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Waypoint Article: "Touhou and the Quest to Discover an Audience Beyond Japan"
cuc:
--- Quote from: Firestorm29 on November 20, 2016, 10:10:02 PM ---I know of lots of the influences in Undetale outside of simply being it's template, but how did it inspire WoW's raid bosses? I've never touched that game, so I'm not sure how it works and what Touhou did for it.
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WoW turned boss battles into the centerpieces of dungeons. A boss battle consists of several highly distinct phases, and each phase is its own elaborate puzzle demanding the players to perform carefully choreographed actions (in WoW this takes the form of team coordination rather than twitch reflex. "Mages, switch your attack type!" "Healers, change your healing target!" "Tanks, block the summoned monsters!" That sort of thing). This is similar to the game design philosophy underpinning many of the best Japanese games, but Touhou was one of the pioneers in further pushing the boundaries of boss battles at the time.
I've seen several people make this observation, including the respected MMORPG designer and theorist Raph Koster in his "Ten Years of World of Warcraft":
--- Quote from: Raph Koster ---In Blizzard?s hands, raids became intricate puzzles to be solved, almost like teaching a large group a complex series of dance steps; a design idea drawn, perhaps, from boss stages in 2D bullet hell shooters.
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Outside of Japan, pirated copies of Touhou were simply the most easily available danmaku games for the majority of the 2000s. Nowadays, it may be easier for younger gamers to dig into the danmaku genre and immediately start bragging about "Touhou sucks", but when most veteran Western gamers who are not shmup experts say "bullet hell shooters", they are always picturing Touhou and its spell cards in their mind.