Touhou Project (aka 東方Project) is a doujin game series focused on, but not exclusive to, the shmup (danmaku/bullet hell) genre, made by a man named ZUN. it spans 30 games, both mainline and spin-offs, and started with PC-98 followed by the current and canon windows series. its also known as being hugely influential in japan and having a very flourishing (and unfortunately weird) doujinshi scene despite being made by a single man during high school. a lot of people know it for its parody flash videos made by fans, and the fanon basically towering over canon for a few years (until people got better and realized that the way the fandom treats the characters is kinda shit). oh, and its also known for having 100+ characters and like 98% of them are girls in frilly dresses.
touhou has been in my life for a little over 8 years now! i think theres a lot of reasons why i love touhou, honestly.
i think, first of all, is that it has a lot of girls. and i like girls. and i like girl characters! and designing girl characters! and theres a lot of girls in touhou. like, over 100 of them. theres no shortage of girls in touhou. their designs are all very good and fun, and also strikingly creative despite the amount of them, and a lot of them also have some damn good stories, or even just their concepts. i cant say im very knowledgeable about touhou lore because theres a lot of material to work through, but the things i do know already sold me on these girls and got me attached to them.
secondly, the music is just godlike. despite zun having to make almost all of it himself (with the exception of the tasofro spin offs, which have the help of other musicians) there are so many good tunes in touhou that i even have a hard time figuring out which one is my favorite. every installment in its series has at least one good song, and some of them have so many itd be easier telling you what songs i DONT like. not only that, but i listen to the fan arrangements of these themes LITERALLY daily. touhou music good. if you dont listen to it, youre missing out.
thirdly, i just have a lot of fun playing the games, regardless of how good i am (spoiler: im not good.) i never got past easy mode in the main games, and if i were to play an online match on hisountesoku, id get my ass handed to me, but that doesnt stop me from enjoying the games one bit. hell, lately ive been actually managing to get 1CCs in certain games, like MoF and WBaWC, which is a first for me, and so, so satisfying. despite the fandom being a bit harsh on bad players, the games themselves only give you a slap on the wrist by forcing a bad ending, which isnt that bad because, i mean.. well, you can find the endings online anyway. so, thats just another reason why i love touhou so much.
