Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream

Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim.Dream is the most unusual piece of the early pentalogy: instead of a classic progression through levels, it offers one-on-one duels on a split screen. Each player has their own playing field, and the goal isn't to survive a path to a boss but to wear down the opponent before they wear you down. Destroying enemies and collecting items on your own side sends the opponent an additional wave of bullets and obstacles, so the game plays out like a race in efficiency — whoever clears their own field better swamps the other one more.

A wide selection of characters is available, each with different fire and different special attacks, and during a duel you can briefly power up, which layers the encounters even further. Two players can sit at one computer facing each other, or you can play through a story mode against computer opponents. On the PC-98 that meant rendering two full shooter screens at once, a solid feat on this platform; the compromise is a smaller playing field and coarser detail, but the smoothness was preserved. The music again builds on FM synthesis and ranks among the best heard in early Touhou.

Versus-style duels returned in the series a few more times, which shows how well the idea worked, but no later take ever had quite the same peculiar energy as this first attempt. At the time the game was a rarity, since a duel between two shooter fields wasn't a common discipline in the year it was released. Today, Yumejikuu is above all a great two-player game on one machine — chaotic, fast, and unexpectedly tactical once you understand how to pour bullets over to the other side of the screen. The solo campaign against the computer is noticeably less interesting and, in later encounters, rather unfair, so the game's value stands or falls on whether the player has someone to play with. With two players, though, it's still one of the most entertaining titles ever made for the PC-98, and the clarity of both fields holds up even after all these years, so the game can be picked up in an emulator without any trouble.