Dream Tropes Wiki/Bullet Hell

Bullet Hell (called danmaku, meaning "barrage", in Japanese, literally "bullet curtain" when translated to English) shooters are a subgenre of Shoot Em Ups that test both your dodging skills and your resistance to seizures. To put it simply, they're (usually vertically-scrolling) shooters where all the enemies have *lotsa dakka*. They often feature extremely elaborate and beautiful patterns of bullet flows, especially for bosses, with hundreds and sometimes thousands of bullets on the screen at once, requiring constant weaving and pattern memorization in order to get the elusive S++ ranks. Not so painfully slow when they cover the screen, eh, tough guy? These games also tend to have True Final Bosses.

However, the genre is not always as Nintendo Hard as it seems. The player's hitbox is often very small, sometimes only one pixel. In addition, the majority of enemy bullets are sprayed wildly and are not actually aimed at the player. Finally, the player is almost always given some variant of the Smart Bomb, which will remove bullets from the screen. Most modern bullet hell games give the player another way to avoid being killed, such as hypers in *DoDonPachi*, *Touhou Project*'s deathbombs, or *Giga Wing*'s Attack Reflector. Though by no means easy, a bullet hell game can be cleared without memorizing patterns or continuing. In fact, Bullet Hell games tend to be just as surmountable as older, less bullet-intensive games. It should be noted that if you do happen to come across an *actual* arcade Bullet Hell game, you will know that bullet-intensive areas tend to make the bullets slower. This is because the hardware used to create the bullets is slowing down, and can't process them all at the same time, and modern ones used to create even recent games like the *DonPachi* series have hardware comparable to that of home consoles. Again, that's a lot of dakka.

In addition, the bullet patterns are not the only elaborate things in these games. The scoring systems often require as much dedication to master as the bullet patterns. Some common elements including "grazing" (where a bullet passes through your character sprite but not your vital hitbox), collecting items dropped by enemies, and not dying. Like the bullet patterns, the scoring systems have become more complex as time went on, going from a very simple Combos based scoring system in *DonPachi* to systems that take multiple pages just to describe the most basic elements like *Hellsinker*. The scores attained have also been subject to inflation.

The types of projectiles fired by enemies and bosses will almost always be colourful Energy Balls to make it easier to tell them from the background, and so you can distinguish them from your own bullets.

Can (and often does) overlap with Cute 'em Up. Usually unrelated to Platform Hell - most of these games are consistent about following their own rules and don't depend on cruel surprises.

Please note that **this trope is for games where there are a remarkably high number of bullets on the screen**. It is *not* a catch-all term for the shoot-em-up genre, although most Bullet Hells are super-classed as shoot-em-ups, and just because a shmup is Nintendo Hard does NOT mean it is a Bullet Hell game. A rule of thumb is: if you can count exactly how many bullets there are from just a quick glance of the screen, it most likely isn't one. By the same token, a Bullet Hell game doesn't have to be Nintendo Hard, though most of them are.

## Known Bullet Hell shooters:

* The *Touhou Project* games are perhaps the best-known example of Bullet Hell these days, and was the series that popularized it in the 1990s. The above picture is a screenshot from the battle with Yukari Yakumo, the second Bonus Boss of 1993's *Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom*, who is unleashing her infamous "Boundary of Life and Death" spell card attack (which is an upgraded version of the final attack belonging to the normal Bonus Boss, Ran Yakumo), in which she fires nigh every kind of bullet in the game. Just when you think that card's the end of it, there's still one more to live through.
	+ Even worse in that Yukari is generally considered one of the easier bonus bosses, especially compared to the likes of Koishi.
	+ Inverted with Rika/Evil Eye Sigma, who is generally considered one of the hardest bonus bosses; She uses the least amount of bullets for her attacks, but fires them in such a fashion that they are remarkably difficult to dodge.
	+ There's also *Touhou Danmakufu* which allows you to create your own *Touhou Project*-style danmaku games in Driller Engine, including bosses with custom-made spellcards.
	+ What happens when you take a *Touhou Project* game, take away the extra lives, disable bombs and continues, and add in several Classic Video Game "Screw You"s inspired by *Kaizo Mario World*? You get *Touhou - Unreasonable Mechanism*, a fan game that shows just how evil the genre can get when this trope is turned Up to Eleven.