Ok I posted a comment earlier but it disappeared so I'll retype it. Probably because I mentioned the thing that rhymes with corn. Anyway, this is another view point to approach the issue from: Some Touhou fans obsess over the survival aspect. This is a result of how spell cards work. ZUN designed all spell cards to be humanly possible without getting hit or clearing bullets, and doing so gives you bonus points. As a result, a challenge was born: lunatic no miss no bomb (no whatever), abbreviated as LNN(N). Essentially, doing a perfect survival run. Meanwhile arcade shmups are designed to be humanly possible with the assistance of bombs, lives and additional mechanics like hyper and break mode. As a result, the expectations from these Touhou fans are at odds with the standards arcade shmups use. To these people, Touhou is about as hard as it gets without being "unfair" and these evil arcade games intentionally kill you to milk quarters out of you. What they don't know is that arcade shmups are largely possible to NMNB as well. I'm sure people can NMNB and no hyper DOJ up to Hibachi if they really wanted to. It's just that using hypers (for score) and bombs (for consistency) makes more sense. It's ridiculous to claim a game like DFK is unfair because the game was properly designed around the bullet and laser-cancelling mechanics. LNN is only a thing in Touhou. The arcade shmup scene focuses on scoring, but in Touhou, LNN runs are more popular than the score runs. Personally when I first got into Touhou, when I search for videos on UA-cam I would find Jaimers's LNN stage clears. Score runs were nowhere to be seen and even if I did, the numbers were just something abstract and I didn't understand how impressive they were. This definition of fairness (possible without getting hit or clearing bullets) doesn't even hold true in the official games. The photography side games and Fairy Wars are flat out impossible without clearing bullets by taking pictures or freezing the bullets. In Violet Detector, one of the earlier levels uses a grid of impassable lasers. There is no way to beat it without taking pictures to break the laser or teleporting. Also, in games like Lotus Land Story and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, there are sections where you can do nothing but pray to RNGesus (e.g. rings of doom, Modern Divine Spirit World). Technically if relying on luck to beat a pattern is considered "fair", then any arcade shmup with enough luck can be NMNB'ed all the way through. Even Inbachi, which is about as humanly impossible and unfair as it gets. As a matter of fact, an LNN run of LLS hasn't been accomplished yet. The closest anyone has gotten is ZPS with a 2MNB run. This concept of "fairness" is merely double standards. Ironically, what started out as a scoring mechanic to enhance the shmup aspect of Touhou ended up pushing it further away from the shmup community. That's about all of the main points I wanted to add on to this discussion. I forgot some of the finer details from my original comment but this will suffice I suppose. Anyway, this divide can be summarised as both camps being close-minded and erroneously assuming things about the other side that they don't know, just like many other conflicts out there. And I insist on trying to make my side comment regarding the questionable content. Given rule 25+9, any shmup that is somewhat popular and has human(oid) characters will have artwork of them with less than what they should have. If you tried hard enough, you could find such fanart of CAVE girls too (Reco, Irori, Leinyan etc.). Touhou's popularity worked against itself in this regard: because Touhou has a huge fanbase, there is much more disturbing content, which becomes more easily discovered by non-fans. This surely drove away a lot of people from the arcade shmup scene from getting into Touhou. The sheer difference in quantity in nasty fan works is what made the difference between Touhou and any other anime-style shmup. Thank goodness I got into Touhou from the fan music, that I discovered the official games instead of just staying content with the fan works and that I discovered Jaimers who got me into arcade shmups.
My dude! Amazing comment, I learned a lot reading through it. Thanks for expanding more on the touhou perspective of the situation! I'm going to pin this because I think it's really useful information that is pretty hard to get a clear explanation about. Thanks for watching my dude!
Speaking of contents, ZUN prioritized music above all else; programming, game design, characters, art are second priorities, that's why you see a lot of Touhou remixes on UA-cam. For example the famous Bad Apple by Alstroemeria Records, if you outside of fandom obviously you would think it's a generic anime song, actually it's a remix of a 23 years old song by the same name from the fourth game in Touhou series. Same as Night of Nights and Everything Will Freeze, are remixes of Flowering Night from Touhou 9 came out in 2005. UN Owen was Her, was from Touhou 6 (2002), known for McDonald Insanity video; the remix, Last Brutal Sister Flandre S, always mistaken as Death Waltz which it isnt. Have you heard of Dodonpachi ost remix? An artist that dedicated to remixing Gradius ost? If there is are they as popular as remixes I mentioned above?
@@HyperVanilo Sorry, but that's just not true. Zun seems to value all parts of the game, from music to the art. Just because his music is prolific, doesn't mean making games is his priority. Just because the art in the earlier games isn't good (though I think PoFV's art is good which is ZUN line art with another guy's shading) doesn't mean it's half assed, it just a weaker part of his 1 man development strategy. He learned to program from scratch purely to make games because he likes games, not for a vehicle for publishing music which is a common misconception and not really based on what he says in interviews or his actions as a game developer.
@@Rysosis If he loves making games his game should've improved from year to year at least the art, he can't just drawing with that style for forever, why doesn't he hire an artist? at this point Touhou should've as good looking as FDF, not the same style for the past decade, no wonder STG community despise Touhou so much, they are already bored by just looking at the title screen.
@@HyperVanilo I mean, the games have improved art-wise. He switched styles between 12 and 13 which caused a bit of a dip but I don't think anyone is looking at Touhou 17 and says it's ugly, it's pretty okay. I don't think you're going to see a drastic improvement between each game in terms of art when it's your weakest skill as well as only one part of a wider whole game you're making. But if you doubt me, you can just read his interviews and see that he loves all parts, not just the music.
2004 SHMUP player: "Anime girls? That's so cringe and ridiculous. Now if you excuse me, I'll be playing a game with a busty lady riding on giant bugs, like an adult."
The difference between an Anime girl and something like a DnD girl, is that a DnD girl is an actual woman with a normal voice. Anime girls give off really unsettling vibes. I don't get how it's possible to be an anime fan without also being a creep with unnatural fetishes.
@@wearethewearethewearethhe Dude don't try to make it look different theyre still ficitonal its the same crap, fantasying over fictional girls is pathetic no matter the deseign, you're no better for prefering an elf girl over Misato from eva, unless you're asexual the only way to win this is by having an actual girlfriend, something that i believe you don't have considering youre talking about freaking dnd. also the touhou characters don't even have voices and there's ZERO fanservice in the official games, don't insult something without knowing
As a Touhou fan that enjoys the games, I say something to keep in mind is that the Touhou fandom is MUCH bigger than just the shmup scene. From my experience, more than 60% of the fans don't even play the games, they prefer getting into the art, music, memes, characters, etc. As for the actual shmup branch within the fandom, Touhou offers a different experience than other games like Ikaruga and Cave series; and that its a focus on charm. Now Touhou games themselves are fun gameplay wise, but Zun puts extra emphasis on gimmicky and good looking danmaku, characters, music, and overall aesthetics. This niche is actually expanding with other series available in Steam, but as games, Touhou is still the go to series that caters to an aesthetic niche that current popular shmups have yet to provide at the same level.
That's a great point, yes the casual fanbase for touhou is massive! It's pretty crazy to be honest ha. You are also right that there really are not any mainstream games like touhou, so I can see how people can really dig into the series. Thanks for watching!
Hello, Touhou fan here! I've been playing Touhou since I was 13 (I'm 19 now), and while I'm not an "anime fan", I was introduced to the franchise by my anime fans friends. I'll be honest, besides Touhou, I haven't seriously played any other shmup. I discovered your channel a month ago, and since then I'm starting to get interested in the genre and different games thanks to you. So, uh, the thing with Touhou is that it's gotten waaaaay bigger than just the shmup aspect. The doujin scene is mostly the reason a lot of people are Touhou fans, so they are more into doujin circles (music), fanarts, fanmade manga, fangames, etc., and usually have this "omg i can't play the games i die so much!!!" experience (not saying it's wrong. That's okay, actually). Then there are also the derivative official media, which includes manga, light novels, music CDs (with their own stories), and arguably the fighting games (official games, just not shmups). So, the aftermath is that Touhou is a franchise that can be enjoyed by a lot of reasons, like wordlbuilding, characters, music, lore, etc. Not every Touhou fan are shmup players, and I think that's fine. As some people pointed out, there are two sides of the "serious Touhou players"; survival players, and score players. Score players are usually left in the shadows thanks to the popularity of LNNs, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon.
"Score players are usually left in the shadows thanks to the popularity of LNNs, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon." I feel that pain...
That's awesome that my channel is getting you more interested in arcade shmups! :-D There are so many great games! You are absolutely right about there being additional material outside the games that bring people into the touhou fandom. I think that's a really cool thing and something I would love to see happen for shmups. I'd be stoked to watch a Dodonpachi anime or manga or something. I also do wish more people would do remixes of CAVE music, because it is actually really good :-) Thanks for watching my dude, it makes me happy to hear my channel is introducing new stuff to you.
I'd say the fact that there's more survival players comes from the idea that scoring is a lot harder. For some reason people have this mindset that if you aren't getting insanely high scores near WR then you're wasting your time scoring, although obviously the average player plays normal with bombs (Or even continues) rather than going into like LNBs or whatever.
@@akiradkcn i'll never understand why the difficulty of something means how better or worse it is to other franchises, like Megaman X6 is hard (because its brocken) and i dont see anyone being like IT'S THE BEST MEGAMAN GAME or IT SUCKS BECAUSE MEGAMAN 1 IS HARDER, just dumb sht
In fact, Touhou games are much easier than arcade shooters. A possible reason is that arcade shooters need to be so fucking hard because they are made to make the player pay money. If the player manages to beat the game on their first try with a single coin, well, your arcade machine is garbage (from the owner's POV) Touhou games are PC games, they don't need to be insanely hard. Why would they?
I am basically the exact sort of person you are talking about. I heard about Touhou through the anime scene, went to check it out and started from the beginning. After playing a couple titles in the series I wanted to try other shmups so I got Ikaruga and Mushihimesama on steam, and I played Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou on a friend's setup. I am definitely still a beginner. But would love to put more time into the above mentioned games and other titles I've been hearing about from the shmup community. It's a little intimidating even bringing Touhou up in the other shmup circles though as I regularly see it get shit on. I probably wouldn't have seen any of Cave's classics if not for Touhou. Also it's crazy to me how true it is that seemingly only about 15% or so of Touhou fans have even played the games, most of them are there for the music. In some Japanese rhythm games they'll have Touhou arrangements listed like a genre, it's amazing how widespread this shitty graphics Indie game has become.
I am of a similar case as well. Got into Touhou from the fan music. Discovered shmups were apparently not dead yet and that they're actually super cool. At the time (like 2010?) when Steam wasn't a thing yet, you would never know what arcade shmups were if you didn't have a local thriving arcade scene. And my country doesn't. Only one or two arcades have a variety of rhythm games (but no shmups), while the rest are dominated by claw machines and those Chinese fishing games. And yeah, Taiko no Tatsujin has an entire section for Touhou fan arrangements.
@Demon Core-kun well if this video didn't convince you, I urge you to check it out! My recommendation is "Double Dealing Character" available on steam. Then go check out some classic shmups if you're feeling it. I also enjoyed Undertale a lot and lots of the skills you learn from Undertale translate over to shmups, even if Undertale is pretty easy in comparison to some Cave titles and such, you've started off on the right foot.
Exactly my dude! And my goal is that, when new people start looking into shmups and saying they learned about them from Touhou, there won't be this unease of the shmup players throwing touhou under the bus for no reason.
When I was in high school I discovered the shoot 'em up genre, and I REALLY wanted to play some. Unfortunately I didn't have any money to buy shmups at the time, but my friend had a USB full of every Touhou shooting games, so they were the first shmups that I started to get really into. I actually didn't want to play them for a while because of the weird all-girl-art style, but eventually my desire to scroll vertically and shoot things won me over. I never really delved into the Touhou fandom much beyond just playing the games. I've 1CC'd a couple of them, but I haven't found another bullet-hell game that I really like after playing the Touhou games. To be fair I haven't looked that hard since I really like collecting for the Genesis, but I want to take a look at some of the bullet hells on the Saturn to try and see if anything captures my interest in the way the Touhou games did.
That's awesome my dude! I didn't know you were a touhou fan :-D Yeah man, I'd love to see what bullet hells you can find on the Saturn and what you think about them. I'm not a fan of the DDP Saturn port, but maybe I'll give it a second chance in the future ha. I'm kind of curious to go through and really compare the differences in depth.
I can agree a lot here. Most Touhou fans arent even that much into shmups and play it casual. They enjoy 2hu as a whole, the whole universe (fandom and canon). And even among the 2hu shmup player, there are 2 types. Those who only play 2hu shmups and the those who play non-2hu shmups. I also made experience with 2hu fans who really dislike non-2hu shmups(and they probably doesnt even really play the 2hu shmups)...well those are elitists so who cares about them. I started to get really into shmups, competitive wise, with 2hu. Even tho I played shmups in the past. Maybe I can say it here: I call it a sin, a bad sin of me, that I really dislike CAVE games at first, cause they look unfair, unappealing etc. Even when I never played it before and know nothing about, I only watched videos of it. So I never touched them for years. Last year, I actually played DoDonPachi on a convention, and have to say, it was interesting. So I started to play DDP and tried to get my 1-ALL. (And also Cirmzon Clover) It was at this time, I actually understood CAVE games and why they are so popular. And last year, October, I made the decision that I abandon the Touhou Shmups for a while to get more into CAVE games and other non-2hu shmups. I totally regret the way I thought about CAVE games in the past.
@@TheElectricUnderground Sadly I was never at Stunfest, but maybe someday I will go there. The convention I mentioned was Dokomi in Dusseldorf, which is primary an Anime and Manga convention but also has an own hall for games and retro games. Sadly no Arcades, because they are forbidden/not allowed (illegal) here... :c
@@TheElectricUnderground if i could, I'd play some of CAVE's games too, but i suck, and I'm trying to git gud first At least i can deathbomb 90 percent of the time from the sheer amount of times i die lol
Touhou, while barely has any anime media (I think Touhou, as far as of writing this comment, has 0 anime where the creator is directly involved), has a lot of other media that brings people in without the people playing the games. The majority of them are fan-made products, not by ZUN himself. Touhou's other main medium are light novels and mangas. And Touhou's music scene is so strong I think people forgot its roots as a shmups. In comparison CAVE and other shmup developers would love Touhou's piece of pie, but we know multimedia franchise is quite expensive. We never got any Dodonpachi manga, right? In this world it's possible to be a fan of a series without enjoying the home medium. In this case, Touhou's main game. That being said, official Touhou games are not limited to shmups. There are fighting games too. Also for those who hate Touhou for its "moe or girly" aesthetic... Do they hate Deathsmiles and Gunbird too? It's a shame that there is such a divide where the arcade scene shuns the Touhou games. Touhou games to me, are at worst, good games.
For sure my dude! I really like your point about there being additional material to bring people into the touhou fandom. Imagine if there was a Dodonpachi anime! That would be pretty awesome actually, especially with how insane the story of that game is ha.
This is a topic I'm very passionate about and was going to be my February topic. The aesthetic gap is a complicated issue. The part I would like to bring up is that, generally, the best touhou games gameplay-wise (touhou 7 - 9.5) are the ones which have the most unappealing (outliers excluding, such as GFW having non-zun portraits) visuals. While the newer games like 16 and 17 have weaker gameplay, they certainly have started to try and push a bit more on the visual side - and not just with the character art, but also with things like the hypers in touhou 17 being as visually satisfying as they feel gameplay impacting. There is then a disconnect between the games that are better from a mechanical perspective to recommend to a seasoned arcade player and the types of visuals which are more likely to pull them in. Design wise, Touhou has some differences which arcade players may not notice/find jarring - mainly that there is a HUGE, MASSIVE disconnect between scoring gameplay and survival gameplay (again, there are one or two outliers, mainly gfw and ds.) An example: Imperishable Night and Mushi Futari - both are bullet cancelling games, but they are designed in a way which means that the person who plays IN will very rarely use the bullet cancelling for survival purposes meaning that they wont consider their bullet cancels really at all, meaning that they don't have a 'foot in the door' for scoring like a game like futari which is designed around the player's route abusing the bullet cancels for easier survival - the futari player already constructs gameplay around bullet cancelling, which leads into the game's scoring conceit. Borders in touhou 7 are just a random thing that pops up which seems uncontrollable and so isn't really looked at from a survival perspective than anything other than just a random bomb they sometimes get, while being a huge fundamental to the game's scoring (grazing unfocused during the border.) Zun has improved a bit on this though in the later games, for examples touhou 16 has a very simple 'release cancels bullets which gives score' mechanic which newer players find easier to get their 'foot in the door' to scoring with (again though, the newer games tend to be the less interesting games more often than not.) I frankly don't understand why a lot of the touhou players, and by that I don't mean random people on the touhou reddit discord servers, but the people who dedicate 100s of hours to survival/scoring in the games, don't play cave games often. Yeah these players got engaged because of the touhou secondaries (people who consume secondary content like the manga, fan works etc.) but they are STG players through and through and games like mushi, futari, sdoj, dfk and other cave titles would appeal to them if they actually gave them a chance. It seems like there's simply a barrier that people need to cross - they haven't actually played arcade stg properly so it's not as if they've dismissed it as games that they wont find enjoyable. Perhaps it's an issue of emulation but I only have one 'casestudy' of this - being Minogame playing mushi 1 but not playing futari because there isn't a good way of playing it on pc. Either way I'd like to at least try to stop 'my side' from not giving arcade stg a chance as I do think when the 'sides' get less segregated it'll be a benefit for both communities if such a divide wasn't so stark. A footnote - if there was past drama, then I'd also like to point out that the stg touhou community has sorta 2 sides to it, broadly speaking 1 side being a mostly newer crowd of players who are more survival orientated and the other side being a lot of older players from irc/forum days who are more scoring orientated (though this is a very hard to define community split, and there is a non zero amount of drama around it like there always is with these sort of things.) Both sides are as hard or if not harder to find than the shmup community as they are kinda blocked from searches by the secondary touhou fanbase being a vocal majority, so the discord servers these people hang out in are secret by circumstance. If you want to contact people in the touhou stg community, people like ZPS who are active in both are good to point towards avenues of contact. It may just be that the reason the communities don't interact is because we're both kinda equally hard to find communities with respect to the iceberg of the internet.
The survival vs scoring divide also makes sense. Among STG Touhou fans, their main goal is mostly to just finish the game (1CC Lunatic being the biggest accomplishment). Scoring comes distant second with the exception of the most hardcore STG Touhou fans. After accomplishing a 1CC run, most players would just move on to the next game instead of trying to improve their score. Me included.
Another great response man! I like these kinds of comments because they help me learn about some info that is hard to find. One cool thing is that, in my research, I was able to talk with the players (like ZPS) who cross over both worlds and appreciate both. However, what I did have trouble finding was the group of touhou players who weren't interested in arcade (especially CAVE) and why. Your and Lunar's comments have definitely helped shed light on the situation. Yeah, I agree whole-heartedly about the issue of accessibility, where some of our best shmups are not easily played on PC or need to be emulated. Futari is a perfect example, especially since I think Futari is a great bridge between touhou and arcade! Imagine a world where Ketsui Deathtiny was available on PC, that would be huge!
@@TheElectricUnderground touhou players see arcade games as a bigger challenge after accomplishing a goal in touhou. There are only the western shmup fanbase that despises the game and shun its players because of something they find unappealing. Touhou hardcore players get to arcade for more challenge, although some of them may get put off after seeing the cave gameplay.
Elite touhou players do play cave games and arcade in general for more challenge, what are you talking about? Personally, I have played touhou a lot, almost religiously, but I have never considered trying cave games. Firstly, the dificulty is offputting. Also, I don't really like the bullet patterns in cave shmups, too spammy and repetitive. Having been familiar with beautiful, unique and well-designed bullet patterns from touhou, I smh can not find cave shmups appealing. I would play any other arcade-like shmup game over cave tbh.
Hi there, just wanted to say that this video is really interesting and pretty accurate. I'm on the Touhou fangame developing side of things, and I get to see a lot of the design mentality differences between something like CAVE and Touhou, because I enjoy both and I've been mainly in the Touhou community for the shmups for a long time. Something I found interesting is where you mentioned the aesthetic of Touhou being a turn-off and something I find interesting is that this seeps into the game design aspect of things as well. Typically, designing a "Touhou" pattern compared to a normal shmup pattern is actually super different because Touhou relies on its bullet patterns as a sort of art form rather than simply being a practical "dodge this" or "cancel this", and when you do something more simplistic and focused on gameplay (which I typically prioritize) it tends to feel unfulfilling to the crowd unless you give it some kind of aesthetic flair. People in the Touhou community have joked that Queen Larsa is just "the color purple: the boss", which while humorous also shows how important aesthetic quality is so ingrained in the Touhou community, and I could see more arcade divide happening based on that design philosophy alone. That said, Touhou shmup players do exist and I hope it's possible in the future for the Touhou shmup and arcade shmup community to mesh together more in the future. Also loved the shoutout to Pearl in the video, he's a super chill dude and immensely cool in the Touhou scene too. Nice video!
Killer comment my dude! That's really interesting to hear that the appearance of the bullet patterns is an important aspect of the game design, rather than just their function. Now that you pointed it out I am noticing this more ha. Thanks so much for watching my dude and leaving a great comment!
Poor Gus, the internet does not forget. Imagine an embarrassing joke you made in your teens following you around for a decade now. I know it's a funny meme, but I m not a fan of it. Anyway, thanks for watching my video though!
It’s surreal watching this and being part of the group of “I’ve never even heard of the Arcade Community” It’s a shame to learn that Touhou games aren’t respected as being good games in some communities. I’ve sunk 100s of hours into all the games. And it’s my favorite game series and fandom to be a part of.
Think you pretty much nailed the reasons for the divide existing in the first place, there's so much Touhou content out there beyond just the games that a significant portion of Touhou fans aren't even it for the games. Really, the players are a very small portion of the greater Touhou fanbase. Also come to think of it, I don't actually know that many Eastern Touhou players that also play arcade shmups, the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Kayar and LYX. (A lot of them do have at least some arcade experience though). There's also a lot of really good Western Touhou players I know that still don't play arcade shmups (ZM, Obama, Yatsuzume, etc.) And one last thing, watch EX-Alice's final pattern in Mystic Square and see if you can figure out what it's based on ua-cam.com/video/k9_Kwu98fU4/v-deo.html
Alice's second phase also resembles the stage 6 boss's final. As someone who went from Touhou to arcade shmups, I was surprised to see that pattern show up in DDP.
@@lunarstrom8160 Yep, that one too There's a few more Touhou patterns that are based on CAVE games, Remilia's 2nd non is a combination of 2 patterns from the final boss of ESP Ra. De
One that I find interesting is that Mima's ubiquitous star spread in SoEW is basically just a DDP Hibachi pattern. Not exactly the same but pretty close.
Ha! How you know me so well ;-D That's really cool, yes it definitely shows that Touhou loves Cave and has been inspired by it. I'm really glad to hear you felt the video is on point!! :-D Thanks for watching my dude.
One thing I love about Touhou is not just the waifus but the gameplay like the Spell Cards and how bullets move in the game. Also let’s not forget the “strongest” character, Cirno.
There's definitely a divide among the touhou community. We have the primaries and secondaries. A primary is someone that is invested in the touhou shmup games, a secondary is uninterested in the games or very casual about them. That's the general definition people use. Most of the fans are secondaries. You have primaries that play other shmup games, those that just play touhou games and even those that only play one or very few of the games, akin to a genwunner.
That's a good description of the situation! I did get the sense that the casual fanbase is much larger than the players, so what you're saying makes a lot of sense. Thanks for watching!
Touhou, what supposed to be an STG game, itself is overshadowed by fangames like Luna Nights, Genso Wanderer, 3rd Eye, Touhouvania series etc., it's enough to make people outside of fandom think Touhou is an anime game, plus the fanarts and the remixes, and to search official Touhou games on Steam you must type the English title because the game's title started with its Japanese title, how people want to play Touhou if the title itself is a barrier? Taito's new game, Touhou Spell Bubble, will absolutely make people think it's Puzzle Bobble but with anime chicks.
Yes I've run into this problem as well! When I was trying to buy FDF2 on steam I couldn't find it at first because the title is in Japanese and all the touhou game results brought up stuff that wasn't shmup related ha. Thanks for watching!
About time someone asked this. Agree with most of your points and kudos to you for trying to make an effort to close the gap between the arcade scene and the Touhou shmup scene but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon. The arcade scene or atleast most of the people from the shmups forum just seem a little too elitist and close-minded imo and most of their hate are unfounded and downright, silly. Though, I would say most of the really enthusiastic haters come from plebs who struggle to even 1-ALL CAVE games / only play old-school shmups like R-Type and they feel the need to bring others down. Truly crab's mentality at its finest! Some of these peasants also have arcade cabinets which brings me to the conclusion that they are working boomers stuck in the past. Now excuse me, I need to get my daily dose of Casper's loli nectar juice while I play CAVE's SUPER COOL AND HYPE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR game , Aka to Booooooo. Can't wait to play the upcoming Dodonpachi SaiSaiDaiOuJou on my iPhone 39 btw ( I heard EXY's sling bikini mode is going to be S-EXY and insane! ) Always remember to be yourselves , shmup forum boomers. P.S. whoever came up with the shmup term should just die, why can't we stick to what JP uses which is STG.
It is for certain people, especially the people who have been around and sort of developed these antagonistic relationships with each other. My goal though is for the new players who have come into the genre (like Kiwi and Moglar did) to not fall into this divide. There is a strong group of western players right now, like Jaimers, who appreciate both and that's the group I want to expand. But yes, for some people the divide just runs too deep and there is no convincing them otherwise.
I think the real reason is that both communities give different vibes, sort of like the Smash community vs the FGC. The shmup players that hate Touhou kinda do so because they'd get associated with the levels of degeneracy that Touhou is associated with (4chan created a separate board for Touhou because of the frequency of Touhou hijack threads there), so going back to the FGC analogy it's like playing Smash and associating yourself with smelly teenagers (to use that stereotype). There's a reason why /shmupg/ calls Touhou players Touhoufappers.
I think that analogy is fitting too but i would like to use another more disturbing stereotype of the smash community and therefore Touhou community, the smash community has a pedo problem, most the players are underage kids and they got lots of predators in their community trying to get into sexual contact with minors.....so yeah, as i said the analogy is fitting and im pretty sure a lot of Touhou enthusiasts are more in it for the little girls depicted in the games than the actual gameplay. I can totally see how you dont wanna be associated with those kind of people. There are tons of shmups out on plenty of systems but these Touhou players choose to play the ones featuring underage girls...this moe shit is borderline pedo stuff.
@@MrBroken030 Uh, no. While there are obvious pedos towards the series, that goes for a lot of other series as well (such as Pokemon). Besides, despite being full of girls, there are tons of women as well, and it is often agreed (not just by the fans and not just from people in Japan) to be the safest series from Japan that are full of females. Touhou got popular due to the music (official and arranges), lore, bullet patterns, and character designs and their lore or what they are based on, and then further on due to the memes. It's really annoying and even outright offensive to stereotype the fanbase as being full of pedos and thus generalize Touhou players as so, especially with how many of the fans actually talk about the gameplay as well and like to make jokes regarding the gameplay for other games (people liked calling Magaki from KoFXI acting like a Touhou character due to his projectile spamming).
As if other STG players weren't virgin loosers themselves hahaha. And no, I don't play touhou, I don't play any videogames for that matter, I prefer to succeed in life rather.
Thanks for clarifying the matter! Being back only recently into the shmup community, the reasons behind this division always puzzled me. I mean, Touhou games do not appeal to me for a lot of reason but these are my tastes, everyone is entitled to have his opinion and like whatever shmup fits his pleasure
Glad the video helped light on the situation. Yeah, I'm completely fine with playing what they want to play, touhou is not going to appeal to everyone ha, that's the nature of how it is designed. I just want to create an atmosphere where we are pushing new and talented players away needlessly. :-D Also, got your vid done! I should be uploaded tonight (my time ha).
I've got into shmups about a year ago through Touhou, simply for it having such a large presence in anime circles that I was always vaguely aware of and decided to go for it. I don't regret it for a single moment. It really seems like only a small portion actually play the games. Even when I was playing a rythym game and a Touhou song popped up, a friend in the group got excited, but said just listens to the fan music. Very happy to have branched out and discovered CAVE games more recently, and hopefully whatever else interests me moving forward. Still not a super strong player and the arcade difficulty is a jump, but been trying my damnest and close to getting a mushi manica 1CC.
Well, being shunned for playing Touhou by the shmup group really makes people not want to enter it, also just a heads up, the gameplay on the video is from FDF, not FDF2.
Ha yeah thanks for the heads up. I play FDF2 more often the FDF and the original footage was supposed to be FDF2, but then OBS did not grab the run and so it was just a blank screen. So I used an old FDF replay that I had but then forgot to update the description ha. Anway, thanks for the reminder, I've changed the description now ha.
I love both arcade and touhou shmups, and if that bothers anyone on either side of the fence, they can lick my nuts and it won't ever effect where I go, who I play with, the games I want to play or talk about, etc. People who gatekeep with hostility should be pushed out by the sane people who understand that it doesn't matter who likes what shmup. Every community should have the basic rule "don't be a dick or we'll kick you out."
A perspective of someone who by way of just playing Touhou for fun, "accidentally" got good at shmups. I started playing Touhou because of the music and the characters. I had absolutely zero interest in STGs beforehand. I didn't know about "actual" shmup games, I didn't know what they were, I didn't know what they were like, and I frankly didn't care because I was playing this one game that was fun. At some point, someone asked me if I would play Mushihimesama or something, so I looked it up on UA-cam and saw this bland game where all the bullets were the same color (purple), there were way too many visual effects in the background (mainly the explosions) making it hard to see, the routing was extremely static so if you varied from it at all you got majorly punished and the music sounded like generic electric guitar and whatnot. By contrast, the familiar land of Touhou had pretty patterns that cared more about looking cool and unique than just pure difficulty, the backgrounds were *fine* but importantly didn't get in the way of the gameplay, you had a lot more flexibility in routing and had the opportunity to do cool (dumb) stuff without immediately being condemned to death, and of course the famous ZUN music, with dynamic tunes and each song sounding different and unique. They almost felt like completely different genres, with nothing to do with each other. I dismissed the CAVE game as some kind of boring bog standard arcade shmup and went back to Touhou-land. The intention was never to get good. I didn't care about 1ccs. I didn't care about getting to Lunatic mode. I was just playing a game where you dodge bullets, and that was fun. Obviously 1ccs and such were still a goal, but I was perfectly capable of continuing to play until I got bored, or indeed switching to one of the many other games whenever I felt like it. This mindset is definitely one of the things that has influenced my playstyle. I really enjoy freeform dodging, going wherever I feel like and just trying to make it work, even without prior knowledge of the stage. Learning and memorizing routes, which involves sitting in one game doing the same thing over and over is hella boring and I don't want to do it any more than I have to. This probably does impact how I feel about traditional STGs, which - although correct me if I'm wrong (which I probably am, because I haven't looked too hard) - have a much higher focus on static routing, learning the stages and bosses, and using your resources correctly. Looking back at it now, I didn't really give traditional STGs much thought at all until Gus' run at AGDQ. Touhou caters for a large number of skillsets, all the way from Normal 1cc to LNN level to scoring, and so I never felt the need to look outside ZUN's games and find something new. For the most part, my initial impressions of Mushi remain the same - I'm still not super excited about how the game presents itself - but I am more willing to give it a go at some point now. However, my enjoyment of the STG genre is probably tied to the Touhou design style now, simply because that's how I learnt to play.
That's really interesting to hear your perspective. I like your brutal honesty ha. From experience, I think that if you are open-minded and start giving arcade shmups a chance, I could see them growing on you and becoming favorites, alongside touhou. :-) Thanks for watching man!
The way the zun draws the characters doesn't necessarily reflect the way they actually look due to zun not being very good at drawing. In the official mangas and spin-offs a lot of the characters are pretty clearly adults
I think the divide stems from the Touhou fandom basically being overrun by the anime/waifu crowd who either haven't touched a shmup before or are super casual about it. Cave if I remember correctly did try with the waifu crowd with games like Mushihimesama, Deathsmiles, DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, and Ibara off the top of my head. Really only the first two are the ones that succeeded.
Ha you are right, it's funny to consider that it is possible that touhou's popularity inspired Cave to make more moe stuff like Deathsmiles and SDOJ :-D It's kind of ironic ha. thanks for watching!
Yo dude! Really appreciate this video. I'm a dedicated Touhou player and server manager, but also one who has been branching out a ton as of these past few weeks. I've gotten into games like eXceed 3rd, StellaVanity, Castle Shikigami 2, Caladrius Blaze, RefRain, the list goes on. I think we as a community should make it our mission to dispel the gap between the shmup and Touhou communities; I know people who loves both the arcade-like shmups and the more danmaku-centric games, both of which are fantastic. My dream comes true every time we get a player who decides to play on both ends of the spectrum! :)
Despite being three years old video still wanna put in my two cents. Literally never heard of Cave or the like at all until I decided to try my hand at making a Shmup and started doing research. All I knew about were the really old games for the SNES like Gradius and some airplane shooters that I don't even remember the name of, and Touhou. Played a few games casually, but not anymore than any other game I play. To me Bullet Hell=Touhou game or some game emulating Touhou. Only very recently have I learned there is a lot more to the genre than I initially thought. Which is nice, cause that means there are even more games for me to look out for and play XD
I have hundreds of hours in both Touhou and arcade shmups. The main difference between them for me is a heavier focus on random dodging in Touhou and strict routing in the arcade shmups. As someone who used to hang out a lot in the Touhou communities, i've often seen people get discouraged by arcade shmups stages, since they were approached with the same approach that they had in Touhou. What i'm curious about, does the opposite happen? Being discouraged by all the randomness? Anyway, hope the gap between Touhou and arcade shmups closes, i think every stg is great and worth playing
I have figured out the perfect way to bridge the divide and I am DEAD SERIOUS, Cave fans need to get Bad Apple running on a CAVE 68000 as an offering to the Touhou fans. This WILL work.
Difficulty is to some degree subjective maybe for some people touhou Games are the hardest Games that exist but for other people its Ghosts n Goblins, Ninja Gaiden, dwarf Fortress, the Sims or Devil may cry or Something Idk, my Point is: everyone has different skills one Person might Play through space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator without much difficulty while someone Else is jerma985 who died to pinwheel
Your description of the Touhou community being more of an anime community than a gaming community is absolutely spot on. While everyone is aware of its origins as a Bullet Hell game, the overwhelming majority doesn't care and are just in it for the music, the characters, the memes, or to be part of the fandom. Never once have I met a Touhou fan IRL that actually plays the games, and the one guy I managed to convince to play the games, and then ended up playing CAVE games and the Raiden Fighters games among others, isn't even a Touhou fan. I undersand that not everyone has the time and/or dedication for the games, but the only time the games or their gameplay ever get mentioned are when comparing their difficulty to other "hard" games like Dark Souls, and when other games that isn't a Bullet Hell have a million projectiles on screen and then pointing out how much it's like Touhou (Which is a personal pet peeve of mine, because most of those fights look more like Suguri than Touhou). This may seem innocious, but think about this: Not only is Touhou stealing thunders from other Bullet Hell games like the CAVE games and some Psykio and Raizing games, but other independent/doujin games like Crimzon Clover and Devil Engine are absolutely overshadowed and remains relatively obscure. Not even other shmups with Moe aesthetics like the Gundemonium series or Orange_Juice games gets shout outs from the Touhou community, and crossovers are what everyone seems to be into these days. I still really like Touhou, but the reputation it has can really be insufferable and makes me wish sometimes it never grew as big as it is.
I'm really glad my video connected with you. I've actually experienced the exact same thing with Melee (when it was popping on in 2016). In the early melee comeback era (2012-2014) everyone was in the community to play the game and to improve. Around 2015 onward though, the community started to get massive but mostly off the back of memes and that sort of thing. The situation got so bad that I would be playing against people and 4 stocking them with Roy (ha), and they'd be telling me I needed to start doing X or Y because of memes. Or I'd win a tournament with fox and here nothing but Final Destination memes over and over, even though Fox is only good on FD against a few characters. Anyway, I'm rambling but I know where you are coming from.
Make sense for Touhou stealing thunders from other STGs because the characters and the musics, tell me have you heard a playlist of Strikers 1945 ost remix? A circle that dedicated to remix Gradius ost? In case you dont know Dodonpachi and Mushihimesama has fanarts in Danbooru, how many of it? Only 100 - 300 arts, Touhou? 632K fanarts.
@@HyperVanilo A circle based on Gradius would be really sick. But if I were to choose a shmup soundtrack that deserves recognition that isn't Touhou, it would have to be 19XX. It's just so damn classy.
I've been playing shmups since 1990 when my dad gifted two-year-old me an NES with Sky Shark, and the same dad would take me to arcades over the years to play games like 1943, Raiden II, and Viper Phase 1 with me. I discovered Touhou not through memetic videos, but through some old webpage in 2004 with a list of free shmups, including trial version of Touhou. In fact, I didn't even know they were called Touhou until my friend asked "Hey, isn't that Touhou?" when I was browsing videos of Shoot The Bullet in 2006. I personally have never minded the aesthetic of Touhou, honestly all the "creepy"/bait-y aspects of the characters comes from the fanart that weird artists make rather than ZUN himself. And although I haven't played Touhou games in years, I still think they are solid games. For a while I was considerably involved with the Touhou community, especially once I started cosplaying characters from that series and got to know fellow Touhou fans. My relationship with that community has always been a strained one, colored by the almost two decades of experience I had with shmups as a whole before coming to that community. The majority (or at least a great plurality) of Touhou fans are "secondary" fans who have little or no experience with the Touhou games themselves. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with being a secondary fan, it's like how people are into stuff like Guilty Gear despite being trash at fighting games and having no desire to make a hobby of it. But I feel myself dissociating from the community when fans remark that the games are too difficult and apparently only exist to be exercises in masochism - I'm the one who's been playing shmups for 30 years and for many of these people, Touhou is the first set of shmups they've ever played, so already they get negative impressions about the genre; this is nothing I fault them for, but it's absolutely one of those points of discussion where I really just don't know what to say because I'm basically the old hag in a crowd of cool shmup-neophyte kids who just prefer to enjoy Touhou as a visual and literary franchise and fan-grown universe. Then there's those who use Touhou's reputation as a "tons of bullets, therefore impossiblest game ever" series as some weird badge of pride in ignorance of the history of sadistically hard arcade shmups that came before it - even before shmups became known for thick bullet forests, the ones in the arcades had that reputation of being hungry for coins! At the same time I'm not too pleased with the way parts of the shmup community treat Touhou and its fans. I don't mind the dislike for the games themselves too much, some shmup fans just don't like how they play and that's fine. But then the less-kind parts of the community wage personal attacks against anyone who has any interest in Touhou beyond the games themselves (much in the same way saying you actually care about shmup lore in general gets you shot...in the leg) and have a vendetta against Those Goddamned Secondaries, or attack anyone who even likes Touhou at all, labeling Touhou fans collectively as the P-word, forgetting that 1. official Touhou character designs are *far* from sexualized, that's mostly a fan artist thing as I said above, 2. people can enjoy works with youthful characters in non-gross ways and the idea that liking Touhou makes one "one of those people" is fucking disgusting, does nothing to combat actual Ps, and doesn't contribute to a healthy shmup discussion at all.
regarding your question about porn. the touhou series is quite literally the #1 most parodied IP in all of hentai, followed by kancolle in #2 and fate/grand order in #3. we can know this because hentai aggregators have a tagging system and touhou has the highest number of tagged galleries out of all parodied content.
I'm a bit of an outlier I guess because I got into touhou through playing other shmups and realising that I like the genre. While touhou isn't my favourite shmup series, it is the one I go back to the most frequently, mostly just because of how many games and fangames there are for it.
I'm the same, where I discovered other shmups before touhou. Even though i'm obsessed with Cave shmups, I am really starting to try to play more touhou because I do think the games are really fun :-) I think Mountain of Faith might be my fav.
The shmup genre itself is pretty hardcore, so I'm not surprised there seems to be a gap. As a person who doesn't know about the shmup scene at all other than some basic info, this was an interesting watch
I dare to say that 1% (or less, i am being generous) of touhou fans don't actually play the shmup games or have played it once and never touched them again, touhou is so big it spawned every kind of niche possible within touhou itself, such as: music,artwork,memes,fangames,the FGC,mugen,anime,fanfiction,roleplay,cosplay,puzzles,the rhythm games community, everything you can imagine, and each of them are big enough to be considered almost as completely separate communities that don't care for the other branches. there's a saying that got popular that said "if it exist, there's touhou of it"
Around 15 years ago I heard the OST for Touhou 8, and through that I found a gameplay video of someone playing on Lunatic mode, I thought all the patterns looked insane and wanted to try the game so badly but had no idea how, or where to buy the game I ended up finding a ISO on some weird forums and that was my introduction to shmup games. Now with plenty of shmups on Steam its a lot easier to acquire them, and I believe that kind of accessibility is extremely important but I don't think I'd be into the genre if I never found Touhou some 15 years ago.
I wonder what STG players think of Gunbird, It's an STG where the protagonists are 4 humans and a golem, following these people's logic Gunbird also can be classified as anime game just because the players are humans... And a golem.
That is an interesting point! I always view the girl from gunbird as sort of an imitation of Kiki's delivery service ha, even though I'm not sure if that is correct or not. I guess the difference would be that Kiki and those 90's anime are not typically in the moe style, whereas Touhou is. Again, I have no problem with touhou and moe, but this is the feedback that I have heard.
I knew about some shmups through Kotobokiya’s model kits and that there was a small community, but I didn’t realize how small and dedicated the community is. I was streaming touhou 6 and a passing by viewer told me to watch your video. As someone who only knew touhou from the old ytpmv’s and remixes, I didn’t understand the magnitude of the divide between the shmup and touhou communities. I would qualify that moe was kinda popular in the 80’s, but I do agree that sci fi fans and moe fans do not meld together. To add on, moe did indeed become more popular in the mid 2000’s and mecha kinda lost its prominence in weeb culture, at least now. I’m probably not gonna play shmups all that competitively since I’m... kinda bad at games in general but thanks to your video and the viewer passing by, I’m definitely gonna try out more shmups. Good video!
@@TheElectricUnderground the funny thing is I’ve never heard of dodonpachi or ikaruga before the model kits, yet I’ve known touhou for as long as I can remember being on youtube
I’m still very much a newcomer to this genre as a whole, but I think I can at least say this: while a lot of the more arcadey shmups seem comparable to a roller coaster, Touhou games seem more akin to something like a torrent river ride. I have a hard time imagining something like a Yagawa game being “zen” or in the same way that Touhou is often described as; the stage design being largely devoid of secrets or breakable objects leads to a sense of focus on the patterns themselves, as well as freeing up the backgrounds to explore different camera angles and types of setpieces (Ten Desires stage 5 is a great example of this). The slower movement and weak-looking shots take away from the adrenaline and the power fantasy, but lean further into the “coziness” of the whole experience. And while Touhou *does* have a sense of spectacle, that spectacle looks very different from something more arcadey, again usually being focused around bullet patterns that move in intricate ways or have interesting gimmicks to them- especially the spell cards, which are often designed to represent specific concepts in a character’s background or in japanese mythology as a whole. Wishmakers’ comment elaborates on the importance of aesthetic in Touhou patterns, among other people’s.
I kinda got into touhou as a joke honestly. I thought it was a meme loli ecchi game that i was going to play with some people and then laugh at how bad it was, but then I found out that wasn't actually the case and I just got completely hooked. Other bullet hell games are honestly too difficult for me, probably because different design philosophy and only having experience with touhou. There's more to it than that, though. I mean I like Len'en, but then something like CAVE just doesn't have the aesthetics for me. I love the way touhou patterns look and feel, along with the music. It's hard to explain, but it's just good for me. For what it's worth I'm currently breaking into hard 1cc territory, although I have nearly every Lunatic on HSiFS. So my skill level is probably not high enough for the fun difficulties on Mushihimesama or anything like that.
My dude! It's always funny when you start something ironically and then up really liking it in the end. I remember a few years back I did that with some musical artists, just to be ironic but as I listened to more and more of their music, I became a big fat fan ha. X-D
@@TheElectricUnderground It really was just me having the wrong idea and being too bored, but man the moment I played I was like holy shit, I love EVERYTHING about this. I never thought I would ever clear any bullet hell. I would love to get into more non-touhou styled bullet hells, but man they seem like a wall.
I'm a Touhou fan who joined the fandom without knowing what a shmup was, just downloaded Touhou 6 because some friends at summer camp were playing it and telling me about the music. I'm really fond of the gameplay and enjoy the process of grinding to a Lunatic 1cc, but unfortunately most of the Touhou community isn't as enthusiastic about tackling the difficulties beyond Normal.
Hi Mark, I just subscribed a few days ago and I'm really enjoying your commentary so far. I'm a longtime shmups forum lurker, but I guess seeing a human face talking about shmups has drawn me out of the shadows. This seems contextual. What do you think about the "Touhou World Cup" event Mino posted about? (If you have no thoughts about it then thanks again for posting all these interesting videos and have a nice day!)
I think it looks hype! I m stoked to watch it :-D I have some shmup homies ZPS and Mairbel playing in it :-D I m Defintely going to talk about it on my channel.
@@TheElectricUnderground Oh that's awesome. I was hoping to listen to some commentary about it, and learn some more about the details behind it. Mino's second video description starts "Touhou is truly becoming esports and it is lovely. The excitement of the players. The excitement of the chat. The memes being born. The thrill. I feel so alive!" I'm hoping there's truth in that.
Good Video. I'm a touhou fan who started playing it for the Gameplay and just to get into the fandom. I would say i like the games now for their distinct Bullet patterns and music, but after playing some of the games and making contact with the fandom i also would say i like the characters, but sometimes i get weirded out by some of the "art", though not all touhou characters are little girls so it isn't that weird. (I'm not an anime fan btw) I would like to play the Cave games someday, but sometimes the lack of variety on the attack paterns turns me off
I never knew people saw the budokai series that way, because here in Brazil the budokai series, especially Budokai Tenkainchi 3 is remembered as a classic, mainly because the ps2 was extremely popular here
I hope the gap closes. I'm a fan of shmup games in general that includes Touhou. I really didn't have any qualms with Touhou, I wasn't the biggest anime fan either. I enjoyed the Touhou shmups eventhough I sucked. The prime divide to me doesn't make sense. Just because Touhou is filled to the brim of anime girls and porn --which really is just the internet being the internet rule34-what-not and really non-touhou shmups are just as vulnerable to it-- is looking at it shallowly without even setting foot into the Touhou content rabbit hole. And I think it is healthy that Touhou is attracting people to the shmup community, not all of them for sure, like some don't even play the shmups, but this doesn't something to discredit the entire fanbase for. Heck there was a similar divide(which still exists probably) between the Touhou community and the Undertale community. Which I'm even more confused of--though yes they are very different games. Rambling aside, I really hope the stigma between the communities die down or at least be suppressed.
There was a similar discussion on the Shmups forum like 15 years ago. At the time I wondered how spaceships blasting millions of shots per second were out, and flying little girls in fancy dresses were in. I still don’t get it.
touhou's massive success is less about the fact they're girls and more for the music, aesthetics and lore. Every stange has iconic music and attacks from the bosses and the bosses attacks all have a unique style and personality to them.
There are a few stats I'd like to share about the thcrap userbase (thcrap is a modding toolkit for Touhou that is most commonly used for translation patches) According to statistics shared by Nmlgc there are around 20000 unique IP addresses that access thcrap servers. MuffinPimp's stats measure 44k to 74k unique IPs. Note that those are *unique IP addresses*, not number of users. The actual number of active thcap installations we can't track because that'd require some client side telemetry which I am against and most other thcrap developers wouldn't support either.
Holy crap, that is a lot of users my dude. So this is the number of people who have booted some of the games on an annual basis or lifetime basis? If it's not annual, is there a way you can check the annual number of unique players? That stat would fascinate me. Also, thanks for sharing and watching the video!
@@TheElectricUnderground that's the amount of unique IPs hitting the thcrap servers over several years. Nmlgc's sheet (which I can hopefully link without my comment not getting listed) docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Ej_CokcLIN_Njll7sxaicKAUqbzaPNTeCMPf5AjvAo/edit#gid=0 also has the stats for unique IPs for just February 2018
I have an interest mainly in Fighting Games. I heard of and tried the Fighting Game spin offs in the official Tou Hou games and found them interesting and fun enough to get me into the Series as a whole. While I found that I wasn't very good at SHMUPs with patience and practice I was able to at least beat a few of them. From there I got a bit more of an interest in the Bullet Hell subgenre and tried a bunch of CAVE SHMUPs cause I heard they were considered peak Bullet Hell. I enjoyed my time with them enough that I imported Mushihimesama Futari on X Box 360 and beat that game a few times. While I'd still consider myself a Casual to Bullet Hell SHMUP games, I probably would have never come around to trying Bullet Hell SHMUPs if it weren't for Tou Hou.
7:03 I totally agree I'd like to see more crossover between arcade shmupers and Touhou shmupers. I play both but I started out with Touhou and am involved with the larger community sometimes. What could we as Touhou players do to get people to try a Cave game for example? I've loaned out a few of my copies of good Cave ports, XBOX360 ports of Deathsmiles and Futari but it didn't seem to light that fire in their hearts like it did with me. I found a download for the PCB demo (just first 3 stages, not piracy) back in 2003 and was mesmerized. I liked playing shmups like UN Squadron, Strike Gunner, Gradius as a kid but they were weekend rental type games for me. When I saw PCB I was like "Oh my god look at all those pretty bullets" and thought this is what shmups were supposed to be. Played that a while then got hooked on WOW. After quitting WOW I saw a review for Deathsmiles and was like "holy shit shooting games I totally forgot" and shot happily ever after.
Honestly I wanna get into more shoot em up games because of Touhou, but I had a friend show screenshots of people hating on Touhou and its fanbase. The only other shoot em up I got into is Len'en which is Touhou inspired. Edit: Also I like Touhou as a medium. I like learning about the lore of the world. I do enjoy the games eventhough I suck at them. So Im just a general fan I guess
Why would people hating on a bullet hell franchise? Heck, they don't even know that Touhou itself is a game, all they know are remixes, fanarts and music videos
I wrote a comment almost a year ago, saying choosing games and bullet hell can be a bit overwhelming. Since then I've learnt that it is possible to like both genres. I like both now, I probably lean towards arcades. What u say is the fact that anime (which I've been a fan of since the 80s and seen 300+). I'm still not great at schmups but use play Touhou for at least half an hour in bed for half an hour at least when I wake up...and it's made such a difference in improving my skills on more arcade style games in respect to bullet dodging. P.S,. Ghost in the Shell is NOT Mecha it's pure Cyberpunk, trust me I own everything the franchise has released, figure, mangas and dvds. I would wet my pants if they brought out a Ghost in the Shell Schmup. I think Crimson Clover is a good bridge point between the two genres as it's so accessible. The point you made about anime being the entry point to Touhou style games is so spot on, as especially as anime as became so massive recently.
I'm just getting back into gaming after a 25 yr break since SF2 on my snes. I get stuff off of Steam. I know what games I enjoy (Sky Force Reloaded, Natsuki Chronicles....Eschatos but it's a bit hard for a beginner like me) and what I don't (Crimson Clover was just too overwhelming), but don't know the lingo to describe it. I'm a bit of a weeb and love anime all the way back to the 80s. But there are so many sub-cultures and types and I'm a really casual gamer that I'm finding picking my next game overwhelming and exhausting. I think I'm a 'Touhou' fan, but I love R-type aswell?
"Touhou fans don't play Touhou games. When you play Touhou games, you're no longer a fan." That's what I've literally heard. Very interesting philosophy.
Why? Because they'd migrate to other Shmups for the challenge? That's funny because I saw someone else post in 4chan, "You can't mention the T word around Shmup players. They'll have a meltdown".
Hey, Touhou fan here. I got into Touhou through the music. Im a fan of arcade shooters, but I love Raizing and Taito, not a huge fan of Cave. So in my opinion for Touhou players, the divide starts on the platform. Touhou is a computer game, Arcade STG are in the arcade or saturn or 360. So as a gamer, you play what you have access to and knowledge of. Most STG could not be played on computer in the biggest popularity of Touhou, you had to play them in arcades or console. So I think thats the first divide in the initial playerbase. Second main divide imo is knowledge of the games, Touhou is more widely known than any other STG Ive played. Most hardcore rpgers or Fighters, or puzzler players have NEVER EVER HEARD of, let alone played the finest offerings in STGs. STGer know final fantasy, skyrim, tetris, Street fighter, etc, but what normie gamer even ever heard of donpachi, Garrega, darius, Thunder Force, escatos, aka to blue, mushihime? I mean even heard of it? So when a touhou player stumbles up Touhou, they may have no idea the arcade world exists. The third divide is the actual fanbases and their views of each other. I have been looked down upon so hard by Arcade STG fans for liking Touhou, and I bet they never even played a touhou game. Arcade STG players (english) believe, rightly or wrongly, that touhou is not a real STg, so those who play it are not real STG fans. For any person wishing to get into Touhou, I STRONGLY recommend Subterian animism (spelled wrong) as the first game you try.
The difference in platform is a great point! Touhou is a PC series and many arcade shmups are either on PCB or on console. The good news, at least for me, is that it looks like PC is becoming more and more the standard place for shmups to be released, even arcade games, so I think that will help with future overlap as well.
@@HyperVanilo Because its my favorite it has great music, variety of shot types, and I love the spellcards. Plus its a real resource manager game with the bomb system. But honestly I just recommended it because its my favorite.
As a Touhou fan myself, and one who hasn't delved much at all into other schmups, I can say one reason I stick to Touhou and it's fangame schmups are the bullet patterns, personally. I may be dead wrong due to lack of exposure to other more hardcore schmups and bullet hells, but from what little experience I have playing and watching them, the bullet patterns in Touhou feel more intricate, and fan vary greatly even from boss to boss. Meanwhile, what I've found in other bullet hells looks like a lot of single, lines, or spreads of bullets aimed at the player, spread shots or lines of bullets shot straight down, and only a few other things here and there for some spice. I personally find it more fun and enjoyable to dodge around all the varying patterns instead of what looks like much of the same. Of course, once again, I could be really wrong about my notes on other schmups due to lack of exposure.
Looking at some of the other comments here I can also see a couple other points that are definitely related to my point, even if they hadn't come to my mind/I wasn't initially aware of them. This includes, primarily, stuff about how survival is a big point of Touhou compared to scoring, which is big in other schmups. The other major point I've noticed that relates is the approach to dodging in either subsection of games. Hardcore/classical bullet hells, from what I can gather, tend to be heavy in routing and following specific plans. Touhou, on the other hand, is much more freeform, with more randomness in the patterns, which may lead into the point I made earlier about the more varied and non-static bullet patterns. The randomness element also allow one to simply focusing on dodging as a skill across the whole game instead of having to spend countless hours working through understanding a game inside and out.
Touhou is the pretty much the reason why i tried STG's in the first place. But my first STG wasn't even from the Touhou series(Or any vertical shooter actually), it was instead the Gradius series(Gradius 1) through emulation, since the whole thing of shoot em up seemed to be the same thing for me. And i sticked around that series for awhile(And R-Type) until i realized that you can get the games through a site with an english patch. Strangely enough, i found Touhou to be a bit easier compared to Gradius(Because of not only the enviromental hazards, but the bullets were also way too small for me see them) even on both normal and hard difficulty on Touhou 6. I can't beat them but i still made way more progress in Touhou(Stage 5 - Stage 4) compared to Gradius(Stage 3 - Stage 1) and it was both fun and tiring since i would get distracted alot and die while seeing the exact moment the bullet hits me on both games... This also made me think of the girls more as combat spaceships rather than their desiginated species for some weird reason, making me want them dead on the spot like the cores. I also tried Ikaruga and R-Type. Those two kicked my ass hard(R-Type being the hardest from the start of stage 1 and Ikaruga in stage 2) but they were fun... In a masochistic way. Also. I usually avoid remixes like the plague because of their edgy covers and stuff(Iosys and comedy music videos being an exception), but i see the hentai doujins just fine(As long as it's of good quality, with an good or okay plot and no beastiality is involved) with my favorite being a series involving a guy nicknamed "Nanashi"(Not the SMT4 apocalypse protag) trying to save Cirno after having sex with her(The series is incomplete and it'll remain that way since the creator has abandoned it and possibly retired). I did like the Koishi Heart Trobing Adventure(I feel a wierd connection between it and Tails Gets Trolled for some unknown fucking reason) and Osana Reimu(Nearly cried but i was left heart broken. Found it somewhat similar to Fate/Stay Night's Heaven's Feel route). Honestly, i kind of ended up liking the Gradius franchise even more after trying it, making me kind of sad to see it just dissapear and be forgotten(Konami sure as hell ain't trustworthy these days). The same thing with R-Type after Irem went bankrupt(I ironicaly found it's universe to be much deeper and better constructed than Touhou, but that just me). Not only that, but i found it kind of dismaying seeing most STGs going more for this vertical style with no hazards(Only bullets) rather than the style R-Type and Salamander(Part of the Gradius franchise, with 2 being possibly the most similar to Touhou for me)... Possibly because they were already overdone in 90's or so(Even though this style was also overdone specifically in arcade only games). But hey, opinions i guess. And i found the artstyle by ZUN to be derpy and stupid rather than moe. Which i like since i've grown up watching stuff badly animated stuff on newgrounds like Sonic Shorts(There was a bit of an evolution in his style but it doesn't seem that drastic. Exemple: www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/a35hdo/evolution_of_zuns_art/ ) Edit: Forgot to put a word in one of the lines...
i'm aware the comment here is old, pardon me, although was wondering if you happened to see the R-Type Final 2 that's being worked on. think it was some studio that splintered from Irem and got the permission to use R-Type stuff, think they were named Granzella or something, like the rebel organization in R-Type tactics 2. heard they promised to release it on quite a bunch of platforms, PC (Steam), switch, other consoles. think they just finished up their 3rd crowdfunding round.
@@PenolAkushari Yeah, i did. If i remember correctly the new video got posted just a few days from this comment. I can just hope they'll be able to finish it and make it good(I think a franchise was ruined once, when a company attempted to revive it). But hey, got to keep it optimistic about some expectations.
yeah, would be pretty exciting if the thing gets finished and it won't be a buggy mess. well, time will tell how things will turn out. wonder if Granzella would continue on with R-Type stuff if Final 2 turns out to be profitable enough, think i might be a bit too overly excited about spaceships with charging wavecannons.
Yeah it's a pretty similar divide, though even more silly because touhou has a ton in common with arcade shmups gameplay wise. Maybe better divide would be the anime fighters vs capcom fighters, which these days just seems silly anyway ha.
I'm mainly a fan due to the music. And I simply like the genre, and moe/loli (lol), so it's kind of a perfect fit for me. I actually sincerely enjoy the gameplay of touhou a lot more than that of most of the big arcade shooters.... it's a lot more chill, or at least has softer parts, like a symphony. One feels a sense of beauty while playing it, again, mainly due to the music. Rarely is any other shooter that compelling to me. I love both Sin&Punishment games, and UN Squadron? I admit I probably haven't spent enough time with the other side of the genre to really appreciate it... but that's because one is more appealing that the other to me, so what can I say. And I've put plenty of real time into 1cc'ing each touhou as they have come out... and always going back to PCB and IN.
I see you’ve already noticed my other comment. I’m making this one separately to account for that. Watching your “shmup gameplay is infinite” video brings an important question to mind for me: are Touhou games designed to be played like other shmups? Reading through Zun’s interviews and omakes for his games reveals a few things about his approach. The first is that he’s a person that puts a lot of thought into almost everything he does, including his game design. The second is that his way of thinking is very different from a lot of people. Reading the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil omake, aside from addressing his own lack of manpower, ZUN expressed some disappointment with the inward-looking nature of danmaku shmups and seemed to want to create one with some of the simpler qualities of older games. “A late 20th century style, 21st century shmup,” as he put it all those years ago. While some of that thinking has clearly changed for him, the impact of it is still felt in the traction that Touhou gained as a series, and I think that was very much on his mind in the late 2000s. Zun has said before that Mountain of Faith was the first game he made in consideration for the long-term sustainability of Touhou as a series, and I think it shows in all the games of its “trilogy.” Many aspects of the series were streamlined; the gameplay systems became simpler, more focused on single-game gimmicks than on building upon the systems that came before, and the patterns shifted further towards prioritizing aesthetics over strategic thinking. Touhou would also go on to make frequent resources a standard in his games. (The MoF omake is also very interesting to read- it’s a reflection on how the industry had changed since EoSD, and Zun’s thoughts on how shmups might be revived for mainstream gamers feels as though he anticipated Undertale in some small way.) I suspect that this is part of why Touhou is among the more popular and visible shmups to the mainstream. In blending qualities old and new with his own thinking, Zun aims to create games that are enjoyable at face value- patterns are fun to dodge and systems are fun to play with, whether or not you plan to really sink your teeth into the games. Patterns that are slow and dense allow for lower difficulty while still squeezing as much aesthetic appeal out of them as possible. A slower pace reduces the exhilaration, and therefore potential stress, involved in playing. And of course, more frequent resources allow more people to see as much of the game as possible. Such games are naturally not as replayable as other shmups, but they probably aren’t meant to be either- I suspect they’re meant to be fun and accessible games that you open up every once in a while, in order to cruise through and enjoy the unique sights and sounds of the series. They’re like a shmup fan’s dessert. Maybe that’s a bit brainless to an arcade-style veteran, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing- and for genre newcomers that expect shallowness from shmups *anyway,* it serves as exactly the right kind of subversion of expectations.
Actually i came from Cave game way in 2004 when i was play Dodonpachi in PSX and following up with Mushimesama PS2 in 2009. and when i got arcade emulator experience, im getting more fans of Cave's games but kinda sad little bit because some great games are Xbox360 exclusive like futari/Espgal2/DFK/SDOJ/Akai. well im just enjoying the game from espgal1/ketsui backwards. and in 2016 i was looking for touhou experience and i was love the aestethic there, especially musics. there's a ton of music made by fans! and when i was playing the game. im realize something that touhou games feels more casual than Cave games. and now im back on Cave games because somehow nostalgic and trying to master my gameplay style on bullet hell. Mann! imagine Cave made touhou game!
The Touhou community and the anime community are not quite related at all, maybe when it was a fad maybe so and only on the western community. Touhou is more close to the doujin scene, its not popular because it's "moe" (you should definitely look that up again), but because of the fan content and its community. On that regard, the only ones losing out are the wester shmup community.
YESSS! Ketsui Deathtiny (The arrange screams CCWI), Rolling Gunner (has double breaks and all that good stuff), and Dodonpachi DFK Black Label (which is included in the steam release of Dodonpachi Ressurection).
Touhou is more for the casual gamer (although i dom t consider them casual, that title GOES to some euroshumps) and anime fan and there is nothing wrong with that. Their games always have a certain degree of quality, polish and consistency specially considering that they are made by One person (zun) .you could talk of some games of zun that are very different with different mechanics and far from easy. "Shoot the bullet" should bé receive more praise from the arcade hardcore audience. I like their games, but i dom t find them amazing (dar from my favourite)
I'd be lying if i said that I enjoy the loli characters that all the anime shmups seem to have, but if the game play is good, I'm good with it. That said, I prefer mechas/spaceships/jets/vehicles to flying little girls fighting other little girls.
Yeah I do wish touhou had more alternatives with it's character designs, they could still be cute but have little animals or something. Magic panda when?
I think you're completely right. The thing with Touhou is that I don't think even 50% of the Touhou fandom has ever played a Touhou game, and maybe 10% has ever completed one. It's not that they're difficult, but that Touhou has more to offer than normal Shmups. Thousands of "doujin circles" (individuals or groups creating fan content) producting fan manga, music, games, anime, books, you name it. This makes Touhou FAR larger than just the
The most hilarious thing about this is that this is the answer to his other video on how to get people to commit to Shmups. The answer had been staring at them in the face but they couldn't get it.
I think even the Touhou fanbase (the ones who actually play the game) are getting pretty tired of the simplistic graphics and general lack of innovation. Touhou is at a critical point in its history where it has an opportunity to really become a high quality series along the lines of Cave etc. FDF 1 and 2 are good step in the right direction. All you have to do is look at Deathsmiles to see pretty much what a real Touhou game would look like, but vertical and a bit different finer points of style of course. If Touhou innovates, especially graphically, it's got a bright future ahead of it. That said, if all you care about is gameplay, I think Touhou is pretty fun. It's missing some things that I love about arcade shmups though.
But ZUN doesn't care about whether his franchise is popular or not. He is the very definition of a doujin creator : someone who creates for himself. The sheer scale of fanmade products is making the franchise look bigger than it actually is.
I absolutely agree about touhou needing to innovate with its presentation. I'm actually really interested in following the FDF team, as I think they may be more on track with the right approach than Zun himself at this point. I'm sure this sounds like straight-up blasphemy to some touhou fans, but Jaimers did say that he wasn't that impressed with the newest official touhou release, while the FDF team do seem to have that passion. I really hope they continue.
@@TheElectricUnderground Touhou can innovate to became better product and gather wider audience, while some Touhou fans are conservative about it and they're kind of gatekeepers themselves. Touhou is never meant to be nice good-looking product for everyone, it can improve, but I doubt its entry threshold will go lower soon. In depth, it is great the way it is, its aesthetics may be rough, but they're unique, and could aspire every creator, looking how lot can be done with such naive art. It is beloved by artists for this, and appear to be one of the most popular franchise within fan-artists: literally millions of pictures, more than 10 thousands of musical albums, fan-animations, games and more... This fan content could be crappy or of ridiciously high quality, but it is always sincere. . Btw, ZUN could draw well, if he is not trying digital art, like on omikuji aminoapps.com/c/touhoubrasil/page/blog/lista-de-omikuji/mo2Z_2x7UkuejrLvWZpRa7GYVDVwvVPZpP1 Its a shame his art sense is so weird, but at least it makes Touhou different. Some fans even having fun with his artstyle ua-cam.com/video/kvwKJXwsKGg/v-deo.html But it just not consistent in original games. >Jaimers did say that he wasn't that impressed with the newest Nobody here ever like newest games at the release year, trust me. Early games are considered golden age of Touhou, and new games probably will never have such big impact on the internet and fan culture (despite that, Touhou 15 did). Its just been here for so long, everyone grow tired.
It's Guwange my dude! You have to check it out, one of my favorites. I love it because not only are you walking around like a boss, but there is BLOOD! Gotta love the gore ha.
Honestly had no idea about the divide until recently and thought people were mostly fine with the whole anime girl aesthetic since the games can be pretty fun. I myself like the gameplay and the music of the Touhous I've played but haven't really dived into other shmups at all. I don't know how much truth there is behind other shmups apparently having vastly superior gameplay, so I'll definitely give them a try and see what I think of in. I mean, eventually, I haven't even played Touhou that much lately and I'm still trying to beat EosD on normal so idk.
I just started in the Touhou community, and I can say that yes, I'm not good at all at shmups. Good thing I got the vacation to get better. I'll probably just stop at normal because I love to play different genres of videogames. I'm mostly here for the characters and the music, but I'll try to get decent. The only other shmup that I really like is Dragon Spirit, an old arcade classic from Namco. Have you heard of it? I have the arcade version, but it's too hard, but the songs are bangers. I managed to beat the easy version (the TurboGrafx one) using save states, but I could try beating it without them. Here's the link and give me your thoughts on it: arcadespot.com/game/dragon-spirit/
A little late to the party, but still: My impression of the divide has always been that Touhou simply is too big to fit in with the rest. Touhou is more than SHMUP's, it's FTG's, it's novels, it's manga, it's a dedicated fangame scene, it's collectible plushies etc. Despite the core of it being SHUMP's, the general overlap to the rest of the SHMUP world always seemed to be smaller than expected. Many Touhou players i know like the games because it's Touhou, not necessarily because they're SHMUP's. While i personally love both, i think bringing both fandoms together would just dilute the SHMUP community with interests that don't fit in.
It is an irony that, 9 months after this video, you pronounced the death of the Shmup, yet Touhou is still going strong. Maybe that's because Touhou has evolved beyond being just a shmup.
I don't shame people for making hentai/cartoon porn of 2hu (derogatory short hand for touhou) but I'm simply more used to the arcade style of game play with shit like crimzon clover explosion my goal for this genre is to get people inta which ever one they like more.
Nice. Thanks for the reply man. Would you be able to recommend Shmups that have Humans/Humanoid type protagonists? Or maybe even a video? K thanks again.
Well, in my opinion the thing with the little girls in touhou is nothing more than a gimmick but you don't come for that, you come for the music. bUt HeY tHaT iS jUsT mY oPiNiOn, YoU cAn HaVe YoUrS.
Very much an outsider looking in: this has vibes of pc master race vs console plebs. The division is so minimal for anyone a step removed. They're both shmups but one has a distinct anime background. That group is much larger but has its own baggage. PC gamers have a similar hate for console gamers. It's a vocal minority but the smaller group feels like the more "pure" group. I say play what you like. I'm sure the shmup group could leave out the 18+ content while still acknowledging the gameplay of the Touhou games. I mean I really like playing Deathsmiles but an outsider might consider that a Touhou game even if not made by them. Or Cotton for that matter.
Oh interesting comparison! Gameplay wise deathsmiles is still more cave then touhou (it has grounded enemies and all that), but I could see it having crossover appeal between the two audiences
Your absolutely right, that’s how I felt about it, a game unpolished made in a basement for anime nuts like Naruto Ninja storm which FGC considers games like that as arena fighters. My little brother loved Touhou I told him that’s no Shumup and let him borrow my library,Einhander,Thunder Force,R-Types,Raiden,Ikaruga, my cave collection and many more. But now I’m just happy ppl still play Shumups.
Touhou is not STG just because it's made for anime nuts, that's kinda narrow minded, dont you think? Does ZUN even stated that his games are for anime nuts?
Hyper Vanilo i know but it’s thumb typing so i didn’t care for checking grammatical errors as long as you understood the context of the conversation which you did. If this was a thesis then it would be a different story.
Ok I posted a comment earlier but it disappeared so I'll retype it. Probably because I mentioned the thing that rhymes with corn. Anyway, this is another view point to approach the issue from:
Some Touhou fans obsess over the survival aspect. This is a result of how spell cards work. ZUN designed all spell cards to be humanly possible without getting hit or clearing bullets, and doing so gives you bonus points. As a result, a challenge was born: lunatic no miss no bomb (no whatever), abbreviated as LNN(N). Essentially, doing a perfect survival run. Meanwhile arcade shmups are designed to be humanly possible with the assistance of bombs, lives and additional mechanics like hyper and break mode.
As a result, the expectations from these Touhou fans are at odds with the standards arcade shmups use. To these people, Touhou is about as hard as it gets without being "unfair" and these evil arcade games intentionally kill you to milk quarters out of you. What they don't know is that arcade shmups are largely possible to NMNB as well. I'm sure people can NMNB and no hyper DOJ up to Hibachi if they really wanted to. It's just that using hypers (for score) and bombs (for consistency) makes more sense. It's ridiculous to claim a game like DFK is unfair because the game was properly designed around the bullet and laser-cancelling mechanics.
LNN is only a thing in Touhou. The arcade shmup scene focuses on scoring, but in Touhou, LNN runs are more popular than the score runs. Personally when I first got into Touhou, when I search for videos on UA-cam I would find Jaimers's LNN stage clears. Score runs were nowhere to be seen and even if I did, the numbers were just something abstract and I didn't understand how impressive they were.
This definition of fairness (possible without getting hit or clearing bullets) doesn't even hold true in the official games. The photography side games and Fairy Wars are flat out impossible without clearing bullets by taking pictures or freezing the bullets. In Violet Detector, one of the earlier levels uses a grid of impassable lasers. There is no way to beat it without taking pictures to break the laser or teleporting.
Also, in games like Lotus Land Story and Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, there are sections where you can do nothing but pray to RNGesus (e.g. rings of doom, Modern Divine Spirit World). Technically if relying on luck to beat a pattern is considered "fair", then any arcade shmup with enough luck can be NMNB'ed all the way through. Even Inbachi, which is about as humanly impossible and unfair as it gets. As a matter of fact, an LNN run of LLS hasn't been accomplished yet. The closest anyone has gotten is ZPS with a 2MNB run.
This concept of "fairness" is merely double standards. Ironically, what started out as a scoring mechanic to enhance the shmup aspect of Touhou ended up pushing it further away from the shmup community. That's about all of the main points I wanted to add on to this discussion. I forgot some of the finer details from my original comment but this will suffice I suppose. Anyway, this divide can be summarised as both camps being close-minded and erroneously assuming things about the other side that they don't know, just like many other conflicts out there.
And I insist on trying to make my side comment regarding the questionable content. Given rule 25+9, any shmup that is somewhat popular and has human(oid) characters will have artwork of them with less than what they should have. If you tried hard enough, you could find such fanart of CAVE girls too (Reco, Irori, Leinyan etc.). Touhou's popularity worked against itself in this regard: because Touhou has a huge fanbase, there is much more disturbing content, which becomes more easily discovered by non-fans. This surely drove away a lot of people from the arcade shmup scene from getting into Touhou. The sheer difference in quantity in nasty fan works is what made the difference between Touhou and any other anime-style shmup. Thank goodness I got into Touhou from the fan music, that I discovered the official games instead of just staying content with the fan works and that I discovered Jaimers who got me into arcade shmups.
My dude! Amazing comment, I learned a lot reading through it. Thanks for expanding more on the touhou perspective of the situation! I'm going to pin this because I think it's really useful information that is pretty hard to get a clear explanation about. Thanks for watching my dude!
Speaking of contents, ZUN prioritized music above all else; programming, game design, characters, art are second priorities, that's why you see a lot of Touhou remixes on UA-cam.
For example the famous Bad Apple by Alstroemeria Records, if you outside of fandom obviously you would think it's a generic anime song, actually it's a remix of a 23 years old song by the same name from the fourth game in Touhou series.
Same as Night of Nights and Everything Will Freeze, are remixes of Flowering Night from Touhou 9 came out in 2005.
UN Owen was Her, was from Touhou 6 (2002), known for McDonald Insanity video; the remix, Last Brutal Sister Flandre S, always mistaken as Death Waltz which it isnt.
Have you heard of Dodonpachi ost remix? An artist that dedicated to remixing Gradius ost? If there is are they as popular as remixes I mentioned above?
@@HyperVanilo Sorry, but that's just not true. Zun seems to value all parts of the game, from music to the art. Just because his music is prolific, doesn't mean making games is his priority. Just because the art in the earlier games isn't good (though I think PoFV's art is good which is ZUN line art with another guy's shading) doesn't mean it's half assed, it just a weaker part of his 1 man development strategy. He learned to program from scratch purely to make games because he likes games, not for a vehicle for publishing music which is a common misconception and not really based on what he says in interviews or his actions as a game developer.
@@Rysosis
If he loves making games his game should've improved from year to year at least the art, he can't just drawing with that style for forever, why doesn't he hire an artist? at this point Touhou should've as good looking as FDF, not the same style for the past decade, no wonder STG community despise Touhou so much, they are already bored by just looking at the title screen.
@@HyperVanilo I mean, the games have improved art-wise. He switched styles between 12 and 13 which caused a bit of a dip but I don't think anyone is looking at Touhou 17 and says it's ugly, it's pretty okay. I don't think you're going to see a drastic improvement between each game in terms of art when it's your weakest skill as well as only one part of a wider whole game you're making. But if you doubt me, you can just read his interviews and see that he loves all parts, not just the music.
2004 SHMUP player: "Anime girls? That's so cringe and ridiculous. Now if you excuse me, I'll be playing a game with a busty lady riding on giant bugs, like an adult."
ha!
The difference between an Anime girl and something like a DnD girl, is that a DnD girl is an actual woman with a normal voice. Anime girls give off really unsettling vibes. I don't get how it's possible to be an anime fan without also being a creep with unnatural fetishes.
@@TheElectricUnderground Espgaluda: Uhhhhh...?
Ibara: Let's keep low....
@@RD-ee9go That just makes the point even stronger lol
@@wearethewearethewearethhe Dude don't try to make it look different theyre still ficitonal its the same crap, fantasying over fictional girls is pathetic no matter the deseign, you're no better for prefering an elf girl over Misato from eva, unless you're asexual the only way to win this is by having an actual girlfriend, something that i believe you don't have considering youre talking about freaking dnd.
also the touhou characters don't even have voices and there's ZERO fanservice in the official games, don't insult something without knowing
As a Touhou fan that enjoys the games, I say something to keep in mind is that the Touhou fandom is MUCH bigger than just the shmup scene. From my experience, more than 60% of the fans don't even play the games, they prefer getting into the art, music, memes, characters, etc. As for the actual shmup branch within the fandom, Touhou offers a different experience than other games like Ikaruga and Cave series; and that its a focus on charm.
Now Touhou games themselves are fun gameplay wise, but Zun puts extra emphasis on gimmicky and good looking danmaku, characters, music, and overall aesthetics. This niche is actually expanding with other series available in Steam, but as games, Touhou is still the go to series that caters to an aesthetic niche that current popular shmups have yet to provide at the same level.
That's a great point, yes the casual fanbase for touhou is massive! It's pretty crazy to be honest ha. You are also right that there really are not any mainstream games like touhou, so I can see how people can really dig into the series. Thanks for watching!
Hello, Touhou fan here!
I've been playing Touhou since I was 13 (I'm 19 now), and while I'm not an "anime fan", I was introduced to the franchise by my anime fans friends.
I'll be honest, besides Touhou, I haven't seriously played any other shmup. I discovered your channel a month ago, and since then I'm starting to get interested in the genre and different games thanks to you.
So, uh, the thing with Touhou is that it's gotten waaaaay bigger than just the shmup aspect. The doujin scene is mostly the reason a lot of people are Touhou fans, so they are more into doujin circles (music), fanarts, fanmade manga, fangames, etc., and usually have this "omg i can't play the games i die so much!!!" experience (not saying it's wrong. That's okay, actually).
Then there are also the derivative official media, which includes manga, light novels, music CDs (with their own stories), and arguably the fighting games (official games, just not shmups).
So, the aftermath is that Touhou is a franchise that can be enjoyed by a lot of reasons, like wordlbuilding, characters, music, lore, etc. Not every Touhou fan are shmup players, and I think that's fine.
As some people pointed out, there are two sides of the "serious Touhou players"; survival players, and score players. Score players are usually left in the shadows thanks to the popularity of LNNs, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon.
"Score players are usually left in the shadows thanks to the popularity of LNNs, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon."
I feel that pain...
That's awesome that my channel is getting you more interested in arcade shmups! :-D There are so many great games! You are absolutely right about there being additional material outside the games that bring people into the touhou fandom. I think that's a really cool thing and something I would love to see happen for shmups. I'd be stoked to watch a Dodonpachi anime or manga or something. I also do wish more people would do remixes of CAVE music, because it is actually really good :-) Thanks for watching my dude, it makes me happy to hear my channel is introducing new stuff to you.
I'd say the fact that there's more survival players comes from the idea that scoring is a lot harder. For some reason people have this mindset that if you aren't getting insanely high scores near WR then you're wasting your time scoring, although obviously the average player plays normal with bombs (Or even continues) rather than going into like LNBs or whatever.
For me, i feel like Touhou and Other shmups can actually be friends, _if only they stop spamming "oHhH bUt tOuhOu iS HardEr"_
Get better friends
Nearly every touhou fan I know says the series is easier than most shumps
@@akiradkcn i'll never understand why the difficulty of something means how better or worse it is to other franchises, like Megaman X6 is hard (because its brocken) and i dont see anyone being like IT'S THE BEST MEGAMAN GAME or IT SUCKS BECAUSE MEGAMAN 1 IS HARDER, just dumb sht
In fact, Touhou games are much easier than arcade shooters.
A possible reason is that arcade shooters need to be so fucking hard because they are made to make the player pay money. If the player manages to beat the game on their first try with a single coin, well, your arcade machine is garbage (from the owner's POV)
Touhou games are PC games, they don't need to be insanely hard. Why would they?
I am basically the exact sort of person you are talking about. I heard about Touhou through the anime scene, went to check it out and started from the beginning. After playing a couple titles in the series I wanted to try other shmups so I got Ikaruga and Mushihimesama on steam, and I played Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou on a friend's setup. I am definitely still a beginner. But would love to put more time into the above mentioned games and other titles I've been hearing about from the shmup community. It's a little intimidating even bringing Touhou up in the other shmup circles though as I regularly see it get shit on. I probably wouldn't have seen any of Cave's classics if not for Touhou. Also it's crazy to me how true it is that seemingly only about 15% or so of Touhou fans have even played the games, most of them are there for the music. In some Japanese rhythm games they'll have Touhou arrangements listed like a genre, it's amazing how widespread this shitty graphics Indie game has become.
I am of a similar case as well. Got into Touhou from the fan music. Discovered shmups were apparently not dead yet and that they're actually super cool.
At the time (like 2010?) when Steam wasn't a thing yet, you would never know what arcade shmups were if you didn't have a local thriving arcade scene. And my country doesn't. Only one or two arcades have a variety of rhythm games (but no shmups), while the rest are dominated by claw machines and those Chinese fishing games.
And yeah, Taiko no Tatsujin has an entire section for Touhou fan arrangements.
Hah, same story here. Anime -> Touhou -> Cave -> Ikaruga -> Other
@Demon Core-kun well if this video didn't convince you, I urge you to check it out! My recommendation is "Double Dealing Character" available on steam. Then go check out some classic shmups if you're feeling it. I also enjoyed Undertale a lot and lots of the skills you learn from Undertale translate over to shmups, even if Undertale is pretty easy in comparison to some Cave titles and such, you've started off on the right foot.
Exactly my dude! And my goal is that, when new people start looking into shmups and saying they learned about them from Touhou, there won't be this unease of the shmup players throwing touhou under the bus for no reason.
When I was in high school I discovered the shoot 'em up genre, and I REALLY wanted to play some. Unfortunately I didn't have any money to buy shmups at the time, but my friend had a USB full of every Touhou shooting games, so they were the first shmups that I started to get really into. I actually didn't want to play them for a while because of the weird all-girl-art style, but eventually my desire to scroll vertically and shoot things won me over. I never really delved into the Touhou fandom much beyond just playing the games. I've 1CC'd a couple of them, but I haven't found another bullet-hell game that I really like after playing the Touhou games. To be fair I haven't looked that hard since I really like collecting for the Genesis, but I want to take a look at some of the bullet hells on the Saturn to try and see if anything captures my interest in the way the Touhou games did.
That's awesome my dude! I didn't know you were a touhou fan :-D Yeah man, I'd love to see what bullet hells you can find on the Saturn and what you think about them. I'm not a fan of the DDP Saturn port, but maybe I'll give it a second chance in the future ha. I'm kind of curious to go through and really compare the differences in depth.
One more reason for Reimu to be in Smash Bros.
And I hope Sakurai and ZUN can be on screen together to talk shmups.
That would be cool! I'd have to play some more ultimate if a touhou character got in :-)
I can agree a lot here.
Most Touhou fans arent even that much into shmups and play it casual. They enjoy 2hu as a whole, the whole universe (fandom and canon).
And even among the 2hu shmup player, there are 2 types. Those who only play 2hu shmups and the those who play non-2hu shmups.
I also made experience with 2hu fans who really dislike non-2hu shmups(and they probably doesnt even really play the 2hu shmups)...well those are elitists so who cares about them.
I started to get really into shmups, competitive wise, with 2hu. Even tho I played shmups in the past.
Maybe I can say it here:
I call it a sin, a bad sin of me, that I really dislike CAVE games at first, cause they look unfair, unappealing etc. Even when I never played it before and know nothing about, I only watched videos of it.
So I never touched them for years.
Last year, I actually played DoDonPachi on a convention, and have to say, it was interesting. So I started to play DDP and tried to get my 1-ALL. (And also Cirmzon Clover)
It was at this time, I actually understood CAVE games and why they are so popular. And last year, October, I made the decision that I abandon the Touhou Shmups for a while to get more into CAVE games and other non-2hu shmups.
I totally regret the way I thought about CAVE games in the past.
Thanks for the comment man! That is really helpful to understand! I'm glad Stunfest (I am guessing) helped you connect with Cave games more! :-D
@@TheElectricUnderground Sadly I was never at Stunfest, but maybe someday I will go there.
The convention I mentioned was Dokomi in Dusseldorf, which is primary an Anime and Manga convention but also has an own hall for games and retro games.
Sadly no Arcades, because they are forbidden/not allowed (illegal) here... :c
@@TheElectricUnderground if i could, I'd play some of CAVE's games too, but i suck, and I'm trying to git gud first
At least i can deathbomb 90 percent of the time from the sheer amount of times i die lol
Touhou, while barely has any anime media (I think Touhou, as far as of writing this comment, has 0 anime where the creator is directly involved), has a lot of other media that brings people in without the people playing the games. The majority of them are fan-made products, not by ZUN himself. Touhou's other main medium are light novels and mangas. And Touhou's music scene is so strong I think people forgot its roots as a shmups. In comparison CAVE and other shmup developers would love Touhou's piece of pie, but we know multimedia franchise is quite expensive. We never got any Dodonpachi manga, right? In this world it's possible to be a fan of a series without enjoying the home medium. In this case, Touhou's main game. That being said, official Touhou games are not limited to shmups. There are fighting games too.
Also for those who hate Touhou for its "moe or girly" aesthetic... Do they hate Deathsmiles and Gunbird too?
It's a shame that there is such a divide where the arcade scene shuns the Touhou games. Touhou games to me, are at worst, good games.
For sure my dude! I really like your point about there being additional material to bring people into the touhou fandom. Imagine if there was a Dodonpachi anime! That would be pretty awesome actually, especially with how insane the story of that game is ha.
This is a topic I'm very passionate about and was going to be my February topic.
The aesthetic gap is a complicated issue. The part I would like to bring up is that, generally, the best touhou games gameplay-wise (touhou 7 - 9.5) are the ones which have the most unappealing (outliers excluding, such as GFW having non-zun portraits) visuals. While the newer games like 16 and 17 have weaker gameplay, they certainly have started to try and push a bit more on the visual side - and not just with the character art, but also with things like the hypers in touhou 17 being as visually satisfying as they feel gameplay impacting. There is then a disconnect between the games that are better from a mechanical perspective to recommend to a seasoned arcade player and the types of visuals which are more likely to pull them in.
Design wise, Touhou has some differences which arcade players may not notice/find jarring - mainly that there is a HUGE, MASSIVE disconnect between scoring gameplay and survival gameplay (again, there are one or two outliers, mainly gfw and ds.) An example: Imperishable Night and Mushi Futari - both are bullet cancelling games, but they are designed in a way which means that the person who plays IN will very rarely use the bullet cancelling for survival purposes meaning that they wont consider their bullet cancels really at all, meaning that they don't have a 'foot in the door' for scoring like a game like futari which is designed around the player's route abusing the bullet cancels for easier survival - the futari player already constructs gameplay around bullet cancelling, which leads into the game's scoring conceit. Borders in touhou 7 are just a random thing that pops up which seems uncontrollable and so isn't really looked at from a survival perspective than anything other than just a random bomb they sometimes get, while being a huge fundamental to the game's scoring (grazing unfocused during the border.) Zun has improved a bit on this though in the later games, for examples touhou 16 has a very simple 'release cancels bullets which gives score' mechanic which newer players find easier to get their 'foot in the door' to scoring with (again though, the newer games tend to be the less interesting games more often than not.)
I frankly don't understand why a lot of the touhou players, and by that I don't mean random people on the touhou reddit discord servers, but the people who dedicate 100s of hours to survival/scoring in the games, don't play cave games often. Yeah these players got engaged because of the touhou secondaries (people who consume secondary content like the manga, fan works etc.) but they are STG players through and through and games like mushi, futari, sdoj, dfk and other cave titles would appeal to them if they actually gave them a chance. It seems like there's simply a barrier that people need to cross - they haven't actually played arcade stg properly so it's not as if they've dismissed it as games that they wont find enjoyable. Perhaps it's an issue of emulation but I only have one 'casestudy' of this - being Minogame playing mushi 1 but not playing futari because there isn't a good way of playing it on pc. Either way I'd like to at least try to stop 'my side' from not giving arcade stg a chance as I do think when the 'sides' get less segregated it'll be a benefit for both communities if such a divide wasn't so stark.
A footnote - if there was past drama, then I'd also like to point out that the stg touhou community has sorta 2 sides to it, broadly speaking 1 side being a mostly newer crowd of players who are more survival orientated and the other side being a lot of older players from irc/forum days who are more scoring orientated (though this is a very hard to define community split, and there is a non zero amount of drama around it like there always is with these sort of things.) Both sides are as hard or if not harder to find than the shmup community as they are kinda blocked from searches by the secondary touhou fanbase being a vocal majority, so the discord servers these people hang out in are secret by circumstance. If you want to contact people in the touhou stg community, people like ZPS who are active in both are good to point towards avenues of contact. It may just be that the reason the communities don't interact is because we're both kinda equally hard to find communities with respect to the iceberg of the internet.
The survival vs scoring divide also makes sense. Among STG Touhou fans, their main goal is mostly to just finish the game (1CC Lunatic being the biggest accomplishment). Scoring comes distant second with the exception of the most hardcore STG Touhou fans. After accomplishing a 1CC run, most players would just move on to the next game instead of trying to improve their score. Me included.
Another great response man! I like these kinds of comments because they help me learn about some info that is hard to find. One cool thing is that, in my research, I was able to talk with the players (like ZPS) who cross over both worlds and appreciate both. However, what I did have trouble finding was the group of touhou players who weren't interested in arcade (especially CAVE) and why. Your and Lunar's comments have definitely helped shed light on the situation. Yeah, I agree whole-heartedly about the issue of accessibility, where some of our best shmups are not easily played on PC or need to be emulated. Futari is a perfect example, especially since I think Futari is a great bridge between touhou and arcade! Imagine a world where Ketsui Deathtiny was available on PC, that would be huge!
@@TheElectricUnderground touhou players see arcade games as a bigger challenge after accomplishing a goal in touhou. There are only the western shmup fanbase that despises the game and shun its players because of something they find unappealing. Touhou hardcore players get to arcade for more challenge, although some of them may get put off after seeing the cave gameplay.
Elite touhou players do play cave games and arcade in general for more challenge, what are you talking about? Personally, I have played touhou a lot, almost religiously, but I have never considered trying cave games. Firstly, the dificulty is offputting. Also, I don't really like the bullet patterns in cave shmups, too spammy and repetitive. Having been familiar with beautiful, unique and well-designed bullet patterns from touhou, I smh can not find cave shmups appealing. I would play any other arcade-like shmup game over cave tbh.
Touhou: The Shump series for people who don’t like Shumps.
Which is most people.
Hi there, just wanted to say that this video is really interesting and pretty accurate. I'm on the Touhou fangame developing side of things, and I get to see a lot of the design mentality differences between something like CAVE and Touhou, because I enjoy both and I've been mainly in the Touhou community for the shmups for a long time. Something I found interesting is where you mentioned the aesthetic of Touhou being a turn-off and something I find interesting is that this seeps into the game design aspect of things as well.
Typically, designing a "Touhou" pattern compared to a normal shmup pattern is actually super different because Touhou relies on its bullet patterns as a sort of art form rather than simply being a practical "dodge this" or "cancel this", and when you do something more simplistic and focused on gameplay (which I typically prioritize) it tends to feel unfulfilling to the crowd unless you give it some kind of aesthetic flair. People in the Touhou community have joked that Queen Larsa is just "the color purple: the boss", which while humorous also shows how important aesthetic quality is so ingrained in the Touhou community, and I could see more arcade divide happening based on that design philosophy alone.
That said, Touhou shmup players do exist and I hope it's possible in the future for the Touhou shmup and arcade shmup community to mesh together more in the future. Also loved the shoutout to Pearl in the video, he's a super chill dude and immensely cool in the Touhou scene too. Nice video!
Killer comment my dude! That's really interesting to hear that the appearance of the bullet patterns is an important aspect of the game design, rather than just their function. Now that you pointed it out I am noticing this more ha. Thanks so much for watching my dude and leaving a great comment!
Touhou is the only shmup Game that has a manga which is literally just characters commenting on screenshots of the game.
We know Gus is a man that doesn't shy away from Touhou hentai
Poor Gus, the internet does not forget. Imagine an embarrassing joke you made in your teens following you around for a decade now. I know it's a funny meme, but I m not a fan of it. Anyway, thanks for watching my video though!
Who is Gus?
Touhou H3NT41 😂
It’s surreal watching this and being part of the group of “I’ve never even heard of the Arcade Community”
It’s a shame to learn that Touhou games aren’t respected as being good games in some communities. I’ve sunk 100s of hours into all the games. And it’s my favorite game series and fandom to be a part of.
Just because it's lean more to anime, something that Shmup community won't touch with 10 feet pole
Think you pretty much nailed the reasons for the divide existing in the first place, there's so much Touhou content out there beyond just the games that a significant portion of Touhou fans aren't even it for the games. Really, the players are a very small portion of the greater Touhou fanbase.
Also come to think of it, I don't actually know that many Eastern Touhou players that also play arcade shmups, the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are Kayar and LYX. (A lot of them do have at least some arcade experience though).
There's also a lot of really good Western Touhou players I know that still don't play arcade shmups (ZM, Obama, Yatsuzume, etc.)
And one last thing, watch EX-Alice's final pattern in Mystic Square and see if you can figure out what it's based on ua-cam.com/video/k9_Kwu98fU4/v-deo.html
Alice's second phase also resembles the stage 6 boss's final. As someone who went from Touhou to arcade shmups, I was surprised to see that pattern show up in DDP.
@@lunarstrom8160 Yep, that one too
There's a few more Touhou patterns that are based on CAVE games, Remilia's 2nd non is a combination of 2 patterns from the final boss of ESP Ra. De
Don't forget Remi's final aka totally not the Guwange final
One that I find interesting is that Mima's ubiquitous star spread in SoEW is basically just a DDP Hibachi pattern. Not exactly the same but pretty close.
Ha! How you know me so well ;-D That's really cool, yes it definitely shows that Touhou loves Cave and has been inspired by it. I'm really glad to hear you felt the video is on point!! :-D Thanks for watching my dude.
I loved your thoughts on this subject. Super interesting
One thing I love about Touhou is not just the waifus but the gameplay like the Spell Cards and how bullets move in the game. Also let’s not forget the “strongest” character, Cirno.
Yes the spell cards are a brilliant piece of design
@@TheElectricUnderground I played some other bullet hell shmups but touhou really is the best and unique in terms of gameplay and mechanics.
There's definitely a divide among the touhou community.
We have the primaries and secondaries. A primary is someone that is invested in the touhou shmup games, a secondary is uninterested in the games or very casual about them.
That's the general definition people use. Most of the fans are secondaries.
You have primaries that play other shmup games, those that just play touhou games and even those that only play one or very few of the games, akin to a genwunner.
That's a good description of the situation! I did get the sense that the casual fanbase is much larger than the players, so what you're saying makes a lot of sense. Thanks for watching!
Gameplay side of the mainline touhou games is underrated and addictive. The satisfying grind to improve is just as fun here as in any Cave game.
Touhou, what supposed to be an STG game, itself is overshadowed by fangames like Luna Nights, Genso Wanderer, 3rd Eye, Touhouvania series etc., it's enough to make people outside of fandom think Touhou is an anime game, plus the fanarts and the remixes, and to search official Touhou games on Steam you must type the English title because the game's title started with its Japanese title, how people want to play Touhou if the title itself is a barrier?
Taito's new game, Touhou Spell Bubble, will absolutely make people think it's Puzzle Bobble but with anime chicks.
Yes I've run into this problem as well! When I was trying to buy FDF2 on steam I couldn't find it at first because the title is in Japanese and all the touhou game results brought up stuff that wasn't shmup related ha. Thanks for watching!
@@TheElectricUnderground FDF 2 is Chinese.
This debate sounds like something from 15 years ago.
It is ha
About time someone asked this.
Agree with most of your points and kudos to you for trying to make an effort to close the gap between the arcade scene and the Touhou shmup scene but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.
The arcade scene or atleast most of the people from the shmups forum just seem a little too elitist and close-minded imo and most of their hate are unfounded and downright, silly.
Though, I would say most of the really enthusiastic haters come from plebs who struggle to even 1-ALL CAVE games / only play old-school shmups like R-Type and they feel the need to bring others down. Truly crab's mentality at its finest! Some of these peasants also have arcade cabinets which brings me to the conclusion that they are working boomers stuck in the past.
Now excuse me, I need to get my daily dose of Casper's loli nectar juice while I play CAVE's SUPER COOL AND HYPE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR game , Aka to Booooooo. Can't wait to play the upcoming Dodonpachi SaiSaiDaiOuJou on my iPhone 39 btw ( I heard EXY's sling bikini mode is going to be S-EXY and insane! )
Always remember to be yourselves , shmup forum boomers.
P.S. whoever came up with the shmup term should just die, why can't we stick to what JP uses which is STG.
@@NB-1 shoot em up is the best, Mr. Oppai agrees.
Based beyond measure
It is for certain people, especially the people who have been around and sort of developed these antagonistic relationships with each other. My goal though is for the new players who have come into the genre (like Kiwi and Moglar did) to not fall into this divide. There is a strong group of western players right now, like Jaimers, who appreciate both and that's the group I want to expand. But yes, for some people the divide just runs too deep and there is no convincing them otherwise.
I think the real reason is that both communities give different vibes, sort of like the Smash community vs the FGC.
The shmup players that hate Touhou kinda do so because they'd get associated with the levels of degeneracy that Touhou is associated with (4chan created a separate board for Touhou because of the frequency of Touhou hijack threads there), so going back to the FGC analogy it's like playing Smash and associating yourself with smelly teenagers (to use that stereotype). There's a reason why /shmupg/ calls Touhou players Touhoufappers.
Hey, I got a comment from my dude KZ! :-D Yeah I agree completely, that's a great parallel. Thanks for watching!
I think that analogy is fitting too but i would like to use another more disturbing stereotype of the smash community and therefore Touhou community, the smash community has a pedo problem, most the players are underage kids and they got lots of predators in their community trying to get into sexual contact with minors.....so yeah, as i said the analogy is fitting and im pretty sure a lot of Touhou enthusiasts are more in it for the little girls depicted in the games than the actual gameplay. I can totally see how you dont wanna be associated with those kind of people.
There are tons of shmups out on plenty of systems but these Touhou players choose to play the ones featuring underage girls...this moe shit is borderline pedo stuff.
@@MrBroken030 Uh, no. While there are obvious pedos towards the series, that goes for a lot of other series as well (such as Pokemon). Besides, despite being full of girls, there are tons of women as well, and it is often agreed (not just by the fans and not just from people in Japan) to be the safest series from Japan that are full of females. Touhou got popular due to the music (official and arranges), lore, bullet patterns, and character designs and their lore or what they are based on, and then further on due to the memes. It's really annoying and even outright offensive to stereotype the fanbase as being full of pedos and thus generalize Touhou players as so, especially with how many of the fans actually talk about the gameplay as well and like to make jokes regarding the gameplay for other games (people liked calling Magaki from KoFXI acting like a Touhou character due to his projectile spamming).
As if other STG players weren't virgin loosers themselves hahaha. And no, I don't play touhou, I don't play any videogames for that matter, I prefer to succeed in life rather.
Imagine being scared of anime tiddies, these ppl who attack touhou fans for that reason sound like insecure virgin themselves
Thanks for clarifying the matter! Being back only recently into the shmup community, the reasons behind this division always puzzled me. I mean, Touhou games do not appeal to me for a lot of reason but these are my tastes, everyone is entitled to have his opinion and like whatever shmup fits his pleasure
Glad the video helped light on the situation. Yeah, I'm completely fine with playing what they want to play, touhou is not going to appeal to everyone ha, that's the nature of how it is designed. I just want to create an atmosphere where we are pushing new and talented players away needlessly. :-D Also, got your vid done! I should be uploaded tonight (my time ha).
@@TheElectricUnderground Nice! Cannot wait!
I've got into shmups about a year ago through Touhou, simply for it having such a large presence in anime circles that I was always vaguely aware of and decided to go for it. I don't regret it for a single moment. It really seems like only a small portion actually play the games. Even when I was playing a rythym game and a Touhou song popped up, a friend in the group got excited, but said just listens to the fan music.
Very happy to have branched out and discovered CAVE games more recently, and hopefully whatever else interests me moving forward. Still not a super strong player and the arcade difficulty is a jump, but been trying my damnest and close to getting a mushi manica 1CC.
average 2hu/arcade hater vs the chad enjoyer of both
You mean average Touhou hater?
I love Touhou and every other shmup. No reason not to.
Well, being shunned for playing Touhou by the shmup group really makes people not want to enter it, also just a heads up, the gameplay on the video is from FDF, not FDF2.
Ha yeah thanks for the heads up. I play FDF2 more often the FDF and the original footage was supposed to be FDF2, but then OBS did not grab the run and so it was just a blank screen. So I used an old FDF replay that I had but then forgot to update the description ha. Anway, thanks for the reminder, I've changed the description now ha.
I love both arcade and touhou shmups, and if that bothers anyone on either side of the fence, they can lick my nuts and it won't ever effect where I go, who I play with, the games I want to play or talk about, etc.
People who gatekeep with hostility should be pushed out by the sane people who understand that it doesn't matter who likes what shmup. Every community should have the basic rule "don't be a dick or we'll kick you out."
A perspective of someone who by way of just playing Touhou for fun, "accidentally" got good at shmups.
I started playing Touhou because of the music and the characters. I had absolutely zero interest in STGs beforehand. I didn't know about "actual" shmup games, I didn't know what they were, I didn't know what they were like, and I frankly didn't care because I was playing this one game that was fun. At some point, someone asked me if I would play Mushihimesama or something, so I looked it up on UA-cam and saw this bland game where all the bullets were the same color (purple), there were way too many visual effects in the background (mainly the explosions) making it hard to see, the routing was extremely static so if you varied from it at all you got majorly punished and the music sounded like generic electric guitar and whatnot. By contrast, the familiar land of Touhou had pretty patterns that cared more about looking cool and unique than just pure difficulty, the backgrounds were *fine* but importantly didn't get in the way of the gameplay, you had a lot more flexibility in routing and had the opportunity to do cool (dumb) stuff without immediately being condemned to death, and of course the famous ZUN music, with dynamic tunes and each song sounding different and unique. They almost felt like completely different genres, with nothing to do with each other. I dismissed the CAVE game as some kind of boring bog standard arcade shmup and went back to Touhou-land.
The intention was never to get good. I didn't care about 1ccs. I didn't care about getting to Lunatic mode. I was just playing a game where you dodge bullets, and that was fun.
Obviously 1ccs and such were still a goal, but I was perfectly capable of continuing to play until I got bored, or indeed switching to one of the many other games whenever I felt like it. This mindset is definitely one of the things that has influenced my playstyle. I really enjoy freeform dodging, going wherever I feel like and just trying to make it work, even without prior knowledge of the stage. Learning and memorizing routes, which involves sitting in one game doing the same thing over and over is hella boring and I don't want to do it any more than I have to. This probably does impact how I feel about traditional STGs, which - although correct me if I'm wrong (which I probably am, because I haven't looked too hard) - have a much higher focus on static routing, learning the stages and bosses, and using your resources correctly.
Looking back at it now, I didn't really give traditional STGs much thought at all until Gus' run at AGDQ. Touhou caters for a large number of skillsets, all the way from Normal 1cc to LNN level to scoring, and so I never felt the need to look outside ZUN's games and find something new. For the most part, my initial impressions of Mushi remain the same - I'm still not super excited about how the game presents itself - but I am more willing to give it a go at some point now. However, my enjoyment of the STG genre is probably tied to the Touhou design style now, simply because that's how I learnt to play.
That's really interesting to hear your perspective. I like your brutal honesty ha. From experience, I think that if you are open-minded and start giving arcade shmups a chance, I could see them growing on you and becoming favorites, alongside touhou. :-) Thanks for watching man!
@h149 This comment was created by an average shmup player.
The way the zun draws the characters doesn't necessarily reflect the way they actually look due to zun not being very good at drawing. In the official mangas and spin-offs a lot of the characters are pretty clearly adults
Oh interesting!!
Because they're drawn by another artist, you wouldn't read manga with ZUN art style, would you?
@@HyperVanilo I've read Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.
I'd be down to read a comic drawn by ZUN.
I think the divide stems from the Touhou fandom basically being overrun by the anime/waifu crowd who either haven't touched a shmup before or are super casual about it. Cave if I remember correctly did try with the waifu crowd with games like Mushihimesama, Deathsmiles, DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, and Ibara off the top of my head. Really only the first two are the ones that succeeded.
Ha you are right, it's funny to consider that it is possible that touhou's popularity inspired Cave to make more moe stuff like Deathsmiles and SDOJ :-D It's kind of ironic ha. thanks for watching!
Haha no, my friends are all hardcore shump fans and they love touhou
@@akiradkcn -has an anime profile pic
Sure bud😂
@@chasepalumbo2929 someone on a video about anime games is using a anime pfp????? *GASPS* ITS IMPOSSIBLE!
Yo dude! Really appreciate this video. I'm a dedicated Touhou player and server manager, but also one who has been branching out a ton as of these past few weeks. I've gotten into games like eXceed 3rd, StellaVanity, Castle Shikigami 2, Caladrius Blaze, RefRain, the list goes on. I think we as a community should make it our mission to dispel the gap between the shmup and Touhou communities; I know people who loves both the arcade-like shmups and the more danmaku-centric games, both of which are fantastic. My dream comes true every time we get a player who decides to play on both ends of the spectrum! :)
Be sure to tune into my channel on Saturday for shoot the baguette which is a crossover event!
@@TheElectricUnderground I remember hearing about it; mind if I ask how it works?
Despite being three years old video still wanna put in my two cents. Literally never heard of Cave or the like at all until I decided to try my hand at making a Shmup and started doing research. All I knew about were the really old games for the SNES like Gradius and some airplane shooters that I don't even remember the name of, and Touhou. Played a few games casually, but not anymore than any other game I play. To me Bullet Hell=Touhou game or some game emulating Touhou. Only very recently have I learned there is a lot more to the genre than I initially thought. Which is nice, cause that means there are even more games for me to look out for and play XD
I have hundreds of hours in both Touhou and arcade shmups. The main difference between them for me is a heavier focus on random dodging in Touhou and strict routing in the arcade shmups. As someone who used to hang out a lot in the Touhou communities, i've often seen people get discouraged by arcade shmups stages, since they were approached with the same approach that they had in Touhou. What i'm curious about, does the opposite happen? Being discouraged by all the randomness?
Anyway, hope the gap between Touhou and arcade shmups closes, i think every stg is great and worth playing
That's a great summary of the difference between the two I think! Thanks for watching man!
gaming
Pearl! :-D
I have figured out the perfect way to bridge the divide and I am DEAD SERIOUS, Cave fans need to get Bad Apple running on a CAVE 68000 as an offering to the Touhou fans. This WILL work.
Oh I ve never seen bad apple before!
Its a song/music video that is from a Touhou game that has been put on EVERYTHING, think Doom running on an ATM.
Isn't Touhou the most HARDCORE Shmups out there?
they the hardest game series ever
Gaming Dreamer, no, Battle Garegga and CAVE games are much harder.
(and for case if your comment is a joke - it is not funny)
@@tehteh9893 not a joke
But the that the image the game have outside it fan base
Look at the screen it bullets horror show
Difficulty is to some degree subjective
maybe for some people touhou Games are the hardest Games that exist
but for other people its Ghosts n Goblins, Ninja Gaiden, dwarf Fortress, the Sims or Devil may cry or Something
Idk, my Point is: everyone has different skills
one Person might Play through space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator without much difficulty while someone Else is jerma985 who died to pinwheel
Touhou games were basically only made to display the music which is where most touhou fans likely come from (the music)
Very true, the music is a big deal
Your description of the Touhou community being more of an anime community than a gaming community is absolutely spot on. While everyone is aware of its origins as a Bullet Hell game, the overwhelming majority doesn't care and are just in it for the music, the characters, the memes, or to be part of the fandom. Never once have I met a Touhou fan IRL that actually plays the games, and the one guy I managed to convince to play the games, and then ended up playing CAVE games and the Raiden Fighters games among others, isn't even a Touhou fan.
I undersand that not everyone has the time and/or dedication for the games, but the only time the games or their gameplay ever get mentioned are when comparing their difficulty to other "hard" games like Dark Souls, and when other games that isn't a Bullet Hell have a million projectiles on screen and then pointing out how much it's like Touhou (Which is a personal pet peeve of mine, because most of those fights look more like Suguri than Touhou).
This may seem innocious, but think about this: Not only is Touhou stealing thunders from other Bullet Hell games like the CAVE games and some Psykio and Raizing games, but other independent/doujin games like Crimzon Clover and Devil Engine are absolutely overshadowed and remains relatively obscure. Not even other shmups with Moe aesthetics like the Gundemonium series or Orange_Juice games gets shout outs from the Touhou community, and crossovers are what everyone seems to be into these days.
I still really like Touhou, but the reputation it has can really be insufferable and makes me wish sometimes it never grew as big as it is.
I'm really glad my video connected with you. I've actually experienced the exact same thing with Melee (when it was popping on in 2016). In the early melee comeback era (2012-2014) everyone was in the community to play the game and to improve. Around 2015 onward though, the community started to get massive but mostly off the back of memes and that sort of thing. The situation got so bad that I would be playing against people and 4 stocking them with Roy (ha), and they'd be telling me I needed to start doing X or Y because of memes. Or I'd win a tournament with fox and here nothing but Final Destination memes over and over, even though Fox is only good on FD against a few characters. Anyway, I'm rambling but I know where you are coming from.
Make sense for Touhou stealing thunders from other STGs because the characters and the musics, tell me have you heard a playlist of Strikers 1945 ost remix? A circle that dedicated to remix Gradius ost? In case you dont know Dodonpachi and Mushihimesama has fanarts in Danbooru, how many of it? Only 100 - 300 arts, Touhou? 632K fanarts.
@@HyperVanilo A circle based on Gradius would be really sick. But if I were to choose a shmup soundtrack that deserves recognition that isn't Touhou, it would have to be 19XX. It's just so damn classy.
Its weird how Touhou can be so obscure to mainstream audience, and so mainstream to obsure audience, huh.
Orange Juice games and Ray series are the ones that got me interested in shmup.
I've been playing shmups since 1990 when my dad gifted two-year-old me an NES with Sky Shark, and the same dad would take me to arcades over the years to play games like 1943, Raiden II, and Viper Phase 1 with me. I discovered Touhou not through memetic videos, but through some old webpage in 2004 with a list of free shmups, including trial version of Touhou. In fact, I didn't even know they were called Touhou until my friend asked "Hey, isn't that Touhou?" when I was browsing videos of Shoot The Bullet in 2006.
I personally have never minded the aesthetic of Touhou, honestly all the "creepy"/bait-y aspects of the characters comes from the fanart that weird artists make rather than ZUN himself. And although I haven't played Touhou games in years, I still think they are solid games.
For a while I was considerably involved with the Touhou community, especially once I started cosplaying characters from that series and got to know fellow Touhou fans. My relationship with that community has always been a strained one, colored by the almost two decades of experience I had with shmups as a whole before coming to that community. The majority (or at least a great plurality) of Touhou fans are "secondary" fans who have little or no experience with the Touhou games themselves. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with being a secondary fan, it's like how people are into stuff like Guilty Gear despite being trash at fighting games and having no desire to make a hobby of it. But I feel myself dissociating from the community when fans remark that the games are too difficult and apparently only exist to be exercises in masochism - I'm the one who's been playing shmups for 30 years and for many of these people, Touhou is the first set of shmups they've ever played, so already they get negative impressions about the genre; this is nothing I fault them for, but it's absolutely one of those points of discussion where I really just don't know what to say because I'm basically the old hag in a crowd of cool shmup-neophyte kids who just prefer to enjoy Touhou as a visual and literary franchise and fan-grown universe. Then there's those who use Touhou's reputation as a "tons of bullets, therefore impossiblest game ever" series as some weird badge of pride in ignorance of the history of sadistically hard arcade shmups that came before it - even before shmups became known for thick bullet forests, the ones in the arcades had that reputation of being hungry for coins!
At the same time I'm not too pleased with the way parts of the shmup community treat Touhou and its fans. I don't mind the dislike for the games themselves too much, some shmup fans just don't like how they play and that's fine. But then the less-kind parts of the community wage personal attacks against anyone who has any interest in Touhou beyond the games themselves (much in the same way saying you actually care about shmup lore in general gets you shot...in the leg) and have a vendetta against Those Goddamned Secondaries, or attack anyone who even likes Touhou at all, labeling Touhou fans collectively as the P-word, forgetting that 1. official Touhou character designs are *far* from sexualized, that's mostly a fan artist thing as I said above, 2. people can enjoy works with youthful characters in non-gross ways and the idea that liking Touhou makes one "one of those people" is fucking disgusting, does nothing to combat actual Ps, and doesn't contribute to a healthy shmup discussion at all.
regarding your question about porn.
the touhou series is quite literally the #1 most parodied IP in all of hentai, followed by kancolle in #2 and fate/grand order in #3.
we can know this because hentai aggregators have a tagging system and touhou has the highest number of tagged galleries out of all parodied content.
Jeez that s crazy
I'm a bit of an outlier I guess because I got into touhou through playing other shmups and realising that I like the genre. While touhou isn't my favourite shmup series, it is the one I go back to the most frequently, mostly just because of how many games and fangames there are for it.
I'm the same, where I discovered other shmups before touhou. Even though i'm obsessed with Cave shmups, I am really starting to try to play more touhou because I do think the games are really fun :-) I think Mountain of Faith might be my fav.
The shmup genre itself is pretty hardcore, so I'm not surprised there seems to be a gap. As a person who doesn't know about the shmup scene at all other than some basic info, this was an interesting watch
I dare to say that 1% (or less, i am being generous) of touhou fans don't actually play the shmup games or have played it once and never touched them again, touhou is so big it spawned every kind of niche possible within touhou itself, such as: music,artwork,memes,fangames,the FGC,mugen,anime,fanfiction,roleplay,cosplay,puzzles,the rhythm games community, everything you can imagine, and each of them are big enough to be considered almost as completely separate communities that don't care for the other branches.
there's a saying that got popular that said "if it exist, there's touhou of it"
Around 15 years ago I heard the OST for Touhou 8, and through that I found a gameplay video of someone playing on Lunatic mode, I thought all the patterns looked insane and wanted to try the game so badly but had no idea how, or where to buy the game I ended up finding a ISO on some weird forums and that was my introduction to shmup games. Now with plenty of shmups on Steam its a lot easier to acquire them, and I believe that kind of accessibility is extremely important but I don't think I'd be into the genre if I never found Touhou some 15 years ago.
I wonder what STG players think of Gunbird, It's an STG where the protagonists are 4 humans and a golem, following these people's logic Gunbird also can be classified as anime game just because the players are humans... And a golem.
That is an interesting point! I always view the girl from gunbird as sort of an imitation of Kiki's delivery service ha, even though I'm not sure if that is correct or not. I guess the difference would be that Kiki and those 90's anime are not typically in the moe style, whereas Touhou is. Again, I have no problem with touhou and moe, but this is the feedback that I have heard.
I knew about some shmups through Kotobokiya’s model kits and that there was a small community, but I didn’t realize how small and dedicated the community is. I was streaming touhou 6 and a passing by viewer told me to watch your video. As someone who only knew touhou from the old ytpmv’s and remixes, I didn’t understand the magnitude of the divide between the shmup and touhou communities. I would qualify that moe was kinda popular in the 80’s, but I do agree that sci fi fans and moe fans do not meld together. To add on, moe did indeed become more popular in the mid 2000’s and mecha kinda lost its prominence in weeb culture, at least now. I’m probably not gonna play shmups all that competitively since I’m... kinda bad at games in general but thanks to your video and the viewer passing by, I’m definitely gonna try out more shmups. Good video!
I am really happy to hear that!!
@@TheElectricUnderground the funny thing is I’ve never heard of dodonpachi or ikaruga before the model kits, yet I’ve known touhou for as long as I can remember being on youtube
I’m still very much a newcomer to this genre as a whole, but I think I can at least say this: while a lot of the more arcadey shmups seem comparable to a roller coaster, Touhou games seem more akin to something like a torrent river ride. I have a hard time imagining something like a Yagawa game being “zen” or in the same way that Touhou is often described as; the stage design being largely devoid of secrets or breakable objects leads to a sense of focus on the patterns themselves, as well as freeing up the backgrounds to explore different camera angles and types of setpieces (Ten Desires stage 5 is a great example of this). The slower movement and weak-looking shots take away from the adrenaline and the power fantasy, but lean further into the “coziness” of the whole experience. And while Touhou *does* have a sense of spectacle, that spectacle looks very different from something more arcadey, again usually being focused around bullet patterns that move in intricate ways or have interesting gimmicks to them- especially the spell cards, which are often designed to represent specific concepts in a character’s background or in japanese mythology as a whole. Wishmakers’ comment elaborates on the importance of aesthetic in Touhou patterns, among other people’s.
I kinda got into touhou as a joke honestly. I thought it was a meme loli ecchi game that i was going to play with some people and then laugh at how bad it was, but then I found out that wasn't actually the case and I just got completely hooked.
Other bullet hell games are honestly too difficult for me, probably because different design philosophy and only having experience with touhou. There's more to it than that, though. I mean I like Len'en, but then something like CAVE just doesn't have the aesthetics for me. I love the way touhou patterns look and feel, along with the music. It's hard to explain, but it's just good for me.
For what it's worth I'm currently breaking into hard 1cc territory, although I have nearly every Lunatic on HSiFS. So my skill level is probably not high enough for the fun difficulties on Mushihimesama or anything like that.
My dude! It's always funny when you start something ironically and then up really liking it in the end. I remember a few years back I did that with some musical artists, just to be ironic but as I listened to more and more of their music, I became a big fat fan ha. X-D
@@TheElectricUnderground It really was just me having the wrong idea and being too bored, but man the moment I played I was like holy shit, I love EVERYTHING about this. I never thought I would ever clear any bullet hell. I would love to get into more non-touhou styled bullet hells, but man they seem like a wall.
I'm a Touhou fan who joined the fandom without knowing what a shmup was, just downloaded Touhou 6 because some friends at summer camp were playing it and telling me about the music. I'm really fond of the gameplay and enjoy the process of grinding to a Lunatic 1cc, but unfortunately most of the Touhou community isn't as enthusiastic about tackling the difficulties beyond Normal.
Hi Mark,
I just subscribed a few days ago and I'm really enjoying your commentary so far. I'm a longtime shmups forum lurker, but I guess seeing a human face talking about shmups has drawn me out of the shadows.
This seems contextual. What do you think about the "Touhou World Cup" event Mino posted about? (If you have no thoughts about it then thanks again for posting all these interesting videos and have a nice day!)
I think it looks hype! I m stoked to watch it :-D I have some shmup homies ZPS and Mairbel playing in it :-D I m Defintely going to talk about it on my channel.
@@TheElectricUnderground Oh that's awesome. I was hoping to listen to some commentary about it, and learn some more about the details behind it. Mino's second video description starts "Touhou is truly becoming esports and it is lovely. The excitement of the players. The excitement of the chat. The memes being born. The thrill. I feel so alive!" I'm hoping there's truth in that.
Preach man preach
Touhou brought me back to all shmups.
Good Video.
I'm a touhou fan who started playing it for the Gameplay and just to get into the fandom.
I would say i like the games now for their distinct Bullet patterns and music, but after playing some of the games and making contact with the fandom i also would say i like the characters, but sometimes i get weirded out by some of the "art", though not all touhou characters are little girls so it isn't that weird.
(I'm not an anime fan btw)
I would like to play the Cave games someday, but sometimes the lack of variety on the attack paterns turns me off
I never knew people saw the budokai series that way, because here in Brazil the budokai series, especially Budokai Tenkainchi 3 is remembered as a classic, mainly because the ps2 was extremely popular here
I hope the gap closes. I'm a fan of shmup games in general that includes Touhou.
I really didn't have any qualms with Touhou, I wasn't the biggest anime fan either. I enjoyed the Touhou shmups eventhough I sucked.
The prime divide to me doesn't make sense. Just because Touhou is filled to the brim of anime girls and porn --which really is just the internet being the internet rule34-what-not and really non-touhou shmups are just as vulnerable to it-- is looking at it shallowly without even setting foot into the Touhou content rabbit hole.
And I think it is healthy that Touhou is attracting people to the shmup community, not all of them for sure, like some don't even play the shmups, but this doesn't something to discredit the entire fanbase for.
Heck there was a similar divide(which still exists probably) between the Touhou community and the Undertale community. Which I'm even more confused of--though yes they are very different games.
Rambling aside, I really hope the stigma between the communities die down or at least be suppressed.
There was a similar discussion on the Shmups forum like 15 years ago. At the time I wondered how spaceships blasting millions of shots per second were out, and flying little girls in fancy dresses were in. I still don’t get it.
touhou's massive success is less about the fact they're girls and more for the music, aesthetics and lore. Every stange has iconic music and attacks from the bosses and the bosses attacks all have a unique style and personality to them.
Dunpeal2064? I know that guy, he introduced me to DDP DOJ back on the Racketboy forums years ago. Shoutouts to Dunpeal if you see this man!
:-D
btw will you make a review of GFW in the near future? What's with your touhou journey? Just asking 👉👈
Yes I shall! Touhou quest shall be done, probably in a more focused form later this year :-)
There are a few stats I'd like to share about the thcrap userbase (thcrap is a modding toolkit for Touhou that is most commonly used for translation patches)
According to statistics shared by Nmlgc there are around 20000 unique IP addresses that access thcrap servers. MuffinPimp's stats measure 44k to 74k unique IPs. Note that those are *unique IP addresses*, not number of users. The actual number of active thcap installations we can't track because that'd require some client side telemetry which I am against and most other thcrap developers wouldn't support either.
Holy crap, that is a lot of users my dude. So this is the number of people who have booted some of the games on an annual basis or lifetime basis? If it's not annual, is there a way you can check the annual number of unique players? That stat would fascinate me. Also, thanks for sharing and watching the video!
@@TheElectricUnderground that's the amount of unique IPs hitting the thcrap servers over several years. Nmlgc's sheet (which I can hopefully link without my comment not getting listed) docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Ej_CokcLIN_Njll7sxaicKAUqbzaPNTeCMPf5AjvAo/edit#gid=0 also has the stats for unique IPs for just February 2018
@@32th most likely inflated as heck numbers from users who are from countries that didnt standardize static ips
I have an interest mainly in Fighting Games. I heard of and tried the Fighting Game spin offs in the official Tou Hou games and found them interesting and fun enough to get me into the Series as a whole. While I found that I wasn't very good at SHMUPs with patience and practice I was able to at least beat a few of them. From there I got a bit more of an interest in the Bullet Hell subgenre and tried a bunch of CAVE SHMUPs cause I heard they were considered peak Bullet Hell. I enjoyed my time with them enough that I imported Mushihimesama Futari on X Box 360 and beat that game a few times.
While I'd still consider myself a Casual to Bullet Hell SHMUP games, I probably would have never come around to trying Bullet Hell SHMUPs if it weren't for Tou Hou.
7:03 I totally agree I'd like to see more crossover between arcade shmupers and Touhou shmupers. I play both but I started out with Touhou and am involved with the larger community sometimes. What could we as Touhou players do to get people to try a Cave game for example? I've loaned out a few of my copies of good Cave ports, XBOX360 ports of Deathsmiles and Futari but it didn't seem to light that fire in their hearts like it did with me.
I found a download for the PCB demo (just first 3 stages, not piracy) back in 2003 and was mesmerized. I liked playing shmups like UN Squadron, Strike Gunner, Gradius as a kid but they were weekend rental type games for me. When I saw PCB I was like "Oh my god look at all those pretty bullets" and thought this is what shmups were supposed to be. Played that a while then got hooked on WOW. After quitting WOW I saw a review for Deathsmiles and was like "holy shit shooting games I totally forgot" and shot happily ever after.
Oh that s awesome! Pcb is actually my next game in touhou quest and I am going to try my best to release a vid about it this month :-)
*Touhou and Arcade Shmups are "Balm for the Soul", you don't play to kill something, you play to Meditate and to get into a Trance ;)*
Honestly I wanna get into more shoot em up games because of Touhou, but I had a friend show screenshots of people hating on Touhou and its fanbase.
The only other shoot em up I got into is Len'en which is Touhou inspired.
Edit: Also I like Touhou as a medium. I like learning about the lore of the world. I do enjoy the games eventhough I suck at them. So Im just a general fan I guess
Why would people hating on a bullet hell franchise? Heck, they don't even know that Touhou itself is a game, all they know are remixes, fanarts and music videos
I wrote a comment almost a year ago, saying choosing games and bullet hell can be a bit overwhelming. Since then I've learnt that it is possible to like both genres. I like both now, I probably lean towards arcades. What u say is the fact that anime (which I've been a fan of since the 80s and seen 300+). I'm still not great at schmups but use play Touhou for at least half an hour in bed for half an hour at least when I wake up...and it's made such a difference in improving my skills on more arcade style games in respect to bullet dodging. P.S,. Ghost in the Shell is NOT Mecha it's pure Cyberpunk, trust me I own everything the franchise has released, figure, mangas and dvds. I would wet my pants if they brought out a Ghost in the Shell Schmup. I think Crimson Clover is a good bridge point between the two genres as it's so accessible. The point you made about anime being the entry point to Touhou style games is so spot on, as especially as anime as became so massive recently.
Oh that s really cool you have revisited this video a year later!! I m happy when my vids stick with people :-)
I'm just getting back into gaming after a 25 yr break since SF2 on my snes. I get stuff off of Steam. I know what games I enjoy (Sky Force Reloaded, Natsuki Chronicles....Eschatos but it's a bit hard for a beginner like me) and what I don't (Crimson Clover was just too overwhelming), but don't know the lingo to describe it. I'm a bit of a weeb and love anime all the way back to the 80s. But there are so many sub-cultures and types and I'm a really casual gamer that I'm finding picking my next game overwhelming and exhausting. I think I'm a 'Touhou' fan, but I love R-type aswell?
yeah I think this divide is pretty unnecessary ha, no reason that players can't enjoy arcade shmups and touhou :-)
"Touhou fans don't play Touhou games. When you play Touhou games, you're no longer a fan." That's what I've literally heard. Very interesting philosophy.
Why? Because they'd migrate to other Shmups for the challenge? That's funny because I saw someone else post in 4chan, "You can't mention the T word around Shmup players. They'll have a meltdown".
Hey, Touhou fan here. I got into Touhou through the music. Im a fan of arcade shooters, but I love Raizing and Taito, not a huge fan of Cave.
So in my opinion for Touhou players, the divide starts on the platform. Touhou is a computer game, Arcade STG are in the arcade or saturn or 360. So as a gamer, you play what you have access to and knowledge of. Most STG could not be played on computer in the biggest popularity of Touhou, you had to play them in arcades or console. So I think thats the first divide in the initial playerbase.
Second main divide imo is knowledge of the games, Touhou is more widely known than any other STG Ive played. Most hardcore rpgers or Fighters, or puzzler players have NEVER EVER HEARD of, let alone played the finest offerings in STGs. STGer know final fantasy, skyrim, tetris, Street fighter, etc, but what normie gamer even ever heard of donpachi, Garrega, darius, Thunder Force, escatos, aka to blue, mushihime? I mean even heard of it? So when a touhou player stumbles up Touhou, they may have no idea the arcade world exists.
The third divide is the actual fanbases and their views of each other. I have been looked down upon so hard by Arcade STG fans for liking Touhou, and I bet they never even played a touhou game. Arcade STG players (english) believe, rightly or wrongly, that touhou is not a real STg, so those who play it are not real STG fans.
For any person wishing to get into Touhou, I STRONGLY recommend Subterian animism (spelled wrong) as the first game you try.
Why Touhou 11? Might as well start with Touhou 15, *if* you have played STG before, if you never play STG start with Touhou 6, 7, or 13.
starting with sa is pretty cursed tbh
that being said though if you already have experience with arcade shmups you'd probably be fine?
The difference in platform is a great point! Touhou is a PC series and many arcade shmups are either on PCB or on console. The good news, at least for me, is that it looks like PC is becoming more and more the standard place for shmups to be released, even arcade games, so I think that will help with future overlap as well.
@@HyperVanilo Because its my favorite it has great music, variety of shot types, and I love the spellcards. Plus its a real resource manager game with the bomb system.
But honestly I just recommended it because its my favorite.
As a Touhou fan myself, and one who hasn't delved much at all into other schmups, I can say one reason I stick to Touhou and it's fangame schmups are the bullet patterns, personally. I may be dead wrong due to lack of exposure to other more hardcore schmups and bullet hells, but from what little experience I have playing and watching them, the bullet patterns in Touhou feel more intricate, and fan vary greatly even from boss to boss. Meanwhile, what I've found in other bullet hells looks like a lot of single, lines, or spreads of bullets aimed at the player, spread shots or lines of bullets shot straight down, and only a few other things here and there for some spice.
I personally find it more fun and enjoyable to dodge around all the varying patterns instead of what looks like much of the same. Of course, once again, I could be really wrong about my notes on other schmups due to lack of exposure.
Looking at some of the other comments here I can also see a couple other points that are definitely related to my point, even if they hadn't come to my mind/I wasn't initially aware of them. This includes, primarily, stuff about how survival is a big point of Touhou compared to scoring, which is big in other schmups. The other major point I've noticed that relates is the approach to dodging in either subsection of games. Hardcore/classical bullet hells, from what I can gather, tend to be heavy in routing and following specific plans. Touhou, on the other hand, is much more freeform, with more randomness in the patterns, which may lead into the point I made earlier about the more varied and non-static bullet patterns. The randomness element also allow one to simply focusing on dodging as a skill across the whole game instead of having to spend countless hours working through understanding a game inside and out.
Touhou is the pretty much the reason why i tried STG's in the first place. But my first STG wasn't even from the Touhou series(Or any vertical shooter actually), it was instead the Gradius series(Gradius 1) through emulation, since the whole thing of shoot em up seemed to be the same thing for me. And i sticked around that series for awhile(And R-Type) until i realized that you can get the games through a site with an english patch.
Strangely enough, i found Touhou to be a bit easier compared to Gradius(Because of not only the enviromental hazards, but the bullets were also way too small for me see them) even on both normal and hard difficulty on Touhou 6. I can't beat them but i still made way more progress in Touhou(Stage 5 - Stage 4) compared to Gradius(Stage 3 - Stage 1) and it was both fun and tiring since i would get distracted alot and die while seeing the exact moment the bullet hits me on both games... This also made me think of the girls more as combat spaceships rather than their desiginated species for some weird reason, making me want them dead on the spot like the cores.
I also tried Ikaruga and R-Type. Those two kicked my ass hard(R-Type being the hardest from the start of stage 1 and Ikaruga in stage 2) but they were fun... In a masochistic way.
Also. I usually avoid remixes like the plague because of their edgy covers and stuff(Iosys and comedy music videos being an exception), but i see the hentai doujins just fine(As long as it's of good quality, with an good or okay plot and no beastiality is involved) with my favorite being a series involving a guy nicknamed "Nanashi"(Not the SMT4 apocalypse protag) trying to save Cirno after having sex with her(The series is incomplete and it'll remain that way since the creator has abandoned it and possibly retired). I did like the Koishi Heart Trobing Adventure(I feel a wierd connection between it and Tails Gets Trolled for some unknown fucking reason) and Osana Reimu(Nearly cried but i was left heart broken. Found it somewhat similar to Fate/Stay Night's Heaven's Feel route).
Honestly, i kind of ended up liking the Gradius franchise even more after trying it, making me kind of sad to see it just dissapear and be forgotten(Konami sure as hell ain't trustworthy these days). The same thing with R-Type after Irem went bankrupt(I ironicaly found it's universe to be much deeper and better constructed than Touhou, but that just me). Not only that, but i found it kind of dismaying seeing most STGs going more for this vertical style with no hazards(Only bullets) rather than the style R-Type and Salamander(Part of the Gradius franchise, with 2 being possibly the most similar to Touhou for me)... Possibly because they were already overdone in 90's or so(Even though this style was also overdone specifically in arcade only games). But hey, opinions i guess.
And i found the artstyle by ZUN to be derpy and stupid rather than moe. Which i like since i've grown up watching stuff badly animated stuff on newgrounds like Sonic Shorts(There was a bit of an evolution in his style but it doesn't seem that drastic. Exemple: www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/a35hdo/evolution_of_zuns_art/ )
Edit: Forgot to put a word in one of the lines...
i'm aware the comment here is old, pardon me, although was wondering if you happened to see the R-Type Final 2 that's being worked on. think it was some studio that splintered from Irem and got the permission to use R-Type stuff, think they were named Granzella or something, like the rebel organization in R-Type tactics 2. heard they promised to release it on quite a bunch of platforms, PC (Steam), switch, other consoles. think they just finished up their 3rd crowdfunding round.
@@PenolAkushari Yeah, i did. If i remember correctly the new video got posted just a few days from this comment. I can just hope they'll be able to finish it and make it good(I think a franchise was ruined once, when a company attempted to revive it).
But hey, got to keep it optimistic about some expectations.
yeah, would be pretty exciting if the thing gets finished and it won't be a buggy mess.
well, time will tell how things will turn out. wonder if Granzella would continue on with R-Type stuff if Final 2 turns out to be profitable enough, think i might be a bit too overly excited about spaceships with charging wavecannons.
Just started playing shmups with Dodonpachi. Sounds a lot like the divide between smash and the fgc
Yeah it's a pretty similar divide, though even more silly because touhou has a ton in common with arcade shmups gameplay wise. Maybe better divide would be the anime fighters vs capcom fighters, which these days just seems silly anyway ha.
I'm mainly a fan due to the music. And I simply like the genre, and moe/loli (lol), so it's kind of a perfect fit for me. I actually sincerely enjoy the gameplay of touhou a lot more than that of most of the big arcade shooters.... it's a lot more chill, or at least has softer parts, like a symphony. One feels a sense of beauty while playing it, again, mainly due to the music. Rarely is any other shooter that compelling to me. I love both Sin&Punishment games, and UN Squadron? I admit I probably haven't spent enough time with the other side of the genre to really appreciate it... but that's because one is more appealing that the other to me, so what can I say. And I've put plenty of real time into 1cc'ing each touhou as they have come out... and always going back to PCB and IN.
bruh literally "hearted" a loli lover's post. Never forget.
Now do a review on Touhou Gensou Eclipse. That's CAVE's game with the Touhou IP. It just came out last week.
Interesting discussion. Here’s a like.
Yay I ll take it!
I see you’ve already noticed my other comment. I’m making this one separately to account for that. Watching your “shmup gameplay is infinite” video brings an important question to mind for me: are Touhou games designed to be played like other shmups?
Reading through Zun’s interviews and omakes for his games reveals a few things about his approach. The first is that he’s a person that puts a lot of thought into almost everything he does, including his game design. The second is that his way of thinking is very different from a lot of people. Reading the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil omake, aside from addressing his own lack of manpower, ZUN expressed some disappointment with the inward-looking nature of danmaku shmups and seemed to want to create one with some of the simpler qualities of older games. “A late 20th century style, 21st century shmup,” as he put it all those years ago. While some of that thinking has clearly changed for him, the impact of it is still felt in the traction that Touhou gained as a series, and I think that was very much on his mind in the late 2000s.
Zun has said before that Mountain of Faith was the first game he made in consideration for the long-term sustainability of Touhou as a series, and I think it shows in all the games of its “trilogy.” Many aspects of the series were streamlined; the gameplay systems became simpler, more focused on single-game gimmicks than on building upon the systems that came before, and the patterns shifted further towards prioritizing aesthetics over strategic thinking. Touhou would also go on to make frequent resources a standard in his games.
(The MoF omake is also very interesting to read- it’s a reflection on how the industry had changed since EoSD, and Zun’s thoughts on how shmups might be revived for mainstream gamers feels as though he anticipated Undertale in some small way.)
I suspect that this is part of why Touhou is among the more popular and visible shmups to the mainstream. In blending qualities old and new with his own thinking, Zun aims to create games that are enjoyable at face value- patterns are fun to dodge and systems are fun to play with, whether or not you plan to really sink your teeth into the games. Patterns that are slow and dense allow for lower difficulty while still squeezing as much aesthetic appeal out of them as possible. A slower pace reduces the exhilaration, and therefore potential stress, involved in playing. And of course, more frequent resources allow more people to see as much of the game as possible.
Such games are naturally not as replayable as other shmups, but they probably aren’t meant to be either- I suspect they’re meant to be fun and accessible games that you open up every once in a while, in order to cruise through and enjoy the unique sights and sounds of the series. They’re like a shmup fan’s dessert. Maybe that’s a bit brainless to an arcade-style veteran, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing- and for genre newcomers that expect shallowness from shmups *anyway,* it serves as exactly the right kind of subversion of expectations.
Actually i came from Cave game way in 2004 when i was play Dodonpachi in PSX and following up with Mushimesama PS2 in 2009. and when i got arcade emulator experience, im getting more fans of Cave's games but kinda sad little bit because some great games are Xbox360 exclusive like futari/Espgal2/DFK/SDOJ/Akai. well im just enjoying the game from espgal1/ketsui backwards. and in 2016 i was looking for touhou experience and i was love the aestethic there, especially musics. there's a ton of music made by fans! and when i was playing the game. im realize something that touhou games feels more casual than Cave games. and now im back on Cave games because somehow nostalgic and trying to master my gameplay style on bullet hell.
Mann! imagine Cave made touhou game!
Stellavanity might be the result ha
Do the logo that appear on the very first seconds come from a shmup game ? which one if it the case ?
The logo is my youtube/website logo :-) The ship in the logo is from Axelay :-D
The Touhou community and the anime community are not quite related at all, maybe when it was a fad maybe so and only on the western community. Touhou is more close to the doujin scene, its not popular because it's "moe" (you should definitely look that up again), but because of the fan content and its community. On that regard, the only ones losing out are the wester shmup community.
Hey do you have any recommendations for fans of crimzon clover world ingnition?
YESSS! Ketsui Deathtiny (The arrange screams CCWI), Rolling Gunner (has double breaks and all that good stuff), and Dodonpachi DFK Black Label (which is included in the steam release of Dodonpachi Ressurection).
Subbed
Yay! 💜
Touhou is more for the casual gamer (although i dom t consider them casual, that title GOES to some euroshumps) and anime fan and there is nothing wrong with that. Their games always have a certain degree of quality, polish and consistency specially considering that they are made by One person (zun) .you could talk of some games of zun that are very different with different mechanics and far from easy. "Shoot the bullet" should bé receive more praise from the arcade hardcore audience. I like their games, but i dom t find them amazing (dar from my favourite)
I'd be lying if i said that I enjoy the loli characters that all the anime shmups seem to have, but if the game play is good, I'm good with it. That said, I prefer mechas/spaceships/jets/vehicles to flying little girls fighting other little girls.
Yeah I do wish touhou had more alternatives with it's character designs, they could still be cute but have little animals or something. Magic panda when?
I think you're completely right. The thing with Touhou is that I don't think even 50% of the Touhou fandom has ever played a Touhou game, and maybe 10% has ever completed one. It's not that they're difficult, but that Touhou has more to offer than normal Shmups. Thousands of "doujin circles" (individuals or groups creating fan content) producting fan manga, music, games, anime, books, you name it. This makes Touhou FAR larger than just the
The most hilarious thing about this is that this is the answer to his other video on how to get people to commit to Shmups. The answer had been staring at them in the face but they couldn't get it.
The game with the bosses look like a cat face with a spider's body🕹🎮😀👍🏾
it is! guwange cat spider!
@@TheElectricUnderground yeah that game is awesome that's a real good game I downloaded it from the Xbox 360 store awesome port🎮🕹😀👍🏽
Maybe this is where Cyriak took an inspiration for "Welcome to Kitty City".
I think even the Touhou fanbase (the ones who actually play the game) are getting pretty tired of the simplistic graphics and general lack of innovation. Touhou is at a critical point in its history where it has an opportunity to really become a high quality series along the lines of Cave etc. FDF 1 and 2 are good step in the right direction. All you have to do is look at Deathsmiles to see pretty much what a real Touhou game would look like, but vertical and a bit different finer points of style of course. If Touhou innovates, especially graphically, it's got a bright future ahead of it. That said, if all you care about is gameplay, I think Touhou is pretty fun. It's missing some things that I love about arcade shmups though.
But ZUN doesn't care about whether his franchise is popular or not. He is the very definition of a doujin creator : someone who creates for himself.
The sheer scale of fanmade products is making the franchise look bigger than it actually is.
I absolutely agree about touhou needing to innovate with its presentation. I'm actually really interested in following the FDF team, as I think they may be more on track with the right approach than Zun himself at this point. I'm sure this sounds like straight-up blasphemy to some touhou fans, but Jaimers did say that he wasn't that impressed with the newest official touhou release, while the FDF team do seem to have that passion. I really hope they continue.
@@TheElectricUnderground Touhou can innovate to became better product and gather wider audience, while some Touhou fans are conservative about it and they're kind of gatekeepers themselves. Touhou is never meant to be nice good-looking product for everyone, it can improve, but I doubt its entry threshold will go lower soon. In depth, it is great the way it is, its aesthetics may be rough, but they're unique, and could aspire every creator, looking how lot can be done with such naive art. It is beloved by artists for this, and appear to be one of the most popular franchise within fan-artists: literally millions of pictures, more than 10 thousands of musical albums, fan-animations, games and more... This fan content could be crappy or of ridiciously high quality, but it is always sincere.
.
Btw, ZUN could draw well, if he is not trying digital art, like on omikuji aminoapps.com/c/touhoubrasil/page/blog/lista-de-omikuji/mo2Z_2x7UkuejrLvWZpRa7GYVDVwvVPZpP1
Its a shame his art sense is so weird, but at least it makes Touhou different.
Some fans even having fun with his artstyle ua-cam.com/video/kvwKJXwsKGg/v-deo.html
But it just not consistent in original games.
>Jaimers did say that he wasn't that impressed with the newest
Nobody here ever like newest games at the release year, trust me. Early games are considered golden age of Touhou, and new games probably will never have such big impact on the internet and fan culture (despite that, Touhou 15 did). Its just been here for so long, everyone grow tired.
Dude what’s that game game playing at start of video??looks sweet like how it’s a walking shmup!!lol
That is Guwange
How have I never played this?!have I been living under a rock!lol
It's Guwange my dude! You have to check it out, one of my favorites. I love it because not only are you walking around like a boss, but there is BLOOD! Gotta love the gore ha.
The virgin Ikaruga is actually a puzzle game vs. the chad Touhou isn't actually a shmup
Ha!
You're right, Touhou isn't just a shmup, it's also a fighting game
@@HyperVanilo it's also an arcanoid
Honestly had no idea about the divide until recently and thought people were mostly fine with the whole anime girl aesthetic since the games can be pretty fun.
I myself like the gameplay and the music of the Touhous I've played but haven't really dived into other shmups at all. I don't know how much truth there is behind other shmups apparently having vastly superior gameplay, so I'll definitely give them a try and see what I think of in.
I mean, eventually, I haven't even played Touhou that much lately and I'm still trying to beat EosD on normal so idk.
I just started in the Touhou community, and I can say that yes, I'm not good at all at shmups. Good thing I got the vacation to get better. I'll probably just stop at normal because I love to play different genres of videogames. I'm mostly here for the characters and the music, but I'll try to get decent.
The only other shmup that I really like is Dragon Spirit, an old arcade classic from Namco. Have you heard of it? I have the arcade version, but it's too hard, but the songs are bangers. I managed to beat the easy version (the TurboGrafx one) using save states, but I could try beating it without them.
Here's the link and give me your thoughts on it: arcadespot.com/game/dragon-spirit/
A little late to the party, but still:
My impression of the divide has always been that Touhou simply is too big to fit in with the rest. Touhou is more than SHMUP's, it's FTG's, it's novels, it's manga, it's a dedicated fangame scene, it's collectible plushies etc.
Despite the core of it being SHUMP's, the general overlap to the rest of the SHMUP world always seemed to be smaller than expected.
Many Touhou players i know like the games because it's Touhou, not necessarily because they're SHMUP's.
While i personally love both, i think bringing both fandoms together would just dilute the SHMUP community with interests that don't fit in.
The only thing that I don't like about touhou is the bullet, it's too shiny and it has too many color
It is an irony that, 9 months after this video, you pronounced the death of the Shmup, yet Touhou is still going strong.
Maybe that's because Touhou has evolved beyond being just a shmup.
It is like the eastern Team Fortress 2. It is imbued with something special that makes it live for a ridiculously long time.
I don't shame people for making hentai/cartoon porn of 2hu (derogatory short hand for touhou) but I'm simply more used to the arcade style of game play with shit like crimzon clover explosion my goal for this genre is to get people inta which ever one they like more.
What game is being played in the background?
Guwange!!! I also did a live clear of the game at a japanese shmup event in Jan ua-cam.com/video/Cum-l5QHDqg/v-deo.html
Nice. Thanks for the reply man. Would you be able to recommend Shmups that have Humans/Humanoid type protagonists? Or maybe even a video? K thanks again.
This is the game I'm talking I downloaded it it's a arcade game I downloaded it off the Xbox store it starts with a g🕹🎮😀👍🏾
Well, in my opinion the thing with the little girls in touhou is nothing more than a gimmick but you don't come for that, you come for the music. bUt HeY tHaT iS jUsT mY oPiNiOn, YoU cAn HaVe YoUrS.
I’m just here to shoot things
Very much an outsider looking in: this has vibes of pc master race vs console plebs.
The division is so minimal for anyone a step removed. They're both shmups but one has a distinct anime background. That group is much larger but has its own baggage. PC gamers have a similar hate for console gamers. It's a vocal minority but the smaller group feels like the more "pure" group.
I say play what you like. I'm sure the shmup group could leave out the 18+ content while still acknowledging the gameplay of the Touhou games. I mean I really like playing Deathsmiles but an outsider might consider that a Touhou game even if not made by them. Or Cotton for that matter.
Oh interesting comparison! Gameplay wise deathsmiles is still more cave then touhou (it has grounded enemies and all that), but I could see it having crossover appeal between the two audiences
Your absolutely right, that’s how I felt about it, a game unpolished made in a basement for anime nuts like Naruto Ninja storm which FGC considers games like that as arena fighters. My little brother loved Touhou I told him that’s no Shumup and let him borrow my library,Einhander,Thunder Force,R-Types,Raiden,Ikaruga, my cave collection and many more. But now I’m just happy ppl still play Shumups.
Touhou is not STG just because it's made for anime nuts, that's kinda narrow minded, dont you think? Does ZUN even stated that his games are for anime nuts?
Hyper Vanilo yeah that’s how I felt back then
And also, it's "you're" not "your"
Hyper Vanilo i know but it’s thumb typing so i didn’t care for checking grammatical errors as long as you understood the context of the conversation which you did. If this was a thesis then it would be a different story.
Saying that a person's interest or passion in a game series is not "real" or "legitimate" is pretty assholish tbh.