Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic Earns 98% Positive Steam Rating 24 Years After Original Release

Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic - The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has made an extraordinary impression on Steam just days after its September 9 launch. The modernized release, arriving 24 years after the Japanese debut of the original The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, has collected 2,958 user reviews on Valve's platform, with 98% marked positive at the time of publication.

That early reception places the game among the strongest-reviewed Steam releases of 2026. Aggregated Steam rankings have put it in the top seven best-reviewed releases of the past month, while its position among the year's top 50 has continued to climb. For a series that built much of its reputation through Japanese doujin culture, fan creativity, and difficult scrolling shooters, the response is a notable reminder that Touhou's foundational games still have an audience eager to meet them on modern storefronts.

New Classic is available on PC through Steam as well as PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2. It revisits the game that became a defining entry for the Touhou Project, giving its visuals and music a fresh presentation while maintaining the structure and identity of the 2002 original.

A landmark shoot-'em-up returns

The original Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the sixth Touhou Project game created by ZUN. It nevertheless holds a particularly important place in the franchise's history. Earlier Touhou games were developed for PC-98 hardware, while Embodiment of Scarlet Devil was the first Windows-era installment. That change helped establish the form of Touhou that many players now recognize: fast, intricate bullet-hell combat; a huge cast of supernatural characters; memorable music; and a setting called Gensokyo.

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Its story concerns the Scarlet Mist Incident, an unusual disturbance that draws protagonists Reimu Hakurei, a shrine maiden, and Marisa Kirisame, a magician, into action. Players choose one of the two heroines and advance through stages packed with enemy formations, elaborate boss patterns, and screens that can become almost completely filled with projectiles.

That visual overload is the point. Bullet-hell games ask players to read dense patterns, find narrow routes through danger, and remain composed when the screen suggests that survival should be impossible. Touhou's games are renowned for turning that pressure into a rhythm. Bullets are not simply hazards to avoid; they form patterns to study, routes to trace, and increasingly demanding tests of positioning and timing.

The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil rapidly became Touhou's best-selling game and helped cement the series as a major name in Japanese shoot-'em-ups and bullet hell. Its characters, music, and imagery also became central to the vast body of fan-made games, music, art, comics, and other works that grew around Touhou over the decades.

What New Classic changes -- and what it preserves

The "New Classic" name describes the project's balancing act. This is a polished presentation of the original game rather than a wholesale reinvention. Alliance Arts has emphasized preservation alongside the updates, ensuring that players can experience the original release as part of the Steam offering.

On Steam, New Classic cannot be purchased by itself. Instead, it is sold in a bundle that includes the Classic version at the same price. The standard package costs $17.99 and contains both editions. A $24.63 bundle adds the New Classic soundtrack.

The Classic version does not include English support on Steam, which may make it less approachable for some newcomers. Still, its presence is meaningful for players interested in comparing the two presentations, or in seeing how a landmark early-2000s doujin shooter originally looked and played. The bundled approach also means the archival version is not treated as a separate premium extra.

New Classic's main updates are its refreshed graphics and newly remade soundtrack. ZUN fully remade the music for this release, an important point given how inseparable Touhou's musical identity is from its game design and fan legacy. Across the series, individual tracks have inspired innumerable arrangements and remixes. Revisiting the score with a new production while preserving the game's core makes the soundtrack one of the clearest ways the release bridges its past and present.

The central gameplay loop remains direct: dodge overwhelming barrages, defeat enemies, and work through the Scarlet Mist Incident as Reimu or Marisa. That clarity is part of why the game can still connect with contemporary players. It does not require years of franchise knowledge to understand what is being asked of the player, though the underlying systems and patterns offer substantial depth for those who want to master them.

A strong Steam debut in a competitive year

A 98% positive rating after nearly 3,000 reviews is especially impressive because Steam's user review system reflects immediate player sentiment at scale. Such a score can shift as more people play and post their impressions, but the opening response gives New Classic an exceptional start.

The game's early standing is also notable in a year containing major successes of very different kinds. It is sharing high-ranked territory with titles including Valheim, the Viking survival game that recently reached its 1.0 update, and How to Fish, an unexpected hit built around a much more unusual premise. That range underlines how Steam's best-reviewed charts can reward both enormous long-running projects and niche games that find a passionate audience.

For Touhou, the result does not come entirely out of nowhere. The series has remained active for years through official games and an unusually durable community. But bringing a key Windows-era title to a major global PC store in a refreshed form gives many players a clearer point of entry than the original release had outside Japan.

It also demonstrates the continued appeal of carefully updated classics. New Classic is not attempting to disguise its age by transforming into a fundamentally different game. Its appeal instead rests on giving one of the genre's influential works a cleaner modern presentation, newly produced music, wider platform availability, and a convenient way to access the historical version at the same time.

Touhou has become broader than bullet hell

Although its vertical scrolling shooters remain the clearest starting point for understanding the series, Touhou now reaches far beyond one genre. The broad premise is often easy to summarize: supernatural incidents erupt in Gensokyo, a fantastical realm that mirrors aspects of the outside world, and its residents are drawn into resolving them. The details, personalities, and scenarios are much larger than that description, but the setup has proven flexible enough to support a huge variety of games.

Several Touhou-related titles are already available on Steam, including games that approach the setting through entirely different mechanics. Touhou Luna Nights, from Team Ladybug, is a 2D Metroidvania that blends exploration with bullet-hell ideas. It is often recommended to players who enjoy games in the vein of Rabi-Ribi.

Then there is Touhou Mystia's Izakaya, a restaurant simulation built around serving customers and managing an izakaya. It has earned a remarkably positive reputation of its own and is regarded as the highest-rated Touhou game on modern platforms. Its base Steam price is $6, providing a far gentler and more relaxed route into the wider Touhou world than a traditional bullet-hell shooter.

Those games illustrate why Touhou can be difficult to explain in a single sentence. It is a shoot-'em-up series, but it is also a setting, a creative ecosystem, a musical phenomenon, and a source of games spanning multiple genres. New Classic returns attention to one of the works that helped make all of that possible.

An approachable historical entry, with demanding action

For players curious about Touhou's origins, New Classic has an obvious advantage: it presents a crucial entry in the franchise's modern history without asking newcomers to track down older software or navigate a Japanese-only original on its own. The inclusion of the Classic version adds historical value, even with its lack of English support.

Newcomers should still expect a challenge. Bullet hell is built around repetition, practice, and learning patterns through failure. A player may not clear every stage immediately, and that is normal. The satisfaction comes from recognizing a previously intimidating barrage, identifying a small opening, and successfully threading through it on the next attempt.

For longtime fans, the release offers a chance to revisit a beloved cornerstone with new audio and visuals. For those discovering the series in 2026, its near-unanimously positive Steam response suggests that a game born in 2002 has lost little of its ability to impress. Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic is both a newly accessible release and a celebration of the game that helped turn Touhou Project into an enduring icon of Japanese game culture.