Touhou Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (New Classic) is a remake of the first entry to the franchise's Windows Era games. Read on to learn what it did well, where it fell short, and our review of the game.
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Touhou Embodiment of Scarlet Devil Review: It’s the Strongest Expression of Love for the Franchise
To say that Touhou was a big part of some people’s lives is often a massive understatement. Entire careers in different fields of art were launched through fans’ shared obsession with the franchise, ranging from Toby Fox and his creation of Undertale to Shinobu Shinotsuki (Neichiru), who went from drawing Touhou's Scarlet sisters to illustrating the globally acclaimed light novel series Youjo Senki.
It is a little-known but very significant cultural phenomenon that continues to shape new artists to this day. And the modern Windows era all started with this specific title: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.
Also known as TH06 (being the sixth actual entry in the series) or EoSD, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil recently received a remake, bringing this historic game not just to modern systems, but to a global audience as well.
Now dubbed TH06NC—with the NC standing for New Classic—this version of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil feels like a genuine labor of love from its developers, Shanghai Alice Reprise. The team is comprised of fellow Touhou nerds, ranging from members of the doujin circle AQUA STYLE to developers from Twilight Frontier, who have worked on both official and fangames for Touhou.
The result, to put it quite simply, is near perfection. It is an extremely faithful, yet at the same time modernized recreation of the game that started it all (sorry, Mima). It even includes some very important quality-of-life improvements, such as displaying your hurtbox when focusing and adding an enemy indicator at the bottom edge of the screen.
And even after all these years, it turns out that Embodiment of Scarlet Devil still has a hell of a game underneath all that history.
The Remake Even Embodies the Early Games’ Lack of Narrative Substance
Embodiment of Scarlet Devil centers around the Scarlet Mist Incident. Long story short, it was an attempt by the vampire Remilia Scarlet to cover all of Gensokyo in a scarlet mist so that she, who’s weak to sunlight, can go out whenever she wants without a parasol. And because not having the sun is a problem, our heroines Reimu Hakurei, the region’s shrine maiden and her best friend, Marisa Kirisame, look for the culprit together and ultimately beat them up.
…That’s basically the entire story. Or, at the very least, the important bits. That’s because while there are different endings depending on which character you finish the game with, they either only show one of the canon conclusions of the story, or, in the extreme case of finishing the game on Easy mode, the non-canon and inconclusive one.
Basically, EoSD’s entire story is that someone caused an incident, Reimu and Marisa look for them, meet and beat up everyone involved, and the day is saved. Extremely straightforward, almost to a fault.
That’s not to say the story is bad by any means. Simplicity does have its charms. However, that is far from everything EoSD’s scenario as a whole has to offer. Unfortunately, much of those, including some lingering questions, are addressed or communicated poorly in-game, or just not at all. For example, you have to read a magazine (Strange Creators of Outer World) to learn the other, more important reason why Remilia caused the Scarlet Mist Incident: to test the newly established Spell Card Rules herself because she was bored.
Another unfortunate thing is that this lack of depth would be a trend for a short while, at least until Mountain of Faith. In a way, you can consider the plot contained within EoSD to be mostly there to motivate Reimu and Marisa to act and get the events going. It’s effective in that regard, at least. And that's ultimately the problem, albeit not one that needed to be solved as a priority:
TH06NC faithfully preserves EoSD’s story, warts and all.
Bullet Hells Are Hard, but This Doesn’t Feel Unfair
Bullet hells are, in my not-so-humble opinion, in a tier of their own when it comes to difficulty. At the extreme end, you have CAVE’s shmups, such as DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, whose true final boss took the playerbase twelve entire years before one of them beat it without using a single continue.
Thankfully, Touhou isn’t part of that extreme. In fact, by almost every metric, Touhou is easy enough that it can be considered “baby’s first bullet hell” in a sense, while still being challenging enough to dunk on every newbie even on the lowest difficulty level.
What is a “Bullet Hell,” anyway? Well, in layman’s terms, it’s a subgenre of shoot ’em ups (shmups) where the main purpose is to shoot down enemies while surviving until the end. Bullet Hells simply crank up the number of projectiles enemies throw at you until they can almost, or sometimes entirely, fill the screen.
Now you might be wondering: “How hard can a game where all you need to do is move around while shooting and dodging enemies be?” And you’re right, it’s very deceptive. That’s because the difficulty lies not in the immediate threats you encounter, but in the way every stage and your own progression are set up.
Shmups have become obscenely efficient at squeezing out every bit of difficulty from their limited mechanics, and Bullet Hells simply amp that difficulty by an order of magnitude. They make every run matter in a way that the majority of genres can’t replicate with their deeper mechanics. In a traditional Touhou 1CC (one credit clear; basically “no continues”) attempt, for example, screwing up Stage 5 can mean that the previous twenty or thirty minutes of competent play were merely the setup for your eventual humiliation.
You aren’t just learning the boss’ patterns; you’re learning how to arrive at them with enough lives, bombs, Power, and concentration left to actually fight her. In a way, the bosses are just a way to identify each level; the entire level itself is the boss. That’s why people can spend weeks or months working toward a single 1CC, even when individual sections become perfectly manageable or even easy.
That’s the part people who haven’t played serious shmups often underestimate. At a high level, you’re learning routes, enemy destruction order, positioning, when to move, when to preserve a bomb, and when to manipulate or simply ignore a pattern.
But regardless of its difficulty, EoSD, and Touhou as a general extension, never feels unfair. Every stage and boss works on a framework that never changes: enemies appear at the same times and locations, while bosses use the same order of Spell Cards (basically the bullet pattern’s name), and so on.
Even the most impossible-looking patterns are therefore consistent. It’s simply asking you to learn what it means. And no, I haven't tried Extra yet. I'll 1CC Lunatic first before I subject myself to Flandre's games.
Quality of Life Improvements Bring EoSD Into the Modern Era
Among the early Windows-era Touhou games, the original Embodiment of Scarlet Devil feels particularly dated, even when compared to its immediate successor, Perfect Cherry Blossom. This is largely due to its lack of several quality-of-life features that would soon become staples of the series, such as the visible player hitbox and the enemy position indicator. In fact, many of the conveniences we now consider part of “modern” Touhou can be traced back surprisingly far, making their absence in the original EoSD particularly noticeable.
Fortunately, the remake carries over a significant enough chunk of these features that it genuinely feels like playing a new title. In particular, there are three standout additions that make a dramatic difference.
The first is the addition of a visible hurtbox for characters while in Focus mode. Initially introduced in Perfect Cherry Blossom, this provides a blatant visual indicator of the exact spot where a bullet will make you evaporate. This completely changes the gameplay experience: instead of relying primarily on familiarity and intuition to judge where your tiny, invisible hurtbox is while navigating dense bullet curtains, you can now make calculated movements and deliberately take risks based on information the game is directly giving you. In a way, it makes the game feel like it is finally on your side rather than the enemy’s; an extremely significant change that fundamentally alters the mindset with which you approach beating up the next girl in your way.
Then, there’s the enemy indicator at the bottom of the screen. This is an amazing quality-of-life addition, especially for newer players, because most people naturally have a tendency to stay as far away from the source of danger (the bosses) as possible. But when you’re staring at your character so intently that your eyes are practically bleeding trying to dodge every bullet, it becomes surprisingly difficult to keep track of where the boss is. The boss indicator solves this problem by drastically reducing the distance your eyes need to travel to check their position. More importantly, it reduces the amount of time you need to divert your attention away from your own safety, letting you keep your eyes focused on the bullets that are actually trying to kill you.
Lastly, there’s the addition of the Point of Collection. Or rather, adapting the later mechanics of the feature into EoSD. It basically allowed you to suck up all of the Power and Point drops on the screen when you enter an unmarked border near the top. It already existed in the original TH06, yes, but you needed to have your power maxed in order to use it. But now, the mechanics have changed to resemble Mountain of Faith’s (TH10) in that it’s always active, regardless of what your condition is. This allows you to gather more Power and Points, and therefore more firepower and lives, far more easily. It effectively acts as a way to make the game easier, but only using mechanics that the modern mainline shooters already possess to keep its identity.
There are still some quality of life additions that could have helped some more, of course, such as placing the boss HP as a circle around them instead of on top of the screen. This makes looking up take much less distance; a seemingly fleeting detail that actually matters a lot considering the hair-breadth allowances some higher-difficulty spellcard patterns afford you. It also makes the boss’ location more readily visible against the backdrop of danmaku every time you need to check how long you still have to capture their spellcard
But overall, the developers have been incredibly successful in making Embodiment of Scarlet Devil feel like it’s a 2026 game, minus some odd gimmick that most of the newer shooters tend to ship with like TH20’s Incident Stones.
Every Character Identity Has Been Preserved, Terrible Anatomy and All
Some of my favorite Touhou fan illustrations, besides those from artists like Morino Hon and Zounose, come from circles like AQUA STYLE (Touhou Danmaku Kagura), Nise-Eikoku Studio (Labyrinth of Touhou), and 未完童話 (Touhou Pocket Wars). So when I heard that the EoSD remake’s illustrations would come from a collaboration between ZUN, AQUA STYLE, and Twilight Frontier (PatchCon: Defend the Library!), I was worried that ZUN’s signature artwork would be replaced by the admittedly more polished illustrations from the other participating circles.
And that’s not good. Part of the mainline games’ charm was ZUN’s artwork having weird anatomical quirks, like Sukuna’s Double Dealing Character art basically having no arm attached to her left hand. Having EoSD without things like Remilia’s sausage fingers or Meiling’s elbow-less arms, therefore, seemed like an affront.
Thankfully, and rather expectedly, the developers (being the true Touhou enjoyers they are) understood the assignment and did their absolute best to recreate ZUN’s original illustrations at modern resolutions. Now we can appreciate the first cast of the Windows-era entries in high resolution, mangled joints and all.
In a way, this is almost as important as recreating the game with just enough quality-of-life upgrades that it still feels like a mainline Touhou game. The character designs are part of its identity and a piece of its heritage that needs no fixing. Though awkward to look at, they’re more than sufficient to communicate ZUN’s goals in designing them, while being just detailed enough to invite other artists to add their own impressions and embellishments.
Look at Sakuya’s design, for example. She’s a silver-haired maid holding knives. So, it’s not really surprising that her attacks involve engulfing the entire screen with them, right?
That said, I also very much appreciate that the bullet patterns—or Spell Cards, rather—remained mostly untouched. And I don’t mean that just because it allowed me to quickly 1CC the game on Normal since I could still roughly remember the patterns from over a decade ago (though that’s also part of it). Instead, it’s because the difficulty, the spectacle, the patterns, and whatnot are all an essential part of every character’s identity.
Cirno’s Ice Sign [Icicle Fall] is still stupidly easy (on Easy), for example. As expected of the “Strongest” (idiot).
Is Touhou Embodiment of Scarlet Devil Worth It?
It’s such a steal, even Marisa wouldn’t think twice
The New Classic release of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil is an incredibly faithful recreation of the game that started the franchise’s glory era. Considering what it offers, just the remake alone being sold for $17.99 is already an extremely cheap deal. But instead, we also get a true work of love: a recreation of the heritage it came from, with full compatibility for modern systems—something ZUN himself couldn’t deliver due to losing the code for the original.
The developers truly didn’t need to include that, but they did. And that, in my opinion, shows just how much they truly appreciate and adore the franchise.
Funnily enough, the price also technically means that both games are sold for ⑨ dollars each. That, and the fact that it was released on the 9th day of the 9th month?
Truly a very strong day for us Touhou fans, indeed.
FAQ
Does the EoSD New Classic have voice acting?
Just like the original, no it doesn't.
How do you unlock Extra Mode?
"Just" 1CC Normal, Hard, or Lunatic Difficulty.
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