Beginner Guide

This page is a work if progress

if you want good food, let it cook. I am not fixing the typo in the header

Introduction

Which people are the target for this guide?

This page aims to teach beginner players about touhou shoot em up games, in the context of non-casual play. Ignoring subjective enjoyment, when it comes to discussing improvement at the game, casual play is extremely inefficient (but not impossible).

Many believe Touhou games to be inhumanly hard, but the truth is that "good" touhou players often neutralize patterns by memorizing key bullets, or just bombing through anything dangerous. Good players know how to avoid danger, instead of brute forcing through it. Teaching how to do this and embracing this mentality will be the focal point of the page.

Anyone can become good at these games with the right mentality, but few enjoy the dedication to learning patterns instead of just casually playing around.

It's also worth mentioning that one can choose to experiment with things that aren't recommended here if they feel like it, subjective enjoyment is important to avoid burn out.

To end this, consider this page if you are thinking of playing with more dedication and the intention of improving.

Touhou basics

General game mechanics

While specific controls can vary from game to game, the general keyboards bindings in Touhou games are as follow:

• Arrow keys to move the character around and in menus
• Z to fire your shot type, as well as confirm a selection in menu
• X to use your bomb, as well as abort a selection in menu
• Escape to bring up the pause menu; starting with Perfect Cherry Blossom (7) pressing R immediately restarts an attempt.
• Shift causes the character to enter Focus Mode. Starting with Mountain of Faith (10), this also slows down replay playback, although this feature can be retroactively added into the older Windows games.
• Control fast forwards through dialogue (and staff roll once it has been seen at least once; in newer games this also speeds up replay playback)

Please note that while controller buttons can be rebound in nearly every game, keyboard rebinding is natively supported only starting with Unconnected Markeeters (18), with older games requiring third party tools to rebind on a keyboard.

Focus mode is an important Touhou mechanic. It was introduced in Lotus Land Story (4), where it simply reduces your movement speed, allowing for precise movement. In Embodiment of Scarlet Devil (6) it also squeezes the character's shot, allowing for better damage output on bosses, but it wasn't until Perfect Cherry Blossomf where focus mode started to work like it does in modern games: significantly modifying the shot type and revealing the character's hitbox. In certain games focus mode also is responsible for further things, but those will be listed on the relevant articles. Focus mode is a mechanic that needs to be learned with practice: overusing it is bad, as certain attacks require the Unfocused speed to dodge, but underutilizing it is also a bad habit some new players can fall into, as the unfocused speed makes it easier to run into stray bullets.

Resources is a term referring to the player's lives and bombs. These are in most games (but not all of them) shown on the right side of screen, with bombs below lives (except in the few games where bombs are not their own resource). Prior to Undefined Fantastic Object (12), they are represented by amount of present icons, but starting with that game all icons are already present and instead fill up as player gathers items that grant them. Lives and bombs together can be written using X/Y notation (for example 0/0 refers to a situation in which player is on their last life with no bombs left).

Lives are basically the amount of times a player can die before a game over occurs, while extend refers to the process of obtaining lives in the game. The specifics vary from game to game, but obtaining an extra life is always signified by a sound effect (and a text pop-up in later games). In most cases a run starts with 2 extra lives, but prior to Mountain of Faith, it is possible to modify that value. Please note that the icons indicate spare lives - that is, game over only occurs after dying with no icons left.

Bomb refers to the special attack that the player character possess that generally clears away bullets on screen, grants a period of invulnerability and deal damage to any enemies in its range. Please note that in most cases, any leftover bombs are lost on death, as dying resets the amount of bombs. Prior to Perfect Cherry Blossom, the player can modify amount of starting bombs.

On a Game over, the player is asked whether or not they want to Continue. The specific details might vary in some games, but in most cases it puts the player back where they died with starting amount of bombs and lives (including any extra ones in the games that allow to modify these values) while resetting their score. The amount of continues in a game is usually limited and amount of used continues is indicated by the singles digit in score (as all other forms of score are in multiples of ten).

Continuing in most games prevents the player from seeing the good ending of that shot type, and in Story of Eastern Wonderland (2) and Lotus Land Story it also prevents from seeing entirety of the game, by ending the game before the final boss's last phase and the last stage, respectively. The amount of continues in a run is also indicated with "Xcc" notation, or "X credit clear", with 1cc referring to no continue clear (where credit is a leftover term from arcade days of having to insert quarters to play game; consequently no continue clear uses only the very first quarter that launches the game).

Shot type refers to the character used to perform a run: in games with multiple choices on a character, they are often distinguished by adding letter after the name: for example, in PCB, MarisaA is Magic Sign, while MarisaB is Love Sign. Picking a shot type is an important choice as, to put it simply, shot type vary in effectiveness. Continuing on PCB example, ReimuA has homing properties on her shot (that is, the bullets will automatically target enemies) while SakuyaA's unfocused shot spreads out at a massive angle (while focus shot locks onto enemies), but in return both have below average damage, making them more effective against stage enemies. In contrast, both of Marisa's shots are pretty narrow, but deal great damage, which is useful for bosses. Further more, each of the characters in this game starts with a different amount of bombs: while MarisaB's bombs are strong and last a long amount of time, she starts each life with only 2, whereas Sakuya's bombs do not deal much damage but can be used 4 times per life, noticeably increasing the amount of mistakes that she can make compared to Marisa. Not only that, but in certain games, the chosen shot type affects encountered Spell Cards, which can make that fight noticeably harder and thus affect the difficulty of the game overall.

Spell Card and non(Spell Card) refers to boss enemy patterns in Windows games. The latter refers to unnamed enemy patterns that are usually simple, while the former refers to named attacks that in most cases are also accompanied by boss portrait and change in backgrounds. In case of Extra Stage, the boss will also be immune to bombs only during the former. As this system does not exist in PC-98 games, the bosses are instead referred to by their attack phases (which may or may not consists of multiple attack patterns).

Stages consist of enemies that can shoot bullets (but don't have to), that the player then has to dodge. Enemies for most part use less complicated and easier to dodge patterns than bosses, with the danger coming from these patterns overlapping. Most stage enemies don't have much health and are easy to shoot down, but certain enemies spawn on stage with more health (or invincibility frames that stop them from being shot down early) and more complicated patterns, as a sort of stepping stone between a stage enemy and a midboss (in most cases they can be distinguished by the latter nearly always having a health bar).

The term Boss refers to, like in other video games, enemies with increased durability and more complex attack patterns. In most Touhou games, boss refers to the enemy you have to defeat to progress in the game, but in case of versus games, a boss instead refers to the enemy that the opponent can send over to a player's screen. In typical games, it is possible for a stage to have a Midboss in middle of it before a proper boss; though there's no hard rule for how a midboss works: it is possible for the stage to start with a midboss, for a midboss to appear right before the proper boss fight, for a midboss to appear more than once during a stage, or for a midboss to be an enemy with no hitbox whose attacks have to be simply dodged. A later stage boss will have more patterns in their fight than an earlier stage boss (with the exception of oldest games, where amount of enemy patterns doesn't always follow an increasing curve), but this is not always true for midbosses.

In all games except Story of Eastern of Wonderland, the boss health is visible in-game, though how exactly it works varies from game to game. In PC-98, the bosses have one single health bar for the whole fight, but in Windows games they are capable of having multiple health bars that represent their patterns. Often a health bar in Windows games will consist of a single Spell Card and a non preceding them, but there are cases where it can represent just a non or a Spell Cards, without the other, or more than one of them; this can be caused by the boss using multiple of such in a row, but not necessarily. Please note that the total health is not drawn to scale: for example, Stage 2 boss in Perfect Cherry Blossom's final health bar consists of two Spell Cards that occupy one quarter of it, with the remaining three quarters consisting of a non, but the latter section will be depleted much faster than the former.

In Windows games, the way a health bar is represented changed over time:

• In Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the current health bar is always white, with no distinction between nons and Spell Cards, while the amount of remaining ones is indicated by the yellow number in upper left corner.
• In Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night, the Spell Card part of health bar is red (with a darker shade of red to represent a second Spell Card), with the remaining ones instead being indicated by smaller health bars in the same point (in case of Extra Stage, this makes each such segment extremely thin, as the game tries to fit all of them in the same amount of space as one extra health bar).
• From Mountain of Faith to Undefined Fantastic Object, the amount of remaining health bars is instead represented by stars under the boss's name. In most cases, the health bar has white section for nons (with blue shade to represent further nons in a single health bar) and orange for Spell Cards, but in case of Subterranean Animism's Stage 4 boss, the final health bar is blue (or purple if playing as ReimuA).
• Starting from Great Fairy Wars (12.8), the boss health is now instead indicated by a solid orange circle surrounding them, with any transition between attacks being indicated by purple notches instead, with the remaining health bars being shown in the same place as before (with exception of Great Fairy Wars, which does not show them). Unlike the previous iterations of health bar, there are two differences:
  • If a fight consists of fighting multiple bosses, they will have separate health bars, though in Ten Desires (13) only the main boss health bar is visible. Whether all of them have to be defeated or just one depends on the attack itself.
  • The purple notches will also indicate transitions between phases of an attack that gets stronger as it gets low on HP, which beforehand were not marked in-game.

Almost every boss pattern also has a timer, which corresponds to the amount of time that a boss will spend using that attack. Running out of time will fail the pattern and cause boss to proceed to their next pattern (though in case of certain midbosses, timing out their first non will instead skip the fight altogether). In Windows games, this timer is visible in the upper right corner prior to Great Fairy Wars and in middle of the very top of the screen since then. In the PC-98 games, it is not visible, and in Highly Responsive to Prayers (1) as well as Story of Eastern Wonderland, the games are inconsistent on which attacks have timers and which don't (additionally, some boss phases in PC-98 instead end after using specific amount of attacks, rather than a fixed amount of time); this timer is not to be confused with the stage timer in the former game, which upon hitting 0 spawns increasingly dense rain of pellets. Additionally, as mentioned above in the boss section, during certain attacks, the boss does not have a hitbox to be damaged, in which case the player has to let the timer expire. When the timer reaches 10s or below, it will turn red and each passed second will be signified with a sound effect (which becomes more pronounced at the last 5 seconds). The length of timer is individual per pattern and can be as short as 10-15 seconds or as long as 180 seconds (although the visual stops at 99 seconds).

Item refers to collectables dropped by enemies (most often after depleting their health bar). Specific items vary between games, but the common ones are:

• Red P items, which increase the character's power; large items increased it by more at once. There are also yellow F power items which immediately max out power, but are rarely spawned during regular gameplay and most often exist to regain power after using a continue.
• 点 (point) items, which increase the player's score by a specific value (the higher they are collected, the better), and in some games are the main source of extra lives. In Windows games they are blue, but in PC-98 games they are instead purple.
• Extend items, which are pink-ish. They are squares with 1-up written on them; starting with Subterranean Animism (11) they can come in pieces, which are instead pink heart-shaped outlines.
• Green bomb items; in older games they are green squares with B on them, but starting with Undefined Fantastic Object they are instead star-shaped with an S on them (starting with that they also come in pieces, which are just green star outlines)
• Bullet cancel items, which are generated when boss enemy bullets are negated by something (such as depleting enemy health bar or bombing) and are always auto collected, with their exact appearance depending on the game. They do not exist in PC-98 games, but a similar mechanic exists in Lotus Land Story and Mystic Square (5), where points are awarded for bullets present during a phase transition.

Hitbox refers to the actual part of an object that actually interacts with other ones and doesn't have to be consistent with the object's graphic. For example, player's hitbox is just a small part of their sprite, and similarly enemy bullets hitbox does not always cover the whole sprite. Enemy bullets come in many types and shapes; generally, larger bullets allow the player to get inside them to a certain degree, in contrast to smaller bullets where the hitbox covers a larger portion of the sprite, though the exact hitbox varies (and in worst cases can be simply not intuitive at all). In older games, all hitboxes are square-shaped instead of circle-shaped.

Point of Collection (PoC) is the fan term for mechanical that was introduced in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and eventually officially named Item Get Border Line; this refers to the invisible line above which all items are attracted towards the player character. Starting with Mountain of Faith, this line is briefly displayed at the beginning of Stage 1 and is always activate; from Embodiment of Scarlet Devil to Imperishable Night, there are criteria that have to be fulfilled to activate it. This line serves as a high risk, high reward system, as sometimes it might not be possible to manually collect all the items (plus collecting point items higher makes them more valuable), but moving the character high on the screen usually reduces the time one has to react and dodge enemy attacks.

Games to start with

Everybody knows that not all Touhou games are equal in difficulty. Picking the easier games leads to faster improvement, picking harder games as a beginner needlessly slows down the process.

There is no perfect game for beginners, most are fine and have tiny cons. What we can do is list games that aren't recommended:

PC-98 (1 to 5)

The first 5 games, developed for NEC PC-98 series of computers are, ignoring emulation barrier of entry, overall quite unique and weird with their mechanics. 1 is a block breaker with shmup elements; 2, while a shmup game, is missing many features that make playing it awkward even for this era; 3 is a versus game (which play differently, as listed below). 4 and 5 are more in line with Windows Touhou games, though still missing few defining features, with 4 being the better option as it gives out resources with far less effort compared to 5.

Versus games (3, 9 and 19)

Versus games in single player are Player vs AI. The mechanics in those games are also extremely unique and tied to the VS concept, the gameplay loop is also completely different compared to main games.

Scene games (9.5, 12.5, 14.3 and 16.5)

The scene games refers to games in which the player is tasked defeating enemy patterns on individual basis. While this makes them somewhat similar to practice in the main games, these games do not have difficulty modes and simply start with low difficulty patterns and increase the complexity every once in a while; endgame scenes can easily take entire hours of attempts for the very first clear.

Great Fairy Wars and Sunken Fossil World (12.8 and 17.5)

While Great Fairy Wars is a regular shoot em up like mainline games, it is entirely balanced around learning its freezing gimmick, to the point that unlike other games, completely abandoning it is humanly unviable. Additionally, since it is only 3 stages long, the difficulty spikes noticeably with each stage, rather than being more gradual. Sunken Fossil World is a boss-only action game that plays nothing like the other Touhou games.

Touhou 11, 12, 15

These games are commonly considered to be not only the hardest but also the least beginner-friendly (punishing mechanics, scarce resources with suboptimal gameplay). Recommended to play only after experiencing the easier games.

Anything that wasn't listed is fine to play as a beginner.

Difficulty choice, first goals, "beating" a game

The focus in this section is to clarify some misconceptions or just bad mentality in the general fandom about what is an acceptable way to beat a Touhou game. These misconceptions indirectly gatekeep some people from playing Touhou without them even realizing.

"Beating" a touhou game can be as simple as just finishing the current run and defeating the final boss, this is the basic definition of Clear.

There are people that believe that a Touhou is beaten only when done with a single credit (1cc). 1cc is what in most games awards the good ending and unlocks the Extra stage, but really the best basic definition for beating a game is just whether the final boss is defeated or not, restricting the idea of "beating" to only 1ccs is potentially de-moralizing to a beginner that can't clear with just 1 continue, for no good reason.

The recommendation for beginners is:

• To start on Easy if you have never played a shoot em up game, Normal if you already played a shoot em up game. Attempt to 1cc the game.

• If either goal of 1cc seems too hard after some attempts and practice, lower the difficulty. Easy mode should clear with as many continues as needed, Normal mode can either do as many continues as needed, or drop down to Easy.

Contrary to what many believe, and what some old memes say, most games do not punish for playing on Easy. Lotus Land Story, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil and Mountain of Faith are the only ones that make it impossible to see the good ending. These three, as well as Subterranean Animism, Undefined Fantastic Object and Ten Desires, also make it impossible to unlock Extra Stage (and in the case of the later three's Extra stages are on the harder end). THERE IS NO SHAME IN PLAYING EASY MODE, DON'T GIVE UP ON TOUHOU IF YOU CAN'T PLAY ON NORMAL MODE!

The importance of practice and bombs

PRACTICE

Now for the juice of the guide.

Anything practice related should be tackled with thprac in mind, as it makes practice easily and efficiently accessible.

Wise words

Most beginners understand that practice leads to faster improvements, but few can grasp the size of impact it truly holds. When played optimally, the mentality for Touhou games should be "practice and memorize things to minimize the amount of raw dodging I have to do". When players practice correctly, everything that isn't 100% rng bullets can be made easier, and in some cases even effortless. The key here is CORRECT PRACTICE.

Correct Practice

Lets say a player wants to practice to learn a certain pattern, without a plan in mind. The worst case scenario would see the player flailing around and hoping they maybe figure out something, learning nothing but succeeding just a few times will make them think they understand the pattern better, when in reality, they don't.

The slightly less bad scenario sees the player mostly understand the pattern, but misunderstanding certain proprieties, thinking they figured out everything needed, they don't realize that there is much more that they can do to make it easier (inefficient practice).

The right path to correct practice should lead the player to look around for information about patterns that truly explains EVERYTHING that is needed to make it as simple as possible. The research should lead to this wiki, and reliable players in the community. The idea now is to apply what is learnt from the correct source, focusing on understanding why it works well.

This whole process becomes both easier and intuitive as players improve their game knowledge. In a way, this whole practice is game knowledge acquisition itself, no better way to understand the game than thinking about how to make life easier.

Deadly misconception

Addressing a vital misconception about practice and its effect on "skill".

Beginners may think that practicing doesn't actually make one better at the game, it's just memorizing things, not improving dodging. This entire mentality is fundamentally flawed by principle, because like already stated many times, Touhou is not just about dodging, it's the combination of many aspects. Focusing exclusively on dodging is one of the aspects that is developed naturally while learning everything else, by practicing strategies that ironically, make you dodge less. For people that really want to practice rng dodge, there is always the option of grinding the rng heavy difficult patterns over and over.

At the end of the day, even when refusing to "simplify" the game through strategy, casual players that play enough will eventually start subconsciously applying strategy without even realizing it.

Conclusion

How much should players practice? As much as needed at their own discretion of enjoyment. There are people that do minimal correct practice, but for the most part spam credits. There are also the so called practice parakeets that spend 99% of their time practicing, to then clear the goal in just a few credits.

BOMBS

Following the "minimize raw dodging" mentality, using bombs is the next important thing to discuss.

Reaction bombing sucks

Let's define what we mean by "reaction". We are not talking about reacting to the sound of getting hit and deathbombing, that is humanly impossible in what is, for most games, a 8 frame window of time to react to a sound, and this isn't even factoring in bomb input time. What we mean by reaction is the more intuitive, visual reaction to dangerous bullets, which sounds like a logical way to use bombs, only bomb when in immediate danger of a bullet about to collide with the character. But this is only in theory.

In practice, no one is perfect, and attempting to react to danger will lead to accidental deaths with bombs in stock, effectively wasting bombs. This method is also inconsistent, and we do not want this, players MUST STRIVE FOR CONSISTENCY to improve at Touhou games.

Ultimately, the ideal way to use bombs is to plan them ahead of time, but how can a player know when to bomb ahead of time?

Planning bombs

Following practice to learn patterns, players should know which patterns are trivial or very simple, the patterns that aren't part of that group are the ones that should be considered for bombing.

What might seem logical is to prioritize bombs on the hardest patterns, plan ALL bombs on everything hard. As players choose patterns to bomb the choices will gradually de-grade in difficulty. If some patterns have too much health, using more bombs is still a good idea, not dying is the top priority. This train of thought is almost perfect but has 1 issue:

• This process often results in a late game full of bombs, and an early game with less bombs, any accidental death to the easier patterns in the early game will cost bombs in stock. A solution to this might be to give up certain bombs in the later part of the game, move them in the problematic early game patterns, and increase early game consistency. Early game consistency is very important, the more players get out of the early game, the more chances they have at the actual challenging later half of the game.

Once the bomb is planned, don't even try to dodge the pattern, just bomb as planned, even if if it looks like the hard pattern is giving good rng this credit! (dies). We go back to dying randomly thinking "damn I should have reacted faster, I know this is hard, and yet I still wanted to do it without bombs...". Greed killed the cat.

Another deadly misconception

Beginners might think that just bombing everything difficult will not lead to improving at Touhou.

Similarly to what has been written already, making your life easier is only a sign of game knowledge and being good at Touhou. Using bombs effectively teaches players how to manage resources, a skill that for many is just as impressive as good dodging.

The players that avoid bombs on normal mode, stays stuck on it for longer than needed. The players that bomb on normal mode quickly move to hard and lunatic mode. The skill ceiling in Touhou is endless, bombing will never slow dodging improvement down, there is always something harder that one can learn to dodge. Forcing oneself to dodge everything is only good for practice in Restriction runs, which are a whole different subject.

Monkey with practice strong, Monkey with bomb practice even stronger

Connect practice and bombing together to become the ultimate Touhou player. Here is a rough explanation of the process:

• Open up a pattern, play around for a while, look up for strategies, if nothing useful can be found about the pattern it's time to use a bomb.

• Take note of the bomb's strength and length for the character chosen, the bomb should be timed to minimize dodging.

• Bomb before the bullets become dangerous, but preferably we also don't want any dangerous bullets after the bomb, test around timings and fine tune to the safest one

• If the pattern alternates between not shooting, and shooting a massive wave of bullets in few frames, try to time the bomb so that the bomb ends right after it finishes cancelling a newly spawned wave.

• Often bombs can deal more or less damage depending on players position, check if anything like that happens with the bomb of choice in the game specific page on this wiki, which should mention details about bomb variance depending on position damage if it exists for that bomb.

• Bombs usually give some iframes of immunity even after they stop deleting bullets, some less then others, check to see if the bomb of choice has long iframes and check if they can be used to avoid more bullets if well timed.

• Take note of the damage taken by bosses. Some bosses may be immune to damage in certain moments of the battle (it's common for bosses in Touhou 7 and 8 to be damage immune for the first few seconds in spell cards)

Techniques

So far the things that were discussed all mainly referred to what are pretty much, methods to avoid or at least minimize dodging, but we didn't really discuss the techniques that are used in practice to simplify patterns, or what to do if practice doesn't trivialize everything.

General tips and concepts

At first impact every pattern is going to seem very hard to approach, one first thing players should do is limit the bullets to look at, recognize which are dangerous, and ignore everything else. Doing this most players will now focus their attention in a specific section of the screen, this is what we call a READING WINDOW (RW).

New players always tend to have their RW close to their own character, as one improves the RW slowly moves up over time as they adjust to faster bullets, and gain confidence in knowing where the hitbox is, without paying full attention to it.

It's also good to remember that diagonal movement is slower than straight movement, moving diagonally to avoid incoming bullets from one direction can be a good idea, slow movement after all is more precise.

Speaking of movement, we can distinguish 2 very generalized methods to avoid bullets, MICRO and MACRO dodging.

• Micro is when players avoid waves of bullets by moving through them slowly with focused movement

• Macro is when players avoid waves of bullets by moving around them, usually done by dashing around the denser part of the bullets (Dashing refers to briefly releasing focus to shortly increase speed)

Pattern components, know your type of bullet properties

All bullets in Touhou behave in 3 distinct ways: Aimed, Static and Random.

When taking patterns as an example, some may be completely aimed/static/random, some might be a mix of those 3 properties (static aimed pattern, randomly rotated pattern, random pattern affected by player position). Most patterns actually have distinct groups of aimed/rng/static bullets.

All the unique ways patterns are approached, usually derive by some primitive concept that is used to approach Aimed and Static bullets. Random bullets are by definition not approachable with some type of technique, just quick thinking and fast fingers.

AIMED PROPERTIES TIPS

Most aimed properties results in bullets that are either aimed directly at the player, or around the player.

It's common to avoid aimed bullets by slowly moving in one direction, we call this STREAMING (insert example). A general good rule of thumb in Touhou is to never move unnecessarily when facing the unknown, we don't want to accidentally spread aimed bullets by moving around (insert example). Patterns occasionally lack the space or time to fully be streamed, a solution to this is a RESTREAM.

Restreaming refers to dashing ahead during streaming, stopping, then starting a stream in the direction one came from (insert example). The difficulty of this technique is completely dependant on the rate at which bullets are fired and the speed at which they travel, these are factors to have in mind when choosing for how long to dash, and for when to stop, though in most cases these detail only matter in precise restreaming techniques.

As a general rule of thumb, always start the dash after a new set of aimed bullets has been shoot, and stop right before the next set is shot (only doable with patterns with slower firing rate, fast firing patterns usually aren't threatening enough to warrant such details). When taking bullet speed into account, usually, the slower the bullet, the longer the dash (as long as possible), we want to do this to give more time to the bullets to leave the screen.

For bullets that are aimed around the player, the concepts of streaming can usually be applied, not so much about restreaming, but overall aimed around bullets require more specific approaches. Restreaming can be explained using a another broader, but very important method to tackle aimed bullets, MISDIRECTION.

Usually done on a larger set of bullets, or even entire pattern, misdirection refers to moving to a part of the screen that won't be the focus of dodging, and aiming bullets in that area, usually done during patterns that have pauses lasting for multiple seconds. Players spend 1 second moving away from the boss, and secure multiple seconds of safer dodging (SAKUYA spell 2 EXAMPLE IS PERFECT HERE).

STATIC PROPERTIES TIPS

Static bullets don't care about player position, and are not random, they will always follow the same path.

The key is memorizing dangerous bullets and safe zones in the bullet formation, memorize to the best of the player's ability, and replicate exact movements. Other than this, there is not too much to say here that is strictly related to patterns that are fully static. What is more relevant to discuss, is recognizing static components. There are some patterns that may seem random at first, but are in reality static patterns with an aimed or rng twist.

In most cases bosses moving is enough to make it look like something is not static, when in reality, the bullets are just spawning in a different position. Some other more complicated cases involved randomly rotated static patterns, and aimed static patterns. examples (add videos eventually)

Hina spell 1 (simple example of randomly rotated static pattern)

Orleans (complex example of randomly rotated static pattern)

Letty Final (Actually static, hard to notice it's not rng)

Mystia Spell 2 (An entirely static pattern, spawned aimed at the player

(gonna think of other examples at a later time)The ultimate use of knowledge of static patterns are SAFESPOTS, spots where minimal movement or even standing still will let players avoid danger. Most safespots are oversights. Examples to show, sakuya st5 midnon for minimal movement, BOWAP for standing still.

when to bottom hug (with bottom dragging explanation) and when to not