Happy New Year!! It’s a new year for Danmaku!! too. As we move into 2025, we are finishing the last pieces of our comprehensive version of Danmaku!!, codenamed “Big Box,” as Danmaku approaches its 10 year anniversary. What started as a literal off-hand comment after Comiket, “We should make a party game based on Danmaku,” has now turned into a decade and more of development, iteration, experimentation, and passion. And now that we’re rounding the corner, we’d like to tell you more about Big Box, including its official name and cover art.
I present you with “Danmaku!! Traditional Festival of Paradise.”
This lovely illustration was made by Gina Chacón, who has graced us with the cover art for every expansion all the way back to the original game, and perfectly captures everything we wanted to express with the game’s title.
When considering the name, we had a few requirements to narrow our scope. The name must be one used to reference Big Box as a whole, not any particular expansion or component. We briefly considered calling it just “Danmaku!!,” but we remembered the XBox One debacle and though it would just be too confusing to those who played the original.
The name needed to be a Touhouism. This meant that it needed to “sound” Touhou. Lunatic Extra, Mutiny of Belittled Spirits, Flowering Night, and Wolf of Black Market were all chosen because they sound like Touhou titles. The complete set needed to invoke the same feeling. This requirement rejects the name Big Box itself, though we won’t complain if you call it that.
The name must not be irreverent. It’s not Danmaku!!’s style to make fun of itself with a goofy name like “Legend of Shining Eastern Wonderland Turbo Edition.” Nor did we want it to be marketing-slop like “Game of the Year Edition.” We aren’t here to sell you the same thing you’ve already purchased.
So what did we *want* the name to be? Ideally the name would invoke a sense of completeness, gathering, and coming together. Big Box is a full collection of Danmaku!! expansions and also a nearly complete representation of all post-Windows Touhou characters and lore (up to 100th Black Market).
Parties are a common occurrence in Touhou, and the general vibe matches our game itself as a party game. This led to several variations along the lines of “Grand Festival Banquet,” but we ended up circling over and over as we couldn’t find something that rolled off the tongue well enough.
One name we considered was Danmaku!! Reitaisai, after the largest Touhou-exclusive event, which is itself named after the Hakurei Shrine’s Reitaisai festival from Touhou lore. However, this is too much of a deep cut for the average person, and didn’t communicate anything about Big Box itself. As a compromise, we named one of our incidents Reitaisai as a nod to this and also so we could use this art on a card.
Eventually, we stumbled upon the word “tradition.” Tradition is a very important concept to the setting and ethos of Touhou Project. Touhou is steeped in a sense of nostalgia for a past that never existed and that we never lived in. The setting, characters, and even the concept of youkai. In addition, danmaku itself and the spell card rules are the traditions of Gensokyo.
In the end we settled on “Danmaku!! Traditional Festival of Paradise.” The name itself is a play on one of Reimu’s titles: Traditional Shrine Maiden of Paradise. However, it also contains subtle meaning that expresses qualities of Danmaku!! and Touhou as a whole. We think this should be a name that can resonate both with lore nerds who could explain the entire Touhou iceberg and the uninitiated alike.
Now that you know about the name, let’s talk about the contents. We don’t have a release date yet, but we will be posting a public beta in the next few months as we wrap up the final changes and the Patreon supporters get first crack at all the content.
Danmaku!! TFoP contains and improves upon each expansion to Danmaku!!, including two unreleased expansions and cards originally previewed as Patreon rewards. This includes:
- Danmaku!! base game
- Danmaku!! Lunatic Extra
- Danmaku!! Mutiny of Belittled Spirits
- Danmaku!! Wolf of Black Market
- Danmaku!! Flowering Night (micro expansion)
Across all expansions, rules text and formatting has been updated for clarity and consistency. We created new card frame templates to make each card type and expansion visually distinct. We also dramatically reworked the main deck to have more variety and incorporate cards that were originally released as part of an expansion directly into the base game.
The current contents includes:
- 100 playable characters
- 26 role cards
- 100 main deck cards
- 40 incident cards
- 40 lunatic deck cards
- 52 mob deck cards
- 60 market deck cards
- 24 animal spirit cards
- 5 hanabi deck cards
- 15 token cards
Lastly, we plan to release a digital version of Big Box that you can import into Tabletop Simulator. This version will be high resolution with full art. Please wait warmly for further updates!
