Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers

Touhou Reiiden ~ Highly Responsive to Prayers is the first game in a series that later became one of the biggest phenomena of the Japanese independent scene — and the only entry that isn't a shooter. The player controls shrine maiden Reimu Hakurei and bounces a magical ball to break blocks on screen, essentially a breakout variant. Reimu, however, can move across the entire bottom of the field, can jump, slide, and launch the ball with her own amulets, so the game leans closer to an action arcade game than a passive paddle bounce.

The levels are short, and boss fights wait in between, with bosses attacking in bullet patterns — here, for the first time, you can see where the series will head. After a few rounds the path splits into two branches leading to different worlds, extending the game's lifespan and encouraging replays. Technically it's a title built for the PC-98 with FM music that even then showed the author's knack for catchy melodies; ZUN, at the time a member of the student circle Amusement Makers, wrote and scored the game himself, and he kept this one-person approach throughout the rest of his career.

At the time it was a marginal doujin game distributed in a small run, and its real significance only became apparent in retrospect. The characters, musical themes, and basic mythology of the world of Gensokyo introduced here are still used in the series today, and fans return to it precisely to see where it all began. As a game, Reiiden is the hardest and least polished entry of the whole early pentalogy — the controls are rougher and the ball-bouncing can be frustrating — but as a historical document it's irreplaceable. It also plays differently from everything else in the series, so even a longtime Touhou fan runs into unfamiliar habits here and has to learn from scratch. It's precisely this distinctiveness that makes the first game one people return to more out of curiosity than for the gameplay itself — and yet you can already tell that the author knew exactly what mood he wanted to give his world.