A very fun game that returned to the idea of the second game and multiplied it tenfold.

A charming story and silly characters, amazing and fun gameplay as well as great music. All this makes this game my favorite Touhou game yet. Even if that's not saying much since it's only the fourth game in the series and no one really talks about the PC-98 games. Now there are only 2 characters that have their own set of skills and it's fun to play as both Reimu and Marisa. And the interactions both of them have with the characters throughout the game are just quite funny.

If you ever want to play PC-98 Touhou games then I think this one is a no-brainer.

What a strange little game.
Played one on a whim and finished it in a day. It's not exactly hard but it's fun.

It's a nice little time capsule to see how far touhou has become so I don't know if I can rate it fairly by looking at it from a modern lens. The ideas are all laid out here, like with one of Karumi's attacks being really similar to Nazrin's first spell card, Rare Metal Detector. It's cool!

There's some weird mechanics as it's one of the PC98 games.
Bosses are really short.
There's basically a survival spell at the end of every stage (except 6). Yuuka's master spark is unreactable so you just have to know when she's gonna use it (so it's not so bad).
No visible hitbox. Movement is really sluggish but easy to get used to.

Some backgrounds for stages 3 and 5 make it really hard to see bullets, I think that's from the limited colour palette of the PC98 (is that why Reimu's hair is purple?).

There's a lot of parts, much more than later games (I don't think it's even a thing in the windows games), where enemies just try to run into you to deal contact damage. It's strange to see but it's interesting.

When you use a bomb, it shows a really cute image of the character you're playing. This should come back, ZUN please.

Bad Apple still slaps and it was nice to hear the original.

If you can get an emulator working (I used Neko Project 21) then I would recommend it at least for the history.

Touhou 2 but with a boss health bar.

Yep, ZUN finally settled with the Shump gameplay and by that I just mean ripping Touhou 2 and just adding a nice coat of paint on top. It's a serviceable sequel for Touhou 2 even though it only brings the boss health bar to the table, though don't get me wrong this is a godsend as it was a pain to know when the bosses would die in Touhou 2 so at least I know how little my damage do to a boss because yeah they brought back the bullet sponge bosses and I sincerely hope this isn't a common thing in the franchise, I really don't want to fall asleep while fighting the final boss every time.
Otherwise same old, same old with the music being just ok and the art style being somewhat of an eyesore with intense background color hurting my eyes.

Should you play it? Not particularly but if you had to make a choice between 2 and 4, definitely go for 4.

This was the first Touhou game I got a 1CC on, so I definitely have a bit of favoritism towards it for that alone. However, this is a very solid game, and one of the better entries of the pc-98 games as a whole.

Bullet visibility can be a bit dicey on certain stages, but overall manageable. The ost is extremely good, and the gameplay is solid. None of the later bosses feel comically easy, or absurdly unfair.

Overall I would consider it a bit easier when compared to windows touhou, but not strictly a bad thing.

This game also introduces focus mode, which is a very welcome change! Makes the game feel a lot better than two in my opinion.

I finally did it. After enduring a little over 2 hours of trial and error, including a random game crash at some point, I have finally achieved my first 1cc in a Touhou game. I am still shaking as I type this, and while Eastern Wonderland was the first game to really pull me in, this one has for sure solidified me as a fan. Keep in mind, I rarely care about high scores, or perfect runs, or just trying to improve in general when it comes to arcade style games or danmakus. But I just couldn't resist letting myself get beat here. I wanted to succeed and see that good ending. I was not going to back down. I WOULD prove that I am NOT a failure of a person. You hear that ZUN? SUCK IT!

As of writing, MarisaB Normal 1cc (my first of the franchise,) but not before a ReimuB run that ended right as the boss died, which got me the bad ending. Hell. Hell.

This felt like the first game that knew what it was doing, but along the way it loses a bit of charm. SoEW had good music and dialogue that was funny enough. PoDD is batshit insane and resultingly fun due to that chaos. HRtP sucks, but if you go through with a friend, it becomes an unforgettable experience. Though, the stuff that makes this stick out at all is retroactive--people didn't know what Touhou or Bad Apple was prior to release, let alone Marisa Kirisame. No game before this sold more than like, 200 copies. These things make it lovely now but that's by chance, really.

However, not quite by chance, there is at least a solid game underneath. Several steps forward were taken from SoEW's unintelligible graphics, and each of the 4 shot types make a surprising difference in gameplay--more than I was expecting, and more than Double Dealing Character provided me, to be honest. Of course there are some hiccups, like Stage 4, which is simply not fun to play, and the fact that the game's resolution is outright gated from you if you're not on a 1cc run. It did motivate me to play the game more, sure, but I'd rather be motivated by the game being fun enough to warrant a replay on its own merits, like PoDD and DDC and probably a stark majority of the franchise.

In any case, this is very clearly going in the right direction, and going off the franchise's ultimate success, I look forward to the rest.