Touhou 6 ~ Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - Stage 4 Lunatic Perfect (MarisaA)

Ever since I covered EoSD, I had this on the backburner as I knew it was a stage that wouldn't go down easy.
At the time, I was at the level where I could only realistically pass books like once a session. More recently I feel like I capture it more than I don't. Something that I imagine is a fluke but still, my mindset approaching that pattern has gotten a lot better, shooting down either book 2 or 3 (or both if they're near each other like in this run) and then ceasing fire and focusing 100% on dodging. If you can predict when the book will go down you can switch to focusing on dodging quickly.
At first it meant I'd enter the Patchouli fight immediately under pressure because runs passing books could be a long time apart. As I got better, this notion faded and I was getting a lot of Patchouli entries per session.
I felt like picking this up again since I got back into Touhou and it felt like a good alternate goal if I was ever tired of UFO, the main goal at the time. I started playing this more aggressively the last couple days because idk I just wanted it.
Yesterday I got 5 1 misses and my books rate was like 7/11 or something like that. Among the 1 misses was a Cromlech death which really stung but the consistency I felt was a good sign of how far I'd taken my dodging since I first started uploading stage LNNs.
I love the MarisaA Patchouli fight a ton and I wouldn't change it for the world, but yeah, it's hard. Has what I'd argue to be 4 of the hardest of all Patchouli cards and Forest Blaze which is sorta mid-tier. So I guess I can go over the spells and how I dealt with them:
Sylphy: Was the hardest one to get good at but I felt like it was the most consistent when I finally did. I tried to broaden my view and look for areas on the left that would indicate an easier space, moving aggressively into it. If you got caught in a bad cluster then there's a chance you get hit or you get pushed to the right and the spell gets a whole lot harder if you're forced to fight the current just to deal damage again. It's a very intense spell that'll beat down on you quickly and I feel like its approach is the most unique.
Radiance: Was the hardest towards the end because it has the highest difficulty variance of all the spells. The sheer randomness of the bubbles keeps you on your toes, but you can get caught out trying too hard to think outside the box. The spell can go from 0 to 100 really fast, so you'll need to adapt. Learning how to read the fireball trajectories quickly is huge in giving you more time to read bubbles and find an escape route. Very tanky as well, you need to be pretty aggressive to shoot it down, but do be careful if she moves low, it cuts the bubbles reading time drastically and they can make situations bad very fast.
Forest Blaze: Kind of a downtime spell but it's not free, it'll kill if you let it push you too much or don't pay enough attention. It plays like an easier Sylphy, luckily, so it's not like it's asking anything new from you.
Megalith: Kinda similar to Radiance in a lot of ways. Measured aggression is key here as well. It can be difficult to track Patchouli sometimes since the bubbles only spawn near her, so I find not straying too close to the sides too often is good for giving you more escape routes and it being a likely place for her to move back to is a plus. Try to read the bubbles early and learn to tell when a situation is going to wall so you can retreat early. Try to get back to a neutral point quickly whenever you retreat to a corner. And then there's the small bullets which aren't super noteworthy but you do need to keep tabs on them, it only takes one poorly placed one to make a situation scary.
Cromlech: Really strange spell that I like to approach with a macro-like mindset regarding the yellow bullets. They can bundle up a lot so I find it good to read where they'll bundle as early as possible so you can sidestep that headache and take a better gap. If you get pushed to a corner, try to be aggressive in moving back to centre, even if you miss damage. You don't want to dodge the yellow clusters in a corner. The fireballs themselves should be read quickly for a place where you can mostly ignore them, giving you more time to read the yellow mess. It's probably the easiest of the 4 hard spells but rng can be kinda unstable on it and the spell is definitely pretty claustrophobic.
I know that's a lot but hopefully someone at a loss on these spells will find use in my findings. I'm writing this tired as hell, hopefully it made sense. I play way better when tired for some reason. Finished runs happen way too often when half asleep for it to be coincidence. Anyway ...
zzzzz