Soul Anchor 2 Notes

general notes and techniques:
-In this game it's easier to jump first and shoot later. That is, you should jump, then during Murasa's trajectory you find the point where you're aligned with your target, and only then should you shoot.
-You can go oob by damage boosting from a fairy multiple times, while next to a wall (no uses as of yet). Does not seem to work with spike pits.
-You can die as many times as you want on a stage. However there's a limit to how many times you can die on a boss (you'll get a game over). If you use a couple continues you'll get a bad ending and be kicked out. It's annoying to practice bosses for this reason.
-You can shoot water and the anchor during the opening cutscenes, but you can't move. You can use this to clear enemies. The only stages with targets that can be hooked during the opening cutscene are stages 4 and 6 (check those sections for details).
-Shooting the anchor in the air slows your descent. This means that if you spam it you fall down slower.
-When doing a diagonal shot, aim for the lower end of a point (the tiny circle at the bottom of a grapple point). When doing an horizontal shot you want to aim at the center of the entire grapple point (above the tiny circle at the bottom). Don't ask me why the hitboxes are different.
-Hooking a point. There's 3 ways of doing it:
	-Directly below: Murasa will cling to the point and shorten the Anchor's chain automatically. You cannot do any movement in this state other than jumping off.
	-Diagonally: You swing left and right on a fixed trajectory. You cannot increase/decrease your momentum by holding the right/left keys. You can however shorten or extend the distance of the chain by pressing up or down. You go faster the more you extend the chain. There's a limit to how long the chain can go when you're swinging. If you grapple a point from very far, the chain will automatically shorten until it's at the maximum possible swinging distance.
	-Horizontally: Same as above, but your trajectory is a half circle and you have way more speed. Good for traversing areas quickly.
	-If you hit a wall or a floor, while swinging diagonally/horizontally, you'll switch to the "Directly below" state. This means that you'll lose control of Murasa's movement and she'll shorten the anchor's chain. Thing is, if you hook a point horizontally and hit a floor right below you, the game will switch you to vertical mode but you'll keep your height, sometimes even being teleported to the location where the grapple point is. The game still thinks the chain is long though, so it'll shorten the chain and you'll climb up, but since you spawned at the grapple points location, you'll climb above it (which makes no sense in real life but it does in videogames). This can be used to gain extra height off of a grapple point, and is also a method for out of bounds (if there's a ceiling right above the grapple point in question, although it won't always work for some reason).
-Out of Bounds navigation:
	-Walls, ceilings and floors are solid from both sides.
	-Middle tiles (no walls/ceilings/floors) have zero collision.
	-Each individual wall tile has collision on all sides except the one opposite to the wall itself. So it looks like a [.
	-Since each tile in a wall looks like [ then if you want to climb a wall, you have to jump out through the opening and then turn around in midair to go inside the next tile.
	-A two tile wide wall will look like this [] so if you get stuck out of bounds inside such a narrow place you won't be able to leave.
	-To get back inbounds, you have to find a place under a floor where Murasa is constantly bouncing up and down and mash jump. I don't know the exact time that you have to press jump, but I assume it's precise since sometimes I fail it for a long time. More research should be done on this.

stage 1
-Clear the enemies during the intro if you want. The fairy walking directly above you is the only one that can give you trouble. Shoot an anchor at the default position (diagonally up right) a bit after stage starts (or just spam it you'll eventually hit her).
-Diagonally shoot the first target and use it to climb to the platforms above (saves a second over going around the bottom).
-Now you have two options:
	-Jump and shoot diagonally the target to the left, then the target on the top. Climb it and go OoB.
	-Jump to the right, damage boost off the fairy (optionally) and shoot upwards to directly grab the target on the top. Then wait for Murasa to slowly climb up to the target and go OoB. This method is faster by 0.6 but jumping from a grapple point into solid floor right above said point is significantly harder than jumping into thin platforms. If you jump into the thin platforms and only then go towards the fairy and vertically shoot the point above you then it's as fast as the other method.
-To go OoB, jump to the left of the top target and hook the target again, so that you can get another jump and go OoB. From there navigate up and to the right (check general notes section for help).
-You can jump and throw water at the green fairy to kill her if her cycle if she isn't jumping soon, to prevent her from messing you up later. If you throw water at the top of your jump you'll be done with the animation before you land so you won't lose time to landing lag.
-Go back inbounds. It's a bit tricky and I don't really understand it too well. Sometimes it feels like doing it closer to the left edge of the floor above you makes it more consistent but I have no idea if it's true.
-Grab the point above the jumping green fairy, use it to climb to the platform right above it.
-Jump and grab the next point. Jump towards it again and grab it again so you gain some height.
-Do horizontal swings all the way to the right. Be careful if the fairies damage you as you're about to shoot the anchor, then it won't come out and you'll fall.
-When swinging off the last red point, you'll sometimes touch the lower platform just before the last section and Murasa will automatically let go of the anchor. Be careful cause if you're just holding right you'll fall and lose some time. Just be ready to jump if it looks like you're gonna hit it.
-Shoot the last red point horizontally. This particular point makes Murasa disappear for a second (??). You can extend the disappearance for longer by not holding anything. The moment you touch forward you'll come back. It lets you gain a lot of distance so you can use it to go under the goal post then just shoot up. Alternatively just keep forward held and when you become visible again then shoot diagonally up-right (it's faster but vanishing for longer is cool).

There's a no-OoB path that's about 6 seconds slower or so. You go through the level normally. When you get to a point where you have to climb upwards and then go to the left, you can just hook the last red point by jumping and shooting upwards (the red point I said you need to be careful of if you hit the lower platform just before the end).

There's a "shortcut" in this level. If you climb out of the first room normally you'll find a place with some thin platforms and a fairy walking around. One of those thin platforms crumbles down when you touch it. If you fall down that pit you'll find a path that takes you straight to the end. It's slower than both methods shown above, however, because you take a longer distance and you have to wait for some cycles on the hookable points.

Kyouko:
-At the start stand to the left of the thick ghostly white line in the background. When Kyouko "explodes" (aka her attack starts) then jump and shoot upwards. If you jump high enough you'll grab the top point right away. I don't know if this is placebo but it feels like grabbing the point is easier when it's spawning (I feel like I need a much more precise jump if I try to grab it later on).
-Kyouko is only vulnerable when she stops moving. Wait for her to stop and hit her with the anchor by shooting it diagonally at her face. It's better to shoot early because the anchor still does damage on the way back so even if you're too fast you won't lose much time.
-Keep spamming the anchor to slow your descent. When Kyouko spawns the next set of points you can easily grab them since you'll still be in the air.
-If you want to avoid some damage, then you can stop the anchor spam for a bit between phases. This will make it so you're lower when the bullets spawn so you won't get hit immediately.
-I'm not sure how this works but it seems Kyouko's bullets deal random damage?? Either that or you can be hit by two at the same time or something. All I know is that sometimes I'm doing fine and then I get hit once and lose 2/3rds of my health and die. It's right at the start though so happy resetting.



stage 2
-Killing the fairy while the intro is playing doesn't make a difference.
-You can use the first grapple point to skip the moving one and jump straight to the third point, but it doesn't matter since you're waiting for the grapple point after that, which is on a cycle.
-Just climb this shaft area, do what I do on my PB.
-The last jump at the very top is a bit tricky. When you're using a grapple point to jump to a thin platform directly above it then it's not very difficult because even if your jump isn't very good you can go inside the platform and the game places you on top of it. When your trying to climb into solid floor however, you need a much better jump. You have to cling as close to the grapple point as possible and do a full jump. It takes a while to get used to it, but eventually you'll grasp the height you have to be.
-Fall down the shaft
-During the next fall you wanna go far left then back right to avoid landing on all the small platforms.
-Shoot the first 3 points diagonally since it's not worth moving horizontally. Once you get the third point then you want to let go right after and shoot the next point horizontally.
-Take the shortcut. On the bottom right of this screen you stand on the corner and the thin platform crumbles, then you can take a path to the right. Note that if you're standing on a crumbling plaform as it's falling you don't fall with it. You'll float in the air until you move again, so move left and right a bunch to fall as fast as possible.
-There's a way to skip waiting for the platform to fall, which saves about 2 seconds. It requires you to let go from the grapple point in such a way that you clip into the thin platform above the shortcut, but don't climb on top of it. Instead it'll move you slightly to the right before you clip out and fall below it, and that gives you enough horizontal distance to make it to the shortcut area without having to wait for the crumbling platform. It's very tricky and precise so I don't do it.
-Take the rocket grapple. You can shoot at it diagonally but it's a bit tricky since there's a thin platform that can block your shot.
-After the second rocket aim directly for the static grapple point, skipping the moving one.
-This part is a bit tricky and you should move according to the cycles. You can grab the lower moving platform wherever it is, then grapple the second one when it comes through, and finally jump to the last one. Alternatively, grab the lower moving platform, then when it stops use that opportunity to jump and cling to the same grapple point, to gain height. Doing this while the point is moving is hard so you should wait for it to stop. Then, once the lower point is below the third point you can jump and grapple it. The shot is a bit tricky because if the anchor is anywhere near the walls at the top then it will stop and you'll fall.
-Jump to the end and grapple it diagonally.

The non-shortcut path is way longer (like 20 seconds). This is counting the mini shortcut where you grapple upwards from the third point in the room after all the descending.

Yoshika:
This boss is random. You can get two hits per cycle, but this requires you to get to Yoshika early enough, so that her invulnerability frames end before she warps again. You need 5 hits so that's 3 cycles at best.
At the start she can stand still and shoot you, or immediately warp to one of the 4 platforms above you. It's faster if she stands still of course.
She can also bait you by warping to a place then immediately leaving and going somewhere else. To my knowledge you can't damage her during the baits (I could be wrong though).
If she baits you, you lose time of course. Also, by baiting you she'll lead you into a place and then spawn somewhere else. This means it might take you too long to get to her so you won't reach her in time to get 2 hits in that cycle.



stage 3
-Ride the boat. Nothing to do here so far, please find a skip.
-In the end of the boat ride, you can anchor the moving grapple point early and ride it up. However, there's a trigger at the end of the boat ride that stops the autoscroller camera. If you don't hit it, the camera will keep going and you'll get crushed. Unfortunately you have to stay in the boat until the end and wait an extra cycle on the moving platform.
-Make your way up this room as seen in the video.
-For the last point at the very top, try to grab it vertically. If you miss it you can still go to the next platform and shoot diagonally left for one last chance at grabbing it before having to wait another cycle. Be careful though because grabbing it diagonally from certain angles can clip you out of bounds and you'll lose time.
-There's a crumbling thin platform right after that leads into a "shortcut" shaft but it's waaay slower.
-Don't grab the clock. It won't give you any good movement at all. Clocks are very weird when you cling to them.
-Use the lime grapple points to cross the spike pit.
-Here you have 2 choices:
	-Wait for the moving point to lower, grab it and climb to the top (the cycle should be in a terrible spot if you went as fast as possible)
	-Turn around and grab the second lime grapple point horizontally, while standing on the middle of the thin platform next to it. You'll clip inside the ground on top of it. From there you can jump up and get out of there. It saves 1 second if the moving grapple point is in a bad cycle (which it should be) and if you clip back in-bounds perfectly. I don't do it any more because clipping back in-bounds is too inconsistent.
-Damage boost off the jumping fairy while you're jumping. You want to land on her platform while she's in the air and jump at her. You'll gain a bit of height from the damage and that will let you reach the thin platform above you. It's about 1 sec timeloss if fairy's cycle is the absolute worst (she's landing as you arrive).
-Then horizontally shoot the grapple point above you. You'll go OoB, just navigate your way straight to the exit, it's right above you. This method saves 6.8 seconds over playing the rest of the level normally (might vary based on the grapple point cycles)
-If you accidentally kill the fairy, you can keep going, grab the OoB point diagonally to cross the gap, turn around and grab the same point horizontally. Use the extra speed from horizontal movement to get to the thin platforms on the left. Then do the OoB. This method of OoB is only about 3.33 seconds faster than beating the level normally, so if your clip back in-bounds isn't very good it won't save any time at all. Alternatively just do the level normally (or reset).

Seiga: Ride the boat. At the end you have shoot her diagonally but try to hit her with the edge of your anchor so you have to walk less towards her. Pls find a skip for this.



stage 4
-This is one of the levels where you can grapple something on the intro cutscene (the rocket above you). However, if you grapple it immediately the rocket will leave without you (since Murasa cannot move yet) and you'll have to wait for it to respawn. You wanna hit it just before you gain control, to save just a little bit of time, while still grabbing the rocket.
-After the first rail fall towards the platform and get the crumble platform to start falling. Then, jump around the whole platform (to skip waiting for the crumbling platform to fall) and grab the hidden rocket below it. You need to get the crumbling platform out of the way or you'll get stuck on it when you ride the rocket.
-Make your way through this shortcut until you get to the spike pit.
-Riding the balloon to dodge the spikes is of course really slow, so just fall off. If you turn around just before you land you get a teensy push forward but it's minimal you don't have to go for it. You'll have some invincibility period from getting hit so just use that to walk through the rest of the spikes.
-Jump off the spikes just before your invincibility period ends and shoot diagonally at the rocket. This way you don't have to get hurt by the spikes twice.
-You can glitch with the balloon here too but it doesn't save any time since you skip very little.
-Go through the rails until the final area.
-Be careful when shooting the first rocket on the last area diagonally, because you might hit the corner of the floor below it and Murasa will let go of the rocket. You want to shoot it as early as possible. Alternatively, get on said floor, jump away from the rocket and shoot it diagonally (slightly faster than walking all the way below it and shooting vertically).
-These first two rockets go way higher than the next rocket. As soon as you see your next target immediately jump and horizontal grapple it.
-For the last rocket you want to go straight to the right one. Either jump upwards/left and shoot it diagonally, or jump right and shoot it vertically. Shooting it vertically will be slower but if you try to shoot it diagonally you might hit the rocket you just used. If you get enough height you can jump right and make it to the next rocket with a diagonal shot, but it might not be worth waiting for the rocket you're on to reach the very tip of its trajectory.
-Once you get off the final rocket you can horizontally shoot the goal point. If you miss then just walk to it and shoot it diagonally.

Tojiko: Not much you can do, just ride the rails. The jumps can be a bit tricky on your first playthrough or two but after you get the hang of the game it should be always easy. Spam water to make sure you don't die from the fairies (I'm not sure you'll die even if you get hit by everything but don't push it). You want to jump off a rail sooner rather than later since the next rail point will move when you grapple it, even if you're not near it. Only concern is getting Murasa's slow shooting animation off as soon as possible.
Tojiko follows your vertical position (otherwise she'd vanish every once in a while) and stays at the same horizontal distance. In the end of the stage she stops moving eventually so you can get close to her, but she'll keep the last vertical position. If you jump just before she stops she'll stay high. This is bad because, after she stops, you want to jump and shoot her horizontally so you don't have to walk all the way towards her.



stage 5
-If you're holding right at the start, be careful since there's a pit right next to you.
-Make your way up the yellow spinning grapple points.
-At the end jump off and vertically shoot the moving blue point, which should be coming downwards if you didn't make a mistake. Wait for it to rise a bit then jump to the left.
-(instead of going left you can go right, there's a theory shortcut here that could save some time but unfortunately you can't make it up a certain ledge currently. Keep it in mind just in case a new glitches comes up or something)
-Don't horizontally shoot the rocket right away because it'll fly off without you. You need to get close to it.
-Make your way over the next 3 points.
-Here you have a few options:
	-do this part normally
	-use the third point to get an extra jump and vertical shoot the top-most point (hard cause you can't see the point and you need a good jump since it's so high)
	-horizontal shoot the third point at a specific position (watch my PB) so that you hit the floor and Murasa glitches out a bit. This will give you enough height to make it to the platform above you.
	-Which one you choose doesn't really matter since you have to wait for the next cycle anyway.
-On the next gap, jump and grab the second point and jump across. The cycle should always be bad if you played well, unfortunately. You could try getting extra jumps from the first point, but it might not be possible since it's constantly moving.
-The secret shaft that let's you skip the spike pit is slower, even if you don't do the upcoming balloon glitch.
-Grab the balloon horizontally from far away, since it teleports you right next to it.
-Go through walls with the balloon. How it works is that you and the balloon have to be next to a wall and then you horizontally shoot the balloon and hold against the wall. Eventually you go through. Since you need to horizontally shoot the balloon you need a floor below you, so you use the spikes. If you try to jump off of a balloon you get no height at all, you just fall down. Once you're out of bounds just do the same thing: jump and shoot right to grab balloon, hold right. If you can't grab the balloon try shooting up and/or moving around. If you can't find it you're stuck. This whole skip saves at least 22 seconds.
-Get off the balloon and grab the rocket below you. Keeping the balloon to go through the next couple of walls is slower.
-Jump down the spike pit. There's a balloon here too but it's slower to glitch with it since you don't skip anything.
-If you jump into the spikes and turn left just before hitting the first set of spikes, you won't get damaged a second time by the spikes. You'll get damaged by the fairy but she doesn't stop you so it's okay. If you can do good damage boosts you can instead avoid jumping at the start and just do 2 damage boosts instead of 1.
-Don't grab this rocket diagonally or you'll hit the ceiling and it will fly off without you.
-You can horizontally shoot the goal from pretty far, but if you do it from too far the goal point will leave without you and you'll have to wait for it to respawn. Just jump when you get to the 4th thin platform.
-(If you don't do the glitch, the bottom secret path is slower by around 4.5 seconds so you should take the normal path to beat this stage).

Futo: The second and last random boss. Much worse than Yoshika because she can waste up to 30 seconds and is later on the run rather than right at the start.
You need to hit her 5 times.
You can't shoot anchors downwards so you can only hit Futo when she's above you. You also can't hit her when she's offscreen. This means you have very few chances to actually hit her.
She can however sometimes stop above you to shoot bullets which is great because you can hit her a bunch of times, but it's random.
You'd think stopping yourself by grappling one of the points would mean Futo would go above you because that's how physics should work, but nope. As far as I can see nothing happens when you grapple a point.
The best strategy is to spam the anchor upwards. Even if Futo moves under you, you can hit her while she's going past you. You can also hit her when she's on her way towards the outside of the screen.
Really just hit her when you can and get lucky. Maybe there's some manipulation that I don't know about, good luck finding it.



stage 6
-This is the other level where you can grapple something on the intro cutscene: The grapple point straight ahead of you. Your swinging trajectory changes based on how early you hit the target (for some reason). If you hit it immediately after the intro cutscene starts, you'll be near the grapple point itself when you gain control (great if you want to take the normal route or the alternative shortcut). To get a swing that puts you near the rocket you want to shoot the grapple point once you see the spinning yellow grapple points on the middle of the screen (during the intro cutscene). Watch my PB and listen for when I shoot the anchor to get an idea.
-The way you're supposed to reach that rocket, by the way, is by going to the leftmost section of the platform you start in. It's a crumbling platform, and if you fall below it you'll find a rocket point that will take you to the rocket point you grab through the glitch. It's of course faster to just get out of the intro cutscene and be right next to the rocket.
-After the rocket, stand on the second tile to the right of the opening you came in, and shoot upwards. This shot is tight, I think the trick is shooting it just after you start falling.
-Jump from that grapple point and grab the next 2 with vertical shots. This area has 6 grapple points but you only need to grab 3.
-Jump and grab one of the yellow spinning grapple points. Feel free to wait a bit to check where the cycle is. If it's terrible you could miss the shot and have to do the previous climb all over again.
-Make your way through the spinning yellow grapple points. Then grab the point that's on a cycle (try not to miss it).
-You can actually hit said point that's on a cycle from the second set of spinning yellow points. It requires you to be extremely close to the yellow point you're on (kinda hard since they move so much), making a jump and blind shooting the moving platform. If you memorized the cycles and made no mistakes I'm sure it wouldn't be as hard but I don't go for it.
-Make your way through the cycle grapple points. Then grab the static point at the end and use it to get another jump and make it through the thin platforms without needing the second grapple point.
-Ride the rail, when Murasa touches the purple grapple point at the end, jump off and horizontally shoot the goal point.

-There's another path where you go through the level normally until you fall down a shaft. Then you go to the left instead of right and get rid of a crumbling platform into a secret path. This path is about 6.83 seconds slower.

Miko: You can move during the opening cutscene so that means blind play! Hold right from the start. When she explodes (the dust clouds come out of her) jump and shoot diagonally up right. Hold up for a bit (to gain height) then jump and shoot horizontally. By now you should have control. You can probably hold up for less time, or jump and shoot the target again instead of holding up to get height, but I like to be at least a bit safe.
Afterwards just make your way through the area using horizontal swings as much as possible.
You can jump at the peak of the third set of spinning yellow points and you'll land on the platform.
Jump off the last point into the rocket as soon as it comes into view, since the rocket launches as soon as you grab it.
At the tip of the rocket jump, get off and hit Miko horizontally. Then go below her and hit her vertically twice.

Nue: She has 10HP. She has 3 patterns and (normally) does them in this order:
-She'll dip at you twice while surrounded by UFOs. You can't hit her during her descent, only when she's at the top. Can get two hits in.
-She'll stand in the middle and shoot lasers at you while UFOs spin around the room. Just tank everything and hit her as fast as possible.
-She'll play a shell game. The UFO that Nue chooses to hide behind is random, but the UFOs always go on the same position. You can use that information to preemptively position yourself under the place where her UFO will be, to save a bit of time.
-If you didn't kill her here, she'll loop back to the first pattern.
If you start a new game after fighting her, it seems the pattern she starts with changes (the order of them is still the same though). It seems to start where it last stopped I think.

Mamizou: It's an autoscroller stage but you can play it as fast as you want. However, you'll have to go through it blindly.
This is better to learn by experience but it's not very hard to navigate. Most jumps between grapple points involve just jumping one tile to the right and shooting vertically. Overall it goes like this:
-Climb the first 3 points, you should still be visible.
-Climb 3 points vertically. Jump right wait a tad and mash diagonally until you hit next point, use it to cross to the next floor.
-Jump on single tile, then on the double tile, jump right two platforms. Then start counting and jump left and right until you count to 6
-Once you reach this area you want to shoot another vertical grapple point. It's above the last thin platform.
-Vertical climb over 3 grapple points. Then jump off and hold right.
-This is the hard part and where I still slow down, since the camera is pretty far. There's 2 single tile platforms, a 3 tile platform, then another single. Then you go left right left right. Then you can right one last time, and jump into the next floor.
-Climb the stairs as best you can.
-Grab the rail, it's above the second to last tile from the cliff. Either move to said tile and shoot up, or just shoot diagonally right as soon as you reach the top of the stairs (faster).
-Switch between rails while the autoscroller camera is still on, which is a bit scary but not too bad.
-You can jump off the rail early but I'm not sure it's faster.
-Just ride the boat until the end. At the end hit Mamizou horizontally from as far as you can.
It's hard to practice boss stages because it's the only stages where you can game over (and if you game over enough times the game kicks you out).