This doesn't have the novelty of being the first Touhou game or the first Touhou shmup, as the prior two PC-98 entries do, but it does have the prestige of being way better than either of them. It's not incredible, I doubt I'll ever like any of these games as much as I do the Windows ones, but all the charm of the series is there. The visuals and audio are still good, but this game shifts the gameplay style again pretty drastically. it's not as out there as The Highly Responsive to Prayers, but its weird Touhou-meets-tetris-multiplayer gameplay is still very fun. Afaik the ninth game uses this style as well but I've never played it. Compared to just Touhou 1 and 2, Phantasmagoria of Dim Dream is easier, faster, simpler, and just flat-out more fun than either of them. I barely died across multiple playthroughs but it never felt like a problem with the game's design. I'd like to see something like this with more fleshed-out gameplay and online play, it's very fun even in this simple form.

An interesting take on the formula from the second game, yet a bit lackluster in the long run.

Compared to the second game this game takes a formula of some kind of versus battle where your character is on the left with the opposing character on the right and you fight each other trying to fill each other's screen with the most amount of bullets possible. Whoever loses all their HP first, makes the other character win. It's an interesting idea but that's all there really is to it. Not to mention that the game is quite easy since you regain all your HP and bombs after you finish the level and in general the game is just far more forgiving. You can also play this game in multiplayer and that'd probably be pretty fun.
This game also focuses much more on the story, so to speak. There's a lot more dialogue this time around and the endings are actually quite different now since there are also multiplae characters you can play as, all having different speed and projectiles. The music is fine and the visuals aren't bad but they're not as good as second or even first game.

Overall, I still think this is a bit better than the first game but quite a bit worse than the second.

I love this game so much it's unbelievable. It's the first "good" touhou games imo considering the quality of the first 2 games.
9 was my first touhou game and one of my favourites, and i heard so much about how this game is worse or more jank but I think it's just people who don't particularly like the vs shmup style of gameplay. Because playing this game is extremely fun. Especially when you get to know the mechanics. No screen clear with charge means the patterns are a lot more forgiving than 9 (for the most part, looking at you okazaki), and instead you have 2 bombs each round that you can use at any time. When you run out of bombs, you can instead gain invulnerability if you bomb while having full charge. Full charge is also the only charge worth using as it instantly defeats a boss that was sent to you. This makes getting full charge the most important part of your resource management.

Once you know how this game works. You can easily breeze through the first 8 stages. The last stage is an extreme difficulty step up though, and you'll need a bit of luck as yumemi just randomly decides when she'll get hit, so your match with her will either end really fast or you'll go 4 minutes without her taking a single hit. With enough saved up lives though you can 1cc. The best part about the game is that 1cc'ing isnt as much of a time sink as normal touhou games, as I got my 2 1cc's with Rikako and Ellen just by playing as i normally have and getting just a bit lucky with yumemi's fight.

Even though most of the characters are barebones, their interactions and writing are pretty funny. I especially love the stage 8 and 9 cutscenes and endings. Kotohime's and Kana's are fun to read through.

Also, Kana's theme is a banger.

The third entry in the touhou series was originally going to be a horizontal shmup funnily enough, but I guess ZUN changed his mind after playing Twinkle Star Sprites and instead made a vs shmup very much in its style. I've come to like this style of shmup quite a lot recently. The snowballing chaos and dynamism of vs shmup gameplay makes it stay fresh where many other shmups naturally become stale. Plagiarised assets aside, PoDD still feels like a unique and fun entry in the prolific Touhou series, also imo even though the first two touhous did still have decent soundtracks, this is where ZUN really started to enter his element in terms of consistently pumping out banger OSTs.

Touhou 3 continues the early trend of ZUN trying out new things for each game, and while the VS. format is a novel concept and is executed decently enough, I got sufficiently attached to the previous game that I was hoping for more of that. This format also lends itself to a much easier game overall; save for the final boss, which had a sizeable difficulty spike that ruined my initial 1cc run dream. I'll probably go back and try this out with a friend at some point, but it's fun enough as a single player experience, regardless.

I thought we were done with the touhou games made before Zun figured out what Touhou was going to be but lo and behold, touhou 3 is a weird split-screen vs shmup with mechanics reminiscent of puzzle game vs modes. Not a bad idea but the firing method absolutely kills it. Remember where you could just fire your bullets and it leveled up as you picked up stuff? Not anymore! Now you have to hold down the button and sometimes it doesn't go further than the second level and sometimes it goes to four and sometimes inbetween and sometimes it continually fires and sometimes it just doesn't for no discernable reason. It's abysmal.