We take a look at some of the most brilliant top-down shooters made by one man.

What comes to your mind when you think of fireworks? Maybe it’s Fourth of July celebrations or backyard shenanigans courtesy of your uncle. For whatever reason, whenever I think of fireworks I think about SHUMPs. Cacophonies of colorful, hypnotic explosions trying to disorient me into losing my last credit of play just before smashing whatever high score may be on the boards. So it’s no surprise as we close on our nation’s independence day, that I would have the masochistic itch to engage in some reflex-testing action full of color and suspense. Thankfully, I have some shrine maidens to scratch that inch of mine.

The Project Shrine Maiden games, more commonly referred to as the Touhou Project games in the hobbyist circles, are curtain-fire top-down shooter games for the PC. They are strictly the products of passionate independent development made by Team Shanghai Alice, a team that I might add, only has one member. This single member goes by the pseudonym of ZUN and is renowned for his solo work on such amazingly put together projects and his passion to create games simply for his love of doing so – oh and his love of drinking. His games however are renowned for having intricate bullet patterns, insane difficulties, lots of color, and some surprisingly catchy electric keyboard and trumpet tunes.

Each of the games takes place in the nonexistent land of Gensokyo and revolves around the shrine maiden Reimu and the witch Marisa, as well as others, trying to stop evil spirits from wrecking havoc on their world. Since the texts of the games are in Japanese, few Western players have gotten to experience the story progression outside of gameplay progress. This is fine since what is so attractive about these games really is the gameplay, but for those inclined to dive into the canon there are a few English patches floating around the net.

Since there are quite a few games in this series, for the sake of page limitations, the fact that some of the games are fighting games, and that I could only get my hands on these few; we are only going to take a look at five of them.