Comments on: 5 tips to help you stop being a secondary Touhou fan and start dodging bullets

By: When The Pillars Of Touhoudom Collide: Original Material VS. Fan Material « Rainbowsphere

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:18:06 +0000

[...] sudden surge of interest within its citizens. Bloggers started to talk about preferred characters, semantics of Touhoudom, and love for the world that spurred an unstoppable cult following, things that I have already [...]

By: ETERNAL

ETERNAL — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:48:56 +0000

@ Digitalboy: I guess we already talked about this, but yes, it's great that you're working toward learning more about the games. This post wasn't aimed at you at all, but your recent posts on Touhou (and a couple conversations with Shance) certainly prodded it along :P @ Scamp: To be honest, you have a point. I enjoy most of the secondary material, but I always find the dialogue in the games to be awkward. At any rate, the bullet patterns are incredibly pretty - I took the screencap for this post a year ago when I went through my Phantasm run to ogle the shiny danmaku. It's something you can't really appreciate when you're busy dodging through it. @ Shmup Gamer: Oh, Aya, how I hate her. She's one of the reasons why I gave up on trying to beat MoF on Lunatic. Anyway, it sounds like you're less interested in the secondary material than me, but part of me agrees with your comment on the remixes. I honestly think there are some great Touhou remixes out there, but it bugs me when half of the doujin music from any given Comiket is a rehash of the same old ZUN melodies. For every Touhou album that gets released, I feel like I'm missing out on a great original album that could have taken its place, but maybe that's just me. @ zzeroparticle: Now that's an interesting way of looking at it. Truthfully, nothing beats the feeling of dodging through a spellcard first-hand, but you can check out some replays if you want to see just how crazy some of the patterns can get without having to ace the card yourself. One of my favourite aspects of getting a new Touhou game is the anticipation of seeing the last/Extra boss's spellcards. @ Blowfish: Touhou is pretty much completely otaku-targeted, so there's definitely the whole moe element among the male fans. I guess that's why I find the franchise so interesting: ZUN knows his frilly dresses and coloured hair, but he really knows his game design too! @ Shance: Well said. Our conversation the other day got me thinking about the gameplay side of the series again, and somehow or the other I got fired up to start taking bullet dodging seriously again. I'll be glad if at least one person reads this post and starts working away at the games.

By: Shance

Shance — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:16:44 +0000

Whoa, that meeting actually spurred this post? Royally glorious.

People, listen to ETERNAL here. He’s probably the exemplification on all of what he said on this post. But thinking he’s listing the hell out of what you should do as a primary fan, I might as well add some more:

6. Explore, Explore

There’s more than one way to play the game. After finishing some standard achievements (1cc Normal, Easy, etc.), challenge yourself and try playing the game with some restrictions (no bomb, no focus, etc.). That way, a single game would have countless replayability potential.

7. Don’t Give Up!

Most of the people took a try on this, dodged bullets, and then called it quits. You can’t be a Touhou fan with that, can you? You just have to practice, practice, practice, till your mind memorizes every single spellcard there is to memorize. There’s no shame in using bombs and credits, because the glory a Touhou fan achieves after finishing the game without giving up is enough to bring him/her to Nirvana.

All in all, it’s up to you people to explore. ETERNAL here just laid down the foundation, so it’s up to you to give it a try. Stick to the program, and you’re good.

By: Blowfish

Blowfish — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:59:08 +0000

Hmmm…Interesting…
I could care less about the Touhou characters but whats always been interesting for me had been the high diffiulty thats getting toned down in games nowadays.

I guess most people are secondary fans though because they simply find the characters cute as so often with “Otaku Culture”

By: zzeroparticle

zzeroparticle — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:27:48 +0000

I kinda know that time and practice are really what’s keeping me from doing well in these games, but then again, I mostly play them to see how creative ZUN can get with the bullet patterns. Every games has always added a new bullet-y twist and it’s been fun unlocking the secret that will allow one to get past the spellcard with minimal life lost.

By: kluxorious

kluxorious — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:04:52 +0000

I don’t even know what Touhou is all about until recently (and still has a lot to learn about it) and I have not jump on the bandwagon either. Just not my kind of things, I guess

By: Shmup Gamer

Shmup Gamer — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:18:01 +0000

As a gamer I became compelled to try out Touhou further because it offered me a lot that many other games couldn’t which was a extreme challenge as a shooter, a genre I’ve been a fan of for years (I’m sad for the slow demise of the genre). It’s challenge I learned against Aya in MoF about after an hour I just simply had no answer against her on hard difficulty. Since toning down the difficulty I’ve 1 CC’d IN, PoFV, MoF and UFO on Normal and slowly progressing towards the harder difficulties. Regarding secondary works I enjoy good fanart like your example above (the artist is really good IMO and the artwork boosts character appeal greatly), good cosplays and basically ignore anything that’s not really canon like doujin manga or the various remixes (I’ve always liked the OSTs more.)

By: Scamp

Scamp — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:57:53 +0000

Heh, I’m only a primary fan and don’t really care about the secondary material because I found those character interactions to be the most boring thing ever created. Why would I want to watch two loli’s bickering when I can watch pretty bullet patterns!

By: digitalboy

digitalboy — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:32:42 +0000

I’m just going to go ahead and guess that this post is in some way aimed at me directly, seeing as I’m the one who’s been going on about how much I suck at Touhou games in spite of loving the franchise LOL

I definitely think it’s important to play the games as a fan. As I’ve researched the Touhuo characters, I keep finding that the ones from Imperishable Night and Embodiement of Scarlet Devil are always my favorites, and then I realized that it’s because those were the only 2 games I spent a lot of time with when I broke into the franchise 2 years ago. I never got good at them back then, though.

I’m determined to do it now, though. I feel lik I’ve finally broken into this series. Yesterday I sat down on the Wiki and read the profile of EVERY character to appear in a main-series game. I then DL’d as many of the games as I could make work (1-9, SWR, and 12.3, for some reason I can’t seem to find working 11 and 12) and started playing the fuck out of them. I only played one round of PoFV, as Yuuka Kazami, and with 2 continues I beat Normal mode, and that was one of the most fulfilling experiences I’ve had in a while. I am READY to kick ass at this series!