Highest bullet count in the series?

[Arcengal]

Which spellcard (or perhaps non-spellcard) has the highest number of bullets on screen at the same time?

I'm thinking IN extra's death-fairy might be the most likely suspect.

[nintendonut888]

If  you manipulate it the right way to cover as much of the screen as possible, the seeker part of ATWTBN is a good contender.

[LHCling]

Question: what do you count a laser as?

[Bananamatic]

Four Devas Arcanum "Knock Out In Three Steps" on Lunatic
MoF Momiji midboss
Event Horizon

Can't think of any others.....but that death fairy would be up there. :V

[Arcengal]

Question: what do you count a laser as?

One loooooooooooooooong bullet.
Even though the graze meter disagrees.

[LHCling]

...screw it, I can't find anything with lasers + a crapton of bullets.

I choose "Nirvana's Cloudy Way in Purple"_{UFO S6 SC1}. Lunatic, of course.

[Sapz]

Maybe the final phase of Hourai Elixir on Lunatic?

[Azinth]

Wriggle's first boss card(lunatic) if you time it out as a human character.   Oh, and the last wave of Flying Pheonix would probably be up there too.

[nintendonut888]

If we count StB, EX-6 is another possible choice.

And in a similar way to ATWTBN, Straw Doll Kamikaze is you manipulate it to have as many bullet on the screen as possible.

[?q]

Hourai Elixir Lunatic's last three seconds probably beats everything else mentioned.  It literally redefines micrograzing.

Although I'd expect Border of Wave and Particle, EX-8's last phase, or 10-1's last phase to come close.

[Drake]

Suika's Deep Fog Labyrinth
Komachi's 10-1 card
Eighty Million Holy Fuck This Card

[JormundElver]

End of Hourai Elixir lunatic also gets my vote.  Doesn't it bug out or something during the end and fail to launch out some shots?  I always figured that was from there being a maximum amount on screen or something.  I remember cause when I capped it there was a break in the rings of bullets heading toward me but not on the other side of the screen, so I always thought it was weird that it would fire a few half-rings... I dunno!

[nintendonut888]

Why would that be a bug? I think it's to give you a false sense of security actually. Like, you think it's over because the bullets are gone, so you aren't expecting to have to dodge a couple more.

[JormundElver]

I always figured it was either a bug or a shot limit in the engine because the missing shots only begin to occur when the whole screen is full of the blue bullets, and then they vary greatly in their amount and location missing.  It looks really bizarre so I've never fully believed it was intended.  I attached a crappy SS off youtube of the effect I'm talking about since both my external and slave drive decided to take a dirt nap in the past month.

EDIT: Actually now that I think about it def. changing my vote to EX-7 considering the nature of it.

[Ranmilia]

Most (perhaps all?) of the Windows games have a certain maximum number of bullets/objects onscreen (or possibly being spawned?) which, if reached, will prevent the game from spawning any more.  It's common to see this in action on a few specific attacks. 

- In SA, endboss Yuugi's second noncard, the one with all the lasers, will fail to spawn quite a few of the blue lasers if you don't kill the enemies firing the red ones.  This can be observed on basically any Hard/Lunatic score run.

- Similarly, Ichirin's midboss noncard in UFO generates too many lasers on Hard and Lunatic and you'll often notice several of the clusters failing to spawn, especially from the generation points above her (which are created last in her firing sequence). 

- Shoot the Bullet 7-2, Remilia's World in Nightmare, adds an additional line of kunai to each spiral every time a photograph is taken.  Score runs for this card abuse this fact by snapping a ton of photos until the kunai max out the bullet limit, forming nearly static lines and preventing poor Remi from firing any of her large round shots. 

There are a few other places this can happen, though it's not usually as easy to observe as those instances (for example, if you rotate StB 7-1 enough, Suika should stop generating shots at some point - but good luck seeing it.)  It seems to be an arbitrary limit imposed by ZUN, as Ichirin's midboss attack fired all its lasers without fail on Lunatic in the first demo, but started dropping some from demo 0.02 on.  It's also possible that this may be a limit on bullets being spawned, rather than being on screen, but I wouldn't know where to start testing this. 

[zaelie]

I dunno.. I'm not a lunatic player. Hourai Elixer final phase looks like it'd be hard to top. Though the SA world record had an insane graze amount. Maybe some of those graze farm spells?

Off topic: Speaking of shot count bugs etc, sometimes bullets bug out and I've seen some shots being placed under a shot fired before it, which looks out of place, yet on other identical iterations the bullet is above the one fired before it like it should be. This is noticeable in circular patterns since there's no easy fix, but I'm talking about in straight lines. Can't think of one off the top of my head though. I think it's truly a bug anyway so hard to replicate.

[Hawk]

Off topic: Speaking of shot count bugs etc, sometimes bullets bug out and I've seen some shots being placed under a shot fired before it, which looks out of place, yet on other identical iterations the bullet is above the one fired before it like it should be. This is noticeable in circular patterns since there's no easy fix, but I'm talking about in straight lines. Can't think of one off the top of my head though. I think it's truly a bug anyway so hard to replicate.

It's not a bug, really.  Bullets are handled with arrays.  Arrays are contiguous memory.  The first bullet spawned is placed in the first slot, the second in the second, and so on.  When a bullet is despawned, you don't remove that slot from the list, because that would be incredibly inefficient (you'd have to move every bullet past that index up one; O(n) is bad, bad, bad).  What you do instead is mark that slot as dead ("don't draw/collide/run ai with me") and add its index to an "open list".  Preferably, this open list has O(1) insertion/deletion times (or it kind of ruins the point).

You always draw from the beginning of the list to the end, in that order, and that's where the "bug" comes in.  It'll work fine at the beginning, when each new index is the one after it, but, once things at the start begin to open up again, things spawned later will be earlier in the list.

Now, I'm not 100% sure this is how ZUN does it, but I'm pretty certain--mostly because of this symptom.

[Poochy.EXE]

If I remember correctly, based on Japanese videos of the "Ultra Mode" fan patches and their comments, the bullet cap is exactly 2,000 bullets (and has been the same from EoSD through SA) ,which I'd guess would be the size of the array. The patches would create lots of problems with boss attacks attempting to spawn upwards of 3,000 bullets at a time, and any past 2,000 would just fail to spawn.

That said, off the top of my head, I also know that the end of Yukari's Last Spell on IN spawns 1,536 bullets (3 * 2^9), which I had calculated based on the Enemy Bullet Bonus. If Hourai Elixir has bullets failing to spawn towards the end, then it's probably hit the 2,000 cap.

[Bananamatic]

I've heard about Saigyouji Flawless Nirvana breaking the pattern at times....doesn't seem like 2000 bullets though.

[Poochy.EXE]

Looking at this Saigyouji Flawless Nirvana timeout video, it seems the pattern breaks only after a few cycles, once there are more lasers on screen. I suspect lasers are stored in memory with a series of coordinates of each "segment" of a laser, each of which takes up 1 bullet slot in the array. Further evidence of this can be found in Shoot the Bullet, where you can catch half a laser in a photo and that part of the laser will turn into a line of small particles and be absorbed, but the part of it outside the frame will still remain, resulting in a shortened laser.

I also suspect that lasers, when spawned, have a fixed "length", and most lasers just have this set to a high value to ensure it extends to the edge of the screen. (See "Kokkuri-san's Contract" and "Boundary of Humans and Youkai" for examples of when lasers intentionally end on-screen.) Additionally, lasers are still kept in memory even if their coordinates are completely off-screen, as evidenced in particular by the large number of mini-Cherry items that'll fly in from the sides of the screen when you beat Ran's Shikigami's Radiance "Fox-Tanuki Youkai Laser" or Yukari's Bounded Field "Mesh of Light and Darkness".

Also, if you look at the type of lasers used in Ultimate Buddhist, they start out thin, get wider towards their middle, and thin out again at the end. If you cut off a laser in StB, it thins out earlier as well. Now, if you look at the lasers of the same type in Saigyouji Flawless Nirvana, the ones pointing towards the bottom of the screen start to thin out before they hit the bottom, while close to Yuyuko, all the lasers are at the same width at points of the same distance from the center of the circle; the ones that are cut off by the top of the screen don't widen or thin out earlier. This leads me to believe that a lot of the 2,000 bullet slots are being wasted by the coordinates of off-screen sections of lasers, so there are technically 2,000 bullets at once; just most of them are actually off-screen laser segments.