Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom/Stage 2
Score Routes[edit | edit source]
Overall Plan: Before Boss Chen[edit | edit source]
All shot types route three borders before boss Chen: one during the green bullet streaming section before midboss Chen, Chen's midspell, and the blue bullets aimed around you at the end of the stage.
Before Midboss Chen[edit | edit source]
For every shot type, any route should enter with around 27k cherry+ and 3 spell cards. One exception is the SakuyaB route that bombs Letty's final spell, in which case you will have around 28k cherry+ and 2 spell cards.
Due to item table variance, you must adjust how much you shoot focused depending on how many cherry items you get. A general rule of thumb is to shoot the third wave focused if you have over 38k cherry+ before it.
For forwards-focused shot types, on the large wave of fairies before the border graze, you must kill one half of the enemies while above to PoC line to collect their items right away, and then kill the remaining half while below the PoC line to activate the next border from the dropped items. This will delay your border timing to get maximum graze from the following border. Additionally, for the enemies you kill below the PoC line, you should move towards them as you are killing them so that they die at around the same time, making their items drop in a more clustered formation and thus giving you a more consistent border timing.
ReimuA and SakuyaA, it is difficult to control the enemy kills on the large wave of fairies. The best you can do is to leave most of them alive, and start shooting when they are all near the center. Even so, the cherry items may drop in awkward locations, forcing you to lose graze on the following border in order to collect them.
Border graze[edit | edit source]
It is slightly better to stream this section from left to right than from right to left. This is because among the first set of fairies, the lower fairies spawn from the left. This means the angle of the lower fairies' bullets will be steeper if you start on the right than on the left, forcing you to move more. The difference is not that big, and you should still try streaming from right to left if it is significantly more comfortable.
You will have to move slower or faster at various points throughout the border due to the heights of the enemies. As such, you can use the enemies' positions for visual cues to time your taps. Also, since you have to stream very slowly, it is important to bottomdrag. One technique is to use numpad diagonal movement to ensure perfect bottomdragging.
Midboss Chen[edit | edit source]
It is not that important to shoot unfocused on the nonspell, since you have a lot of leeway to get the next border. More specifically, the nonspell cancel gives a lot of cherry items, and the midspell has a long timeframe before she starts shooting. For all shot types other than ReimuA, you want to cancel the nonspell on the second cycle where the yellow rings around Chen appear. Letting yellow rings shoot a little bit before the cancel will give a little more score and cherry+, but it's not very important. ReimuA must cancel on the third cycle where the yellow rings appear due to her lower damage.
During the midspell, you start your border shortly before the first bullets appear. You can use the rings around Chen to figure out where the bullets will spawn, use that to read how to spawngraze them in advance. You can continue to try to spawngraze the later waves as well, but it is very RNG-dependent and somewhat risky.
After Midboss Chen[edit | edit source]
Memorize where the trails of enemies spawn and when the random enemies spawn to PoC items. When you get to around 45k cherry+, you should pay attention to the number of cherry items to collect.
You can start the border either through unfocused shooting, or having a cherry item drop on you. Unfocused shooting only gives around 500 cherry+, and you are not guaranteed to get a cherry item before the border, so you will need to have at least 49500 cherry+ before the border. As such, you will have to control your cherry+ with both unfocused/focused shooting and dropping cherry items. For example, if you have 47000 cherry+, you can get to 49800 cherry+ by collecting 2 cherry items and shooting entirely focused. If you have 47500 cherry+, collecting 2 cherry items will get the border too early, and collecting one cherry item will only put you at 48900 cherry+, so some additional unfocused shooting is needed to get to 49500 cherry+ before the border.
The amount of graze you get from the blue bullets depends on the fairies' random positions, so variance of a few thousand cherrymax is expected. For the arrowheads afterwards, staying higher will give more graze, but is more precise. Additionally, if your route requires you to kill the arrowhead fairies after the border ends, you will have to adjust your height depending on your border timing. More specifically, you have to go lower if your border was late, and you will have to stay near the bottom of the screen if you got your border from shooting. Thus, it is ideal to get your border from a cherry item on such routes.