Danmaku (also known as bullet curtain, bullet hell, curtain fire, manic shooters, or 弾幕) is a modern subgenre of shmup involving hundreds or thousands of bullets on the screen at once, a small (usually single-pixel) hitbox for the player, and the primary challenge of the game being to avoid bullets rather than to kill enemies. In some, such as Shoot the Bullet, you don't kill things at all, but exclusively dodge bullets by moving from safe spot to safe spot as the bullet patterns shift. It then becomes not so much a shooting game but a pattern recognition game involving careful movement between safe locations.
Notable danmaku games[]
The most notable danmaku games are the Touhou Project games of ZUN, but there are thousands of other games, many modeled after Touhou.
- Shoot the Bullet
- Mountain of Faith