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Reactions to Touhou

bullets, bombs, and girls, what more do you want? its touhou!
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Octagon
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Reactions to Touhou

Post by Octagon »

Apparently, many people cannot handle Touhou.
A Youtube comment at this Mountain of Faith replay is a nice example:
what kind of weird game is this and how do little girls shoot so many bullets ! ?
Let's collect examples of people being unable to cope with this awesome series of games.

This topic is not meant for being condescending to people who happen to be unaware of the phenomenon of bullet hell, but for discussing "culture shock" and people not understanding things we may take for granted due to fan myopia.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Paperkoopa »

Myself.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Septentrion Pleiades »

I like, "how much of that do you have to dodge?"
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Octagon »

I very much like this argument; other than "how much of that do you have to dodge", “lol omg all the characters are little girls! its just little girls firing lasers at eachother lol for pedos XD” seems to be the usual reaction to Touhou, and this gives an interesting reasoning what exactly is wrong abbout that train of thought.
This is pretty awesome as well.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by RobinLSL »

Octagon wrote:I very much like this argument; other than "how much of that do you have to dodge", “lol omg all the characters are little girls! its just little girls firing lasers at eachother lol for pedos XD” seems to be the usual reaction to Touhou, and this gives an interesting reasoning what exactly is wrong abbout that train of thought.
This is pretty awesome as well.

That felt really nice to read.

Thinking about it, it's actually really really really freaking true that having an all-female cast actually REMOVES the sexuality of the whole thing. How cool!
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Aposke »

Oh cool, we're talking about Fawriel now.
Well yeah, that guy's pretty awesome, he runs http://ask-disciple-kyouko.tumblr.com/ and is currently working on his own Touhou Doujin and whatnot.
He makes some very interesting and thoughtful posts sometimes and generally seems like a pretty nice guy to have around.

But yeah, reactions to Touhou?
I don't know, the two people I've told about Touhou so far have never complained about it being full of girls or anything, most comments I get about it are "Holy shit all these bullets."
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by gamercal »

Yeah, the biggest reactions I got from my friends, after the initial "what the fuck is that?" pretty much amounted to "how the hell do you even play this?". Pretty much ignoring the gender thing and looking solely at the bullets xD
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by freelop »

I don't show touhou to people because chances are if you are likely to be the sort of person who would like it then you already know about it. If not then there isn't much point in them knowing about it.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by ano0maly »

freelop wrote:I don't show touhou to people because chances are if you are likely to be the sort of person who would like it then you already know about it. If not then there isn't much point in them knowing about it.
Actually, you should present it to people who are familiar with shmup games or bullet patterns, like Strikers 1945. I was aware of that "plane game" before, so I was sort of used to the mechanics when I played PCB (the first one I played).
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by raekuul »

Anytime I show it to people, they see the bullet patterns as bullets and ask "How do you not get a headache?"
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Aposke »

A still-kinda-offtopic notion:
Fawriel is actually a member of the Talkhaus.
Huh.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Octagon »

When I showed one of the games to some people I know, they took a while to understand that these pretty little colourful flashy things were bullets.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by O-Card »

Aposke wrote:A still-kinda-offtopic notion:
Fawriel is actually a member of the Talkhaus.
Huh.
she comments on pretty much every raocow video

or used to, no idea
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Zatsupachi »

raekuul wrote:Anytime I show it to people, they see the bullet patterns as bullets and ask "How do you not get a headache?"
Exactly people say to me when I'm passing time in an internet shop.
I'm just like: "Looks pretty normal to me."
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Snakebite969 »

I show my Touhou replays to friends

They're like "HOW DO YOU DODGE THAT?!"
I'm like "I don't. They dodge me. See there, for example; one just tried to hit me - the rest are like 'AAAH GET AWAY SHE'S TOO POWERFUL'. "

And then I get hit, and my entire speech is ruined.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by CRBWildcat »

I was initially extremely reluctant to try the games. When someone at my usual hangout posted a Touhou topic (circa June 2011) and offered a friendly competition involving high scores, statistics and what not, I told him that my experience with Life Force didn't come close to preparing me for that sort of monstrosity; I'd seen footage of the games, and I didn't like the look of things. "Too many bullets" and "Heart problems aren't really my thing" were amongst the comments I posted.

The other guy later argued that my misgivings were unfounded, claimed that I'd been looking at the Hard- and Lunatic-level patterns, and that the Easy and Normal difficulties were perfectly manageable. He went on to say that the bullet storms varied in intensity, and that it was possible to survive them if the player practiced enough, and if he/she was familiar enough with the attack patterns and Spell Cards. He ended his post by linking some footage of Imperishable Night, at which point I finally conceded the argument and promised to give the games a try.

Looking back, I'd have to say that we were both right: the games are manageable, and at the same time they like to mess with my nerves. 8-)
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Noxy »

Octagon wrote:“lol omg all the characters are little girls! its just little girls firing lasers at eachother lol for pedos XD”
This is actually a legit reaction because
Bartle wrote:Reactions to touhou fans would make a much better topic.
Someone else mentioned that having an all-female cast went a long a long way in not making the series overtly sexual or something, and while that's true for the Touhou series, this isn't even remotely true for other doujin series. Western example, but Skullgirls gave had this lovely dev quote about how it's perfectly normal all the girls do high kicks to flash their underwear at each other because that's what women do when they're together apparently?! Or the Rosenkreuz Stilette games where you can practictically list the boss characters by their archetypes (I feel shameful just admitting I know the series because of one character pretty blatantly being designed for pedophiles).

When I first heard about Touhou learning that it has an all-female it set off alarm bells in my head before I could be dazzled by the amount of bullets on-screen in the games. When you know the least bit about otaku it's hard not to get the impression it's an all-you-can-eat-buffet kinda game where you can choose which character you want to masturbate to (it didn't help that the guy who introduced me to Touhou also turned out to be a pedopile). It took like a year being exposed to Touhou before I decided to try out the games and realized, hey, these games aren't creepy at all!

But then we get to the part where the Touhou series is in a niche genre known for its difficulty, so many Touhou fans (feels like 99% a lot of the time) don't play or even care about the games, or even the mangas and artbooks made by ZUN himself, so people just get a buncha female characters to care about, when a buncha nerds starts obsessing about an all-female cast the resulting fandom stuff is invariably going to turn out pretty goddamn creepy. At this point I mainly stick to works by ZUN and the occasional PV that shows, and even the later gets me the creepy dud often enough.

It's just disappointing, I just wanna recommend Touhou to other nerdy buddies and not feel like a creep by association or having to warn people of fanworks or feel like pre-emptively justifying myself.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Clamestarebla »

The first time I experienced Touhou was about 1 and a half years ago. I downloaded Lotus Land Story, put it on normal and made it halfway through before getting my first game-over...and then Elly kicked my ass.After that, I said to myself, well I'm pretty decent at this. I changed it to Lunatic and I'd play about 30-45 minutes every day and I would get better each time. I eventually got to Yuuka and her theme blew my freaking mind.I managed to get the good ending on lunatic after about 2 weeks. Then I moved on to Mystic Square, put it on Lunatic and my mind exploded at Ice Lake because that stage is pure awesomeness. I have the good ending for Yuuka and Mima so far. I haven't played any Modern Era games yet because the files for these are so damn huge.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Zha Hong Lang »

I've never had to deal with anyone who complained about the fact it was little girls. Pretty much all people have noticed are the gignatic masses of bullets on screen, though I have had my brother say, "That's not so hard, it's all in patterns! They never directly shoot at you, it would be much harder if they did that instead of patterns."

... and aside from the fact that's five-minute-thought-period kind of assumptions, he also plays FPS games (especially CoD) as a standard, so I say he's free for his own world there.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Sorel »

My first reaction:

WTF dem bullets.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Electrictunes »

I remember at first I was like: "Oh a game which is as hard as I wanna be the guy". But then I realised that they are harder. Now I play them sometimes I used to play more. Also I remember getting constantly asked "How do you see your character" and "How can you play this so calmishly looking".
I always tell everyone that I get really relaxed because of the music so I can focus on the game more.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Lunikyuu »

I can't remember which came first, but there are two different instances that come to mind when I think about when I first heard about Touhou. One was me stumbling upon a video of Utsuho's boss fight while I was browsing random stuff online. The other was when I was in high school once during lunch/break period when someone was playing Touhou on one of the computers, and one of my friends was like "oh man guys, this guy's playing Touhou!" so a few of my friends and I just kind of watched for a while. Either way, I remember my first reactions were that it looked extemely beautiful and murderously hard at the same time. After playing SA, I can say that neither of those opinions have changed, though I do find it pretty fun still.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by CRBWildcat »

I found several old reactions to the games that I thought were particularly amusing:

"These games are for masochists seeking the day their spirit dies."

and

"...They are now sitting on one of my three external drives gathering digital equivalents of dust waiting for the day I go, "Let's cause self pain now yays!""

Although now that ISC is out, I have the feeling that these comments will have more of a ring of truth to them. Suffice to say I'm not even going to touch the game until after the temperatures around here drop back down into the 60s.
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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Saturn Moriya »

What I hear alot from "real gamers" when they see Touhou, or any bullet hell game for that matter, is "this game sucks you can't even move". It annoys me so much! It's understandable to be overwhelmed at first glance, but you don't have to write it off as terrible because you feel it may be a challenge your gamer ego can't handle. It's completely fine if it's not for you, but please don't be an ignorant prick. My first reaction too was "this is completely insane". But then I thought "I have to try this". I don't get why all these people don't want to be challenged.

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Re: Reactions to Touhou

Post by Sorel »

Saturn Moriya wrote:My mom says "ooh that's pretty".
Your mom has the best reaction so far.



I tried TH 6 at my pals house and my first reaction was "What happened". Next reaction was "How is this even possible".
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