Video Game / Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream

aka: Phantasmagoria Of Dim Dream

The first attempt at something more multiplayer.

Reimu: "What's with these pamphlets? (How is this some sort of ancient prophecy?) How can ruins have a grand opening? And none of this was here yesterday! How can you all be taken in by something that's so obviously suspicious!?"
Marisa: "Hm, so Reimu's not interested. That must mean..."
Reimu: "...Who said I'm not interested?"

—From the prologue

Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream is a video game developed by ZUN Soft and published by Amusement Makers for the PC-98 in 1997. It's the third installment in the Touhou Project franchise.

Some strange ruins have appeared near the Hakurei Shrine, drawing a large crowd. Only one person can go inside, so a battle breaks out to decide who it will be.

The game is a split-screen "duel" Shoot 'Em Up inspired by Twinkle Star Sprites, featuring both a story mode and 1-v-1 multiplayer.

In the Windows Touhou series, this game would receive a Spiritual Successor titled Touhou Kaeidzuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View.

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This game provides examples of:

• A.I. Breaker: Reimu's yin-yang orbs, Rikako's homing gears and Yumemi's crosses throw off the otherwise Perfect Play A.I. allowing them to potentially lose the fight prematurely, which is why those three are regarded as Game-Breaker characters.
• All for Nothing: Yumemi presents her research at the academy... Only to get laughed off again, as shown in her ending. She moves back to Gensokyo and is implied to remain there.
• Another Dimension: The true origin of the ruins, actually a "Probability Space Hypervessel".
• Battle Butler: Chiyuri is Yumemi's research assistant in "comparative physics".
• Boss Game: Due to the versus shmup format, there are no stages in the traditional sense. Instead, story mode is comprised entirely of boss fights.
• Brick Joke: Kana's victory quote against Mima is "You definitely don't have legs", in reference to the latter's ghost tail. Kana herself is a poltergeist, and the audience isn't shown whether she has legs or a ghost tail until her ending. She does have legs.
• Chairman of the Brawl: A favorite technique by Chiyuri. She bonks Yumemi on the head after she takes out the Earth-Destroying Bomb.
• Charged Attack: Holding down the shot button charges the gauge. This allows you to fire a stronger shot that destroys fireballs quickly and deals more damage to bosses. Charging for even longer allows you to cast danmaku patterns or even summon a boss on the opponent's field.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Stage enemies come in four colors, each of which indicates how many times you must hit them to take them out with your regular shot (charged shots, bombs and explosions are a One-Hit Kill no matter what).
  • Red - 1 hit
  • Green - 2 hits
  • Blue - 3 hits
  • Purple - 4 hits
• Counter-Attack: There can only be one summoned boss on screen at a time; if you cast a boss attack (done by charging the gauge all the way) when there's already a boss on your field, it results in a "boss flip": the boss on your field despawns, then a new boss spawns on the opponent's field.
• Cranial Eruption: Whenever Yumemi hits Chiyuri's head, a noticeable head bump appears. In most endings, however, Yumemi gets one after Chiyuri hits her on the head with a chair.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Marisa makes her first playable appearance here, but has yet to be established as the series's Deuteragonist, as she's listed after Mima in the character select screen.
• Fan Game: Can be considered one for Hatarakimono, including Ellen as a Guest Fighter and making a number of references to Izumi Takemoto's works.
• Fist Pump: In both Chiyuri and Yumemi's endings, the latter victoriously holds one of her fists to her shoulder.
• Genre Shift: The previous game was a single player shooter, this is a versus shooter.
• Guest Fighter: Ellen from the manga Hatarakimono.
• Heart Symbol: The enemies in Ellen and Kana’s stage are simple heart symbols.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Ellen's hitbox is awkwardly located at the top of her head, rather than on her back. This may throw people playing her for a loop.
• Humiliation Conga: This happens in most endings to Yumemi. After the Player Character defeats her, Yumemi tries to take her with her with a world-destroying bomb (although she afterwards claims she was kidding). The latter gets interrupted when Chiyuri, Yumemi's minion who she abuses, hits her head with a chair. Additionally, she injured her similarly to how she attacks her^note Yumemi abuses Chiyuri via bonking her noodle with her fist and she tells her to quit it. In Kotohime's ending, she even mocks Yumemi when she offers to grant a wish and sees through a bluff she makes.
• Jurisdiction Friction: In her ending, Kotohime tells Yumemi and Chiyuri that she's a cop, but that she has no jurisdiction over them because they are from another world.
• Karmic Injury: Played for Laughs. For all the times Yumemi bonked Chiyuri's noodle, she does the same to her in most endings (albeit with a chair).
• Last Chance Hit Point: You can only die if your health has already dropped to one hit point (represented as half a heart). Any hit that would otherwise kill you from higher health will instead just drop you to one hit point.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
  • One of the playable characters, Ellen, is the protagonist of the manga Hatarakimono. Some of the science duo's lines are references to Sayonara Parallel and Apple Paradise by the same author.
  • Reimu's ending features a Robot Maid named "Mu*ti".
  • When Marisa asks Yumemi for a "scientific weapon" from her world, she gives her Mimi-chan - a talking ICBM from the manga Don't Leave Me Alone, Daisy.
• Limit Break: After you run out of bombs, pressing the bomb button while having your charge meter filled to the max activates Charge Max Ability, which makes you invulnerable for roughly nine seconds and powers up your shots while it lasts.
• Long Song, Short Scene: Rikako has the longest theme out of any boss in the whole series, at 4:57. However, the fight against her will most likely be over in under two minutes. Even on Lunatic, where matches can take longer, you're unlikely to hear the whole track.
• Magic from Technology: In their search for actual magic, Yumemi and Chiyuri wield an imitation they call "scientific magic", which is "born from positively-charged photons and light waves".
• Mirror Boss: In story mode, you fight every character in the game, including yourself. Some characters even acknowledge the fact in their victory quotes. Yumemi and Chiyuri's stories actually provide an in-universe explanation: the Chiyuri you play as is her Alternate Self native to Gensokyo, while in Yumemi's story, Chiyuri messes with the ship's machines creating a second Yumemi; since they can't go back home like that, Yumemi solves it by fighting herself.
• The Night That Never Ends: In Mima's ending, Yumemi alters the Moon's orbit to make it always night.
• Palette Swap: All playable characters have one, in order to make it easier to tell who's who during a Mirror Match. Pressing the bomb button in the character select screen in story mode lets you play the character you selected with her alternate colors.
• Perfect Play A.I.: The AI is very good at dodging bullets, until it decides it's time to die and starts making amateur mistakes (which takes longer in later stages and higher difficulties, but less in later rounds of the same stage). Yumemi is infamous for being able to dodge massive vomits of bullets, with Round 1 being nigh impossible to defeat without some luck on how enemies spawn or using certain EX attacks that confuse AI.
• Player Versus Player: Versus mode lets you play a best out of three against another human, against the computer, or even invert this trope by making two AIs go against each other.
• Power Gives You Wings: Marisa has wings when summoned as a boss. Oddly, these wings are never seen again anywhere in the series.
• Promoted to Playable: Mima, a boss in the previous two games (final boss in the second game's case) and Marisa, the fourth boss of the previous game, become playable in this game. In Marisa's case, this will stick for the rest of the main series.
• Recycled Animation: Mima's boss attack uses the same bullet pattern and the same character sprite as her final phase from Story of Eastern Wonderland.
• Riding the Bomb: Lacking any idea of how to use Mimi-chan, Marisa is seen simply riding it around (which also happened in Mimi's story of origin).
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: The plot kicks off when ruins (actually a ship, but no one knows that at first) appear in Gensokyo out of nowhere, while announcing a "grand opening" and offering a reward to whoever goes inside first. In the prologue, Reimu openly questions it:
  Reimu: What's with these pamphlets? (How is this some sort of ancient prophecy?) How can ruins have a grand opening? And none of this was here yesterday! How can you all be taken in by something that's so obviously suspicious!?
• Slapstick: Yumemi scolds Chiyuri by punching her in the head. Chiyuri returns the favor in most endings with a folding chair.
• Spell My Name with a "The": The title screen reads "The Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream".
• The Stinger: Clearing the game without continues nets you a post-credits scene.
• Taking You with Me: On her defeat, Yumemi threatens to blow up the planet with a "Four-Dimensional Positron Bomb", only for Chiyuri to hit her over the head. She then claims she was just kidding.
• Unequal Rites: Reimu is annoyed by Yumemi calling her abilities mahou (magic), insisting that they're instead shinsenjutsu (something more to do with Taoist self-refinement). Despite using magic herself, Ellen doesn't really get the difference.
• You Wanna Get Sued?: When Reimu asks Yumemi for a way to keep her shrine clean more easily, she initially offers her housekeeping android... Multi from To Heart (referred to as "Mu*ti" and shown with a bar over her eyes). Chiyuri then forces Yumemi to make it something that won't get them sued, at which point Multi is replaced by a Captain Ersatz named Ruukoto.

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