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 Gensokyo 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 readers is a great way to describe the residents of Gensokyo.
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 Carano.
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.
It is.
Lots of cool stuff there.
And who's joining me here in the wonderful state of Maryland?
The strongest podcaster, Will Cuevas.
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 Soho could very easily become a podcast in of itself.
There's like 20 mainline games and probably hundreds of fan released 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 manga that are out there.
I mean it's there, there's doujin as a whole, and then there's touhou, which is, 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 doujin 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 doujin are probably indie, but not all indie are doujin kind of thing.
That's yeah.
Um, if it had been 10, 15 years ago, I would say that the line between Dojin and Indy is is a lot more gray.
My in my opinion.
But you know, after you know 10, 15 years of, you know Xbox live, arcade and you know your undertales and your braids and all that.
You know all that, like Indy 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 are like OK yeah, that kind of makes sense that we're at that point.
But now Dojin 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 uh the the, the Indies are now 2004 you know the cave story in Toho.
I would have put them in the same bucket.
But 2026, now no it's, it's different.
Um, But that's not to say that Dojin is not a respectable branch of the video game world.
There's a lot of great stuff in there.
Yeah, going with that definition, sort of like the difference between stuff that's on the Nintendo eShop and stuff that's on 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 as far as I checked last night, there's no official Toho stuff on there, but that's kind of by choice from Zune himself, which we'll get into later yeah uh later, but like it's, there's a lot of stuff like on the switchy shop, on the steam store, not so much i'm not sure about like sony, definitely not xbox.
I, i don't, i don't have an xbox and i i highly doubt that uh, japan is putting uh douche and stuff up on on xbox's store.
But uh yeah, it's out there Yeah.
And I should say in this context we're talking about how Dojin works as far as games, but Dojin is not just games.
There's a lot of other stuff.
It's really just anything that's not... professionally produced, professionally published.
We'll get into a little bit later, but the big dog in Japan is Comiket twice a year.
Dojin Circles come out and they 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.
Yeah. but, uh, it's, it's, it's really neat.
And I wish we, I wish we had a little bit more of that here in the U S.
It's hard because you know we, you know just much bigger land, land mass, we're a lot more spread out.
Uh, 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 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 and 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 doujin 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 wasn't Nintendo, was an indie game.
I mean, if you think about it.
Yeah, it's interesting.
But I do love that sort of hobbyist spirit that is still in Japan.
Like, 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... the indie show floor that is at MAGFest every year.
I've seen a lot of great stuff on those show floors in the last ten 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 hope this one fit.
And like that game has disappeared off the face of the earth.
I cannot find any trace of that ever existing.
Did I hallucinate when I, when I, 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...
I mean, you talk about how they've been doing it longer and like doujin stuff.
It's usually not sold in stores, but there are like specialty shops that will stock it.
I think there's one I'm forgetting.
I really should have written it in the notes.
I think it's Tsurugaya that sells doujin stuff sometimes.
Yeah.
Like basically just leftovers from Kamikaze.
Yeah.
But but here I feel like it's 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, but like video games and other stuff like that maybe, 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.
I think around like 2017 is when he kind of finally opened the door to doing that after nearly a decade of being hesitant to do stuff like that.
The PC-98 stuff is just gone.
He's said multiple times that he does not want to...
To deal with that.
Which is kind of strange because, depending on the interview you read about him, he either maintains the PC-98 games as canon lore or he's like embodiment of Scarlet Devil.
The first Windows game is essentially like the fresh reboot.
You got to pick your story, man.
You got to stick to it.
We want to talk about Zune 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 2007, and then I ended up moving back there in 2009.
So this must have been about 2000...
Nine, I guess, when I moved back where I was watching on Nico Nico Doga.
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.
It's not really a new thing, but at the time, I had never really seen anything like it.
And I just saw random people playing different Touhou games and I was very intrigued because I'd always loved the Sega Saturn shooters and things like that.
So that was my introduction to it, is watching streamers play it.
Well, 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 my parents limited the amount of Internet time I had.
They were trying to save me from that brain rot.
And the second night.
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.
For sure.
In particular, fan animations for Toho stuff, you know, like Marissa stole a precious thing.
As she does.
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 base song that this video is is playing.
Like, and it's like, you know, Alice's theme from a perfect cherry blossom.
It 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, it's a, shoot them up.
I love this genre, you know i i had been kind of cold on it for you know, a couple years uh, high school was very much the uh, jrpg and metal gear.
Solid years uh for me.
But i played a lot of shooters on uh, the super nintendo, the sega, the nes.
I mean guardian legend is my favorite nes game period.
It was a 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 Soho 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 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 uh yeah, it just it's great.
It's very it scratches a very specific uh type of uh Shuma bitch which I'm sure we'll get into, uh kind of like how that game, how that gameplay, separates itself uh 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 manzai routines.
So, like you know, you've got your straight man and you're a goof off characters and they're telling jokes and, you know, most of them made absolutely no sense to me because i knew nothing about the context to toho or whatever like 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 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 Exo Machine with the remake of Perfect Cherry Blossom.
I think it's Perfect Sakura Fantastica.
Yeah.
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 zune work and i'm like hey, this is also really cool.
I should probably check out the source material, huh.
So At this point, I've played quite a few of the Toho games.
I'm not particularly great at any of them except for that Exegame, but they are very fun.
As a big, you know STG head, I will say that the skill set that you need for for toho games specifically are a little different than your standard uh, than your standard one.
You still got.
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.
Um yeah, routing is absolutely like tantamount uh.
That that's like the skill you will come out uh developing if you uh, if you play a lot of those.
Again, I think if you look at some of the works that kind of inspired Zune, it kind of makes 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 one.
I mean he's got, he's got to do it all the programming, the graphics, the music, everything that's great.
He's a true uh, renaissance man.
Yeah he, uh.
He's done a couple interviews, so i pulled a lot of these details from those.
Um 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 closely, 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.
You didn't quite take it the uh to the extreme that uh, you know satoshi did, but But yeah.
So he first started off with like little LCD games around 1982 when he started kindergarten, like stuff from Nintendo and 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 name-dropped Capcom's Son Son, which is like a character run and gun shooter, I guess you'd say
Konami is 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 those out,
Yeah.
And also like he messed around with the Dezemon 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 uh resources, yeah.
And then, like he got into school, into his school's band uh, forget exactly what instrument he was playing um, but he got into music and composing.
Uh, and I'm willing to bet it's it's gotta be a horn instrument, considering how how you know horn heavy a lot of his music used to be.
It's uh you know uh the uh the meme is uh the.
The zoom pits uh the you know Zuna his love for uh uh 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, uh...
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 he 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, $1,000 to go to it, or however much a PC-98 was at the time.
Turns out no one really needed him specifically to, like, compose music for them.
So he just sort of taught himself how to 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.
Yeah.
And he started getting back into shooters around this time too, because the fighting game boom was starting to die off.
He name dropped, Taito's Rayforce, Metal Black and Darius Gaiden, as all like 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 Tidal, man.
Don't sleep on Tidal.
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 Touhou game, highly responsive to prayers.
Uh, 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, uh your character back and forth, to bounce like a card into a food-a-card into the air and hit things.
Uh, it's kind of a mess, but that was kind of the start.
Uh, you gotta start somewhere man yeah, he did this 2009 interview where he sort of described the, the aesthetics that he wanted for his games.
Um, Because he liked Japanese aesthetics but he didn't like want to make this just Edo era by itself.
So he started mixing in, like, Western elements, too.
And so his team, Shanghai Alice, like uh development circle name that he used, uh 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 in 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 Reimu.
As he said it, 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.
Yeah.
Obviously, he's never messed with Pocky and Rocky.
Yeah.
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, Hinare, 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 Matsuri.
But it wasn't actually sold until like summer 97 Comiket, which is 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 an actual shooter.
And he sold them both at that 97 show, apparently like 50 copies of each.
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
That's not bad, yeah.
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 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 Danmaku 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's just came out with, what, the 19th or the 20th last year?
20th.
Jeez.
Yep.
That's a lot.
It's a low 20.
It's not like he's only done the 20 games, because he's also done these spin-offs here and there.
Yeah, he's never-ending, never-stopping.
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 guy that I followed had me make a breakout clone.
Shout out to the 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 him up tutorial.
I was like, let me play, 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 musically uh, I don't have the musical background that Zune has but I'm also very musical focused.
Um, you know, 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.
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 length.
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 interesting, cool when you time it just right, where you fight a mid-boss and it's a big ship that flies in and you're shooting, you're shooting, you're shooting.
And there's this one.
Blue Revolver, it's a very cave pilled shooter.
The third stage is my favorite one because it's got like this like really kind of like high tempo drum and bass track going on.
And like if you do it just right, you get to the mid boss.
And as this sort of like like a drum beat 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, the drop right as you destroy the mid-boss and you get this like big, like like full screen explosion.
And then, like your your, your shit kind of like speeds up and the 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 feels 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 Toho game is just like a high concept album.
But it's also like fun to play.
But like, the music is just fantastic. it's yeah.
And uh, there's um I I've seen a couple of videos that kind of break down, hit the way he composes a song and like, kind of like, syncs it up to the gameplay and like like, kind of like, some of like the 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 uh, appreciate it uh 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?
I do think it was funny the other day.
Um, 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 Reimu on there.
And I 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...
We ended up talking, and they're talking about how occasionally they will put on a Toho soundtrack at work on the intercom system for their background music.
We're like, yeah, you know, my coworkers always dig it.
They always wonder where it's coming from.
I'm like, well, it's from a game.
It's a.
It's a really well, not all of them, but there there's a lot of uh, real high energy tracks.
That's some like real, like hustle and get the housework done.
Like, Oh crap.
Mom's going to be here in 10 minutes and I haven't done anything yet.
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 exposure to fighting games, which is no surprise, given he's...
Of that age where he was there for, like the.
You know the, the golden arcade age.
But you pointed out, you know the the draw to 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 what who your favorite character is.
Uh might, might be.
Um, it makes that that comparison really kind of makes a lot of sense for for, for toe, and musically it works out great too, because characters have character themes and he's got a lot.
He's got a lot of lay motifs that he gets to uh, he gets to compose there.
He co-developed some fighting games with Toho characters with another doujin group, Twilight Frontier.
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?
Yeah.
Just about every genre of video game possible has been covered by a Toho game or a Toho fan game.
Even very specific franchises.
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 Air Riders?
Guess what?
There are two, two Toho Kirby Air Riders.
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, better.
Yeah, the time control stuff in 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 is a high mark for fan works and it definitely uh, definitely has uh, earned that uh, that accolade.
That game is why I'm like all right, you know what Sakura, you're the best one.
You're the best Toho character.
You can stop time and throw knives.
I played a recently released fan game called Cerno Lifts the Boulder.
Guys, you will never guess what Cerno does.
It's like a 3D collect-a-thon 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-Kazooie scale before they went like full on like Donkey Kong 64 and it just became just unwieldy.
Like it's really solid.
I'd 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 allowed to exist, I think.
Because other IPs, it exists and it's like they 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 doujin level, maybe sometimes occasionally poking into like that kind of like modern indie delineation that i that i described earlier.
But he's really kind of kept in the doujin level for himself and a lot of it is that he um, You know he wants, 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 kind of close to the chest.
And I really respect him for doing that.
But he's also very generous with this universe that he's created.
He has a set of guidelines that he's put out for people who want to make their own fan works.
And frankly, it's not very... terribly oppressive or anything.
It's kind of like just your basic stuff.
Don't be political.
Don't hate speech.
Don't try to pass it off as an official work.
Make it clear that it's a fan work.
Don't pull from my existing works.
Don't plagiarize another creator.
It's all very basic stuff.
And so, by kind of keeping it in the dogen sphere 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, it's, Really cool because it allows for people to express themselves.
It gives them a framework to work in, to make their own game, tell their own story, make their own music.
All that
He fosters creativity.
By by doing that it kind of you know, and that 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, the 2010s, a lot of people just like really latched onto that show.
You know the the, my little pony thing.
Lauren Faust one and it just kind of like clicked in a lot of people's brains where suddenly they were like getting invested in telling stories and making music and creating characters and all that stuff.
And it's like, OK, 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, you know, 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.
Yeah.
Uh and like there are a couple of things that like he licensed out and it's mostly like the commercial stuff.
Like you know, Toho Luna nights, we mentioned um the, the X uh the, the pair of X, the games they're actually like there's a trilogy of these remakes of, like the early windows games.
Um, 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 Spellbubble on the Switch which, like I don't know, have either of you ever played this one?
Which one?
Toho Spellbubble.
It's by Taito.
It is a mashup of Puyo Puyo and a rhythm game.
Oh, back to the roots.
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.
There's so many IPs.
I wish would do this, but they got too big, which is why Zune remaining in that doujin space.
It's a smart decision.
The brand, despite having all the 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 in 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.
So I will definitely check that one out.
And Spellbubble, 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 Bobble.
Yeah, sorry.
I said Puyo.
I meant Bubble Bobble or Puzzle Bobble.
I mean, I like Puyo too.
Don't get me wrong.
I had a big Puyo Tetris phase, uh, when I was in, in college, but I, I, uh, Googled it really quick.
Spell bubble is um, bubble bubble and like that's like outside of, like uh, the fighting games.
That is like my go-to whenever i come across a mvs cab.
So uh, 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, giving some more money to Zune.
Yes, of course, as it should be.
I'm telling you, like, your favorite franchise or your favorite genre has been covered by Toe.
There's a guy I've been watching recently lately on uh twitch.
He played a lot of, he's been playing a lot of, he plays a lot of toho uh stuff and in particular lately he's been playing megaman toho games.
Of course, Of course, those exist.
They're really good.
They're really good.
I think they're called like FC Rockmaid 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.
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 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 covers of that song, which is itself a remix of a song from the fourth Toho game on the PC-98.
Yeah.
And yeah, if he was fussing or something, they're like, Bram, do you want to watch Bad Apple?
And you're like, yeah.
So I'd throw that out and he would just be mesmerized for a while.
Oh.
I mean Bad Apple.
Like you know, it's one of my go-tos for like in terms of like timeless fan animation work.
Like, the main draw is that, you know, it's two colors.
It's use of, like, positive and negative space on, like, you know, in terms of, like, the animation.
But like it's so good, how much it, how much it does uh with that, and then it's just a catchy song to boot.
Yeah uh, 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 buttoho.
Yeah, I've seen Toho run on refrigerators like all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, we keep gushing over the fan games, but it's not just that.
You get into the fan animations and they're so much just stuff out there from like the last 20 years.
Um there, there there's um 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 uh 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.
Um, it's, 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 projects.
There's one in, I think, Tokyo, Reitaisai, 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 endogen 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 impressive for one thing.
Yeah, not many events within 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.
Their CEO, CEO Taku um, for speed running.
There's, like you know, AGDQ and SGDQ twice a year.
MacFest has like a million events.
If you don't like um, But like you know every now and then like something does well enough that it can kind of do that twice.
Even like, 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 off.
Mm hmm.
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 back when they were more like fan run and everything in the 70s and 80s.
What if they didn't bring it back and make it into a huge production?
What if it just stayed a fan works realm?
Oh, yeah.
And I did find out there is a Toho Fest in Torrance, California that runs every year since 2023.
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 fairly approachable.
I feel like Bullet Hells.
They have this reputation of being very difficult and hard for people to break into if they're not already a shooter head.
Yeah.
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 or five levels of difficulty going from easy all the way up to lunatic.
I think what separates...
Toho from other bullet hell, or Danmaku 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 um it to kind of give like shoot them 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'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 amount of space that the player can work with.
Toho consistently has more instances of dumb bullets than smart bullets.
So when i say that routing is really important, so i mean that because you can consistently count on a pattern being the same from playthrough to play through the playthrough.
That's not to say that smart bullets don't occur, 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 to do levels or parts, 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 tend to be slower moving.
There's not a lot of big movements in in toho games, that's not to say there aren't at all.
It happens but, like 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.
They're just doing like these tiny little micro adjustments and they're Sometimes 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 it's a bullet hell shooter.
The player has a smaller hitbox which is possible to be made visible.
Sort of the key thing there is.
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 shooters from Cave do if you hold down the fire button.
But for Toho, I think starting with the seventh game, 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 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...
Zune 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.
Yeah.
Part of the origin of Cerno being stupid is in her first appearance.
If you are playing the game on easy mode, you can literally fly right in front of her face, get like right up on her body and all of her bullets will go around you.
She will never hit you.
100% whip.
It also doesn't help that in the manual, you know there, there's a screen cap of her of of, of gameplay, of her specifically.
And there's like a little arrow pointer.
It says Baca.
Um, you know, she was always meant to be stupid, but like that's a bit uh.
You know, personified by uh, that battle on easy difficulty where she just point blank misses.
She's just flailing her arms like this and never hitting you.
It's great.
Like one of my D&D characters.
The screen filling bullets thing, 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 gonna 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 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 a 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 do that crazy fake-out stuff where it gets really close to the player and then they all stop and turn around and go the opposite direction, stuff like that.
It's very.
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.
Yeah.
I mean, there are a ton of hacks for these games.
There's English translation patches, but there's also ones that...
We'll adjust how visible hitboxes are, or I'm pretty sure there's some that just are flat out making new stages and whatnot.
But these exist.
I've seen the patches.
And with there being 20 games, the core gameplay is... the same across all the games.
Uh, it very standard kind of like you start out, you can fire, you know your your your, 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 uh, make you invincible.
That's clear the screen of 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 Toho 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...
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 there's no like power up drops in that game.
Instead it's like you kind of like push.
You 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.
But that's just specific to that game.
Perfect.
Cherry Blossom introduced the Supernatural Border where basically, if you collect enough Cherry Blossom points, you basically get 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 get some points.
Or the supernatural border only lasts a certain amount of time.
And if you keep it the entire time, it goes away and you get a massive score bonus.
So you know it basically plays to.
You know basically the two primary types of shuma players those who play for survival or those who are score chasing.
So it's like one mechanics, you know kind of works, applies to both players.
It's really creative.
You know it's very much that Miyamoto, like you know, one solution to many problems kind of.
It's very simplistic but very creative.
So Toho seems dense and unapproachable, but really it is.
It's actually a very approachable series.
And there's plenty of games to pick from, where there might be 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 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 firing 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 particular region, at least your shots are still hitting them.
So even if you can't track their location yourself or what their health is, you know you're still doing something.
Or if items pop off off the top of the screen, there'll be indications that that's where they are.
And in, I think, every game since the 7th or 8th.
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 be vacuumed up to you, which is a very fun way to power up really quickly if you don't immediately crash into something and die, which
So it's like a real risk-reward sort of thing.
It's a really fun way of doing it.
Exactly.
Because it's encouraging you to move around and use more of the screen than you probably would otherwise.
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 your weapon strength.
Because in previous titles, 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.
Uh change, you know, because it just, it just assumes at this point your max strength and now you can start working on your uh 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.
I remember 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 a piece.
Yeah, it's very not what we're used to.
That D-pad sucks.
I'm sorry.
Those arrow keys, just like the... weirdest layout it's so awful very non-intuitive layout on each other it's horrible um but i mean hey man big props to the pc98 uh i i wanted to joke earlier that like zune'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.
That could be so many different people.
So shout out to the PC-98, allowing the Japanese to essentially have their bedroom programmer movement, much like the UK had with the Speccy and the.
I'd like to think he saw the like.
He saw that 16-bit sensation anime from a couple years ago and, like the one character on there, is 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-98s all like networked together.
And I'd like to think that Zune saw that and was like, yes, I've been seen.
Um...
The games.
Like we said earlier, the games have multiple difficulties, so you can definitely tailor there.
There's definitely you can start off really easy.
And then as you progress and skill on it.
You know, you can 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 called.
They're typically called extra where you fight like like kind of like a like a.
They're very challenging levels.
Typically there'll be like a boss rush and then it'll 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-em-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-em-ups that you can grow into and you can take it 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, like a fun, kind of like slower pace, shoot them up with like some banging music.
You can, you can do that too.
Just play it like on the, on the lighter difficulties.
And that'll open the 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.
Um, it's, it's, uh, We kind of joked a little bit about piracy and stuff like that earlier.
I'm sorry for the Western audience.
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 Comiket to get you know the most recent Toho game.
Or like I'm not going to like you know Otakon and paying some guy for like what could or could be like a bootleg version.
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 a copy of like the first PC-98 game on floppy, like one of the 50 copies.
No, no.
But now it's a great time to get in there.
Like the mainline games are being made.
It's a great time.
Great time to be a Toho fan.
Always a good time to be a Toho fan, especially now.
Yep.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So I got to ask you know Lindsay, since you put together this Dojin 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 joys 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 toho.
Well, I guess I'll put in Cerno.
Yeah. one of the few joys um so i did that and um there's way more than just toho um obviously but toho is probably so i have three cases and toho is about half of one um because it is that important um it's a it's a hue it's a hue 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 um i put in uh curiosities of lotus asia which is the book zune wrote i put in serno i put in marissa um perfect cherry blossom maybe another game i can't remember my personal Favorite game is Imperishable Night, but I bought it and it came after I was laying out 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...
And other games I ended up putting in the exhibit.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with Ao 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, 2009 when it came out.
Ao Oni, so A-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.
Yeah.
You recognize it, right?
Yes.
You've seen this.
And I put in, like, Yume Nikki Exit 8, which is, like, so good.
I keep showing people Exit 8.
I'm 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 is 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 is always great.
Yes, it's great.
And talk about multimedia franchises.
Goodness.
Char Aznable, you know, launched a thousand ships in an hour.
Which Char?
Yeah, which Char is this?
Yeah, I started on... Perfect Cherry Blossom was my first one.
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.
True.
Even outside of her being a playable, I do think the freeze mechanic is really cool.
I've never really...
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 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, it just feels really good.
It's a, it's really fun.
The only, only shame is it's a shorter title.
It's only got three levels.
If you don't take the extra stage into, into account, but yeah, that one's my favorite title.
That was 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, as a matter of fact, I think she's the only character to get a nendoroid proper of her maid.
Actually, no, I take it back.
Reimu and Marisa have definitely made into Nendoroids once or twice.
But Cerno 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 a sunflower and stuff like that.
She's kind of like, merchandise-wise, one of the more well-represented characters.
I wouldn't say she's one of the most popular.
Not really studying that off the top of my head.
I don't even think I'd put Cerno 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, Reimu is kind of a dummy.
They're all kind of dumb.
They're all kind of dumb.
In their own way.
Even the people that are supposed to be like god-tier geniuses like... Kappa.
What's her name?
Nitori?
No, Nitori's just mean.
She's just Wario.
She's just Wario in Toho form.
Freaking train girl.
I'm super blank.
I'm really annoyed.
Yukari.
Thanks, Yukari.
Oh, yes, yes.
I kept wanting to say Ran, Ran Yakumo, but it's like, that's not right.
I know it's not right, but like Ran, kind of like runs in Yukari's circle.
Uh, yukari 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 Under Night.
We're really Hilda.
Hilda is more Yukari because Yukari came first.
Low-end Thai whiz.
Yeah, exactly.
They're all Jason Mendoza from The Good Place.
But yeah, I really enjoy 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 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, in all these fan works 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, and...
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.
In some interviews he has expressed that 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.
Everyone's effectively immortal, but 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 room for characterization stuff like that.
That's largely been the efforts of the fandom and they have have taken that sort of um, that permission that soon has given them and they've ran with it.
Um, you know, a lot of a lot of uh characterization and stuff is effectively inside jokes right Uh, within this like massive massive, worldwide fandom.
It's really cool to see you know to, to have seen that evolve or like like again.
Like my 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 Yukari 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 just like that's.
You know, I don't think Zoo never wrote that proper, but like Marissa stole the precious thing.
And now Alice, you know, and now it's like a fanon pair.
Like, cool.
Awesome.
You know, at the end of the day, Toho is vibes.
Yes.
More than lore.
Yeah.
It's really fun.
Going back to...
12.8 and 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.
She can't die.
So she doesn't have lives.
Instead, she has motivation because she's very loud and brash and knuckleheaded and stuff like that.
So her life counter is called a motivation and it goes, it comes in the form of a 100%.
You know, 100% is one life to live.
200% is two lives, et cetera, et cetera.
And every time she takes a hit, she loses a hundred percent 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's that's the lore within the game.
And 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 like well, she can't die.
So she just kind of like gives up and goes home.
And it's like, OK.
Never mind that the story of 128 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...
Okay, so the idea here is 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 start zooming in and focusing in.
And the idea is that you want to catch photos of the boss who's doing these bullet patterns at you.
And ideally, you want to get you and the bullets in there as well to get more points.
And if you screw up, then you have to wait for your camera to recharge.
There's a timer at all these fights.
It's such a weird...
I don't even like a photography shooter.
I've, I've never seen one of these.
No other franchise, no other franchise would do that.
No other franchise would do something so experimental with, with the genre, with the shoot up genre.
You know it's it's.
Every Shumup is either Don Pachi Gradius or freaking.
Are you pulling a Kelvin's dad here?
Yeah, exactly.
No other franchise would be willing to do something so experimental and get it right.
You know, as well.
And that's really cool that it happens.
Yeah, it reminds me of, like... 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 gameplay premise.
You know earlier I joked about like Nitori being basically Gensokyo Wario.
But she is to the point where at one MAGFest I played a Western developed fan game that was basically just WarioWare with Nitori.
It's available on Steam.
I recommend it.
It's Nitori's WarioWare and it's really fun.
It's really fun.
My favorite Nitori WarioWare minigame is the Doom game, where you're playing as Sakuya and 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, yeah, like, she's basically Notori Wario.
She's just, like, you know, kind of like a slightly crooked, you know, greedy, you know, merchant.
And, you know, so...
That leap in personification makes sense because that's the same progression that Wario went on from the Wario Land games to WarioWare.
It really works.
Incredible.
It may actually probably already exist, but Yukari in the fighting games she has this super where she launches 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 uh was like, but her whole thing is that, like you know, she can't control portals uh, 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 to go what with like portals.
Well, the good news is, you know, because fan works are so lax for Toho, like anyone could make Dead Should They Go Toho.
I could do it.
You could do it.
I could do it.
Even you, listener.
Bring it to Toho Fest.
Exactly.
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 have possibly been talked about Toho.
But, you know, what's everyone's final thoughts?
I was going to ask like, what's everyone's favorite character, but it sounds like Bernie sorted that out.
We're outnumbering you.
Nine to one.
Americans really seem to love Cerno.
But, yeah, final thoughts on Toho, like...
Basically, whatever.
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 pop into any space on the internet or IRL, I guess and people will welcome you and introduce you to games that will appeal to you.
And as Will mentioned, 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 a few years ago.
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, 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 that.
There's a lot of people like that within that community.
It is very friendly.
It's very well regulated.
They do a good job of 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.
This is a multimedia franchise.
It's not just video games.
It's not just... you know, shoot them 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.
It's.
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 session.
There's so much to cover.
So the fact that we just spent most of it just kind of like gushing about like why just Toho is...
So it is so impressive and so important.
I you know.
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.
The IGN thing, 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, 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-related that they really latched onto and found interesting, 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 the rhythm game, a lot of the japanese rhythm games or eastern uh rhythm games will have a lot of toho music um on available on it.
I mean heck, I mentioned Smile Basic earlier.
Smile Basic has Toho fan works on there, 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.
Taiko Tatsujin 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, you could drum bad apple.
You could Taiko bad apple.
It's a great song to play.
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 your... 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 industry.
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.
Um, And there's things hobbyists do that people in 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, you know, in the cloud and calling it a day.
Because if we just had the like source code of some toho games is that really preserving the whole like fandom like it isn't it's like one percent 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 the all the different videos the music um 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.
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've done that.
And it's like, That's the human condition.
That's the human experience.
People expressing themselves and they just do it.
They just happen to do it through this specific framework that one person has provided them and has graciously shared 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 at will, where I We'll gush about retro video games Gundam basketball, sometimes all three of those things at the same time.
I'm just a guy, but I love... this stuff.
I love yapping about it.
Well, whenever someone gives me the uh, you know the uh, the platform, in the time to uh yeah, yeah.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me on here again.
Uh, I will just say that we could always just do like um, Like the Sonic Retronauts crew did and, you know, do do an episode specifically on just the fan games.
They did do a two part Sonic fan game episode or a series, like we could very easily do that about Toho, 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 Gipp and his crew.
Anytime Stuart and the Sonic Boys do an episode, I'm there like day one.
Like, oh man, I block out time of my day to listen to them gush about Sonic.
He'll be very pleased to hear that.
And as for me, you can find me on a blue sky at Atari archiveorg, 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 great, quite uh, a good community in its own right.
So i highly recommend checking that out if you're interested.
Uh, and with that uh, i'll leave you to focus in and then watch out for oni and other yokai.
Thank you.
