Nansei Project (Nansei, 南西, meaning "Southwest") is a series of Touhou-inspired albums made by Finnish composer and artist, LENK64
. Created in 2011, Nansei originally began as a Touhou fan-project, but soon received a Continuity Reboot, splitting off from Touhou and evolving into a separate work featuring its unique canon and protagonists. Some albums were also remade with updated art and music.
Taking place in a world known as Kuusou no Sekai (空想の世界, which means "World of Fantasy"), a shrine maiden named Miko Kokunai and her adoptive sister/best friend, Ritsuka Hayashi, solve various incidents and keep the peace throughout the land.
Nansei Project contains examples of:
- Adaptational Expansion: The remakes often add new characters and music that weren't in the original. In the remake of the fourth album, everyone but the final boss is a new character. Meanwhile, in the remake of the seventeenth and the 2.5th albums, everyone is replaced with new characters.
- Adaptational Name Change: Some characters are given completely different names in the remakes.
- Adaptation Title Change: Likewise, some remakes also change the album titles completely.
- Adaptational Species Change: It's also common for characters to receive a species change in the remakes.
- The Ageless: Some characters (such as those who are native to Wonderland) don't age, and thus cannot die from old age.
- Art Evolution: The series has a drastically different art style nowadays than when it began in 2011. This image◊ shows how the creator's art has changed over the years.
- Continuity Reboot: As stated above, Nansei started out as a Touhou fan-project until the creator decided to make Nansei a separate work. Naturally, the Touhou characters were removed when the first few albums were remade.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Even more than Touhou. Nansei has characters based on Japanese mythological creatures like Bakeneko and Nekomata, Kitsune, Tanuki, and Kirin. But it also has a scarecrow, werewolves, grim reapers, a yeti, a näkki, a half-angel/half-demon, and some characters that are made-up creatures.
- Improbably Female Cast: Like Touhou, most of the cast is made up of female characters. Unlike Touhou, however, Nansei does have some male characters who act as bosses (and even final bosses) or central characters of a story. Nansei also has a few genderless characters.
- Mad Artist: Several — the art-loving troublemaker Wyra Sonohoka, the Big Bad of the game Chusokarashi no Manaato (herself a work of art, whose madness is a result of Wyra interfering in her creation), and the Disc-One Final Boss Hypolla Hiromi, who is not so much mad as she is manipulated by Manaato.
- Miko: One of the main characters is a shrine maiden named Miko.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Every character in the 18th album, Mountain of Gods is drawn in a more Touhou-like, almost chibi art-style, which stands out heavily from the art of the other albums.
- No Plot? No Problem!: Some albums have plotlines, while others don't and are left up to interpretation. The creator is from Finland and English isn't her first language, so she doesn't write stories in English very often. Most of the albums that have a storyline were done by a team, however this aged poorly.
