Saiko no sutoka: Yangire Mode: Essentials (truncated)

Yangire mode is, at the time of writing this guide (pre-Nightmare Mode) the hardest available gamemode in Saiko no Sutoka.

Quite a few core mechanics are tweaked in this game mode, and it is made with the sole purpose of being as unforgiving and unfair as possible to complete casually.

As unfair and punishing as it may be, always remember that that is exactly the intention, to seem insurmountable. You are by all means, at a disadvantage, and all odds are against you when you try to tackle winning this mode earnestly.

Knowing this, expect to restart often if things get unlucky early, and don’t be too worried about not succeeding all the time. You will see many people call it masochistic, sadistic, impossible, unfair, especially when it comes to the achievements. But this is all just exaggeration, to some extent. As long as you understand the mechanics and have a fair degree of luck on your side, you can also beat this mode and, by extension, get all the achievements for the game.

So to reiterate, knowledge is power. And this game has the ever-so-lovely side effect of being rather unpopular: lack of documentation.
I am hoping to help in this matter.

This section is dedicated to providing all the relevant raw information about the differences and quirks of Yangire mode.

・Greatly improved hearing (see corresponding section)
・Moderately higher damage output
・Near silent footsteps
・Highly increased agility (running speed↑↑, can now jump through windows)
・Is now carrying the exit key on her suit
・Can no longer behave friendly in any capacity.
・Attacks can inflict bleed damage for a short duration.
・Has mode-unique behaviour.
・You cannot resist her choke-out event.
・Hide and seek exclusive minigame after choking out the player.
・Bright red glowing eyes and lipstick, more visible in the darkness.

・Diary is removed, but 8 notes will still spawn. (see corresponding section)
・Various previously cosmetic items are now usable.
・A photo frame is added at the headmaster’s office allowing you to enable Extreme Yangire Mode when knocked over (interacting with it 3 times shortly after the game begins).
・Everything is much, much darker and harder to see.
・The sun is red!!
・Shoes do not spawn.
・All sinks are filled with blood, making finding the infirmary key harder.

Everything else stays the same.

This is the same across all gamemodes, but it seems a lot of people are still unaware:

8 keys spawn in total each time you start the game.

• One headmaster’s office key that spawns in said room, in one of the 6 possible locations.
• One infirmary key (normal/hard gamemodes) or the exit key (yangire+ only) on Saiko’s butt.
• One exit key in the locker protected by the 4 digit password.
• 4 classroom keys, which all spawn randomly around. (See clarification below here)
• One infirmary key in one of the four possible bloody sinks on each hall.

・Each hallway has 3 classrooms, and one of those classrooms will be locked (because it contains a digit for the code), while the other two will be open in that hallway. That means you will need respectively one A key, one B key, one C and one D key to get all 4 digits for the code.
・3 of the keys will always spawn somewhere in unlocked classrooms, and one will always spawn in a random utility room (cafeteria, computer room, meeting room, library, power room).
・Locked classrooms with a code digit will never have a key in them.
・The infirmary can never have a key in it, its only purpose is to give you ailment cures and health, it is entirely optional.
・Trying to steal the exit key from Bunny Saiko without a protective item will cause her to decapitate you instantly.

In Yangire mode, Bunny Saiko will put down traps for the player similar to Normal/Hard mode.
There’s two types of traps:

Bunny Saiko (and as you have definitely seen already, normal Saiko) can break door windows to cause glass shards to fall to the floor acting as a trap if you move over it.

Walking or running over broken glass creates noise, deals damage to your HP (and the damage progressively gets higher the more glass you cross over), and in general makes for a sad situation for everyone involved.

When does it occur?
・If Bunny Saiko sees you in a classroom and the door is open, she will break the glass of the open door leaving shards in the entrance.
・If Bunny Saiko notices a locked door, she will break it, taking the windows of the door down with it, which will again leave shards in the entrance.

How to avoid it?
Crouching over broken glass will still make a noise, but you will receive no damage.

Bunny Saiko leaves down tripwires pre-emptively while she’s exploring the school and looking for you.

If you walk or sprint through a tripwire, you fall down and stagger for a short duration, before getting back up.
Please note that tripwires can come in three variants randomly:
1. Normal (only stuns you as mentioned)
2. Poisonous (stuns you + deals ~2 damage per second until you get a cure from the infirmary)
3. Sleeping gas (stuns you + makes you dizzy and leads to the office bad ending sequence)

Please note that stepping over a tripwire and falling is audible to Bunny Saiko from anywhere!
Additionally, trip wires can spawn in only two types of locations:
・Behind any closed or open door
・In the central area of the school on either the first (ground) or second floor blocking the connection from the classroom hallways to the central area.

How to avoid it?
Crouching over tripwires allows you to completely bypass them, and if you look at one of the sides behind the tripwire, you can tell what kind of effect it has. If it’s empty, it’s just a normal tripwire. If there’s a dark bottle you can infer it is a poison/sleep kind of tripwire.

There’s a handful of useful items exclusive to Yangire mode.
Specifically, there’s 3 items you can use to aide you in your escape.

・The Keef Mask (closet at the end of D hallway under the stairs below the C hallway)
・The Brick (found behind the ventilation units in the center-of-school area of the roof)
・The Bunny Pages (found scattered around the school, there are 8 of them)

All these items will work just as much on Bunny Saiko as on Elissu.

A really useful item that, once worn, will give the player a total of 15 seconds of protection while they stare or glance at Bunny Saiko/Elissu. However, it puts a mask effect on your screen and makes it slightly harder to see, as well as changing the ambience significantly to thumping noises while you are not being chased.

A throwable item! You can re-use it infinitely by just picking it up after throwing it. It can either be used to make noise and attract Bunny Saiko/Elissu to a particular location, or you can throw it at them and if it makes contact, it will stun them in place for 5 seconds, allowing you to pick it back up and run.
※The Brick angers Bunny Saiko on each impact equal to 3 burned pages (see below).

In this mode, the pages act as defensive items. If you hold a page, it will give you a total of up to 5 seconds of protection while you stare at Bunny Saiko/Elissu (it will cause them to burn). You can tell the durability of a page by looking at it in your hands, it gets more transparent the more it is used until it burns away.

However, you can only carry 1 page at a time. If you grab a new page, the one you had before gets discarded
It also is ideal (if it can be helped) to only use 2 pages fully (10 seconds of burning Saiko total) and no more, because after that she will start getting stronger and faster.

3+ pages (10.01+ seconds of burning): She moves faster than you and hits for double damage.
6+ pages (25.01+ seconds of burning): She moves at unfathomable speeds and instant kills you.
※You might be wondering how it can work on Elissu, if the pages all burn away when you start Extreme Yangire Mode. The answer is, you can grab the first page in the office before starting extreme mode, and it will remain with you and can be used against Elissu.

For the mask and the bunny pages, please take into account how they work:
They only stun Bunny Saiko/Elissu while you are directly looking at them and keeping them in your line of sight.
However, they remain stunned for a little even if you stop looking at them.
In this way, you can think of the time of each item as a durability. E.G The mask has 15 seconds of durability, that is to say, you can stare at Saiko/Elissu for a total of 15 seconds before the mask goes away, and with the pages, you can stare at Saiko/Elissu for a total of 5 seconds before they burn away.

This means that the most efficient way to use these items is to not actually stare unless you have to move really close to the enemy. Instead, you should only take quick glances to stun them momentarily and then continue moving. If you do this, you can increase each item’s usability by extreme amounts. Think about the fact that you can stare at Saiko for less than a single second each time you take a glance. This means that you can get a lot of protection if you just use the items as sparingly as possible to prolong their “time durability” so to speak.

Please note that items stack. That is to say, if you wear the mask, and you are holding a page, the masks’s durability has priority (its timer starts draining first) before it burns away and then you start using the page’s durability instead.

In this mode, Bunny Saiko might as well have actual bunny ears, because what she can hear is nothing short of incredible.

・Running
・Locking a door
・Turning on/off the power
・Making a mistake in the power room sequence
・Inputting using the keypad on the safe
・Tossing the brick
・Draining a bloody sink
・Stepping on tripwire
・Walking over glass
・Interacting with the exit door without a key to unlock it.

・Opening/Closing a door
・Unlocking a door
・Walking (very close proximity only)
・Crouching around (extremely extremely close proximity only)

Bunny Saiko behaves in certain ways that are unique to this game mode.

⁂ Bunny Saiko can jump through classroom windows, forcing entry that way. This is particularly dangerous in case you locked the door in hopes of stopping her, which is largely ill-advised because you lock yourself in with her if she decides to force entry through the window.

⁂ Bunny Saiko likes to camp the entrance of a classroom after spotting you. She tends to hide around the desk near the door, so be mindful she can vault over this obstacle.

⁂ Of course, Bunny Saiko hiding behind the pillars in the power room is as dangerous as ever.

⁂ Bunny Saiko has unlimited knife (sword) throws, and can never go unarmed (unlike the normal Saiko).

⁂ Bunny Saiko only has one choke game (that she plays after she knocks you out and drags you to a classroom), that being hide and seek. She will count to 5, lock the room’s doors and come after you.

⁂ Should Bunny Saiko pounce on you, she will begin slashing you with her swords in an alternating mash of Q/E quick time event. This deals considerable damage..

This section is dedicated to strategies, tips and methods to counter Bunny Saiko.

Of course, no two runs will look identical, so you need to adapt on the fly depending on what happens.

Here are good habits to make each

☆- Don’t run unless you are sure you got spotted and/or are being chased.

☆- When running through hallways, open as many doors as you can while it won’t matter. This saves you a potential tell on your location when sneaking into them to look for keys later.

☆- If you find a classroom key in a non-classroom room, never enter one of these rooms other than for the purpose of hiding temporarily.

☆- In each classroom you enter, open the inner-most locker (the one on the side facing right at the door) so that you can hide it in later. This is the most optimal behaviour, because it means if you run in the classroom to hide, you will be able to hide the fastest, and both lockers will be closed once you hide so that Saiko will have to pick 50/50 if she will check yours (first), and additionally if she checks without being there she will have to walk the longest distance to check the other corner’s locker which is considerably further away. Furthermore, this is the optimal hiding locker because it allows you to confidently see both if Saiko enters the classroom and if she’s sitting outside (you can tell from her shadow on the floor).

☆- The optimal way to check a classroom the fastest and safest is to immediately walk towards the inner-most locker (make a turn to the corresponding direction from entering), open that locker, check the back of the classroom (cabinets, drawers), and loop back around hugging the wall opposite to the door so you can check the other corner’s cabinets and leave the classroom with the windows and outside in direct line of sight.

☆- If Bunny Saiko is camping the entrance desk, approach from a side in which she is forced to get up and walk around the desk. If you get too close to the desk and do not take the corner wide, she will vault over it and you might take unavoidable damage, so take the corner wide and react immediately to her getting up to chase you.

☆- If she throws a blade at you (visible from wind-up animation), you can either misdirect (fake going one way and strafe the other similar to a matador motion) or run straight towards her (assuming you have a protective item). Doing the latter works because the knife arcs upwards and you can go underneath it by moving closer to her from the throwing range.

☆- Maximise your defensive item efficiency appropriately:
・Aim the brick low on the body to reduce deflection and control where it lands after impact. You will typically use this item after you’ve used up your two pages, so only as a last resort (because it angers her equally like 3 pages) so you will only use it as a temporary distraction with its noise, or you will use it to make an extra final escape or hiding attempt.
・Mask/Pages: Use them as sparingly as possible, only taking quick glances when being chased, to stun Saiko enough to do objectives or run away.

☆- Don’t run straight forward, due to this game’s movement you cannot run without holding the W key. This means that having to turn 180 degrees really slows you down to check behind you while running. Instead, strafe diagonally holding A+D or A+S respectively, and turn your mouse as sideways as possible so that you can run in the desired direction and flick your mouse back and recalibrate diagonally to glance at Saiko without losing speed.

☆- If you want to escape her, try to minimise how many long corridors you run through. Her speed is great and comparable to your running speed, so you need corners to make considerable progress. The greatest way to lose her is to do laps through the center of the school (double stairs) and utilise as many line-of-sight obstructions as possible, whether that is corners, stairs, you name it. Just remember that she hears the doors you open if she’s nearby, so while chasing you opening a door means you are unlikely to escape right after.
・Instead, make distance and then try to walk or even crouch away around a corner, but remember that even that is audible if she’s really close, so adapt and react to if she loses you or not.

☆- Even if the chase music stops, use your eyes to confirm if she has stopped chasing you. Sometimes it stops on purpose to trick you.

☆- When Bunny Saiko says “Hmmm”, that means she is tired of chasing you and is changing behaviour.

☆- You can see her glowing eyes from about a full classroom’s exterior away, but no further than that. If you don’t see her eyes don’t be sure you’re safe to move forward, so use game sense.

☆- Lower graphics settings make the game slightly more visible (brighter). This allows you to see the codes without turning on the power (see corresponding section).

☆- Turning on the power makes Saiko’s visibility higher in hallways and staring into classrooms.

Due to the nature of this game mode, and especially if you are playing on the Hard difficulty where outrunning Bunny Saiko can prove to be a challenge, you will soon realise that you won’t be worrying about your HP all that much, as you will either be constantly using items or being stealthy and avoiding damage at all.

For the sake of information, your two only healing sources in this mode are the lemon tea (10 HP, cafeteria) and medkit (25 HP, infirmary).

Most people never revisit the headmaster’s office until the end of the game when they have the code, but it can be worthwhile to go back and take a glance at the CCTV computer.

The camera monitor automatically tracks Saiko and shows you where she is. This is particularly useful later in the game when you might need to visit a key area downstairs and are unsure whether it is safe or not, or if you have completely lost track of where she has gone.

However, a more overlooked yet useful usage of the cameras can take place from the hallways themselves and not the office.
If you take note of the locations of the cameras around the school from the monitor, you will notice that they are physically there in those locations. It is good to keep track of those locations, because if you then move through those areas, take a look at the camera’s frontal lighting. If it is red, that means you are alone in that area. Should the camera lights turn/stay green, that means that Saiko is behind you and is creeping up on you or has just come up in that hallway/area. The cameras are not proximity based either, as soon as Saiko is in that general area, the lights will let you know (they do not need power to function of course).

Here is how I recommend starting your runs in this mode, with the necessary restart points:

It goes without saying, but avoid running throughout this routine !

Immediately as you spawn look to your left and check from afar if the key is visible through the glass cabinet, while you begin walking to the right side of the room opposite of there.
If the key is in the cabinet there, walk to it and get it and open the door immediately.
If not, look towards the other side that you’re approaching and check if it’s in the other visible glass cabinet spawn. If it’s there, get it and leave. If it’s not, immediately check the cabinet under it and the spawn under the bookshelf.
If you do not find the key in this routine, it means that it has spawned in one of the bottom cabinets on the other side of the room, and you will lose too much time checking, so restart.

※On your way out with the key, grab the page in the left wall of the office door (guaranteed spawn).

As soon as you open the door and leave, hug the wall to the left and go through the C hallway without opening any of its doors, and head downstairs. Here, if you want to make your life much easier, you can equip Keef’s mask right away and deal with the frustrating ambience and visual obstruction. If you want to play without it as an extra challenge and to feel more comfortable, that is also acceptable.

Then, make your way straight ahead through D hallway to the power room, turn on the power without making any mistakes, and head upstairs through the nearest staircase (to your right when exiting the power room).

If at any point during this process you run into Saiko, restart right away.

From this point on, you will explore the school freely and you must be wary of where keys can still spawn, and how much sound you make while searching.

Remember two things here:

and..

In detail what this means is, you want to initially check absolutely everywhere:

・When passing by classrooms, look through the window and try to spot the key if it spawns on the floor of the classroom. If you do this you know that you will only need to visit that room in that hallway.
・When you find a key in a utility room (e.g. cafeteria), then you know there will never be another key in one of those, so you can avoid searching for them and wasting more time.
・When you find all 3 classroom-spawning keys, you know the last hallway you didn’t check won’t have the last key so it’s useless to waste time searching there.

In each of the four hallways, you essentially have two goals:
１．Open the locked classroom, get the digit and immediately leave.
２．Find the key in one of the two unlocked classrooms, or evaluate that that hallway is the one without a key in it.

This is because of two primary reasons:

The code itself is an integer in the code, so it can never start with 0.

and of course,

The code can never have two of the same number.

This means that if you have 3 digits, you can very realistically brute force the last one and win.
See this example:

You collect the digits 3×08, and you need to guess the last digit.
＞ It cannot be 3, 0 or 8, so you only have 7 possible combinations:
3108
3208
3408
3508
3608
3708
3908

Instead of immediately trying to find two random pairs, and then failing because that requires considerable luck, you can instead silently figure it out each time.

What you have to do is turn on and then off the first four switches in order, which will allow you to see their color without making an error. By process of elimination this will always give you enough information to find all the pairs right afterwards, thus making for an optimal power activation with enough speed.

Keep in mind the power-on noise itself and the doors opening are still going to attract Saiko (if she is the close in the former case, and always in the latter).

If you press a light switch after turning on the power, it will turn off while power remains on. This will make Bunny Saiko unable to turn the power off again, and instead you will see the message “Solve the circuit connection below” when she tries to.

This is also cheap, but it will also make her completely silent for a while after occurring (no voice lines)（?).

This requires an external program so in my opinion it is cheap and a trick, but if you only care about victory I ought to share this here.

On lowest graphics settings (they must be set to very low or mobile in the launcher, but this may vary based on your system), you can simply take a screenshot of the code board in a classroom, and using any image editing program, you can turn up the brightness + contrast really high to make the codes visible. Here is an example (works in both yangire and normal/hard game modes the same):

What you see:

Edited:

It’s pretty cheaty.

Hitting Saiko with the brick 3 times in short succession (<5 seconds) while wearing the mask, and then leaving the area causes her to completely freeze and repeat a voice line in place.

If you bring her to the roof near the ventilation system and do this, you can make this game mode a total joke, so use it at your own discretion.

The only ways to make her snap out of the glitch is to either turn on the power, fall on a tripwire or input on the safe keypad.

※This even works in Extreme Yangire mode, as long as you do not agitate Elissu, you will also nullify that mode with this glitch.

This section has relevant information for Extreme Yangire mode, activated by tapping on the photo frame of Hatsune Elissu on the right side of the desk.
note: unfinished section, sorry!

Once you get choked out while holding the exit key on hard extreme yangire mode, remember that Elissu will always lose if you do not pick any option and just stay on rock.

※This only applies to the ending of hard extreme yangire mode. Normal mode is normal