Touhou

re: The speculations in the last three posts: holy crap, all of those sound amazing wooooow Especially Alba's

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It's still bein' finetuned, yeah. Clarste can link you to the not-yet-finetuned version, if you want.

edited 25th Feb '15 11:35:39 AM by FellDeedsAwake

I wish SOMEONE would license* these manga, I'd love to have a hard copy I can read on my shelf. But ZUN would probably block that. The worldbooks would be even harder too, weren't those doujin-printed and had very small runs in Japan? I'm pretty sure ZUN would object to a publishing company translating and printing BAiJR, PMiSS, and SoPM.

Especially since he has the very strict policy of "don't let people learn about Touhou without knowing about the original games".

*:Bizarrely enough several of...''those'' manga sites insist that WaHH has been licensed, which is obviously not true

edited 25th Feb '15 11:31:04 AM by Frostav

He does? I mean, I'm pretty sure all of the mangas are circulated in proper manga magazines and such, abit not especially big ones.

I mean, I think there is a reasonable chance that a good chunk of fans could come in with the mangas, if the fandom hasn't gotten to them first.

Remember his doujin guidelines? One of them was "always make sure that it is obvious you work is a fanwork and not official". There was also the "don't put in on stuff like Steam where foreigners can see it" rule too. I feel that would apply to his own manga as well.

I mean, if, say, Dark Horse translated WaHH and then published it, you'd probably see it in your local bookstore. I'm not sure how ZUN would feel about that.

I had a dream a few days ago that ZUN and Yen Press decided to collaborate in order to bring the Touhou mangas over to America, all of them fully translated with ZUN's assistance.

It started with the Three Fairies and Silent Sinner getting released simultaneously one volume at a time, then Wa HH and FS at the same time.

Doubt that they're going to get translated before the games. I heard somewhere that ZUN was considering translating those, though. Is that true?

Why would they not licensed the manga in your place when here in Indonesia, we got Elex Media licensed the entire Bougetsushou in a bundle? Are your publishers thinking Touhou is too niche, or something along the line?

edited 25th Feb '15 11:49:25 AM by AlaAlba

No, maybe I'm just flanderizing ZUN's doujin attitude too much.

Looks interesting. Though I wonder if mystery man will end up being a cop-out with an existing character being under the mask doing a fake voice like in a few issues ago with mysterious triangle hat cat seller man person being Udonge.

WAHH and FS aren't doujin in the first place. They're published in normal magazines and sold at normal bookstores.

That is kinda also what I'm afraid of... Although, thinking about it, when that had happened earlier in FS with Reisen, I really liked the twist; was unexpected and gave us some nice char development. If it would be the same again this time... that would kinda suck "Oh hey, guys, nah, it's not an interesting male demon guy, it's just me, Sakuya, cosplaying for some reason lol!" O_O

edited 25th Feb '15 4:18:35 PM by FellDeedsAwake

All the Touhou manga/literature works are commercial works. People often forget about this important fact

I'm probably not one to talk, but I've often wondered what the comics would seem like to someone who didn't care about Touhou. Wouldn't they be, like, the most boring thing ever? On the other hand, it's a bit hard to imagine the target audience of these magazines not being more than a little familiar with it. They're very otaku-oriented.

They're probably fine. I began my Touhou interest with SSiB, and I found it interesting enough. Looking at the other works, aside from the more encyclopedic ones like PMiSS and SoPM, they're probably fine as well.

And the shooter games are equally, if not even more, otaku-oriented. I think Twilight Frontier themselves already said along the line that they're relying on the fighting games to attract people who don't know about Touhou into it (and ZUN himself doesn't really care much about these kind of advertising)

edited 25th Feb '15 5:28:35 PM by tryourbreast

I meant the magazines are otaku-oriented. For example, Comp Ace which runs Forbidden Scrollery is basically filled to the gills with Nanoha and Fate Stay Night spin-offs. Obviously, Comiket where ZUN sells his games is also otaku-oriented, but I was just thinking about the odds of some random passerby encountering the Touhou comics.

Edit: Seriously, they have like 5 Nanoha spin-offs running at the same time.

edited 25th Feb '15 5:43:59 PM by Clarste

Right now I'm finding myself wondering how long an Archive Binge of those two mangas would take. I'm starting to feel tempted to go on one. I've been participating in this thread for a while now, but have not played any of the games, nor have I read much of the supplemental works besides bits and pieces of the artbooks that are translated on Touhou Wiki; namely, some BAiJR articles, some PMiSS profiles, some GoM entries, and most of SoPM. I also browse Danbooru for fanart and other fan-works, but most of what I know about Touhou actually comes from this site.

I'm thinking that might change soon. Ever since ZUN's visit to Atlanta, I've been holding onto some tiny hope that there will someday be a legitimate way for Westerners to get the games, so I'm still going to hold off on that. But downloading the mangas are looking more tempting as a way to experience the franchise firsthand, and finally call myself a True Fan.

edited 25th Feb '15 5:57:56 PM by Lightblade

You need to clear at least three games on Normal or higher and preferably get some Extra Stages (and Phantasm for PCB) cleared as well.

Then you can enter the realm of True Fan.

The Touhou franchise consists of 4 aspects: The game themselves, game endings, character profiles (i.e those texts bundled with the game), and commercial materials (mangas, literatures, and encyclopedias).

Playing the games alone gives you almost zero information on everything, except the character's name and probably the image of "A bunch of jerks comes in the stage, apply some insults and start throwing tons of stuff at each other as that's how everyone fights with each other".

Character profiles give you basic essential information so you can understand what's going on, and stop thinking along the above line.

Most information, if not all, actually comes from the commercial spinoffs, especially the part about world-building, metaphysics and stuff. They make Touhou actually a world enjoyable.

Endings are nothing but a subset of them (Touhou endings are totally different from regular game endings), but given their difficulty of obtain, and scarcity (you know what I'm talking about here), they just get ignored by most people, and makes me tempted to seperate it from the main stash of settings. But then, they still convey little to no information if you don't first finish reading all the mangas and literatures.

So, well, you can't avoid looking at the mangas if you're serious trying to get a grasp of the whole picture. And the True Fan argument is nonsense, really

edited 25th Feb '15 7:57:27 PM by tryourbreast

A True Fan should be able to achieve 200 rpm.

I will accept nothing less.

Yakumo crew
Youmu
Yuyuko
Fantastic night
senseless
Yoshika and Seiga
Chibi Myon 4koma

On the subject of canon, while we're at it - in the long run, though, ZUN did admit that one of Touhou's pulls was the lack of information... even then, plenty of people ignore Reimu's grouchiness and still argue about Sakuya being Jack the Ripper.

I'm not defending dumb shit like NEET Kaguya or padding jokes or - worse - the tired, worn out gag about Alice being a failure, just that I feel like it's not completely necessary to get into the official canon manga to get the Full 2hu ExperienceTM. (Man, I hope I don't sound like one of the people still salty over Nitori's new characterization. I'm still of the opinion ZUN did it to poke fun at the moe depictions of several of his characters.)

Vaguely related: I've been burnt off Touhou for a long, long time and have just vaguely started to come back. The last game I played was Ten Desires and the last major thing I remember was ZUN getting married. Any tips for the new danmaku games?

edited 26th Feb '15 11:59:22 PM by YungVenuz

ZUN mucked with unset canon when he did that. And no one was actually arguing about true fans stuff

Most shmups don't have multiple manga, light novels, and databooks as hard canon

Not with the sort of people that argue about canon

DDC is pretty great, ISC is okay, don't play the new fighters

I'm not a big fighter fanatic, anyway, so I'm cool with not touching them. :V

Oh, and they're fangames, but you might want to check out Mystical Power Plant and Riverbed Soul Saver