I’ve played the Touhou bullet hell series (credentials: beat Perfect Cherry Blossom on Phantasm but haven’t played the more recent ones as much) and viewpoint on that:
When you’re first learning, your eyes are on your character. As you get better, your eyes are actually on a broader area that isn’t focused on your character, most commonly somewhat above them (since most bullets come from above).
While you’re learning on low difficulties, it suffices to keep your eyes on your character, see every bullet that gets close enough to be a threat, and reactively dodge it. On higher difficulties, you need to be thinking ahead, dodging towards areas of low incoming bullet density, reacting to high-level patterns, or manipulating shot patterns to not get walled off, and you can’t do this if you are tunnel-visioned on the small bit of screen around your character. Most commonly your eyes will be a few inches above your character watching incoming bullets, and you’ll be executing dodges based on a kind of peripheral vision and memory of where the bullets that passed through your focus one second ago were going. (It’s hard to describe).
I tried Touhou Perfect Cherry Blossom at one point and never got past any difficulty, so I defer to your expertise here. There’s a general skill of getting better at focusing one’s attention in tandem with getting better at execution and this post is only a first approximation.
I’ve played the Touhou bullet hell series (credentials: beat Perfect Cherry Blossom on Phantasm but haven’t played the more recent ones as much) and viewpoint on that:
When you’re first learning, your eyes are on your character. As you get better, your eyes are actually on a broader area that isn’t focused on your character, most commonly somewhat above them (since most bullets come from above).
While you’re learning on low difficulties, it suffices to keep your eyes on your character, see every bullet that gets close enough to be a threat, and reactively dodge it. On higher difficulties, you need to be thinking ahead, dodging towards areas of low incoming bullet density, reacting to high-level patterns, or manipulating shot patterns to not get walled off, and you can’t do this if you are tunnel-visioned on the small bit of screen around your character. Most commonly your eyes will be a few inches above your character watching incoming bullets, and you’ll be executing dodges based on a kind of peripheral vision and memory of where the bullets that passed through your focus one second ago were going. (It’s hard to describe).
I tried Touhou Perfect Cherry Blossom at one point and never got past any difficulty, so I defer to your expertise here. There’s a general skill of getting better at focusing one’s attention in tandem with getting better at execution and this post is only a first approximation.