Touhou Bunkachounote ~ Shoot the Bullet is a video game created by Team Shanghai Alice for Windows computers in 2005. It's the 9.5th videogame installment in the Touhou Project franchise, released as a tie-in to the book Touhou Bunkachou ~ Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red.
For reasons known only to herself, the tengu Aya Shamameimaru has started travelling around taking photos of people and their Spell Cards.
A twist on Touhou's traditional Bullet Hell formula, Shoot the Bullet has you rematch bosses from previous Windows games, armed with new and more difficult attacks (and in the case of Suika and the PoFV cast, traditional attacks period). But rather than fighting back, you must take their pictures. The more interesting the photo, the more points it's worth.
A Sequel titled Double Spoiler ~ Touhou Bunkachou was released in 2010.
Has no relation to the Shoot the Bullet trope.
This game provides examples of:
- Boss Game: Rather than conventional stages the game is divided into collections of "scenes", each featuring a different Spell Card.
- Genre Mashup: Bullet Hell Shoot 'Em Up meets First-Person Snapshooter
- Genre Shift: While still being a vertical shooter, this is the first installment that is a "Danmaku photography game".
- Megamix Game: Brings together bosses from multiple previous games, reinterpreting them into Shoot 'Em Up format where necessary.
- Mirror Match: Eiki's last spellcard Judgement "Cleansed Crystal Judgement -Aya Shameimaru-" has her turn into Aya using a literal Magic Mirror. It's implied to be some sort of test of character.
- No-Sell: During her scenes, Reisen can make herself intangible for a brief instant at a time. While she's in this state, any pictures you try to take of her will not count.
- Run, Don't Walk: In addition to the focused movement that's a core mechanic of the series, in this game you can speed up your camera's charge by holding down the focus and shot buttons, which will also make you move even slower than regular focusing.
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: Usually the spells get more complex in later levels, but once in a while you get oddballs. For example, Level 4 involves characters associated with a gimmick that make their spells harder to read - Reisen's phasing bullets, Tewi's bouncing bullets and Medicine's poison - and usually will take time to get used to... but the final Scene on that Level uses such a simple pattern, that if one has good timing, it's perfectly possible to do it on first try. Or how EX-5 is very simple compared to everything else in EX or the previous two stages, and is more of an endurance match than anything. On the other side, one of the hardest Scenes in the game is in Stage 9, which isn't the final one.
- Smart Bomb: While Aya doesn't use a traditional bomb, she can destroy bullets by catching them in her photos.
