Touhou Gensoukyou ~ Lotus Land Story

Touhou Gensoukyou ~ Lotus Land Story is the fourth entry in the series and the first in which the player chooses between Reimu Hakurei and the witch Marisa Kirisame — a duo that has since become the face of the entire Touhou franchise. Each of them has different shot patterns and a different take on the magic attack, so the character choice changes not only the difficulty but also how each bullet pattern can be solved. The story leads the heroines to a lake and into the dreamlike world beyond it, with a tone that is more dreamy and calm than in the previous entries.

In terms of gameplay, it's a significant step forward: the bullet patterns are slower but denser and more deliberate, so for the first time the game truly plays out the discipline the series is famous for — finding the safe gap in a pattern that looks impassable. Boss fights consist of several phases with distinct characteristics, and there's even a hidden extra stage for the most hardened players. On the PC-98, the game pushes the platform to the edge of its capabilities with the number of bullets shown on screen at once and still keeps things smooth; the graphics are more polished than in its predecessors, and the color palette separates bullets from the background better, which is essential for this genre.

The music is among the most cited parts of the early pentalogy, and several tracks from here return in arrangements in later entries and in a vast amount of fan work. At the time it was a doujin title sold at events and online, but this is exactly where the series matured into the shape that the Windows entries would later refine. Today, Lotus Land Story is the best entry point into the PC-98 era of Touhou: it's readable, fair, and its difficulty can be managed even without years of training. Collecting point items near the top edge of the screen introduced a principle that stayed with the series, and combined with the character choice, it gives the game unexpected replayability. Even after all these years it doesn't feel dated — the bullet patterns are designed so well that they would hold up in a modern game, just at a coarser resolution and with fewer effects. Anyone coming to it through the later Windows entries will be surprised how little the game's core has changed since then.