If you noticed over the past couple of days, the past two articles from our blog have vanished. The reason actually had to do with our community, and some members learned that the information in one of them was misleading and factually incorrect. This was first pointed out by a few users on multiple Discord servers.
How Did the Community Know Something Was Wrong?
At midnight UTC on Thursday, February 19, 2026, Drillimation published their second article on a series of the worst Touhou Project fangames in history. Within three hours of the article’s publication, Discord user @tsukuyomimoonphase noticed something was not right about it and decided to discuss it with Ciel Chandelleur (controlled by Emiko Hosokawa).
The discussion mostly centered on Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity and the fanservice that led to the game’s reception hitting rock bottom. This lasted for nearly four hours. In the same conversation, @tsukuyomimoonphase began to question why Homestead Harvest, one of the other games on the list, was present. The article began to garner criticism over the potentially confusing and misleading content that placed it in poor taste. Several players, including on another server, noted that the game was unfairly labeled as an asset flip, which was thrown around offensively.
The term “asset flip” is used to refer to games that appear to have unethically used premade assets for the purpose of being a cash grab. Despite Homestead Harvest being a farming sim with a good reception, most of the assets used appear to be entirely original, and no accusations of this were found on the store page reviews or related discussions.
Another fangame that was brought up was Touhou Seisen’ei ~ Forlorn Souls of Wicked Past. The initial article claimed the game was the same thing but used the soundtrack recordings from the official Touhou Project games, and several players disputed. One player who took a look at the game for five seconds became extremely obvious that none of the official assets were there. Composer Ocha worked hard on the game’s soundtrack, which is entirely original. The critique also promoted a false conspiracy theory about Team Shanghai Alice legal representative Fumio Oyamada throwing a fit over the game. In short, many claimed that Drillimation viewed other creators as their competitors in the field, rather than community members.
According to Ciel, she and Hosokawa have the evidence that Drillimation had been viewing every other fan creator as their competitors – including excessive promotion of their works, which they deem to be lacking in quality and containing numerous artistic/graphical and storyline potholes that they refuse to fix, through means such as pressuring gaming news outlets to write articles about them as well as forcing Touhou Project fan music creators such as FanTouhouMusic to make remixes of their music. This practice is attributed by them to choke out other creators’ chance to build a name for themselves, and they have been urging Drillimation to admit to this malpractice, to little avail. Hosokawa has learned that the Prophet often doesn’t understand the concept of constructive criticism and calls it “frustrating”, and has admitted this to be the worst mistake since the beginning of their partnership in late 2021.
Upon discovery of these controversies, Drillimation pulled the articles from viewing and issued a statement on their social media platforms, as well as apologizing to their fans who may have been confused. Drillimation had plans for a series of these articles, but they have been pulled from the schedule as a result.
New Pipeline for Touhou Project Fangame Critiques
According to this Reddit thread, one user commented that creating a game requires a significant amount of time and effort (roughly a year and a half, on average). Even free games are subject to the same thing. If a developer puts out a free game, and that player doesn’t like it, they’ll simply move on to something else.
Even the lowest-rated itch.io projects are hard to find. This is because itch.io’s search and filter settings generally hide low-rated content to prioritize active and high-quality projects. Browser extensions don’t help as all they do is sort the games based on the number of ratings they have. Most users who enjoy fangames usually rate them five stars, and those who don’t often leave no rating. Very rarely do they leave a one-star review or leave the game itself simply unrated. Instead of searching through, the Prophet will play the newest ones without researching them as a sort of first impression. The critiques will be similar to the Spray n’ Play (formerly known as Squirty Plays and Jimpressions) videos produced by Stephanie Sterling.
The Prophet won’t be the only one playing them. Drillimation will invite other players on their server to try the fangame and provide additional information about it. To avoid the hassle of downloading stuff which could lead to malware, only the browser-based games will be the focus of the critiques. The ratings could all vary – they could be extremely good in most cases, but it will be hard for a game to fall at the bottom of the scale. Some of these developers could end up becoming very sensitive to criticism, and we just need to pray they don’t turn into another Digital Homicide.
Conclusion
While the article did not land in the Major Code Red category which would spell a legal meltdown and career-ending disaster, this mistake landed in the Severe Zone category of the AVGN Scale, though it borders on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde category. This was not just an article that people disliked; it accidentally spread misleading and factually incorrect information. This would be like a game being an unplayable mess, only for the fans to point out they don’t realize there was a run button.
For the Jekyll and Hyde factor, the specific mention of the false conspiracy theory regarding Fumio Oyamada moved the article from a simple mistake to a bipolar disaster. One day, you’ll be writing a critique, and the next day, you’ll accidentally fuel a community witch hunt. To compare the various aspects of the article:
| Rank | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| Debatably Bad | Too light. It wasn’t just a difference in opinion; there were objective factual errors about the original assets. |
| High Contamination | Getting closer. The asset flip accusation contaminated the reputation of a well-received game like Homestead Harvest. |
| Severe Zone | The article’s status. The community backlash was swift, and the errors were significant enough to force a total deletion of the content and a public apology. |
| Major Code Red | Fortunately, the article avoided this. A Major Code Red would be if the developers of the original games actually took legal action for libel and/or slander, or if this site got permanently shut down. |
This whole thing serves as a wake-up call. The Touhou Project playerbase is built upon a foundation of passion and mutual respect, and as a platform with critiques that work, we have a responsibility to be fans first and critics second.
As a way to move forward, we have three key changes. The first is no more five-second glances. When a game is on a list, we must play it thoroughly to verify the assets and mechanics. Second, we will lean on the expertise of players on Discord and Reddit to ensure our impressions align with reality. Lastly, legal representatives and developer histories will be verified through official channels before a single word is published.
We have traded the top ten lists for more thoughtful, browser-based impressions. It’s hard to rank the worst because, at the end of the day, someone will put their heart into those pixels. From now on, we’ll make sure our heart is in the right place too. As someone once said, delaying a game to fix mistakes will make it good, but rushing it will forever make it bad.
The next article will be an example of a review of one game that follows the above procedure.
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