Needless to say for an entire week I was trying to 1CC EoSD with 2 starting lives until I watched a replay and realized I'm a dumb.
I can 1-up you. When I decided to try out Touhou, I downloaded the EoSD demo and immediately went to options. Not knowing what "Player" meant, I set it to 1 thinking it meant 1 player only.
I think it took 2-3 nights before I realized why the demo was so unforgiving with lives.