Part 6: Stage Thoughts CV2

_{The picture strongly suggests that this is the last stage...guess we'll have to amend a second Wily skull for the next level? Spoilers there's a next level.}

Stage Thoughts
Yeesh.

• First of all, this level is really not bad at all; in fact, I'd say it's quite fun and a completely appropriate challenge. The boss on the other hand...let's tackle that later, shall we?
  
• As I said many times in the video, this is really "many moving parts: the level". Before, you very rarely had to keep track of more than one thing at once, this now flies out of the window. It's a very logical escalation, but it also makes things way harder because Christopher still is not the most agile man in the world.
  
• This has the added benefit of finally making the "standing in the way" armors somewhat threatening, because you have to keep juggling rope transfers while they take their sweet time on narrow-ass platforms.
  
• The first half is nothing much to write home about, I'm glad at least that they don't make you replay that. It would be just a waste of your time because there's little actual danger of fucking up, even for someone as bad at staying consistent as me; it's telling that one of my deaths is from standing up.
  
• Additionally, waiting for the crushers is a little boring, and it's weird that you can't destroy the first but have to destroy the second. Somehow it's also not as tense as in their first iteration, I wonder why?
  
• The real meat of this level is of course the rope room, and oh boy did my wish for a little more challenge with that setpiece get fulfilled. Again, don't get me wrong, this room is great, I'm just bad.
  
• With the one caveat that you tend to "stick" to ropes a bit too much, and considering you have to jump a bit upwards, that can get real dicey real quick if you don't plan ahead correctly. The engine is still not really meant for on-the-fly platforming, after all.
  
• Another thing is that you're a bit slow in turning around (I mention that), with the real issue being that if you want to jump to a rope from the left and immediately whip to the direction you just came from, you'll probably whip to the right instead. That cost me a few hits from a bat.
  
• Oh, and of course I completely forgot that you can quick-slide down ropes again!
  
• The Punaguchi placements are quite devilish, but still completely in line I feel. The slow speed and actually sensible hitboxes help a lot. This is how one should update terrible enemies from one game to the next and make them interesting and fun to deal with! (the fun comes from pulling off clever dodges)
  
• Really don't like them making me walk over a small gap - the fact that it's possible because Christopher's sprite can, 8-bit-typical, balance perfectly on his last ankle-pixel, doesn't mean that they should call attention to it.
  
• The final stretch is nothing to write home about; interesting spider setups, but I think I'm way too experienced with respawn rules and screen scroll management to be fazed by that at all. Could be quite tough for a kid, though!

Now for the boss.
Soleiyu is obviously fucking hard, and merrily crosses the line to bullshit a few times, I think. It's not a terrible encounter - my semi-comparison to the first game's atrocious final boss is a little uncalled for - but I do think they ask a bit much of the player. It gave me a lot of trouble already, I cannot imagine how daunting this fight must feel for someone playing this on an actual Gameboy with little to no experience in other platformers.

The key point that makes it feel so over the line is that I see no other way of winning consistently (you prooobably can damage race him if you get lucky) than to manipulate his AI. He'll always whip when he gets close to you, whichs stops him in place, and that's the only way to make him stand still long enough so the knives fall harmlessly behind you instead of you getting trapped between him and them. I might well miss a different loop than the one I ended up doing where you force him to do the same thing over and over and therefore get your openings to cross from left to right over and over, but...that'd still be manipulating him. I think that having a boss become easier, even trivial if you realize that his behaviour is completely based on your position relative to him is perfectly fine; not every player will have the discipline to even pull that off, and the fight will probably FEEL like it's random and frantic for almost every casual player. An example of an excellent manipulatable fight is Zero from MMX2.

The problem here is that it feels absolutely necessary to do this kind of manipulation, and you can't even get it consistent (at least I can't); Soleiyu might jump forward or back, up on the platform or down with no real rhyme or reason. Exploiting his whip-happiness seems the one thing you can always do, and they probably did account for that by making the whip hitbox mercifully tight so you can't get hit from a different plane; with the one problem being that you can't hit him either.

Apart from the knives, therefore, this does feel like a fight against yourself, and such duels are usually pretty good. In this case, it misses the mark a little because you have fuck-all for movement options, and while Soleiyu doesn't either, I don't see him getting knocked back from anything and Christopher sure as hell can't just magic up infinite semi-homing knives. Speaking of which: obviously, as you cannot just jump and weave through those at will, they also have to be manipulated into falling where you are not, adding another element to this hell dance.

Overall, it's simply a little too much to ask for. You can develop a working strategy incorporating Holy Water (which is thankfully given to you every time) which involves a lot of patience and not jumping at the wrong moment (i.e. directly into the knives' path), but the fight being drawn-out due to Soleiyu's unpredictable behaviour means that you just have more chances to fuck up. Hence my final Dark Souls comparison: I feel like I did understand at the end what I had to do, the problem was not making too many mistakes in the span of a very frantic minute or two. That's usually how bosses in the Souls games work for me as well, and finally putting together that string of "little enough fuck-ups" feels amazing and bestows a great sense of accomplishment.

Really wish that didn't come at the tail end of a possible repeat of the same 5-minute-stretch of level each time you die twice; the limited lives given are not at all enough for you to learn the very, very complicated fight in time, so I think the rapid-fire repetition the save state gave me was absolutely vital. Otherwise each attempt has an undercurrent of panic because you really don't want to fuck up and have to replay the rope room, and that hinders the learning process quite badly, at least for me. I'd have been almost perfectly fine with this level (the fight is still a bit too much on its own) if the checkpoint was right before Soleiyu.


Music

Passepied [Dracula's Castle Part 2] [I corrected the spelling to the actual French dance, which I had to google]

Soleiyu's Room
Faith [Talking to Soleiyu]
Chromatische Phantasie [Soleiyu Battle]

I got sick of the stage music after a while tbh. That's a bit coloured by my experience however, so take that with a grain of salt. I see now however that it's just a 1-minute-loop, that might have something to do with it...
The chromatic fantasy (in German) - that's the music motif, not the colour thing, by the way - is a very interesting battle theme which I greatly enjoyed when I didn't get absorbed in the rhythm of whipping. It's quite restrained in its complete focus on a single-track melody, and I feel like playing this on piano would be fuckin' dope. Wonder if there's non-8-bit-remixes?

not-edit-while-waiting-for-the-video-upload: of course there is! I knew this was Bach as fuck.

another edit: this is such a dope sprite