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| Waypoint Article: "Touhou and the Quest to Discover an Audience Beyond Japan" |
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| cuc:
Waypoint, the recently launched video game site of VICE network, has published an article on Touhou. Unlike certain other low-quality articles in previous years, this one contains opinions from a wide range of interviewees, from ZUN to people involved in bringing Touhou to the West, as well as the fans we know as N-Forza Talka and Overcoat. https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/touhou-and-the-quest-to-discover-an-audience-beyond-japan |
| cuc:
You see, unlike nearly every other video game website, Waypoint is actually well-funded, and can afford having the the writer interview multiple subjects for an article not about blockbuster games. Surprising how much difference that makes, huh? (The writer's inexperience still shown in things like linking to a pirate site, but that's another issue.) Given current circumstances, this is one of the better introductory articles in English since DIYGamer's Touhou guide. It's unfortunate DIYGamer already died years ago, because the guide's more old-school hardcore gamer-oriented perspective should have been able to complement other articles. |
| aUsernameIsFineToo:
I absolutely love how it makes it seems as if Touhou is a PS4 game. All these official Western releases that will likely never be released on the platform Touhou started on. Is it really that hard to do a localization for PC and sell CDs/DVDs in stores or digitally downloadable copies? Also shame on them for linking to "that pirate site". We should probably contact them and get that sorted out before people start believing that Touhou is a "free" game. |
| cuc:
Someone we know already informed the writer before I made the post. It's the editor's job to update the published article. --- Quote ---I absolutely love how it makes it seems as if Touhou is a PS4 game. --- End quote --- The PS4 initiative IS the Touhou headline of the moment. Also, the article has offloaded some of the responsibility of explaining what Touhou is to the embedded video. To be fair, it's simply hard for any writer to do Touhou justice in a short article, not to mention for a young journalist. The way I generalize it is the "three domains of Touhou": Touhou as ZUN's "life's work"; Touhou in its original doujin context; and Touhou the subcultural phenomenon. For each domain alone, the writer would need to introduce a considerable amount of knowledge for things to make sense, e.g. the concept of danmaku shooter, and Japanese myths and social zeitgeists for the first, the concept of doujinshi and doujin games for the second, and the cross-polination between doujinshi and the broader otaku/internet culture for the third. We haven't even begun to properly gauge the under-credited infleunce of Touhou in the West, like how it provided the template for Undertale's combat, or how it inspired World of Warcraft's raid boss design. |
| N-Forza:
It's not actually me that was interviewed, but Talka, who ran the circle I used to be a part of. It was still pretty cool they reached out to people in the doujin scene regardless. |
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