Touhou Coming West After Twenty Years

The Touhou series sees its first-ever official Western/English release on May 7 of this year.  Barring, of course, various less-than-official English patches.  The localization team at Japanese indie game distributor Playism says they’re releasing two of the most recent Touhou games in English simultaneously: Touhou 14: Double Dealing Character and Takkoman.  Takkoman’s a platformer; Double Dealing Character, being another main Touhou installment, is a bullet hell.  Double Dealing Character originally came out in the summer of 2013, and Takkoman’s a fan-made game based on Touhou mythos. 

Touhou 14: Double Dealing Character

Touhou is something of a Japanese crossmedia indie phenomenon.  ZUN (that’s one guy’s pseudonym, not a company name) has cranked out almost twenty Touhou games to date since the mid-90s, most of them bullet hells or fighters.  Unlike a lot of doujin, ZUN’s universe is completely original.  Over the past twenty years, the Touhou fever’s spread to manga, light novels, and a crazy amount of fan works.

Takkoman

Double Dealing Character and Takkoman will be available through the Playism store in just a few short days, for $15 and $10, respectively.  This series is gigantic overseas; we’ll see how it fares here.