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Touhou Project ("Touhou", 東方, meaning Eastern or Oriental) 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 intricate bullet 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 Elegant Gothic Lolita clothing. Much of its popularity, however, comes from its enormous Doujinshi and Shipping community, unusual in that the community is creating doujinshi based on doujinshi, and is taken to another level with the equally enormous amounts of amateur musical arranges 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.Nearly all the games in the series have a plot along these lines: In the Magical Land of Gensokyo - a Fantasy Kitchen Sink in Japan, which exists halfway inside Another Dimension thanks to a powerful magical barrier - some Anti-Villain with a lot of Applied Phlebotinum on their hands thinks messing with the laws of nature to fulfill a not really evil plan would be a good idea. Miko Reimu Hakurei or magician Marisa Kirisame, due to annoyance and greed, respectively, must go out and fix the problem, occasionally with playable versions of bosses from previous games thrown in for kicks. They spend the first 2 levels wandering aimlessly and defeating random monsters/people that have no relation to the Big Bad. The third boss, however, happens to know something about the incident and points them in the right direction. The fifth boss is the Big Bad's Battle Butler, and the sixth boss is the Big Bad herself. After defeating the Big Bad, the main character will have a tea party with the Big Bad and their Battle Butler after which some other task arises, taking the form of the game's ultra-difficult extra stage.Like Cave Story, it's also outstanding in that the entirety of the games, including the sprite graphics, 3D graphics, character portraits, dialogue, story, music composition, programming, bullet-patterns, and concept are all done by one person known only as"ZUN".See also the character page (NOTE: all tropes concerning individual characters should be placed there), the extensive wiki, Seihou Project (a sister series of sorts) and the crossover page. Also, Touhou Project has its own quite impressive Crowning Music Of Awesome page.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.
The long list
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 Gensoukyou ~ Lotus Land StoryTranslation
Eastern Fantasy Land ~ Lotus Land Story
TH 05 Touhou Kaikidan ~ Mystic SquareTranslation
Eastern Wondrous Romance ~ Mystic Square
TH 06 Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet DevilTranslation
Eastern Scarlet Devil Land ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
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
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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.
All There in the Manual: Touhou games do a great deal of storytelling in-game compared to most top-down shooters, but some of the details of the plot are only available from the additional material on the game CDs. Additionally, most of the information about Gensoukyou in general comes from the add-on books released separately from the games.
Curiosities of Lotus Asia is a series of Slice of Life short stories written by ZUN from Rinnosuke's perspective.
Eastern and Little Nature Deity / Strange and Bright Nature Deity / Oriental Sacred Place is a Slice of Life manga focusing on the various misadventures of the three fairies of light as well as, usually, Reimu and Marisa. ZUN is credited for "scenario", which could mean all sorts of things about how closely he oversees this, but he at least provides the general ideas.
Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red is 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.
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.
Perfect Memento in Strict Sense is another book, part of the Gensoukyou 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.
Silent Sinner in Blue is a manga about a complicated incident involving the Moon. Mostly set after MoF, it's more plot-focused than most of these works, but as with the fairies' manga, ZUN has the enigmatic "scenario" credit.
Cage in Lunatic Runagate is a series of short stories that tie into SSiB, though they focus more on the characters' personalities and backstories and is more serious than most Touhou material.
Inaba of the Moon and Inaba of the Earth are a series of gag 4koma related to SSiB and CiLR. Together, the three bear the title Touhou Bougetsushou. ZUN had less to do with this than with the other manga. He's said he pretty much just gave the artist/writer a general idea of who should show up when.
The Grimoire of Marisa is the third book, "written" by Marisa as she comments on characters' spell cards.
Ghostly Field Club, Changeability of Strange Dream, Retrospective 53 Minutes, and Magical Astronomy are a series of music CDs that also had strange, extremely short stories about two girls, Maribel Han and Usami Renko, who live in the future outer world.
Wild and Horned Hermit is another manga, set after the events of DS. Looks to be a semi-serious series following Kasen Ibara, mostly focusing on world-building. Still new, though.
Symposium of Post-mysticism is the recently announced follow up to Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, Adding and expanding characters from Mountain of Faith to Ten Desires.
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 to defeat. Doesn't stop her from fighting said heroines, just because. Considering Mamizou'spower, perhaps the heroines should just stay at home.
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, but fan art, Fan Vids, and other such things are very prone to making it look like an anime series rather than a game.
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.
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.
Eirin and Reisen from Imperishable Night both fit the part, being Kaguya's pharmacist and pet respectively.
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.
Subterranean Animism reverses this trend by having the Big Bad and the stage 5 boss be the pets of the stage 4 boss.
Berserk Button: The fandom has one in the question "What anime is this?" as well as when someone on Youtube claims that Touhou stole from the McRoll. For the uninitiated, the McRoll is based on Flandre's theme. Western fandom is also beginning to detest old memes (pads, etc.).
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).
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.
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.
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.
City With No Name: The Human Village (somewhat justified in that there seems to be only the one), and the Former District of Hell. Makai and Higan could be aversions if they contain actual cities. There's also a Tengu City somewhere up Youkai Mountain and a Lunar Capital on the Moon, but they may just be a product of people only talking about it indirectly (popular petnames).
If Rinnosuke's theories are correct, the entire realm of Gensoukyou inverts this. According to him, things such as magic, youkai, gods, etc. are able to exist in Gensoukyou 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, so this is hardly conclusive proof.
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.
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 Gensoukyou.
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 Gensoukyou. The only 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.
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.
Everyone Is A Super: From common fairies to even average Gensoukyou humans, who have some magic powers, it is flat-out assumed everyone has some kind of special powers or danmaku powers here.
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: If we were to tell you that kedama essentially means "fuzzball" in Japanese, could you guess what enemy it refers to?
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.
Recently Yuuhei Satellite has created a fanime of their own. Gensou Magenkyou or Fantasy Kaleidoscope. It can be found here. Japanese fandub here. Which retells the story of Perfect Cherry Blossom which had an Anachronism Stew around the end parts.
Fantastic Ghetto: The underground is basically a place where despised youkai eventually settle down.
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 Gensoukyou'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.
This one, a combination of the famous Bad Apple!! shadow art and various drawings, is absolutely amazing.
End of Daylight is a beautiful play of positive and negative space, and is truly classy in a badass way.
Touhou Kinema Kan is just simply gorgeous. If the people behind this didn't get jobs as professional animators, that would be a damn shame.
By the same group, Touhou Kourindo is an equally gorgeous glimpse into the life of Rinnosuke, told Back to Front.
These guys decided to top themselves with Memories of Phantasm. It's an amazingly well-done adaptation of Perfect Cherry Blossom, and could convince anyone that Touhou started off as an anime.
Charge! Master Spark crosses Perfect Cherry Blossom with Macross and includes a bonus mini-video! While it's mainly a parody of Macross 7, see if you can pick out which other installments the various scenes come from.
IOSYS' two Flash fanvids, Marisa Stole The Precious Thing and Overdrive are notable not only for being popular in their own right, but also being the best examples of how the prevalence of parody videos featuring characters from other series in place of the original Touhou characters also draws viewers back to the original videos, and to Touhou in general. Thus, they are often the first contact the public has with the series.
Anime Tenchou x Touhou Project, a ufotable project that crosses over with the Animate chain's mascot. It does not appear that it will ever be released to the public.
A new one where Cirno shows Reimu exactly why she is the STRONGEST of ALL fairies in this MMD dog fight vid: Linkee!"
This three-partvideo shows what happens when Final Fantasy and Touhou marry each other and have a baby. It desperately needs a translator because the quality is jaw-dropping.
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.
Game-Breaking Bug: In Ten Desires, the game will up and 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 a few days.
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.
Ghibli Hills: What most of Gensoukyou's landscape consists of.
As with White and Grey Morality, nobody is really evil in Gensoukyou, 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".
Good-Looking Privates: Somewhat popular is fanart depicting the Touhou girls in military gear and packing guns.
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 Gensoukyou'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 Gensoukyou'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.
I Believe I Can Fly: Pretty much everyone. By this point, the series has stopped trying to justify it. Subverted 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 24% (and growing) of its content (over 200k images) 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.
Lunarians don't age, since it's "impure". They can die by non-natural means, though.
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. The PC-98 games had Genji, who doesn't count, due to being a turtle, and half of Shingyoku as well.
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.
Interestingly enough, that's how the games were created. ZUN couldn't find any game he really liked, so he created his own. And boy, did it work.
In addition, a good chunk of the fandom's appeal is the opportunity to do this with ZUN's artwork/character designs.
The Library of Babel: Patchouli's library (often called Voile, after her stage theme) is frequently interpreted as this. Canon is somewhat vague on the details.
Living Forever Is Awesome: The youkai are living it and loving it. Only one character seems to have a problem with immortality, and that's just because she regrets what she did to get it.
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.
The Magic Goes Away: There are various fanmade interpretations of this, ranging from "Magic has disappeared from the world at large, and Gensoukyou is one of the few remaining homes for it," to "It's an elaborate Masquerade which allows creatures of magic to exist without being bothered".
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.
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 Gensoukyou 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. These factors combine to make them pretty much perfect mooks.
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) and absolutely no sexual themes.
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.
Non-indicative 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.
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
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 pentagram inside. 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, especially the "Space Elves" type. (There's also Parsee 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.
Nearly all of the cast gets this treatment due to ZUN's art style, which makes characters tend to look like early preteens no matter their age or described appearance. Very few characters in the entire series seem to have noticable breasts. Fanart takes this as a license to give the characters whatever figure they feel like, though the more popular ones usually get a general appearance agreed upon by most fans.
The Fighting Game installments of the series have really muddied the waters here, as the art was done by an artist who is perfectly capable of and willing to draw girls with busts.
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!
Puny Humans: Humans in Gensoukyou 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.
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 Gensoukyou: 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.
Subverted in both Lotus Land Story and Imperishable Night, when 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.
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.
One important reason for Touhou's popularity is how ugly ZUN's original character art is, inspiring legions of fan artists to improve it. As alluded to elsewhere, he seems to have trouble drawing a girl who looks postpubescent, leaving fans to come to a consensus on what some characters should "really" look like.
In a broader sense, the entire series itself has next to nothing resembling sexual or romantic content, but you would never guess that from the fandom.
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.
Many, many references to Alice in Wonderland, including a character named Alice.
ZUN is an admitted fanboy of Jojos Bizarre Adventure and as such there are lots of shout outs to that series.
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.
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".
There are also references to Fist of the North Star in the fighting games, most notably Hisoutensoku. If Reimu's ultimate spellcard "Fantasy Heaven" ("Musou Tensei" in Japanese, which happens to be a homonym for Kenshiro's ultimate technique, "Unconscious Transmigration of Souls", also pronounced "Musou Tensei") is successfully activated in the third round of a match, the background music will change to a mashup remix of Mystic Oriental Love Consultation and the Fatal KO theme from the Fist Of The North Star fighting games. Fitting because said spellcard is a guaranteed knock out unless the opponent gets very lucky (no, it is NOT a One-Hit Kill)
Sleeper Hit: Even the fandom is baffled at how a simple shooting game 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 Place*
yes, that's one series with title changes
and the short story serial Curiosities of Lotus Asia. This tends to put off some fans who are used to the combat-heavy games, though others enjoy the laid-back view of Gensoukyou.
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 Gensoukyou.
Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Goes from vampires blocking out the sun to walk outside freely in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, to a ghost trying to awaken a demonic cherry tree that had been sealed away in Perfect Cherry Blossom, to someone stealing the Moon in Imperishable Night, to fighting a god who plans to amass Gensoukyou's faith in Mountain of Faith, to stopping a celestial being who has been toying with the weather and causing various natural disasters in Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. Seemingly peaked in Subterranean Animism, in which the Final Boss has the power of nuclear fusion and wants to use it to incinerate Gensoukyou in its entirety.
Story Arc: So far, the series can be split into two arcs, with characters from the first unlikely to show up in the second.
The first Arc represents the first five games, with Mima as a recurring villain-type even though she's only a primary opponent in the first two.
The second Arc so far represents every version released for Windows, with a new villain every time. Also, games after Touhou 10 have a plot that is kick-started by events in the game before.
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.
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 and the story mode of Scarlet Weather Rhapsody. Also tends to happen in the dialogues.
Too Dumb to Live: Perfect Memento in Strict Sense marks fairies as such. Subverted by the fact that fairies are immortal.
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.
Twenty Minutes into the Future: The stories with Maribel and Renko are partially set in the near-future of the outside world.
Vague Age: Basically everyone that isn't the Scarlet sisters, who have known ages.*
And even for them we only know their chronological ages. Fanwork has portrayed them physically resembling anything from teens to preschoolers.
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. Subverted, because there is no real danger save for confused people picking random fights with each other, which is just another day in Gensoukyou, and the incident solves itself eventually.
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.
Those who are good are apathetic to everything unless it affects either their interests or Gensoukyou itself.
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 Gensoukyou 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 Gensoukyou 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: Most of the titles are meaningful and fairly straightforward, but it does slip into this from time to time, with things like Mystic Square or Silent Sinner in Blue. The Japanese titles really aren't any better.
A Wizard Did It: Pretty much the explanation for anything odd that happens. A popular fanon theory holds that Gensoukyou as a whole runs off the disbelief of the outside world.
For actual blue-haired characters, Remilia, Nitori, Tenshi, Kogasa and Cirno count. Though Remilia's initial appearance featured her with white hair.
Even excluding the youkai, there are the silver-haired Sakuya, Youmu, Keine, Mokou, and Eirin, though the latter is from the Moon.
And the green-haired Sanae.
Yuri Genre: Mostly restricted to Fanon. Barely implied in the games themselves, apart from Marisa jokingly suggesting to Flandre Scarlet that she get married to Reimu in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. ZUN has acknowledged the possibility of his characters having relationships, though.
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,*
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.
Half the shot-types in Mountain of Faith and Subterranean Animism, namely MoF's ReimuC and MarisaA, and SA's ReimuC and... all of Marisa's.
MarisaA in SA isn't too bad, and she still has enough power in her focused state to still deliver hurt to enemies up front.
Undefined Fantastic Object is actually pretty good with avoiding this, with all-around great shot-types... and MarisaB.
Marisa's Master Spark bomb in Undefined Fantastic Object definitely falls under Awesome But Impractical. The massive speed penalty it saddles her with makes it nearly impossible to collect a UFO that isn't flying almost directly at you. Timing color changes is even worse.
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. However, the timing is very, very precise. You basically need to predict your own death in order to use it.
Beyond the Impossible: The whole series could be characterized as "And here, ZUN thought if you can win after 20 tries, the game is too easy".
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.
Breaking Out: Highly Responsive To Prayers has many elements of this.
Breather Level: While the final bosses are devastating, the final stage tends to be mercifully short, often with enemies that drop full powerups.
Reisen is infamous for being one of the easier stage five bosses.
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.
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.
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.
Dual Boss: Yuki and Mai in Mystic Square Stage 4. Ten Desires has a Trio Spell Card. Specifically, the final Boss's third card(On all difficulties), as well as the regular dual battle against Seiga and Yoshika(minus the first Spell Card).
Speaking of Trio Spell Cards, don't forget the original trio, the Prismriver Sisters in Perfect Cherry Blossom.
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 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.
You could get the ex stage in Subterranean Animism on easy, but a bug relocks it.
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 fighting game spinoffs: Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, and Touhou Hisoutensoku.
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 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, and Hisoutensoku are 2-D fighters.
Nobody is entirely sure what to call Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler.
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. Some hitboxes are purposefully larger to make the boss fight easier.
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.
It Got Worse: 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.
It's Short, So It Sucks: Massively averted. Despite each game taking on average no more than 30 minutes to complete, the series has a very big following, especially for a shmup series.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 SmartBombs your side of the screen and puts bullets on your opponent's side of the screen.
It's also a notable source of Gameplay and Story Segregation, since in Imperishable Night, the playable characters become bosses and use their 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost all the the spell cards in Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler, as you take successful shots.
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.
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