How did you discover Touhou and what was your experience?

[Rio]

I wanted to know how you guys discovered Touhou and how you did and experienced it.


I've discovered Touhou from browsing the internet. Since I went a little far on some videos (not YouTube), I've discovered Imperishable Night, it was released for awhile now, so I decided to try it. Once it was finished downloading, I got to it instantly. Once I started up the game, I instantly loved Touhou. Once I pressed Game Start (something like that), I thought I could do Normal on the first try, but then I failed, I didn't know how to focus, shoot, or use bombs back then, so I died at stage 2.  :V

After practicing in Easy, I beated the game without continues, after that victory, I tried Normal and so far I only made it to stage 5. I thought Practice Start would help and it did. Soon after, I can 1CC Normal and can do Hard. :getdown: So that's my discovery and my experience, what was yours?

Piracy is no-no on our forum. Please consider reading the forum rules. -Helepolis

[LunaWillow]

I first met up with Touhou when I was looking for anime arts for my characters in some online RP. I came across Reimu's and Aya's fanart. I liked them.

After that I saw that one of youtubers I subscribe actually played Touhou, so I watched it. I knew it was too hard for me, so I didn't bothered playing it.

After that I came across some other danmaku game (Bullet Heaven, pretty cool game). It was inspired by the Touhou, and I could beat it, so I decided to play Touhou. I re-watched let's play of that youtuber thinking "I can do better than him". I got EoSD and tried out easy. I regret my pride... Patchouli ate me.

I've heard that IN is easy and game actually let you get good ending on easy, so I tried it out. I thought that Marisa was hard :getdown: I tried out the team that fought Reimu and cried. She was even harder :qq:

After a long, long practice I managed to beat IN easy. Gee, I was so proud of myself! Also thanks to that game I liked Yuyuko. Her shot type is best for noobs.

I get other games, learning more about the game. Some of the games mean something special to me, like SWR or IN. I made my first normal 1cc (PCB), my happines was huge! I was like "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! I DID! I DID IT! BEST GAME EVAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!". I also did my first extra clear (PCB again) and I just seat with open mouth, thinking "How the hell..." Right now I'm trying to 1cc all other games (my progress is in my signature) and maybe clear some easier extra. After that I want to try out hard.

[Colticide]

I had seen touhou things here and there and didn't really understand it all but after checking out Smooth McGrooves U.N. Owen acapella is was hooked on terms of music, gameplay & difficulty, and character designs. After that I fell down that mountain into the river of touhou and never looked back.

[Failure McFailFace]

This was a few years ago, when I was around fifth grade (am high school freshman now). I was browsing around YouTube, eventually finding that part of YouTube where all the Japanese stuff is posted.

Around this time I was looking at automatic Mario levels, as I stumbled upon it from ProtonJon's Kaizo Mario videos.

I found one with Marisa Stole the Precious Thing, and got hooked. I looked for the original, and found the original IOSYS video. That then led me to finding other remixes, like the infamous UN Owen was Her MIDI, Ran Ran Ru, and among others.

After a few months of this, I got the EoSD and tried it in 6th grade. Being the idiot that I was, I accidentally set the initial lives to 0, and failed countless times from accidentally attempting to do a NM run. I figured out that the setting is how many lives you get, and I got hooked on the other games, too.

[Mr Jovial]

I was in some chat room (don't remember what it was on though) and someone posted some youtube links. The links were videos of Lunatic Rave 2 and the songs being played in that game were Border of Life and Night of Nights. I thought "Hey, those songs are good, where are they from?" Found out it was Touhou so I got TD on a whim. Couple of weeks later I gave it a shot and eventually managed a normal 1cc and that was in the Summer of 2012.

[?q]

I wound up here from a particular video of Imperishable Night Extra.  It wasn't a great run, nor was it high-quality, but it seems like a lot of people saw it and said "that looks really cool/colorful" and tried it out.  I think either people saw that or Precious Thing/Overdrive when I joined, mostly.

This was before MoF was released, mind.  Bad-quality YouTube was pretty standard, and the Western community wasn't nearly as accomplished as what it is now, so there weren't very many points of introduction.

[ふねん1]

My origin with Touhou has two parts. First, in the spring of 2009, I was following the whole WRYYYYYY thing on Youtube and came across this video. I didn't know enough about the series at the time to really pay it too much attention, but that is technically my first exposure to Touhou. What actually got me into the series was this video by Kefit, which a mod posted in the Ice Climbers social thread on Smashboards in the fall of 2009. I saw the video and was impressed by pretty much everything - the bullet patterns, the music, the characters, you name it. I got SA shortly after that and never looked back.

[Helepolis]

@ Boat,

Piracy is a huge no-no on our forum. Seeing that you openly like to speak about it means you didn't read our forum rules. Highly suggesting you to read the forum rules.

[Solomander]

a video had a touhou song playing in the background i thought the song was good so i looked up the source and i got hooked on touhou since then.

[nav']

It's all raocow's fault. His LPs of SMW hacks often feature Touhou-based levels or Touhou background music, then there was his Let's Play of Super Marisa World... The curiosity was too much, so I googled for some Touhou music. Didn't like it (no, really). Then I googled for Touhou arrangements and...

Flashback to several months before: I'm sitting in front of my computer, desperately trying to find new, interesting music, oversaturated and bored to death with all sorts of metal and folk rock, but too used to the sound of guitars to look elsewhere. I visit the Metal Archives yet again and begin browsing the bands by country.  Done with Russia, so let's try Japan this time. Meh... Meh... Meh (...) Me... wait, actually, this sounds interesting. Crow'sClaw. Oh, and this -- Iron Attack. Quite good. And such huge discographies. Why is almost everything instrumental? And why is the music so much better than anything I've heard before?

...so of course the first songs I stumbled upon were by Crow'sClaw and Iron Attack (and Demetori). I had been listening to Touhou music for months without realizing the true source. Eventually I got used to ZUN's original music, but the instrumentation was really hard on the ears at first.

So much for the discovery, now my first experience. It took me several more months to actually try playing the games. My first experience was a mixture of terrible and awesome. On one hand, playing EoSD without the vpatch and using the keypad on a keyboard which kept locking up was the definition of terrible. I needed months to get my first clear and didn't care about score at all until much later (thanks, Karisa!). On the other hand, even the outdated audiovisuals of EoSD were enough to leave a lasting impression on me. Stages 4 and 6 were incredibly atmoshperic and I couldn't stop whistling Patchouli's theme for weeks.

[Colticide]

...so of course the first songs I stumbled upon were by Crow'sClaw and Iron Attack (and Demetori). I had been listening to Touhou music for months without realizing the true source.

I had a friend who did the same, I was talking about Yukari once and mentioned her theme Necrophantasia. My friend said he knows a song like that but wasn't touhou. He sent me a link of a Guitar cover of Demetori's version and I told him that's touhou which left him stunned. He hear that song for years.

[Tengukami]

What actually got me into the series was this video by Kefit

That's pretty funny - I use Kefit's perfect Lunatic Stage 5 run of SA as a frequent example to show people when they want to see what the gameplay is like. Not to be a smartass or anything; I think it's a genuinely beautiful (if difficult) stage and Kefit's annotations make it look less intimidating, but still pretty exciting.

[Cats]

I learned of Touhou through a forum I used to frequent. It was mostly a community of StepMania players, but there were other common interests mixed in there, Touhou being one of them. Funny thing, the first Touhou video I watched was also one of Kefit's.

I had always had a bit of an interest in vertical STGs, but never knew they could get that intense; through some recommended videos at the time, I also learned of Dodonpachi and Mushihimesama.

[ふねん1]

That's pretty funny - I use Kefit's perfect Lunatic Stage 5 run of SA as a frequent example to show people when they want to see what the gameplay is like. Not to be a smartass or anything; I think it's a genuinely beautiful (if difficult) stage and Kefit's annotations make it look less intimidating, but still pretty exciting.

No worries. I did see his Stage 5 video shortly after that, so that helped as well lol.

[aUsernameIsFineToo]

Guitar cover of Demetori's version

Demetori's Necrofantasia is one of the best Touhou covers I'll ever hear. I clearly remember blasting that as I merged into the highway at about 60 miles an hour on the way to school one morning with a good friend of mine riding shotgun. We we're talking about good music to drive to. He suggested that, so I handed him my phone for him to search that up on YouTube :V


As for how I discovered Touhou, it's a long yet memorable story: I was looking up the maximum polyphony of the MIDI synthesizer chip in my computer because it sounded like it was dropping notes every so often. That search eventually led me to the U.N. Owen was Her "Death Waltz" MIDI on YouTube, which sounded kinda catchy. I downloaded it, tried playing it abusing the YMF724 chip for sh!ts and giggles, and a blue screen of death later I decided to delve deeper into the origin of that song...

...And so, ladies and gentlemen, that was how I discovered what Touhou was. I still have that song on my computer, timestamped with a creation date of 9/15/2009. It still won't play, but I keep it there as a reminder of how I discovered this wonderful series.

[Your Everyday NEET]

I was playing a rhythm flash games on some websites . I think the game is called DJ Maniac. It has Cirno Perfect Math Class in it. I instantly liked it, so I decided to watch it on youtube and recommended it to my friends. After knowing that song's origins which is Touhou, I decided to do a little research on Touhou and I found many many fanworks.
Call me crazy, I became fans AFTER I watched Koishi Komeiji Heart Throbbing Adventure.

Thus begins my journey as a Touhou fans and member of MoTK.

[SomeGuy712x]

I forget exactly when I first heard of Touhou, but I think it was like a decade or so ago, when 9.5 was the latest game, when I saw my brother playing those games on his computer (and I think I remember him saying that 9.5 was the newest one at the time). However, I didn't think too much of it at the time, and just thought of them as shooters similar to Gradius and such. However, a few years later, when I started watching YouTube videos regularly, I heard more and more about Touhou. (NakaTeleeli's "Let's Kinda Play Touhou 6" videos were among the ones that helped me learn more about Touhou.)

As for when I first started playing Touhou myself: I guess I'll just restate what I said in that older "first experience" thread:

The first Touhou game I ever played was Imperishable Night, way back at the end of January 2010, almost five years ago. Now, I was playing on a file of my brother's that already had a bunch of things unlocked, and the first thing I did when I started playing was try out Spell Card Practice with spell no. 1, thinking it would probably be on the easy side, and I could get used to the gameplay. Of course, I had no idea that spell no. 1 was Wriggle's midboss spell on the Hard difficulty, and I remember being surprised when I saw the word "Hard" over on the right when the spell started. Still, I think I actually managed to capture the spell! (Unfortunately, I didn't save the replay of that.)

After that, I tried practicing stage 1 on Normal with Yukari solo (remember, this save file already had some stuff unlocked, including being able to play with solo characters), and I did quite well for not knowing how IN's scoring and time orbs and stuff like that worked at the time. I even managed to trigger the Last Spell and capture it. And, I did save the replay of that one: Replay (Yeah, it's quite obvious that I didn't understand many details of IN's scoring and such back then.)

Then, I recall trying to play a full game (I think with Reimu & Yukari) on Normal, and not doing so well. After failing to 1cc Normal several times (though I think I did do well enough to get the normal ending via stage 6A), I tried Easy, and I think I remember 1cc-ing Easy on my first attempt without losing a life! (I forget which route I took at the end, though.)

UPDATE: Actually, looking through my replay files again, it turns out that I did also save the replay of that no-miss Easy clear, where I had completed the game via stage 6B. Here it is: Replay
(Note: This run starts with no reserve lives because I had set it that way in the options, thinking that since increasing the starting lives above the default reduces bonus points, I'd get increased bonus points for starting with fewer lives than the default, but that turned out to not be the case.)

[RuneDevros]

It was on the Official Tales Series Forum. November 24th, 2006, in a thread simply titled "Eh?" that linked to Marisa Stole the Precious Thing was how this long journey into the Touhou started.

Good times. Good times.

[MrL1193]

I have various memories of encountering Touhou in general before getting into the games, but I can't really put them into a clear order. I'm pretty sure Super Marisa World and Mega Mari were in there somewhere, and I probably heard some Touhou music without realizing it, but it's all rather hazy.

I have two somewhat more distinct memories of seeing the actual Touhou games, though I'm not sure which of them came first.

Back in 2010 or so, I used to play Mario Kart Wii a lot, including doing competitive Time Trials. Some of the members of the community were also into Touhou, so every now and then, they would put Touhou music in their videos. One such video that I watched used Flandre's theme, U. N. Owen, in its original form and gave the name of the track. The music interested me enough to make me want to look it up, and that led me to a video of EoSD's Extra Stage. I remember being both impressed by the apparent skill demonstrated by the player and rather confused by the dialogue. (I believe it was Marisa's scenario, which probably didn't help.)

The other memory is more straightforward. I've been following the Youtube LPer RoahmMythril for quite some time, and while he's best known for playing Mega Man, he's also dabbled in Touhou a bit. In one of his old videos, he showed off some of his StB replays, and while I had no idea what the game was at the time, I watched it anyway because of who was playing it.

Roahm also gave me my first proper introduction to Touhou a couple years later, when he did a full LP of IN. He explained the mechanics as he played, and since he was only playing on Normal, the game looked doable enough. I think I can safely say that it was because of that LP that I finally bought PCB some months afterward.

My first hands-on experience with the game consisted of several hours of frustration over the installation, but I eventually found everything I needed and got the game running with the English patch, though I ended up using AppLocale unnecessarily because I hadn't changed the Japanese folder names. I also didn't know about the VSync patch back then, but I started out on Easy mode, so it wasn't too bad. Even on Easy, though, I needed continues to finish the game; everything from Stage 4 onwards was difficult for me, and Resurrection Butterfly seemed utterly impossible. I kept practicing and trying out different shot types, though, and a few days later, I managed to 1cc Easy using Sakuya A. I quickly moved on to Normal mode, and a few more days after that, I got my first Normal 1cc (albeit with the help of extra starting lives; I had also used them in my Easy 1cc, but I finished that run with 2 extra lives anyway). It wasn't until several months later that I got around to clearing the game with the default number of starting lives, and by then I had already cleared the Extra stage and started working on the Phantasm stage. Both the Extra and the Phantasm stages were major challenges for me, and even after I learned how to deal with Ran, Yukari still gave me a lot of trouble. However, I kept working on the Phantasm stage on and off, and after enough attempts, I finally managed to clear it and felt quite accomplished for having done so. (Little did I know at the time how much easier it would have been with VSync. :derp:)

Sorry for rambling on for so long... Writing all that did take me on a nice trip down memory lane, though, so thank you for that.

[ILikeBulletZ]

I basically knew about Touhou somewhat since a really really long time, but never really did care enough to fully get into it or even bother to learn about it...


Enter my discovery of TvTropes- On itself a rather big discovery for me...


Long story short, it eventually lend me to the Touhou page... my curiosity got the  best out of me, and I got PCB to start with...


IIRC, I started out on EASY MODO. I got up to either Youmu or Yuyuko and died (died as in NO CONTINUES LEFT)...I don't remember exactly where, sadly

But anyway, I just got hooked pretty much in the instant I started to play... and the rest is story, as they say.

[t_prinny]

I believe February 2013 was around the time I discovered Touhou if not early March that year. I just came from learning Castle Shikigami II and I think I was looking for videos regarding that game to see if there were better ways to approach stuff. At some point, I came across Touhou videos. Either something I just came across while looking for runs or possibly related to the "hardest video game boss" video on youtube. At that point of time, I started watching more Touhou runs (specifically Raak1010's runs on youtube).

It wasn't until June when I first got Perfect Cherry Blossom. Before that point, I was trying demos to see what I like (that and dealing with school stuff). I was also looking at what I needed to do to run the games on my PC as well as what to do when I import stuff (first time I've ever imported something).  I came across some problems, but I was able to fix those quickly. As for why I specifically chose PCB, I figured I would spend a lot of time with it since I knew about its Phantasm stage and its requirements. After a couple of days of playing, I managed to clear normal (Video of that clear). Hard took about another month to learn and lunatic ended up taking about 3-4 months of serious learning.

It wasn't until January last year when I got Imperishable Night. I was pretty busy learning to survive PCB that year. I really like to take the time to learn a game especially if I enjoy playing it (attempting to score didn't come until later).

[Cream Soda]

I liked danmaku and I liked magical girls. It was natural. I was really bad back then... oh wait, I'm still really bad. ;3

[pokemon123]

When I joined this forum just to play mafia, but went hey it's pointless being on a touhou forum when you don't even play touhou. I then played EOSD.

[Usamiko]

My first exposure to Touhou was when I downloaded a skin changing mod for GTA San Andreas. A special skin there by the author of the mod was that of a young brown haired girl with a cute hat. The skin's name was Renko. I really loved the girl's character design so I looked up who the hell Renko was. I remember reading about her on the Touhou wiki and having no clue whatsoever who she was or what Touhou was. I didn't read further on the wiki so I didn't knew Touhou was a game, and I just assumed it was an anime of some sort. This was in mid-2013 if I remember correctly.

A month after that and I started playing Fate/ Extra on the PSP.  Getting stuck at some point, I googled a walkthrough and came across a blog with Very good one. The blog's name was Cirnopoly, and apprently the author of the blog was a huge Cirno fan. I read further into the blog and saw a video of Perfect Math Class. I found the video amusing but I LOVED the melody and I was also super curious who Cirno was as I found her to be cute and adorable. I searched the original song of Perfect Math Class and came across a video of Beloved Tomboyish Girl. As I was listening, I was surprised to see that it was from a video game. It didn't took long for me to try out the games myself.

I was horrible at arcade games in general (not to mention being a sore loser),  so I didn't expected much on my first playthrough. To my surprise, I actually had...a lot of fun. While I easily lost all my lives on Cirno, I loved listening to her theme as I desperately tried to dodge Icicle Fall. When it was all over, I found the experience exhilirating as I tried my best dodging everything being thrown my way. I went on to play EoSD for 3 straight hours after that.

To this day, I still haven't 1CC a game on normal. But since I'll stay a fan for many years to come, I have plenty of time to do so. And as I consistently reach Kaguya on Normal, I figure that Normal 1CC ain't too far now :3

[Ghaleon]

I made this thread awhile back when I was new and people gave me good answers, so I'm not complaining or anything but I was told "THIS topic AGAIN"...Despite that, I still think it's a good topic!

That said the answer I got like 75% of the time from like 4 pages IIRC was the same, which I haven't seen a single time here! How times have changed... When I asked, the vast majority of people said some mcdonalds TV commercial remix of U.N. Owen was her, which quite frankly is pretty awful, dumb and..uhh...I don't know how anyone can watch that video and say to themselves "WHERE IS THAT SONG FROM! I MUST BECOME A FAN OF IT!"... It nearly scared me away from Touhou after people answered and I looked at it!

Anyway for me I discovered touhou when I was on a phase of lamenting on how every videogame was stupid easy (before hard games became a fad thanks to dark souls, not that dark souls is even all that hard..it certainly is a good game, and the challenge in it is good enough that I most certainly wouldn't list it as a complaint when I was searching for hard games, but it just isn't up there on the list IMO). I played thru I wanna be the guy, and I wanna be the fan game, and didn't think ninja gaiden was as hard as people hyped it up to be and kept searching, and found "Mushihimesama-futari". Ilooked at some videos (before it came out on xbox360), and said "I wanna play that game NOW!". Alas I couldn't afford an arcade import, but I learned the word "danmaku", and the first google that popped up when I searched "danmaku on pc" (or something like that), was touhou...That's how I found it. I played it, loved it, challenged myself to be able to 1cc lunatic difficulty on the series in a year, was told lol...kinda sorta ALMOST made it, but quit at SA because I frankly didn't enjoy SA as much (and if I did, I honestly don't know if I could have beat it without seriously spamming that game for too long) ever since.

Discovering Touhou has made me grow as a gamer so much though, more than just hard games, or touhou, or anything like that. I learned So effing much about modern Japanese games (which I like, and always liked, but kinda haven't been exposed to as of late until touhou because modern media kinda shuns it and I didn't know the lingo), I discovered what "doujin" games were, which I love, a bit before indie games became somewhat of a...uhh.. it's not a fad, indie games will last I'm sure, but....I dunno, It was a sudden growth for sure. I decided I LOVE anime art style in my games despite that I still don't watch anime or read manga (I'ved watched a few since touhou, and read 1, I stll prefer playing videos rather than watching them, and reading novels instead of comics/manga).

It may even change my career if I motivate myself to learn Japanese so I can try to localize stuff. I love learning, but languages (not just japanese, all languages)... seem so illogical and arbitrary to me, it's like my #1 weakness... *sobs*. That's another topic on its own though. That's pretty detailed on how I discovered Touhou though, even though I still feel like I owe it more of a description =P.

[Tengukami]

Yeah, I gotta second being puzzled at how anyone can see McRoll and react by wanting to know more. The first 10 seconds especially are unbearable.

The Rozen Maiden version of Marisa Stole the Precious Thing (with Suigintou and Shinku as Alice and Marisa) would be my first introduction to Touhou before I knew I was being introduced to Touhou, in like 2006/7. I just wanted to know more about the band. I discovered My Body Wishes That You Burn To The Moon, also by IOSYS, and noticed the actual credit was to some ZUN person. Googling that name led me to Touhou, and after playing the newest game at the time (MoF), I was hooked.

This is also why I will continue to defend IOSYS in a musical sense, though my vague understanding is they kinda ran afoul of ZUN's guidelines or something. I don't remember all the details.

[Sakurei]

I told a friend I was bored and she told me to play Touhou. I got EoSD and played EoSD. Am I really the only one who wasn't fished up by listening to some silly arrangement? That was in May 2009. I've been around for a bit. Although not as long as some other people. Lots of grandpas and grandmas around, I tell you.

[Tengukami]

Am I really the only one who wasn't fished up by listening to some silly arrangement?

Unfortunately, not everyone gets right into the games from Day One with no fanwork introduction. You're one special guy!

[Cream Soda]

Sakurei is a girl! That aside, I had no fan work exposure, which makes at least two of us. (totally not bragging here... or am i)

[Tengukami]

Sorry, I often confuse Sakurei with Zengeku.

And yeah, "no silly memes for me I went full shmup" sounds like bragging. Not that there's anything wrong with that.