Thanks a ton for playing and giving some feedback. The visual spectacle of patterns made up of many many bullets is one of the main reasons I like Bullet Hells, and why I usually call them Danmaku.
Oh and I finally know itchio has a spoiler markdown, that’s fantastic to know. I’ll respong to your gripes in spoiler markdown too.
Spoilery stuff
I absolutely feel you on the pacing issue. It can take a LONG time to beat and when healing the duration of attacks can get tiring towards the end. I do have some ideas that might help in this case, but i got them like yesterday a few hours before release. But I might implement them when I get around to putting in spell practice. The idea is to have the second phase start at around 70/80% of full HP, cutting down a little on the easier start of that phase. And on top maybe reducing the maximum number of sequencial attacks a bit. I might also improve the healing factor a tiny bit. Currently the damage you take is 7, while the heal is at 10. I might put it to 12-13.
I absolutely get that the retry time of the Last Spell is rather long. But I really don’t wanna shorten it further so people don’t exhaust themselves when retrying for 100 times. On games with 1-5 second retry times I sometimes see myself get frustrated from the amount of attempts I do. I don’t give myself any breathing room and just pushing buttons constantly. which is rather stressfull.
However I absolutely get that waiting those 20 seconds when you know you are still atleast 50 attempts away from a win, doesn’t help learning such elaborate patterns. To help that I wanna make a spell practice. So after reaching far enough you can decide to replay a spell as long as you want without any waiting time.
On the “True_Final_Spell_Deluxe” with the returning bullets: Yeah, there is no build-in telegraph when they’ll hit you. The idea is that you find your own telegraph. In games with this level of difficulty that’s nothing too uncommon to do. I myself used either the lasers turning on as my jumping cue, or the bullets being visible again at the edge of the screen.
Though I think the latter one isn’t as easy to discover because of all the visual clutter. I probably should remove the double stars at the start. That way there’s a clean version of the returning bullets that people can more easily practice. Those double stars don’t add anything other than visual noise and lag anyways.
To finish this, thanks for playing my game and of course congrats on beating it. I am really happy to hear that you enjoyed it and reading the feedback was very fun.