Embodiment of Scarlet Devil Clearing Tips#

This chapter collects practical, clear-focused advice laid out in stage order. Before it begins, one terminology issue needs sorting out — it affects how you read several pages of this site.

Terminology First: What “Spell Card” Means on This Site#

Across this site’s articles, the term “spell card” is used in two distinct situations, and it pays to keep them apart:

In this game the player’s bombs are themselves declared as spell cards (Marisa B’s Love Sign “Master Spark”, for instance), so when veterans talk about “using a spell card” they usually mean bombing. The convention across this site: boss patterns are written as “boss spell cards”, and the survival move is written as “bomb” or “player bomb”.

Three Things to Sort Out Before You Attempt a Clear#

1. Lock in your shot type: start with Reimu A (Homing Amulet) — its shots are homing talismans that demand the least movement precision, and both of Reimu’s shot types are easy to handle in terms of movement speed and range (★★★/★★★★).
2. Start from Normal: Easy cannot reach Stage 6. Normal is the minimum bar for a full run — and the minimum bar for a good ending.
3. Know what a continue costs: continuing (up to 3 times) zeroes your score, blocks replay saving, and drags the ending down. When the goal is a clear, dying halfway is the better trade.

Boss Battle Essentials, Stage by Stage#

Stage 1: Rumia#

The shortest boss fight in the game, mainly there to teach you the rhythm. Midboss and boss are both Rumia herself; on Hard/Lunatic the midboss phase adds Moon Sign “Moonlight Ray”, and her proper spell cards are Night Sign “Night Bird” and Darkness Sign “Demarcation”. Note the known bug on Easy where a non-spell timing out mistakenly triggers “Night Bird” — odd bullets there are a bug, not your fault.

Stage 2: Cirno#

Icicle Fall is the most classic introductory spell card in the game — the perfect place to practice “hugging the edge of a pattern” for the first time. From this stage onward the drop sequence starts to matter: every 3rd enemy destroyed drops a point/power item on a fixed rotation, so planning where to stand lets you power up while you fight. The midboss here is Daiyousei; Cirno’s remaining spell cards are Hailstorm (Hard/Lunatic), Perfect Freeze, and Diamond Blizzard.

Stage 3: Hong Meiling#

Midboss and boss are both Meiling, so it is effectively one fight played twice. Her Color-series spell cards (Colorful Rain, Vivid Chaotic Dance, Dazzling Color Typhoon) follow fixed rhythms — ideal for practicing the pace of “watch one full rotation inside a spell card before you act”. The stage reaches the front gate of the Scarlet Devil Mansion — Meiling is exactly that gate’s guardian; her midboss phase uses Gorgeous Sweet Flower and Selaginella 9. Also note: on Lunatic, Rainbow Sign “Rainbow Wind Chime” has a known bug where point items stop dropping once the item counter fills to 512.

Stage 4: Patchouli Knowledge#

The stage is the Scarlet Devil Mansion library, and the midboss is Koakuma. This boss’s spell cards change with your shot type, so when studying the fight, study the set your own loadout faces. Her cards cover fire, water, wood, metal and their combinations (such as the Fire & Earth Sign “Lava Cromlech”), with single-element cards like Fire Sign “Agni Shine”, Water Sign “Princess Undine”, Wood Sign “Sylphy Horn”, and Metal Sign “Silver Dragon” — the bullet styles differ wildly, so top your bombs up before entering.

Stage 5: Sakuya Izayoi#

Stage 5 moves into the mansion’s inner corridors; midboss and boss are both Sakuya. Her spell cards revolve around time and maid techniques (The World, Manipulating Doll, Clock Corpse, Luna Clock, and more). Her bullets are fast and their angles shift constantly — this is where focus-mode micro-movement pays off the most.

Stage 6: Remilia Scarlet#

Stage 6 is the mansion’s top floor and the longest chain fight in the main game: first midboss Sakuya (Magic Trick “Eternal Meek”), then Remilia’s string of spell cards, from Scarlet Netherworld and Curse of Vlad Tepes down to her final spell card, Scarlet Gensokyo. Resource management decides this stage — enter at full power with at least half your bombs left, because every scrap of slack in the Remilia fight comes from there. Her final card hits hard: bomb through it without hesitation, since the “bombs × 1 million” clear bonus matters less than securing the clear itself. If you play the modern re-release, note that her Divine Punishment card was renamed from “Star of David” to “Star of Vanities”.

Extra Stage: Flandre Scarlet#

Challenge it once the unlock conditions are met (same shot type, Normal or above, no-continue clear). The stage sits in the mansion basement; the midboss is Patchouli, using Moon Sign “Silent Selene”, Sun Sign “Royal Flare”, and the Fire-Water-Wood-Metal-Earth Sign “Philosopher’s Stone”. No continues and no score-based lives inside — the margin for error is razor thin. The final card, QED “Ripples of 495 Years”, corresponds to Flandre’s own account of 495 years without leaving the basement; it is the last stop among the game’s 64 spell cards, and the Extra spell bonus base of 70,000×(remaining seconds+10) is the highest in the game. Detailed strategies live on the Extra Stage page.

Resource Planning Between Stages#

• Stages 1–2: the power ramp. When the drop sequence offers power items, collect them first — the goal is near-full power before Stage 3.
• Stage 3: the boundary of the trial version. Full-game players should start banking bombs here for the boss fights ahead.
• Stage 4: Patchouli’s spell cards change with your shot type, so enter with power and bombs both topped up to ideal levels, and study the cards your own loadout faces.
• Stages 5–6: two hard fights back to back with Sakuya and Remilia. The clear bonus of “lives × 3 million + bombs × 1 million” only appears in the Stage 6 tally on non-Easy difficulties — and only if you clear it alive.
• Extra Stage: tallied separately once unlocked; no continues, no score-based lives. Planning notes live on the Extra Stage page.

Spell card bonuses are priced in tiers per stage: if you break the health bar within the time limit without being hit or bombing, the bonus = base × (remaining seconds+10).

General Tips for Stage Traversal#

• Positioning before damage: the destruction sequence is fixed (every 3rd enemy destroyed drops a point/power item); stand where you collect first, and the damage output follows.
• Graze as you go: each graze is worth 500 points and pushes up the unit price of star items; enemy formations are a steady graze source.
• Focus-mode movement: hold Shift to slow down and slip through gaps precisely. Note that focus mode does not shrink your hitbox, and the original game never displays it.
• Pausing is free: press Esc freely while studying a boss pattern’s structure.
• Point items reward height: their value depends on collection height — the higher you collect, the more they are worth. Collected even 1 pixel below the collection line they are worth only 75%, and about 25% near the bottom of the screen. Full values per difficulty are in the difficulty table below.
• Spell finishes depend on leftover bullets: the instant you break a boss health bar or a spell card, every bullet left on screen pays out starting at 2,000 and rising in increments of 10 (combined cap 3,324,800) — the denser the field when you finish, the bigger this payout.

Four Principles of Resource Management#

1. Lives are fuel for score thresholds: 10 million, 20 million, 40 million, and 60 million points each award an extra life (you start with 3, cap of 8), so chasing score and staying alive are the same job.
2. Bombs are valuable; lives are more valuable: trading a bomb for a life (a deathbomb — press X within about 6 frames of being hit) is always a good deal. The deathbomb window shortens with each success and resets once you lose a life.
3. A power interruption is the costliest loss: dying resets power item value to 10 points, and rebuilding costs about 1,554,350 points — never getting hit outranks every scoring trick. Power climbs the ladder 8/16/32/48/64/80/96/128 (MAX), and after a death you can only rebuild it rung by rung.
4. Full power, full collection: at max power near the top of the screen you auto-collect every item in play, and full-value point items depend on this state.

Goals by Difficulty#

Common Misconceptions, Corrected#

After the First Clear#

A first no-continue clear on Normal means three things at once: a good ending, Extra unlocked for one shot type, and a complete run saved as a replay. After that, a sensible order of goals: switch shot types to pick up the other 3 good endings → use Practice Mode to take on Hard → then sink your time into Extra and the score-focused routes on the Scoring System page. The Practice Mode unlock rule also kicks in at this point: clear a stage on a given difficulty with a given shot type, and that stage’s practice entry unlocks, with continues allowed in practice — break down the hard spell cards of Hard and Lunatic in Practice Mode first, then verify them in a full run.