50 Fun Facts About Touhou Project

Which one-man developer has written the code, art, story and music for the mainline Touhou Project games?

ZUN is the pen name of Jun'ya Ota, who started the series as a mathematics student and built it up as a one-man studio.

In Touhou Project, what is the name of the hidden land sealed off from the outside world by a barrier?

Gensokyo literally means Fantasy Land, and things forgotten by everyone else, from extinct animals to lost tools, turn up there.

Which Touhou song became world-famous through a black-and-white shadow-art video posted on Niconico?

Bad Apple!! began as a stage theme in the fourth Touhou game in 1998, and its video is now ported to old computers as a kind of graphical 'Hello, World!'.

Reimu, the main heroine of Touhou Project, holds which Shinto role instead of a shooter's usual pilot?

Shrine maiden is the job Reimu does at the Hakurei Shrine, the only known gateway between her hidden homeland and modern Japan.

Remilia Scarlet, who rules the Scarlet Devil Mansion in Touhou, is which kind of supernatural being?

A vampire more than 500 years old, Remilia was given a childlike personality as a deliberate contrast with how such long-lived creatures are usually shown.

Which Touhou ice fairy is tied to the circled number nine after a game manual labeled her an idiot?

Cirno went on to star in the fan song 'Cirno's Perfect Math Class', and her fame even earned a promotional tie-in with McDonald's Japan.

Sakuya Izayoi, the time-stopping, knife-throwing maid of Touhou, was inspired by a villain from which manga?

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure supplied Dio Brando, whose frozen seconds and flung blades Sakuya borrows while running her mistress's household.

Which organization recognized Touhou Project in 2010 as the most prolific fan-made shooter series ever?

Guinness World Records honoured the flood of fan games the series inspired, which its creator invites by placing few limits on derivative works.

Which indie game creator has cited Touhou Project as one of his musical influences?

Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, joins a huge following for the series' soundtracks, which fans rearrange onto albums sold by the stack at Japanese conventions.

Touhou Project belongs to which shooter subgenre, adopted with its second game, Story of Eastern Wonderland?

Bullet hell games bury the screen in slow, ornate patterns, and Touhou's creator says those patterns are how his characters and plots come across.

Which human magician, first met as a Stage 4 boss, became the second main playable heroine of Touhou Project?

Marisa Kirisame mastered magic through sheer hard work rather than birth, and the fan song 'Marisa Stole the Precious Thing' became a widely parodied meme.

Touhou Project games rank their difficulty settings Easy, Normal, Hard and then which signature top level?

Lunatic has been the top setting since the very first game, which also introduced the last-resort bomb that wipes the screen clean.

At which Japanese fan convention did 2,372 Touhou Project circles break the single-series participation record?

Comiket is also where the series first went on sale: its first two games debuted there in 1997 and sold just 80 copies between them.

Kaguya, the exiled moon princess of Touhou's Imperishable Night, comes from which classic Japanese folktale?

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter also shapes the final battle, where Kaguya challenges the heroines with her 'Five Impossible Requests'.

In Touhou lore, the moon rabbit Reisen fled to Earth fearing an invasion during which real space mission?

Apollo 11 looked like the start of a human attack to Reisen, and nobody in her new home can set her straight because they never heard of the landing.

In Touhou's Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, how is the Extra Stage boss Flandre related to Remilia Scarlet?

Her younger sister Flandre stays in the mansion basement, and a magic rainstorm is conjured to stop her slipping out.

Which Touhou boss theme for Flandre Scarlet reached Western audiences through a viral Ronald McDonald remix video?

U.N. Owen Was Her? later became a staple of Black MIDI, a hobby of cramming absurd numbers of notes into a single piece.

Suika Ibuki, the tiny Touhou powerhouse who loves drink, feasts and contests, is which creature of Japanese folklore?

An oni several hundred years old, Suika can thin herself into mist, and she kept the parties going to lure her hidden kin back out.

Touhou Project lost the entertainment Grand Prize at Japan's 11th Media Arts Awards to which Nintendo game?

Wii Sports took the prize, but a nomination from the Agency for Cultural Affairs was striking for a hobbyist series sold at fan events.

The first five Touhou Project games were written in the 1990s for which ageing Japanese home computer?

PC-98 machines gave the early games their FM-synthesis music, and the later jump to Windows was treated as a clean slate for the story.

Which Touhou meme of disembodied heads telling viewers to take it easy now narrates countless Japanese videos?

Yukkuri began as crude text art of the two lead heroines in 2007, and their catchphrase took bronze in Japan's 2008 Net Slang of the Year.

What name is given to the Touhou plush dolls with blank, scornful faces designed by the illustrator Neji?

FumoFumo dolls, made by the merchandise company Gift, became an online craze that has set off panic buying whenever stock appears.

In Touhou's Subterranean Animism, the hell raven Utsuho gains which power by consuming the divine crow Yatagarasu?

Nuclear fusion was meant to turn Hell into an energy source, and the extra heat is what burst a geyser open beside the Hakurei Shrine.

Kogasa Tatara of Touhou's Undefined Fantastic Object became a yokai after being forgotten as which everyday object?

An umbrella left behind for too long, Kogasa is bored and lonely, so she keeps trying to perfect the art of scaring humans.

Which half-ghost gardener of Touhou's Netherworld fights with a long katana and a short wakizashi?

Youmu Konpaku's longer blade is said to kill ten ghosts in one slash, and it was she who stole spring itself on her mistress's orders.

Which Touhou sage, a yokai who manipulates boundaries, helped create the barrier that hides her homeland?

Yukari Yakumo sleeps twelve hours a day, so her servant Ran handles most of the daily upkeep on those borders.

Which asthmatic magician runs the vast underground library of Touhou's Scarlet Devil Mansion?

Patchouli Knowledge has lived for over 100 years and rarely leaves her books, casting elemental magic drawn from the Chinese five phases.

Which tengu newspaper reporter is the playable star of Touhou's photography game Shoot the Bullet?

Aya Shameimaru has no ordinary shot in that game: her camera is both attack and defence, wiping enemy fire off the screen with each photo.

Touhou's creator drinks daily, has brewed his own label and has reviewed which beverage for a magazine?

Beer is such a fixture for him that he once programmed Uwabami Breakers, a shooter themed around it, and he names Kirin as his favourite brand.

Which doujin circle handles the art and gameplay of Touhou's official fighting-game spin-offs?

Twilight Frontier pitched the partnership because its lead wanted to make an aerial fighter without inventing a whole new cast and world.

Flandre Scarlet's dialogue and one of her attack names in Touhou quote which Agatha Christie mystery novel?

And Then There Were None also supplies lines for one heroine, who taunts the beaten boss with the book's counting rhyme.

Which theme for Remilia Scarlet did Touhou's composer write as a homage to a Maurice Ravel pavane?

Septette for the Dead Princess is one of two tracks its composer called most representative of the game, part of a push for a brighter, jazz-fusion sound.

According to her Touhou profile, the mistress Remilia Scarlet's signature ability is to manipulate what?

Fate is what Remilia claims to steer, though later works question whether she alters anything or simply predicts what is coming.

Suika Ibuki made her debut in which Touhou spin-off, the first fighting game in the series?

Immaterial and Missing Power is numbered 7.5 because its story sits between two main games, even though it came out after the later one.

Which Touhou magician, known as the Seven-Colored Puppeteer, fights by controlling many dolls at once?

Alice Margatroid never fights at full strength, preferring to win by a slim margin so that the battle stays fun.

Which ghost princess rules the Netherworld mansion Hakugyokurou in Touhou's Perfect Cherry Blossom?

Yuyuko Saigyouji wanted a demonic tree to flower so she could revive the body sealed beneath it, never suspecting that the body was her own.

Which Moriya Shrine wind priestess, once revered as a living god, became playable in Touhou's twelfth game?

Sanae Kochiya first appeared as the messenger who ordered the Hakurei Shrine to close, serving a goddess hungry for the worship of the whole land.

Hidden Star in Four Seasons marked Touhou's 2017 debut on which digital storefront?

Steam went on to carry nearly every main Windows entry, though three early favourites stayed absent for years amid talk that their source code was lost.

In Touhou games, which term describes letting enemy bullets brush the character sprite without hitting the hitbox?

Grazing rewards risk with bonus points, and since the hitbox is far smaller than the sprite, skilled players can do it constantly.

Embodiment of Scarlet Devil introduced which Touhou system that gives each boss attack pattern its own name?

Spell Cards were first devised in 1999 for another shooter series, as a way to label patterns and add depth to the characters firing them.

Which Touhou shopkeeper runs the antique store Kourindou and narrates the novel Curiosities of Lotus Asia?

Rinnosuke Morichika is one of the few male characters in a cast of more than 180, nearly all of them girls and women.

Which immortal Touhou extra boss drank the stolen Hourai Elixir and now feuds endlessly with Kaguya?

Fujiwara no Mokou is a nobleman's daughter out for revenge, because Kaguya's impossible requests had once humiliated her father.

Which Lunarian pharmacist in Touhou's Imperishable Night swapped the real moon for a fake to hide her princess?

Eirin Yagokoro brewed the immortality elixir herself, and guilt over it drove her to kill her fellow envoys and flee with the princess.

Which bored celestial levels the Hakurei Shrine with an earthquake in Touhou's Scarlet Weather Rhapsody?

Tenshi Hinanai found Heaven dull and envied the troublemakers below, so she staged a disaster of her own in the hope that someone would come and beat her.

Toyosatomimi no Miko, the Touhou saint who can listen to ten people at once, is based on which historical figure?

Prince Shotoku inspired this final boss, and a temple had been built for the very purpose of preventing her resurrection.

Which ransomware unlocked files only after victims scored 200 million points in a Touhou game?

Rensenware, written as a joke, demanded that score in Undefined Fantastic Object on its hardest setting, and its student author soon released a tool to neutralise it.

Which martial artist guards the gates of Touhou's Scarlet Devil Mansion?

Hong Meiling later joined the first fighting spin-off through a patch, a choice made mostly by the partner studio with little input from the series creator.

Which convention devoted solely to Touhou, named by the series creator, began as a way to hand out game demos?

Reitaisai borrows its name from the Hakurei Shrine's grand festival, and it grew from 114 fan circles at its first outing to several thousand.

Touhou's creator spent the series' four-year hiatus, and several years after, working at which game company?

Taito hired him on the spot after he showed the interviewer his own shooters, and he kept the day job until 2007 while making the Windows games.

Which Touhou extra boss sealed her own third eye and gained control over the unconscious mind?

Koishi Komeiji shut that eye to stop hearing others' thoughts as her sister does, and closed off her own heart in the process.