I mean, prior to this highlight's associated stream, he played the entirety of Touhou 1-5, so of course he's gonna know more about those games than he does the Modern games as his first exposure to the series.
@@Youhadabadday2021 Yeah exactly lol… that’s the surprising part. Out of the small percentage of touhou fans who’ve even PLAYED the games, most have only played the windows ones and glanced over PC-98. Finding a touhou fan who’s played through and knows the story of the pc-98 games is super rare lol
fun fact: until touhou 12 zun would draw the clothes first and then eyeball where the arms, legs, etc. should be which is why the anatomy is a bit wonky in earlier games.
@@rainphee its easier to draw the Body first? Im no artist but im pretty sure knowing what type of clothes (especially Coloring it) makes it easier to draw the heads and Limbs after..
3:30 IIRC spellcards were introduced specifically to make magic battles non-lethal, but back in PC-98 there were no spellcards and thus every battle was life-or-death. When Reimu said "let's bury em" she wasn't kidding
Shoutout to that time reimu offered a gay marriage to a boss in PC-98 and then murdered them so thoroughly she considered burying them on the spot like 3 minutes later
@@notloopers1110 Correction for proper lore chads and not yuribait shippers: Reimu was clearly fucking with Meira and gave zero fucks as Reimu in 98 was an absolute shit-talking gremlin. Post-battle dialogue confirms.
I was watching as it happened and didn't even notice. Thank you for this comment as it has convinced me to buy Everhood with like a minute of looking into it. I have no idea what this game is and I've never heard of it before but a steam review said "rhythm Undertale" and I was hooked.
Aside from like Mario, Sonic, and Pikachu, I think Flandre has one of the most iconic designs out there just purely being like "I've seen that character before"
Small correction, they were definitely trying to kill each other before Spell Cards. The Spell Card system gamefied the magic bullet spray nonsense so that people would stop dying as much. c: Back in the previous game, the burning houses in the background of the Stage 6 boss was that boss doing horrific collateral damage. Isn't that neat? Welcome to the era of magic paintball!
4:35 My parents used to own an arcade and since I was little we've had a few pinball machines in my family's house, and whenever the game ended I would run away and cover my ears You're so correct in describing it as a "nightmare feature" why does it have to be so LOUD
Apparently it's because arcades are loud so they have to make the sound loud enough to be heard by people nearby to basically be like "CHECK IT OUT THIS GUY WON"
It’s genuinely amazing how much content he can get out of a game that runs at 30x the speed. Pretty cool of grayfruit to play the entire game like that, too!
Reminds me of a streamer named Scorpy who played thru all of the Philosipher's Stone on PC at like 2x speed and it was a wild ride (note: you can look him up as "Socpens" so you don't get any results for minecraft vids made by a different guy with the same name)
I didn’t even notice this before, but the game Monolith (or I guess Star of Providence now), which is itself a danmaku and certainly inspired by Touhou, has a Steam Achievement that you can get called “Shoot the Bullet”. You get it by taking a screenshot when there’s a ton of bullets on screen.
Damn, that’s cool! I think I actually met one of the devs for that game back in one of my college courses - he could have been making shit up, but I prefer to think that he was legit.
I would say Grayfruit has been better exposure to touhou to viewers than mostly any other outlet on the internet, just by being "guy playing the official games"
I mean there's full playthroughs, commented and not, spellcard discussions etc etc. It's just a niche genre just like gray said. i don't want to laser focus on a very technical game after being in school (before) or work (now) so even though I am a huge touhou fan, I barely played the official games.
The best part of 9.5 is the game over tips. About half of them are actual tips on how to play the game better, as the game is very different from previous entries to the series. The other half are @#$%posts of the highest order. My personal favorite is "This is a reminder that taking voyeuristic photographs in real life will get you arrested." Also I believe the in universe explanation for folks being "defeated" in this game is that the cast considers Aya a nuisance and after attempting (and failing) to chase her off they just leave. And tbh, fair. I would probably also leave if some rando walked up to me and started taking photographs of me without permission, especially if I had already asked them to stop.
It's the only one I've played so far. Very fun, but boy am I bad at this genre. Never got close to finishing Normal without continuing. Maybe I should play the rest of the games to get some practice and I'll be able to do it haha
Yeah, all Windows Touhous have "unlock everything" codes; but it was a fairly recent discovery, like a year or two ago, so you probably couldn't have used them back in the day.
34:49 This is my favorite Touhou character so I have to give this bit of lore. Mokou isn't kidding when she says she's invincible. She is straight up immortal. Non-fatal wounds regenerate after a while and total destruction just has her pop right back. This actually plays into her gimmick in one of the fighting games if you're ever doing those, where Mokou's gimmick is that some of her attacks damage her with recoverable health. And one of the her attacks, a fire pillar, recovers all of that white health. If you pay attention to the animation, you can see that she straight up just evaporates herself and then pops back into existence to recover health, and that's metal as fuck.
To add to this, in _Urban Legend in Limbo_ (Touhou 14.5), the characters get the powers of Urban Legends from our own world. One of my favorite gags from ULiL is that Mokou's Urban Legend is "spontaneous human combustion" (basically various stories/rumors/reports about people bursting into flames) and nobody, at ANY point in the story, EVER realizes this because it's just something Mokou does on a normal day.
It's very cool to hear him talking about the patterns, that's something that not a lot of people tend to talk about in Touhou, even though there's two entire official books dedicated to them.
fun fact! toby fox has been influenced by touhou may times, the most explicit of which was probably in the homestuck soundtrack where some of the songs are pretty much just remixes of touhou ones and a lot of them use the same soundfont
New grayfruit video? while im recovering from surgery????? this almost makes up for the nearly crippling abdominal pain! EDIT: On second thought, watching grayfruit while in a condition where laughing physically hurts me is not the best idea
I can explain this one at 18:21 , If I remember this correctly that is effectively yuyuko's dead body in that tree, she forgot her body was there over the 1000+ years since she died
Im so happy that you continued playing Touhou, its just a silly series with amazing music, and not many play the games so this is new even to me, a touhou fan, to see gameplay like this Can't wait to see if you continue the games, my fav ones are the coming after these so I really would love to see that Also, poor Wriggle, she was already kinda bullied in the fandom and now even grayfruit joins XD
It’s funny to me how as a child I used to be scared SHITLESS about Ronald McDonald Insanity (I have zero knowledge about Touhou at that time). Then growing up it was just inevitable that I’d stumble upon more Touhou on the interwebs and I’d be coming back to that same old video and see that wacky whahaha woohoo edit for what it is
Fun fact: this is the point where these games start being available on Steam. Because of how recently this series has started making its way onto the platform, only two of the ones shown here are currently available, and I find it hilarious which ones have been brought over thus far. It’s literally just the two weird ones at the end. Not Imperishable Night, which is a great starting point, not PCB, which Greyfruit’s chat says is the best, no. We got the two that play nothing like the others, because apparently it was important to add the games in reverse order, which had some amusing results. On the bright side, the game I want to play (Imperishable Night) is probably the one that’s next to be added.
sorry to say, 6 through 8 cant be added to steam because zun lost the source files and masters for them, otherwise they would be on the platform already
Something that's only partially touched on here (possibly because Grayfruit doesn't know the details), is that Touhou 6 is the start of what has been dubbed the "Windows Era" of Touhou, which has continued up until the present day. This is different from the "PC-98 Era" because Touhou 6 was essentially a _soft reboot_ of the series, and could also be considered the first time Touhou started taking itself seriously. Only four total characters from the PC-98 games have made it over to Windows, and basically everything from the PC-98 games is considered non-canon now.
"basically everything from the PC-98 games is considered non-canon now" that's a wrong statement, the official statement is "things from PC-98 have happened in some form, but later games take priority if contradictions happen" also it was PCB that rebooted the series, EoSD just happened to be canon unlike PC98 (you can read the omake and other extra materials and it's clear it was written in mind with PC98 still being canon)
@@offandsphere6788 unfortunately for them EoSD is a PC-98 game in a disguise: - No hitbox on focus, no boss marker - No quick restart (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) - You only get name if you have dialogue (F for Dai and Koa) - A lot of random and fast patterns - Some dialogue is nonsensical even for Touhou (English beef? Washington Convention? Reimu murdering Sakuya?) - Stage 5 is a maid who throws a lot of knives and is a pain in the ass (okay this is just MS but it's funny ZUN did it twice in a row) - Lore is pretty much minimal (the barrier didn't even exist yet)
@@ephraimium6755- The game has 5 stages on Easy, just like LLS. Sakuya even points it out like Yuuka does. - Annoyed portraits still have that iconic sweat drop from the PC-98 era. - In-game portraits only existed down to the waist. - The graphics aren't actually transparent, the game makes them look that way. -The name of the game's executable is in Japanese, just like the PC-98 games. No wonder A6 Yuuka and Alice were basically modernised versions of their PC-98 selves.
6:03 Terraria also takes a lot of inspiration from bullet hells when you think about it, especially with modded - but even in vanilla, you have bosses like Empress of Light and the Lunatic Cultist.
Bullet Hell patterns can be so neat, I especially like it when charact3rs have a theme to their patterns. I really like the Len'En Project (thrift store touhou, affectionate) and how it does things like having a character who uses a mix of direct attacks and indirect stuff, or a character whose gimmick is reflecting things.
The official stance on PC98 is actually the exact opposite of what you said. It is canon, unless it doesn't fit. Luckily, there is not many things that don't fit.
To be fair, “it’s not canon unless it does fit” and “it is canon until it doesn’t fit” are kinda the same thing, where it’s like “if no contradiction, then canon, if contradiction, then non canon”
@@Somerandomjingleberry I believe the exact stance is "it's canon until the windows games contradict something from pc98 in which case it's no longer canon" but it's also been stated that even if something were "non-canon" it's still probably vaguely canon as in approximately the events of those games happened ZUN wasn't exactly worried about the story back then if you can believe it
6:34 I feel Bullet Hells were a major genre in the arcade scene in the 80s and 90s, like Galaga, Xevious, and the like. It's just that the concept died there rather than evolving into like modern bullet hells in the japanese market. It also doesn't help that arcades are much less popular here.
Let's start with some fun facts! EoSD: - don't care there ain't much besides that we all call Meiling China cuz her name was written in chinese I believe. PCB: -Prismriver sisters are named after the Prismriver muscal instruments. Probably you did indeed notice, but I find it funny anyways. -They're also daughters of a girl called Prismriver something I don't remember her but she died or something and all got fucked up. -The trumpet one can bug out and just go doing the weirdest things getting out of the pattern she should have, so we all consider her crazy. This is pretty funny as her power is to "make souls happy with the sound of brass" and that "she can turn someone so euphoric that they become insane", being completly on character there. -Letty is considered fat cuz a bug on her hitbox makes her bigger. She is since then the official BBW for all the H fans out there. IN: -Voyage 1969. I just love that song and the reference. -There's a dialogue if you play marisa and alice in which reimu is scolding marisa for being a fucking prick and always making mischiev around and at the end of the dialogue marisa goes "OKAY OKAY. The night being so long, the youkai getting angry, the extrange length of this bamboo labyrinth and the silly hats on your shrine statues are all Alice's foult. NOW MOVE OUT OF THE WAY" which is my singular favourite line of dialogue. -Similarly, when fightning against mokou who is inmortal, marisa just says "Oh well no problem. She's inmortal but her clothes aren't" at which mokou just responds "Please don't". -Don't bully the tomboy cricket thing she's trying her best his best something what a fucking dweebus. PoFv: -EVERYONE and I say EVERYONE related Cirno with the number 9. In the manual of the game the number to explain what is something on the image that describes "the dumb enemy" is a 9, on top of Cirno, that's all. -Medicine Melancholy is probably the most secondary and unimportant character in the entire saga that has an official name (Koakuma didn't have a name until the fandom decided to give her one, and yet she has more stroy behind her than Medicine Melancholy). -There's a lot of nice dialogues in this one so nope I ain't quoting anything but the lore dumps here are a hellhole. StB: -This is the first time Suika shoots something instead of drinking and punching you I believe. -Really the game comments itself there isn't much there to say nor I have knowledge about it. Mima is dead just accept it everyone. Pinball machines want to kill your descendants whenever they give you an extra game. I would also recommend you to check some fangames now that you're here. They're all delightful to different degrees and, besides the risk of becoming a touhou streamer, I think you would enjoy the indie, lighthearted nature of -really- indie games trying -really- indie stuff, similar to flash games but with a little bit more punch and depth. There's been a new dungeon crawler on the works (dreams of arcadia I think?) that looks interesting. Also MariAli which is a puzzle platformer with dual characters if I remember well, then some 2D beat 'em ups like TouhouVania and uuuuuh something else It's been so many years since I played these. They're all lovely tho. Suika VS Mechasuika would probably take a laugh out of you if you even manage to understand how the fuck that plays cuz I don't know.
Her name is Layla Prismriver btw also they're not her daughters they're actually her sisters that got separated after they're dad died from a magical object, Layla made the current prismrivers (all based off her original sisters) with the magical object so she wouldn't be lonely, and due to them being poltergeists and Layla being a normal human, she died naturally like her original sisters while the poltergeist prismrivers became forgotten and got into gensokyo also Layla taught them instruments because her sisters used to play instruments until they got separated
Phantasmagoria: noun 1) a shifting series of phantasms, illusions, or deceptive appearances, as in a dream or as created by the imagination. 2) a changing scene made up of many elements.
As someone who's been a Touhou fan since I was literally 8 years old, watching Gray play through the series starting at the first game onward is really fun
It’s amazing how many people I’ve seen with this same experience, touhou was probably my first exposure to the “full internet” outside of the kid websites I was allowed on initially, and 7-8 year old me was so fucking obsessed, I’m now an adult, and despite no longer being a fan (I got new hobbies at like 11) the designs and music still hold a special place for me, especially since I work as an illustrator/character designer now, and I have a lot of respect for the series for basically getting me into art and appreciation of music 😅
For the PoFV version that I presume you have, you have to install a "Cirno" font (Yes, the font is actually named Cirno) in order for the translation to work right. Taking a shot in the dark; I assume that's the part that was giving you trouble with the English translation, and that the text was all misaligned and ran off the screen when you tried without it. The files for the font should be included in the game folder.
38:11 The shmup fighting gameplay thing is more commonly referred as "Twinkle Star Sprites clone". It's part of a very long history of fighting games and puzzle fighting games popularized by Puyo Puyo, but Twinkle Star Sprites have many dedicated fans and Touhou 3 and 9 aren't alone with this. You may want to check out Rival Megagun and Twinkle Star Sprites itself.
Part of the reason people like a lot of these games is because they really don't make arcade style games like this anymore. I think it'd probably hurt their uniqueness to try and make them more like modern games if anything. Of course, I would be open to seeing how that could be done.
@@HyperVanilo Uwah! Sweet! I looked up. Seeing high quality character art and voice acting in a Touhou shmup feels weird though haha. I was personally thinking about a game that had the same sort of UI visuals and SFX that the mainline series has. Updated art would be nice and it would make sense, but the idea of an official arcade cabinet installed in popular locations that just uses regular ZUNart sounds hilarious to me in a charming way.
Gray should also play Immaterial and Missing Power for the full experience. that is, the experience of losing two lives to Yukari's Infinitely Bullshit Flying Object. Also Gray DKOing on Resurrection Butterfly made me wheeze.
Props to the editor, they did a good job. Ps. The Touhou "Soundfont" is actully from a Edirol SD-90 Synth Module, basically a midi file playing devide. Also, the knocker kinda reminds me of a shishi odoshi (basically a device that scares deer away, its a bamboo fountain that as it pours the water out it makes a hollow "clonk" as it hits the ground)
So in the Phantasmagoria games, you can use your own Meter attacks to counter their Meter attacks, so waiting for them to use one then slamming them with your own is a good way to go. You can even bait it with a small attack, then counter their counter with a bigger counter.
6:30 realm of the mad god is a permadeath bullet hell mmo i've always loved the gameplay loop of but sadly its been dying for 12 years with no real hope of resurgence, i think markiplier played it in like 2015 and that's as mainstream as it ever got. the game has always had very prevalent p2w aspects and bad rwt/spam bot problems, but after playing for 7 years i always find myself crawling back to it. it still gets very frequent content updates, adding increasingly difficult dungeons over time. check out some gameplay of stuff like hardmode shatters(archmage fight/patience phase) or true kitsune umi
I noticed grayfruit skipped IaMP. ig if he's gonna cover it with Lark like other fighting games and not do story routes, it makes sense to wait until Soku since each trio of fighting games basically iterate on each other.
Nah mate, the satisfying feeling of the whole pinball machine reverberating when you win a game (can happen with score as well as the end) is crazy, idk anything else like it
7:50 YOU BROKE THE RULE! YOU BROKE THE RULE! YOU BROKE THE RULES YOU DINGUS!!!! In all seriousness the creator of the Touhou series ZUN made it kind of a rule in the fanbase not to show any of the endings screens so the only way you’d be able to see them is by beating them yourself
To be fair given Gray’s “I think aggressively placing content behind a ton of skill checks is a bit prohibitive and I don’t think the difficulty lovers lose anything if those checks are made optional cuz they’ll do them and have fun anyway” stance it kinda seems like he’d disagree with that policy just on principle
I’d been more interested in the Touhou series as pieces of culture than as actual games. _Shoot the Bullet_ is the first one of these I actually want to play.
I think that's fair enough, and not uncommon. A lot of people play these games curious to understand about Touhou as a subculture. Playing them can really help you see that. Shoot the Bullet and the other "scene games" as we call them (Double Spoiler which is the sequel, Impossible Spell Card, Violet Detector and Hundredth Black Market) are certainly very unique interpretations of the genre, so if you never cared for Bullet Hell before you could certainly see if giving it a new twist and objective could help it for you. Do be aware that the scene games are largely even harder than the mainline games, though.
"Bullet hells have yet to get a really big landmark hit in the West." 6:32 I'm gonna be that one guy (of probably many) who'd argue that Nier: Automata counts as bullet hell. And that one has a butt-load of international appreciation. *Get it?*
I am almost certain that the reason the loud knocker goes off is to let employees know that a free game was given, and be able to adjust the game if too many are given out. I have no evidence of this except that I have literally never had a game pay out a free game in my 27 years of existence.
Yeah Grayfruit the knockers in Pinball machines are honestly the best part when you get a Replay from score alone cause it tells everyone in the arcade "you actually got skill come look at this guy". Im a big fan of pinball and been to some tournaments and you hear these go off a lot in tourney settings. Also if you ever get the chance I highly recommend finding a Weird Al pinball machine at a local cause that shit is really cool
as someone studying japanese, once you learn a character, that shit is read as fast as a single letter. also, there are a lot of words with 2-3 characters that only ever appear together to make that one word, so after seeing like the first 1-2 characters you can guess the whole word and just glide through the characters. also on gaki, you can compound it with just about anything. ahogaki> stupid brat; kusogaki> shitty brat; erogaki> horny brat etc.
It's so refreshing to see a streamer actually delve into shmups. And not just touhou for the sake of it, but a bunch of classics in other vods. Shoutouts to the ketsui song at 36:55. Shmups do tend to have really good music, it's not just a touhou thing.
It's so surreal watching someone who knows more about touhou 98 then any of the PC games
fr the fact he can recongnize things mentioned from the old games in the new ones is awesome
Me:
Watching this gameplay is my first time seeing non-pc98 touhou gameplay lol
I mean, prior to this highlight's associated stream, he played the entirety of Touhou 1-5, so of course he's gonna know more about those games than he does the Modern games as his first exposure to the series.
@@Youhadabadday2021
Yeah exactly lol… that’s the surprising part. Out of the small percentage of touhou fans who’ve even PLAYED the games, most have only played the windows ones and glanced over PC-98. Finding a touhou fan who’s played through and knows the story of the pc-98 games is super rare lol
A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE TOUHOU PROJECT
Not new actually, scroll back to the earliest video from 5 months ago
Yeah he played Pc98 first so he’s kinda based lol
Im the new hand!!
Kosuzu pfp spotted. We are now friends
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
He’s so real for being basically a human soundboard but having THE single worst trump impression
Trump doesn't deserve a voice as easily-replicable as it is, it's a relief some are immune
@@quantumblauthor7300trump deserves this fate
For people having trouble looking for the minute: 15:47
fun fact: until touhou 12 zun would draw the clothes first and then eyeball where the arms, legs, etc. should be which is why the anatomy is a bit wonky in earlier games.
That is extremely interesting
Why.
@@rainphee its easier to draw the Body first? Im no artist but im pretty sure knowing what type of clothes (especially Coloring it) makes it easier to draw the heads and Limbs after..
@@Box_of_Octopus i am an artist as my job and i promise you that doing the clothes first and the body second is so utterly backwards
@@rainphee is doing it backwards a Bad thing? or are you saying that it is better to do the head first? (no offense)
3:30 IIRC spellcards were introduced specifically to make magic battles non-lethal, but back in PC-98 there were no spellcards and thus every battle was life-or-death. When Reimu said "let's bury em" she wasn't kidding
I thought it was because Reimu just destroyed everyone she went up against and it was a way for other people to actually win against her.
Shoutout to that time reimu offered a gay marriage to a boss in PC-98 and then murdered them so thoroughly she considered burying them on the spot like 3 minutes later
@@notloopers1110 Correction for proper lore chads and not yuribait shippers: Reimu was clearly fucking with Meira and gave zero fucks as Reimu in 98 was an absolute shit-talking gremlin. Post-battle dialogue confirms.
@@TheDarkArcherz funny prank regardless
@@TheDarkArcherz As if that's somehow more heterosexual of her lmao. "Russian taunt" core
Touhou isn't exactly my cup of tea, but I gotta give it to them, Alice Margatroid is a baller name. It's like the feminine version of Throckmorton.
Alice Megatron?
I think it's borrowed from a Agatha Christie novel.
Give it to him*
ZUN is a married man with 2 kids
@@HyperVaniloits easy to see why they're confused, its called Team Shanghai Alice and its literally just one guy
@@irisidem6580kinda. It’s a combination of Alice from Through the Looking Glass and Mrs Murgatroyd, which is an Agatha Christie character
Just wanna give props to Gexuma for showing a quarter-second clip of Everhood when Gray said 'undertale'
omg I must've looked away from the video when he said it, please do you remember the timestamp?
@@MrBlinky1010125:44
absolutely unbelievable
I was watching as it happened and didn't even notice. Thank you for this comment as it has convinced me to buy Everhood with like a minute of looking into it. I have no idea what this game is and I've never heard of it before but a steam review said "rhythm Undertale" and I was hooked.
@@Wewerefunny dont be afraid of easier difficulties if you arent familiar with rhythm games, its a little hard
Aside from like Mario, Sonic, and Pikachu, I think Flandre has one of the most iconic designs out there just purely being like "I've seen that character before"
I don't know, if you see a silhouette of Flandre you would think it's a humanize Marx
nobody's thinking Marx ima be honest bro
Small correction, they were definitely trying to kill each other before Spell Cards. The Spell Card system gamefied the magic bullet spray nonsense so that people would stop dying as much. c:
Back in the previous game, the burning houses in the background of the Stage 6 boss was that boss doing horrific collateral damage. Isn't that neat?
Welcome to the era of magic paintball!
4:35 My parents used to own an arcade and since I was little we've had a few pinball machines in my family's house, and whenever the game ended I would run away and cover my ears
You're so correct in describing it as a "nightmare feature" why does it have to be so LOUD
Apparently it's because arcades are loud so they have to make the sound loud enough to be heard by people nearby to basically be like "CHECK IT OUT THIS GUY WON"
The knocker. I'm 34, and I fucking hate that thing. I think there's one machine that uses a bell instead of a knocker when you get a free game.
Fun fact: All of Touhou (only the Windows main games) cheat codes are related to beers because ZUN is a drunkard
wasnt it only from touhou 10 and onwards,
@@Sky_nord
Nope, all of Windows games
Oh he's the only other person to ever point out how pinball machines have that really loud thing when you get a free game
It’s genuinely amazing how much content he can get out of a game that runs at 30x the speed. Pretty cool of grayfruit to play the entire game like that, too!
What a god of a gamer
Reminds me of a streamer named Scorpy who played thru all of the Philosipher's Stone on PC at like 2x speed and it was a wild ride
(note: you can look him up as "Socpens" so you don't get any results for minecraft vids made by a different guy with the same name)
I didn’t even notice this before, but the game Monolith (or I guess Star of Providence now), which is itself a danmaku and certainly inspired by Touhou, has a Steam Achievement that you can get called “Shoot the Bullet”. You get it by taking a screenshot when there’s a ton of bullets on screen.
oh? hell yeah! i gotta get that achiviement now
Was just about to comment this, I had to check myself. Love that game
Damn, that’s cool! I think I actually met one of the devs for that game back in one of my college courses - he could have been making shit up, but I prefer to think that he was legit.
calling Wriggle a dweebus is just .... perfect
Love your username
@@SlyHikari03 thank you
I would say Grayfruit has been better exposure to touhou to viewers than mostly any other outlet on the internet, just by being "guy playing the official games"
I mean there's full playthroughs, commented and not, spellcard discussions etc etc.
It's just a niche genre just like gray said. i don't want to laser focus on a very technical game after being in school (before) or work (now) so even though I am a huge touhou fan, I barely played the official games.
"Shoutouts to big yellow"
Peak mentioning peak, my day is improved dramatically
When did that happen?
@@lofigalaxy1272Shoutouts at 43:48.
The best part of 9.5 is the game over tips. About half of them are actual tips on how to play the game better, as the game is very different from previous entries to the series. The other half are @#$%posts of the highest order. My personal favorite is "This is a reminder that taking voyeuristic photographs in real life will get you arrested."
Also I believe the in universe explanation for folks being "defeated" in this game is that the cast considers Aya a nuisance and after attempting (and failing) to chase her off they just leave. And tbh, fair. I would probably also leave if some rando walked up to me and started taking photographs of me without permission, especially if I had already asked them to stop.
Touhou 6 was the first one I played. Have fond, stressful memories of trying to clear it without continuing. I didn't know there was a code!
It's the only one I've played so far. Very fun, but boy am I bad at this genre. Never got close to finishing Normal without continuing. Maybe I should play the rest of the games to get some practice and I'll be able to do it haha
Yeah, all Windows Touhous have "unlock everything" codes; but it was a fairly recent discovery, like a year or two ago, so you probably couldn't have used them back in the day.
Found you
34:49
This is my favorite Touhou character so I have to give this bit of lore.
Mokou isn't kidding when she says she's invincible. She is straight up immortal. Non-fatal wounds regenerate after a while and total destruction just has her pop right back.
This actually plays into her gimmick in one of the fighting games if you're ever doing those, where Mokou's gimmick is that some of her attacks damage her with recoverable health. And one of the her attacks, a fire pillar, recovers all of that white health. If you pay attention to the animation, you can see that she straight up just evaporates herself and then pops back into existence to recover health, and that's metal as fuck.
To add to this, in _Urban Legend in Limbo_ (Touhou 14.5), the characters get the powers of Urban Legends from our own world.
One of my favorite gags from ULiL is that Mokou's Urban Legend is "spontaneous human combustion" (basically various stories/rumors/reports about people bursting into flames) and nobody, at ANY point in the story, EVER realizes this because it's just something Mokou does on a normal day.
that's insane
yes
if I had touhou powers I'd use some pain magic, and use it on her till she faints. I recall something like this happend in the manga or elsewhere?
love watching touhou stuff and being like "oh THAT'S what that terraria mod was referencing" at multiple points
Where did this beautiful art come from? With a thumbnail like that I didn’t even realize it was a grayfruit video
The artist is credited in the description
Please read the description
For a moment I thought it was Sr Pelo,
I was most definitely wrong
Shoutout to olistar
27:49 Oh my god the loading text in the bottom right has tiny grayfruits falling off it, What an insane detail
It's very cool to hear him talking about the patterns, that's something that not a lot of people tend to talk about in Touhou, even though there's two entire official books dedicated to them.
fun fact! toby fox has been influenced by touhou may times, the most explicit of which was probably in the homestuck soundtrack where some of the songs are pretty much just remixes of touhou ones and a lot of them use the same soundfont
25:44 every synapse in my brain fired when you showed that 1 second of everhood
New grayfruit video? while im recovering from surgery????? this almost makes up for the nearly crippling abdominal pain!
EDIT: On second thought, watching grayfruit while in a condition where laughing physically hurts me is not the best idea
F. Hope you recovered well.
love to see Gexuma working on official grayfruit vids
I can explain this one at 18:21 ,
If I remember this correctly that is effectively yuyuko's dead body in that tree, she forgot her body was there over the 1000+ years since she died
nah, it's the tree itself fighting back
Im so happy that you continued playing Touhou, its just a silly series with amazing music, and not many play the games so this is new even to me, a touhou fan, to see gameplay like this
Can't wait to see if you continue the games, my fav ones are the coming after these so I really would love to see that
Also, poor Wriggle, she was already kinda bullied in the fandom and now even grayfruit joins XD
It’s funny to me how as a child I used to be scared SHITLESS about Ronald McDonald Insanity (I have zero knowledge about Touhou at that time). Then growing up it was just inevitable that I’d stumble upon more Touhou on the interwebs and I’d be coming back to that same old video and see that wacky whahaha woohoo edit for what it is
Fun fact: this is the point where these games start being available on Steam. Because of how recently this series has started making its way onto the platform, only two of the ones shown here are currently available, and I find it hilarious which ones have been brought over thus far.
It’s literally just the two weird ones at the end. Not Imperishable Night, which is a great starting point, not PCB, which Greyfruit’s chat says is the best, no. We got the two that play nothing like the others, because apparently it was important to add the games in reverse order, which had some amusing results. On the bright side, the game I want to play (Imperishable Night) is probably the one that’s next to be added.
sorry to say, 6 through 8 cant be added to steam because zun lost the source files and masters for them, otherwise they would be on the platform already
@@ofthenoseclan Oh.
Sadly eosd can't be added onto steam
Something that's only partially touched on here (possibly because Grayfruit doesn't know the details), is that Touhou 6 is the start of what has been dubbed the "Windows Era" of Touhou, which has continued up until the present day. This is different from the "PC-98 Era" because Touhou 6 was essentially a _soft reboot_ of the series, and could also be considered the first time Touhou started taking itself seriously. Only four total characters from the PC-98 games have made it over to Windows, and basically everything from the PC-98 games is considered non-canon now.
"basically everything from the PC-98 games is considered non-canon now"
that's a wrong statement, the official statement is "things from PC-98 have happened in some form, but later games take priority if contradictions happen"
also it was PCB that rebooted the series, EoSD just happened to be canon unlike PC98 (you can read the omake and other extra materials and it's clear it was written in mind with PC98 still being canon)
@@Dukstless then you have the pc-98 haters that to their credit do know japanese and those haters say that the zun pc98 interview was mistranslated
@@offandsphere6788 unfortunately for them EoSD is a PC-98 game in a disguise:
- No hitbox on focus, no boss marker
- No quick restart (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)
- You only get name if you have dialogue (F for Dai and Koa)
- A lot of random and fast patterns
- Some dialogue is nonsensical even for Touhou (English beef? Washington Convention? Reimu murdering Sakuya?)
- Stage 5 is a maid who throws a lot of knives and is a pain in the ass (okay this is just MS but it's funny ZUN did it twice in a row)
- Lore is pretty much minimal (the barrier didn't even exist yet)
@@Dukstless - Insanely brutal Rank system that fluctuates based on how well player do
- No replay save for practice mode
@@ephraimium6755- The game has 5 stages on Easy, just like LLS. Sakuya even points it out like Yuuka does.
- Annoyed portraits still have that iconic sweat drop from the PC-98 era.
- In-game portraits only existed down to the waist.
- The graphics aren't actually transparent, the game makes them look that way.
-The name of the game's executable is in Japanese, just like the PC-98 games.
No wonder A6 Yuuka and Alice were basically modernised versions of their PC-98 selves.
6:03 Terraria also takes a lot of inspiration from bullet hells when you think about it, especially with modded - but even in vanilla, you have bosses like Empress of Light and the Lunatic Cultist.
But you not even bother talking about the Destroyer that thing is pure bullet-hell game inspired
Still having flashbacks to Masomode EoL and the "speen" attack.
@@thebirdgamer1522 I think people are too busy throwing entire wheels of finely aged cheese at him to notice
For example, Calamity is jam packed with Touhou references
@@PhantomGato-v- I didn't realize it had the references to touhou
"Either this or the night of the nights are one of the most remixed song"
Sir, Its called Flowering Nights
Bullet Hell patterns can be so neat, I especially like it when charact3rs have a theme to their patterns. I really like the Len'En Project (thrift store touhou, affectionate) and how it does things like having a character who uses a mix of direct attacks and indirect stuff, or a character whose gimmick is reflecting things.
The official stance on PC98 is actually the exact opposite of what you said. It is canon, unless it doesn't fit. Luckily, there is not many things that don't fit.
To be fair, “it’s not canon unless it does fit” and “it is canon until it doesn’t fit” are kinda the same thing, where it’s like “if no contradiction, then canon, if contradiction, then non canon”
@@Somerandomjingleberry I believe the exact stance is "it's canon until the windows games contradict something from pc98 in which case it's no longer canon" but it's also been stated that even if something were "non-canon" it's still probably vaguely canon as in approximately the events of those games happened
ZUN wasn't exactly worried about the story back then if you can believe it
Good to see more Touhou. Glad you've been enjoying the series, it's always fun to catch the streams when they're up.
I love the mention of Undertale with the smash-cut to Everhood
10:56
IM SORRY BUT HE SOUNDS LIKE ONE OF THE PETERS FROM THAT ONE PETER QUARTET CUTAWAY 😭😭😭
6:34 I feel Bullet Hells were a major genre in the arcade scene in the 80s and 90s, like Galaga, Xevious, and the like. It's just that the concept died there rather than evolving into like modern bullet hells in the japanese market. It also doesn't help that arcades are much less popular here.
Dude has accomplished the impossible by being able to play Touhou 6 for the first time after doing all the PC-98 games.
I tried to "viewer get in here on this" and grayfruit pranked me by immediately cutting away.
"I think Donald Trump would like Touhou"
- grayfruit, 2 thousand and whatever
even before grayfruit asked, I'd already went to overlap my mouse with the other two
EVERHOOD MENTIONED. Now you MUST play it.
Let's start with some fun facts!
EoSD:
- don't care there ain't much besides that we all call Meiling China cuz her name was written in chinese I believe.
PCB:
-Prismriver sisters are named after the Prismriver muscal instruments. Probably you did indeed notice, but I find it funny anyways.
-They're also daughters of a girl called Prismriver something I don't remember her but she died or something and all got fucked up.
-The trumpet one can bug out and just go doing the weirdest things getting out of the pattern she should have, so we all consider her crazy. This is pretty funny as her power is to "make souls happy with the sound of brass" and that "she can turn someone so euphoric that they become insane", being completly on character there.
-Letty is considered fat cuz a bug on her hitbox makes her bigger. She is since then the official BBW for all the H fans out there.
IN:
-Voyage 1969. I just love that song and the reference.
-There's a dialogue if you play marisa and alice in which reimu is scolding marisa for being a fucking prick and always making mischiev around and at the end of the dialogue marisa goes "OKAY OKAY. The night being so long, the youkai getting angry, the extrange length of this bamboo labyrinth and the silly hats on your shrine statues are all Alice's foult. NOW MOVE OUT OF THE WAY" which is my singular favourite line of dialogue.
-Similarly, when fightning against mokou who is inmortal, marisa just says "Oh well no problem. She's inmortal but her clothes aren't" at which mokou just responds "Please don't".
-Don't bully the tomboy cricket thing she's trying her best his best something what a fucking dweebus.
PoFv:
-EVERYONE and I say EVERYONE related Cirno with the number 9. In the manual of the game the number to explain what is something on the image that describes "the dumb enemy" is a 9, on top of Cirno, that's all.
-Medicine Melancholy is probably the most secondary and unimportant character in the entire saga that has an official name (Koakuma didn't have a name until the fandom decided to give her one, and yet she has more stroy behind her than Medicine Melancholy).
-There's a lot of nice dialogues in this one so nope I ain't quoting anything but the lore dumps here are a hellhole.
StB:
-This is the first time Suika shoots something instead of drinking and punching you I believe.
-Really the game comments itself there isn't much there to say nor I have knowledge about it.
Mima is dead just accept it everyone.
Pinball machines want to kill your descendants whenever they give you an extra game.
I would also recommend you to check some fangames now that you're here. They're all delightful to different degrees and, besides the risk of becoming a touhou streamer, I think you would enjoy the indie, lighthearted nature of -really- indie games trying -really- indie stuff, similar to flash games but with a little bit more punch and depth. There's been a new dungeon crawler on the works (dreams of arcadia I think?) that looks interesting. Also MariAli which is a puzzle platformer with dual characters if I remember well, then some 2D beat 'em ups like TouhouVania and uuuuuh something else It's been so many years since I played these. They're all lovely tho. Suika VS Mechasuika would probably take a laugh out of you if you even manage to understand how the fuck that plays cuz I don't know.
Her name is Layla Prismriver btw also they're not her daughters they're actually her sisters that got separated after they're dad died from a magical object, Layla made the current prismrivers (all based off her original sisters) with the magical object so she wouldn't be lonely, and due to them being poltergeists and Layla being a normal human, she died naturally like her original sisters while the poltergeist prismrivers became forgotten and got into gensokyo also Layla taught them instruments because her sisters used to play instruments until they got separated
@@Unbelievablyunfunny true, that's all the "fucked up or something" I didn't remember
This guy's commentary is somehow addicting
so awesome to see someone enjoying these games with a fresh pair of eyes :')
Phantasmagoria:
noun
1) a shifting series of phantasms, illusions, or deceptive appearances, as in a dream or as created by the imagination.
2) a changing scene made up of many elements.
yeah
As someone who's been a Touhou fan since I was literally 8 years old, watching Gray play through the series starting at the first game onward is really fun
It’s amazing how many people I’ve seen with this same experience, touhou was probably my first exposure to the “full internet” outside of the kid websites I was allowed on initially, and 7-8 year old me was so fucking obsessed, I’m now an adult, and despite no longer being a fan (I got new hobbies at like 11) the designs and music still hold a special place for me, especially since I work as an illustrator/character designer now, and I have a lot of respect for the series for basically getting me into art and appreciation of music 😅
For the PoFV version that I presume you have, you have to install a "Cirno" font (Yes, the font is actually named Cirno) in order for the translation to work right. Taking a shot in the dark; I assume that's the part that was giving you trouble with the English translation, and that the text was all misaligned and ran off the screen when you tried without it. The files for the font should be included in the game folder.
The Everhood clip is very much appreciated (also Gexuma did an awesome job editing as usual)
7:05 I was scared that he would ask this question it hurts 😭
Glad to see that grayfruit is a fellow Reisen enjoyer
OMG I FREAKED OUT WHEN HE DIED THE MOMENT HE FINISHED RESSURECTION BUTTERFLY I LITERALLY FUCKING SCREAMED
I do find it funny that Momma Toriel got Baby Flandre's attack.
Touhou fan excited to play their favorite game for the first time
Gee Reimu, I guess it really WAS an imperishable night 🤠 also always nice to be reminded how insanely wacky and charming these games are lmao
"It's like we're holding hands. Viewer, get in on this"
[Scene cuts before I can get in on this 😠]
38:11 The shmup fighting gameplay thing is more commonly referred as "Twinkle Star Sprites clone". It's part of a very long history of fighting games and puzzle fighting games popularized by Puyo Puyo, but Twinkle Star Sprites have many dedicated fans and Touhou 3 and 9 aren't alone with this. You may want to check out Rival Megagun and Twinkle Star Sprites itself.
"Why is Japan obsessed with Jack the Ripper?" Because England is a big thing in Japan, has been for a long time. Hello Kitty is English for instance.
bullet hells were very popular in latin america, specially the metal slug series and anything SNK
Bullet hells would be fun to see coming into a modern age and not just staying with the old arcade style.
Part of the reason people like a lot of these games is because they really don't make arcade style games like this anymore. I think it'd probably hurt their uniqueness to try and make them more like modern games if anything. Of course, I would be open to seeing how that could be done.
I think a Touhou arcade cabinet would go so fucking hard
There is a Touhou arcade cabinet, Perfect Sakura Fantastica, it's basically the arcade port of Fantastic Danmaku Festival 2
@@HyperVanilo Uwah! Sweet! I looked up. Seeing high quality character art and voice acting in a Touhou shmup feels weird though haha. I was personally thinking about a game that had the same sort of UI visuals and SFX that the mainline series has. Updated art would be nice and it would make sense, but the idea of an official arcade cabinet installed in popular locations that just uses regular ZUNart sounds hilarious to me in a charming way.
14:46 the way grayfruit says prismriver has me dying
18:28
The worst feeling you could ever get in one of these games.
oh, he PLAYED these games
Perfectly timed considering how I just got into touhou and watched your previous vid yesterday lol
Gray should also play Immaterial and Missing Power for the full experience.
that is, the experience of losing two lives to Yukari's Infinitely Bullshit Flying Object.
Also Gray DKOing on Resurrection Butterfly made me wheeze.
It's a shame you didn't have English translation for Touhou 9, it has some of the best dialogue in the series.
35:20 Perfectly timed
Props to the editor, they did a good job.
Ps. The Touhou "Soundfont" is actully from a Edirol SD-90 Synth Module, basically a midi file playing devide.
Also, the knocker kinda reminds me of a shishi odoshi (basically a device that scares deer away, its a bamboo fountain that as it pours the water out it makes a hollow "clonk" as it hits the ground)
So in the Phantasmagoria games, you can use your own Meter attacks to counter their Meter attacks, so waiting for them to use one then slamming them with your own is a good way to go. You can even bait it with a small attack, then counter their counter with a bigger counter.
if only he got as far as the "Ultimate Buddhist" spellcards on the touhou 7 extras. woulda loved to see his live john twitch reaction
"did she use 3 attacks in a row on me?? She's bullying"
Zanmu using 1000 attacks in touhou 19
Touhou 8 extra was so much fun, took me a week of constant dying to finally clear it
6:30 realm of the mad god is a permadeath bullet hell mmo i've always loved the gameplay loop of but sadly its been dying for 12 years with no real hope of resurgence, i think markiplier played it in like 2015 and that's as mainstream as it ever got. the game has always had very prevalent p2w aspects and bad rwt/spam bot problems, but after playing for 7 years i always find myself crawling back to it. it still gets very frequent content updates, adding increasingly difficult dungeons over time. check out some gameplay of stuff like hardmode shatters(archmage fight/patience phase) or true kitsune umi
Hearing all of this music brings me back so much. All the classic TF2 and OLD SPICE BODY BLOCKER BODYWASH remixes
I wonder when Grayfruit will find out about Yukari's trains
[Edit] Fahrenheit 621? Don't tell froot about the furries
I noticed grayfruit skipped IaMP. ig if he's gonna cover it with Lark like other fighting games and not do story routes, it makes sense to wait until Soku since each trio of fighting games basically iterate on each other.
Nah mate, the satisfying feeling of the whole pinball machine reverberating when you win a game (can happen with score as well as the end) is crazy, idk anything else like it
2:56 Touhou gaming sound
I'm glad Mr. Fruit is playing these games and having fun with them because it's so nice to enjoy them calmly :)
It should be known with the characters a lot of websites actually have more touhou fan art than they do nsfw art
i really truly hope he knows about all the amazing touhou fighting games
I dont know what a toe how is but is this a game or a bunch of funny shapes that dance around
Play your song, funny two who man
@@bawbehh anime grills? No my bbq is american made
That McDonalds ad remix gave me whiplash to my childhood so cool to know it wasn't forgotten media
7:50 YOU BROKE THE RULE! YOU BROKE THE RULE! YOU BROKE THE RULES YOU DINGUS!!!!
In all seriousness the creator of the Touhou series ZUN made it kind of a rule in the fanbase not to show any of the endings screens so the only way you’d be able to see them is by beating them yourself
He came across that issue when looking up the endings for the older games, he wasn't able to find any good videos and chat informed him of that
To be fair given Gray’s “I think aggressively placing content behind a ton of skill checks is a bit prohibitive and I don’t think the difficulty lovers lose anything if those checks are made optional cuz they’ll do them and have fun anyway” stance it kinda seems like he’d disagree with that policy just on principle
I’d been more interested in the Touhou series as pieces of culture than as actual games. _Shoot the Bullet_ is the first one of these I actually want to play.
I think that's fair enough, and not uncommon. A lot of people play these games curious to understand about Touhou as a subculture. Playing them can really help you see that.
Shoot the Bullet and the other "scene games" as we call them (Double Spoiler which is the sequel, Impossible Spell Card, Violet Detector and Hundredth Black Market) are certainly very unique interpretations of the genre, so if you never cared for Bullet Hell before you could certainly see if giving it a new twist and objective could help it for you. Do be aware that the scene games are largely even harder than the mainline games, though.
"Bullet hells have yet to get a really big landmark hit in the West." 6:32
I'm gonna be that one guy (of probably many) who'd argue that Nier: Automata counts as bullet hell.
And that one has a butt-load of international appreciation.
*Get it?*
i remember watching the vods a while back, this is quite pog
I am almost certain that the reason the loud knocker goes off is to let employees know that a free game was given, and be able to adjust the game if too many are given out. I have no evidence of this except that I have literally never had a game pay out a free game in my 27 years of existence.
I honestly wouldn't mind watching Grayfruit mastering Touhou on stream.
Yeah Grayfruit the knockers in Pinball machines are honestly the best part when you get a Replay from score alone cause it tells everyone in the arcade "you actually got skill come look at this guy".
Im a big fan of pinball and been to some tournaments and you hear these go off a lot in tourney settings. Also if you ever get the chance I highly recommend finding a Weird Al pinball machine at a local cause that shit is really cool
as someone studying japanese, once you learn a character, that shit is read as fast as a single letter. also, there are a lot of words with 2-3 characters that only ever appear together to make that one word, so after seeing like the first 1-2 characters you can guess the whole word and just glide through the characters.
also on gaki, you can compound it with just about anything. ahogaki> stupid brat; kusogaki> shitty brat; erogaki> horny brat etc.
love watching other people play touhou. each gameplay I see feels different and I love seeing their reaction to what surprises it offers.
It's so refreshing to see a streamer actually delve into shmups. And not just touhou for the sake of it, but a bunch of classics in other vods.
Shoutouts to the ketsui song at 36:55. Shmups do tend to have really good music, it's not just a touhou thing.
That thumbnail is sick
11:03 he sounds like he just got slapped in real life. So good. Never change.
This was the video that introduced me to Touhou. Touhou has consumed my life 6 months later. Thank you for showing me a gem of a franchise.