Well this is one hell of a difficult game ! For some reason I felt compelled to try again, and again... and.. again... I spent about 2 and a half hour playing : the first 30min just to reach the boss, the rest desperately trying to beat it.
I've never been much of a bullet hell fan where there is so much going on that you have to purely focus on dodging to stay alive and whether the attacks land is mostly luck, unless you get the right power up at the right time.
The boss fight was such a high jump in difficulty curve, I tried over a hundred times but only a few attempts made it past the first few cycles. The attack patterns cover the screen so densely at first it felt absolutely impossible, though with some luck I found a safe spot for the close pattern and thought there might be one for the far one too.
I managed to find one eventually, though it took breaking the game by tabbing out for ~30s during the intro of the boss so it appeared way down to understand why it was so hard to find one : the last shot of the far pattern is aimed directly at the player, so depending on where you are at that time it can make or break the dodgeability.
Anyhow, I found a path that would let me get through both patterns unscathed when well executed, but little did I know this was this easy part.
By that time I had managed to beat the first phase a few times but promptly died to the various Omega Attack Pattern Of Unavoidable Doom the second phase has to offer.
I was starting to realize that the true difficulty of that first phase comes from managing to kill off the goons at exactly the right time that you can finish dodging the patterns before you have to dodge the bike being thrown back at you. For some reason there's extremely little time between the patterns, and once a pattern has started you have to get in position immediately and stop moving as even the tiniest movement almost guarantees getting hit. Adding to the goon dying at the wrong time issue, they don't stop their attack pattern when killed until all shots have been fired, making the already air-tight woven bullet knitting into a vacuum-tight one. On top of that the power ups being completely random throw in an extra layer of unpredictable-ness, which I found usually worked best by avoiding taking power ups altogether. And if that wasn't enough, the goons seem to randomly take damage in a completely untelegraphed way. I am not sure if it was a bug but a goon on the other side of the screen suddenly taking 3 quarter of its health instant and dying at a random point screwed me over many times.
Anyway, if I somehow made it past that phase, I still had to overcome the boss' patterns, which ask for even faster reactions, though there was a sliver of hope as one attack pattern seems to be bugged and doesn't deal any damage.
But getting that concentric fireball circles pattern multiple times in a row would be an RNGesus miracle. The straight line one is manageable if you don't get caught in a bad spot, but the lightning one ? At this point I'm convinced it's impossible to dodge.
Anyway I persisted, I had been going for about an hour and a half when I finally got to the boss again and seemed to have had the aforementioned miracle happen ! I definitely took my revenge on the boss :
I continued trying the fight for a good 30min after that as I was slightly disappointed in how it ended, but never got this lucky again, and I eventually gave up.
Well that was a wall of text ! A few things I wanted to mention :
- The voice clips are fun the first couple times but they get old very quick
- The player's hitbox is really unclear, even after all this time I was still confused as to why sometimes I phased through bullets just fine and sometimes I took damage from afar, the bikes especially seem to have very weird collision.
- You can collide with bullets that have gone out of the screen I'm pretty sure.
- The cutscenes were really cool, though maybe going a bit fast since they require finding text to read. I wonder what the cutscene after beating the boss looks like.