WE'RE NOT DONE YET!

If you haven't beaten Hi-Fi RUSH/watched a full playthrough of it yet, and you don't want to be spoiled, leave now! Come back after you've beaten it/watched it all!

Cheering crowd

Upon beating Hi-Fi RUSH, you unlock quite a few new things to do and peruse! There's the SPECTRA challenge rooms that are scattered throughout the tracks (which you can now replay through); a new difficulty called rhythm master; the Rhythm Tower; the model viewer and costume store*; and the two arcade game modes, Power Up! Tower Up! and BPM RUSH! All of which the game very quickly informs you of.

*The costume store and model viewer aren't going to be discussed here, I just wanted to mention them since they're only unlocked after you beat the game. If you'd like to learn about them and all the costumes and models you can buy, head on over to the shopping page.

Table of Contents
  1. The SPECTRA Challenge Rooms
  2. Rhythm Master Difficulty
  3. The Rhythm Tower
  4. The Arcade Challenges
    1. Power Up! Tower Up!
    2. BPM RUSH!
  5. Fun Fact!

THE SPECTRA CHALLENGE ROOMS

Starting with the SPECTRA challenge rooms, these are what those mysterious doors you (probably) saw scattered about are for. Upon entering, you have to walk up to a glowing tile on the floor, which will show you what the challenge is and let you decide whether to tackle it or not. Each challenge is different, and some are trickier than others. They all involve defeating enemies in some way, and reward you with different things when you beat them; circuits, life gauge pieces, etc. There are eight total, and they can be found in the following tracks: one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, and ten.

Now, if you haven't beaten all of the rooms yet and you don't want to be spoiled, skip past this bit. Because, upon beating all of them, you unlock a hub room that's underneath Vandelay tower. You can get there by speaking to Peppermint in the hideout. In this hub is eight more challenge rooms, with their challenges being harder versions of the original eight. As you beat each one, you get one step closer to unlocking the big door that's across the chasm. Through that door, your ultimate reward awaits you...

RHYTHM MASTER DIFFICULTY

Rhythm Master is the final difficulty you can play on, and is the hardest difficulty in the entire game. The rhythm timing is incredibly tight, enemies have extremely high health and their stun gauges are just as strong, and the amount of damage you take is increased significantly. Plus, if the rhythm meter ever drops to a D rank during a fight, you immediately die. Once this difficulty is unlocked, you can, of course, replay all the tracks on it, as well as start new saves on it.

THE RHYTHM TOWER

The Rhythm Tower can be accessed by speaking with Korsica. It's a timed challenge in which you have to beat floors to progress. There are 60 floors, and the timer gets added to whenever you parry on beat and land beat hits perfectly. The rank you get for beating a floor also adds time; what rank you get dictates how much time is added. Your final rank for a floor is determined by whatever rank you have on the rhythm meter when you finish the floor. You earn gears for progressing through the tower, and if you beat it, you get the motherload. However, if you die or run out of time, you lose it all.

Before going in, you are given the ability to change your special attacks and chips. Make sure you choose wisely, as you cannot change your loadout mid-run.

Every fifth and tenth floor, you are given the ability to cash out, pause your run, or continue. You can also purchase health and batteries from Korsica before starting the fight on those floors. However, you aren't paying in gears; you pay in time. You can, of course, choose to simply buy nothing, but that's ultimately up to you and how well you think you're faring and will be able to continue to fare.

If you choose to pause your run and return to it later, don't try to start a new run before beating that one. You can only have one run going at a time, so starting a new one will delete the original.

Every tenth floor is a boss fight, with the only exception being floor 30, which is a gauntlet where you have to fight three waves of tough enemies.

Speaking of tough enemies, the rhythm tower has a few enemies that cannot be found in the tracks (at least, as enemies). Said enemies are the SHIN BRUT-1L, super ES-101, DUM-1E, and the tanning SBR-001. They're all tougher versions of regular enemies, with much higher stun gauges and more health, as well as increased aggression. They also have slightly different attack patterns.

Click here if you'd like to see all of the enemies that are on each floor!

THE ARCADE CHALLENGES

The arcade game modes can be accessed through the arcade machine that's located between Macaron and CNMN's areas in the hideout. As mentioned earlier, there are two to play: Power Up! Tower Up! and BPM RUSH! Each has 20 challenges to be done in order to get all of the rewards that the arcade machine has to offer.

The challenges are unique to each game mode, and they all give you points. The tougher the challenge, the more points it gives you. If you have enough points, you can receive a reward (or multiple) by going into the rewards section from the arcade machine's main menu. These rewards range from new photo mode poses to special attacks. And, if you beat all of the challenges for both, you gain access to a special, secret area that's mentioned in one of the vlogs scattered throughout the tracks...


POWER UP! TOWER UP!

Chai flexing and facing a BRUT-1L, who is attacking him. 808 is nearby. There's other enemies in the background. Said background is red, orange, and yellow. The area around Chai is green.

Power Up! Tower Up! is similar to the Rhythm Tower, in that you progress up the floors of a tower, with each floor having different enemies. However, unlike the Rhythm Tower, you aren't timed; instead, at the beginning of each floor, you are given the choice to upgrade one of your abilities or change your special attack—though you can also choose neither. The upgrades can come with a downside (which is called a bug) or a bonus that lasts for that floor only, though sometimes they have neither. Each choice you make either increases or decreases your score multiplier.

Successfully beating a floor while a bug is active increases your multiplier—doing so while a bonus is active decreases it. If you die, instead of losing all your progress like you do in the Rhythm Tower, you are given the option to continue. However, doing so decreases your multiplier. There are also only 25 floors total, rather than 60, and there are no boss floors.

Whatever chips or special attacks you have equipped before going in don't matter; same goes for your health and reverb upgrades, alongside any health tanks you have. All of your abilities are nerfed and reset in the tower. That's where those upgrades come in; they boost your abilities and give you chip abilities. Choose wisely...and remember the challenges you need to complete, as many of them have to do with these upgrades.

You can pause in the middle of a run and go back to the hideout, much like the Rhythm Tower, but unlike it you can do so at any time through the pause menu. You can continue a paused run, or start a brand new one, but remember that if you do so while one is paused, that run will get deleted and replaced by the new one.

Some floors have a special challenge floor that you can choose to do instead of the regular one. Beating these increases your score substantially—and losing them decreases it just as much. Beating them also gives you special rewards, such as multiple upgrades at once or increased ones. The rewards each one gives you are always the same, no matter what the challenge was. Speaking of which, the challenges are random, and there's a chance that you'll do the same one multiple times throughout a single run. Some of them are similar or the same as the SPECTRA challenges, whilst others are brand new. The higher the floor you're on, the more difficult the challenge will be.

The enemies on each floor change; sometimes they're the same through multiple runs, sometimes they're different. Dying and choosing to continue can also change the enemies on a floor. Speaking of which, much like the Rhythm Tower, there are enemies that you can encounter here that you can't in the tracks. Said enemies are the SHIN BRUT-1L, super ES-101, DUM-1E, KEM-N0, and DM-ET1L. They're all tougher versions of regular enemies, with much higher stun gauges and more health, as well as increased aggression. They also have slightly different attack patterns, and, in the case of the KEM-N0 and DM-ET1L, have unique rhythm parry sequences.


BPM RUSH!

Chai running away from a bunch of enemies. 808 is next to him. His player is visible on top of him, and there's bursts of energy coming off of him. There's a wall of speakers to the left of them. The background is blue, green, and yellow. The area around Chai is pink.

In BPM RUSH! instead of worrying about a timer or what upgrades to get, your only goals are to keep up with the ever increasing tempo, survive, and go as fast as you can. If you die, the run's over. You also cannot pause a run and continue it later. Luckily for you, it doesn't take long to get through a run. Especially if you're aiming for a high rank, as the faster you beat it, the higher the rank you get.

Your special attacks and chips matter here, so make sure you choose wisely before going in, as you can't change them once you've started a run.

You have to fill up your BPM gauge, which is a bar along the bottom of the screen under where the BPM you're playing on is. In order to do this, you have to do things in-time with the music, avoid damage as much as possible, and be aggressive. Not engaging with enemies for even a small amount of time can make the gauge start to empty, so keep on them at all times.

Once you fill up the gauge, any enemies remaining will instantly die, and you'll be put up against one to three enemies. You only need to worry about one of them, however; you'll know which one because they'll have a target hovering above them at all times. Once you defeat them, you move on to the next floor.

There are three difficulties you can play this mode on: easy, normal, and EX RUSH. At first, you only have access to easy and normal. Upon beating it on either difficulty with an S rank, you gain access to EX RUSH. EX RUSH is much harder than the other two; it starts on a higher BPM and puts you up against tough enemies that become even more difficult due to the fast pace. The health kick and health parry chips also don't work on this difficulty, so your only option for healing is Pick Me Up.

To circle back to the enemies I mentioned, you'll be going up against the same ones you can encounter in Power Up! Tower Up! However, on easy and normal difficulties, there are some enemies you don't have to deal with, such as the WA-ES-2. When playing on EX RUSH, they're thrown back into the fray.

FUN FACT!

If you're playing the game on Steam, if you've ever pressed shift + tab to activate the steam overlay, you may have noticed that you had a custom status message that fit whatever you were currently doing in-game. There's one for every track (some even have multiple) and other areas of the game, but I'm only going to list the ones related to the post-game content here.