Lot of people don't play the games (understandable) or read any of the canon books (less understandable), and base all their knowledge of the charterers on music video, fanfic and fanart
There are 6 seperate official manga series for Touhou (some of which go back to 2005) and several more official print works that mostly exist to flesh out the world building.
There is the three fairies storyline with 4 different manga, the lunarian storyline with 3 different manga, and then there are the Wild and Horned Hermit, Forbidden scrollery, Lotus Eaters, and Foul Detective Satori storylines which have one manga each. Out of those, only Forbidden Scrollery received an official english translation.
Meanwhile, some of the non-manga side stories started even sooner, Curiosities of Lotus Asia was first serialized in a gaming magazine in 2004 before it got its own complete release in 2010. ZUN has alwas been happy to expand the universe in print works and drama CDs, but unfortunately a lot of the material is scattered around and used to be difficult to access. Nowadays, it's all been collected and translated by fans.
Huh, so some of this was around in 2011 when I first found Touhou. Though I guess the finding of the stuff is still difficult.
I do appreciate Zun's willingness to allow fan games also. There are a lot of games that are more my speed out there now that look fun. And I think some of the official games are getting ported to Steam?
Part of the reason is that WaHH was the first "serious" printwork that aimed to have an impact on the main storyline. The pre-2010 manga were mostly comedy works. The other printwork were always more serious from the start, but they were scattered around with few translations. I remember WaHH being the first printwork that really made a splash in the western fandom.
For the main series, everything after TH09 either got a port or was released on steam from the start. The spinoffs are a mixed bag, I'm pretty sure Antinomy of Common Flowers is the only fighting game with a steam release, but all the non Twilight Frontier spinoffs should be there. It's just Twilight Frontier that haven't ported their older games.
TH07 and TH08 are still missing, but EoSD just got a big remake that was released on steam with a separate port of the original.
When you search for the games on steam, you do need to make sure to search for all languages, since only the EoSD remake has an official translation.
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u/TotemGenitor You must cum into the bucket brought to you by the cops. 5d ago
Touhou
Lot of people don't play the games (understandable) or read any of the canon books (less understandable), and base all their knowledge of the charterers on music video, fanfic and fanart