Bullet Hell Monday



''"Why don't we play a bullet hell shooter? I made it for you who think bullet hell shooters are hard." - Masayuki Ito''

Bullet Hell Monday, as the name implies, is a bullet hell style shmup game that aims to appeal to both hardcore players, and newcomers to the genre alike. Developed by [Masayuki Ito] and released on October 3rd, 2016 on the Android Play Store, it has since garnered great success, with over 500,000 downloads, and a 4.7/5 star rating of roughly 15,000 reviews. The game is developed in the Unity Engine.

The game is a fairly straightforward bullet hell/danmaku style STG, however one of its most defining features is its Chapter select design. Instead of the common handful of stages played sequentially, the player is initially tasked with completing missions to progress through the game by completing specific objectives. Additionally, the game has a total of 9 unique ships to play as (2 unlocked by default) and focuses on rewarding the player with AP points from completing levels in order to spend on unlocking and upgrading ships.

Most of these mission objectives, referred to as Bonuses by the game, are achieved by clearing levels with under certain conditions. Conditions can range from as simple as clearing a level without taking damage, clearing it with a certain score or multiplier, defeating a certain number of enemies, beating a level within a certain time limit, and so on. Some objectives are hidden from the player until they are completed, adding a bit of a puzzle and exploration elements to the gameplay. Additionally, the game keeps track of how many bonuses were cleared, showing a completion percentage for each chapter.

Other modes such as Challenge and Extra are unlocked by progressing through the game, and offer more challenges for dedicated players, as well as online leaderboards for competition.

On May 24th, 2022, Masayuki Ito announced on their Twitter page that a PC/Steam port of the game would be releasing sometime later that year, and on August 12th, 2022, the beta Playtest for the PC port was opened. On September 11th, 2022, the PC port was officially released on Steam. The game has received a handful of updates since then, mainly pertaining to small gameplay fixes, and quality of life updates to various game options and settings.

Controls (Mobile)

 * Touch/Mouse/Arrowkeys: Move (and Shoot)
 * Touch/Z: Shot
 * Bomb/X:Bomb
 * Switch/C: Switch Shot Type
 * Left Shift (PC Only): Low-Speed Movement

As the game is designed for mobile devices, the game has a very simple control scheme. Shooting is automatic whenever you are touching the screen, and you move your ship by sliding along the screen. The game supports a wide range of customizable options, allowing one to tailor their control scheme to their liking. For example, the Bomb and Switch actions can be changed from a 2 Finger Tap, Button, or Double Tap control scheme, with options for adjusting sensitivity of ship movement, double tap inputs, and button placement on the screen as well.

Additionally, the PC port was designed with multiple control schemes in mind. The controls are fully customizable, as well as offering more options than the original. The ability to play with Mouse, Keyboard, Controller, or any combination of such are all supported simultaneously in gameplay. This allows for much more freedom of movement and control of the player's ship than most other shmups, and opens up the ability for advanced strategies to develop from these combinations of gameplay control styles (for example, using Mouse controls for fast quick movement across the screen, while using digital Keyboard input for careful and planned movement without using shot during dense patterns)

Challenge and Extra Modes
Two modes named Challenge and Extra can be unlocked by progressing through the game. Challenge mode offers a gameplay style more akin to traditional arcade shmups with 5 sequential levels to be played for a high score. Extra Mode actually has two distinct sub-type modes: Endless and Accel.

Endless 1 and 2 are endless modes, where the game increases in difficulty, with the goal being to survive the longest, and score the highest. Accel 1 and 2 are similar to Endless, however the difference is that the game speed increases over time along with difficulty. Like Endless, the goal is to survive the longest, and score the highest. In both modes, the player can select the starting difficulty/speed of the game before beginning. Setting the difficulty higher will increase the amount of multiplier gained from enemies, but at the expense of the bullet patterns being more difficult (or playing at a faster game speed in Accel).

Music Box
A Music Box option can be unlocked in the Shop once certain conditions are met (Clearing Chapter 510 ) The Music Box costs 200AP, and when unlocked, will add a new option on the main menu, indicated by a music note. Tapping the new option will then bring up a screen where you can unlock every soundtrack in the game for various AP costs. Once a track is unlocked, it can be listened to at any time from this menu.

Characters / Ships / Styles
There are 9 unique Ship Types in the game, with 2 unlocked at the beginning (Laser and Wide shot type). Each type can be upgraded in exchange for AP points in various ways from Level 1 to Level 10. Such upgrades include a stronger main shot, adding additional options, stronger bombs, a larger bomb stock, and an Item Auto-collect feature.

The 9 Ship Types are as follows:
 * Laser: A ship with a powerful narrow shot. (Unlocked by default)
 * Wide: A ship with a weaker wide-spread shot. (Unlocked by default)
 * Phantom: A ship that can place a decoy of itself to misdirect bullets while dealing powerful damage.
 * Homing: A ship with powerful missiles that home in on enemies.
 * Shielding: A ship that can shield itself from damage.
 * Time: A ship with a a shot that will lock-on and destroy enemies after a short delay, and weaker, wide rotating options.
 * Search: A ship with a shot that can sway form side to side, with options that will aim towards enemies.
 * Lock-On: A ship with a shot that will lock-on directly to nearby enemies.
 * Blade: A ship with a powerful short range shot, and a sweeping blade that turns bullets into items.

Each Ship Type also has a unique bomb as well, themed after its shot type.

The player is able to equip 2 different Ship Types at a time, and switch between them freely at any time when in a level. In the PC/Steam version, all shot types are available from the start.

Weapons
This section describes the weapons that you use in the game and elaborates on them further. Stuff like standard shots, focus shots, bombs, weapon pickups that differ in functionality, options, etc. This can be omitted if not relevant to the game in question.

Items
Items are geometric shapes dropped by enemies when defeated, or when converted to from cancelled bullets. Items act as the primary source of score in the game. Their value is affected by the current score Multiplier.
 * Small Items are worth a small amount of score. They are pentagon shaped
 * Large items are worth a larger amount of score. They are hexagon shaped

Items can be collected by moving into them with your ship, by using a bomb, or by using the Auto-Collect function when unlocked on an upgraded ship.

Bomb Items can also occasionally be rewarded by fulfilling certain conditions, such as destroying specific enemies, defeating a boss phase, or reaching a certain multiplier/item threshold in the Challenge and Extra Modes. These are indicated by a large box appearing with an audio cue. Once the box is destroyed, the player can collect it in the same manner as score items.

Rank
While the game does not have a traditional Rank system, the Extra Modes do to an extent, as the better and longer you play in Endless or Accel mode, the more difficult the game will become, either by increasing bullet pattern difficulty, or increasing the overall game speed.

In normal Chapter stages and Challenge Mode, there is no Rank system.

Chapter Mode
Chapter Mode is the main mode of the game to play. The player is tasked with clearing various missions and stages in order to progress to the next chapter, all the while earning AP (Ability Points) in order to power up their ship. Mission completion requirements are revealed gradually to the player as they progress, with some being hidden and up tot he player to discover how to complete (displayed "??????" question marks, or with important keywords hidden from the player until accomplished.)

There are 5 Chapters, each consisting of 10 stages each, with the last stage of a chapter being a boss fight. The boss stages are similar to the ones encountered in Challenge mode.

Completing missions adds to overall game completion percentage, tracked by the game. Completing all missions awards 100%. (Challenge and Extra Modes are not required to be played for game completion in this way, as well as fully powered ships, though having at least one fully powered ship type is necessary to achieve some missions tasks.)

Chapter Mode 100% Mission List
Below are collapsible tables consisting of all the missions listed by the game, sorted by chapter and stage. They are hidden by default to avoid spoilers, as discovering the tasks is part of the challenge in a way. Click the Expand button on a table to read its contents.

Scoring
Scoring in Bullet Hell Monday is relatively straightforward. Destroying enemies and collecting as many items as possible increases your score. However, score gained from these sources is affected by the Multiplier.

The Multiplier is a percentage number on the top of the screen that increases as you destroy enemies and obstacles. Destroying an enemy quickly will reward the maximum amount of Multiplier from them, with the multiplier gain decreasing the longer the enemy is on screen. Destroying enemies with a Bomb rewards double the amount of multiplier from them, however as the player has a limited supply of resources, strategic bomb use is required to maximize your scoring potential.

While Chapter Mode does not have a focus on scoring, the Challenge and Extra Modes are designed with high scoring in mind, reinforced by those scores being tracked on official mobile leaderboards (iOS and Android), and Steam leaderboards (PC), for their respective versions. Score is still important in Chapter mode however, both in order to achieve certain bonus requirements, as well your best scores being tracked on the result screens and in stage select in detail.

Score Grades/Ranking
Achieving certain scores will also award a letter and star grades in both Challenge and Extra modes. The letter rankings increase in the order C, B, A, S, and U, with a U++ ranking being the highest awarded by the game.

Letter grades are in sets of 3. For example, there are score requirements for A, A+, and A++ scores, which are relatively close together, whereas it takes a relatively larger improvement in score to go from A++ to S, and so on. Notably, The "U" set of score rankings are often significantly higher than the "S" rankings, effectively only being reachable through very strategic use of resources. The "U" set of rankings is intended as a "secret" for the player to achieve, as the star ranking only shows vacant slots as high as S++ (however in the PC/Steam version, there is an achievement for reaching a U++ grade, which is visible on the global achievement leaderboards).

Additionally, in Challenge ALL, your total score also has its own score ranking, separate from the stage rankings. This is to effectively grade how well the entire run overall scored.

Grade Requirements
The following is an incomplete list of score requirements to reach certain letter grades. Only A ranking and higher is listed for brevity.

Score requirements are listed in millions.

''Note: Easy and Hard rankings are still WIP. Values may be off slightly or missing.''

Strategy
See (Template Page)/Strategy for stage maps, enemy and boss descriptions, walkthroughs, and advanced play strategies.

''Advanced Strategy page WIP. Comprehensive basic strategies listed below.''

Basic Strategy
General strategy for the game is simply increasing your Multiplier as high as possible through defeating enemies quickly, using all resources available to double multiplier gain from defeated enemies, and collecting as many score Items as one is able to before the end of a stage. This is easier said than done, and discovering optimal bomb usage is necessary to reach the highest scores. Besides that, survival is generally the best way to increase your score, as surviving longer means more multiplier and items gained from defeated enemies, which means more score regardless of play. On some stages, specific enemies will drop Bomb Items for the player to pick up and replenish their bomb supply. Knowing when these occur and under what conditions is key to both scoring and survival play. In many cases, defeating a phase of the orb boss will commonly drop a spare bomb item in many stages of the game. Some other large ships and obstacles will also drop bomb items when destroyed.

For survival play, a good general strategy would be to utilize your bombs for scoring, typically reserving them towards the end of the stage for quickly defeating boss parts and converting large bullet patterns into lots of score items. Holding onto 1 bomb in stock for use as an auto-bomb is a good idea as well, as auto-bomb will consume all remaining bombs in stock. Manually bombing down to one as needed can mitigate this resource cost, and open up scoring potential in the stages.

Additionally, choosing easier ship types can make survival easier. Laser and Wide types are good general purpose, and are the default ship types. Search Type is only slightly weaker than Laser, but locks on to nearby enemies, and also has a very powerful and long-lasting bomb. Phantom Type can also be useful for its ability to place a decoy to easily misdirect aimed bullets, but can also take some skill to use as its shot is its most powerful when focused and close range. Shield Type is explained in detail below, but is very safe due to its shield allowing it to take an extra hit over other types.

All ship types have their strengths and weaknesses, however experimenting to find a combination of 2 that provide a lot of versatility is overall a good path forward. As mentioned earlier as well, keeping Auto-Bomb turned on can also assist both beginners and expert players alike, when utilized wisely.

Challenge Mode Strategy
For Challenge mode, general strategy applies, but routing your resource usage to gain the maximum amount of score from each stage is even more important. Particularly when attempting an All Stage clear, which requires the player to clear all 5 challenge stages in a row without life or bomb refills in between, similar to a traditional arcade shmup experience. An extend, or extra life, is gained every 20 million points when playing through the Challenge All Stage. This can be critical to high scoring routes as an extra life gives 3 more bombs to use to help build Multiplier and convert bullets into score items. In the mobile version of the game, an extra life is even more potent, as It gives an additional 3 bombs, on top of the 3 that are refilled after losing a life.

Extra Mode Strategy
For the Extra Modes, survival is the most important in acquiring a high score. As the modes continue endlessly, scoring potential is much higher (theoretically infinite). Because the levels do not end, focusing on pure survival is ideal, as again, surviving longer means more opportunity to gain more score and higher multiplier.

Additionally, Extra Modes offer 1 continue by exchanging AP, (or by watching an ad on mobile versions), which does not invalidate or reset your score. As such, players only seeking to achieve a high score should make use of this option on particularly good attempts of the modes. For those interested in a more pure "1cc" style challenge alongside scoring however, this can be ignored to simply go to the result screen with whatever score was obtained.

Shield Type
The Shield Type ship is unique, in that it gives the player a shield at the start of each life that protects from 1 hit. Upon being hit, the shield is broken, and will cancel bullets in a small radius around the player. If aiming purely for survival clears, use of this ship type can be recommended for an easier clear, as it effectively is 1 extra resource per life than you would have otherwise (and can function similarly to an auto-bomb)

An important thing to note is that there are separate leaderboards for not using the Shield Ship Type however (at least for Extra Modes). If you do not select the Shield type, your score will be updated to both leaderboards, with respective ranking for each. It should be noted that the in-game leaderboard icon will display your ranking for the overall leaderboard, regardless of if Shield was used or not in that playthrough. The reason for this is because having the shield gives a significant survival advantage, which can make a significant difference in the Extra stages. For Challenge Mode however, the leaderboards are not split, as it does not affect scoring in such a significant way by comparison (since in Extra, survival is scoring during long play sessions)

Continues
In the mobile verions, Challenge Mode does not allow the player to use a continue once defeated, however in the PC/Steam version, you can use as many continues as you like to keep playing, at the cost of some penalties. Continuing will result in your score being reset to 0, an additional number denoting how many continues were used being added after your score, will disable being able to save a replay, as well as the score being treated as an Unofficial Record on the results screen. Additionally, scores set using continues will not be posted to the leaderboard. The game will notify you of these penalties to using a continue before allowing you to (and since the 1.2.1 update, also requires the player to hold a button to confirm).

Advanced Strategy
Blade/Time (or Time/Blade) type combination is regarded as having the highest scoring potential in the game. This is because of the long duration of the Time and Blade bombs, allowing for one to have longer windows for gaining double multiplier bonuses from defeating enemies as the bombs are active, as well as Blade's unique ability of periodically cancelling bullets with the sweeping blade when firing, and for the small cancel when switching to it initially. Additionally, Time bomb is used for quick positioning of the ship to near instantly defeat some waves of enemies with Blade's high power shot, in combination with the invincibility frames it gives. This was nerfed in the PC version somewhat, making score routing much more difficult due to shorter invincibility when switching weapons. The small cancel radius when switching to Blade though can somewhat mitigate this difference, but not entirely.

Development History
If available, you can include information here about the hardware, the development of the game, and its general reception. Try to have as much information in this section cited as possible.

Version Differences

 * Include information here about differences in a game between various versions. This includes regional differences, patch updates/bugfixes, and the like.

Gallery
See (Template Page)/Gallery for our collection of images and scans for the game.

Video References
If the game already has an existing entry in the Video Index, please link to the page here. If you want to link to smaller clips perhaps not included in the Index, you can also leave them here.

 (There is probably a better way to sort all the info for these replays, though I'm not sure the best way to go about it. A dedicated Video Index page should definitely be made at this point though. For now, have just been documenting a handful of notable replays I can find on Youtube here. Can probably also use tables like these to document the leaderboards as well in a separate page or section. It is a lot of scores to go through though, so probably best to only document the top 10-20 of each difficulty/mode + any that have existing videos as well. ~Xeirla) 

Other/Trivia

 * The Bullet Hell Monday Playtest for the PC/Steam version was opened on August 12th, 2022. In this version most modes are locked, only the Tutorial and Challenge 1 being available. Additionally, all ship types were unlocked at max level for the player. The intent was to test the stability of the game, particularly concerning general gameplay, replays, and the leaderboard.


 * Masayuki Ito has responded very well to player feedback throughout the series, which is most apparent in the PC/Steam version of the game. During the playtest, many highly suggested features and quality of life changes were incorporated into the game, resulting in things such as more settings/options for different control schemes and setups, as well as 100 replay slots (where originally only 20 were planned).


 * The mobile version does not feature a True Last Boss at the end of a Challenge ALL playthrough. Its inclusion in the PC version is presented as a "glitch" of sorts, and is a formidable challenge to an unsuspecting player!


 * Masayuki Ito was the sole developer of the game, and thus created all the graphics and music as well. His youtube channel has the full OST of each game he has developed, organized into playlists as well for convenient listening. The official OST is also available for purchase or streaming on a variety of music platforms, but most notably on Soundcloud, and via Steam for the PC version.


 * Cool facts and random tidbits go here!

References & Contributors

 * 1) Remember to include everyone that you can in your credits if they contributed information! | Having links handy is even better, when available.
 * 2) If you are a primary source of information for a game, be sure to link to your Shmup Wiki user account by including a link to your profile, such as: (Your Name)
 * 3) And while you're at it, make yourself a little profile page (if you want, of course)! As a contributor, you deserve to be recognized for your efforts.

Masayuki Ito's (Developer's) Twitter: https://twitter.com/dot_decluster Masayuki Ito's (Developer's) Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/masayukiito

US Google Android Play Store Page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.msykit.Stg1u&gl=US

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2003660/Bullet_Hell_Monday/

Initial PC/Steam port announcement: https://twitter.com/dot_decluster/status/1529041828447928320

Contributors: Xeirla Also special thanks to the players who have posted gameplay footage and guides on Youtube, as well as Masayuki Ito as the developer of the game, as well as publicly uploading the OST to be listened to freely as well! ~Xeirla


 * Original template page assembled by CHA-STG and Plasmo.