Beginner Guide to Touhou Lore

A beginner's guide to the Touhou lore through exploring every piece of the Touhou canon. Whether you're a Touhou Fan already or just wonder what is Touhou, this is a good place to start. You might be familiar with The Touhou Project, but how much do you know about its official works? This is a condensed guide to all canon sources in the series, and even where to begin.

The Touhou Wiki
Purchasing Guide
Precise Chronological Canon Order (For crazy people)

Songs Used
Dream of Arcadia - ZUN
Greenwich in the Sky - ZUN
Mary, the Magician - ZUN
【malus】 - Hatsunetsumiko's

0:00 - Intro
0:42 - What is Canon?
1:19 - Video Overview
1:43 - Official Games
2:42 - First Game Recommendations
3:11 - ZUN's Music Collection
3:29 - Touhou Bougetsushou
4:06 - Touhou Sangetsusei
4:29 - Touhou Kourindou
4:48 - Touhou Ibarakasen
5:07 - Touhou Suzunaan
5:31 - Ongoing Manga
5:38 - Short Stories
6:05 - Danmaku Books
6:25 - Touhou Bunka
7:09 - Touhou Gumon
7:55 - Misc. Canon
8:20 - Recommended Starting Points
8:56 - Awesome Outro

[Erkling_heathcliff]

Touhou is like many mini fandoms in one fandom like
The fumo fandom
The oficial games fandom
The shitpost fandom
The art fandom
Soo just start from what you want to see and discover more

[totallyalpharius]

Complete guide to Touhou Lore and Canon - 9:13 long.
Complete guide to Touhou fanon - the last chronicler died in the process of compiling it.

[omegasynth]

You're gonna chuckle, but the thing that got me interested in Touhou Lore was playing a DOOM mod based around it.

[timur_glazkov]

Oh, I've been waiting for a decent canon catalogue for so long. This is wonderful, my friends who are new to Touhou will appreciate this a lot! Canon and fanon can be very hard to distinguish at times, and I think knowing what's universal and what's not is pretty important.

[NarrowSpark]

I'm just happy that Okina choking Clownpiece is a canon event.

[gott]

With respect to the manga, it should also be noted that sadly only "Forbidden Scrollery" has ever gotten an official English-language translation courtesy of Yen Press. At point, it doesn't look like there are plans to release further additions anytime soon.

[absoutezeo]

While Perfect Memento in Strict Sense is a good book to read to get a basic understanding of a lot of characters and races, I think it's important to mention that because it's from the perspective of Akyuu who knows a lot but not everything, it DOES contain information that is outright incorrect in places, as the wiki itself points out.

[Ravensgale]

I got pulled into the world of Touhou Project through the music. I was already a mythology and history nerd so the appeal of Gensokyo and some of it's denizen's connections to it pulled me in even more.

[GensouChronicle]

EDIT: I added a link to a completely chronological ordering of the canon in the description if people want to follow an exact guide of when to play/read what. if you want it.

Just to get things started a bit, I wanted to go more of the games I didn't touch on in the video.
Touhou 2 - This is the first shoot'em up. If you're bothering to start with 2, you might as well start with 1 in my opinion.
Touhou 7 - This is another really nice starting point. It's a little more polished than Touhou 6, is pretty easy, the gimmick isn't too overt and likewise has a lot of popular characters.
Touhou 8 - As much as this is an easy game with a lot of iconic characters, I've seen a lot of people bring up a point of its really lenient 'death bomb' window teaching bad habits to newer players. Other than that, players should definitely mind how the time gimmick works in this game since it can lock them out of an ending. But if someone was set on starting with this one? Go for it.
Touhou 9 - I don't know anybody whose ever suggested starting with this one, but it doesn't seem too bad honestly?
Touhou 10 - This isn't a bad start. It's pretty easy and introduces the Moriya folks. Only downside I see it maybe discouraging new players from bombing since it's tied to your power. That said you can save up enough power to bomb without losing any in this one, so it's not all bad.
Touhou 11 - This one is pretty hard. It's like 10 except there's no wiggle room for bombing with your power. If you bomb, you lose power. I wouldn't really recommend this one first, but I know the Komeiji sisters are pretty popular. Maybe try this second if you really are set on it?
Touhou 12 - This one is tough and has a pretty involved gimmick. Compared to the ones I've mentioned, I actually haven't 1cced this on normal back when I still played the games regularly.
Touhou 13 - This is very easy, but I personally don't think it's great to start with since the gimmick can be used to bypass a lot of stuff, thus trivializing gameplay. Which, is fine if you want an easy first win, but won't help too much with getting better for the other games.

[Acertaintouhoufan]

>channel named “Gensou Chronicle”
>uses Akyuu in a lot of thumbnails
>personal choice for best manga being forbidden scrollers which features a lot of Akyuu
>PMiSS written by Akyuu is the most important canon work for lore
The waifu bias is just obvious at this point

Ok jokes aside I’d like to give an argument that Touhou 8 also works really well as an introduction as it has a partner system which both allows for easier death bombs and introduction to both the EoSD and PCB cast via playable characters on top of the IN cast. So basically, a 3 in 1 package in terms of introducing characters lol. The music in IN is also phenomenal and will definitely draw people in immediately (especially stage 4 onwards)

[mrrp]

The CD stories and the accompanying music are some of the my favorite works of fiction. They’re beautiful.

[mush-broom]

As someone whose knowledge of Touhou is mostly based on games (and fanworks), this 5min video is very helpful.



There are quite alot Touhou official works and I'd like them a try, but idk.. feels overwhelmed trying to choose which one to start, and end up doing nothing.

However, I had already planned to start with Forbidden Scrollery, and your video convinced me even more.

[xaropevic]

To choose one of the Touhou CD themes as the background one is a pretty fitting choice!

[octapusxft]

It does not help that the main games are usually avoiding the story segments on videos at the request of ZUN. It is quite fascinating how respected he is though.

[nawalathhariansyah]

This will make it easier to recommend some official stuff to some of my buddies! Thank you!

[fourteenroads]

Nice video, Now I have something to show my friends whenever someone asks how to get into touhou. Thanks! Hope that you'll continue this kind of quality content of touhou lore.

[raikaria]

Just as a bit of an extension to the game canon:

While all information can be considered canon in the games; there are a few games where we know a 100% canon ending, or some which are not canon:

- EoSD [6] Extra is Reimu, based off 17.5. Flandre explicitly recalls losing to Reimu [and is quite angry that she gave up and lost against Yuuma]. If you pick a route where she meets Marisa; neither seem to recognise each other.

- Lotus Land Story [4] is Reimu, based on the canon statement that [until 18.5]; Marisa had never defeated Reimu and is always 2nd best. Likewise; IN [8] cannot be Marisa canon, neither can PoFV [9] or PoDD [3] since these would all involve Marisa beating Reimu. Same with 17.5 and the fighting games. These all cannot have Marisa as canon; since Marisa canon means Marisa would have to have defeated Reimu... which she hadn't.

- UM [18] is actually Marisa canon. 18.5 explicitly states Marisa defeated the Market God.

- WBaWC [17] we know down to the shot-type thanks to 17.5; is Reimu-Eagle. Yuuma explicitly says that her underlings helped Reimu defeat Keiki. However, it's also implied in the [non-canon] Marisa story that Marisa was the protagonist on the Extra Stage; since Yuuma appears to have heard about her from Saki.

- SoEW [2] Extra is explicitly non-canon. Rika; Reimu and Genji explicitly discuss the whole stage being a What-If.

[Plungi_]

0:10 Yk what else is massive? TAPER FADE 🗣🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[apon]

Thanks
I already follow the wiki list for the written works, but it's nice to have an introduction to all of them and to know at which point it's best to read them.

[KazmirRunik]

I think it's worth mentioning that the whole of Touhou canon is a good amount of writing, a bit of a journey if you want to try tackling it all. Those novels are 100+ pages (each), and there are over 200 chapters of manga in total.

Also, the different canon works do reference one another, but a person probably won't always be able to appreciate these references unless the works are experienced in the canon's chronological (mostly release) order. For instance, CoLA references PMiSS, EaLND, and MoF in proximity to when those other works first released. The Scarlet Team's IN FinalB route (2004) is the first time the events of SSiB are foreshadowed, but Sakuya is seen again setting these events up in both BAiJR (2005) and CoLA (2006 in ch. 18) before SSiB actually begins in 2007, with a bit of further setup having taken place in Magical Astronomy (2006). As a bonus, the CoLA chapter foreshadowing Sakuya's involvement in SSiB also directly nods to Suika's story in BAiJR. It can be a bit of a knot to catch all the interplay, that is unless the works are experienced more or less in order of release, so that you know what information & characters are available to the canon by the time the stories happen.