Should you buy Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic? - 09/09/2026 Blog Entry

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Development Concerns
• The Good
• The Bad
• Conclusion
• Addendum

Preface

TLDR: It depends on your ethics.

21/09/2026 Update: Every owner of Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic - the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil should try to do one of the following, with the goal of getting a proper AI disclaimer on the Steam page that details the full usage of AI in game, as is stated on Steam's Guidelines on AI Content, because the remake uses AI, as stated by Shanghai Alice Reprise.
By doing this, we can ratify if they deserve the community's trust, as we will be certain if said statement covers the game's AI usage thoroughly or if they are lying by omission and that is crucial for the future of Touhou, the rest is in your hands.

• 1) Report the game on Steam for unlabeled AI usage.
• 2) Leave a negative review of the game as protest.
• 3) Refund the game.

Want to know why I said that it depends on your ethics? Keep on reading.
A few months ago I did a blog post talking about some of my concerns with the game's development. Many things changed and some stayed the same. Check Development Concerns if you are interested in getting an ethical analysis about the actions done by Shanghai Alice Reprise; that is your place.

Because this release is pretty new, this blog is subject to being updated frequently until things stabilize. I will try to give an objective analysis, so for example subjective things like game difficulty or music taste are out of the question.

To keep it short, this is the first Touhou game worth buying, as it improves massively on gameplay, accessibility, translations and quality of life improvements. Vote with your wallet. Even then, things could improve further and depending on your ethics you might not like this game as much, as what I am about to confirm is very divisive.

Development Concerns

28/09/2026 Update: SuzunaanLatam made a great interview to translator ACE. On there he reveals that translators only had 24 days to do all of the translating, this ended up being problematic for the Brazilian team, as they had to translate almost from scratch. This game's development was very chaotic, to say the least. It confirms that translators faced stringent, crunch and grind, time constrains.

15/09/2026 Update: After talking more with other translator, he told me that there never was an official contract between translators and Shanghai Alice Reprise, just an NDA related to porting the game to the Nintendo consoles. It further corroborates the lack of professionalism of Shanghai Alice Reprise, this time it worked out for them because it helped smooth out the addition of Latin American Spanish and remaking of the Brazilian Portuguese translations.
Was it so hard to say they were working as volunteers from the start? It does prove my point that it is a way to bypass payment of work, just leave it to the fans.

I talked privately with one of the many translators working on this game. She revealed to me that at some point it was discussed if translators are getting properly rewarded, but it seems that talks died down. Currently, the only reward they got for their hard work was a Steam key of the game, no payments and that was explicitly mentioned in the terms they agreed to. Paying them money or further improvements to the situation in the future look to be difficult. Maybe they will get called for future translation projects, hopefully with better conditions.

With that in mind, things like the recent video with ZUN explicitly showing off the translations on a positive note come off as very out of touch with reality, to say the least.

I watched a full playthrough and I found that translators are missing from the credits at the end of the game. They are present in the credits you can find on the main menu, but it reduces the visibility of everyone else involved in making this remake. You may even interpret it as them being lesser parts of the project.

I said it before, but this sets a very dangerous precedent. The translators only got a copy of the game for the full translation work, including revising the existing translations and social media posts. If you label your project as doujin and set it in Japan, you can get away with not paying translators. If this is ok on Japanese culture among semi-doujin projects, it is not being clearly communicated to the rest of the world. There is also a cultural struggle inside of translation groups, some would be happier with payment but others think it is a selfless cause.

Another part of the debate is if the game should follow or not the conventions used by the community on previous translations. On this remake, Gensokyo is called Gensoukyou, among other cases. The english translator of Mystia Izakaya, Reale雷耀, made a petition for translating tradition to be respected.
We can see this divide clear as day thanks to the interview made by IceFairy in Touhou Garakuta to many people inside the translation teams.

Going back to payments, this reality would be less outrageous if translators were clearly labeled as voluntary contributors. More as in that interview, it looks as if all translators are happy to participate. What is actually going on here? But the fact that they were subject to NDAs and such a heavy workload with such a low reward is disappointing. This brings up the question, what will be done with the money generated from the remake? Who is getting paid and who is not? Doesn't it look discriminatory?

On the interview made by IceFairy, we can see that some translators said this process was stressful. Be it from trying to deliver their best to meet expectations, talking with community members or the technical challenges of making the translation work in the context of the game.

Aridow was the only one brave enough to poke the youkai, this is his full quote:

Aridow: That would be great, but I’m a little pessimistic about the current French Touhou scene. I think it’s quite niche. But I hope it will encourage Zun to make new versions of the following games and to hire translators with professional contracts.

All I hope is that it brings prosperity to them in the long term, the current approach is only possible due to the many people treating Touhou as a hobby alongside people who don't need to fight for getting an income. For professional translators, it is not sustainable.
In my opinion you should think twice before buying this game if you care about the gaming industry's professionalism in the future. Let's say you don't like humans and you would rather have AI translate your game, well, in order to get even close to the quality of a human you need to pay someone money to get access to a high-quality LLM.

Translating something is a job that should be paid better than with a copy of the game. Especially when the game is engineered to sell well. Acceptable price, marketing (present in Shibuya!) and console releases, recipe for success. I can guarantee it from looking at it through my Marketing student eyes.

A part of the problem with the way translators accepted to get treated is that many of them are not professionals with a degree and decades in the industry, so they might lack the technical expertise to negotiate properly or they prioritized the honor of doing this. One example, you can negotiate payment based on the amount of words/phrases you translate, there was no mention of that anywhere.

Buying this game is a dilemma. If you don't buy it, but still talk about this situation, you are showing that you don't like how things are handled. But if you buy it, Shanghai Alice Reprise might see it as proof that translators deserve to get paid, as they will get too much cash.

12/09/2026 Update: A debug string only present in the decompilation was found on the game, guaranteeing that the decompilation was used. I got confirmation by one of the developers of the decompilation, Wearr and they are disappointed about the lack of credits regarding their job.

There is strong leaked evidence that points to the game being made based on the decompilation made by GensokyoClub. The engineers I consulted privately, told me that they have a smoking gun that proves it.

It is inefficient for Shanghai Alice Reprise, who lacks the original source code, to reverse engineer the game themselves when that project and all of the fan made documentation efforts on it exist. Furthermore, the bundled original game needed to get adjusted to run on modern systems smoothly, doing so without thcrap or the source code is difficult. You need a competent revese-engineer in order to get it without recurring to the decompilation or AI.

One possibility was the usage of LLMs internally in order to decompile the code. Regardless, from what was already gathered from the game's files, we are certain that the current game was derived from old code, be it an LLM, decompilation or the actual source code made by ZUN, somehow.

Now, this isn't a practical problem but an ethical one. Even with Shanghai Alice Reprise being within their legal rights to use the decompilation or AI for this remake, in the case it was the decompilation, not acknowledging it leaves a lot to be desired. It is rude.

Another source that is showing evidence for the decompilation being used is Wearr. In this Twitter thread, she goes into detail about many unexplainable choices surrounding the game's files. I am not qualified enough to explain it for any reader to understand, but my sources with engineering skills corroborated they are valid concerns.

17/09/2026 Update: Shanghai Alice Reprise admitted that AI was used in an undeterminate amount of art assets, according to them in order to upscale images and some effect filters. The important thing is that this revelation means that Shanghai Alice Reprise tricked consumers into buying the game without knowledge of AI being used on the game. This is a problem because it violates Steam's Guidelines on AI Content. Report the game if you can, it's the only way to find out the truth.

21/09/2026 Update: I encourage everyone to take a look at the research paper that details SynthID thoroughly.
Please do so before speaking like an amateur of how accurate of a tool it is, unlike a certain someone... . Posts like that distracts us from constructive efforts into knowing the full truth. Its accuracy is beyond the question now, as knowing the truth depends on reporting the game to Steam for AI usage, because Shanghai Alice Reprise proved that the tool is accurate by revealing that AI was used.

15/09/2026 Update: The only way we have to find out the truth is by contacting Shanghai Alice Reprise's official support channels or by asking people in charge of the graphics directly, because there was little to no contact among each team inside the game's development (for example translator to artist). According to the credits, the graphic artists who worked on the game are: JYUNYA, Unabara Iruka, Ki-san, Warashina, Moyashi and Kami.

By checking many of the backdrops used on the game with OpenAI's own SynthID checker, we can see that most if not all of them (I didn't bother to test them all) get picked up with as being generated using OpenAI's products. This goes against Steam's AI disclosure policy, the game should get reported to Steam until they can verify that Shanghai Alice Reprise used AI. Until it gets verified by them, we may better assume AI was used on these images.

We know that ZUN doesn't mind using AI, as he used it for background art in Touhou 19 and 20. I consider it inevitable that it was used during the process in this age, but there isn't a concrete "yes we used it" from them.

However, deeper looks at the accompanying backdrop assets on the left side of the game's screen show us some oddities. The kind of images shown here are the ones getting picked up by OpenAI. I know the PISA scores have been falling globally, but surely the artist who made these backgrounds knows how a 4 in Roman numerals looks like? It is hard for me to imagine what logic was used for a person to make this mistake.
Even things like the subdivisions are all over the place.

There are other weird backdrops, like these two, but it is harder to say they are made with AI:

Now, until we get some proof by Shanghai Alice Reprise, it is safe to asume these are AI. One of the claims circling around was that it gets detected as AI content due to the artwork being upscaled, but I tried running the lowest possible resolution versions of the images through SynthID and it still showed up as positive. I tried a very small 400x400px promotional image from a website made a few months ago by Shanghai Alice Reprise and one of the backgrounds of the game captured while the game was running on 720p resolution. Even if we try it with the images extracted directly from the DAT files of the game, they still show up as positive.

I even tried checking backdrops from Genso Wanderer, another game developed by JYUNYA with a similar art style to the supposed AI images and they came up as negative. This has the potential to disprove the theory that the artstyle itself is causing false positives, increasing the likelyhood for some form of AI being used on the backdrops of New Classic. I even checked the promotional website for Genso and art there came up not having an AI watermark.

The Good

This game made a lot of changes in order to get up to standard with what you would expect from a modern game. JYUNYA was one of the biggest proponents for this internally. He wanted to add things like the focus indicator, infinite lives mode or extended keyboard layout choices. One of the objectives of this game is to bring Touhou to a wider audience, we can see it with the ports for consoles (Switches, PS5). There are also things like achievements, support for old replays and of course the translations. Even the bullet patterns were kept accurate to the originals.

That sounds scarce, but it is very impressive when we remember that we are comparing it with the official Touhou games developed by ZUN. Those games are usually more expensive and buggy products. Things improve further by having the sprite work made by Unabara and many other nice things.

New Classic is essentially two games in one. The recreation of the original EoSD and the remaster. The price of the game is justified by the amount of enjoyment you can get out of it.

The Bad

The enemy indicator that appears at the bottom is missing the Boss text that made it very legible on the original Touhou 06. It was remade like the indicator present in modern Touhou games. This is problematic because a red highlight on a red background is a recipe for bad accessibility.

The ending scenes still have to be cut out, even during live streaming, as the rule stating that is unchanged. That is a dumb rule for the modern age. This is a strange rule, Touhou Patch Center makes the endings public and Shanghai Alice Reprise openly collaborated with them but they didn't get in trouble for it.

Many of the dialogues have been tweaked. I am uncertain if this is due to translating everything again or purposely changing things.

You can use more keys on your keyboard, but it is not possible to rebind them to create your own custom layout.

Conclusion

Overall, this release looks pretty good. The end product is what you would expect from a remake of EoSD. If you don't care about the stuff I said on Development Concerns, buy this game so we get the actually popular games remade and published officially. This is a really good product.

Of course if you don't see these concerns as a big deal, buy the game. Just label the translators as volunteers and go on with your day. Even entry jobs in my third world country pay more than what Shanghai Alice Reprise gave them. Now, if gaming ends up in an even worse state in 5 years, I warned you, every task done with the goal to make money deserves payment to those involved. You can also have a perspective of it is not my fault that translators are bad at negotiating, so I don't care, more power to you...

This is why I quit studying video game development. This sort of behavior loop confirms my fears. It is all crunch and grind while getting paid pennies. Meanwhile this is the trend, I recommend you rethink your relationship with gaming. For example, let's stop pretending Valve is sunshine and rainbows, like you would own the game you bought; the translators don't even own the copy they got gifted, unfortunately.

I am content, the game is good, but I have a lingering sense of sadness. You can guess why. My enjoyment of Touhou is on the verge of collapsing, more as bad things get confirmed with time, I can start to see the cracks in the wall show up even with a new coat of paint. I have a love-hate relationship with Touhou at this point. What do you think about this game?