Touhou Cannonball

~ the obit ~

Touhou Project is a doujin series. One man, ZUN, has written its games since 1996, and it grew enormous because he let other people build on it, so the work made around Touhou dwarfs the games at the center. 東方キャノンボール is what happened when a commercial publisher asked permission properly and got it.

Touhou's reach has a strange shape. The arrangements travel anywhere there is a video site, and the games themselves stay where the people who read Japanese are. It is entirely possible to have heard Touhou music for years from outside Japan without ever learning that it came from a bullet-hell game made by one person.

Aniplex published Cannonball on 1 October 2019 and its subsidiary Quatro A built and ran it. The game underneath was a board game: you rolled dice and moved toward a goal once you had met whatever the condition was, and some of those runs took a very long time to finish. CloverWorks animated an opening for it, directed by Satoshi Yamaguchi and released twenty-eight days before launch.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sixty voices ~

ZUN's own games have never had voice acting. The characters have had decades of fan-made voices instead, none of them official, because there was no official recording for anyone to be measured against. Cannonball hired professionals for around sixty playable characters and five more who stayed as NPCs.

Akari Kito played Reimu and Yukari Tamura played Remilia, and the list carries on at that level for pages. For characters who had existed for more than twenty years as text on a screen, hearing sixty of them speak with an official cast was new.

~ the dice stopped ~

The notice went up at four in the afternoon on 14 September 2020. Two hours later the paid currency, 砲石, stopped being sold, though the stones players already held stayed usable to the end. That end was exactly a month out, on 14 October at two in the afternoon.

Three hundred and seventy-nine days, start to finish. The fan works will outlast it, which was never in any doubt. Buried with the servers is the only version of these characters that ever spoke with permission.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »