Hi-Fi RUSH

Just as an FYI to start, this is, by a mile, the hardest achievement in the game imo. I would only recommend trying this mode with a fully maxed out Chai AND with all your Health Tanks maxed out. Additionally, if you are even a little rusty with your rhythm, I would highly recommend enabling the metronome with so that you can play to the beat visually. Trust me, you’ll need all the help you can get.

As for the mode itself, it is not accessible when you initially access the arcade machine. To unlock it you’ll have to beat either the Easy or Normal variant of the mode with an S rank. Easy is probably the way to go for that, especially given that Normal isn’t going to be remotely good practice for EX Mode anyway. EX Mode has a couple of special modifiers not found in Easy and Normal that make it an absolute hell to clear if you don’t know what you’re doing, which are (from most to least manageable imo):

1. Health items are absent (Pick Me Up IS NOT banned);
2. Start at 185 BPM/Beats Per Minute; all waves after wave 1 are at 200 BPM;
3. Healing chips are disabled; and
4. Enemies deal an additional 0.2x damage every wave after wave 2, capping at 2x damage at the final wave (wave 7)

Additionally, in line with the other BPM Rush difficulties, your health is fully restored and your Reverb gauge is reset at the start of each wave. The health restoration is about the only thing going for you here.
No health items isn’t really that big a deal due to Pick Me Up, nor is the fast start once you get used to its rhythm, but the additional damage and disabling of healing chips forces you to take a Reverb-focused chip loadout unless if you’re a god to have a hope of beating this. I myself used Battery Magnet Lv.2 (battery amount increased by 20%) and Parry Charge Lv.3 (batteries appear 40% of the time on a successful parry) on my successful run; my special attacks were Pick Me Up and Hibiki. If you want to try other chip loadouts (and especially an alternative Reverb attack) however feel free, just don’t use High Risk, High Return unless if you want to write a death note.

As for the execution of the run, my recommendations (because saying ‘just play well’ like I ended up doing doesn’t exactly help anyone) would be to make use of Shred (, , then spam ) when you can to quickly get your Reverb gauge up and to make constant use of Jam Combos (both for the i-frames and also because they allow you to get a free combo on an enemy provided their stun gauge is broken, which shouldn’t be hard with Korsica), while using Hibiki whenever there’s a lot of enemies around you, as that seems to increase the BPM Gauge very quickly, but make sure to keep a very close eye on your health while you’re filling up the BPM Gauge. I would recommend using Pick Me Up whenever your health is under 75%, as, in the later waves especially, your health goes down real fast. However, unless if you’re really close to dying, I would recommend just using Hibiki when the VIP enemy spawns to kill it quickly. As for the new enemies, you should get a decent enough idea as to what they can do with the couple of runs you’ll probably do before trying EX Mode, so I won’t waste any more words on them; same thing applies to the base game enemies.

With that, that’s about all I’ve got for EX Mode. GLHF with this challenge. It’s definitely the hardest thing in the game but also imo the most fun.