Until Tomorrow - Bleak and Blank, Red Coins (No Savestates)

Very brutal star with a nasty spawn but at least it has routing options to make up for that. The route I got the star on here is very weird and one that I never did before, but it worked out well, so I'm happy. Three jumps/sections really stand out in this star to me:

1:32 - Slope run off into precise wallkicks: You need to run off the slope with as much speed as possible and with a decent angle here and it's VERY hard to get consistent, if it ever gets consistent at all. This is the jump that traps you in spawn.

5:55 - Very tight crossover: I guess this is one of the few jumps where me not learning to pause buffer is really detrimental since this is insanely tight without a firsty. I seemed to get decent consistency as long as I practiced though.

The whole section from 8:24 to 10:15 but ESPECIALLY the slope jump into triangle wallkicks at 9:30: Hands down the hardest path of this star. I had to put a good deal of practice into this before getting decent consistency. I did 8-9 hours of attempts in 4 sessions total to beat this star and the 2nd and longest of those 4 sessions was miserable because I had almost no luck getting past this path.

The rest of the star is still quite hard and in some cases was pretty cursed for me. Both my 20/21s died to the long jump at 16:01. In both cases, I took time to line up the jump and shorted it. Go figure that just going for it and not lining it up was more consistent for me.

I rate this star about the same as QQ reds from SNR, marginally harder than JoS reds from DE and marginally easier than GotE reds (with WC cheese) from IoF. This star also marks a big milestone for me: WWMelancholy 120 coin star is now out of my top 25! That star was my first tier 7 and was once upon a time my hardest by quite a decent margin. It's amazing to have so many stars harder than that 5 years down the line (some of them being WAY harder).