Touhou 17: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature/Stage 3

First-Half

Scoring

Most routes either enter with 2 or 3 tokens. 2 tokens usually leads to doing 1 hyper in first half, otherwise the player doesn't have enough tokens to attempt token dupe 3 token usually leads to 1 extra hyper (roughly 6k PiV) + dupe. Just like stage 2, the token dupe here should always be attempted, as there is no particular setup.

First Hyper

The first hyper is usually a 5 otter and happens shortly after releasing the first 2 beast tokens in the stage. the section in which you start the hyper features two lanes of smaller fairies, the hyper should roughly be activated when the fifth fairy in the row appears on screen. Players should attempt to kill fairies on the row closest to the token they will use to start the hyper, with less bullets on the screen it's going to be easier to get into position.

During the hyper, players usually stream at the bottom of the screen while shooting down to kill wisps, when this streaming ends, the players move up to spawn cancel mentos from the pair of big fairies. This part specifically can be optimized by not killing these fairies, and letting them live until hyper runs out, if hyper is timed correctly, it should end right after these fairies stop shooting mentos. At the same time, players have moved right to kill the big fairy on the right, this one should also die before hyper runs out.

The section that follows here is where the player either attempt a second hyper, or they don't. Without hyper, players should focus on surving the section, doing PoCs only if easy, and getting 4 otters ready in bar, and then start hyper during midboss dialogue.

Second Hyper

Doing the second hyper on the other hand, can be challenging for beginners, the problem here is that one wants to start either a 3 or 4 otter hyper for the next pair of big fairies. Managing tokens can be challenging here because one needs to adapt to the random tokens released from first hyper. Bombing before starting the second hyper is a reasonable option.

Following the hyper activation on the pair of fairies, players should now focus on streaming high on screen towards the left side of the screen. This streaming should preferebly be as slow as possible, a critical beast token is going to be dropped by the last wisp in the wisp train. This token can easily move and block the way out at the top of the screen, to avoid this one should stream slower and give themselves more space to move around the token. If the second hyper is done using 4 otters, this probably disappears, because the hyper is long enough to completely clear the screen of bullets before needing to move up.

The last focus should now be put on collecting tokens and starting a 5 otter hyper preferably on Midboss dialogue.

Midboss

Scoring

Usually always played with at least 2 tokens on screen to attempt dupe, attempting dupe requires no difficult setup. The important thing to do here is trying to have the hyper end as soon as Kutaka releases the tokens. At the same time, players must kill Kutaka before the 14 second mark, otherwise, a pair of pairs WON'T spawn right after midboss, this pair drops 2 beast tokens.

Load video

Local File

Local File might collect personal data.

ContinueDismiss

Example of movement to help with decrease sniping chance

To ensure doing both of these things, it's better to use a 5 otter hyper, start hyper during dialogue, and never stop doubling the hyper deplete, by either shooting, or touching Kutaka with otters. Doing this with 4 otters is possible, but extremely tight, unless tokens are consumed during the hyper (only possible when having more than 2 tokens on screen).

For the actual cancels now. The white bullets (bird shit) are fast and spawn with a weird rhythm, very prone to sniping. Holding the otters on top of Kutaka is a must to cancel the whites, any lower will pretty much guarantee their escape. Players should either opt to react to the bullets by moving in the middle, or attempt doing focus counterspin, which should prevent "dangerous" bullet escapes (that is to say, bullets will escape, but only on the left side, the counterspin motion naturally leads the players to the right whenever bullets escape on the left).

Second-Half

Scoring

Most routes in this second half focus on cycling out the large number of fish tokens using 1/2 neutral hypers. Depending on if the dupe was succesful or not, the number of neutrals will vary from 1 to 2. Following the dupe hyper the players finds themselves in a tricky situation where it is very common to bomb to collect all the items on screen, while preparing the tokens for a new hyper. This bomb is done on the streaming wisps coming before the wave of fairies shooting static bullets. Transition into the rice fairy streaming while collecting tokens can be done no bomb, but it does require a weird restream, while also making sure to spawn tokens from the hyper low on screen to facilitate collection. To be optimal one would also want to fit a quick PoC before the release of the tokens The main neutral hyper can be done during the rice shooting streaming fairy section at the extremely tiny cost of graying items that will release during the streaming. If going for only 1 hyper, it is recommended to do it here, as the next place is more complex.

Return of Infinite Fairy section

The section after rice fairy streaming is a less dense wisp streaming followed by another infinite fairy section similar to the one in stage 2. Lots to discuss here

The Infite fairy section can be bombed to kill a total of 5 fairies if done correctly. The tokens spawned here are potentially useless, but the section should be bombed regardless, as dodging here with tokens flying around is often not reliable. The number of tokens for kutaka varies alot, as Kutaka is a complex boss and lower end routes will skip hypers for safety, this variable number of needed tokens is why the tokens in this last section are potentially useless.

This place is also where a neutral hyper can be started. To do it, it requires collecting 4 tokens before the infinite fairy section, which is often complicated and why it's recommendeed to hyper here only if there are extra tokens from ths succesful dupe.

High level routes attempt to POC during the wisp streaming while collecting tokens to hyper