Rabbit and Steel: Rabbit and Steel Story Walkthrough

Completing the story of rabbit and steel is no small feat. It will take time, and it will take commitment. If you really want to do this, you will be raiding, constantly.
Its a tedious task, and so if you attempt this, i recommend the following steps:

• Play on Cute Mode.

I know, to some of you this will feel like a cop out. I do agree, it kinda is. However, the amount of times you will have to raid warrants it – and you have to win. I’ll elaborate later in this guide what I mean by this, but just know that if your spending your time constantly doing ~40 minute runs on higher difficulty’s and don’t happen to have 12 hours a day to spend doing runs like I do, then its best to save yourself some stress and commit to cute mode.

• Play as the Ancient Rabbit.

The Ancient Rabbit’s quirks make it perfect for completing the story. Don’t worry if you don’t have the Ancient yet – you’ll unlock them naturally throughout the course of the story, by just the volume of fights you’ll have to complete. Ignoring the 20 or so fights i had beat before I started the story, I ended the run on ~120 total boss kills. And those were all 9.5/10 to completion runs!

• Play with a controller.

I play with an official PlayStation 4/Dualshock 4 controller, but an xbox controller should work just as fine. Compared to keyboard and mouse, being able to just move the joystick around to move makes the game feel much smoother, and much more manageable.

The ancient rabbit. You can get this rabbit either by clearing the emerald lakeside on hard, or by clearing 50 bosses. The ancient is perfectly tuned to the monotonous grind of story completion, but don’t worry if you don’t have them yet; the Heavyblade worked fine for me until I discovered the joy of Ancient.

The Ancient doesn’t quite work like the other classes. The ancient is focused around your pet, and using it for your DPS.
Your Primary shoots out 2 damaging balls, one from you and one from your pet;
Your Secondary charges your Special, and also locks your pet on a target;
Your Special is where the ancient starts to get good. It has a 20 second cooldown, but its justified. It dose a ton of damage in a large area around your pet, multiple times. We’ll get back to you.
Your Defensive works as just a standard defensive, with one added bonus: you summon your pet to your location.

The pet is the name of the game: set them stationary on the enemy, and watch them shred. While your pet is locked through use of your secondary, they won’t move. This sounds bad, but you can use it to your advantage: you can focus on dodging, while your pet deals massive damage! Especially with your special that’s big enough to hit multiple targets, and the thing that brings it over the edge:
Emerald Special.

Emerald Special. Ignoring my phone camera quality, look at this. Absolutely absurd. The emerald special removes the manual activation of your special to an automatic activation every time its up, and increases the damage per to hit to 500. It hits 4 times. So combine this by picking up an item that gives up repeat like the Raindrop Earrings, or an item that absurdly increases special damage like the Mountain Staff or the Royal Staff, and things can get out of hand pretty quickly.

Some other good items you can take are items that do something when you move x rabbitleaps. You don’t care about being in position (relative to the boss, you still have to dodge the bullets) so moving around procs these really easy. On the other side, I would avoid taking items that lose there effect if you have to click defensive like the plague. Not only if your defensive a valuable tool for repositioning your pet if something weird happens, but Shira’s ultimate requires a use of your defensive in order to dodge it without the help of a loot.

Enough about the ancient. Lets get into the story.
When preparing for a run, you’ll want to select offline mode. Don’t worry, you can still bring a buddy to raid with you – if your local. If you don’t have friends to bring to your house, looks like your playing solo, and this guide is written under the assumption you are playing solo. Theres nothing wrong with wanting to play with friends, but if you want to beat the story, I don’t think its practical.

Throughout the prior sections, I’ve made mention of how completing the story is a grindy, tedious task. Why? For best story progression, you have to complete the entire run. The story only progresses in the first part of each world, where Asha the Shopkeep resides. You have to complete story beats per area around 8-10 times, so getting the maximum number of beats per run requires almost full completion, and while it doesn’t seem to be required, why not beat Shira if your allready that far into the run? Plus per spell you break, Shira gains additional dialogue. So how do you actually progress the story? The map will have these question marks under the map; this indicates that an area is a world you can visit to progress the story. In each area of the map where you encounter Asha, one of 2 events can happen;

• Asha has some dialogue talking about the state of the world in her shop screen

• 1 or more of the stage enemies appear below Asha, and can be talked to.

Don’t worry if you lose the fight – as long as you talk to them, the story for that place will progress. If you lose, you just won’t be able to progress as many storys at once in that run. Also something to note is that story for each world isn’t limited to that world. For example, in the King’s Arsenal section of the story, when I completed it the final place with a story beat, it started in the Emerald Lakeside, and then progressed to the Arsenal for the battle to break the spell on Merran. Another time, i had started another section of the story (Churchmouse Streets i believe), but then the mid world for the run was the Crow’s Nest break the spell fight. To actually break the spell, all you have to do is beat the boss! This is part of why I recommended playing on Cute mode if you just want to experience the story – do you really want to spend 3 days, or if you don’t have 12 hours a day to play Rabbit and Steel multiple days, fighting the insanity of high difficulty bosses?
A good indicator of when your close to finishing the story is when you free your first world. I freed Matti at 4 in the morning, and then the next day progressively was able to free the other worlds in only 1-2 more runs per story. Don’t worry about having to do an additional run for Shira – your able to free Shira and your final boss (for me it was Merran) on the same run. One thing to note though is that while beating Shira gives you the achievement, it doesn’t actually grant you the trinket – play the credits open immediately after to do so.

Steel Yourself, Rabbits, and good luck.

In this section, I’ll go over some quirks and events I noticed while completing the story. While I’ve kept the main walkthrough as spoiler free you can really keep a walkthrough, beyond this point will contain spoilers. Regardless, thank you for reading!

• Ancient Rabbit –

So, one of the key signs one if under the influence of the spell is a dark star above there head. you don’t really see it on many of the bosses, with it being most noticeable on Matti’s Phase 2. That’s why I find it curious that when you use attacks on the ancient, the same star will appear above there head and pet.

• Churchmouse Streets –

Despite what the game may have you believe, Matti’s shield dose not make her immune to damage, and its an unlockable to defeat her while the shield is up. Pretty Neat!

• Red Dragonhouse –

Red Dragonhouse is where the ancient shines the most. In the chaos of all the lasers, you can focus on being in the right area to dodge while your pet melts those dragons, especially Karsi. Also, when you free Ranalie from the spell, shes the only boss who falls without anyone else to raise her back up. Sad.

• Scholar’s Nest –

So you know how part of this worlds whole gimmick is that you get teleported? Your pet doesn’t get teleported, and also doesn’t get knockbacked by knockback. Use this fact to play in your favor!

• Emerald Lakeside –

This is the other world where the ancient shines the most. While your doing a dance routine, your pet gets great DPS in, and thats just not something a class like the Heavyblade can do in that scenario, and part of why I highly recommend the ancient.

• King’s Arsenal –

This is the only downside of using the Ancient for this; the King’s Arsenal becomes a tick more difficult. The bosses like to move, and your pet doesn’t. However, if you position your pet right, you can hit all 4 Tasha at once, just like how you can hit all the mice at once in Matti’s charged attack! Additionally, Merran always attacks from the same places in the same order every run, so position your pet where she’ll end up when shes charging her ultimate, and you’ll be fine!