Der erste Teil der Touhou-Reihe und aus heutiger Sicht "das schwarze Schaf" der Reihe. Was auch daran liegt, dass es ursprünglich kein Teil der Reihe werden sollte.
Eine Art Breakout mit Bullethell-Elementen (ähnlich wie Arkanoid), manchmal fragwürdigen Hitboxen, unberechenbare Boss-Attacken, komischer Steuerung und einem sehr guten Soundtrack, welches zum einen der größten Merkmale der Reihe werden sollte.

Heutzutage ganz okay spielbar und am ehesten für Fans geeignet, die mal den Ursprung der Reihe mal erleben wollen.

I wasn't going to be playing the PC98 touhous so soon but since some kind soul made them easily accessible I did.

Here, at the beginning of all things, it's not even a shmup! There are some shmup elements in all the bosses that shoot tons of bullets at you, some Arkanoid inspirations, and a healthy dose of Kikikaikai (Pocky and Rocky) as you're a shrine maiden who looks similar and has the same weapons: a card for shooting and a melee with a rod.

Your goal here is to use your yin-yang orb to hit targets without having it slam into you. This is pretty neat but since its a small target, aiming it precisely is a big pain. The game is super hard and you can very easily lose all your lives in an instant. You get unlimited continues if you don't mind a bad ending, but the final boss I fought had a literally ten second unskippable intro every single time. I checked to make sure that I wasn't exaggerating that.

The music rules even back here. I could even recognize a leitmotif that has made its way through to the modern era. Good shit.

This game has no real story to talk about: Reimu's shrine was destroyed and she is willing to Attack and Dethrone God over it. There are multiple routes you can take to do this with their own bosses, but only Mima the ghost will become a recurring character. The one route I chose had me going to Jigoku (hell) but inexplicably turned into a bunch of Christian imagery and Sariel was the final boss so I'm not kidding. Reimu is pulling a Kirby here she will just start rampaging if you mess with her.

Anyway on its own this is an interesting but just 'eh' old indie game so it's very fun that it's actually the start of a cultural phenomenon so powerful that it has a dril tweet

The start of Touhou is a really interesting one. I honestly really enjoyed this breakout style of gameplay even if it was jank as hell. Any of the boss stages were just so easy to due being able to just use a bomb and wipe everything out, but the bosses of this game were truly the peak. While nowhere near being great, they were really enjoyable and actually presented a challenge unlike the rest of the game. My favorite part of this game was the imagery and style. This game is really nice looking and it has some weird style to it I guess I would say. Everything about this game just looks unique, and the bosses are probably some of the coolest design-wise.