Characters

Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame reminisce about characters they've encountered, from the Silent Sinner in Blue prologue.

The Touhou Project features a great number and variety of characters. Over the course of 30 games, literature, and music CDs, the cast has grown to having over 180 characters. Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame are considered the protagonists of the Touhou Project, due to being the most frequent playable characters in the games. Other characters' roles in the games consist of supporting characters, bosses, or minor appearances. However, due to a diverging points in the series, some of the characters (namely, the majority of the PC-98 ones) have not been mentioned again.

List of Characters

Touhou Project

Here is a list of all Touhou Project characters, categorised by their first game or publication appearance (Characters with * after their name do not have an official name). NB, the "generations" (term unofficial) for the games are split according to this image.

Seihou Project & Project Blank

Here is a list of all Seihou Project and Project Blank characters by "Shunsatsu sare do?" and RebRank respectively, categorised by their first game or publication appearance. Note that they aren't Touhou characters, but Seihou did contain guest appearances by ZUN himself, and that Seihou characters aren't part of Project Blank, but do officially contain Seihou characters.

Other

Here is a list of other related characters. Note that they aren't Touhou characters.

General Information

With its focus on bishoujo characters, the Touhou series possesses a large cast compared to other shoot 'em up games, maybe even those of shooting games, and are notoriously female. Most Touhou characters reside in a fictional landlocked region called Gensokyo, where humans and youkai live. The youkai often prey on the humans while the humans try to exterminate them. A character's most common role in a Touhou Project game is being a boss, and they have titles and a theme song associated with them. Midbosses, however, tend to not have a unique theme. Many characters also have unique abilities, and almost all Windows characters have at least one ability named in the fashion of "capable of ~~" (~~程度の能力), showing their strength and power with various capabilities.

Though each game features a collection of different characters, the main character of the games is always Reimu Hakurei, joined by Marisa Kirisame. The only games where this is not the case are Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler; Aya Shameimaru is playable in both, and Hatate Himekaidou can become playable in the latter. The same thing applies in Fairy Wars, Impossible Spell Card, Violet Detector, and 100th Black Market which has Cirno, Seija Kijin, Sumireko Usami, and Marisa Kirisame as the sole playable character in their respective games.

PC-98 Games

Cover of Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream, featuring PC-98 characters that appear in the game.

As of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, ZUN decided to develop games for the Windows platform and flesh out the universe starting from a clean slate. Besides the Returning characters from the PC-98, none of the other characters from the PC-98 games have reappeared in the Windows era, although cases such as Mima's appearance on the case of Akyu's Untouched Score vol.4 exist.

PC-98 characters tend to have a title and music theme, but no ability has being explicitly stated to most characters. They also don't have articles and interviews, or other appearances in print works.

Windows Games

Another minor pivotal point exists with the release of Mountain of Faith, marking the "2nd Windows generation". While previous games had independent storylines, the plots of Mountain of Faith up to Ten Desires were connected (e.g. The events of Ten Desires were triggered by the construction of the Myouren Temple, which in turn was triggered by the Palanquin ship being released by the geyser by Utsuho Reiuji's power.) However, Double Dealing Character contains no storyline related to the previous games, so it could mark another minor pivotal point for a possible "3rd Windows generation".

The character appearances trend also resets. For example, Sakuya Izayoi was a stage 5 boss in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil who later became playable in Perfect Cherry Blossom up to Phantasmagoria of Flower View, but has not made an appearance after that in any danmaku Touhou game up until Double Dealing Character.

• Fighting Games

A consistent cast can be seen in the fighting games. Rather than inventing a new set of characters, only one or two new characters were added with the rest coming from previous games. So far, only four characters have first appeared in a fighting game.

• Photography Games & Puzzles

In Shoot the Bullet, Double Spoiler and Impossible Spell Card, characters from previous games are used. Shoot the Bullet contains most characters from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil to Phantasmagoria of Flower View, while Double Spoiler adds the cast from Mountain of Faith up to Undefined Fantastic Object. Impossible Spell Card contained a variety of characters, mostly from Ten Desires and Double Dealing Character.

• Literature

The cast of Touhou characters also grows with the addition of the novels and comics. Only Aya Shameimaru and the Three Fairies Of Light were later featured in a game. Touhou literature is directly connected with the Windows games, as events that happen within the literature are mentioned in the Windows games, and vice versa. Perfect Memento in Strict Sense and Symposium of Post-mysticism and Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red have in-universe articles and interviews about individual characters, along with The Grimoire of Marisa having spell cards related to the characters.

Seihou Games

Cover of Kioh Gyoku, featuring Seihou characters that appear in the game.

Note: This section is part of the Seihou Project by the Doujin circle "Shunsatsu sare do?".

Characters of the Seihou Project were created by "Shunsatsu sare do?" and have nothing to do with the Touhou Project, although they also do have their own theme music. The Seihou Project however contained characters from the Touhou Project, named Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame and Yuuka Kazami. Even in Touhou, references to Seihou characters are extremely rare, with one coming from Dolls in Pseudo Paradise.

It appears that each game contains most characters from the previous. Unlike Touhou characters, Seihou characters are designed to be very Western, which is the opposite of Touhou; even their names are western. They also have more frequent male characters that appear in the shoot 'em ups. Since Seihou is set in the future, the characters are also designed to have a futuristic feeling with then, along with having their own aircraft. However, unlike Touhou characters, most character don't have any titles or abilities associated with them and most characters' species are human.

Character Designs

An example of in-game introduction to a character's name (namely Raiko Horikawa): top, title; middle, character's name in Japanese; bottom, the romaji of the name in Japanese naming order.

Names

Generally, almost all names for each character are written in the Japanese script, either in hiragana, katakana or kanji. Names generally start with the surname followed by the first name, but when they are written in katakana to show a western name, they'll be in western naming order, where they'll have a middle dot (・) to show where the surname begins. The names may not truly be actual names in real life, as they may contain kanji to represent the character overall, for example Yuyuko (幽々子) literally translates to "ghostly child".

ZUN has provided romaji and kana versions for most of the Windows characters; the latter only included if the name's in kanji. On some rare occurrences, he'd include official English translations of the name. There have been instances in error of romaji however, such as those listed here. Some characters only have one name, notably the PC-98 characters, such as Rika and Shinki. There are even those that have no name, such as Tokiko.

For western languages, such as English or French, names are obviously written in the Latin script, called romanization/romanisation. Also, the naming order from Japanese is switched to fit suitably with Westerners, for example "Saigyouji Yuyuko" (西行寺　幽々子) becomes "Yuyuko Saigyouji". Unofficial romaji may be used for convenience; for example, "Byakuren Hiziri" was officially used, but "Byakuren Hijiri" has not been officially used yet. Choices and alternative spelling can come in many when romanising katakana; one example is Maribel Hearn, who ZUN doesn't even know the official translation and has other possible translations such as "Maribel Han" and "Mæriberie Hearn".

Eastern languages, namely Chinese and Korean, also have some forms of conversions. Chinese conversion from kanji to hanzi depends on the variant of the Chinese language whether it accepts the hanzi/kanji or not; they can sometimes keep their original kanji, but must always be transliterated from hiragana or katakana. Names are always transliterated to hangeul within the Korean language. In cases like Yuyuko's name, since the Japanese iteration mark "々", casually called a noma (ノマ), isn't formally used in the Chinese or Korean language, it's best to re-use the previous hanzi/hangeul (e.g. 幽幽子/유유코).

Fans of both of the Western and Eastern fanbase have given alternative fan-names for the characters based on their characteristics, such as the Five Magic Stones.

Designs

Despite there being many species of youkai, almost all the characters take a humanoid form, and are notoriously female. Their designs are notoriously colourful and are based around their characteristics, culture and appearance in a game or manga. It's also notorious that almost all characters have some kind of head wear, such as ribbons or non-human attributes, and that they tend to have a skirt. For characters to not have these attributes is somewhat rare, such as Yuuka Kazami not having a hat and Fujiwara no Mokou wearing trousers respectively.

The designs are based on the species a certain character is, such as Nitori Kawashiro being a kappa and having a backpack to represent a tortoise's shell, and Raiko Horikawa having a drum since she is a tsukumogami. This also relates to animal-based characters, such as Chen having cat ears, Ran Yakumo having nine tails due to being a Kitsune and Mamizou Futatsuiwa having a large tail due to being a bake-danuki.

Some characters however have not even been given an official portrait, such as Layla Prismriver and Youki Konpaku. This leads to fans theorising their appearances.

Male characters

It's seldom to see male characters appear in the Touhou Project as they are either not named (Various humans shown in Hopeless Masquerade), not humanoid (Genjii, Sokrates, Unzan) or do not have official appearances (Youki Konpaku, Marisa's unnamed father, Myouren Hijiri). However, the one with the most recurring appearances is Rinnosuke Morichika, who is sometimes mocked in the fanbase over this. Another male character with a name and an official appearance is Unshou. There is also one before all of these, called Shingyoku, but this character has three forms, so this character may not exactly be male.

However, it has been theorised that ZUN might've had trouble designing male characters due to the number of female characters – such as statements like "it would be weird to have an old man as the last boss in Touhou" for Myouren been originally the final boss of Undefined Fantastic Object – but later confirmed that he feels that "boys get in the way of the game" and that "boys would just ruin the balance of the series." He prefers females to fight in the games.

PC-98

Amongst the PC-98, only some characters had a full portrait of themselves from head to feet. The PC-98 had a 16-colour limit, where one obvious feature was that most PC-98 characters had the same eye and hair colour; the only characters who have different eye and hair colour are Elis, Konngara and SinGyoku's "male" form. Also, ZUN has stated that he won't go back to doing 16-colour graphics.

Drawings

Some characters that don't appear in Symposium of Post-mysticism (with ZUN) by TOKIAME.

ZUN takes on most of the drawings for the characters that appear in the Touhou games. His distinctive ways of drawing is different compared to other artists. The character portraits used in the fighting spin-off games developed in collaboration with Twilight Frontier, however, have been drawn by alphes (Immaterial and Missing Power, Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, Touhou Hisoutensoku and Hopeless Masquerade), and Moe Harukawa (Urban Legend in Limbo and Antinomy of Common Flowers). ZUN had various artists to draw the manga and other official books, such as Aki★Eda for Silent Sinner in Blue, and several artists in the case of Perfect Memento in Strict Sense. Makoto Hirasaka drew the Touhou Sangetsusei mangas, but also drew the characters for Fairy Wars since the game is based on the manga.

Reception & Fandom

Main article: Fandom: Characters

See Also

• Character Titles
• Character Abilities
• References to Touhou
• Alternative spellings
• Fanon and Memes

External Links

• Characters: Touhou on TVTropes.org

(note that they use fanart for pictures of characters who didn't appear in fighting games or official print works.)

• List of Touhou Characters on Danbooru (NSFW)
• List of Touhou Characters on Wikipedia