Touhou 15: Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom/Sagume Kishin

「One Winged White Heron」 - Normal Mode | Reisen Scoring

This will be tips for scoring Sagume's final spell, One Winged White Heron, on normal difficulty with Reisen this guide will assume you go into heron with 3 shields active and 2 bombs in stock, while also having 2 lives to spare.

Basics of the Scoring

Firstly you should understand how grazing heron works. You want to go to the point where Sagume was originally standing still, on the left or right and when as soon as she moves away you want to go into the part where the lasers spawn without getting hit. Afterwards you want to go over to her before she starts spawning another wave of lasers. Every 4th time you are on the right side of the screen you must suicide into the lasers after briefly grazing to do a death rebound, which consists of the suicide and then using a shield bomb before she starts spawning lasers. Knowing where to sit inside the laser clusters is a skill you will have to acquire on your own. You must always be following a cycle of having 3 shields to graze with when on the left side on the screen and 1 when grazing on the right side. If your results do not look like this you are doing something wrong. Your death rebounds on the the 4th wave will consist of doing very brief graze on the wave before suciding.

Optimizing Graze

For the graze on the left side you want to graze from the moment that Sagume's hitbox isn't in the cluster of lasers until she starts moving downwards after finishing. When you go to the right you want to go upwards diagonally towards where she moves before quickly going down to her before as she starts spawning new wave. At this point you should only have 1 shield and your grazing method will be similar to that of 3 shield grazing. You'll use a bomb midway through the screen once you lose your shield so you can gain 3 shields. Afterwards you will go back down and repeat this until you need to death rebound the final wave you'll graze will be a right side graze and then with 5ish seconds left you'll go for the kill to actually get your 100% shootdown. Something important to note is that when you do a 1 shield graze and then bomb there should be a few lasers shooting up at the top left, you want to very briefly graze these before going down for the normal grazing. Do not be fooled into grazing it too much as the normal wave is always worth way more, but this is also necessary for a WR graze.

Movement RNG

Sagume doesn't always move the same way, sometimes she moves a shorter distance and others longer. These will be called "short waves" and "long waves". Short waves give far more graze because the lasers are more clumped up and give more graze. The final stretch to get 34K graze will require you to get mostly short(er) waves. Her movement is purely RNG so you better have trained on how to gamble.