I'm also interested in a guide if one is available. Just picked the game up and was curious about the speedrun. If there isn't one I'll probably inevitably do one myself.

I know this thread is from almost a year ago, but I'm interested in playing around with the PC version and seeing what can be found.

The backup I had on from years ago was English patched though, think that would make a difference/is that allowed?

Awesome! I've dropped the pastebin link there - I really need to get back to running this in the future :P

Noname asked and I was curious as well, since it doesn't specify in the rules:

Does hard path require the second playthrough to get the "true" ending? Or is it only the first run through to Z?

I actually drafted some notes for 100% years ago - around the time I routed any%. I'm pretty sure there are actual strats now, though, so the notes might be obsoleted. Can drop a pastebin link if anyone is interested.

Some thoughts:

From what I've gathered from experience, this isn't faster. As it currently stands I sit on extra resources upon dying to Hourai Elixer. This includes dying at the start of Stage 2-6 to have bombs going into midbosses/bosses, dying after Mid Keine to have the bombs I need for the boss fight, and occasionally dying while dodging Tewi.

When I first started speedrunning Imperishable Night in 2013, there weren't anywhere near as many people running Touhou games as there are now. I was trying to find other runs/runners but only came up with 1) DS and StB pages on SDA, and 2) a score race on SRL for Imperishable Night. It took a few months for me to even see a Mountain of Faith run. I wanna say Karisa had already posted a HRtP video on YouTube around that time, but I didn't see it until much later.

That may seem off topic, but I'm bringing it up because no rules were in place, as nobody ran the game. When I started running I used max lives. I thought continues would be faster, but they weren't (this is why I don't have a Normal time up as it is - I've only done 2 runs, 4 years ago, which were 2ccs). Noname found my runs on PBTracker, came up with a route that 1ccs, and I saved literal minutes. We're talking from ~25-28 minutes for a good run to my 22:09 in less than a week.

I see that, as noname mentioned, default lives is a standard among other games. I honestly was only thinking of using additional lives because I'm bad (I recently got my first normal 1cc!), which means I would be able to actually complete the run, as I'm not really consistent at dodging (see: I call Marisa ImperishableTroll because I ram into stars on her nons. Always.) I can respect and understand default lives as a rule, because as stated above it is more than enough to bomb each spell, die 1-2 times in a stage, and allot for incidents (Reimu intensifies).

TLDR: Default lives is fine and more than enough for a good IN run. I don't think extra lives or 2+ccs are faster, and I'm terrible at dodging danmaku.

No problem, thank you for the clarification :)

I'm only posting this for clarification:

If I change the player setting from the default (starting the game with 2 lives/3 bombs in stock) to a higher setting, would this be okay? I did see one run that does this on the leaderboard, so I assume this is fine as it is something in the game settings as opposed to using a third party utility?

I'm just wanting to make sure (I'm going for Normal, and was considering increasing my lives at the start). I'm not wanting to get anyone in trouble by any means - the run in question would have been a 1cc regardless - but just wanted to make sure this was allowed before I tried to submit a run.