@Enns: No no no! No need to apologize at all. Didn't come across as insensitive or anything like that. It's not something I'm shy about sharing.

@Sparky_Buzzsaw: I feel like a jerk for asking something like that now, sorry if I was being insensitive about it. I'm glad you were able to adjust to it, sounds really rough.

@Enns: Yeah, back in 2003. I'm legally blind now, since even before that my astigmatism was godawful. But it's not so bad as it sounds - really, the only annoying part is that I no longer drive. I can still play games if I sit up close to the TV, and with magnifiers or large-font texts, I still do all the reading I want. It can sometimes interfere with my gaming habits, but usually there are so many games out that it's not really a concern at all.

@Sparky_Buzzsaw: I don't blame you in the least. You've had a detached retina? That sounds scary as hell. My eyes hurt just thinking about it..

I've never been much of a fan of bullet hells. The stress of the gameplay and the strain on my eyes combine to make one giant stew of rage and headaches. Seriously, they make me feel like I'm either going to have another detached retina or a heart attack. Or likely, both!

A Bullet Hell Blog Post

I can enjoy a shooter as much as the next person, but I've never cared much for bullet hells. Only having played a hand full of them I'm largely unfamiliar with the sub-genre. A lot of my favorite games have been anime styled but a majority of bullet hells I've seen seem to feature half naked anime girls as it's basis of "character design", at least that's the impression I have. That leads me to believe that the actual game part is likely to be trash while going for an easier sell to certain players. It might be unfair to size up bullet hells that way, browsing through xbox live arcade suggests not though. After stumbling into a BGM video on youtube, my curiosity for a particular game has opened up a genre I've stereotyped and written off since ever.

SUGURI's music won me over and I found myself searching youtube for more of it's tracks. Watching a few game play videos it's mechanics and fast pace piqued my interest and I decided to seek out the bullet hell. SUGURI being very Japanese and very indie I was a little uneasy about dropping 10$ on it over direct2drive, when it comes to indie games I tend to be cheap. After considering the game play videos I figured I've done worse (I'm looking at you Corpse Party) and bit the bullet. My initial impression was that this game is fucking hard. After five minutes or so I warmed up to the dash mechanic, it's music track lodging itself into the back of my head. I liked this, I like this bullet hell with a flying girl in it.

Dashing is the center point of everything in SUGURI. While dashing Suguri can evade, but more importantly completely pass through energy based attacks. When dashing through enemy attacks she builds up her special meter and heat percentage. High heat causes her to take a ton more damage so always dashing can be no good. Risk reward at it's finest the best way to fight a boss is to dash and charge up for special attacks giving you an offensive boost and much needed invincibility frames. A lot like deflecting shots with a beam saber in Megaman X Zero I was having fun nerding out with this game.

It's a bummer but I can never recommend this game to just any player. It's too damned hard. It has the trifecta of difficulty settings easy, normal, and hard. Only that they're completely misleading and should be normal, hard, and TAS required. To compare a little, while both require memorization I feel that Dark Souls asks for patience and methodical play, while SUGURI wants you to twitch and have some mutated form of peripheral vision. There's this one boss on stage-4 that's a complete jerk. I can go on for paragraphs about how much of a jerk Kae is but this blog post is starting to run long. On top of difficulty SUGURI's stages are extremely short, and there are only seven of them. I had subdued expectations to begin with so I'm sure it's contributing to the glow I have for this game.

After experiencing Hime's boss battle I have an urge to play more like it. Touhou has a trillion forms and disturbs me, but it does have excellent music and I know it's origin is in shooters, where can I even buy those gam- I just bought Jamestown this minute. I can't find the quick look Jeff did where he had a robot shooting hundreds of missiles. I've given credit card info to a Japanese site I can't even read to buy SORA, SUGURI's sequel. I'm making poor life choices thanks to flying anime girls.