaguya: Might be one of Kotohime, since they are both sheltered princesses, are both kind of strange in the head, have theme songs with similar titles ("Maniacal Princess" and "Lunatic Princess"), and both have a connection with rabbits (Kotohime's name means "little rabbit princess").
Minamitsu: Possibly of Chiyuri, due to the fact that they both wear sailor suits. Additionally, she has a teleportation attack similar to Chiyuri's, and her ship can do interdimensional travel.
Mononobe no Futo: Who looks similar to Shingyoku's male form.
The Fair Folk: Youkai tend to act like this. They have been relatively behaving this generation due to a lazy yet powerful miko and trigger-happy Cute Witch who have been befriending them constantly.
Touhou Musou Kakyou by Maikaze, the first episode of which was released at Comiket 75. Managed to bring in such big names as Rie Tanaka to do voice work. Unfortunately, it had poor sales and it wasn't until 2011 that another episode was announced, and another year until it was released.
Yuuhei Satellite's Gensou Magenkyou (or Fantasy Kaleidoscope), which retells the story of Perfect Cherry Blossom albeit with Sanae from Mountain of Faith showing up at the very end. Although the original version had no voice-acting, it can be found with a Japanese fandub here.
Patchouli to Explode, released at Reitaisai SP2. Unlike the other examples here, it's based on a doujinshi and follows a small cast.
Fantastic Ghetto: The underground is basically a place where despised youkai eventually settle down.
Fantastic Nature Reserve: The purpose of Gensokyo's existence, which was eventually made clear from Mountain of Faith onward. Since belief in such beings as youkai and gods is rapidly disappearing in the outside world, Gensokyo is a haven for them.
The residents of the underground are mostly youkai who are hated or feared, usually for their power. A notable example is the satori species. According to Hatate's comments from Double Spoiler on Satori's spells, there used to be many satoris on Youkai Mountain, but they were banished to the underground because of their ability to read other people's mind.
Undefined Fantastic Object 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...
Reimu is unique in that, despite one of the few dealing with youkai being jerks on a daily basis, she doesn't care about them one way or another.
Among the youkai, Mamizou is noted for her dislike of foxes and was responsible for driving them away from her native island of Sado. Whether foxes dislike tanuki in return, and whether Mamizou will attempt to do something similar in Gensokyo in the future, is unclear.
Fanwork Only Fans: Touhou is typically introduced to will-be fans through a fan video or music before those people discover the games themselves. There are many people who are fans of fandom interpretations and doujin circles and have never played an actual Touhou game.
Hate Plague: In Double Dealing Character, something is causing various, normally non-violent youkai to become aggressive. It seems to be affecting player characters too; Marisa and Sakuya become Ax Crazy if you play through the story with their currently cursed weapons.
Flandreization: Fanon is fond of this, characters commonly reduced to a single character quirk which may or may not have been a major part of their character in the original games. Given that this happens to every single character, often in multiple ways, a full list of every change would far, far larger than this page.
Full-Contact Magic: At least in the fighting games, as well as in fanworks, the intense nature of spell card 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: Most of 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, as the 12th game's English name is Undefined Fantastic Object.
Gaiden Game: Anything with a decimal point in its number.
In UFO, reaching 1 billion points would up and crash the game. A patch was released to fix this 12 days after release.
In Fairy Wars, hitting Retry from the pause menu on Stage C2-2 or C2-3 and then subsequently beating the game on route C2 without returning to the menu would crash the game. This one has not been patched.
In Ten Desires, the game would crash if you are not using a bomb, a valuable resource, when the Survival Card of the Extra Boss ends. This is the second last attack in the entire game.
Even worse, that makes it impossible to capture in Spellcard mode because you aren't given any bombs to start with. Be grateful the patch for that only took 4 days after release.
In Hopeless Masquerade, the game will crash if Mamizou's Last Word is blocked.
Gameplay and Story Integration: Certain dialogue reflect gameplay events; for example, Nitori will not comment that her optical camouflage suit broke if you time out her Optical Optical Camouflage spellcard.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: There tends to be a disconnect between what a character's powers are said to be, and what they can actually do. No matter what a character's stated powers are, they only manifest in the form of danmaku in-game. Justified, in that the spell card rules require danmaku to be used to solve disputes. It's what stops every stage 5, 6, and extra boss from curb-stomping you. See Holding Back the Phlebotinum.
Although divine beings are said to be poisonous to youkai, Remilia can safely suck Tenshi and Suwako's blood in Hisoutensoku in her alternate special move "Vampire Kiss".
As with White and Grey Morality, 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 Sorting Algorithm of Evil) would be shifted back to the lighter tone of the rest of the series in subsequent games, which was indeed the case with UFO, save for the aforementioned philosophising about the nature of youkai and humans.
Fanworks love to avert this, claiming that one (or more) character is a jackass psycho. It's a running gag in some boards that everyone is evil, and some fans are of the opinion everyone is too rude to be truly "good".
Great Big Library of Everything: Voile, the Magical Library note It's yet to be officially referred to as such, but that's the name of the music track that plays there in the Scarlet Devil Mansion's basement. It's large enough to allow for a stage roughly five-minute-long aerial battle over the bookshelves traveling in one direction without ever reaching the end. The library is maintained by Patchouli Knowledge, who spends her days locked up inside adding to the already-massive cache of knowledge - she's not just the librarian, but also the author of an unspecified proportion of the tomes in her library, and probably the overwhelming majority of the magic books in the library, given the esoteric rules for wizardry in the Touhou 'verse. While 100 straight years of this this have given her anemia, asthma, and Vitamin A deficiency, you are more than likely to find anything you could ever want in there (Marisa sure does).
By the end of Imperishable Night, only all the team members, Kaguya and company, and Keine know that the real incident was the corrupted Moon. Everyone else thinks that the real incident was the unending night, which was actually caused by the protagonists you chose in order to buy time to fix the Moon.
From Reimu's interview in Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, it would seem Gensokyo's residents are unaware of her resolving any of the incidents.
Hard Work Hardly Works: Most youkai seem to get by with whatever talent they're born with and no training whatsoever.
Reimu's laziness, yet apparent genius lets her get by without any training either. Averted with Marisa, who works like crazy just to keep up.
Heart Is an Awesome Power: 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.
Holding Back the Phlebotinum: The spell card system was created, because the youkai would have no other way to fight Reimu, who is canonically unbeatable by any method when she isn't messing around and killing her would possibly result in the collapse of Gensokyo's barrier, which separates it from our world. For Reimu it may just be an excuse to be lazy and not take things seriously. Some of the more forward thinking youkai recognize that the spell card system allows them to sit down and have tea with mortal enemies, and keeps the place at least safer, if not safe.
Hyperactive Sprite: In the fighting games, Suika keeps goofily swaying back and forth when standing in place.
In Mountain of Faith, Nitori spins while shooting bullets in all directions. A lot.
I Am Not A Gun: Youkai, as beings born from human fears or as explanations for the unknown, tend to have a specific "purpose" that they were born to fulfill, most commonly to antagonize humans. Not all of them want to though, despite the risk of death or worse for being forgotten after abandoning their "purpose". Byakuren's Buddhist temple was created to help youkai either find a new purpose or simply come to terms with non-existence. Of course, most of the younger ones don't even know they have a purpose or why they should care.
I Believe I Can Fly: Pretty much everyone. By this point, the series has stopped trying to justify it. Originally, Reimu walked or used Genji, a flying turtle.
Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: With the exception of Sangetsusei and some of the music CDs, the Japanese title of every official Touhou work shares at least one kanji with the name of a character introduced in it (or involved, in the case of Seasonal Dream Vision).
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.
Although Danbooru isn't specifically dedicated to Touhou, over 25% (and growing) of its content (over 300k images, out of Danbooru's total of over a million) is Touhou. Some individual characters (and not even just the main characters) have more images than entire popular series such as Final Fantasy and Lyrical Nanoha. As an example, Fujiwara no Mokou, who's never been playable in any game, is represented in more posts than the entire Final Fantasy franchise.
All who drink the Hourai Elixir gain the resurrective type, at least functionally. The very concept of death is removed from their being, but in practice this works by having them "respawn" whenever they take what would've been lethal damage.
The fairies work like this: They have very short life spans, but are reborn in the same shape (a healthy one, that is) as soon as they die even if they're blown to pieces, essentially making them immortal.
Lunarians don't age, since it's apparently caused by "impurity" which they've isolated themselves from. They can die by non-natural means, though, and it's implied that despite their efforts they still carry small traces of impurity from before they moved to the moon and will eventually die of old age, just much much slower.
Toyosatomimi no Miko and company were seeking this, as was Byakuren.
Immortal Immaturity: Practically everyone. Notable exceptions are Kaguya and Yuyuko, when she's not busy harassing her guardian.
Improbably Female Cast: The entire cast just happens to be female with the apparent exception of Unzan, although he's less of a person than an angry cloud, and Rinnosuke, who is an Expanded Universe character and Non-Action Guy. The PC-98 games had Genji, who doesn't count due to being a turtle, and half of Shingyoku as well.
Informed Ability: Due to how danmaku battles work,note they're essentially a formalized dueling system designed to level the playing field and reduce lethality most characters' stated abilities have very little relevance to their gameplay performance.
It Amused Me: Bored characters do a lot of crazy things in this series and are occasionally responsible for the entire plot with no further motive than to shake things up. Many extra stage fights are along these lines on the part of both protagonist and boss. This is the entire reason why Tenshi comes down in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
Justified Trope: So many. The Spell Card Rules, drafted by Reimu, justify Non-Lethal K.O., Let's You and Him Fight, Super Move Portrait Attack, the ability to have crazy semiregular incidents while maintaining White and Grey Morality, and even the use of the Bullet Hell genre itself... because the tropes are the law. And for very good reasons: it lets youkai do what they do best, lets Reimu easily resolve the incidents, and lets youkai fight back without fear of killing Reimu, which would be a very Bad Thing.
Leitmotif: Each boss in the main series gets a unique song for her Boss Battle, which naturally becomes her Leitmotif in fanworks.
Shrine of the Wind ~ Theme of Eastern Story (an unused track from the first game) has become the Leitmotif for the series as a whole, with the intro music of all the main Windows games being remixes of it. Some Final Boss themes also incorporate elements of it.
This even spreads over to Pixiv, where the Leitmotif acts as a special tag for exceptionally beautiful artwork, even for unofficial Leitmotifs for special characters. For example, the original kanji for "Lunate Elf" along with its English reading is a tag for beautiful Daiyousei works.
Living Forever Is Awesome: The youkai are living it and loving it. Only Mokou has a problem with immortality... and that was because she very possibly killed a man to get her dose of the Hourai Elixir. In the expanded universe, it goes slightly beyond that, having resigned to her fate after going crazy from sheer boredom at one point.
Loads and Loads of Races: A large number of youkai and other groups, with every mainline game adding at least one more. Even "youkai" is just an umbrella term, and they can range from angry, ravenous monsters, to classical vampires, beings that might as well be human.
Love Confession: There's a series of artwork revolving around the viewer confessing to a Touhou character. Aside from the unbelievable nerdiness of this, there are some subversions - getting rejected, suffering a horrible death and/or beating, or confessing to joke characters, like a yukkuri, or Unzan, or some other ridiculous meme... or ZUN himself. Or Suwako's hat.
Lovely Angels: Imperishable Night, the 8th game in the series, fits 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.
Lower Deck Episode: Fairy Wars, a much shorter game than usual, focuses on a quarrel between Cirno and the Three Faeries. Every single person in the game is a fairy, with Daiyousei, Lily and the Three Faeries themselves as bosses, rather than any of the usual "A-list" cast members. Except at the end of the extra stage, where Cirno takes on Marisa.
Lucky Rabbit's Foot: Tewi the rabbit, an unabashed prankster whose explicit power is giving people good luck.
The Magic Goes Away: Gensokyo was created as a safe haven for magical creatures and gods who can no longer exist in the outside world. It's also implied that humans can't cast spells out there either. Although given the existence of immigrants it's not as though there's no magic outside. Yet.
Byakuren: But then, because of the Westernization of Japan, folklore became superstition, shugendou gave way to secularism, and they were forgotten about along with humanity's fear of the dark. The tengu who were working together with humans starting appearing less and less. For this reason, the existence of these youkai was endangered. And not just tengu, but all youkai...
Meaningful Name: Most characters have at least one name (the family name, most often) that's vaguely related to what they do.
The Merch: A good amount, considering it's a doujin series. It includes, but is not limited to: doujinshi, costumes, mousepads, jewelry, plushes, and high-quality figures, including Figmas.
Mirror Match: Miko's fifth match in Hopeless Masquerade is against herself. Of course, it's just Mamizou, and the fight ends after one spell card, only for the real fight to begin.
Mission Control: In Subterranean Animism, various youkai provide this to Reimu and Marisa, leading to different ammo/bombs, different special skills for Reimu, different dialogs and endings, and different ways of getting horribly mauled by Satori.
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.
Mook Promotion: Most of the normal enemies in every game are fairies. However, the ice fairy Cirno is a self-proclaimed strongest fairy, and may well be one, appearing as a boss in few games and being the sole protagonist of Great Fairy Wars with an ability to freeze bullets.
Mooks: Fairies, in addition to the lesser-used Fuzzballs and Doofy Ghosts. Fairies are suicidally overconfident, weak, and effectively immortal (regenerative), though the last doesn't manifest in the games, probably because they "respawn" somewhere safe offscreen. These factors combine to make them pretty much perfect mooks.
New Powers as the Plot Demands: Built into the descriptions. Almost all ability descriptions include 程度の能力 (Teido no nouryoku), which is currently (as of June 2012) being translated as "capable of". Basically, everyone can do more than what's stated.
This is confirmed in Forbidden Scrollery. According to Reimu's discussion with Kosuzu, her powers had recently awakened. This also suggests that Muggles who don't have powers now can have them later on.
The Night That Never Ends: The plot of Imperishable Night plays with this. It's your characters causing it, so they can find the source of the real incident.
No Hugging, No Kissing: Despite what the majority of fanwork will tell you, all the official content has virtually no romance (and always kept to backstories or non-sequitur jokes) and absolutely no sexual themes. Amusingly a couple of the characters are even married (the Watatsuki sisters) but this seems to serve the single purpose of making them the nieces-in-law of another character and their husbands are never seen or mentioned at any point.
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.
A good number of characters are implied to have killed people, but no one that's introduced ever dies. The only exception to this is Mokou apparently dying during her battle... and it doesn't count, since she's immortal.
Nonindicative Name: Team Shanghai Alice, the name ZUN operates under, is (1) a single person, not a team; (2) based in Ebina, Japan, not Shanghai; and (3) he isn't named Alice.
Non Nazi Swastika: Both Ran and Yukari Yakumo use manji-themed spellcards. Ran's version is Shikigami's Shot "Ultimate Buddhist" and Yukari's is Evil Spirits "Butterfly in the Zen Temple."
Non-Specifically Foreign: With the sole exceptions of Hong Meiling and Kaku Seiga (Both being Chinese), the Scarlet sisters (who are from Europe, but they're never stated from which country are from) and, in less degree, Parsee Mizuhashi (possibly from Iran), all the characters with non-Japanese names are never stated from which country are from, if they were born outside Japan in first place.
This is even more weirder regarding their names along with the nationality of their species: Letty Whiterock is a English sounding name, but she's a yuki-onna, a Japanese type of Youkai. ''Double Dealing Character takes it to the next level by having all its youkai described as Japanese youkai in their profiles but also referred to as Western youkai in the song titles (ningyo/mermaid, rokurokubi/dullahan, etc).
Not Drawn To Scale: 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.
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
Not So Extinct: It was widely believed that there were no oni in Gensokyo despite otherwise being a Fantasy Kitchen Sink. And then of course they immediately meet one. In fact, it's not even mentioned until they meet her and it comes up in their conversation with her as Arbitrary Skepticism.
Older Than They Look: Applies to pretty much every character that isn't stated to be completely human, which is Reimu, Marisa, Sakuya, and Sanae. And even then, questions have been raised about Sakuya, even in-universe.
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).
One step up in the fighting games. As far as Alphes' character portraits go, literally everyone has the same face.
Yukari and Ran have Shikigami. (The latter is a Shikigami herself.)
Almost every boss in the Windows games is shown surrounded by a magical circle with a hexagram inside. (It's not a pentagram, but it's pretty close.) Chen, Sanae and Iku also incorporate pentagrams in some of their attacks.
And with Mononobe no Futo we now have an actual Onmyodo magician in the cast.
Mamizou uses lots of shikigami in her spellcards, in the form of human-shaped, dog-shaped, bird-shaped and frog-shaped paper dolls. She can also make copies of herself presumably by transforming her shikigami, since her ability is to change the shape of objects.
Our Elves Are Better: While in Touhou "elves" means fairies (who are none too bright), the Lunarians fit this trope to a T, specifically being Space Elves. (There's also Parsee and sometimes Aya having pointed ears, but that's besides the point.)
Parental Abandonment: Mr. Kirisame is the only parent of a canon character who is not dead, missing, or otherwise unaccounted for. And even then, he's only mentioned, and Marisa quickly ignores and attempts to change the subject. Considering how some youkai are stated to simply come into being under certain circumstances rather than being born, it's likely that many of the characters have never actually had parents.
Poor Communication Kills: In Imperishable Night, the boss fight with either Reimu or Marisa is the result of one or both sides either not understanding what's actually going on, or outright refusing to listen. When the Ghost Team tries to mention the Moon to Marisa, Marisa says "this has nothing to do with the Moon!" and if Magic Team brings it up to Reimu, she turns around and blames them for the Moon as well!
Popularity Power: Popularity is one stat in Hopeless Masquerade. It goes up as you land attacks, declare spellcards, and goes down as you take hits and play too defensively. At 100% Popularity, you can perform a Last Word spell, and if the match goes to a time-out, the player with more Popularity wins, as opposed to the one with more health, as in most fighting games.
Toyosatomimi no Miko's special ability in the game is that she gains more power the more popularity she has, complete with her cape changing colors to match.
Power-Up Full Color Change: In Hisoutensoku, characters with superarmor become red-tinted, while the auto-counterhit state Meiling can acquire is indicated by her becoming yellow.
Puny Humans: Humans in Gensokyo are vastly outnumbered and outpowered by youkai (and other subraces), and the number of humans who can go toe to toe with them can be counted comfortably.
Red Shirt: The fairy maids that Remilia takes with her on her lunar expedition in Silent Sinner in Blue fit the classic Star Trek redshirt archetype in that they accompany the main characters onto an alien world and are completely useless when dealing with the native inhabitants.
Then again, it was already well established that Remilia's fairy maids are useless at everything.
Red Sky, Take Warning: The plots of The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and Scarlet Weather Rhapsody.
Also, depending on who you ask and/or the artist, the yukkuris.
There's a meme about depicting Keine's hakutaku form as one.
Sacred Hospitality: The number one rule for Muggles in the backstory. Be polite. All the rude people the series focuses on have the firepower - or at least regeneration - to survive it.
Schizo Tech: There are actually four different technology levels in Gensokyo: humans and youkai, who are pretty much at medieval level; items that come from the modern world outside (and, in the PC-98 games, came with the Outsiders themselves); the kappas, who are tinkering and working on Magitek, including Optical Camouflage and Hellfire-powered geothermal power plants; and the Lunarians, who top the tech tree in canon and have futuristic technology, which in Silent Sinner in Blue is revealed to be a Japanese version of Crystal Spires and Togas. Even the outdated technology that the renegade Lunarians displayed in an exposition in Gensokyo is far more advanced than anything on Earth.
Schrödinger's Player Character: In most games the characters the player didn't select still exist, just don't expect to hear from them until the ending.
In both Lotus Land Story and Imperishable Night, the character you didn't select shows up as one of the bosses.
Naturally averted in the versus shooters and fighting games where you get to fight most of the characters you didn't pick. Phantasmagoria of Flower View, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody and Hisoutensoku even have everyone's story canonically happening in some order.
Interestingly played with in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Rin Satsuki was supposed to be a player character for that game, but was removed for unknown reasons. A line from Marisa during her route suggests that Rin had a profession as a doctor, like Eirin, but Fanon takes this all over the place.
Seinfeldian Conversation: Er... often. Some of it is due to the heavy use of references to eastern mythology or folklore and metaphors that only make sense in Japanese.
Many, many references to Alice in Wonderland, including a character named Alice.
ZUN is an admitted fanboy of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and as such there are lots of shout outs to that series. Sakuya performing ZA WARUDO is one such example.
"Her sake does not even drop!" during Yuugi fight is a homage to Master Zeppeli and Jonathan Joestar, classy gentlemen who really didn't drop their wine in intense fights.
"Do you remember how many times you've eaten bread?" is a homage to Dio Brando, the Big Bad of the Joestar arc, who can't remember how many times he exsanguinated humans. *
Marisa does remember how many times she's eaten bread... thirteen times. She prefers Japanese food.
Marisa uses the quote "yareyare da ze" ("geez, give me a break") after defeating Wriggle in Stage 1 of Imperishable Night.
One of Kaguya's spellcards in Shoot The Bullet is the Red Stone of Aja.
Even the name of the series itself may be a Jojo's reference - it is written with the same kanji as Josuke's surname.
Three different characters have references to the works of Agatha Christie.
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.
Nue, the Extra Stage boss of the above game, has mutiple. She has a spell card that uses PlayStation buttons, and references the Nue of legend.
One strip in Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth contains a reference to the Wizardry series. Also, a certain weapon in the comic is labelled "HHG of Aunty Ock".
Nitori's Last Word is basically a huge homage to to Snake's final smash in Super Smash Bros Brawl.
One of Ichirin's alternate color schemes resembles Index's outfit.
Sleeper Hit: Even the fandom is baffled at how a simple shooting game series got so popular.
Slice of Life: Very common in official written works, especially the manga Eastern and Little Deity / Strange and Bright Nature Deity / Oriental Sacred Placenote 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.
Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: Type 6. All the important characters who actually do anything are female. To be fair, there are a few male characters, but their roles are limited.
Canon Touhou works in general tend to be on the silly side.
Fanworks can be anywhere on the scale. ZUN seems to encourage this intentionally, for instance by never explicitly nailing down how dangerous it really is for humans to live in Gensokyo.
Society Of Immortals: The Lunar Capital, rather explicitly, but also youkai society in general, as youkai are implied to have no natural lifespan. Although most of them don't exactly form societies, other than exceptions like the Tengu.
Space Elves: The Lunarians, who are of the "Mystical Enlightened Race" subtype. As their name indicates, they hail from the moon, though they originally lived on Earth thousands of years ago before leaving to escape the Shinto concept of impurity.
The key to making the magic-powered moon rocket in Silent Sinner in Blue is to realize that they should be thinking of it as a voyage across the sea and call upon gods associated with sailing and seaships.
Also, more literally, the moon is associated with the sea (as opposed to Earth being a "mountain"). The Lunar Capital is even the same place as the Dragon Palace, meaning that if you get lost at sea you might end up on the moon.
Space Station: Torifune, introduced in Trojan Green Asteroid. It isnote or will be, with the Mary and Renko stories taking place in the future a Japanese space station designed to test terraforming practices. Then it somehow became an illusion and is now a fantasy jungle floating in outer space.
Spell My Name with an S: Official spellings for character and place names can vary within the series. For example, ZUN writes "Gensokyo" in English in Perfect Cherry Blossom—this is predominantly the spelling the fandom uses. The back cover of Grimoire of Marisa spells it as "Gensoukyo." "Gensoukyou" and "Gensokyou" are alternate spellings directly derived from the romanization from the kanji involved, and there has been a push by some fans to make either spelling the common variant.
Story Arc: About three, connected more by the characters that appear than the actual story.
The first arc is made up of the five PC-98 games. It's canonicity status is vague, beyond a few Shout Outs in the Windows games.
The second arc is the "Windows Trilogy" of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, and Imperishable Night, with Immaterial and Missing Power taking place between the latter two games. See the Trivia section for more explanation. The game Phantasmagoria of Flower View acts as a bridge between this arc and...
The "Moriya Shrine Trilogy", which consists of the games Mountain of Faith, Subterranean Animism, and Undefined Fantastic Object. Unlike in the previous arc, each game after the first is the direct result of an event in the previous game - the ultimate instigators being a group of newcomers to Gensokyo who upset the status quo in an almost Butterfly of Doom fashion.
Scarlet Weather Rhapsody occupies an odd place; it was released after Mountain of Faith (and is numbered as such), but is essentially unrelated to the arc. In fact, it's probably closer to being part of the previous arc. On the other hand, Touhou Hisoutensoku is clearly part of the "Moriya Shrine" arc; it takes place after the trilogy and is influenced by it's events.
Double Dealing Character looks like it will be a throwback to the "Windows" trilogy. Two of the more prominent characters from the trilogy return in the game, and the stages revisit past locations such as Misty Lake and the Bamboo Forest of the Lost.
ZUN: 'When it comes to Gensokyan sisters, in general the younger one is "broken"'.
Stronger With Age: A general rule of the setting. Animals will turn into youkai if they manage to live long enough, and something similar appears to apply to humans, going by the immortals we've seen.
Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Interestingly, magicians are shown following The Scientific Methodmore than the obviously technology-based characters, though most of the latter are closer to engineers than scientists. Rinnosuke even refers to the modern technology of the outside world as "a type of magic that requires no spiritual power".
Also, the Japanese name of every game includes "Eastern", "of the East", or "Oriental". That is, after all, what Touhou means.
Wild and Horned Hermit uses theme titling, though it's more obvious in Japanese. All of the titles take the form of four kanji describing the character, followed by a single hiragana, followed by two kanji for the character's species.
Title Drop: The final spell cards in Perfect Cherry Blossom, Imperishable Night, Mountain of Faith, Ten Desires and the story mode of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. Also tends to happen in the dialogues.
Some character names borrow kanji from the Japanese titles themselves but are read slightly differently. These characters are also central characters in their respective games (Sanae borrows from Mountain of Faith and half of the Touhou title, while Eiki Shiki borrows two from Phantasmagoria of Flower View). This gets funny when a forum post was joking about the then-upcoming character in Hisouten would be called "Tenko" ("ko" being a common suffix for a girl, plus the last kanji of Hisouten) and we got "Tenshi" (same Kanji, different reading).
Too Dumb to Live: Perfect Memento in Strict Sense marks fairies as such. Fortunately (for them) they respawn.
Touhou Will Ruin Your Life: After a few weeks of being in the fandom, there's a chance you'll be letting memes slip out of your mouth or using Touhou-themed forum avatars.
Gensokyo IS Japan. :-) However, note that even if they use obscure or archaic words, so long as there is no precise intent, they basically express themselves in Japanese in the games.
Twenty Minutes into the Future: The stories with Maribel and Renko are partially set in the near-future of the outside world.
Unmoving Plaid: Utsuho's cape in Hisoutensoku. It has stars and galaxies on it, which always appear at the same angle.
Vague Age: Basically everyone that isn't the Scarlet sisters, who have known ages although their apparent age is more of an open question, and the characters of Ten Desires who are specific historical figures with documented birth dates. We have a rough idea of what centuries Mokou, Kaguya, and Byakuren came from, and that's about it. Even the normal humans have so little past and such rough art that's hard to tell.
Vicious Cycle: The events of Phantasmagoria of Flower View happen every sixty years. But there is no real danger save for confused people picking random fights with each other, which is just another day in Gensokyo, and the incident solves itself eventually.
Webcomic Time: Almost averted, since Mountain of Faith at least. The stated time between Kanako's arrival in Gensokyo and her meeting with the other religious leaders in Symposium of Post-mysticism is about 4 years. In realtime, there'd been 4 years and 8 months. With Mountain of Faith being set a few months after it's release, and Symposium of Post-mysticism a few months before, the figure is actually about right.
Might be the case for some unexpected creatures. In one chapter of one of the manga, it's suggested a couple of times that a mysterious egg may be from a cat youkai.
The same chapter also confirms crow tengu having eggs, and while they're related to birds, the two examples we've seen of that species look basically human.
Most of the final bosses in the series are more selfish than they are outright evil as well, having a lack of consideration for the rest of Gensokyo rather than outright finding pleasure in screwing over everyone else.
A few notable exceptions: the Saigyou Ayakashi of Perfect Cherry Blossom - a mindless, man-eating tree; Utsuho Reiuji during Subterranean Animism, who was mad with power and wanted to melt the surface world (although to be fair, she's also rather stupid); and Taisui Xingjun, provided he actually exists.
Wings Do Nothing: Everyone in Gensokyo has a method for flying, whether they use wings or not. One footnote in Perfect Memento says that "... even without wings we can all fly." This shouldn't be too surprising given that Everyone Is A Super.
Witch Species: "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.
Word Salad Title: In both English and Japanese, though the main games are generally fairly good about avoiding it. The fighting games generally have incomprehensible Japanese titles, though, and the side materials make little effort to make sense in either language
note See also the extensive wiki
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