Touhou 19 - Intelligence of Beast / Tiny Shangri-La | Reacting To Video Game Music!
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- Опубликовано: 9 янв 2025
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#Touhou #Touhou19 #Reaction
"ZUN strikes me as someone who wears their heart on their sleeve" - Honestly yeah, every game ZUN has extra comments about what things were going through his head at the time of development or after he's finished what he thought retrospectively.
So TH19 he says he wanted to make a game that's "imperfect" and "organic" in opposition to how AI works are coming in to place and it's value entirely being "efficiency". So he made a game with 19 playable characters, you know, as you do. Or as he put it: "'While humans are all abuzz about AI, the beasts are the ones building a world of mental enrichment and a palpable sense of life.' That's the fantasy crammed into this game's main theme."
"Tiny Shangri-La" uses the Chinese musical instrument "Erhu". ZUN said 21 years ago that he wanted to be able to play the Erhu, and he achieved this through MIDI.
Esraj & Erhu - Ethnic String Phrases from Sinuscore
Considering the fact that many newer Touhou games have one or two instruments unique to that game alone, we probably won't hear them again. At least not for a long time.
ZUN definitely wears his heart on his sleeve and also not afraid to say what he wants at times. He's the kind of guy who loves to dance and hangout with his fans at conventions, have a beer, gets to know the doujin scene, goes to a lot of indie game events, has made theme songs for indie game events like Bitsummit, composed a unique piece to help promote tourism to a small rural town, and more. He embodies an indie spirit and loves all the things people create around his work which is also why there's such a big scene around Touhou and lots of fan works.
It's tradition to spend like 2-3 loops at least in the title screen when first playing a new touhou game.
Can confirm, totally a worthwhile tradition.
Unless you heard the demo version already.
Then it's at least one loop.
Your mention of wondering how these songs would sound if they weren't played by midi instruments is a large part of why the huge scene of fan arranges is so fascinating. The compositions for these songs are so cool, and hearing them played with new instruments and or in new styles is always fascinating. (Not to say the originals aren't really cool too, cause they are really cool, the midi instruments give them such a unique character)
I know you've heard a few of the remixes in the Marbles streams you do, but I'm not sure how well you remember any of those; the Remixes people do for these things can be super well produced, and its one of the pillars of the community. Even here with you removing the drums cause ya wanted to hear what that was like, and thinking that it was super cool- that's how they get you! It's an endless rabbit hole, there are 100,000+ remixes that have been cataloged, and that number is still growing. I myself have 100+ physical CDs that fan groups have released of Touhou music arranges. And that's only a tiny tiny fraction of the CDs that exist. One can get into Touhou and be a big fan and have an endless mountain of content to wade through, and *only* be into the music. And the thing is, the music isn't the only part of Touhou that's like this, fan games, fan art/ animations/ manga /fully produced anime, etc. There's just so much stuff spawned from Touhou to get immersed in. This is part of why so many fans love finding any way to get you to listen to officially licensed arranges from Fan Groups (via Lost World, or side game OSTs) cause to a lot of people, that's an intrinsic part of what Touhou music *is*, and missing that is cutting out such a huge part of the picture.
Anyway, these songs are great, especially Tiny Shangri-La, this is from the most recent Touhou game, and its always cool to see that Zun is still cranking out new ideas for music even after 20+ years of doing this, and many hundreds of songs.
I'm gonna be redundant with one of my previous comments, but a good example of a sad or melancholic Touhou song would probably be the final stage of Touhou 12: Fires of Hokkai.
The song is a big contrast with the final boss theme that comes up right after it: Emotional Skyscraper ~ Cosmic Mind.
Yeah, that is definitely one of the most interesting final stage and boss combos
My immediate thought was Lullaby for a Deserted hell and Green Eyed Jealousy for the most somber Touhou songs personally.
Yes, Tiny Shangri-La is a boss theme. Son Biten is a monkey girl based on the Monkey King from the popular chinese myth (which also inspired Son Goku from Dragon Ball). It's the reason why her theme sounds so chinese.
No, she actually isn't the Monkey King. In fact, she's more like a goon working for one of the animal yakuza families... it's complicated
I hope someone requested Kingdom of Nothingness, the final boss theme from the same game. By far one of the craziest themes in the entire series
Oh, men I hope it, the pick of Touhou 19 songs.
2:44 "Divine Bloodlines" from Castlevania Rondo of Blood? I'm not a Castlevania fan but I know this because there is another Touhou track with similar melody, it's called "Heian Alien", it's very unique so I hope someone has requested it
yupp
Touhou is not a spinoff, it's an original IP. ZUN originally made it as a college project. Now he's 50 and still making it.
Touhou title screen themes tend to be calmer than usual & sometimes atmospheric for obvious reasons. But this one is definitely one of the exceptions. I think you've reacted to the Touhou 14 title screen theme; that's a good example of a calmer title screen. Touhou 9 & Touhou 10's title screens are also great examples. My favorite is Touhou 9s.
Title screen themes, as well as ZUN's original non-OST works, showcase what he can do when he doesn't *need* to make his music super fast paced and hectic. Some of my my favorite music from him are his calmer music, like "Lovely Mound of Cherry Blossoms ~ Japanese Flower" and "The Purest Sky and Sea" and "Boy and Girl of the Science Era". Since he made those for an album, not for a bullet hell game, he didn't need to make them crazy. They're really good.
ZUN is not fluent in English, but even then, Touhou's 'Engrish' titles are still more coherent than many of the things I have seen in Japan LOL. I still remember going for a ski trip in Japan one time and saw a sign that warns tourists to beware of falling icicles which says "Please do not make contact with the cone ice they want to meet your face". XD
I do agree that these titles have their own unique charms to them. Like, you could get some idea of ZUN's thoughts and inspiration when creating the plot for a game or for certain songs. Some of the English in song titles that I like are "Kaeizuka (Flower Reflecting Mound) ~ Higan Retour" and "Kanjo no Matenro (Emotional Skyscraper) ~ Cosmic Mind".
About the brief history of the games, the first one came out back in 1998 with sequels following usually within the same year or a year gap. Then the series went on hiatus until 2002 where the series have essentially been 'rebooted' with a more connected storyline, established characters and lores as well as a shift from the PC-98 platform to Windows and changes in the gameplay mechanics, though still largely retains the style of music. Since then, the game would see almost a yearly release, often with an official spin-off or side-game releasing within the same year, with a 2 years gap at most between the mainline ones. The games are often released at events in Japan, either a general one such as Comic Market or Touhou's very own events like Reitaisai.
The meaning behind each title screen theme usually refers to the overall theme of that game, not about the playable characters and not even about a specific part of the story in general. In this case, let me copy and paste the exact words of ZUN about this song:
"I made it a powerful, beast-like title screen. Imposing yet transient, powerful yet powerless, I tried to capture these contradictory elements of the co-existing beasts' intelligence."
I love that ZUN always shares his notes about the songs that he made. You could say it's almost like something you'd find in old game manual and booklets that modern games have abandoned. XD
I don't think you're wrong about how the song represent parts of ZUN's life either, in fact I truly believe that Touhou itself represents ZUN as a whole. In some biography, it says that ZUN left the video game company, Taito, due to the job being unsatisfactory before creating Touhou as an indie developer, although I heard that he actually got reprimanded by his boss during his time in Taito for creating his own game (which many believe to be Touhou prototype) in his spare time, saying that if he has free time to make games, then he should use it for the company - which upset and caused ZUN to leave in pursuit his own ideal game.
I have Touhou 19 brainrot. Game hasn’t even been out for a year yet and I’ve clocked in 480 hours.
So if you end up hearing the other title screen/main menu themes of the touhou games (at least the ones for 6 and later) you'll find they all share the same leitmotif, but every one is expressed in different ways. Once you pick up on it, it makes it fun to identify when it suddenly appears in other themes throughout the series. (There's even one stage theme where it is the dominant melody)
That leitmotif (at least parts of it) also appears in many portions of Tiny Shangri-La, if that gives a bit of a hint.
If you think Tiny Shangri-La is a unique sound to Touhou, just you wait for when Touhou 19's "Kingdom of Nothingness" eventually comes!
It's awesome how ZUN can still be this creative after 25 years of music composition!
Erhu is easly my favourite instrument and hearing it in touhou for the first time was a treat. All of the new tracks in this game are really good.
Used to didn't like erhu but god damn was I wrong. It's so sick to compose with it holy cow
ZUN recently published a new album called Taboo Japan Disentanglement! It has some pretty nice surprise so don't hesitate to check it out if you want.
Anyway thanks for reacting to my favorite song from the OST!
Unfortunately all of the tracks uploaded to RUclips were taken down
@@user-ly2nx7ss2x Google is your best friend!
Since Touhou 13(2011), it has been customary for integer works to be released every other year. Touhou 19 was released in 2023, so Touhou 20 is likely to come out in 2025. That year marks the 30th anniversary of Touhou Project.
in touhou, pretty much every [character]'s theme is a boss theme, even when the protags are featured and playable, their themes are not in the game unless they are also bosses in it
I hope someone requested Futo's theme, for the violin
Most boss themes in Touhou are fast-paced and energetic. Some stage themes and many ending and credit themes are where you want to look for the calm and/or sad songs.
You recently listened to Junko's theme, Pure Furies, but the stage 6 theme that proceeds it, The Sea Where One's Home Planet Reflects.
There's also The Eternal Seam Engine , the staff roll theme for 12.3 and 15.5.
Lullaby of a Deserted Hell from Touhou 11, stage 5 is also good. This one in particular has had many people notice the juxtaposition between the tone of the song and the constant barrage of bullets you have to dodge.
I mostly played Touhou 6-10, but assuming nothing changed for later games, an average player will definitely hear the title screen theme MANY times. The reason being that the game returns you to title screen every time you lose, and you will lose A LOT.
I lost count how many times after losing I would just sit before the title screen, gathering energy to try again. Touhou games are really difficult, so I would need a moment to gather myself after a loss, especially if I got into a later stage
For the newer games, you can just retry after losing all lives and you won't need to go to the menu. So for the most part you don't have to stay on the title screen very long.
But this game is unique because the runs are generally shorter and most of the replayability comes from switching between the huge cast of characters, instead of retrying a run after dying. So yeah, you'll hear this theme a lot.
The erhu is an easy way to make a song sound east asian haha.
I've personally really been enjoying ZUN exploring more complex instrumentations and harmonic identities in recent years, all without losing the key "Touhou" factor. I think you could do an interesting video by going through every single title theme, since it's in practice a theme and variations
A couple other motions ZUN takes that depart from his signature style are tracks from his music albums and tracks from before Touhou 6, as those have different sets of constraints when it comes to presenting the music.
I particularly like "Dream of Arcadia" from the music album Changeability of Strange Dream, along with "Treacherous Maiden ~ Judas Kiss" from Touhou 5: Mystic Square.
Title screen themes in Touhou play for longer than you'd expect, since it often plays while in settings, selecting difficulty and character, seeing your play records, etc.
For if Tiny Shangri-la is a boss thene or not, sort of. Touhou 19 is actually a 1v1 bullet hell, so it's a character's theme but may not have the exact same energy or structural style as the usual boss themes.
Funny you should mention DDR.
Every DDR machine I've used in the last 7-8 years, when you select folders, it's usually genres, like rock, edm, etc. But in addition to those, there is almost always a touhou folder. With remixes of all these songs. And not just DDR, but all modern arcade rhythm games have a touhou folder lol.
A lot of Touhou titles are in two parts. Every official game, manga, music CD, etc has both a Japanese title and an English title that are not translations of each other. The 1st game is "Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers", and Reiiden itself could be translated as Wonderous Tale which isn't related to the English part of the title at all but both are related to the game. Some of the music tracks are titled similarly, for example for "Tonight Stars an Easygoing Egoist ~ Egoistic Flowers", the first part is a translation from 今宵は飄逸なエゴイスト, while the second part has been in English the whole time. So when the song pops up in game it pops up as " 今宵は飄逸なエゴイスト ~ Egoistic Flowers".
However, Intelligence of Beasts is actually a fan translation from the original Japanese song title 獣の知性 (Kemono no Chisei) (which is also why there's a lot of slightly different English names for a lot of different Touhou songs, the titles were originally Japanese and different translators translated them differently). And then Tiny Shangri-La is different from both of those in that the title is in katakana, which is the Japanese alphabet used for transliterating foreign words. So it's original title is タイニーシャングリラ, which is read as 'tainii shangurira', which is just Tiny Shangri-La but forced into Japanese phenomes.
As for Tiny Shangri-La itself, it's the theme for Son Biten, who's a monkey youkai who's design is deliberately riffing off of the Monkey King, Son Wukong (which is why the Chinese sound of the song). Touhou 19 is different from most of the other mainline games in that it's a competitive game, think link Tetris Attack but with shmup gameplay. Clearing enemies lets you launch attacks to your opponent's side of the field. So it's her boss theme when you're playing against her in the story mode but also her theme when you're playing as her in free-play or versus other players.
Noooo im all caught up on your Touhou game videos now! Hope to see more soon! :D
Ah. Touhou 19 is special, in that it is Touhou, but Versus. 1 vs 1. It still plays like a bullet hell, with each player taking half of the screen. You compete by clearing waves of enemies. The better you do, the more points you get. Points that you can spend to send attacks to your opponent's side. Get enough built up, and you can even send a boss version of yourself to harass them for a while! (And vice-versa) You have a limited number of hits, so the last person standing wins!
In the story mode, the CPU is essentially on a timer, since it can perfectly dodge bullets.
I haven't played it yet, only seen gameplay footage, so I can't really comment beyond that.
The meaning of the subtitle cannot be understood unless you know the story and setting of the work.
In order to understand the story and setting, it is necessary to watch multiple Touhou works and analyze and connect the information obtained.
In addition to games, Touhou works include comics, novels, books with newspapers and history books written by characters, and CD albums, all of which have stories.
Some of them are no longer available and are no longer available, making it difficult to obtain information on them.
Biten is silhouetted because the game was new at the time and it was to avoid spoiling people in the thumbnail
The wikipedia article for Touhou also has a timeline of all the official releases.
Theres a site that compiles high quality touhou midis, if you cross reference with the public community spreadsheet of ZUNs sound sources, you can make perfect recreations and mess around with them. Of course only a handfull of samples are free, however.
Son Biten is a monkey girl who believes she is the reincarnation of Son Goku (Or, more commonly known in the West by the Chinese name Sun Wukong, or just 'The Monkey King') from Journey to the West. Of course, the Japanese name Son Goku is widely known for the Dragon Ball protagonist which uses that same name.
ZUN doesn't speak English much more if at all than any other average Japanese person. Japanese people just love putting English and other languages in titles and stuff. This happens in a bunch of other series to varying degrees, Kirby does it a lot too for example. But those get localized to more natural sounding English since they're under a big company after all. Like Kirby has titles like Dirty&Beauty or Prayer song to God which get localized to Sullied Grace and Song of Supplication.
二胡の音色好きだからこれからも使ってほしい
Everyone recommends touhou game music, but I recommend touhou album music more
ZUN once said that the music that serves the game actually limits his performance.
When I listened to the touhou album, it was really on another level
2004夢違科学世紀 ～ Changeability of Strange Dream.
2006卯酉東海道 ～ Retrospective 53 minutes.
2006大空魔術 ～ Magical Astronomy.
These are recognized as the three best touhou albums
Also I recommend
2012鳥船遺跡 ～ Trojan Green Asteroid.
2012伊弉諾物質 ～ Neo-traditionalism of Japan.
2024七夕坂夢幻能 ～ Taboo Japan Disentanglement.
This has probably been explained before, but: If you see something that looks kinda messy and not well-drawn, that’s the official artwork of the full-numbered titles. (If it has a .5, it’s a spin-off made by other people). ZUN designs all the characters and does the art for the games he works on himself, and he has a great design sense, but not a lot of drawing skill.
Also yeah I think the English titles are just ZUN sitting there with a dictionary and picking out words that sound cool. Like the time he created “Imperishable Night”, which sounds amazing until you remember that “imperishable” is generally used for food that doesn’t spoil rather than just being a synonym for “unending” or “immortal”.
Touhou is its own thing. It started when zun made a couple games in the late 1990's and as he made more, a few fans started making some fan works and/or remixes and it started spreading. Then bad apple music video plus a mcdonald Japanese comercial got mixed with touhou and you time skip to now, where its all over the east and is spreading into the USA and Europe. It is its own universe and all done by Zun, whether games, manga music all is zun. If not zun its fans which are free to create cause zun has little copyright rules. They exist but are lax and so easy to follow.
The name is usually fan translations, and the name is probably not supposed to translate to english, consider he sometimes wrote english in the name (after the "～" symbol)
In fact, I don't know if you know this, but the game doesn't have any official translation, it's all japanese, so there maybe a lot of things got wrong with the translation, and you can see, some of the names don't translate well.
Touhou 19 is a bullet hell versus game, the title theme also plays during the part when you select characters. (so player hear it quite a lot)
The other video has a silhouette for the related character, but because it's a new game, they use this to prevent spoilers.
here's some commentary in the music room, and obviously it's also fan translated:
Beast of Intelligence
"This is the Title theme.
I made it a powerful, beast-like title screen.
Imposing yet transient, powerful yet powerless, I tried to capture these contradictory elements
of the co-existing beasts' intelligence."
Tiny Shangri-La
"This is Son Biten's theme.
She's a monkey who thinks she's the rebirth of Sun Wukong.
I feel admiration for fantasies like Journey to the West at regular intervals.
I composed this with a "Journey to the West" image in mind, deliberately ignoring the game's worldsetting.
It came out sounding very beautiful, so I'm satisfied."
touhou titles are so weird and quirkly
Zun we love you so much ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂)⸝♡
I like how non-apologetic Touhou in general. Game? FUCKING HARD. Music? WEIRD AND NOT FOR EVERYONE. Title names? NICHE AND ABSURD. Artstyle? WONKY. All characters are girls? DEAL WITH IT. HAVE A PROBLEM? DO YOUR OWN GAME! Instruments? TRUMPETS AND MIDI! Game numbers? FUCKING LETS JUST SAY 1, 2, 3, 3.3, 3.4, 7, 13, 13.1, 15. Copyright? DONT CARE, ALMOST NON-EXISTENT. FANS - DO WHAT YOU WANT AS LONG AS YOU HAVE FUN. Plot? Jeez, lets not even start that one.
It just have so charming "im just me, even if its weird" energy!
Funnily enough, ZUN has pretty much confirmed that this mentality is what led him to make Touhou.
"However, he has stated that the actual reason why he made the game series and Team Shanghai Alice is because he couldn't find any games he liked himself, so he decided to make them himself. In the Swedish Magazine Interview, when asked what games he will make in the future, he says he will continue to make 'games that stand out, so if all [his] fans disappear [he is] still happy [that he] can keep doing the games [he] want[s].'"
There are quite a few interviews talking about why he made Touhou, and it boils down to just wanting to do his own thing, unapologetically.
Idk if you already react to this one, but its one of my favorite from Pokemon Scarlet/Violet.
Awesome tecno/trance mix: Battle Penny
As far as Touhou game titles go, here's the best I could try to interpret them
Highly Responsive to Prayers - You play as a priestess so I guess you would be responding to a lot of prayers?
Story of Eastern Wonderland - Self explanatory, probably the most generic title in the series.
Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream - Mostly nonsense, even with context.
Lotus Land Story - The final boss is a demon that has an affinity for flowers (Also the first mention of the series' setting when reading the japanese title: Gensokyo)
Mystic Square - Another generic nonsense one.
Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - The scarlet devil part refers to the main villain of the game, a vampire with ties to the color scarlet.
Perfect Cherry Blossom - The plot of the entire game is caused by the antagonist wanting to see a demonic cherry blossom tree bloom.
Immaterial and Missing Power - The final boss spends most of the story watching the characters while invisible to most of them.
Imperishable Night - The entire game revolves around a single night that the protagonists try to extend as long as they can.
Phantasmagoria of Flower View - Makes more sense than the previous one, flowers are blooming unnaturally everywhere.
Shoot the Bullet - You shoot photos of the opponents' bullet patterns.
Mountain of Faith - The game is about confronting gods atop a mountain.
Scarlet Weather Rhapsody - The entire game and plot revolves around unnatural weather, including scarlet skies.
Subterranean Animism - The game takes place underground.
Unidentified Fantastic Object - The main mechanic of the game involves chasing UFOs around the screen to gain resources.
Unthinkable Natural Law - This title is also mainly unrelated to the game.
Double Spoiler - This photography game revolves around a pair of protagonists you could play as.
Great Fairy Wars - Another simple one, fairies are waging war against one another.
Ten Desires - The final boss' main ability is to be able to hear every desire of an individual, and is also related to the ten precepts of Taoism of which a majority of the cast for this entry practice.
Hopeless Masquerade - A being made of masks had physically lost her hope and is causing havoc throughout the village because of it.
Double Dealing Character - The true villain of the game is a deceiver that incites the main conflict in the first place.
Urban Legend in Limbo - The characters are able to channel different urban legends and folktales as part of their powers.
Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom - The game revolves around the moon's Lunar Capital, which is the titular Lunatic Kingdom.
Antinomy of Common Flowers - Had to look up what antinomy meant, but this probably refers to how the pair of antagonists are wildly different personality-wise, but are both still related and have that in common.
Hidden Star in Four Seasons - The title refers to the final boss, who is a god so powerful that they changed parts of Gensokyo into separate seasons.
Violet Detector - (I got no clue on this one, other than the protagonist for this game wears a lot of purple)
Wily Beast and Weakest Creature - The wily beast refers to the beast spirits serving as your allies that enslave humans, which are the weakest creatures.
Sunken Fossil World - The plot of the game revolves around a pool of oil located underground.
Unconnected Marketeers - Besides the word marketeers referring to the shops you can enter between stages, I'm at a loss for this one.
100th Black Market - Seeing as Zun adores Comiket, he decided to name this entry after the 100th convention.
Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost - Probably talks about the beast spirit factions' ambition to conquer the world of the living for their own.
Mystic square is a really weird version of a magic square. Mystic Square has a lot of SMT inspiration in it, so probably something related to that.
Still very weird.
With Unconnected Marketeers, the final boss is a god of marketplaces that was dying because everybody (outside of Gensokyo) shops online nowadays.
The Unconnected could be referring to us, people who do most of their shopping online and thus aren't connected in a market anymore.
With Antinomy of Common Flowers, the antagonists are named after two common flowers in Japan
I don't know if ZUN knows English but I can assure you that a lot of the names in English are especific references that most people don't understand but assume that it makes sense in some way.
There are ghosts and beasts in the game so I assume the "unfinished dream of all living ghost" and "intelligence of beasts" make sense somehow
There are songs in this game with zunpets these were one of the few without it.
The main menu theme is only used on the main menu, touhou players are the kind of people who would purposely take longer to start the game just to hear the song, the same with the staff roll songs
The son biten theme rocks 🤟🏼
I never thought how it would sound without the drums, that was interesting 🤔
One of my favorite title themes.