/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>11378751
The games are sold on compact discs (remember those?) at real-life conventions in Japan, then they're resold at various shops.

Just download them. You can find pre-patched, translated downloads at http://doujinstyle.com/ ("Touhou [Official Games]" on the right). But be aware that some of the older translations are awful, and they're currently being updated by fans.

You can safely ignore the PC-98 games (Touhou 01-05), as they're generally considered non-canon. The best starting point is probably Imperishable Night (Touhou 08) as it's one of the earlier Windows games, but it's fairly easy and where the series started to come together in terms of looks, gameplay, and music. You can play Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (Touhou 06) and Perfect Cherry Blossom (Touhou 07) after that if you'd like, they're both fun games but in my opinion weak starting points.

And in case you're worried, the Touhou games do have nice little plots but they're mostly self-contained and everything you need is explained in the included text files. You can also try the wiki at touhouwiki.net. Basically: Gensokyo is a fantasy land cut off from Japan by a magical barrier, and Reimu Hakurei's job is to look after that barrier and deal with incidents. Now off you go.