I'll chip in as well. I'm no expert either though - only did enough to 1cc.
Stage 1 - yeah, basically do what Zil says. (on my run I opted to trance the midboss cuz I couldn't capture it consistently enough)
Stage 2 - yeah, kill midboss faster. I think you can still do it outside the bounce lines (that's what I did, and I didn't need a bomb to collect stuff after), but make sure you unfocus when you are at the edge to let homing add damage, and maybe, to be safe, dodge the very first wave inside the bounce lines.
Stage 3 - it's hard to do in practice mode, but in an actual run, since you carry over trance gauge from stage 2, you can trance the set of life-fairies before midboss Kogasa (make sure to trance right when the things come out, so that you can speed kill + have trance wear off to collect more spirits). Then, I think you should capture Kogasa's nonspell (really, just practice, the gap is big enough for Reimu to squeeze through) and then bomb Kogasa's spell to replenish trance (and kill it fast enough for extra fairies to show up).
Stage 4 - I don't see many problems here. If you have trouble dodging the midboss nonspell, during the stage, the trance before midboss can be activated a hair later to completely trivialize midboss's nonspell (sit where the bullets are fired so that when trance finish, all bullets are already fired and away from you). During boss, please please please capture the first spell and maybe last spell lol, cuz those are the easiest attacks. The nonspells and the 2nd spell you can bomb cuz imo they could be hard (I can't do them with any consistency at all).
Stage 5 - You are not collecting enough spirits. You can trance every single set of resource-fairies if you plan a route.
Replay:
http://replays.gensokyou.org/download.php?id=17883In the beginning, unfocus kill the semi-circle of spirits at shotgun range and then focus kill the big fairy, moving up asap to collect spirits. Do the same thing to the next set of spirits and big fairy. You should aim to kill almost all of that type of big fairies before they shoot more than 1-2 sets of bullets - this will drop more spirits and let you collect them, plus the fairies from the right side will drop a huge load of spirits letting you fill up trance gauge - you can only collect them if none of the big fairies are in the way.
Trance the first set of fairies - right when the come out. This will let the trance wear off when the laser-orbs come out, so that you can continue collecting spirits to trance again before midboss. Bomb the orbs if you have trouble killing and collecting spirits at the same time. You should be very close to full trance by the end of the laser-orbs.
If your trance gauge is NOT full, use 1 bomb and collect just enough spirits to get your trance gauge to full. Then, activate trance. The trance should carry almost all the way through the nonspell. This means you don't have to bomb the spell if you can capture it since you've already sped through half of the midboss fight, and thus you are almost guaranteed to have extra fairies after.
If you kill the midboss fast enough (by bombing the spell or trancing the nonspell), there will be some of those same big fairies again, which you can kill easily by shotgunning (which will be close enough to auto-collect spirits). Those fairies are important for getting to full trance gauge unless you are very good at collecting stuff from the circles of spirits that come after.
Lastly, you can kill the first wave of the end-stage fairies without bombing. This requires you to get to the left side of the screen _before_ any fairies come onto the screen. Try to aim and kill as fast as possible, moving through each fairy. When the 2nd wave come, activate trance, kill fairies on the right and left side before killing the one in the middle (or else some might run away, like in my replay).
Stage 6 - the latter half of the stage, you can activate trance a little bit later to maximize resource collection, provided that you can switch directions once. As for Miko...
Miko's 1st, 2nd, and 4th spell are easier than the rest. Get one or two of them to the level that you can capture consistently.
I think all three of them are relatively capturable, the 1st is really short - dodge 1 wave and you are done, the 2nd is just not getting blinded by those bright bullets, the 4th is just circling around the screen unfocused.
You can also consider capturing the knives if you feel confident.
For the last spell, there's a trick to avoid bombing when it switches phase.
Basically, you want it to switch phase when you aren't streaming a whole sheet of large round bullets, because otherwise you'll get screwed over as the phase-switch creates another sheet of bullets to stream. This means watching the health and stop shooting a little bit before the phase switches.
