>>3149 I like everything about Touhou itself and I'd say it has helped me relax. The merch, the music, the albums, the characters, and ironically I feel pretty relaxed when playing the games even during 1CC attempts since the soundtrack being consistently good makes the experience for me pretty enjoyable even when failing. However, I absolutely loathe 99% of the western fanbase. Almost everyone are secondaries or tertiaries who only know about Touhou through non-sensical memes, porn, or mentally retarded tumblrniggery. The remaining 1% that actually knows shit about Touhou I can pretty much only find in imageboards or obscure websites. I am also aware that a good chunk of the Japanese fanbase are also secondaries but at least compared to the western ones there's a way higher share of actual fans of the source material, and they also don't arrogantly act as if they know everything about it while not even knowing that official mangas exist. I do wish I could one day visit Comiket or Reitaisai.

Touhou was a very important part of my teenage years, discovering Gensokyo and the characters within was a wonderful experience that i wouldn't trade for anything in the world. And that makes it all the more painful to witness the series in it's current state, i wish i could move on. >>3155 People would actually play the games if ZUN had stuck to quite literally any other genre, but unfortunately he picked bullet hell of all fucking things as the hill to die on. A shame, really.

>>3230 Could've been worse, he could've stuck to the brick breaker

>>3232 I disagree, HRtP is a novel fusion of genres even to this day while most danmaku struggle to differentiate themselves from one another (no, no one gives a shit about different scoring mechanics), i would much prefer if he had stuck and further iterated upon that instead. Surprisingly, the only HRtP-like i've ever seen was a Len'en fangame

>>3149 yeah im currently having a hard time with orin but I beat a couple of the games on hard already and ex stages. I would be happy having any physical media pertaining to the series myself or attend reitaisai or something.

>>3238 There was an anon in the 4/jp/ gameplay threads who was making a GBA-style remake of HRtP and it actually looks like something I would've spent many hours trying to beat while travelling as a kid. Imagine a new decimal game that uses HRtP's brick breaker style of gameplay, it'd be pretty unexpected.

Improved? I think it stole it from me.

>>3244 Yeah, i saw it. I wonder how far development went on that, it looked really promising. >Imagine a new decimal game that uses HRtP's brick breaker style of gameplay As much as i'd like that, it would mean acknowledging the existence of the PC98 games, which seems to be a big no-no for ZUN these days. Also, is tasofro still around anymore? >>3251 Welcome to the club.

>>3149 made me addicted to its games and I got Lunatic 1CCs and ExNNs so it definitely improved my life even if it was just something to kill time

>>3238 HRtP is definitely my favourite. It is more challenging but far more rewarding than the bullet hell ones, and the music is just incredible.