Hi-Fi RUSH – Beginner to Advanced Player Guide

If you’re looking to understand how to get S ranks more consistently, and understand hidden mechanics and advanced tech then this guide is for you (videos provided).

How to parry more consistently before you know all the enemy patterns

Most players will get the wrong idea about parrying, thinking its supposed to be a high level technique but in reality the game is built around it in such a way where atleast 80% of the time it’s only necessary to be on beat while tapping the parry button for it to work, this is especially true while you’re trying to combo an enemy and say a ranged enemy starts to aim at you—just start tapping the parry button and you’ll be saved.

Keeping combo when you can’t hit anything

This is mostly important information when it comes to starting out in Rhythm Master difficulty where you game over if you reach rank D, at first i was sure this was essentially impossible since the game is extremely generous with S rankings(only taking a few seconds at the start of the fight) but as you go further into the game you’ll probably notice there’s a few instances where there’s essentially nothing to hit(i.e only shield enemies, or a more specific case Rekka when she’s electrified). The solution is managing your two ranged assists in such a way that they keep building the chain infinitely.

Also this is pretty useful to know in general since you can guarantee a full combo can happen in any regular fight as long as you keep those two assists available.

Enemy specific information

If i had to guess i’d say most people will find the samurais difficult because of the special invincibility state they can activate at around half-health which is unique to them. It essentially breaks your combo and also may force you to full parry an chain which has no tell like all the other attacks where you’re shown the combo’s timing. In reality you can skip the whole thing by hitting the samurai with Korsica who can disable the samurais invincibility.

The two bird enemies are probably one of the more annoying enemies in the game since they have pseudo immunity to the magnet chain, meaning if they fly far away from you there’s a pretty high chance you’re gonna lose your combo and also waste a bunch of your time if the bird keeps running away. On the other hand you can perma stun-lock them pretty easy if you keep jumping and starting a combo before they start flying up.

If you find the big enemy execution’s annoying like I do(after seeing it for the billionth time it starts to get grating since it cuts off your combo and such) you can essentially skip all of them as long as you start tapping parry to the beat right in front of them.

This one is extremely useful and also is super cool (the dev who suggested this is awesome), if you go straight to a shield enemy at the start of a fight and tap parry to the beat you can break their shield as they spawn in.

This in reality applies only to Mimosa but if you’re trying to get an S rank in the Rhythm tower then this stun-lock technique will be insanely useful.

Spam strategy and stun-locking enemies and bosses

I’ve seen some people figure this out but in case you haven’t: Assists are straight-up overpowered

If you throw all three of them together and have some sort of cooldown chip equipped, you will essentially nuke the entire screen with projectiles meaning the chain meter will skyrocket even if there’s only one enemy in the fight.

You can go to insane numbers which give score bonuses, meaning that even if you don’t get all the fancy bonuses or hell even if you keep getting the negative effects like repetitive, your combo will be so high that the score will become way more than it’s actually expected of you to get for an S rank.(most fights its trivial to get 100 combo with this strategy, meaning you’ll get around 30 000 in bonuses).

In lower difficulties, you’ll essentially melt enemy health bars in seconds, which is great if you’re going for 100% since you have to replay the game 5 times for the S ranks(which by the way is stupid).

Movement

Enemy Step

This one is really useful if you want to combo an enemy without any of the other enemies bothering you. Just do a three light hit combo and when Chai pauses he actually gains vertical momentum and so does the enemy.

I haven’t found any mentions of the following two movement techniques:

Quick Running

This is essential if you don’t want to take a million years in your multiple playthroughs for 100%.

The timing is rather strict, you can’t be too fast or the distance will be too small and you can’t be too slow or you’ll get a really slow dodge attack instead. I visually time it so I start a new dodge when Chai touches the ground. You’ll have to experiment yourself in training mode but for me it helps to do 1 regular dodge > then with the second perfect dodge start the quick running (just find something that helps you find the rhythm essentially).

(in 2D movement, it may be easier to practice in 2D actually)

(in 3D movement)

Air grounded dash

This weird glitch makes the game think you dashing along the ground so it lets you essentially do dash > jump > dash again which is way further than the game expects you to be able to travel in midair. I didn’t find any use for it but i thought having some info about it here might help some speed runner do something crazy with it :shrugs:

the timing is really weird but I semi-consistently got it to work with a really quick jump > dash transition, I can’t really give more specific info than that since I barely got it to work.

Rhythm tower S rank requirement

If you’re going to attempt the Rhythm tower achievement there’s really three things you need to get 10+ minutes in your run:

• Buy Hibiki
• Get as many battery chips as possible
• learn how to spam assists(which lets you spam the basic light combo, meaning you get lots of batteries quickly)