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r/touhou•
maxdefolsch

List of unofficial / fan-made Touhou anime

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Hi ! I've been meaning to do that for a little while.

Why did you guys first get into Touhou ? I don't know about you, but for me, it wasn't for the games. I do like hard games, but it certainly wasn't what made me interested in the first place. And even if I already knew that Touhou music was well-known for how good it was, it still wasn't my main motivation for getting into the series.

What intrigued me was the universe of Touhou, the world of Touhou, the lore of Touhou. Gensokyo and its inhabitants. Although developing the story has never been a priority, it spawned an incredibly fascinating dream world, and gave birth to one of the most dedicated fandoms in the world. I knew a bit about the setting, but I wanted to experience for myself the phenomenon that became so loved in the 15 last years.

So that's what I did, last year. I finally got bored enough to start playing the games, reading the books, and get my hand on every bit of official content I could find. And it was satisfying ! But now that I was "into it", it wasn't enough.

Before being a Touhou fan, I am an anime fan. I'll take a wild guess and assume that I'm not the only one in this community... Anime, as a media, can and has been incredibly powerful in the way it tells a story, including but not limited to by enhancing the immersion with high-quality visuals and music. So, of course, I was hoping to find out that there were official anime adaptations of Touhou out there, especially since the setting of Gensokyo seemed to offer so many possibilities. Surely, now that I knew this world, I was going to live something even more amazing by seeing it come to life in animation. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that ZUN explicitly refused to produce a Touhou anime.

I then turned to fan-made content. Even if they were not canon or official in any way, it could still bring me entertainment or even touch my feelings. And luckily, as I mentioned, this fandom is famous for being incredibly talented and prolific, to the point where it actually produced a few anime episodes. Which I've watched as fast as I could. Some of them were extremely good, and some of them were not, but even those were still anime episodes, with an atmosphere that made me feel closer to Gensokyo.

Now that I'm pretty much caught up with everything and that I know a bit more about Touhou and its community, I noticed something (or rather, I had already noticed when I was searching for fan-made content). It's actually a bit difficult to find information on Touhou fan-made anime. You have to search around quite a lot, find subtitled videos, and sometimes the information you get is not up to date... It would be a lot easier if there existed a list of Touhou anime and videos to check out, but as far as I know, it's not a thing.

... Yet ! That's what I'm doing right now, as you all already know because of the title of the post (spoilers). To help newcomers find the same feeling that I once found, I compiled a list of every piece of Touhou anime that I could unearth. Now, in addition to the big series that most fans know, there are also a lot of little independant animated videos floating around on the Internet, so I allowed myself to restrict a bit what counted as "anime" in my mind.

Therefore, this list does NOT include :

  • 3D / MMD videos. Some of them are absolutely hilarious but it's not what I'm searching for here.
  • Animations with a style that's too different from anime / manga style. Sorry, I'm biased.
  • Parodies that trace or are heavily based upon an existing anime video. I saw a couple anime openings like that.
  • Anime videos that are essentially slideshows or with minimal animation.
  • Anime videos that are just of insufficient quality. I know it's arbitrary and depends on the viewer but I feel like it really breaks the immersion. Please don't take that as a lack of respect for hard-working fans !

I apologize if you were searching for these kinds of animated videos. I'm not planning to make a separate list for those but I'd be interested to see your recommendations if you do !

Now, onto the list. I'll first talk about the main anime series that exist (you probably have already heard of most of them), and then I'll list a bunch of little anime videos that I found.

 

#A Summer Day's Dream

Japanese : 東方二次創作同人アニメ 夢想夏郷

Romaji : Touhou Niji Sousaku Doujin Anime: Musou Kakyou

English : Touhou Unofficial Doujin Anime: A Summer Day's Dream

Created by : MAIKAZE (website, Youtube, Twitter)

Support the creators by purchasing the anime and related goods here

 

Touhou Wiki - Musou Kakyou: A Summer Day's Dream

Touhou Wikia - Musou Kakyou: A Summer Day's Dream

MyAnimeList - Touhou Niji Sousaku Doujin Anime: Musou Kakyou

MyAnimeList - Touhou Niji Sousaku Doujin Anime: Musou Kakyou Special

 

The first big Touhou anime series, notable for its use of high-ranking professional voice actors. In this series, while Gensokyo is preparing for a summer festival, a thief strikes and steals Reimu's donation box. The cast starts to investigate.

 

  • Episode 1 (December 29, 2008) :
  • Episode 2 (August 12, 2012) :
  • Episode 2.5 (May 11, 2014) :
  • Episode 3 (August 13, 2016) :
  • Episode 4 (???)

 

#Anime Tenchou x Touhou Project

Japanese : アニメ店長x東方Project

Romaji : Anime Tenchou x Touhou Project

Created by : ufotable (website)

 

MyAnimeList - Anime Tenchou x Touhou Project

 

A collaboration anime project of Anime Tenchou and Touhou that was shown at the 2010 Animate Ichioshi Bishojo Anime Matsuri. Full disclaimer : the real thing, as far as I know, cannot be found anywhere on the Internet. I included it in this list mainly to explain this to people who search for "touhou anime", come across this information, and can't find the actual episode.

 

 

#The Memories of Phantasm

Japanese : 幻想万華鏡～The Memories of Phantasm～

Romaji : Gensou Mangekyou The Memories of Phantasm

English : Fantasy Kaleidoscope The Memories of Phantasm

Created by : Manpuku Jinja (website, Youtube, Twitter)

 

Touhou Wiki - Fantasy Kaleidoscope The Memories of Phantasm

Touhou Wikia - Fantasy Kaleidoscope The Memories of Phantasm

 

This series retells the plots of the games, although it sometimes takes minor creative liberties with them. The original videos lacked voice acting (dialogue was displayed as text on screen), but fans released dubbed versions afterwards.

 

  • Episode 3 : The Scarlet Mist Incident (Part Two) (December 30, 2013) :
  • Episode 5 : The Flower Incident (Part One) (June 12, 2015) :
  • Episode 6 : The Flower Incident (Part Two) (October 18, 2015) :
  • Episode 7 : The Mysterious Giant Youkai (May 22, 2016) :
  • Ephemeral, Great and Splendid Land of Grief (Imperishable Night OP) :
  • Episode 8 : The Eternal Night Incident (Part One) (December 29, 2016) :
  • Episode 9 : The Eternal Night Incident (Part Two) (August 11, 2017) :
  • Episode 10 : The Eternal Night Incident (Part Three) (December 29, 2017)

 

#The Sealed Esoteric History

Japanese : 秘封活動記録 ～ The Sealed Esoteric History

Romaji : Hifuu Katsudou Kiroku ~ The Sealed Esoteric History

English : Hifuu Club Activity Record ~ The Sealed Esoteric History

Created by : Kyoto Fantasy Troupe (website, Youtube, Twitter, Weibo, Bilibili)

Support the creators by purchasing the anime and related goods here

 

Touhou Wiki - Hifuu Club Activity Record ~ The Sealed Esoteric History

Touhou Wikia - Hifuu Club Activity Record The Sealed Esoteric History

MyAnimeList - Hifuu Katsudou Kiroku: The Sealed Esoteric History

 

In this series, we follow Maribel and Renko, the two girls from the Secret Sealing Club introduced in ZUN's music albums, as they research events linked to Gensokyo. It's fully voiced and features professional voice actors such as Kana Hanazawa and Eri Kitamura.

 

  • Prologue (OP) (November 25, 2014) :
  • Episode 1 - Moon :
  • Episode 2 - Prayer (August 11, 2017) :
  • Episode 3 (???)

 

#Touhou Hakureisou

Japanese : 東方博霊荘

Romaji : Touhou Hakureisou

Created by : niikyouzou (Weibo, Bilibili)

 

What we all dreamed of : a slice-of-life anime set in an alternate universe where Gensokyo is an apartment complex and Reimu is the landlady.

 

 

#Meteors of Triple Dimension

Chinese : 幽幻天仪盘 ~ meteors of triple dimension

Created by : ForeverShrine (website, Weibo)

 

This is a particularly promising series if it gets done : the first PC-98 anime ! I personally know next to nothing about the PC-98 games, but I'm sure a lot of you guys would enjoy seeing that.

 

 

#Danmaku!! Animated Series

English : Danmaku!! Animated Series

Created by : Studio Yuraki (Youtube, Twitter)

 

This series will have the Touhou cast play Danmaku!!, a Touhou-based board game that acts like Jumanji.

 

 

#Promotional videos / music videos / other stuff

I'm glad there's so many of them, but it makes it difficult to pick the ones you want to watch (one solution is to do like I did and just watch everything). The ones in bold are my personal favorites, the ones that I found the most beautiful or the most emotional.

 

 

#Bonus : some personal recommendations for non-anime stuff

These are just a couple of personal recommendations regarding non-anime videos. Unfortunately, I can't list everyone's favorites (I mean, I could, but that would go far beyond the scope of what I was trying to accomplish with this post), so please don't attack me if your "must-watch" isn't included here.

 

  • Music video : Bad Apple

If you haven't seen Bad Apple yet, congrats on getting an Internet connection after ten years spent in an isolated cave. This black-and-white music video is many westerners' first contact with Touhou (... that, and McRoll), and it became so iconic that dozens of variations have been done with different visuals.

I'm going to share two of them : the original one, and the English cover by Cristina Vee that I really like.

 

  • 2D animation : Diamond in the Rough

I said earlier that the lack of animation or different styles might break the immersion, but there are exceptions. This one is done in a minimalistic comic style that I didn't know about but later learned was known as Walfas. At the time I started watching it, I didn't think I would be able to take it very seriously, and yet I can now confidently say Diamond in the Rough is the most incredible experience I've had among all the works presented in this list.

Diamond in the Rough is a deconstruction of the "Gappy Stu" Touhou fanfics (works of fiction where a young character is gapped into Gensokyo by Yukari and devolves into shallow wish-fulfillment). We follow the adventures of Brolli Diamondback, a bored teenager who gets gapped with the promise of living a more interesting life. I don't want to say more, but I urge you to watch it. Here's the playlist.

And if you have watched it, and you're interested in a detailed analysis of the whole thing, including episode-by-episode breakdown and literary discussions, check out The Definitive Guide To DitR written by the author. I spent like two hours reading it the other day and I found it absolutely captivating.

 

  • Doujin : Touhou Osana Reimu - Touhou Reireimu

An original doujin converted to a video series. It explores the relationship between Reimu, her mother, and Rumia, in a surprisingly powerful story. You can watch it here.

 

 

And that should cover about everything ! I hope you find this list helpful. Hopefully the layout is fine, but if you have any suggestion about the presentation or if you think I should add any other information, I'd be happy to receive your feedback.

If you would like to help me, please let me know of any information that's incorrect, inaccurate, or outdated. If you find an anime video that's not on this list, feel free to post it in the comments. It's possible that I just missed it, or it may be that I saw it but didn't feel it satisfied the criteria I mentioned at the beginning of the list.

Have fun !

Posted Nov 8, 2017, 7:30 PM UTC · edited

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