Touhou 17 ~ Wily Beast and Weakest Creature - Extra Stage Perfect (MarisaW)

Wow, I made that way harder on myself than it ever should have been. Seems no matter how many times I tell myself I only get results as soon as I start actually having fun and feeling myself in-game for once, I keep going back to the same well of complaining because I don't get it in the timeframe I wanted it. I'll need to work on that because as far as I'm concerned, there's literally only 1 "easy" stage left of the 12 still out there.
I will note I had some unfortunate moments going for this. I nearly got the run within an hour of picking up the goal but my keyboard fucked up during the 8th non which isn't a hard pattern. I've known for a while my laptop is on its last legs and a more performance-heavy 2hu like this one really showed the worst of it. There were frame drops in this recording as well. I also had a situation where I was at the end of the survival and fired too early, which meant fireballs were shot and my hyper broke as a result. Wish I saved a replay because it seemed like a bizarre interaction anyway. Felt like a total slap in the face given I was really confident it was the one and then I didn't get the chance.
It's not as bad an extra as I remember, I did complain a ton about it on Discord but I think that was me complaining just because my mental was terrible. It's the same thing though where the hypers just make me feel that much more uncomfortable the whole way through and I just find it harder to enjoy as a result. Thanks to Echo Alert for the hyper route on survival, though. Definitely helped make this challenge a lot less stressful near the end.
Also forgot to thank Aevean for giving me like every route I was missing for the maingame (which was a lot lemme tell you). He probably halved the grind time compared to if I figured shit out myself.
The stage portion is kinda tricky. I feel like it'll suck for some of the weaker shots, really testing your raw dodging ability in the second half. Kutaka herself is trickier than I thought she'd be. I very much remember being stuck on her third spell, but how she went during this grind was like the total opposite.
I honestly think Saki's 1st spell is the hardest one. It feels like it has so much variance. I do like the idea behind it a lot, forcing your way through the bullets so you get something dodgable in the last part when the blue wave comes out, but sometimes you can work really hard to get a bad wave anyway or just bottomhug and get an easy wave. It feels too volatile for the idea to work. It was after capping this that I felt I had a run.
2nd spell kills people a lot, I think you just gotta learn to read those 3rd waves in particular. My capture was really scuffed on this run.
5th spell killed two runs, one because I didn't expect her to move at that angle and so quickly the second time she charges and the other time because I didn't get in position quick enough and got weird waves. I feel like this one needs practice just to be ready for the weird fringe cases like that but idk maybe my confidence was just shaken.
7th spell sucks. It's definitely hard and also really volatile. MarisaW can kill it before the 2nd wave reaches you but if you miss too much damage then just play defensively. If the yellows give you some breathing room then the reds can sorta take up most of your attention for that wave which I think helps a lot.
Survival killed two runs. One I mentioned, the other I just played bad. I still felt I was playing really shaky in this run but I got my rhythm going once I got to the waves that mattered. There was that one wave I killed like 2 wisps and lived. Yeah, that was careless.
If you wanna know what the route is for avoiding the forced hyper, you go into the survival with a hyper and collect everything until there's EXACTLY 1 resource token and 1 animal token. One the hyper runs out, the other two animal tokens appear. Collect them all once the hyper is over, one of each animal and there's no way you can hyper. Should be Wolf, Eagle, Otter, Resource. Saki drops a bunch of stuff to work with after 8th spell so I'd practice from there or from 7th spell so you can get that practice in as well and figure out how it all pieces together. Just make sure your hyper continues into the survival and that those resources remain. Too many and you run the risk of prematurely hypering, too few and you're praying you win the gacha.
So all that remains is stage 6. That stage won't go down without a good fight so we'll see what happens.

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