Welcome to Touhou Project, a video game series about a racist shrine maiden with a large hatred toward youkai. The main objective through the Touhou Project games is to end whichever incident is occuring in Gensokyo, Japan.

Quick warning for new players: The Windows Touhou games do not follow the same canon as PC-98 Touhou games, however, I do recommend you play the PC-98 games if you enjoy how Touhou 6 feels. If you are new into Touhou, it's recommended you start with Touhou 6 if you want to know the current canon lore. Also, the PC-98 Touhou games Have limited features compared to the Windows games, changing gameplay. As such, this guide will only go over the games released for Windows.

Another warning: THIS GUIDE IS STILL BEING WRITTEN! This guide is going to be updated further at this point and will be expanded upon.

In this section, I will describe general Touhou gameplay mechanics for new players. Though I previously stated that this webpage will explain frequently neglected details in other tutorials, it is important to put new players on the right path.

If you are playing Touhou Project and notice you can't fire with 'normal' keys like MOUSE1 or SPACE, it's because Touhou Project was intended for an audience who had previously played games on the NEC PC9800, a Japanese computer released in the late 1980's. This system is what the first 5 Touhou Project games were exclusively released for. Its control scheme for video games mimicked that of Nintendo's SFC/NES, with two action keys and the arrow keys acting as the D-Pad. The two action keys are Z and X. Z being used to fire regular shots, and X being used to Bomb/clear the screen. In the majority of Touhou games, the SHIFT key can be used to slow your character, and in titles after 6 be used to display a hitbox. It is very useful to ensure you arent running headfirst into bullets, as your character is far faster than what you'd usually see in traditional bullet hell/SHMUP games. Another key featured in the majority of Touhou titles is the CTRL key. It isn't used in gameplay/combat, however is used to skip cutscenes to save you from having to keysmash to skip said cutscenes. Last but not least, in a select few titles, the C key is occassionally used to activate character/item specific abilities.

Touhou's rules follow the rules of your typical verticle scrolling bullet hell/SHMUP. In fact, Touhou was one of Undertale's inspirations gameplay-wise. Essentially, a boss throw a bunch of objects at you, and you have to dodge them or you die. Just dodge them, and you will win.

Touhou Project features powerup items to increase your power, points, bombs/spell cards, and lives. Each with their own according items.

There are three more items in the Touhou games that I did not mention, because they don't appear in every playthrough: depending on if you use bombs/lose lives:
The full power, star, and green point items. The full power item appears when you use a continue after losing every life When you continue, you respawn with the default number of lives and recieve a full power item to restore your power. The star item is generated by destroying bullets with a bomb and acts as a point. It functions just like a point item however, it is automatically collected. Green star items function similarly, however they vary in size and have the kanji 点, which means "point" written on them similarly to the blue point item. The green point items are used from Touhou 12 onward, and replaced the star items.