Your first experience at (any) Touhou game(s).

[Nolegs the Cat]

Title shamelessly stolen from the other thread

What it says on the tin. I saw this thread while scimming over the next few pages, and decided I liked the idea of this thread.
So let's discuss our first touhou experiences, hmm?

My first experience was PCB. I had just gotten the game and, having heard about it, tried normal on a whim, with ReimuA. My first gameover was to Flower Wither Away, due to having no bomb-sense what-so-ever :V
I started getting better as that run progressed though and managed to clear the game with all continues, having no lives and no bombs left at the end of Resurrection Butterfly. A few days later I 1cc'ed PCB on easy for the first time, and the rest was history.

Now that I've gotten my story out of the way, what are your first-hand experiences when you just got your first game?

[LunaWillow]

I started at EoSD. I had a small experience with danmaku before (Bullet Heaven) so I thought I'm going to beat the game first try. You can guess the outcome yourself.
I died to Patchouli (I was playing on easy). After that I dropped EoSD for a loooong time (Second to last game I 1cc'd) and moved to IN.
In IN (:V) I had my first easy 1cc. Ah, I was so happy! I'm not sure what team I was playing as, but I think it was Yuyuko/Youmu.
Hah, I remember when I thought Mokou was boss of stage 6A (I only watched people defeating Kaguya on route B before). I was so surprised when I saw Eirin.
Ahh, great memories. After that I slowly began to become better and better. I 1cc'd every official game on normal now (I never forget my first 1cc and joy after that~). I hope I'm going to do some hard 1cc in the future, and maybe more extra clears.

[Your Everyday NEET]

My first Touhou game was PoFV. At first, I didn't know it was a versus shooter. The opponent were really easy, they died before I even blinked. I thought the AI were stupid until I met Aya, she's the first opponent who put up a decent fight. But she's still pretty easy compared to the final boss herself. She's a total nightmare, I spent all of my continue fighting her.

My second Touhou game was EoSD. From there I learned four things.
1. Cirno is not an idiot
2. On normal, Icicle Fall did not have a blind spot
3. Meiling's rainbow bullet is tearing my eyes apart.
4. Stage 4 is always brutal.

[Shin Rokuren]

First game was SWR and got used to it pretty quickly thanks to Eternal Fighter Zero.

First shooter was EoSD in 2009 or so and got my first continue screen at Rumia cause it was the first shooter I've played in a PC and my last vertical shooter as far as I remember was Mazinger Z back in 1994/1995 at the arcades. My first normal 1cc was IN and first Extra clear was Suwako.

[Hope ♦ Metal]

EoSD for me. I don't really remember much even though I started in October last year, and I of course used all my continues for my first run so I don't have a replay to watch. I think I managed to get past Patchy after not too many tries, but apparently her fight is harder if you're playing ReimuB and I primarily played ReimuA (though I tried Marisa, too). For a while, that fight was the point where I let myself start using continues. It's also the first game I 1cc'd.

[Tengukami]

I worked my way from discovering IOSYS to discovering Touhou just as the full version of MoF came out, and I wanted to try the latest game, so that's where I began.

That was an experience, to say the least. Especially given I sort of manually learned the controls, so I didn't know about focussed movement or even bombing for a few weeks and could not understand how anyone could play this game. Once I got the controls down, though, it was all about going through the back catalog in more or less chronological order. Been hopelessly into Touhou ever since.

[Mikuru]

Mountain of Faith, about six weeks ago. I'd watched playthroughs of most of the games on Youtube, and decided to start with MoF because I love its music the best -- I also liked its simpler mechanics and lack of grazing, but the music was the main draw. I decided to skip Easy and play only Normal until I got the 1cc, which I think took me just under four weeks. I remember that when I just started, I kept game-overing to midboss Hina until I consulted Touhou Wiki to learn which button was focus. Also, I didn't really use continues (the system is broken in MoF), so I just had to progress by starting from the beginning and getting a little further each time. Every time I reached a new stage or boss felt like a great achievement 

[Choco Beam]

IaMP is my first touhou game. I don't remember the details anymore since it was 9 years ago but I probably liked it to play it for at least a couple of months. EoSD is my first main touhou game, first played it in 2005 or 2006 I think. I remember sucking so much back then (and I still do now) and can't even 1cc easy and that game doesn't even let you go to stage 6 on easy mode. I gradually got better and got a 1cc easy eventually. First Normal (EoSD) 1cc was in 2006. I moved straight to Extra after my Normal 1cc and got curb-stomped by Flandre.  I remember watching Kefit's Extra clear in Youtube as a guide back then but it was still ridiculously hard for me. After months of on and off attempts, I got my first extra clear on 2007. First Hard 1cc was in December 2009. First Lunatic 1cc was in January 2010. A Casual player back then, still a casual player now  :V (probably the reason I never be really good at these games).

[?q]

Imperishable Night Easy, ze  :dragonforce:
I literally rushed to the other side of the screen at the sight of three bullets cruising around the middle of the play area in Stage 1.  That run died midway through Keine.  Then I learned how to focus and after a few games of progress I was able to break through to the with the magic of continue spam.  I probably still have a picture uploaded somewhere of me capturing Kaguya's third spell (on Easy) after a fairly solid chunk of time in Spell Practice.

...I'm a little better now.  (Also, I'm glad that there are good starter games other than IN now.)

[Petroesjka]

First Touhou exposure was Ten Desires. I've never really played any SHMUPs before, so it all came as a shock. I couldn't dodge anything, and I was a total coward, staying at the bottom of the screen for everything. Fast forward a couple months, and I'm still pretty terrible at Touhou in general. I've played through every Touhou STG on Easy, more or less, and I can say that I can't 1cc any game solidly. Recently I've been practicing games on Normal more, and while I am getting the hang of it, I don't know if I'll ever improve to a point where I can clear a game on Lunatic.

[Fastest Thing Alive]

A very faint memory of getting to at least the second stage of Imperishable Night would be first, but that's very faint and from what I remember has to have been at least 3-4 years ago.  My ore recent and current 'first' experience would be someone talking about what I think was trying to beat either Flandre or Remilia in a steam chat, can't remember which. I asked what they were talking about and a week later I played Mountain of Faith on Easy for the first time, and that was that.

[SerB18]

My first experience in Touhou was a month ago when I tried out Ten Desires. Despite the veterans saying that the newer games are easier than the ones made before, I was caught off guard at stage three. In all of my experience in dealing with bullet hell bosses (My one and only experience in bullet hell is Sky Force) I never saw one that healed itself. Also, since Youmu is my favorite I tried her out first. Needless to say, I got my butt handed to me harder than a T-34 going up against a Tiger I.

Yuyuko is disappointingly easy though.

[RCLeahcar]

I first started playing Touhou in December 2014 (though I first became familiar with the name when I was 9 thanks to some Vocaloid videos or something). For a long time I wasn't interested in it, but after coming across some more memes and stuff I just had to explore what it really was.

Anyway, I started off with EoSD, since it's the first Windows game. On my first attempt, I died before Hong Meiling's midboss appearance on Stage 3 using all my continues, on Easy Mode. Though I found it really hard, I had a lot of fun playing it. It felt like an extreme version of Space Invaders in a way at the time, but now I've been playing it more it feels completely different. Once I played a little more I vowed I would practise until I could 1cc the whole game, and I tried out all the other games too.

Now, on EoSD, I can beat Stage 4 on Normal Mode as long as I continue (I only did so during the level).

[Cream Soda]

No silly memes for me; I went full shmup. I played the games in order, more or less, starting with Highly Responsive to Prayers, which obviously I played on my NEC PC-9801 (good deal on that: it was only 298,000 yen) using an original copy of the game that I bought at Comiket 52 back in 1996. I thought Touhou seemed kinda boring (like vocaloids, or boat waifus!) but then I realized the games were good and fun. The fact they turned out to be full of awesome grills was merely an added bonus.

[Tsuken Yasashi]

IN was my first game that I've played.  Though I technically beat it on Normal mode with Reimu/Yukari for the first time, I couldn't get past the last spell card phase.  I recorded a playthrough of it for the lulz as proof.

When I switched to UFO after a long time getting used to IN, it was a waaaaaay different experience.  I couldn't even use bombs before I died due to the fact that I was not fast enough to hit it.  I have yet to beat the game as of now.

Plus, no difficulty selection on Shoot the Bullet, which gave off the assumption that the difficulty was automatically Lunatic.  Also, the system was really different to me at first because the weapon used was a camera, and not danmaku shots.  I only passed the first and second level in that game and never picked it up again because Rumia was hard enough to pass through...

[Skullbelly]

Don't ask why, but my first experience was with this famicom version of EoSD. Then I got the actual game. I can't remember what I played after EoSD, I played them all in random order. I think it must have been Ten Desires around when it came out, but I'm not sure.

[Tribow]

My first game was EoSD.
I came into Touhou practically searching for it. There was this arcade game that I LOVED called 19XX. Unfortunately I couldn't go to an arcade everyday, so when I got a laptop I searched EVERYWHERE for a game similar to it. This is how I came upon the bullet hell genre. I played Bullet Heaven and completed it 100%.

Once I finished with that, I was still hungry for more, especially since I knew there were other bullet hell games out there. I ran into a website that told me of the term 'danmaku.'
As soon as I saw a japanese word I knew this meant Japan must have a ton of games like these. I went to google images and searched Danmaku.
Of course one of the first results was Touhou.
I researched about it and found out about the large fanbase.

I went nuts until I finally obtained EoSD. Since then I've been attempting to play every game in order starting from EoSD.

I loved EoSD so much, yet even now I can barely beat that game.

I got EoSD last year, and I found out about touhou six years ago. It took me soooooooo long. Just to start playing.

[Mino ☆]

My first experience with Touhou was a long time ago when I played EoSD's demo version for the first time.

I had a friend who was massively obsessed with Touhou so I decided to check it out. I remember playing it and having so much difficulty on everything and it was so crazy. This was roughly 2009 or 2010 or so. But in the summer of 2010 I started playing Touhou again and this time I actually started going for achievements.

In November of 2010 or so, I embarked on my long journey to beat Ran. I hadn't done anything in Touhou before, but I wanted to clear this extra stage. So I spent long months working at it until about May 2011 which was when I finally beat Ran. That long journey which took like 6 months was full of endless failures, rages, and at one point I swear I screamed and saw stars....

Granted, I played on and off. It wasn't nonstop grinding or anything.

By around mid 2011 I started doing normal mode, then in late 2011 I moved onto hard mode. Got my first Lunatic 1cc on January 2012, which was in PCB. And from then on it was an uphill ride!

[Phoenix-P]

SA easy for me, started without knowing about focusing, grazing  or death bombing..nah no problem i said! ...everything going smooth until parsee's midstage attack....there wnt all my lives :V dammit Parsee   

[Chaotic Phoenixma]

I don't even remember which one I started with or even what my first 1ccs were(it was probably IN for 1cc though, but that could be wrong). The only thing I remember is that I started on Lunatic because I always have to try the hardest difficulty first and was quickly convinced that I should probably work my way up from Normal.

Then I eventually 1cc'd all the normals and extras, then went to hard, then did the Windows Lunatics (up to UFO since I quit before 10D came out)


I've been considering getting back into the series sometime though.

[Plastic Vortex]

EoSD. I knew that the game was harder than it looked, so I didn't underestimate it. I went to try normal, as I wanted to get better by playing a harder difficulty. Didn't bother going for the non-existent safe spot on Icicle Fall. I guess it allowed me to go all the way up to Meiling's last card.

It was the first game clear and my first Extra clear too. ^^

[WodofGar]

I first found IOSYS's music video Cirno's Perfect Math Class on a trip to Universal Studios in December of 2013. I had watched like one or two anime series before and wasn't too deeply interested with Japanese stuff. I liked it and went on to watch more of their stuff and started noticing character consistencies over the next few days and looked up some of the names. I came upon the Touhou games on the 19th of January and downloaded EoSD. I'm a gamer, but the most bullet hell experience I've had was in the form of Galaga so I sucked major balls at it. I was glad I liked the stage 1 theme, because we got to know each other reeeeeally well. I've gotten better since then because I play Touhou almost every day. It's the one series of games I've been interested in the longest.

Thank you ZUN for giving my miserable ass something to do after school.

[Mitsuhide]

My first experience was with EoSD, a couple of weeks ago. I made it to Sakuya on my first run, Normal mode, Reimu B. Got beat really bad. I haven't even defeated the final boss yet, let alone did a 1 continue run.

[Spencer]

My first Touhou game was Imperishable Night, since I was very uncommon with Touhou I thought it was pretty hard and I died at stage 5. Eventually I was able to beat the game and I felt so accomplished...
Then I played UFO.. I can never beat stage 5... those curvy lasers man!

[Invidialbum]

My first game was Double Dealing Character. It took me a few attempts or so to get a 1cc on Easy difficulty with SakuyaA and I can nail it down every now and then with ReimuB.

I later got into other Touhou games and eventually managed to beat Mountain of Faith and Imperishable Night on Easy without continuing (the former was done with MarisaB). As for why I haven't 1CC'd any of the games on Normal, it's because Seija flips me around to my death in DDC, Aya's Illusionary Dominance card devours my lives and Marisa...the less said, the better.

[Pakken11]

Started with EoSD Easy. Had no idea what the mechanics was, just knew Z was shoot and X was bomb - didn't even know the existence of a focus button, nor what the red and blue items were. Continued partway through stage 4, managed to 1cc Easy that same day after reading up on stuff on the Touhou Wiki.

Normal 1cc came a week later, and I remember being extremely frustrated at dying in the early stages.
Extra was over two weeks after that, and I used to plan out resource usages and routes in classes that I didn't like, and stay up til 5 AM pulling my hair out lolol
Needless to say, Extra was quite the shock after doing only Normal >A>
I didn't know how to recognize streamable patterns unless they were blatant, even less about turning (Flan 8th non-spell =0=), and gaps within the stream? (i.e. seeing both the stream AND individual bullets simultaneously) I only started recognizing THOSE earlier this year ROFL :getdown:

Went on to PCB Easy after all that, and the bullet density just completely bashed me over my head - had to continue on Yuyuko Easy, and this was after dealing with Flandre. Seriously, it's the MECHANIC that makes the game easy, (which, again, I didn't really understand even after reading up and until working through Extra/Phantasm) NOT the patterns. Compared to EoSD, PCB is a beast - at least on lower difficulties.

[Phantasmal]

I first played ISC, but I don't consider that my starting spot. I only played for a day.

My first game was EoSD. (Easy-modo!! Lol!! Funny meemee am I funny?!)
I beat easy mode on my first try, but I used all of my continues. (Lol nub)
Then I discovered that I could use Focus mode. -.-'

After about a month, I still couldn't 1cc it; the furthest I ever got was to Remilia, but then she killed me.
I read online for strategies and tips, and only found one that could help me: give up!

Well, not like that.

It told me to, "If this is your first visit to Gensokyo, try switching games for a bit, see how you do! Then come back later."
So I switched to IN, and eventually beat it. I was finally happy.
Then I came back to EoSD and beat Remilia up, and, well, yeah. I actually can't remember which one I played next.

Currently, my favorite is PCB. I just love it.

[SirChaotick]

I came across Touhou via some bullet hell flash game. Saw a bunch of people in the comments mysteriously referencing "Touhou", whatever that was, and when I looked it up I was pulled in immediately by the promise of incredible difficulty.

The very first one was Imperishable Night Normal. (even then I instinctively knew to shun the easy modos)
Didn't have any problem with figuring out the controls, but my stalwart refusal to use continues meant I only ever got to Eirin once before I realized it wasn't the first game in the series.
Then I went into the pattern of 1cc'ing all Windows games on Normal in order, and so forth.

[zero_breaker]

My first time playing Touhou was PCB. Saw a video of IN Extra a few years ago, didn't remember much but the music is stuck in my brain, then rather recently (around last year) when I stumple upon another IN Extra run video I recognized the music and started looking into Touhou; Ironically I've never played IN.

Tried out Normal mode first, even though I'm not familiar with shmups outside of an arcade game I've played a few years ago, I somehow managed to not get hit once until stage 2 midboss. Stage 4 was a nightmare; I had to use two continues before the stage. I ended up barely passing stage 5 with copious use of bombs, and bombed the hell out of Yuyuko (Not an 1cc, for that matter).

Played a few other ones including EoSD, MoF, UFO and DDC. I could never get use to MoF(and by extension, SA)'s bomb system, though.

[MatsuriSakuragi]

Perfect Cherry Blossom in 2007. I had been getting into shmups for a while before that  thanks to a friend and while I was looking at various sites to find new games to play I saw a screenshot of a game with a lot of colorful bullets and a link to the demo.

God, it's almost been 10 years since then.