Do not miss! Do anything else!
In this game misses are far worse than bad or wrong hits. Now this might not seem as obvious first, since they are in the same section in the results screen. When playing though, it makes a massive difference for how much presses you need to recover, since in the harder difficulties it is a noticeable difference whether you hit wrong, bad or miss when you do something wrong and your Life is spiking down.

With recovery I mean the hits required for you to get back to the same health bar you had before doing something wrong. It shouldn't matter whether they are cool or good hits (at least I can't notice the difference), so hitting good hits should do just as well as hitting cools.

It is probably easiest to notice in easy difficulty where misses take around 8 hits to recover, bads take 5 hits and wrongs take 0 hits in easy difficulty, already you can see that wrongs can be seen as safes, which don't eat your life bar, but break your combos.

In normal it takes 12 hits to recover from miss, 8 hits from bad and 1 hit from wrong.

In hard it takes 12 hits to recover from miss, 8 hits from bad and 2 hits from wrong.

In highest difficulties the punishment is also highest. In Extra Extreme/Extreme: misses take 13 hits to recover, bads 10 hits and wrongs take 5 hits.

So, the easiest solution is to just press something, literally anything, as long as it matches the amount of hits wanted on the screen in the right rhythm (with double presses press any two buttons and with 3 any three buttons because otherwise it is counted as a miss). This is because wrongs are punished the least and rhythm loss is punished the most with bads and misses. If you press at least something when wanted you might sometimes hit the right notes, giving you more health bar moving forward in the hard sections.

Use practice
Now this might seem obvious and useless at first, but when getting to the more difficult songs, they tend to have some sections that are almost impossible to clear first try. Practice mode can be found from the menu when selecting a song, there are following options: Start Rhythm Game, Start Music Video and Start Practice, with practice mode you can choose any timestamp from the song and start straight from there, there will be no music video in the background to enjoy (or disrupt you), and you can always restart from a chosen timestamp and move it around to help you learn the wanted part of the song. Now you can play either the song all over again and waste up to 3 minutes getting to the difficult section or instead use practice to get to that difficult section, and play it over and over again until you clear it. My recommendation is that you complete it at least 5 times in a row without a doubt during the practice. After that you should be able to do it in the rhythm game.

Use short button FX
This might sound a little weird, but this makes a difference for me at least. By having a short button FX it is easier to keep up with faster songs, since you can hear more easily if you hit the press exactly or not. I DON'T recommend having the following button FX: Button FX A-I, Taiko drums, Bell or Clap. These are pretty long and it is really hard to tell in rapid sections whether or not you kept up in rhythm or not and were you early or late. It is much easier to tell with short button FX how you messed up. (There is a mod which can tell you if you are early or late, but you should really try some other FXs than the recommended and find the ones that suit you the most)


Do not use the recommended settings for a controller or keyboard
It REALLY improves your game when you use controls that help you make quick decisions or you can just press the wanted combination more quickly. There are other guides for controls (both controller and keyboard) that might fit your style more. But here I will recommend the configurations that I use with my controller and another configuration that I consider a little more optimal if you want to optimize the handling of a controller.

Some people recommend 3 presses for your controller (L1 and R1), but I consider them so rare compared to 2 presses that it is much more efficient to map inputs for 2 and then press the 3rd wanted input with your other hand.

My controls (PS4 controller):
Left = Left and Square
Up = Up and Triangle
Right = Right and Circle
Down = Down and Cross
Joy sticks for slide presses.
(the before mentioned are recommended settings)
L1 = Up and left
R1 = Right and down
R2 and L2 = All presses (Up, down, left, right) for easy holds.
I consider this to be best configuration for easier stages (these should be good enough to not cause any complexities for around 9 stars in my opinion), but I have noticed that there start to appear more complex presses where fat fingering (intentionally) will be much more relevant and therefore in more optimal configurations you want to cover the presses that you cannot fat finger (opposite directions) by making these the R1 and L1 input.

So in more optimal configuration I would use same as above, but replace:
R1 = Up and Down
L1 = Left and Right

This would be the configuration I would use if I had learned it from the start.

These controls are better for example in the intense part of The disappearance of Hatsune Miku in extreme where there will be rapid section with opposite directions and having the opposite directions as configurations for R1 and L1 will make it quite a lot easier since you can just spam the macro and not have any complex positions with fingers/hands.

Learn to use both of your hands
This advice is really obvious and self explanatory, but improving with 2 hands might not be that obvious. If you are just beginning, then it is recommended you hit for example every other press with your other hand in easy songs or do some kind of exercise where you switch between your hands constantly, this helps you improve really fast to use your other hand and it helps you with upcoming rapid sections where using one hand isn't an option. The other thing you should learn with 2 hands is multipresses. These are really essential to learn, since rapid multipresses are really hard with 1 hand. Last thing you might want to learn is to react situations where your hands won't act in same rhythm or other hand does more than the other, this is something that isn't easy, but it isn't that common either so it isn't really necessary to learn in the beginning.

Keep an eye on your health bar, not your completion bar
When clearing the stage for the first time, it is usually very hard to perfect or get great scores from it. It is more important to keep your health bar at safe ranges, because when it drops in higher difficulties, it drops FAST. Obviously the optimal situation is to keep it always as high as possible, but with above mentioned strategy (Do anything but miss) the drop shouldn't be as harsh and can occasionally mean surviving with low health instead of dropping out.

Songs have easy and hard sections, they begin with the easy section.
Usually songs last around 2 to 3 minutes where the first minute can be considered the easiest minute. This is your time to pump up the health bar and prepare mentally for a harder section. In the first clear or try it is not possible to know how hard the difficulty gap will be between the constant and hard sections, but the stars will give some advice.

I have higher difficulties listed here, because easier difficulties are usually very constant before "Chance time" where the difficulty jumps to the next difficulty for a while (for example from normal to hard, technically you will be playing the following difficulty of the song for the duration of Chance time) and you won't lose lives during chance time, so as long as you'll get 50% before entering chance time you should be fine.

Now what to expect from the higher difficulty levels:
Around 7 star stages have usually only a couple hard sections, they are not too difficult and have similar elements to each other in a song. After these hard sections they usually return to the previous pace (For example the short multipress sections in The World Is Mine extreme). IF you know what is coming it is usually a pretty easy clear, if you do not, then they might lead into pretty fast defeats or massive hits to health bar.

8+ star stages have usually several sections with different styles of combos, but these sections are usually more lethal and faster than 7 star stages. The biggest difficulty change is probably the different styles you have to prepare for (for example Luka Luka Night Fever extreme has couple intense multipress sections and several intense rapid sections). You might clear some stages first try with luck, but usually they are very hard to clear with your first try. Under 9 star stages usually have around 3 to 5 second difficult sections.

9+ star stages have massive spikes in them that easily lead to drop outs and difficult sections last longer than 3 to 5 seconds, but otherwise are actually not that hard during their constant phases compared to 8 star stages (for example The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku extreme has pretty easy first half and very difficult second half). Usually the spike is so massive that clearing these with your first try requires some serious skill & luck.

10 star stages have a mix of everything and not in the easy way. They have even steeper difficulty spikes than 9 star stages and the difficult may vary a lot in a stage. 10 star stages usually have several long difficult sections. (For example World's End Dancehall has pretty constant first half, then a very intense rapid section, then a constant section after that and at last a massive spike once again for the rest of the song).

(These are not definitions for the difficulties, but descriptions, there will be exceptions to these descriptions with some songs)

Keep up your motivation
I enjoy most of the songs that I have perfected. For ME personally it really helps if I like the song, though just grinding for the grind might be fun sometimes, but the important thing is DO NOT stay in one song for too long. I have personal experience where the game starts to feel more frustrating and I start to dislike the song, just because I have played it for several hours without making a breakthrough. Remember to play different songs, so the game stays fresh and not as frustrating. Sometimes when perfecting a song you might have learned some new tricks to complete some other songs, so if you can't perfect a song maybe you can clear another song you haven't been able to clear before.

Learn the difficult parts of the song
Now, it is obvious and this is easier said than done, but it is really important when clearing songs or perfecting them that you know when you are about to face a difficult section. The difficult sections of a song are easiest to figure out in practice and you can try different approaches there. There you will easily see when you fail a section and you are able to immediately restart from the hard part and try again until you learn the section. This is especially useful if you are trying to perfect a song.

Try out easier songs with similar difficult sections
There are enough songs in this game, that there should be songs with similar hard sections as the current difficult stage you are struggling with. If you feel like some parts of a stage feel like overcoming them is impossible, then I recommend for you to try and find an easier song with similar sections and play them so you will learn how to approach the difficult section of the difficult song.

Thank you for reading my guide! I hope any information I shared here came out as useful, if it did adding this to your favorites makes it easier to read it again.

If you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, strategies or something you feel like I forgot to mention here, share them in the comments.


Extra advice:
One thing I notice that people are not using a lot, is the progression bar at the bottom as advice for clearing songs with certain ratings, they do not have the following option from Game/Control config enabled: Clear Threshold Display -> ALL
This shows you how close you are completing a stage, and whether or not it is possible to get Standard, Great or Excellent rating (if your bar is above the threshold it is possible, if it is a little below it is still possible if you manage to not fail anything and manage to hit some holds, if it is way below, then the possibility is lost). This helps you to keep track of how well you are doing in the song overall, and see if you need to restart in the middle of song. For example you are no longer able to get a Great rating, you can restart and not waste time stressing whether or not you can complete the song with wanted rating.