Gensou Shoujo Wars/Danmaku

Description

Literally meaning "curtain fire", danmaku is a general Japanese term for the hail of bullets that cover the screen in any given STG. In order to replicate this, all enemies in this game are capable of emitting fields of danmaku represented as colored squares. Any player units standing in these fields will suffer generic Defense, Evasion, and/or Movement penalties, and sometimes (or often, in the case of bosses) a special penalty too. Danmaku fields can stack, which is visually represented as the colored squares being brighter.

The penalties tend to scale with difficulty, as does how many fields go up at once. On Lunatic, it's not uncommon for every single enemy to put up some danmaku.

This system is fairly harsh on both Supers and Reals alike, thanks to the Defense and Evasion penalties. It also makes blowing through boss health bars riskier than your average SRW, as each bar is associated with a new spellcard and thus a new danmaku field. This isn't to say that purely offensive strategies aren't effective (far from it, on Normal at least), but being a little more cautious really can save you some trouble.

Counters

There are three separate ways to handle danmaku fields. The first, and most obvious, is to simply destroy the unit responsible for the field. This is obviously harder for bosses, and even difficult for grunts on higher difficulties (where they will defend). The second is to use a Bomb, a consumable resource gathered from enemies marked with a green 'B' (the number of which decreases on higher difficulties). At the cost of 10 Power, the user will fire off a generic MAP attack that damages enemies and clears out all danmaku in a four panel radius.

The third method is the most all-purpose: Focusing. Represented as a white dot on the character's map icon (a reference to the Touhou series, where Focusing exposes a character's hitbox), Focusing allows a character to ignore all generic danmaku penalties and gain a flat +10% to Accuracy. It also lowers their Movement to whatever their Focused Move happens to be (in parenthesis next to their Unfocused Move on the status screen), costs 10 MP a turn, and prevents them from fully dodging attacks. If they ever dodge, they will take Evasion Rate% of the original damage. So if a character were to graze an enemy attack that would have done 1000 damage with a 50% accuracy rate, they would take 500 damage. Thanks to grazing, it's actually not advisable for characters who rely on Double Image to stay Focused.