Len'en Project

The Len'en Project (鏈縁Project) is a series of vertical danmaku shooting games made by Japanese game developer JynX. Although it takes inspiration from the Touhou Project and Seihou Project, the games are technically not fangames towards them and that it's set in a separate world which features an entirely new cast of characters, therefore having its own canonicity.

It is set in the land of Mugenri, a haunted region containing humans and youkai alike. Yabusame Houren is the main protagonist, and together with her friend Tsubakura Enraku, they're youkai exterminators who solve incidents.

Games in this series
The name Len'en is composed of the kanji len (鏈 lit. "chain") and en (縁 lit. "relations"). Both kanji could also be translated as "connections". The letter "l" used in the romaji is official, as shown in various file names of the games, even though it's more usual to use the letter "r" in romaji. However, the apostrophe used isn't official, but it's used to separate the two "syllables" because, in this case, it's ambiguous in romanisation. The romanised letters are "lenen", in which the Japanese hiragana is ambiguous to represent either "re (れ), n (ん), e (え), n (ん)" or "re (れ), ne (ね), n (ん)". The apostrophe is commonly used in romanisation when an ambiguity like this comes up.

On the fourth instalment Brilliant pagoda or haze castle, the first kanji has been changed to a more simpler-looking 連, which also reads as ren having the meaning "connect". This was because it makes writing a lot easier and "it seems lighter".

According to the developer's blog, it's a "similar to a certain shrine maiden danmaku shooting game, but if you try it you may think it's pretty different... but it's really nothing more than a rip-off of Touhou"-type danmaku shooting game.

Characters
The characters in this project are either human or youkai and that they take many references to the characters of the Touhou Project. Strangely, most of the characters have names that are themed around birds, or are named after birds. An important note is that while in Touhou the characters are all female, the characters' genders are generally left ambiguous in the Len'en Project. It's likely that their genders will never be revealed, and that it's simply up to the player's interpretation. For convenience, this wiki will refer to them as female.

Differences from the Touhou Project
There are many aspects of Touhou that Len'en, as a series based on Touhou, imitates and parodies. The gameplay, character drawings and the music are all similar to Touhou. However, there are things that are based on Touhou but which are unique in their own way.

For example, while Touhou often uses the kanji fu (符) in many of it's spell card names, the spell cards in Len'en use the kanji hai (牌). These two kanji have more or less overlapping meanings, but fu is generally translated as "sign", whereas hai is more like "card".