Why Touhou Is My Kind of D&D

This post isn’t very comprehensive, I just hope you’ll be inspired to see beyond your hatred for anime (though this isn’t really anime, it’s a video game…which may be worse for you) and find something that might perhaps be a bit interesting.

I’ve always been a Touhou fan, but I have never been a Touhou convert until recently.

There is a subtle difference between the man who plays Subterranean Animism on Easy mode once a week and cheers for the colorful little graphics and addictive schmup play, and the guy who runs through Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil on Lunatic every day trying to beat his past high scores, all of which have been a thousand points higher each time (an utterly miniscule increment in Touhou’s scoring scheme).

I used to be the first man, and I am slowly moving towards the insanity that is the second man. Except I don’t care about my high score, I just want to shoot loads of bullets at that god-damned vampire girl’s face.

For background, Touhou are a series of shooter games for the PC. They are called “curtain fire” shooters because the difficulty of the game is the massive amounts of bullets being shot at you from nearly all sides. You get better at the game through pattern recognition – after you figure out how each boss shoots, you can exploit gaps in their patterns to defeat them.

The graphics are really nice for such a simple game, with good backgrounds, cute characters and some really amazing bullet patterns. They are colorful and childlike, with enemies being symbols, shapes and fairies, and bosses being female antagonists, rivals, or even friends. The music is also amazing, and Touhou has an insane culture of remixes and arrangement albums.

Hell, it has an amazing culture in general.

The title statement is actually meant to draw your attention rather than having anything to do with what I really feel about Touhou. It’s not really my “kind” of D&D because a) it’s not D&D and b) I don’t have a “kind” of D&D. I play many different games in many different styles.

However, Touhou helps to illustrate a point I have made before that I really like a kind of whimsical, fairy-tale-ish touch to a story and specifically to my roleplaying game stories, rather than the grungy gritty bullshit a lot of fantasy is moving towards.

I feel that a certain naivete and simplicity in storytelling is now considered taboo and is exorcised from anything but “lowly” children’s literature, which is a shame, because especially in games, a very simple story can go a long way. We don’t need 5000 word character backgrounds in 50,000 word settings to have a rich story.

That’s not to say I cannot enjoy anything gritty (I played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the World for the PC recently and rather enjoyed it…more than I enjoyed lovecraft’s prose.) But I prefer when things have a touch of childish mysticism to them, or at the very least when they are not so utterly suffocated in grit that any glimmer of balance and normality is lost to violence, horror, dread and disgust at poor helpless humanity. I like a little magic, a little unexplained caricaturesque joy in a story.

Moving back to Touhou, the setting for the games is simply amazing. It is expanded upon in each game, though there is also a small manga created just to add some more character and liveliness to the setting. The games each have 6 stages which tell a small story (often somewhat confusing at first, not due to complexity, but due to a lack of information) which you come to understand near the end.

Usually the story involves something bad happening that draws out the main character, Reimu Hakurei, a shrine maiden with a very important shrine to keep which doesn’t get too many visitors nonetheless. Reimu travels to the source of the problem, battling minions, rivals and sometimes friends along the way, and eventually solves the problem.

Some of the stories seem like they’d make good D&D campaigns, especially Imperishable Night. Also, Reimu is totally an adventurer. She even talks about looting a town filled with annoying youkai at one point. Though the stories are told through sparse, simple dialog, there’s actually a lot to see in there.

(Especially because there are different endings depending on your difficulty level, character chosen, choices in the game [though not in all games is the choice element present] and whether or not you used a continue after losing all your lives).

Gensokyo, the setting for the games, is a mash-up with a lot of Eastern myths, and a some western ones as well (such as the witch Marisa, who even has the stereotypical black and white dress and black pointy hat of most “kid witches”). It is separate from the real world due to a magical boundary but exists alongside it. In Gensokyo, normal humans and mischievous youkai (who most of the time look perfectly human in appearance, if wearing silly hats or frilly clothes) interact in an ancient-style japanese society (though this aspect is not emphasized much at all).

The plots of the games are great fun to think about. For example, in Imperishable Night, the player can select from teams of characters, 1 human and 1 youkai, from previous games to investigate the disappearance of the moon (which has been replaced by a fake moon which can never become full). The characters have different motivations for going out. My favorite is the “main character” Reimu’s team: Yukari can’t sleep due to whatever’s going on, and has Reimu guide her to the problem because she doesn’t go out much so she wouldn’t know where to go in the first place.

The characters are all great fun, ranging from shrine maidens to ghosts to demons to a nuclear crow girl (with a megabuster-like arm). Some have very interesting backstories – Yuyuko for example has one that you just have to read and take in. It really resonates with me. She’s one of my favorite characters.

Touhou feels like a “modern” eastern style fairy tale, and manages to have decidedly serious (when you take the consequences into account and see the bad endings) stories while not being seemingly too dark or strangling. It really is a good illustration of what I was talking about before.

It is very hard to describe because I think it’s something you just have to experience, and because there’s so damn many characters and quite a number of stories. This post has already ran longer than I wanted it to, but you can check that wiki for more in-depth information.