Touhou 5 : Shinki Death glitch cause (Discovered by Starshine)

I couldn't get my arse to go thru this all myself (and I'm also bad at the game), so Starshine went thru the trouble of comparing any influence of earlier stages to values in the memory viewer. Scarlet Moose had the idea.
Turns out that the jello/cheetos lasers fired by Yuki and Mai are behind it all. The X and Y coordinates of every single part of this annoying projectile stay in memory after the fight, well into the shinki confrontation. Her opening phase reactivates these projectiles, but their graphics are not rendered not due to them not being in memory (believe me, they are, ZUN sucks at mem managment) but because there is no rendering call in Shinki's opener for them.
And yes, that's Np21Debug's memory viewer, can't believe that it turned out useful for once.

[@KarisaMirisame]

Wow, it's nice to finally know the cause of this. Just need to stop shooting Yuki/Mai during the curvy laser phase to avoid the Shinki "random" death, I suppose? It gives no bullet cancel bonus anyway.

[@Spaztron64]

Yes. Once they leave the screen, they're gone for good and you're safe.

[@ASE-PRL]

what the fuck

[@innocence6090]

This is a pretty amazing find, congrats to everyone involved in discovering it

[@oosha2000]

At least, the bug is avoidable. Avoid defeating the duo (Yuki and Mai) during the homing bullet. If done successfully, you should be safe enough to start fighting Shinki after playing. It's unusual, though.

[@Zack54]

Well, I had no idea this was a thing. I was really close to having my first Normal 1CC, when suddenly I literally died at the start of the battle. All went downhill from there...

[@toro2812]

I feel you, MS was one of my first normal 1ccs but it was certainly not an easy task, the entirety of stage 4 is just absolutely infuriating.

[@Zack54]

@@toro2812 I have the same opinion about stage 4. That double boss fight is a run killer for me

[@oosha2000]

I got that bug today, really odd. I had one life left beforehand. After that, I had to continue normal mode once. Sadly, I got a bad ending as a result.

[@oosha2000]

So did you manage to beat the game after that or did you have to play from scratch ?