Sora

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Your name is Sora... Because you're just like the sky... Beautiful, dignified, and full of life."
—Sora's parents
"Father... Mother... The sky... Isn't beautiful at all... I want to clean up this sky!"
—Sora, Accleration of SUGURI‍'‍s sora teaser

sora is a Prequel to the fan-acclaimed SUGURI, a horizontally-scrolling doujin Shoot'Em Up by Orange_Juice released during Comiket 78 for Windows PC. Just like its predecessor, it stars a title protagonist, Sora, who must fight her way through waves of Mecha-Mooks with a boss waiting at end of each stage. sora's storyline takes place on a once peaceful world being ravaged by an ongoing war between humans and altered humans. It was a war that brought chaos, death, destruction, and the end of any moral values that will ultimately bring an end to all life on Earth. Sora, one of the most powerful altered-humans ever created, is unwilling sent into battle to settle the score. Like Suguri before her, Sora can amass a large arsenal of weapons at her disposal, ranging from beam rifles, bazookas, energy swords, and even a pile bunker thrown in for good measure. The game maintains its trademark dashing and lock-on shooting gameplay, but this time Sora's able to three weapons instead of two (generally an energy weapon, a ballistics weapon, and a close-range weapon). The game also improved on its combo-scoring system and adds more emphasis on funneling through enemy fire to restore lost life energy and building up energy for your Hyper Attacks.

An English-translated version of sora has been released on June 1, 2012 and it's currently available through GamersGate. Surprisingly, this was not localized by Rockin' Android, the same translators of SUGURI, but rather by ΩTH as it involves use of such terms as "reploids" when the characters were originally referred to as "altered humans," as well as a few Dub Name Changes.

Like SUGURI, sora was followed up with a Shoot'Em Up-meets-Fighting Game with Acceleration of SUGURI 2 released a year later during Comiket 80 in 2011. The game features both the heroines and boss chacters of their respective game as playable characters, a Story Mode[1], Arcade Mode, local and online Versus Mode, and notability borrows a few other mechanics from Senko no Ronde. During it's initial release however, lacked certain key originally planned for the game and suffered from character balance issues. Thankfully, the Orange_Juice took action and fixed many of the game's issues with update patches.

sora's official Japanese website can be viewed here and its English website can be viewed here. Acceleration of SUGURI 2's Japanese website can be viewed here.


Tropes used in Sora include:
  • Action Girl: Sora, rather she likes it or not.
  • Advancing Wall of Doom: Stage 4's boss, Sham, uses this as part of her attack patterns.
  • An Ice Person: Tsih.
  • Apocalypse How: The war between humans and altered humans brought destruction to Earth as it made very the air to support any lifeforms toxic and ultimately uninhabitable.
  • Art Evolution: A huge improvement from the artist in terms of the art-style and overall visual quality in sora compared to SUGURI. The same goes for Acceleration of SUGURI 2 compared to its predecessor.
  • Attack Drone: Sora can use the Pod weapon much like Suguri.
  • Background Boss: The mid-stage of Stage 5 in sora.
    • Also the first two phases of the final battle with Starbreaker in Stage 7.
    • The final battle in Acceleration of SUGURI's Story Mode when Sumika Turns Red.
  • Beam Spam: Oh boy does sora deliver on this. The Artillery weapon also qualifies.
  • Blow You Away: Mira.
  • Blind Idiot Translation: The English lyrics incorporated in "Le Train" and "Grand blue" songs from sora.
    • The same goes for "Remember me" in Acceleration of SUGURI 2.
  • Barrier Warrior: Nath specializes on defensive tactics to reflect engery-based attacks.
  • Bullet Hell: Very much like it's predecessor.
  • Charged Attack: The Buster. Other weapons can use a charged shot as well.
  • Cute Little Fangs: Tsih has them in Acceleration of SUGURI 2.
  • Defeat Means Friendship: In a similar fashion to the original SUGURI; Sora and Suguri quickly made up after their scuffle during the events of the True Final Boss battles.
  • Downer Ending: The game ends with Sora slowly plummeting back to Earth, with hopes that the skies above will clear up after stopping Starbreaker from unleashing an Earthshattering Kaboom as a last-ditch effort to destroy Sora along with the planet.
    • Golden Ending: During the EX Stage, Sora notices the sky is still black and toxic while descending to Earth, realising her efforts of trying to save the Earth are for naught. She finds Hime and Suguri on Earth and blames them for the fighting that ruined the world then proceeds to attack them. Once the fighting was over, Suguri reveals to Sora that in the end, she saved the world and the sky has returned the beautiful clear blue color she once remembered from her childhood.
  • Dub Name Change: In ΩTH's English localization of sora, the names changes as follows: Tsih's name was changed to Telos, Sham was changed to Siri, and Nath was changed to Nadius.
  • Frickin' Laser Beams
  • Genki Girl: Tsih.
  • Genre Shift: The true final battle with Suguri in sora's EX Stage is turned into a fight straight out of Acceleration of SUGURI.
    • The final battle with Sumika in Acceleration of SUGURI 2's Story Mode is also reminiscent to the final battle with Starbreaker in sora.
  • Gratuitous English: In sora, it features the songs "Le Train," "Grand blue," and sora's version of "Rendezvous"[2], all of which incorporates English vocals instead of Japanese, although some of songs have mistranslated lyrics.
    • Acceleration of SUGURI 2 has "Swordfish" and "Remember me," both of which are also sung in English. The latter does suffer from mistranslated lyrics; the former on the other hand, not as much.
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: Mira.
  • Humongous Mecha: Nath pilots one.
  • Fundamentally Female Cast: To a similar extent of SUGURI.
  • Kick the Dog, Kick Them While They Are Down: This happens to Nath in sora by Starbreaker after Sora defeats her.
  • Kill It with Fire: The Flamethrower.
  • Laser Blade: Sora can use one, and she knows how to use it.
  • Lightning Gun: The Shock weapon.
  • Limit Break: Hyper Attacks also returns in sora and Acceration of SUGURI 2, but players can now chose either Standard[3] and Advanced[4] modes to invoke the Hyper Attacks.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Like Suguri via the Launcher weapon. Stage 1 also opens with this, although this trope is invoked in many places of the game.
  • Mecha-Mooks
  • Meaningful Name: Sora's parents named her after the Japanese word "Sky," referring to how beautiful they are, although it doesn't seem like the sky is beautiful at all in the game at first; After the battle with Hime and Suguri in the EX Stage, the black and toxic skies returns to its beautiful, clear blue color again, thus Sora fulfilled her purpose as an altered human.
  • Mook Maker: Sham can summon reinforcement mechas to fight alongside her.
  • More Dakka: The Machine Gun, but then again, this game is a Bullet Hell shooter after all.
  • No Continue Run: Required to unlock the secret characters and their respective stages in Acceleration of SUGURI 2.
  • One-Winged Angel: Sumika, the Final Boss of Acceleration of SUGURI 2's Story Mode scales it up once her Armor gauge hits the 33% mark.
  • Peek-a-Bangs: Alte.
  • Playing with Fire: Starbreaker.
  • Rank Inflation: sora and Acceleration of SUGURI 2 does this just as their predecessors did.
  • Ray Gun: The Rifle series.
  • Roboteching: Orange_Juice loves their arching lasers and missiles.
  • Scarf of Asskicking: Mira wears one.
  • Scoring Points
  • Shock and Awe: Alte and Sham uses some electrical attacks.
  • Shoot'Em Up: sora, just as SUGURI before it.
  • Spread Shot: Rifle-S.
  • Title Drop: After the credits from sora's EX Stage, it was revealed that the is game is titled as SUGURI II.
  • Token Loli: Tsih and Starbreaker.
  • True Final Boss: Two in fact, Hime and Suguri in the EX Stage of v1.1EX in sora.
  • Turns Red
  • Wave Motion Gun: The Rifle-M's and the Artillery's Limit Break.
  • You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Tsih, Nath, and Starbreaker.
  1. ↑ (which wasn't added until v1.3)
  2. ↑ Hime's boss theme from the first game
  3. ↑ (which lets the player evoke their Hyper Attack immediately corresponding to the weapon button held when launching the attack like the original SUGURI)
  4. ↑ (which will enact a shield to protect Sora from harm for a brief amount of time, during which can trigger the Hyper Attack if any of the weapon buttons are pressed while the shield is up)
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