• Step 1: Become a Touhou
  
  

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• Step 2: Acquire Drip
  
  

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• Step 3: Kill them all
  

So to actually explain a little bit of the interactions happening with the loadout;

8 Manipulation + 1 Sub Weapon allows you to launch equipped sub weapons as projectiles. Different weapon types behave differently when activated this way. Personally I prefer swords for this method.
Increasing the Manipulation skill beyond 1 allows for a higher number of duplicates of each sub weapon to be spawned at once. (i.e. 2 Sub weapons x 8 Manipulation = 16 Projectiles)
8 Expand makes each projectile absolutely massive, as seen in the 'Kill them all' step.
8 Samidare effectively allows each summoned weapon to pierce enemies rather than disappearing after striking
8 Wave functionally turns each projectile into an explosive, dealing massive AoE damage with each enemy struck
7 Guidance simply makes projectiles homing, higher levels increase homing aggression.

More or less of each skill may be tweaked up or down depending on personal preference or available SP for skill building, but I found this particular setup to be immensely effective at clearing even late-game stages and dealing with Brave Generals.
While you may choose to swap out all Wave skills for levels of Elemental Skills, I have found that just wave alone is plenty strong for all applications.
It is strongly recommended that you do not mix Wave with any other Elemental Skill, as doing so may cause yourself to be effected by whichever elemental skill you choose. While it may be a bug, at time of writing the AoE effect of Wave skills can inflict status effects on anyone in range, including the player.

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Berserker - Can no longer block, much more ATK
Sprit of Asura - Halves HP, Greatly increases ATK
Samurai Spirit - Increase Damage for each equipped gear matching Main weapons
Enhanced DEF - Increase DEF
Enhanced ATK - Increases ATK
Collector - Automatically pick up items/gear
N.Sword Arts - All attacks use Ninja Sword moveset
Sword Master - Swing Swords Faster

While not every damage increasing gear directly effects the damage inflicted by the previously explained skill setup, the important pieces of gear that do are Berserker and Spirit of Asura. Other damage gear will aid for the few moments when you may want or need to use normal attacks against enemies such as Samurai Spirit and Enhanced ATK
As well Collector is a nice QoL skill as you can very quickly acquire all arms, scrolls, and healing items almost as quickly as you clear a level. This has additional utility in the final boss fight if you happen to take damage, as you'll freely pickup any healing items dropped by the spawned foot soldiers.
Additionally the Ninja Sword Arts and Sword Master skills are essential for truly unleashing the potential of this build and becoming the unstoppable anime protagonist you were meant to be.
Ninja Sword Arts forces all equipped weapons and subsequent attacks to utilize the Ninja Sword move set regardless of their weapon class.
Sword Master will remove the small windup animation from most attack skills allowing your attacks to come out much quicker.
Combined together, these two passive skills effectively allow you to wield this games equivalent of the buster sword like daggers and cut your enemies to ribbons with extremely fast attacks that deal massive damage.
Some may choose to swap out a few pieces here or there for other preferred skills for whatever reasons. However this is the gear that I use to boost my damage potential about as high as I need it to be to kill everything with ease.
As well, so far as I've seen with most if not all passive skills, the player can only benefit from them once. Meaning you can not stack all Enhance ATK skills to get a massive boost to damage, unfortunately. Instead you can take duplicate skills and forge them together to enhance a gear to a maximum of +5, which improves the power of whichever skill is on the equipment.

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There are many ways to play this game, and there may well be better ways to get even more damage output utilizing other skill or gear setups. This is just me sharing the OP build that carried me through most of the game.
Also in case anyone is curious what my other skill setups are;

Other skills are just relatively simple combat skills for carving my way through hordes of enemies (The combo bound to my Square button)
As well as a simple Hyper Thrust to just inject DPS straight into singular enemies (The skill block bound to my Triangle button)
Jump and dash skills are pretty self explanatory.
At any rate, hope this guide was helpful especially for those who may be struggling with the game, or even those who just wanna watch the world burn. Have fun, and happy hunting!

Also just to show how large the swords from this gear set can be when used with Enlarge. Possibly the sword with the largest hurt box in the game. Also drip check.

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I greatly appreciate the free internet points.