Touhou HRtP Tips

- During regular stages, focus on sliding around to keep the orb in the air instead of throwing ofuda at it. Throwing ofuda is not only harder to get right, but can get you killed if the orb hits you at an angle. Sliding makes things pretty easy because the orb moves at the same speed as reimu while she's sliding, so you just need to follow it around.

- After a while, you'll stop hitting any new bricks with the orb because the bouncing angles while sliding are fixed. At this point you need to throw a single well-aimed ofuda at the orb to change its direction slightly, and get back to sliding again. You need to make sure the ofuda hits the orb while it's falling, don't do it while it's rising or it'll speed up uncontrollably.
If you keep the combo going you'll start getting 12k points per brick, which is great for gaining extends.

- On stages with lots of bricks, as soon as the level starts take a couple steps to the left and use a bomb, you'll get tons of points and usually an extend. Moving to the left is needed so the orb will bounce off reimu while the bomb is active, which keeps the combo going.

- Ignore the P pickups, using bombs will drop many of them and you can't pick them all, so the combo on those will get dropped often. Chaining bricks is a more reliable way to score. Once you're more experienced, you can try farming pickups instead of bombing (they give 65k points at max combo), some people find that easier.

- Learn the bosses' patterns so they won't catch you unprepared. Some of them are pretty easy to avoid, some will take practice and accurate movement. Mima and especially Elis can fuck you up with their random attacks (lasers/bullets need you to stay below the boss but rockets need you to stay away so it's a matter of luck), but you can afford to lose a few lives if you do everything else right.

- Unlike on other games, you don't lose your bombs by dying, and you can use bombs to get lives back (as explained above), sometimes even two with one bomb. Also, bosses won't take damage from bombs unless you're on your last life.
Thus, during bosses it's fine to be greedy with bombs and only use them if you're at max bombs or when you're certain you're about to die. The exception to this rule is when you're on your last life, you need to survive and the boss will take damage from bombs so feel free to spam them at the slightest sign of danger. Even in these conditions you can usually recover the 1cc run by gaining some extends during the following stages.