The Touhou Project is a shoot-em-up video game series developed by ZUN, who does all the graphics, music, art, plot and coding.
The series has a long story, the games have been released almost yearly since the first installment for the pc in 1996 and the fanbase is very dedicated to it, creating massive quantities of art, manga/comics, music remixes and fangames for the relatively obscure status of the series
The games have something that make them incredibly unique from the classic Shmup genre and even other "bullet hell" shmups, from the big all female cast to the immediately recognizable music style and enjoyable story lines, the touhou games combine gameplay with elegance due to how it handles bosses and level design.
Levels for the most party are your typical shmup, they start easy and become increasingly difficult, the enemies can be quite uninspired but do their job when pacing the game.
The bosses however, are a completely different beast, not only they pose a big challenge, they are actual duels, since the 6th game of the series "Spell cards" have become a recurring concept, where the boss unleashes a intricate, beautiful, and mortal attack, that while being difficult, are completely fair (most of the time) and designed to be beatable, without pure randomization, making the tough battles have a sport-like feel, and challenging the player to do better and learn from their mistakes.
Spell cards can be beaten in two ways, emptying the boss current HP meter or just waiting until the timer ends, there can be more than 1 spell card per battle, usually incresing the further you get in the game, and beating them without losing a live or using a bomb (which are actually spell cards of your own), nets you a score bonus and other benefits for playing fair and square.
Spell cards are brutal, mesmerizing, and most importantly, fun, not only they put the games to a league of its own, but combined with the interesting playstyles and gimmicks of each game, they are of the most interesting and fun games of their class
The main games usually stay similar, with unique tricks, like having dual characters, bewitched weapons that have fun effects, tying your bombs to your strength meter, and other stuff.
Some spin off really take the genre for a "spin", for example:
-Fairy Wars, where you can freeze enemy bullets in place and freeze any that touch the aready frozen bullet, creating screen wiping chain reaction that also give you experience and level up your normal shooting power.
-Shoot The Bullet, a pokemon snap-esque take, where you must take pictures of the enemy and the range of the picture also erases bullets for protection, this one comes in bite sized challenge battles with no regular stages, just set spell cards from which you have to dodge and take good shots
-Impossible Spell Card, where the bosses ditch the fairness in their attacks due to the misdoings of the main character, short battle based like Shoot the Bullet, you have a set of cheating items you can use to overcome the unfairness of the almost unbeatable spell cards (they aren't actually impossible).
All in all, extremely fun series, worth checking out, but be prepared to play on easy mode and run out of continues many times.
