Apparently Elly got 118th in the latest poll, which I guess isn’t great but it was one spot ahead of Youmu’s mentor, and Youmu is pretty popular, so I guess there is some silver lining by association. And “Bad Apple!!” is still in the top 100 for the music poll (out of nearly 500 songs), which is pretty good for something from the PC-98 era.
It kind of blows my mind that U.N. Owen and Septet for the Dead Princess still have the top two music spots locked down after all these years.
The demo for Touhou 16 came out this weekend. After Reisen broke the glass ceiling for youkai as playable characters in the main series entries, Aya and Cirno have now been promoted to PCs. I’m especially excited about the former since she’s one of my favorite characters.
It looks pretty interesting. Aya’s autumn shot type looks potentially very different from normal Touhou gameplay judging from some early runs I’ve seen, but also potentially a lot of fun. It has a PCB-like system where collecting special items charges a gauge, which lets you activate a special effect that can give you invulnerability and/or cancel bullets, and it seems to be possible with some planning and good timing to recharge it fast enough to cancel bullets almost constantly at some points, at least on Lunatic.
minusT also recently released a new 3D danmaku animation. I always like to follow their stuff, and the new one is really good: