Drillimation Systems Announces Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity

On Saturday, February 1, 2025, Drillimation released a video on YouTube in what appears to be the announcement of a new Touhou Project fangame being developed by Drillimation Systems.

This is the third Super Nintendo-styled Touhou Project fangame from Drillimation Systems. After finishing work on Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest, the Prophet was confident that they could develop another game like this. The project didn’t officially begin development until last month when 2025 began. Originally, this was planned to be part of the Emiko Anthological Universe (often abbreviated as Emiverse) but it ended up becoming its own standalone game after multiple fallouts.

Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity, as the name suggests, puts the player in the middle of a Gensokyo-wide scent that causes every woman’s hair to grow uncontrollably. Unfortunately, a few individuals with the exception of Queen Marisa, are not happy about it and wish to seek out the source of the scent. Many elements of the game including characters and songs were conceived during a year-long preproduction process while Touhou Kichouden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2 was in development.

This game was a result of a deal between Drillimation Systems and Atelier in Wonderland going bad. In 2022, the latter group released an album titled Touhou Tengyakushuu ~ Zenith of Antinomic Monarch. It wasn’t a game, but rather an album structured in the style of a Touhou game. Creating a video game takes a lot of effort and skill, and artists not willing to create a game could take a shortcut and do what Zenith of Antinomic Monarch did. Drillimation discovered the album in early 2023 after listening to FanTouhouMusic’s arrangement of Slavonic Titania, the stage 2 boss theme. Drillimation produced a PC-98 remix of the song using FanTouhouMusic’s video as reference.

Relations were initially warm, and Drillimation had plans to produce a game adaptation of the album. During the development of Song of Divine Tempest, Studio Emiko insisted that Drillimation produce an adaptation of the album with its creator as director, while the rest of Song of Divine Tempest‘s staff would do all of the assets. Atelier in Wonderland had almost no involvement in the video game industry in the year the album had released. When Drillimation and Studio Emiko proposed the idea of an adaptation shortly after Song of Divine Tempest released, Melody Harmonia disapproved. It was actually the intentions of Drillimation who wanted to produce an SNES-style game and have the album’s creator direct, but she was not willing to direct games in any other genre besides visual novels. At the time of the proposal, Atelier in Wonderland had released their first game Rosetta and the Well, and their second game Snow Angel & Silver Devil was in the works.

During the latter half of Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2‘s development, Drillimation’s games reportedly made Melody Harmonia uneasy and right when the game was nearing completion in October 2024, she had already become infuriated, decided to cancel the contract, and cut off most communication from the company on Twitter and Bluesky. The Prophet was infuriated too, but Drillimation insisted the canceled proposal could be repurposed into a standalone game inspired by the album’s characters, settings, and music, and Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity was the result.

Interestingly, Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity almost never got made. In the middle of Mythos of Phantasmagoria 2‘s development, the concept of the game was falling out of Hosokawa’s favor, as she thought a Touhou Project fangame with a concept on hair growth was ridiculous and suggested something else. Several users on a separate Discord server thought this was a weird concept, but is unique nonetheless. Drillimation was not willing to scrap the project, but the project was allowed to continue if adjustments were made to the characters. For balancing reasons, the player will meet some characters who are not affected by the scent.

Drillimation hopes to get this project completed and released by the end of this spring.