Just cleared Touhou 18, and read up on the majority of the plot.

I had a blast with the game – that was probably the most fun I've had out of any Touhou game, the plot and the music are slightly less strong compared to 15-17, but strangely I'm finding myself caring less and less about these comparisons as new games come out.

I remember excited waiting for Touhou 10 to come out back in 2007, and over time I've become more and more amazed by ZUN (the creator)'s persistence in creating one game after another. It doesn't really matter much that one game had better music while another one had better story and gameplay – the very fact that a solo developer can continue a single series for so long is amazing to witness. I can't think of anything quite like it, not even an analogy. It just feels like watching some sort of miracle unfold in real time. This is something that I especially treasure since I don't expect ZUN's new Touhou games to be around in 20 years, at least not with the current frequency.

As a creator, it's really easy to get hung up on creating perfect things and make nothing for years. There's something really convincing about Touhou that says very convincingly, over 26 years, 18 games, and hundreds of characters and tracks, that the act of putting things out there is beautiful in its own right.

As someone who creates things, there's nothing quite as inspiring as that.

(Edit: just saw the following on Touhou Wiki, which made the character design quite neat)

Chimata seems to be based on Ichigami (市神), a god of marketplaces in japanese folklore. Ichigami was worshipped as the god who protect the commercial activities and security of marketplaces. when the old school traditional marketplaces go into a decline in Modern Japan, folk religion of Ichigami also declined.

Chimata is a god of marketplaces, defined here as physical marketplaces (such as a town square). Rather than a god of capitalism or something like the stock market, she is more akin to a god of barter and trade, or marketplaces as they were before the invention and proliferation of capitalism.

Specifically, she is the god of “special event” marketplaces (as opposed to something like a regular farmer's market), which in Unconnected Marketeers is signified by the lunar rainbow. Her powers and goals are aligned towards trade occurring in those marketplaces, and when ownership of an item is transferred from one person to another in a regulated way.

She may be based on a long-forgotten medieval Japanese custom of holding markets when there's a rainbow. It was believed, that the boundary between the human world and the world of Gods is beneath rainbows, so holding a market during a rainbow would please the Gods, because they temporarily receive everything that is being sold there.

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Categorized under: #gaming, #touhou, #art

I've always struggled to give a good answer when I hear that question. Touhou has a very specific appeal to my that's very difficult to articulate on the spot. For my sanity though, I'll attempt to answer it here.

To start out with some background, it's important to know that Touhou is a video game series. The game series started in 1997 and has a total of 24 official game entries that builds on the same world. As the series grew popular, Touhou branched into official light novels, comics, and CDs. However, the amount of official work pales in comparison to fan works (5,000+ CDs and 30,000+ comics). Most people hear about Touhou through fanworks, which can make things confusing. The original game looks something like this:

The games take place is a fictional village named Gensokyo. The world “Touhou” literally translates to “Eastern”, and true to its name populated by characters inspired by Japanese religion, culture, and folklore.

“Touhou” is really an apt name for the series, as I blieve the primary strength of the franchise is that it recreates the appeal of traditional Japanese culture much more successfully than any other media franchise.

Creating new works from historical source material is the modus operanti of creators worldwide. Take the magician:

In such a way, Touhou 7 rediscovered the appeal of the Saigyō Hōshi, Records of the Ancient Matters, Records of the Great Peace, Motojirō Kajii, and Tales of Tono. Touhou 14 rediscovered the appeal of Rokurokubi, Tsukumogami, Amanojaku, Inchlings, the concept of peasant rebellions. The list continues on.

That means that every time I visit a new Touhou game, I can expect to find something beautiful about a fascinating culture that most likely no other media has shown me before. That's among the best thing you can ask for from any piece of media.

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Categorized under: #gaming, #touhou, #art