Any tips for Satori's version of Mercury Poison? I feel as though if I see it enough times, I'll figure out how to dodge it, but I'm too lazy to play through stage 4 practice seeing as how the rest of it is pretty much trivial, so tips on where to look on the screen/what to look for would be much appreciated.
I made it to Radiant Treasure Gun 
...so yeah, biggest issue at the moment is resource collection in Stage 2. Specifically, is there an efficient route which starts the stage with just one red or green UFO (or one of each)? I haven't managed to get that extra red UFO yet and am wondering how essential it is.
I've had trouble with the very last fairy wave before Ichirin, but now it seems like it can be streamed in one motion from the bottom. And would the way I started Dipper Creeping Close lead to four-corners?
To be completely honest, your UFO route is overall pretty bad. You should pretty much only be getting reds, and should be wasting as few UFOs as possible. Right now, you're mostly getting them haphazardly, which WILL make your life hell if you aren't very, very comfortable with Shou/Byakuren. As someone who has pretty bad dodging skills, let me tell you that I basically bombed every pattern Shou/Byakuren had in my 1cc, which is basically where most of my bombs went during the run. You're dying at RTG because you pretty much ran out of resources. You can go much farther with a better UFO route. Basically try to pick up reds whenever, and utilize rainbows sparingly. Greens only in stage 6 of course.
As for stage 2, there are two essentially "perfect" (meaning you either don't waste any UFOs or waste 1, I don't remember which) routes you can take through it, one with two reds from stage 1, and one with one red and one green from stage 1. I'm not too comfortable with the first, seeing as how I believe the timing for that is far too strict for my tastes, but the second one is what I used for my 1cc. I double checked just now, and the path does indeed work for SanaeA, and I'm thus guessing for basically any shot type, so it should be fine. It goes like this:
-For the opening bit, do it as normal, but don't pick up a UFO token. Instead, stick with the rainbow token so it stays onscreen longer, and when the yin yang orbs start spawning, pick up the blue one to summon a rainbow UFO and stream the bullets from the bottom of the screen while killing the UFO.
-From there, pick up your 3 red tokens and summon a red UFO for the next wave of yin yang orbs. Pick up your two red tokens from the UFO and the one that spawns from the fairies.
-Summon a red UFO from the fairy after the next wave of yin yang orbs, and pick up the red token from that and the fairy that comes after. This part is a bit tricky since your timing for picking up the token immediately before Kogasa midboss is very tight. You may need to bomb to get it, but it'll be fine regardless of whether you do bomb or don't. From my experience, you won't be really hindered in stage 3 because you were down a bomb or something. One tip is that the UFO stays on screen long enough that if you time it properly, you can finish off Kogasa's non-spell and use the screen clear to run up and grab the token while it's red. If you aren't fast enough or something, you can totally use a bomb to skip the card. That way you won't get mad because of clip deaths/Kogasa being mean and moving away from you. Make sure you bomb after the card starts though. Otherwise you won't do any damage.
-If you do bomb the non-spell, try not to bomb the spell. You only need to bomb 1 in order to finish off Kogasa midboss fast enough to get enough enemies to spawn for the next bit to fill up a UFO. Using both would be a waste.
-Pick up the red token that Kogasa drops to summon a UFO. If you can pick it up immediately, then that's great, but I often find that it's too dangerous to do so, so it's fine if you wait a wave if you bombed Kogasa midboss, or finished her off quickly. If you didn't, then your red UFO won't get enough items to fill up. If you don't get enough point items to fill it up, you can try to salvage it by using a yin yang orb from the next part, but don't let the red UFO escape.
-You might need to bomb the next bit with the yin yang orbs and the fairies. You need to keep shooting, but the screen can fill up with bullets fairly quickly.
-Pick up all red tokens during the next bit. A bomb will help, and might even be necessary. If you can, try to only use one bomb during the entire stage portion. It's totally doable, and you get an extra bomb to use against Kogasa. I used it on her first card, but if you're safe spotting it, then you can get a free pass through one of Kogasa's final cards.
The UFO routes for the next 3 stages are much more of an open affair. You'll probably have to make adjustments on the fly. There are two reasons why you probably want this particular route through stage 2. 1) You waste exactly 0 UFOs, and you'll end up with almost maxed out lives when you get to Kogasa. 2) You'll start with exactly one red UFO token for stage 3, which, as it turns out, is the best starting set up for using UFOs to skip some of the harder bits of the stage. Less headache.
Recollection: Princess Undine on Lunatic - Satori's MarisaB 2nd spell (Touhou 11, Stage 4).
IMO that card is RNG BS, but maybe there is a way to get through it consistently. It's constantly wrecking me too, so I decided to study it a bit. I played a practice stage and timed it out to study it, and here's what I think:
-The card's difficulty is in large part determined by Satori's movements, similar to Yamame's opener. If she decides to move down, you're screwed. If she moves up, then the card is trivial. Basically you want to look for the cases where she moves down.
-For the most part, your most difficult situation is caused by the combination of Satori moving in a disfavorable way before she starts firing the lasers. She moves either two or three times between every laser fire, and your worst case scenario is something where she moves to the left, then right, then down, and begins firing lasers. You'll have the slower bullets trapping you and the lasers closing in very quickly with little space to maneuver.
-For the most part, the best/easiest things to read to determine where to move are the big and white bullets. Relative to the center laser she fires, you will want to be on the side opposite of them if Satori is near the middle of the screen, and I believe it's easier to dodge them while on the same side as them if she is higher up on the screen.
-I did notice that the above method isn't really foolproof, in that you will still end up with tough situations to dodge regardless of which side of the lasers you are on, but you will never hit either a wall or an absolutely impossible situation to dodge, which I think is probably most important.
-When Satori is near the middle of the screen, you absolutely don't want to dodge the small bullets by staying close to the center laser of the array that she fires. In my case, I found that I often got clipped by those lasers because I had to contend with both the slower, small bullets, the faster bullets, and the lasers constantly tracking my location. Try to squeeze through the small bullets to the other side if you see the opportunity.
Honestly though, I just plain have a difficult time with the card. It's a crap shoot for me.
Going to do an SA lunatic clear with ReimuB. Are there any good survival-focused replays available for that shot-type and is there anything else I need to know?
I used Nindella's because it was the first one I saw :V.
ReimuB's shots are weak, the homing/piercing does pretty much nothing, and the bomb sucks.
Don't DO make a plan around them (since the weaker bomb makes it harder to gain power and skip stuff). You WILL NOT be able to skip any cards with her bombs, and you'll likely have to use 2 to skip a card. If you do use it, you'll want to plan your uses, because like MarisaB, the bomb doesn't move with you and only covers a certain portion of the screen, and since bullet density is smallest near the bottom, you won't get much damage out of it. Your best card skip candidates are the ones where lots of bullets spawn more or less on top of the boss, like Okuu's first card. If you don't plan your bombs, think of it more as a life as opposed to a screen clearer. Small damage, small bullet clearing capabilities.
You'll want to get very accustomed to certain areas of the game. The last bit of stage 3 is, for me at least, especially harrowing because the lasers disappear while in the bomb's area of effect, and I use those to help judge where the ones that are coming at me are going to hit, which killed me many, many times. Other than that, nothing really comes to mind. It's just a hard shot type to 1cc with if you're coming off of shot types where bombs can really trivialize stages/bosses with little thought/planning (ReimuA and ReimuC).
