YMMV / Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

• Cheese Strategy: On Easy difficulty, Cirno's Icicle Fall has a very big blind spot right in front of her, making for easy pickings. This blind spot is the subject of many a joke about her, though this blind spot is covered on Normal difficulty and higher.
• Common Crossover: Flandre is frequently drawn with Marx due to their similar looking wings.
• Common Knowledge: While チルノ becoming Cirno instead of Chirno is a genuine mistake on the early translation part (especiallly since even official works weren't quite consistent early on) that kinda effectively got Grandfather Clause treatment, フランドール was always supposed to be Flandre, given sometime after Perfect Cherry Blossom release, ZUN specified how certain non-Japanese boss names from this game are supposed to be spelled in Latin (since midbosses and bosses didn't have them spelled out in-game until the next game).
• Difficulty Spike: Stage 4 is where the game starts to get really frustrating and the bullets on the stage are pure agony, even on Normal difficulty. The fight against Patchouli also adds to the difficulty because her spell card order is different depending on which character and shot type you use.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Flandre is easily the most notable case for this game and in the Touhou fandom as a whole. She's the Super Boss who has nothing to do with the main plot, and the number of appearances she makes from then up through 2018 can be counted on two hands (only two of which have any lines). Despite this, the fact that she debuted in the first game of the Windows series, combined with her unusual appearance, her status as both a Memetic Badass and a Memetic Psychopath, and the countless remixes of her theme music make her one of the most well-known characters in the franchise.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Meiling possesses perhaps the most well-known Fan Nickname in the series, "China", which came about because fans weren't sure how to pronounce her name.^note The characters 紅美鈴 can be read in Chinese as "Hong Meiling" (or a few other ways in some other dialects of Chinese), or in Japanese as "Kurenai Misuzu".
  • The section of Stage 4 right before the midboss is infamously known as "Books" due to the enemies being literal books that flood the screen with very dense danmaku that's incredibly difficult to navigate, especially on Lunatic, where it has earned its reputation as one of the hardest stage sections in the whole series.
• Fanon: Everything about Rin Satsuki, the Dummied Out playable character, is fan conjecture based on available evidence. She's assumed to be a kirin because of the pun when you read her name in Japanese order, Satsuki Rin, and because her given name is spelled 麟, a Kanji also found in the word for kirin. She's commonly associated with flowers and sometimes with wind because of the code indicating her Spell Cards would have been a "Flower Sign" and a "Wind Sign". She's believed to be a nurse because after Marisa tries and fails to trick Flandre that she's Reimu by claiming to be a shrine maiden, she wonders if she should instead have claimed to be a nurse. And she's often believed to be the unnamed character in the circle cut◊ advertising the game despite this having never been confirmed, leading to that being used as her commonly accepted design in fanworks.
• First Installment Wins: This is the first Touhou game on Windows, and various fan polls have proven that it is, without a doubt, the most popular game in the series.
• Growing the Beard: This game introduced the Spell Card system, something that would become a mainstay of the series.
• Older Than They Think: Neither Reimu and Marisa's new designs nor ReimuA's bomb actually debuted in this game. The former first appeared in Seihou Project's Extra Stage, while the latter is part of Reimu's moveset as one of the hidden boss doodles in Magic Pengel (where the official localization names it Dream Seal, years before English fan translations).
• Once Original, Now Common: ZUN has lamented that Remilia's character concept of being the vampiric Final Boss who looks like a little girl doesn't seem novel anymore, since in the time since EoSD's release, the "powerful vampire is really a little girl" gimmick has essentially become an archetype of its own.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis: If you've heard of "U.N. Owen", there's a good chance it's through the title of Flandre's Leitmotif, rather than the book the name came from.
• Sequel Displacement: Because of the fact that this game was where the series found its popularity, and ZUN did a Soft Reboot of the series from this game onwards, the previous five games are mostly ignored when not outright forgotten about.
• That One Attack: It shares a page with the series' other entries.
• That One Boss: See this page for more.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Cirno's name is officially pronounced as "Chi-ru-no" despite the romanization, but many western fans have a habit of constantly pronouncing her name as "Sir-no" because of the way it is spelled in English.
• Watch It for the Meme: This game became very popular in the West thanks to Flandre's boss theme. Fans used to play it so they can hear "U.N. Owen was Her?" in a nice quality.
• Woolseyism: Marisa's exchange with Remilia telling her to take what she wants in Stage 6 contains a pun about a type of flower. In the Japanese text, Marisa replies "Ah, is that so [aa, soukai]? Just now, that was the name of a flower: "pachypodium geayi [aasoukai]." The English patch version changes it to:
  Marisa: I can, thus I will. Just now, that was the name of a flower: acanthus.

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