Getting started...

[oleo_sidhe]

This is probably in the wrong place, and you all have probably seen things like this before, but...

For a while now, I've been noticing Touhou all over the internet. The characters seem interesting, the music catchy, and I really like how it's all the project of one person.

"So," I said to myself, "Let's get in on this." And I went to the official site, and got confused. I managed to download a game (I think), but couldn't get it to run. The game couldn't find the file it needed, or something. So I got nervous, deleted the whole thing, and left my interest alone. For like, a year.

Now, though, it's been piqued. So, I come to you, with very little computer, Japanese, or Touhou knowldge, for advice. Any links, tips, or any advice you can provide would make me a happy person.

Thank you.

[Stuffman]

Help Me, Eirin! would probably have been the best place for this.

Regardless, quick breakdown.

There are 12 main touhou games and 2 fighting games, as well as one official side game. Usually one gets released each year.

PC-98 (you need an emulator to play these):
1 - Highly Responsive to Prayers (HRtP)
2 - Story of Eastern Wonderland (SoEW)
3 - Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream (PoDD)
4 - Lotus Land Story (LLS)
5 - Mystic Square (MS)
Windows:
6 - Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (EoSD)
7 - Perfect Cherry Blossom (PCB)
8 - Imperishable Night (IN)
9 - Phantasmagoria of Flower View (PoFV)
10 - Mountain of Faith (MoF)
11 - Subterranean Animism (SA)
12 - Undefined Fantastic Object (UFO)
Fighting games:
7.5 - Immaterial and Missing Power (IaMP)
10.5 - Scarlet Weather Rhapsody (SWR)
12.3 - Hisoutensoku (expansion to SWR)
Other:
9.5 - Shoot the Bullet (StB)

Now, you should probably start with either EoSD or PCB. EoSD is the first windows Touhou but PCB is a significant step up in quality. Most people regard IN to be the best, and it has the most content.

If you want to try the PC-98 games the best (only?) emulator for it is Anex86. HRtP is actually an Arkanoid-style game rather than a shmup.

The Phantasmagoria games are VS Shooters, like Twinkle Star Sprites. Shoot the Bullet involves you playing as Aya and dodging incredibly dense shot patterns while trying to take pictures of the enemy.

The touhou games aren't freeware, if you aren't comfortable with piracy you'll need to order some copies from some place like Paletweb, or you can see N-Forza's thread about getting them. In either case, it's the admin's policy to not give out download links to the touhou games here.

For the one you downloaded, you were probably missing something like d3dx9_33.dll, right? You can easily plug the filename you're missing into google and find a quick download link for it, I've had to do it a couple times.

[Zengar Zombolt]

If you want to try the PC-98 games the best (only?) emulator for it is Anex86.

There's T-98 Next, that AFAIK is better, but harder to set up.

[Prime 2.0]

T-98 Next has different V-synth noises(often having some be almost impossible to hear in some tracks), but unlike Anex86, the sound playback is instantaneous, and SFX will never cause tracks in the music to stop playing... however, it seems that ZUN may have synched the music in stages based on the delayed playback, and T-98 experiences some graphical glitches not present in Anex86, such as the animation on Marisa's shot not working right, and weirdness in the teleportation effect in MS stage 4.

All in all, you might want to keep both emulators around to see which one you prefer. One thing that neither of the people mentioned here though is that you want to run these emulators in a Japanese language setting, which can be achieved either by setting the standard for interpreting non-unicode programs on your computer, changing the regional settings, or using Applocal on the program. But no matter how you go about it, you'll need eastern language support installed on your computer.

Also, should you choose to go with applocal, here are some instructions for making a right-click entry you can use to run stuff in Japanese with it.

It should be noted that it is not required that you run the emulators in a Japanese regional setting, but that in-game text will not display properly if you do not, especially in Anex86.



With the stuff about the emulators out of the way, I'd like to say a bit on the windows games:

First off, nearly all of them have demos that you can download from ZUN's official site, but that the EoSD demo will not work. Bearing in mind that Touhou 9 is not representative of most of the series, and that Mountain of Faith and onward do not have the arcade style continues of the previous games(and thus are less forgiving to people just starting out), I'd have to recommend PCB for your first romp through the series. It's widely as the best game in the series(Stuffman is weird like that), sporting one of the best soundtracks in the series, a great selection of shot types, memorable characters, and great danmaku.

Plus, the English Patch works on the demo!

Get your stuff here:

PCB Demo (lzh is a type of archive, like zip. Winzip won't be able to open it, but Winrar and 7-zip work fine)
PCB English Patch
How to play
Prologue

And because the wiki is acting weird right now, here are the google cache pages for the gameplay and prologue articles.

[grgspunk]

Don't forget to download the latest DirectX.

[Rikter]

Do not be suprised of you die several times and have to continue on stage 1 on easy on your first try.

Anyways most people say PCB, IN and MoF are the easiest Touhou games.