< SUGURI
Dashing, Beam ammunition and Live ammunition[]
Suguri and the Acceleration of Suguri spin-off series both use the triangle of Dashing, Beam ammunition and Live ammunition:
Dashing makes you immune to Beam ammunition. Live ammunition can harm you, even when dashing. Beam ammunition destroys and clears Live ammunition to give you more room for dashing.
Many enemies defend themselves offensively by throwing out rockets, mines and so on to impede your own Live Ammunition attacks. Remember which enemies use this type of ammo and take them out with Beam weapons.
Nearly each attack used both by you and the enemies falls into either Live ammunition or Beam ammunition, a few being Penetrating and Melee attacks. However, certain attacks are both indestructible and “undashable”, meaning that your dash will not make you immune to them: for example the flamethrowers in Stage 4.
Live ammunition disappears upon hitting an enemy or other live shots. Beam ammunition penetrates live shots and disappears upon hitting an enemy or a stage obstacle. Penetrating weapons can’t be stopped by walls, shields etc. and will hit multiple enemies in a row. Enemy penetrating attacks are "dashable". Melee weapons give a temporary Shield to protect you while attacking. Enemy melee attacks can’t be dashed through.
When you dash into a nearby screen edge you do a "walldash". That allows you to enter the dash state and evade bullets without actually moving around and risking a missile in the face. You can also dash into the wall diagonally to do more precise dodging.
Heat percentage, damage received and health gauge[]
Your heat increases when you use your dash. Holding down dash will raise your heat gradually while tapping dash to switch directions frequently will raise your heat much more rapidly. Every bullet touching the rings trailing behind you will also increase Heat: dash through many bullets and your heat will skyrocket.
For each attack there's a damage value. Suguri has 10000 HP available for each stage. Being at 100% Heat doubles damage: at 200% you get triple and at 300% quadruple damage. E.g. when you get hit by Kae's punch at 100% Heat you lose 3000 HP or 30% of your entire health - but when you suffer a hit at 300% Heat (which is very likely) you receive 6000 damage.
While not dashing your heat percentage cools off at approximately 50% heat per second.
Hyper gauge[]
To use a Hyper attack you need to fill your Hyper gauge until you gain Hyper stocks, indicated by the flashing number. Using a Hyper attack uses up 1 Hyper stock.
Your Hyper gauge fills when the rings trailing behind your dashes come in contact with any enemy attacks or when you deal damage to enemies.
Lock-on[]
Pressing either of the lock-on buttons allows you to attack a specific enemy, e.g. when your target is still a large enemy but you feel that you should take out smaller enemies around it first. Pressing both at the same time disables lock-on until you press either button again. Playing without lock-on is an advanced technique which has its merits, for example in the tunnel in stage 6 to prevent hitting the walls, or with slow weapons like 4-Cannon to hit agile enemies.
General Advice[]
Keep in mind that you can always swap your weapons after beating a stage, even in Arcade mode. Your weapon choice influences the difficulty of the various stages very much.
Example:The Sword+Spread Gun combo works well in the first two stages, but does poorly against the stage 3 boss. Something like Beam Rifle+Beam Bazooka is the snug and safe way there.
Please read the Weapon guide for more information and choose your weapons for each stage prudently.
Fitting for a shooting game, the enemies fly in relentlessly. Take them out as soon as possible or you will have a screen filled with bullets. In SUGURI however you can increase your Hyper gauge using the large amount of bullets and then sweep the screen with one or two Hyper attacks. Learn the enemy patterns so that the situation doesn’t overwhelm you.