Today Marvelous Entertainment announced that it will publish a new Touhou Project game titled Touhou Shinsekai developed by Ankake Spa.
The game is actually not fully new, as it was revealed by the developer as Touhou Choushinsei at the end of 2021. It'll come to PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on a yet unannounced release date.
Interestingly, Marvelous already mentioned that the Steam version will be distributed by its North American arm Xseed games, so a western release is very likely.
The game's title translates as "New World" and it's a bullet hell action JRPG. If the name Ankake Spa rings a bell, it's because it's the developer behind Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity, which was also published under the Marvelous/Xseed umbrella.
You can check out a trailer below and see what the game looks like.
If you're unfamiliar with the Touhou Project franchise, it was originally created by the doujin developer Team Shanghai Alice with a debut all the way back in 1997. Team Shanghai Alice was actually a solo developer, Junya "ZUN" Ota.
Since then, the popularity of the franchise has exploded in Japan into a full-fledged pop culture phenomenon, mostly due to the fact that, in true doujin fashion, pretty much everyone is authorized to use the IP and its characters. This has sparked a metric ton of games and other kinds of media by all sorts of indie developers and semi-recently even established publishers like Marvelous have started to pay attention. The fact that the work of a single man managed to create a massive multimedia franchise is certainly one of the most interesting and unique aspects of Japanese gaming culture.
