Touhou 17: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature/Stage 2

First-Half

Scoring

1 otter hyper is used during this first half, on a section we are going to call "Infinite Fairy Section".

Infinite Fairy Section

The section takes this name because everytime a fairy is killed, another spawns in a random position, this spawning happens until a certain point in the section, where killing one fairy will not spawn another. The first fairy kill spawns a beast, every subsequent fairy spawns a point token.

Marisa can usually kill 3, high level routes take this number for granted, if lucky she can occasionally spawn a fourth, which will simply be consumed during Urumi. Reimu is similar, as she works with 3 spawns (she might be able to spawn a fourth, but lower dps might make it impossible). Thanks to slashes, Youmu has a very high damage output, and can consistently kill 5 fairies, at the cost of losing some PiV during the hyper. The fifth token unlocks an extra hyper on Urumi if no tokens are consumed through the whole stage.

Now, about the actual hyper. It's usually started 1 second before tiny fairies from both side start shooting rice, on the section right before Infinite Fairies, the otter spirits should be placed on top of the fairy for optimal cancels. Attempt to kill fairies as quickly as possible. To optimize, Marisa and Reimu shouldn't attempt to speedkill the third fairy, instead bring it to low hp, and just let the hyper timeout. Youmu should instead kill all fairies as fast as possible (less PiV here, more PiV later thanks to bonus Urumi hyper).

Midboss setup

Finishing the hyper, the stage will soon transition into midboss, there are a few things to discuss here.

First of all, it will be important to start a 4 otter midboss hyper, within the first or second wave. it can be challenging to collect tokens right after Infinite Fairies hyper, so it is not uncommon to see a bomb here to help with token collection.

Marisa can choose to bomb stage 1 4 times, and reach this place without bombs, so what follows here is a suicide for bomb reset. This suicide also adds 2 tokens, which just like Youmu, will unlock an extra hyper on Urumi. Suiciding here is a common route for beginner scorers. Reimu or Youmu should never use 4 bombs on stage 1, so this suicide is probably unviable, they should instead bomb (Youmu's slash might help with doing this no bomb aswell.

One last detail: If Infinite Fairies hyper is started later than planned, there might be no physical time to collect beast tokens spawned from hyper release, if they spawn as eagles, make sure to always start IFS hyper early enough.

Midboss

Scoring

Start a 4 otter hyper and place otters on top of Urumi, kill her right before hyper times out, moving close on the kill to spawn the cow token. For optimization purposes, the Urumi should die before the 19 second mark, otherwise there is a risk of not spawning a pair of fairies right after midboss, which would lose PiV from not shooting those fairies, as one normally hypers right after midboss kill. If 2 fish tokens should be on screen during midboss, this is enough to dupe. This dupe here is highly recommended to attempt, since there is no unique setup for it, good movement and good kill timing to not let the tokens spread much are the only requirements. Duping puts the player ahead by 3 tokens as per usual, in this case it gains 1 life 1 bomb and 1 beast, losing the bomb and life pieces are potential losses of extends. Duping effectively gains an extra neutral hyper, and also a slightly more optimal Urumi (more about that in urumi page).

Second-Half

Scoring

With a correct midboss kill timing, the section begins with a pair of fairies to shootdown, follows a bunch of streaming fairies, and then one bigger fairy in the middle of the screen, this is the section that is normally neutral hypered using tokens from dupe. Some players may choose to bomb right after the first hyper of the section to help with collecting the fishes for this second neutral hyper. Focus on survivng the last streaming section, making sure to kill the last fairy in the last 2 fairy trains.