Touhou 18 ~ Unconnected Marketeers - Stage 4 Lunatic Perfect (Sanae)

And that closes things on the most recent usual maingame in the series. Stage 4 in UM is like the modern 2hu MoF stage 4, in that it's really fucking hard. They both have a difficult and complex midboss, a super nasty boss fight and said boss fight contains a super infamously hard pattern.

When I was in the earlier stages of learning this game, I felt like maybe the rumours surrounding this stage were a little overblown, at least as far as Sanae is concerned. Now that I'm finished, I definitely don't think it's on or even that close to the level of LoLK stage 6. Probably easier than EoSD Stage 4 with MarisaA but it is still one of Touhou's hardest stages, with a pretty gross amount of things that can kill you, including an easy top 10 tier difficulty pattern.

I'll leave some notes here for the stage which helped me:
=Stage=
Don't shoot down the second green rice fairy otherwise too many additional fairies will spawn. Doing it this way prevents any chance of that section bleeding into the yellow spam, which you're gonna need to be ready for.
There's an exploit with Sanae's shot type where her frogs fire on a global timer of sorts and so long as you're unfocusing at the time they're due to be fired, they'll appear. This means you can focus during the intervals between the times frogs are due to fire to get some focus damage in as well.
I bring up the exploit because the yellow spam gets a lot easier when you use it effectively. It's something really worth practising. It feels borderline safe when you're doing it properly; a very far cry from the disgusting mess Reimu and Marisa contest with.
You can copy this route for Jimbo. Part of it is roughly aimed, though the pattern is super wonky. One specific landmark is the safespot in the bottom right, since the pink bullets are fully static.
Spatial awareness is king on Jimbo; try to spot mentos that are going into your path. You can predict roughly when they're going to accelerate, which will take a bunch of practice to get full use out of. The safespot in the corner will sometimes be blocked off so it's good to have backup plans for when Jimbo decides to be playful. Very difficult pattern though. I'd go as far as to say 2nd hardest pattern Sanae has to deal with in the game.
Blue spam is something I'm pretty bad at. Sanae can pretty much delete the first wave but I never found a way to do the same for the second, so I just stream it and keep full attention on how blue rice will fold to find a way through. It's important to stay calm, even if the big fairy rice starts to overlap.
I never learned the yin yang section near the end, though in hindsight I should have for LNBNC. Being there on low power is surprisingly likely so it'd have been good to have a backup for that. Sorry.

=Misumaru=
Misumaru at this point I'd call harder than Aya literally just because YYDO exists. I managed to get master on the spell (which is 100 captures) in practice but it still felt heavily weighed against me. There's so much to it and when it decides to be mean, it feels just insurmountable. Easily in the top 10 hardest patterns in the series. Also in my top 10 favourite lol it's very fun
For some notes, I think how you decide which direction you're going to move to dodge the incoming wave is crucial to getting more waves that actually feel possible. You need to read that circular wave really quick and sorta balance out where you want to enter that ring from. It's why I chose the far left gap early in the spell. Might have been better moves, but I did feel like that one was one where stray big yangs weren't gonna intefere.
On that note, keep a lookout for stray big yangs. They can immediately make a wave that much harder and you need to plan around them, because some of them really linger and those hitboxes are no joke.
Finally, playing with height is big on YYDO. Often you might be afraid of going higher up on the spell because you'd think you'll just get crushed but often you can escape bigger waves that way. It actually happened in this run, where I got close to her to avoid a pretty scary situation. It's a surprisingly big part of your kit.
-2nd spell has a very crucial quirk where you do NOT move in line with the small yang gap until after she's fired the next wave. The reason is so you have more room to work with if she moves down so you can avoid potentially tight situations.
-3rd non was a bit of a worry until I decided to give it the Asteroid Belt treatment and make the yin yang pattern into muscle memory so I can focus more attention on the red droplets. Surprisingly worked a charm.
YYS killed 2 runs and it stinks to die to because it's a raw test of skill and discipline with fairly minimal rng. Make sure you have escape options, always be looking ahead for potential issues and avoid big yangs like the plague. They move more than you'd think they do and it changes everything.

I'm about to run out of characters. Extra next. Yeah