Retronauts - 770: Touhou Project

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Get your spell cards ready, as Kevin Bunch, Will Cuevas, and Lindsey Kurano discuss the vast world of the Touhou Project.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, it's the original Yo-Kai Watch. You like that? That's the best I could come up with for this. Hi, welcome to Retronauts, possibly the longest-running retro gaming podcast still happening. And this week, we're focused on the good weirdos of Gensoquio and the similarly long-running Toho project, which is just extremely expansive. It's not just like its own series. It's kind of its own ecosystem. Absolutely.

Good weirdos is a great way to describe the residents of Gensokio. They are all little gremlins. Yeah, they're all willing to choose violence at the slightest provocation. For tea and cakes. Yeah. And who do we have joining me for this one? We'll start to our north, or to my north, rather. Would that be me, I suppose?

I guess I'm in upstate New York that's quite north. So my name is Lindsay Carrano. I am the Electronic Games curator at the Strong National Museum of Play, which is to say I'm basically the video game person at the Strong. Which is a great job to have, I feel like. Lots of cool stuff there. And who's joining me here in the wonderful state of Maryland? The strongest podcaster will Quayvos.

Well, I'm so glad you both could join me for this because Toho is a very large subject, and I could not possibly cover all this ground on my own. I'm not even sure we can cover it between the three of us, but we'll give it a shot. Talking about Toho could very easily become a podcast in of itself. There's like 20 mainline games and probably hundreds of fan release. the games of varying quality. Some, you know, kind of needs a little help, but some of them are actually really fantastic. And then that's not to say all the music albums that have been released, all the fan animations,

the official and unofficial, you know, manga that are out there. I mean, it's, it's, there's, there's Dogen as a whole, and then there's Toho, which in itself is just absolutely, absolutely massive. It's really hard to quantify it, really. It's just, it's been around for a long time, and people all over the world really love this franchise. And we're here to talk about why. Yeah, and that's actually a good segue. I did want to ask, you know, how everyone came to Toho in the first place, how they were first exposed.

But I think, I guess first off, we should explain what the heck is a Dojan work in general. Because, I don't know. How would you describe it? Like, I think it's sort of like an indie work, but it's not quite the same vibes. Yeah, I would say it's kind of in a weird gray area. Like, all Dojin are probably indie, but not all indie or Dojin kind of thing. That's, yeah. If it had been 10, 15 years ago, I would say that the line between Dojin and Indy is a lot more.

gray in my opinion but you know after you know 10 15 years of you know Xbox Live Arcade and you know your undertails and your braids and all that you know all that like indie has really as like a like a industry within within the video game industry has really come a long way to the to the point where like recently I heard the term triple I as in like the big dog indie companies I'm like okay yeah that kind of makes sense that we're at that point but now Dojan is like I kind of see that as like the, and I don't mean this pejoratively, but like the amateur, semi-professional people who like, you know, they just do it. They're truly doing it for the love of the game. And maybe they make a little money, you know, here and there.

And that's great. But like, ultimately, they're just, they're not quite at the scale that like the Indies are now. 2004, you know, Cave Story and Toho, I would have put them in the same bucket. But 2026 now, no, it's different. But that's not to say that, you know, Dogen is not a respectable branch of the video of the video game world. There's a lot of great, a lot of great stuff in there. Yeah, going with that definition, sort of like the difference between stuff that's on the Nintendo E shop and stuff that's on like the smile basic games listing. Yeah.

I mean, there is quite a bit of. Toho fan game stuff that has made its way to the Switch. And none, as far as I checked last night, there's no, like, no official Toho stuff on there. But, like, that's kind of, like, by choice from Zoom himself, which we'll get into later. But, like, there's a lot of stuff, like, on the Switche shop, on the Steam store. Not so much. I'm not sure about, like, Sony, definitely not Xbox. I don't have an Xbox.

And I highly doubt that Japan is putting Doge and stuff up on. on Xbox's store, but yeah, it's out there. Yeah, and I should say, like, in this context, we're talking about, like, Dojin works as far as games, but, you know, Dojin is not just games. There's a lot of other stuff, you know. It's really just any, anything that's like not, you know, professionally produced, professionally published.

Like, you like, you know, we'll get into a little bit later, but like, you know, the big dog in Japan is Coma Kett twice a year, you know, Dojin circles. come out, you know, and they sell their video games, they sell their music albums, they sell their, you know, their manga, you know, whatever it is that they're making. And, you know, the merchandise that goes along with it.

And, you know, and again, like Kevin described, it is its own ecosystem. But it's really neat. And I wish we had a little bit more of that here in the U.S. It's hard because, you know, just much bigger landmass were a lot more. more spread out, like that.

But there also just isn't quite that culture of it here. There is a little bit with stuff like itch and whatnot. But I just, it feels to me like it's not the same. And I'm trying not to do it like a place, place Japan kind of thing, you know, about it.

But like there's just, just they've been doing it a lot longer. And I think they're a lot better at going about it. Yeah, that's the thing I wanted to bring up is they have been doing it a lot longer. And like some places online seem to understand that in some, I think maybe don't. know that history but like indie game as like a buzzword took off in like the 2010s but that sort of

hobbyist dojean spirit has been in Japan since the 70s and like depending on how you define indie games pretty much any game made before like the mid 80s that was that Nintendo was an indie game I mean if you think about it yeah it's interesting um but I do love that sort of hobbyist spirit that is still in Japan. They have Tokyo Game Show, but they also have Comiket. And it's nice they have both of that, whereas we are kind of missing the Comiket side here. Yeah, we're really hurting for something like that.

The closest thing I can think of is like the indie show floor that is at MacFest every year. I've seen a lot of great stuff on those show floors in the last 10 years. And fortunately not all those projects came to completion, which is a real bummer. There was like this one I saw a few years ago that it was basically like a

modern take on bump and jump from the NES, if you remember that? And I was like, man, I really helped this one fit in it. And like, that game has disappeared off the face of the earth. I cannot find any trace of that ever existing. I'm like, did I hallucinate when I, when I tried that demo out? Because I had a lot of fun playing it, but

I have not seen it since. Yeah, I feel like there's like, uh, I mean, you talk about how they've been doing it longer and like, Doge and stuff. It's usually not sold in stores, but there are like specialty shops that will stock it. I think, uh, Oh, there's one I'm getting.

I really should have written it in the notes. I think it's Suduagaya that sells Dojin stuff sometimes. Yeah. Like basically just leftovers from Comic Cat. Yeah. But here I feel like it's more siloed. Like you'll have like an indie comics show. Like there's a local one here in Maryland somewhere.

You're pretty good about like the comic books. I think. But like video games and other stuff like that, maybe not so much. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of these Toho games, especially the early ones, were only available through Comiket. Yeah. And I feel like he's only started selling them on Steam, you know, just because. It's, I think around like 2017 is when he kind of finally opened the door to doing that after like nearly a decade of being hesitant.

Yeah. So do you like to do something like that. The PC98 stuff is just, is just gone. Like, you're, he's, he's said multiple times that he just, he does not want to, uh, to deal with that. Uh, anymore, which is kind of strange because, um, in, and depending on the interview, uh, you read about him, uh, he either maintains the PC 98 games as, uh, canon lore or he's like, uh, embodiment of Scarlet, Scarlet Devil. The first Windows game is, uh, essentially like the fresh reboot, uh, it's like, like, you got, you got to pick your, your story, man. You got to stick to it. Let's, we want to talk about Zoom proper instead of just kind of like dancing, dancing around.

We want to give a little primer on his background and who he is. Yeah. But yeah, first I just wanted to run through. Like, how did people on this council? How did we discover Toho? Lindsay, do you want to go ahead? Yeah. So I did a study abroad program to Japan in 2008.

And then I ended up moving back there in 2009. So this must have been about 2009, I guess, when I moved back, where I was watching a Nikoniko Dolga. And for those that aren't familiar, it's a video streaming service. And it's sort of very, I guess, Japanese in the sense that it's like kind of bombastic. You have the comments overlaid on the video, which is like it's not really a new thing. But at the time, I had never really seen anything like it. And I just saw like random people playing different Toho games and I was very intrigued because I'd always love the Sega Saturn like shooters and like things like that. So that was my introduction to it is watching streamers play it.

Will. Kind of kind of a similar thing. In 2007, I basically got my first computer like a computer that belonged to me. And I also had like unfettered Internet access because in high school, school my parents limited the amount of internet time I had. They were trying to save him from that brain rot. And the second I got into college, I was like, ah, bring me the brain rot.

But I spent a lot of time on 2007, 2008 era YouTube. And I wasn't on Nico Nico proper, but I did. There was a lot of like stuff that would get brought over. In particular, um, uh, fan animations of, uh, for Toho stuff. You know, like, like Marissa stole the precious. thing. As she does. Or I would, you know, I would see these animations and then I'd be like, oh, the music's

really catchy. And then I would, and then that kind of turned into what is the bass song that this video is playing? And it's like, you know, Alice's theme from Perfect Cherry Blossom. I was like, well, what's Perfect Cherry Blossom? Then I, you know, search further. And before you knew, I was like, like, oh, okay. It's a shoot-em-up. I love this genre.

I had been kind of cold on it for, you know, a couple of years. High school was very much the JRP and Metal Gear Solid years for me, but I played a lot of shooters on the Super Nintendo, the Sega, the NES. I mean, Guardian Legend is my favorite NES game, period. It's very middling shoot-em-up experience, but it's one of my, it's like the first shoot-em-up I ever played. I love that game to death. And Toho kind of really got me back into it.

It was a little tricky. in 2007 to get a hold of those games, but I managed to do so. And yeah, I think Perfect Cherry Blossom was the first one I played. And then I just kind of went from there. And, you know, Toho is one of those franchises that like, you know, I come back to it, you know,

on and off and whenever there's something new. And yeah, it's just, it's great. It scratches a very specific type of Shumo bitch, which I'm sure we'll get into kind of like how that game, how that game, how that gameplay separates itself later. As for myself, I came to it very circuitously,

I guess, as far as Toho goes. So something around 2010, a friend of mine got really into the Toho M1 Grand Prix animated skits. And they're basically just like monseye routine. So like, you know, you've got your straight man and your goof-off characters

and they're telling jokes. And, you know, most of them made out. absolutely no sense to me because I knew nothing about the context to Toho or whatever cultural things they were trying to pull from on this. He thought they were hysterical. So he had us sitting there watching them for like three hours and I'm like, I'm done, man. So I didn't think more about it until, I don't know, like 2017, 2018, when I visited this gaming center that used to be in Virginia called the Cave. And they had an Exa machine, with the remake of Perfect Cherry Blossom.

I think it's Perfect Sacra Fantastica. And I got really into playing that. And I'm like, oh, hey, this is pretty cool. And then Toho Luna Nights came along, another non-Zoon work. And I'm like, hey, this is also really cool. I should probably check out the source material on. So at this point, I played quite a few of the two. Toho games. I'm not particularly great at any of them except for that XA game, but they are very fun.

It's, uh, this, this as a big, you know, STG head, I will say that the skill set that you need for Toho games specifically are a little different than your standard, uh, than your standard one. You still get, you know, your basic stuff like, you know, don't get hit, you know, stuff like that. And then like, you know, knowing the difference between like smart bullets and dumb bullets and stuff like that. but it's definitely route that game is those games are all about the routing

all about the routing more so than almost any other game I've played outside of maybe like the cave shooters yeah routing is absolutely like tantam out that's like the skill you will come out developing if you if you play a lot of those

yeah I think if you look at like some of the works that kind of inspired zune it kind of to make sense that this is how he makes his games. So, yeah, you already mentioned we should probably get into Zune, and I think now is a good time. Zune is the development name of Junya Ota. He is the creator of Toho Project and the one-man developer of basically all of the mainline games and most of the spinoffs. It's very impressive.

I mean, he's got to do it all. The programming, the graphics, the music, everything. That's great. He's a true renaissance man. Yeah. He's done a couple interviews, so I pulled a lot of these details from those. Basically, he got into video games as a child

because, like, a lot of kids in Japan in the early 80s, his big hobbies were playing video games and collecting bugs. The bugs doesn't really factor in too close, although I feel like some of the like Toho theming, I could see like a through line to bug collecting at least as far as like

the weirdo characters and like weirdo bugs. I don't know. I'm reaching here. He didn't quite take it to the extreme that, you know, Satoshi did. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. But yeah.

So he first started off with like little LCD games around 1982 when he started kindergarten like stuff from Nintendo an epic, and then eventually got a Famicom, Super Famicom, when those came along. And because he lived in Hakuba and Nagano Prefecture, there was a lot of ski lodges around, and ski lodges had arcade machines. So he played a lot of arcade games. So he named-dropped Capcom's Sun-Sun, which is like a character, like, run-and-gun shooter,

I guess you'd say. Konami's a home port of Gradius 3. because he's not insane. You know, the arcade game is awful. Awfully difficult. Gradius is the gift that keeps on giving. Big fan of RPGs, Epic's handheld game, Jungle, of all things.

And also, he got into fighting games like everyone else at the time when Street Fighter 2 dropped. So, like, there's a type of game that just has a lot of characters that are all about their personality to make you want to try and those out. Yeah. And also, like, he... He messed around with the Dezaman engine to design a shooter for Super Famicom in high school, which, you know, the first one for Famicom now actually available through the console archives through Hamster. So, yeah, it's basically a program for your home console that you use to make your own shooting game, and he used it.

It's crazy that as early as the Super Nintendo, we were providing consumers with, like, game maker resources. Yeah. And then like he got into school, into his school's band. Forget exactly what instrument he was playing. But he got into music and composing. I'm willing to bet it's got to be a horn instrument, considering how, you know, horn heavy a lot of his music used to be. It's a, you know, the meme is the Zoom Pits. You know, Zoon and his love for hit trumpets.

I can see it. So this all leads up to him graduating high school. He's going to Tokyo Denki University. He decides to join an unofficial game development club called Amusement Makers because he really wanted to, like, compose music for games. And he was just, you know, as he described it in an interview, and this is a translated quote, mind you. He didn't actually say it in English.

I didn't really have game dev in mind. I was just thinking to myself, wouldn't it be cool to make games in the future? If there's a club that's all about game creation, why shouldn't I join it? He didn't have a computer at this point, so we had to buy a PC 98 to join this unofficial club, which is a detail I just love. It's like, all right, I want to do this thing. I'm going to go spend, you know, a thousand dollars to go to it, or however much a PC 98 was at the time. Turns out no one really needed him specifically to compose music for them.

So he just sort of taught himself out a program out of books and manuals. And by the end of his first year at the university, he'd made like a little Puyo Puyo clone, and that sort of started him down the path. And he started getting back into shooters around this time too because the fighting game boom was starting to die off. He named dropped. Taito's Rayforce, Metal Black, and Darius Gaiden as all the things that got him back into shooters.

And I'm like, you know, I get it. Those are very like... Don't sleep on Tito, man. I know. Yeah, those are... Keep on Tito. Very stylish. Rayforce is one of my favorites. Same. Same. So basically, you know, he made this Puyo game.

He wanted to make some more stuff. And what he settled on as his next project was what wound up being the first Toho game, highly responsive to prayers. It's a breakout clone, except it doesn't use like a mouse or anything. You're just sort of like using the arrow keys to move your character back and forth to bounce like a card into a futa card into the air and hit things. It's kind of a mess, but that was kind of the start. You got to start somewhere, man. Yeah. He did this 2009 interview where he sort of described the aesthetics that he wanted for his games, because he liked Japanese aesthetics,

but he didn't, like, want to make this just Edo era by itself. So he's sort of mixing in, like, Western elements, too. And so his team, Shanghai Alice, like, development circle name that he used sort of pulls from that, because he kind of had this idea in his head that, like, well, Shanghai's sort of where East meets West. So there's, like, aspects of both there. And I want to evoke this sort of thing and Alice, the part, you know, it's evoking like the fairy tales, Alice and Wonderland sort of thing. Like, okay, yeah, I get it. So he came up with this Shrine Maiden character that shows up in that first game, and that's Rameau.

As he said, Shrine Maidens were not terribly popular at the time. So he thought that was just like an interesting character to make for a central hero. obviously he's never, you know, messed with Pocky and Rocky. Yeah, I was about to say, show some respect. Pocky and Rocky is a top five all-time video game for me. So I'm like, what do you mean? I mean, he's not wrong.

There's really just Pocky. That's it. It stops there. And Sailor Mars. I guess there's the two. Yeah, that's where my mind went. Go figure. I was like, yeah, Hino-Rae, show respect.

Yeah, the Trinity. But yeah. So we did this. This was finished in 95, and then he, like, showed it off the next year in, like, November for the university's local festival, the Hatoyama Matsti. But it wasn't actually sold until, like, Summer 97 Comic-Ket, which was an interesting aspect. I didn't realize there was such, like, a gap on that. And by that point, he'd also finished, like, the second game, which was a actual shooter. And he sold them both at that 97 show, apparently, like, 50 copies of each.

that's pretty good That's not bad, yeah Yeah Apparently good enough that he decided to keep at it And kept making more of them every so often Third game Like was a Twinkle Star Sprites clone Which I thought was really interesting

And it makes sense Because like Twinkle Star Sprites had just come out around then It's super cool, great game I kind of love that he's got a few of these like Twinkle Star Sprites clones because there's basically none. Yeah. But after that, he's mostly just done like these Don Maku shooters.

These are like bullet hells with Toho. And, you know, after the first five games, he jumped from PC 98 to Windows. And since the 10th game, they've all been on Steam. So that's kind of where that's been. I think that he just came out with what, the 19th of the 20th last year? 20th. Jeez. Yep.

That's a lot. It's not like he's only done the 20 games because he's also done like these spin-offs here and there. Yeah, he's never ending, never stopping. It's funny that he... It's funny to read about his starting point to where he is now, specifically that he bought a bunch of equipment,

taught himself, started with a breakout clone, and then eventually landed on shooters. And I say that because I got bored. So I bought a bunch of equipment to start making games. And the first guide that I followed had me make a breakout clone.

Shout out to Lazy Devs Academy on YouTube. Great people to learn from if you want to learn some game dev. And then after that, after I was done with that tutorial, I went to his shoot-em-up tutorial. I was like, let me make a game in a genre that I really truly enjoyed.

I've been following that one. Like, okay, cool. And I'm also like, I'm not as music I don't have the musical background that Zune has, but I'm also very musical focused. That's just like one of my favorite things in video games to talk about. So I'm just like,

I'm just reading about his background, I'm like, damn, this is, me and him are almost the same human. He's just a lot more successful than I. There, but for the grace of God. No, I do think it's very funny that he came to this primarily as a composer because one of the things he's mentioned in his interviews that he likes about

the shooter genre is that like a stage is a set amount of like length. Yes. I, I, that's definitely something that I've described. It's like, it's like you, the stage is only so long. And you can, and if you do it right, you can kind of like time events that happen in a level to be with the music. And it's really cool when that, when you time it just like, time it just right where like a, like a, you fight like a mid boss and like it's like a big ship that flies in. and you're shooting, you're shooting, you're shooting, and like the, there's this one, um,

blue revolver. It's a very cave-pilled, uh, shooter. The third stage is my favorite one because it's got like this like, really kind of like high tempo, uh, drum and bass, uh, track going on. And like, if you do it just right, you get to the mid boss and as this sort of like, a drumbeat is like, uh, ramping up in terms of, uh, in tempo, if you get it just right, you can like, get to like the the drop right as you destroy the mid boss and to get this like big like like full screen explosion and then like your your your ship kind of like speeds up and the the background

scrolling speed ramps up and it's just it's so cathartic to like nail that it's just like man it just feels it's like cinematic it's so good he orchestrates it so well and like none of this is surprising to hear his like music background because I've always thought every to Ho game is just like a high concept album basically, but it's also like fun to play. But like the music is just fantastic. It's yeah. And there's a, I've seen a couple of videos that kind of break down hit the way he composes a song and like kind of like sings it up to the gameplay and like like like kind

of like some of like the the tricks that he does. And it's really it's really cool to see that kind of like veil pulled back and see like how like have explained like like technically how. he does it just makes me appreciate it so much more in terms of like he's like he always starts out this you know like a boss theme by doing this and then like halfway through he does this and it's like oh okay yeah that tracks that tracks and it just it just makes me appreciate those like more it's like it's like you can get that you can get the joy of experience that either like playing it yourself or just watching a video you know of it if you if you're like shying away from the uh the difficulty

they can't get pretty rough. Well, you know, they do frequently have like an easy mode at least. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. But what I do think it was funny the other day, I was wearing a Toho shirt, and I was out and about. And I stopped at like a sandwich place for lunch. And the person behind the counter sees my shirt. And they're like, oh, hey, you've got Marisa and Raymoo on there. And I'm like short-circuited for a moment because I'm not used to just people around town.

knowing what Toho is. How to handle that. So, like, we ended up talking, and then they're talking about how occasionally they will put on a Toho soundtrack at work on, like, the intercom system for, like, their background music. We're like, yeah, you know, like, coworkers always dig it. They always wonder where it's coming from. And I'm like, well, it's from a game.

It's some really, well, not all of them, but there's a lot of real high-energy tracks. That's some, like, real, like, hustle and get the house. housework done type. Like, oh, crap, mom's going to be here in 10 minutes, and I haven't done anything yet. Got it luck in. Now. Yeah.

I feel like the music is one of the big appeals to Toho for sure. And also, like, I mean, the characters are also, I think, the other big thing that people gravitate towards, because there's so many of them. And they're all so weird. Yeah. When you pointed out his, when you pointed out the, you know, his, his exposure to, to fighting games, which is no surprise, you know, given, you know, he's of that age where he was there for, like, the, you know, the golden arcade age. But you pointed out, you know, the draw of fighting games is, like, the cast of, like, colorful characters that, like, that are very interesting and unique and very, like, attention grabbing. Like, that's basically the cast of Toho.

and it's a very large cast but they're all very eccentric and they're all very distinct from one another and it's very like a little something for everybody in terms of like you know who your favorite character

might be it makes that that comparison really kind of makes a lot of sense for for Toh and musically it works out great too because characters have character themes

and And he's got a lot, he's got a lot of lay motifs that he gets to, he gets to compose there. He co-developed some fighting games with Toho characters with another Dogeing group, Twilight Frontier. I think there's like, what, three Toho fighting games? Three or four, I lost track. Yeah. I should have really written it down, but there's just, there's a lot of these Toho games, okay? Just about, like, just about every genre of video game possible has been covered.

by a Toho game or a Toho fan game. Even like very specific like franchises. Like, do you like Toho and Final Fantasy Tactics? Guess what? There's a Toho Final Fantasy Tactics game. Do you like Toho and Super Mario RPG? Guess what? There's Super Toho RPG.

Do you like Toho and Kirby's Airwriters? Guess what? There are two, two Toho Kirby Airwriters. And the Castlevania game is so good. Oh, yeah. It's like, it shouldn't be this good. And some of them are better than the thing that they are based on. Not all, not all, but some are just better.

Yeah, it's incredible. The time control stuff and that Luna Knights game was so much fun. Once I figured out how it worked, which took longer than I want to admit, even though it's just on the sign at the front of the game. Yeah, Luna Knights is a high mark for fan works, and it definitely has earned that accolade. I'm going to say that that game is why I'm like, all right, you know what, Sakka, you're the best one. You're the best, you're the best, you're the best, hello character. You, you can stop time and throw knives.

I played a, I recently released a fan game called Cerno Lips the Boulder. Guys, you will never guess what Cerno does in your game. It's like a three, it's like a 3D, uh, collect-thong style game. And it's fun. It's fun. It controls really well. It's got like just the right-sized worlds. It's like, kind of like the banjo-cazui scale before they went, like full on like Donkey Kong 64 and it just became just unwieldy. Like it's really solid. I check that one out. If you want to like a collect on itch to scratch.

And what's crazy about all of this isn't just that there are all these games representing all these genres in this Toho universe. It's that they are like allowed to exist, I think. Because like, you know, other IPs, it exists. And it's like they have. have a threat of being shut down or whatever. But the fact that they can exist is like so unique. It works out really well because for as successful and as long as he's been doing it, Zune has always kind of kept himself at like the Dogen level, maybe sometimes occasionally poking into

like that kind of like modern indie delineation that I described earlier. But he's really kind of kept in the Dogen level for himself. And a lot of it is that he, you know, he wants to maintain creative control over, you know, what he, what he has done so far. Some of it is, you know, he's a little gun shy. He's like, oh, I don't know how popular this would be. And I'm like, I don't know how you can say that in 2026, buddy. There are multiple Toho conventions at this point. You bring your stuff to one of them. But more importantly, he does want to sort of maintain the creative control. He wants to keep it, you know, kind of close to the chest. And I really respect him for doing that. But, but, um, but, um, but, but more important, he does want to sort of maintain the creative control. He wants to keep it, you know,

But he's also very generous with the, you know, this universe that he's created. He has a set of guidelines that he's put out for people who want to, who want to make their own fan works. And frankly, it's not terribly oppressive or anything. It's based, it's kind of like just your basic stuff. Like, don't be political. Don't, you know, don't hate speech. Don't try to pass it off as an official work. You know, make it clear that it's a fan work, you know, stuff like that.

Don't pull from my existing works. Yeah. Don't plagiarize another creator. It's all very basic stuff. And so by kind of keeping it in the dogen's fear and keeping it close to his chest, it allows him to share it among other people without the threat of cease and desist and stuff like that. And it, it's really cool because it allows for people to express them. It gives them a framework to work in to make their own game.

tell their own story, make their own music, all that. Like, he fosters creativity by doing that. It kind of, you know, and that, that's not something that happens very often. I think, like, the last time I saw that sort of thing happen was, like, when, like, the whole, like, brony thing kind of, like, blew up in the, the 2010s. A lot of people just, like, really latched on to that show, you know, the, my little pony, the Lauren Fowse one. And it just kind of like clicked in a lot of people's brains where suddenly they were like getting invested in in telling stories and making music and creating characters and all that stuff.

And it's like, okay, that's wonderful. I will never, I will never, you know, say no to something that inspires people to to do that, to be creative. You know, no artist exists in a vacuum, that whole thing. So I really respect Zune a lot for just saying like, I'm going to keep this to myself. I'm not going to go big with it. And by doing that, I can share it with everyone else and allow other people to express themselves as well. It's really cool. Yeah.

And like there are a couple things that like he licensed out. And it's mostly like the commercial stuff. Like, you know, Toho Lunanites, we mentioned. The XA, the pair of XA games, they're actually. like there's a trilogy of these remakes of like the early Windows games. They were made by like a Chinese team and they're available for sale on Steam

but also as arcade games. There's also Taito's Toho Spell Bubble on the Switch, which like, I don't know, have either of you ever played this one? Which one? Toho Spell Bubble. It's by Taito. It is a mashup of Puyo Puyo and a rhythm game.

Oh, back to the root. I love it. With, like, Toho music. And, like, you pick your character from the cast of Toho characters, and I think they all have different, like, attack patterns. I got to play this at Magfest against someone who knew what they were doing, and I did not. And I got completely demolished. But it was very fun, and the music was very good. And, you know, he got a license with Taito to do it and probably made it enough to make it worthwhile to keep doing Toho stuff for a little while.

So there's a lot of stuff at like all different levels of unofficial works. Yeah, it's such an enviable model. I just, there's so many IPs I wish would do this, but they got too big. So which is why Zoom remaining in that Dojin space just, it's such a, it's smart decision. The brand, despite having all the sort of cooks in the kitchen, I think does have a consistency and a level of quality you can expect, which is what more can you ask for? and the passion. Yeah, and like you have all these other works,

but at the end of the day, like when Zune is putting out a new Toho project, like people get excited for that because he's the guy who's making the original ones and people like what he does, even if it's super weird, like, I don't know, if you have ever tried any of his photography shooter games, but

these are so bizarre. I'm great, Camel, here, and now when you went home 50, so I will definitely check that one out. And Spell Bubble, I did a quick little Google search. I'm like, okay, so it's rhythm, but it's also Bubble Bobble. You know how I love Bubble. Yeah, sorry. I said Puyo.

I meant Bubble Bobble. I mean, I like Puyo, too. Don't get me wrong. I had a big Puyo Tetris phase when I was in college. But I Googled a really quick. Spell Bubble bubble. And that's like outside of like the fighting games, that is like my go-to whenever I come across a MVS cab, so say less.

It's bonkers. I need to play this. Yeah, I just Googled it too. I'm glad that you both get to come away with this. Yes. Giving some more money to Zoom. Yes, of course, as it should be. I'm telling me, like, your favorite franchise or your favorite genre has been covered

by toe. There's a guy I've been watching recently, lately on Twitch. He played a lot of, he's been playing a lot of, he plays a lot of, he plays a lot the Toho stuff. And in particular, lately, he's been playing Mega Man Toho games. Of course. Of course those exist. They're really good.

They're really good. I think they're called like FC Rock Made and there's a bunch of these. I think there's like three or four of them now. They're solid. They're solid. Classic Mega Man games. Like, these are good. These are like

competent, classic style Mega Man games. If you're looking for something, new in that vein and you don't mind the Toho skin that's been laid over it, it's still a classic Mega Man at its core. It just has a Toho layer of paint put over it, but it's fantastic.

I remember there was a stint where my son, when he was a baby, well, a toddler, he got really into Bad Apple animations and like covers of that song, which is itself like a remix of a song

from the fourth Toho game on PC 98. And yeah, if he was fussing or something, you're like, Bram, do you want to watch Bad Apple? You're like, yeah. So I'd throw that on and he would just be mesmerized for a while. I mean, bad Apple, like, you know, it's one of my go-toes for like in terms of like timeless fan animation work.

Like what the main draw is that, you know, it's two colors. It's use of like positive and negative. space on like a you know in terms of like the animation but like it's so good how much it how much it does with that and then it's just a catchy song to boo yeah with lyrics uh applied i like that uh it got ported to like all sorts of different old platforms just like people like can i run bad apple on this it was like for a while it was like the doom demo of but toho yeah i've seen seen toho run on on refrigerators, like all kinds of stuff. But yeah, you know, we keep gushing over like the fan, fan games.

But like they're like, it's not just that. There's like a whole, like you get into like the fan animations and there's so much just stuff out there from like the last 20 years. There, there, there's, you know, semi-pro or like professionally developed, you know, musical albums. It's just Toho music. Like, like professional bands have done. Toho music on their albums. And then, and then, like, the animations out there, it's, like, hundreds of hours worth of, like, just stuff that's out there over the last, like, 20, 20, 25 years. It's, like, really just a multi, it's a multimedia franchise.

Like, we, you know, we think of it as, like, a gaming as a game franchise. It's, it's kind of stifling. It's multimedia, frankly. Yeah, like, I wasn't kidding. There are Toho conventions, like, specific to. Toho project. There's one in, I think, Tokyo, Ray Taiside that started in 2005, and it runs, I think, once or twice a year. It was once a year.

Now it's twice a year, except for, you know, COVID times, but it's been doing this annually. And that's an endosian event, just about Toho, largest of its kind in the year. And, like, the fact that they can sustain that two times a year is, like, pretty important. impressive for one thing. Not many, not many, um, not many, um, not many events within,

uh, some sort of fandom do that. I can, I can think of a handful, you know, we think like CEO in the fighting game community, they're CEO, Cotaku,

um, for speed running. There's like, you know, AGDQ and SGDQ twice a year. Magfest has like a million events. If you know, there's like, uh,

there's, Meg West. Um, so there's that, but like, you know, Every now and then, like, something does well enough that it can kind of do that twice. Even like the, I, you know, talked about like the whole like Brony fandom earlier.

I can't think of any of any events from them that like ran twice a year. Like there was a bunch of events throughout the year, but none that were like the same event run twice a year that I can think of. You know, it's, it's rare that that happens. It's a sign of, you know, how popular something is when they can, when they can pull that all. Yeah. I'm just thinking, like, you know, the only things I can really think of comparable would be sort of like Star Trek conventions. Yeah. Back when they were more like fan run and everything in the 70s and 80s.

Like what if they didn't bring it back and make it into like a huge production? What if it just stayed like a fan works realm? Oh yeah, and I did find out there is a Toho Fest in Torrance, California. That runs every year since 2003. I'm not about to travel out to California for it, but I wish everyone well who does go.

I would do that. And tell me about it. I would do that. Pay me more money, and then I can do it. Call it a fact-finding mission. I would like to touch on sort of the Toho

games themselves as shooters. Sure. Because I think they are they are fairly approachable. I feel like Bullet Hells, they have this reputation of being very, like, difficult and hard

for people to, like, break into if they're not already shooter head. But I feel like the Toho ones are fairly approachable, not just because they have the different difficulty levels. It definitely helps. There's

typically four levels, four or five levels of difficulty going from easy all the way up to lunatic. I think what separates a tow from other bullet held or Don Maku, as they're sometimes called, is there's still

instances of there being what are called smart bullets, bullets that track, that lock onto a player's position and go towards them forcing the player to move. To kind of give like shoot up one-on-one, there's two main types of bullets. There's dumb bullets that just kind of go out,

and they go out in the direction they're fired and they there there's no change to like their trajectory and then there's smart bullets that lock on to the player's position at the moment they're fired and move towards that position forcing the player to move so when you think about it in terms of space management dumb bullets control space smart bullets control movement and by movement i mean they control the player's movement or the player or the amount of space that the player can work with Soho consistently has more instances of dumb bullets than smart bullets. So when I say that routing is really important, Toho, I mean that because you can consistently count on a pattern being the same from play through to play through to play through. That's not to say that smart bullets don't occur in Toho, but by and large, there's more of this sort of like, this is the pattern that comes out.

This will always be the pattern that comes out. And so if you are familiar, if you spend enough time practicing, which as a franchise, Toho gives the players great training tools to do levels or parts, you know, or even just specific parts of levels, you can practice it, you can memorize it, you can study it, you can experiment with it, and you can succeed at it. Because there are so many bullets on the screen at any given time, they're also, they tend to be slower moving. There's not a lot of big movements in Toho games. That's not to say that there aren't at all. It happens. But typically you watch a playthrough of like even like like like the hardest levels and the highest difficulty.

And players are moving like within like a 20 pixel area for an entire attack. Like they're in there just doing like these tiny little micro adjustments and they're sometimes not not moving at all. If you can find that sweet spot, you don't got to do anything. You just hang out. there and let everything pass by you. Of course, because as a bullet-held shooter, the player has a smaller hitbox.

Yeah. Which is possible to be made visible. And it's sort of the key thing there is like, starting from the fourth game onward, you have a button that'll let you focus. And then your character moves slower, sort of concentrates their fire. They might have a different firing pattern.

Sort of like what the, what shooters from like Cave do. Yeah. If you hold down the fire button. But for Toho, I think starting with the seventh game, like, you can see your little hitbox in the center. Yeah. It's very dinky. And it helps.

Because, yeah, like you said, the bullet patterns are very, like, slow, especially for this kind of shooter. They're also really elaborate. Yeah. And it can seem intimidating when you first see one until you realize, like, I don't have to worry about most of this stuff. Yeah. I just have to focus on like the parts that are coming down towards me. And like, Zoon loves to do these sort of fake out tricks with like bullets moving in very weird ways or like they'll move back in and then fly out in different directions.

But like once you know what to expect, you're like, okay, I just have to find like this spot and I'll be okay. Part of part of the origin of Cerno being stupid is in her first appearance, if you, if you are playing. playing the game on easy mode, you can literally fly right in front of her face, get like right up on her, on her body. And all of her bullets will go around you. She will never hit you. 100% width. It also doesn't help that in the manual, you know, there's a screen cap of her, of, of, of, of, of, of, of gameplay of her specifically. And there's like a little arrow pointer.

It says, Baca. She was always meant to be stupid, but like that's a bit, you know, personified by, uh, that, that battle on, on easy. difficulty where she just point blank misses. She's just flailing her arms like this and just and never hitting you. It's great. Like what am I D&D characters?

The screen filling bullets thing is it's just for show. He does like spiral art with bullets. He really does. That's basically what he's doing. It's like really only the bottom third of the screen that you've got to like concern yourself. Basically the area you're in because there's never

really going to be a pattern where you have to like kind of like go up high on the screen. You know, that's more of a, that's more of like a cave, Ketsui, uh, type deal. But Toho, you're going to spend a lot of time in the bottom third of the screen doing, you know, again, just these like small micro movements. And that's kind of like what makes Toho stand out is that like you watch a video of it. And it's like, you know, very beautiful geometric, uh, you know, sort of like like, Fantasia like Disney's Fantasia. like level spectacle to the you know just the the the visual you know show of of these of these bullet patterns that all have names and stuff like that they're called spell cards and they all have like uh you know all kinds of names um it's a very uh even if you don't play these games they're very uh entertaining to watch just because it's just like there's so much stuff on the screen and it's like how and it's like like as kevin pointed out like bullets will sometimes like do that crazy fake out so much

stuff where like it gets really close to the player and then they all like kind of like stop and turn around and go the opposite direction and stuff like that it's very i it would be cool to break into the code of those games and see like what the math that generates these you know these these patterns look like you know like it just i'm sure they're you know the math behind it is like absurd i'm sure someone has by now i mean there are a ton of hacks for these games Like, there's English translation patches, but there's also ones that, like, will adjust, like, how visible hitboxes are or, you know, I'm pretty sure there's some that just are flat out making new stages and whatnot.

So these exist. I've seen the patches. And with there being 20 games, the core gameplay is the same across all the games. It very standard, kind of like you start out, you can fire. you know, you're, you're, you're, you fire these bullets. They have, you know, certain amount of strength. You can power up that strength as you collect, uh, item drops. Uh, there's basically different like thresholds of like power that you reach.

You've got like three bombs that make you invincible. That's clear the, the screen of, uh, bullets. That's like you're basically like, you know, your emergency like, I'm screwed. Let me like not die thing. And that's consistent throughout every total game. But every game on its own has like, some kind of unique mechanic or bring something new to it. My personal favorite is 12.8, the one where you actually get to play a CERNO proper,

she can freeze bullets. And if a bullet touches another bullet that is frozen, it becomes frozen too. So you basically create, you know, so now you're kind of like turning that whole like screen full of bullets like against the self because now you're chaining. You create these like, you know, these big chains of just like ice walls. and the more bullets you freeze, the more you power yourself up. That's how she powers up in that game. There's no power up drops in that game.

Instead, it's like you kind of like push it as far as you can, like let more and more bullets fill the screen, and then you freeze them. And that's what powers her up. And that, you know, but that's just specific to that game. Perfect Cherry Blossom introduced the supernatural border where basically like if, you know, you collect enough, cherry blossom points. You basically get like a temporary shield that you can either willingly get rid of by pressing bomb to, you know, clear the screen of bullets and draw them into you to, to get some points or the supernatural border only lasts a certain amount of time. And if you keep it, uh, the entire time, it goes away and you get a massive score bonus. So, you know, it basically a place to, you know, basically,

the two primary types of Schumann players, those who play for survival or those who are score chasing. So it's like one mechanics, you know, you know, kind of works, uh, applies to both players. It's really creative. You know, it's very much that Miyamoto like, you know, uh, one solution to many problems kind of kind of deal. It's very, it's very simplistic, but very creative. So Toho seems dense and unapproachable, but like really it is, uh, it's actually, it's actually a very approachable series and there's plenty of games to pick from where there might be like a specific mechanic

that you hone in on that like that really like appeals to you. So it's worth exploring, you know, as many of those mainline, you know, shmup titles as you can. And it's never a better time now because,

you know, because they are becoming, they're a lot more accessible than they've ever been in the past. You know, one thing I do appreciate like with how dense the bullets can be, is that there's also markers on screen as to where things are. Yes. So, like, when you're in a boss fight, you know, the bosses are fighting lots of bullets.

You're probably not paying that close attention to where the boss is. But at the bottom of the screen, there's a little marker that's telling you exactly where they are located above you, like, vertically. So you know that as long as you stick in that, like, particular region, at least your shots are still hitting them. So even if you can't track, like, their location yourself or, like, what their health is, you know you're still doing something. Or, like, if items pop off off the top of the screen, there'll be, like, indications that that's where they are. And in, I think, every game since the seventh or eighth, if you go up to that top third of the screen, all items that have been dropped that haven't gone off the screen will, like, be vacuumed up to you. which is a very fun way to power up really quickly if you don't immediately like crash into something to die. So it's like a real risk reward sort of thing.

And it's like a it's a really fun way of doing it. Exactly. Because it's like encouraging you to move around and use more of the screen than you probably would otherwise. Like, I don't know, they're very, I have to give them a lot of credit that I did not previously. They're very well put together. Starting with the eighth game, I believe the eighth game and going forward, there are training mode options where you can like replay a stage. And specifically, it starts you already maxed out on, you know, like your weapon strength. So you, because in previous titles, it was you'd have to start working that up.

Eighth game, I believe going forward, you're automatically maxed out, which is a nice quality of life change. You know, because it just, it just assumes at this point your max strength. And now you can start working on your routing from there. Yeah. And, you know, far be it for me to encourage piracy, but it's very easy to find guides in English on how to play, like, the first nine games that aren't available on Steam. Like, when I remember, like, when I set up my PC-98 emulator a few years ago

to try out the early Toho games after messing with them at Magfest, I literally found a webpage like, here is step by step how you download this emulator and set it up so that it will run these games and this is even how you can use your controller on it so you don't have to use the like funky keyboard

I don't know if you've ever used to yeah it's very not overused to that deep pad sucks those arrow keys just like the weirdest layout it's so awful very non-intuitive layout it's horrible But I mean, hey, man, big props to the PC 98.

I wanted to joke earlier that like Zun's background makes him indiscernible from anybody else of his vintage. It's just like, oh, a guy who went to college, bought a PC 98 and started learning how to program games. Like that could be so many different people. So shout us to the PC 98, allowing the, the Japanese to essentially have their bedroom programmer movement, much like the UK had with the, the specky and the

I'd like to think he saw the like he saw that 16 bit sensation anime from a couple of years ago and like the one character on there's obsessed with the PC 98 and like there's a bit where he's like in the future and he just saw like a warehouse of PC 98's all like networked together and I'd like to think that that Zune saw that is like yes I've been seen

um the games like we said earlier, the games have multiple difficulties, so you can definitely tailor. There's definitely, you can start off really easy, and then as you progress in skill, there's always somewhere to go. As you go up in difficulty, there's chances for hidden stages. Basically, every game has at least one hidden stage. Some have two.

They're typically called extra, where you fight like kind of like a, like a, like a, They're very challenging levels. Typically, there'll be like a boss rush. And they don't end on a sort of like in-game like super boss that like just does the most insane stuff that you'll ever see in a shoot-up. It's definitely a, you know, it looks rough when you YouTube it because it's always like people playing it like the most absurd levels of play. But like that's really not all there is to it. You know, try one out. play it on easy mode and

it's very much a franchise of shoot-ups that like you can grow into and you can take it as far as you are and as far as you desire to if you want to play it at the absolute highest level you can do that but if you just want to

play like a like a fun kind of like slower-paced shoot-em-up with like some banging music you can do that too just play it like on the lighter difficulties and that'll open window to you for watching some of those really fun fan animations, you know, that are that are out there on YouTube and are very impressive.

It's, it's, you know, we talked, you know, we kind of joked a little bit about piracy and stuff like that earlier. Like, I'm sorry, like, for the Western audience. Like, that was just a fact of life as a Toho fan for a decade and a half. It's great that Zune has finally ripped off that bandage and he's putting more of that stuff on platforms that are accessible for the West because for the longest time, I was like, I would love to give Zune my money. but I'm not paying importer fees or I'm not flying out to Japan to go to Comicette to get, you know, the, the most recent Toho game or like I'm not going to like, you know, Odicon and paying some guy for like what could or could be like a bootleg version.

So like it's, I want to give this man my money proper, but he's not allowing me to do that. You don't want to spend, you know, thousands on the, on a copy of like the first PC 98 game on floppy, like one of the 50s. copies. Exactly. Like just no, no. But now it's a great time to get in there. Like the mainline games are being made accessible. It's a great time.

Great time to get Toho fan. Always been a good time to get a Toho fan, especially now. Yep. So I got to ask, you know, Lindsay, since you put together this Dojan game exhibit at the Strong, how much Toho is there? So I was so happy with all the mentions of Cerno because I put her in because she's my favorite. And that's one of the choice of being a curator is I get to decide. So and it's like, of course, I do my due diligence and I put in things that are worthy.

But it's like, oh, I need to put in something to ho. Well, I guess I'll put in CERNO. One of the few joys. So I did that. And there's way more than just Toho, obviously. But Toho is probably, so I have three cases. and Toho is about half of one because it is that important. It's a huge. It's a huge. It's huge. I mean, we've talked about it. Gosh, we've talked for an hour and we could talk for another six very easily. It's just I put in Curiosity's of Lotus Asia, which is the book Zunro. I put in Cerno. I put in Marissa. Perfect Cherry Blossom. Maybe another game. I can't remember. My person,

favorite game is imperishable night, but I bought it and it came after I was laying up the games. Yeah, that's just my favorite. It's not even the first one I played. I think the first one I played was Mountain of Faith, just given the timeline. But then I went back and did all the Windows games.

Of course, no PC, 98 games, but in other games, I ended up putting in the exhibit, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Al-Oni. It's a sort of indie horror game.

If you Google it, you'll maybe recognize it because it was like very memed on in like 2008, when it came out. Al-O-O-N-I. And that was an RPG maker like horror game. And I like had to put that in because right when I moved to Japan, that was an indie game that pulled out. You recognize it, right?

There it is. Yes, you've seen this. And I put in like you may Nikki exit eight. which is like so good. Oh my God. I keep showing people exited. I'll like you have to play this. Pico Park,

cave story, a whole bunch. I don't know. Come see the exhibit. It'll be great. How long is the exhibit running? It'll be up for three years, at least.

And I may swap in some stuff, but Toho will remain. And where's this exhibit at? So it is at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. And we have way more than that. That's just like my next exhibit's going to be about Gundam. So if you do anything about Gundam, invite me back. I'm knee-deep in research currently.

I will keep that in mind. Gundam's always great. Yes, it's great. And talk about multimedia franchises, goodness. Char Asin, you know, launched a thousand ships in a morrow. Which char. Yeah, which char. Yeah, I started on Perfect Cherry Blossom was my first one.

Um, classic. My favorite was also imperishable night up until 12.8 came out. And I was like, okay, well, now I get to play a CERNO. Even, even, even outside of like her being a playable, um, I really, I do think the freeze mechanic is really cool. I've never really experienced that in, uh, in any other schum up. And, you know, like I said earlier, it changes like, kind of like the way you approach the game because like now it's like, now you want the screen to be full of bullets.

And now you want to play it dangerously because you have to like, wait and wait and wait. You have to put yourself in a position where you will get hit because the ice burst is not terribly big. You have to, like, be able to connect to that bullet. So you have to wait and wait and wait until the screen is full of bullets and then intentionally put yourself in harm's way and time it so that you kind of like maximize it. And when you do it, it's cool because the bullets don't all freeze instantly. It's kind of like, like, you see like this like chain effect and it fills the screen and it's like, wow. Wow. It just feels really good. It's really fun. The only shame is it's a shorter title. It's only got three levels if you don't take the extra stage into account. But yeah, that one's my favorite title.

That one's my second favorite. So we have the same sort of things we like, I guess. I didn't realize this was the CERNO podcast, but I welcome it. I welcome our Ice Fairy Overlord. We exist. she's I mean she's um as a matter of fact I think she's the only character to get a a ninderoid proper of her made actually no I take it back ramu and marissa have definitely made into into nindroids yeah once or twice but serno has two versions she has her basic self and then her like summer like sunburned self where like she's like tanned and like she's got like sunflower and stuff like that that's funny but uh she's kind of like merchandise wise one of the more, more well-represented characters. I wouldn't say she's one of the most popular. I, you know, not really studying that off the time.

I had, I don't even think I put Serno in top five in terms of just sheer popularity. But she does seem to have a good amount of, like, merchandise representation, which is interesting. Listen, Toho fans love, they love those, those dummies, you know. They're a lot of, like, Raymu is kind of a dummy. They're all, they're all kind of dumbies. all kind of dumb. In their own way. Yes.

Even the people that are supposed to be like, like God-tier geniuses like, um, uh, Kappa. What's her name? Nitori, no. Nitori just mean. She's just wario. She's just wario in tow form.

Um, freaking train girl. I'm super blankingered. I'm really annoyed. Yucari. Thanks. Yukari. Oh, yes. Yes.

I kept wanting to say, um, uh, ran Yakimo. But it's like, that's not right. I know it's not right. But like, Rand kind of like runs in Ukari circle. Uh, Yucari is also really dumb, but she's also,

like, supposed to be, like, the basically, like the smartest person, like the Toho universe, she's like, got like that manipulative bastard energy to her, but she's also stupid. They're all stupid.

It's great. It's relatable. She's Hilda from, from Undernight. Or I, really, Hilda is more Yukari, because Yukari came first.

Low end, high whiz. Yeah, exactly, exactly. They're all, they're all, Jason Mendoza from The Good Place. But yeah, I really enjoy, like, Marisa.

Just like, yeah, I'm like the good person, but also I just like to steal things. Like, I'll help you, but I'm just going to, like, raid your valuables while I'm at it. I do think that the characters are definitely, like, one of the big draws, especially, like, because you see it all these fanworks, they're, like, pulling from different characters. depending on what they want to do with them. And, you know, you have this massive cast. You can kind of just pick and choose who you want. A lot of the characterization that these characters have,

a lot of it is not actually canon, though. Again, because Zune is so willing to turn over creative input to the fans, you know, in some interviews, he has expressed that, like, past a certain point, he stopped caring about writing stories and lore because, you know, in these mainline games, they're shoot-em-ups. And in shoot-em-ups, there's not a lot of events. You fly through the stage, you shoot a bunch of stuff, and then you get to a character flies in.

They introduce themselves, and they're going to die because that's what happens in a shoot-em-up. Character shows up. They fight, someone gets defeated, and nobody dies in tow. Like, everyone's effectively immortal, but they, like, they get beat up and they leave. So there's not a lot of chance for interaction and dialogue and storytelling and stuff like that.

So there's not a lot of rules. for characterization and stuff like that. That's largely been the efforts of the fandom. And they have taken that sort of that permission that soon has given them. And they've ran with it. You know, a lot of a lot of characterization and stuff is effectively inside jokes within this, like, massive, massive worldwide fandom. It's really cool to see, you know, to have seen that evolve. Like, again, like my, I've been kind of like in and out of Toho since 2007.

So I kind of like check back in every now and then. And it's like, it's cool to see like what they've kind of really done. And it's like someone makes like a fan animation where they like kind of like crack a joke about like Cerno or Ucarry or ran or whatever. And the rest of the fandom kind of like jumps on that. they lock in on it and now all of a sudden like Marissa and Alice are like kind of like a Yuri pair and it's like that's I don't think Zun ever wrote that proper but like Marissa stole the precious thing and now Alice you know and now it's like like a fanning pair like cool awesome you know at the end of the day Toho is vibes yes more than more than lore yeah it's really

fun I going back to you know 12.8 in my love for Cerno I love that in that game, there's no lives. There's motivation. Within the Toho world, fairies are immortal. They cannot die. So the idea of Cerno having a lives counter makes no sense. She's immortal. Like, she can't die.

So she doesn't have lives. Instead, she has motivation because she's very loud and brash and knuckled-headed and stuff like that. So her live counter is called a motivation. And it goes, it comes in the form of a 100%. you know, 100% is one life, two life, 200% is two lives, et cetera, et cetera. And every time she takes a hit, she loses 100% of that motivation. And if it reaches zero, she just, she doesn't die. She just kind of gives up and goes home.

Like, that, that's the lore within the game. And that, that's just a fandom, you know, even though this is a mainline game, that's still like, kind of like a fandom thing that like, well, she can't die. So she just kind of like gives up and goes home. And it's like, okay, cool. Never mind that the story of 2.8 is something as trivial as like, she thinks a bunch of other fairies like destroyed her house, which wasn't true. But like, it's that stupid of a plot line.

And she's just like, now she's out to prove that she is, in fact, the strongest fairy, which she may or may not be, you know, depending on the source. I appreciate Aya as like, you know, the quote unquote journalist character. and she has her like photography games, which are just like, you, okay, so the idea here is like it's a vertical shooter, except you're not shooting things because you're not actually trying to kill anything. You're a photographer. Right.

So you have to wait for your camera to charge up. And then when you push the fire button, it'll like start zooming in and focusing in. And the idea is that you want to catch photos of the boss who's like, you know, doing these bullet patterns at you. And ideally you want to get like you and the bullets in there as well to get more points. And if you screw up, then like you have to wait for your camera to recharge. There's a timer at all these fights. It's like it's such a weird, I don't know, like a photography shooter. I have never seen what have been.

No other franchise would do that. No other franchise would do something so experimental. with with the genre with the shootup genre you know it's it's you know every shum up is either don pachi uh gradius or uh freaking are you are you pulling a kelvin's dad here yeah yeah exactly exactly you know but it's no other franchise would be willing to do something so experimental and and get it right you know as as well uh and that that's really cool that happens um It reminds me of like, this is a very, like, indie game. Like, you know, if Dojin works, they're like experimental,

but they're also, like, pulling from arcade stuff. Like, this is just like him kind of just like, okay, well, I don't have to make this like an arcade style game. I can just sort of do what I want. But the game works, though. The game works well with its, like, you know, gameplay premise. You know, earlier I joked about, like, Neutori being, basically Gensokio Wario, but she is to the point where at one MagFest,

I played a Western developed fan game that was basically just Wario Were with Natori. It's available on Steam. That's great. I recommend me. It's Nitori's Wario Ware, and it's really fun. Incredible. My favorite Nitori Wario Ware mini game is the Doom game where you're, you're playing a Sakuya and it's it's Toho doom for like three seconds and you basically

just have to like shoot at monsters before they like touch you and stuff like that but uh but yeah like she's basically Natory Wario she's just like you know kind of like a slightly crooked you know greedy uh you know merchant and uh you know so that leap in personification makes sense because like that's the same you know sort of like progression that Wario you know went on from the Wario Land games to Wario where it really works. Incredible. I'm just wait. It may actually probably already exist, but like Yukari kind of in the fighting

game, she has like this like super where she like launches like a train and her opponent, a literal train. And so now I'm wondering if there's like a fan game where it's like one of those like train operator sims like a was like, Chideco. And chidego, but it's Ucari. But her whole thing is that like, like, you know, she can control portals. In the, in the lore, it's called gaps or whatever.

But she's like, she's basically like, like, kind of like a, you know, she can create portals and stuff like that. So imagine like, Densha de Go what with like portals, you know, well, the good news is, you know, because fan works are so lax for Toho, like anyone could make Densh de Go to Toho. I could do it. I could do it. You could do it. I could do it. Yes. Even you, listener. Bring it to Toho Fest.

Exactly. It's Toho Fest in California. I think we're coming up on our mark here. So once again, as I predicted, we did not touch on, like, more than half of the stuff that could possibly be talked about Toho. But, you know, once everyone's final thoughts, I was going to ask, like, what's everyone's favorite character? But it sounds like we're sorted that out. Nine to one. Americans really seem to love Cerno. But, yeah, final thoughts on Toho.

Like, basically whatever, you know, start with you, Lindsay. I don't know. It's great. It's fun. The music's amazing. And it's a really friendly community. So you can, like, pop into any space on the internet or IRL, I guess. And people will welcome you and, you know, turn, introduce you to games.

that will appeal to you. And as we'll mention, there's pretty much everything under the sun. I recommend the Castlevania one. It's really fun. It's so good. And yeah, come to the Strong Museum. We have a game preservation

symposium happening this summer. We could talk about preserving Toho and the difficulties with that because it's such a massive thing. I'm very into video games and preservation. And yeah. I will second the strong, having done research up there, like, a few years ago. Like, top-notch research library.

Yeah. I got a couple of trips to New York coming up, so I'll try to... Yeah, head up here, and I'll give you a behind-the-scenes tour and everything. It'll be fun. Awesome. Yeah, we'll go ahead. Yeah, but just kind of like reiterating what Lindsay said, it is a very welcoming. It is a very inclusive community.

I've noticed that like there are people of, you know, all walks of life, you know, all kinds of backgrounds, you know, gender, sexuality, neurodivergent, all that stuff. Like, like, there's a lot of people like that within that community. And it is very, it is very friendly. It's very well regulated. They do a good job just kind of like taking care of themselves. It's a great community to be to be a part of. And yeah, I've already said it before. like this is a multimedia franchise.

It's not just video games. It's not just, you know, shoot-em-ups. There's all kinds of, you know, stories and manga and animation and music and every genre, every style of game under the sun has been covered, you know, cosplaying. There's like so many characters that you can, that you can, you know, you know, cosplay as and all kinds of stuff. It's got very long, rich history, just all kinds of talented content creators out there.

I know this episode was kind of like chaotic and not the most structured, but it's like, like as Kevin pointed out, it's like we can't possibly talk about, you know, even a fraction of it in just, you know, just one one session. There's so much to cover. So the fact that we just spend most of it just kind of like gushing about like why just Toho is. so it is so impressive and so important. I hope that it encourages you to, if you haven't yet, to explore this franchise, I promise you you will have a great time.

There is, you know, the IGN thing, and there's something for everybody. I promise you, there is something for everybody. Give it a shot. You will not come out of it feeling like you wasted your time. Yeah. Yeah, I've known a number of people who are really into Toho, but don't play shooters. But they found other things that are Toho, like, related that they really latched onto and found extremely appealing.

So, you mentioned, like, the Castlevania clone, like, that one's fantastic. You know, Toho Spell Bubble, if you're a music gamer or a puzzle gamer, perfect. A lot of the rhythm game, a lot of the Japanese rhythm games, or Eastern rhythm games, will have a lot of, A lot of Toho music on available on it. I mean, heck, I mentioned Smile Basic earlier. Smile Basic has Toho fan works on there. Yeah. As like some of the stuff people have just popped on the platform.

Like, you could find Toho stuff all over the place. A lot of it's really cool. Tyco Tasujan has a whole folder that's just, it's either Toho music right from the games or it's like the fan made. Like you could drum bad apple. You could Tycoe Bad Apple. It's a great song to play. And you know what? Play Subterranean Animism.

That one's great. That's one of my favorites. And yeah. With that, either of you have anything you wish to plug. I think Lindsay already kind of plugged here. Oh, yeah. I like half plugged it. But there's a conference happening July 29th and 30th at the Strong Museum called Save the Games.

all about video game preservation. My background prior to the Strong Museum, I was in film preservation and audio preservation. So I have like a deep love of preserving media and culture. And the video game preservation, it's really still in its infancy. And a lot of it is done by hobbyists. And I love hobbyists.

There's a lot of people in my field that look down on hobbyists. But I think that we have to coexist. and there's things hobbyists do that people and institutions can't do because of reasons and vice versa. So it's a great conference where you come together and talk about preserving games because there's a lot of games we've already lost through inaccessibility or just like things like, you know, 50 copies and it's sold and it's gone. Not to say it's the case with that, but there are many games where that's the case. It's something I'm very passionate about. And game preservation, as you can imagine with something like Toho, it's not just like ripping the game code and putting it in the cloud and calling it a day.

Because if we just had the source code of some Toho games, is that really preserving the whole fandom? Like it isn't. It's like 1% or not even because it's like it's way more encompassing. you'd have to preserve, you know, the conventions, the fan art, the, all the different videos, the music. It goes on and on and on the fan games. And it's like taking multiple pictures of all of these different areas and piecing it together to form the picture. So something, I hope all of you think about things that you love, like how you can preserve them. Yeah.

Really hoping to make it up there. It's not just software. It's a culture. It's a culture. Yeah, that's why it's so hard. It's a culture. It's an art form. And, you know, I talked about a little bit earlier with like, you know, how this franchise has inspired, you know, people to, you know, exercise their creative, you know, to flex their creative muscles.

And they, and they've done that. It's like, that is a, that's the human condition. That is, that's, you know, the human experience people, you know, expressing themselves and they just do it. They just happen to do it through this specific framework that one person has, uh, you know, provided them and it has graciously shared the sort of like the the the steering wheel um for it yeah so just give the franchise a try i don't really have anything personally to plug i'm not really i don't screen i'm not really kind of active on anything you can find me on blue sky if you want uh at super bowl of will where i will gush about you know retro video

games gundum basketball sometimes like all three of those things at the same time um you know I'm just a guy, but I love this stuff. I love yapping about it whenever someone gives me the, you know, the, the platform and the time to, uh, to. So yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on here again. Uh, I will just say that we could always just do like, um, do like, like the Sonic Retronauts crew did. And, and, you know, do a, do, uh, an episode specifically on just the fan games. Uh, they, they did do, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, they did do, uh, uh, uh, uh,

a two-part Sonic fan game episode or a series. Like, we could very easily do that with Batoa, where we talk about specific fan games that we really enjoy. Just throwing it out there. Now, that is an idea. Shout out to Stuart Gip and his crew. Anytime Stuart and the Sonic Boys do an episode,

I'm there, like day one, like, oh, man, I get, I block out time of my day to listen to them, gush about chronic. He'll be very pleased to hear that. And as for me, you can find me. on a blue sky at Atari Archive.org, which is also my website, and also my name of my YouTube channel, and the book I have available through limited run games. So if you like learning about early video game history, so do I, and I'm bringing it to you through

my synthesis of information. And you've been listening to Retronauts. This is Patreon-supported. and if you subscribe to our Patreon, you can have access to extra bonus episodes, you know, Friday episodes a couple times a month, Diamond fights, Sunday columns, and community podcasts, and we also have a Discord server that is quite a good community in its own right. So I highly recommend checking that out if you're interested. And with that, I'll leave you to folks. Focus in and watch out for Oni and other Yo-Kai.