YMMV / Touhou Yumejikuu ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Yumemi and Chiyuri are vaguely explained as coming from a civilization centuries more advanced than ours. Fans have filled in the details in different ways, with the two most common explanations being that they're either from another universe, or from Earth's future.
  • Was Yumemi really joking about blowing up the world, or did she only say that to cool things down after Chiyuri brought her back to her senses?
  • Is Kotohime really a cop? Or even a princess, for that matter?
• Difficulty Spike: Getting to the Final Boss (Yumemi) isn't terribly difficult if you know what you're doing. Getting past her will probably take a continue or two to drive the Dynamic Difficulty down enough to make her reasonably beatable. Good thing you still get the good ending after continuing.
• Epileptic Trees: Fans are divided on whether Rika and Rikako are the same person or not. Both are more scientifically-minded than most Gensoukyou residents.
• Fan Nickname: Yumemi has an attack when summoned as a boss where she creates a very dense bullet cluster infamous for how hard it is to get through it unscathed, leading to it being referred to as the "Cloud of Death".
• Game-Breaker: Reimu, Rikako and Yumemi. Their EX-Attacks are AI Breakers that can end fights prematurely. In addition to this, Yumemi has the highest stats in the game, Rikako's charged shot can decimate summoned bosses in an instant and Reimu is tied for the fastest charge in the game letting her reflect bosses with little effort.
• Growing the Beard: Not necessarily in terms of gameplay, but in terms of writing; this was the first game in the series to have an elaborate story (the first game had a barebones Excuse Plot, while the second had a bit more story, but it was still not very robust), even featuring a plot twist before the final act and giving a complex motive to the final boss, as well as the first to have a cast of fleshed out characters with a lot of personality and a backstory (the second game conveyed a bit of personality through dialogue, but this was limited due to the cutscenes themselves being short). From this point onwards, Touhou would go on to have characters with plenty of personality and creative plotlines, marking the beginning of the series's more narrative spin.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In Mima's ending, she gets Yumemi to alter the Moon's orbit so it's always night. And five games later, the protagonists cause an endless night to buy time to solve an incident.
  • Kana's victory quote against Mima points out that the latter has no legs. A picture of Mima with legs is shown during her bomb animation in Mystic Square, albeit she still doesn't have them in her sprite or her ending artwork.
  • Ruukoto pretty much shares many similarities with Tama, both being green haired robot maids who wear blue.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The leap from Hard to Lunatic difficulty is absurd compared to other games in the series, with the gameplay turning painfully fast-paced and the AI becoming orders of magnitude more aggressive, cementing its reputation as one of if not the hardest Lunatic 1CC in the series and putting off even very skilled players from trying this game on said difficulty.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Within the game itself, Kotohime being a cop is not revealed until her ending. Even her profile makes no mention of it. However, it's such an effective demonstration of her generally outlandish character (even by Touhou standards) that it has become her most distinctive trait.
  • The true nature of the so-called ruins was written as a plot twist, but nowadays just about everyone who has heard about the game already knows the reveal. The fact that Reimu and Marisa's endings are Signature Scenes likely has to do with it.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Ellen is agreed by many players to be one of if not the worst character in the game. She is tied with Kana for the lowest movement speed and with Rikako for the lowest charge speed, with nothing to make up for it unlike those two (Kana is tied with Reimu for the fastest charge in the game, while Rikako has a very powerful charged shot and an A.I. Breaker EX-Attack), and her charged shot is not particularly strong either. To make things worse, her hitbox is awkwardly located at the top of her head instead of on her back, making dodging uncomfortable while you get used to it.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Yumemi. She's one of two Final Bosses to be a human, and an outsider at that (the other being Sumireko on both counts), as well as one of the best playable characters. And in Lunatic difficulty, she has earned herself a reputation as one of the hardest final bosses in the entire series, which she manages to do while being a mere human with no innate power (unlike the aforementioned Sumireko who has Psychic Powers), relying solely on artificial magic that Yumemi herself claims cannot compare against the real thing.
  • Chiyuri gets this as well quite often; due to the ending where she hits Yumemi with a folding chair, there have been several fan depictions of her wielding said chair as a proper weapon. One such instance is the fangame Udongein X, where she uses the chair in tandem with her Ray Gun.
• Signature Scene: A rare case in the series where this happens with the ending. Specifically, Reimu's ending where she receives Ruukoto, a nuclear-powered robot maid, and Marisa's ending where she receives Mimi-chan, an intercontinental ballistic missile with a smiling face, which she proceeds to fly atop like she would with her broom.
• That One Attack: Shares a page with the rest of the series.
• That One Boss: Also shares a page with the rest of the series.

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