I tried a couple more times to do that fight, even following a tip to buy more healing item to have on hand first. Still failed. I will probably try again another day, but it is not really fun for me, the fight mechanics. I don’t get the appeal of bullet hell and some of the attacks later in the fight seem designed in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to dodge everything because of the pace it goes at and things overlapping. I probably just suck at bullet hell though.

But yeah, the pacifist ideology of it kinda annoys me. I want to give it a fair shake to see it all the way through so I can properly judge what it’s actually doing in design and storytelling as a whole (partly cause the game designer in me is interested to learn from what it does well in design), but I wish there was a way to play it without the bullet hell stuff. If I end up giving up again, maybe I’ll just spoilers myself and watch a playthrough of the parts I haven’t seen.