The way the clawed girl works is that she has only 1 air dash compared to Wryn's 3, but that dash is replenished whenever you either damage an enemy or reflect a projectile. This makes routing the clawed girl's non-boss areas intricate and detailed in a way that might not be obvious to people watching replays, so I decided to make this guide to make the gameplay more clear for anyone who wants to try speedrunning with this character. I'll detail the route move-by-move for the 1st stage then only leave minor notes throughout the rest of the guide. This will make the guide pretty front-loaded, but it's the best way I could explain movement.



Something else I want to mention before we begin is that the Clawed Girl's parry range is gigantic compared to Wryn's, and helps make swiping at enemies a lot easier. Another important note is that if you try to parry a projectile that's too close to you, the projectile will simply disappear and you won't get your air dash back.

Right off the bat, in the first room of the game, the clawed girl's dash isn't long enough to exit the first room, so I dash forward then tilt it downward to land on the ground and start another air dash more quickly. If you're using a controller, you can simply tilt your control stick slightly downwards.

Something there will be a lot of is using the air dash to do damage to refresh the air dash without attacking. So the first thing I do upon exiting the building is air dash toward the 1st enemy, then use the replenished air dash to kill the 2nd enemy instead of swiping at him, which lets me use my next air dash later to skip the 3rd enemy and reach the 4th enemy.

I then dash toward the top-left enemy. I wait a split second for him to fire so that I don't get hit by any of his bullets, then dash toward the right enemy, swipe him, then dash.

After those two, there's 2 strategies as to how to deal with the 1st bazooka enemy, 1 risky and 1 safe. The risky strat is to dash straight towards him and either reflect his bullet the moment it comes out or swipe him before he can fire. The safer strat is to dash above him, dodge his bullet, and swipe him on the way down. After that, I then dash towards the next 4 enemies and swipe them to replenish my air dash.

Normally, the game's first miniboss has 3 possible patterns he can do. The quickest is to go straight to the long hop and fire a bullet, and the other 2 are to do short hops before doing the big hop and firing. We can ignore all of this by provoking him to attack immediately by dashing through him.

In the room after that miniboss, it's possible to get all the way to the top of the building without touching the ground, and in order to do that, you want to dash far enough to the right to dash straight upwards, then stop when your parry is in the enemy's range. Your parry range is big enough to hit this enemy when your touching the ceiling directly below him, so this isn't too specific. From here, you just swipe whatever enemies and bullets you can to replenish your air dash.

Right before the second miniboss lands on the ground, you can slow time in order to skip him bouncing off the ground and laughing for a second and get straight to hitting him.

For bosses, you want to be attacking them for as much time as possible, which gets interrupted by your dash. So in order to maximize damage, getting out of the way of projectiles should consist of very short dashes with claw attacks in between them. Something else I should mention is that any time a boss has an attack where they change colors, if you parry them too early, it will do nothing and the attack will become unparryable.

If you're low on HP after the 1st real boss during the autoscroller, you can reflect projectiles back at enemies to fill your energy gauge faster than if you simply attack them.

The only thing I have to say about the next boss is that you need to parry a quite a few projectiles at once in order for it to be faster than just dodging the projectile and continue clawing.

From this point on, I'm not going to detail the specific route I take through each stage since that would make this guide way too long, so hopefully you can now understand the routing by looking at replays. I will however be pointing out anything that didn't come up in stage 1.

Something you can try to do is end your air dash right in front of a cluster of bugs, swipe the first few, then dash through the rest so you still have another air dash afterwards. However, it's risky because if you don't do it quickly enough, they'll fire at you. Otherwise, you can go under or above them, swipe them there, and continue.

When you reach the kitty copter, the cluster of bugs needs to be dead before the boss fight will start.

When the boss is firing missiles at you, you want to be attacking towards the top of the copter so you don't destroy any missiles that you can reflect back at him. You also want to be careful about accidentally making his next attack unparryable by trying to parry a missile and parrying him when he changes color too early.

For some fadeouts, such as the ones directly after this boss and the next boss, you can buffer a jump by holding jump before the fadeout and continuing to hold it until you jump in the next scene.

The section on the way to the bus is purely RNG where the flying cats decide to spawn, but something you can do when they're in a good position is to swipe at them, then dash though them since they have enough HP to survive a swipe.

There isn't much to say about the bus boss. It used to be optimal to get behind the bus and mash dash, but after the nerf to that strategy, it ties with the amount of time to kill him if you reflect one missile.


So Squidclaw found a weird thing where if you attack Valentine from this specific angle, you do slightly more damage to her. Doing this once allows you to 2 cycle the fight. Neither of us have any idea why this works, but it's there.

For the fight itself, Valentine has 3 attacks she can do, and she telegraphs them shortly before doing them. When she points at you, she's going to laser. When she moves to the bottom-right and grunts, she's going to throw a van at you, and when the moves to the bottom-right and does nothing, she's going to throw 3 cars at you.

For the 3 cars, you can try to go directly in front of them to parry them more quickly, but if you parry too early, they become unparryable.

In the first part of The Chase, your claw attack's hitbox is actually big enough to destroy missiles that are close to you, so you don't have to worry about them nearly as much.

When fighting Red Sprite, you want to stay a decent distance away from her while still being able to attack so you can parry her bullets without absorbing them.

One thing you can do to speed up the 1st phase of the ninja is claw him for a short time before he attacks. For the 2nd phase, you can just stay on the outside of the ship, and the only attack you'll need to worry about is his yellow projectile, which you can reflect back at him for good damage.

The rocket man can shoot 2 rockets that you can parry, but the timing for when he fires them is different every time he uses the attack, so you will need to get a feel for it. His attack for when he fires bullets at you can be avoided by staying directly below or above him, and this will stop him from aiming at you.

When you enter Launch, you want to hold right and fall a little bit before dashing so you can reach the projectiles to regain your dash without touching the ground.

When the Chaff Spammer fires reflectable bombs, if you're floating directly under him, you can reflect both bombs back at him. If you're quick enough, you can go directly on top of him and reflect the next 2 bombs back at him.

In the room after the autoscroller, there's meteors that randomly spawn, so what I do is swipe at & dash though those meteors. You are able to swipe big meteors without destroying them so you can also dash through them.

For the 1st boss in the boss rush, you want to stay in the corner when he slams downward. That way when you reflect him he'll be right next to you when he hits the wall, so you can keep attacking him.
For the 2nd boss, the best way to avoid projectiles from them is to always be moving sideways. Even the slow movement from floating is enough to avoid most projectiles.
For the 3rd boss, you want to stay at a distance so that you can react if he tries to move into you or throw his shield.
For the 4th boss, when she fires bombs at you, you can reflect most of them back to her. I go into more detail in the description of this video.

There's a couple of important things to know about the bubbles in the Warship. Firstly, big bubbles have enough HP where swiping won't destroy them. Secondly, the big bubbles' hitboxes are much larger than they look, so you can dash near them and still get your dash back.

When you get to the section where you need to fall down a hallway, you can avoid all of the bubbles by staying on the right wall before the drop, but it's awkward to do since hitting a wall doesn't stop your momentum, so you might just land next to the bazooka enemy directly below.


When the boss uses the attack in this picture, you can reflect each of them individually right as they come out to deal more damage.

When the boss in the zero gravity section is firing barrages of bullets at you, you can slowly move left to right while clawing to avoid them so you can avoid losing damage by taking time to dodge. When this boss closes the 2 walls in on you, it's possible to reflect them both back without slowing time.

The 2nd phase of this boss's shields work in a weird way. If you're hitting any of them, you won't do damage regardless of whether or not you're hitting the boss.

In the 2nd phase of Valentine's fight, she can grab one of these bazookas. The one on the left will fire 4 quick shots that fire straight, and the one on the right will fire 3 slower shots that arc downward.

The laser on the 3rd phase is probably the toughest part of the run. It's possible to rush her down to finish the phase as quickly as possible, but it's best to take it slowly. If you take damage during this part, you're in hitstun for a pretty long time compared to just taking the attack slowly.

In the 4th phase of the fight, after breaking her shield once, you can hit her 3-4 times, taunt, and then start attacking again and the audience will break her shield again immediately. However, the audience has a cooldown on when they will throw debris so if you try to do it too quickly, the audience won't react to you taunting. This isn't normally a problem unless Valentine is close enough to the floor where you don't have to jump to reach her.

After you kill the 1st boss, on the way up the building your claw attacks refresh your jump when you hit the rivals van, which allows you to continuously dash straight upward while refreshing your dash without worrying about missile spawns. What you want to do here is face towards the ship before you jump. This will allow you to damage boost off of the boss's laser, and since you were facing towards him before you jumped, you will be sent to the left.

When the rival is doing a volley, it's possible to reflect it at point-blank range, and it's fairly trivial thanks to the gigantic parry range.


Thanks for reading! I hope this helps anyone who wanted to give the clawed girl a try but didn't quite know where to start.