Part 7: Final Thoughts

_balls

Stage Thoughts

The background is metal as fuck.

...

I think I said most of what I wanted to say in the video; there was ample time for that, after all. This boss is garbage because there is no strategy to it, no action and no thought. You follow an exact pattern which you have to memorize every single step of, or you die. It's like a rhythm game where after three strikes, you're out. Pretty much the polar opposite of Soleiyu who has absolutely no pattern, so no memorization, but who has to be manipulated carefully in order for you to have a chance to succeed; those are two perfect example of how not to do bosses, though I do vastly prefer Soleiyu to Dracula, even if the boy took me longer. It's better to have an overdemanding boss where you are actively engaged, have to think on the fly and react to what he's doing than this ludicrously constricting nonsense where you have to actively spend half an hour just to learn exactly what to do.

Music

Road of Enemy #2 [Before Dracula]

Sons of Satan [Dracula Battle]

Union [Ending]
The End of the Day [Staff Roll]

I was a bit down on Drac's boss music because everything irritated me, but in retrospect, it's half of a good song. The left-to-right scales in the second part are amazing, but the intro is grating and the GB sound chip doesn't do it any favors. Seeing as you'll mostly hear that while you die in confused agony very early, my impression should be understandable.

The ending is overly sentimental and does nothing for me (especially not after this pos boss). It's also weirdly sad even though we utterly crushed Dracula for a second time. Maybe it's because the text crawl for some reason demands Soleiyu to immediately start fighting again which is bullshit; if Dracula is so load-bearing (like his minion bosses as well) that the entire castle crumbles, his "armies" should be dust now. Just...let us have a victory, game. I know that many endings from that era were like "but is the threat TRULY over??? Find out in the sequel!!" but I don't think Soleiyu got a sequel game so fuck it! Whatever! My headcanon is that Christopher can now allow himself to develop a dad bod, become Chillstopher again, and Soleiyu just does the same.

The staff roll is nice .



Final thoughts that I forgot to express in the video: it's amazing how much of a step up this game is compared to the first Adventure, I cannot stress this enough. For the updates to the engine alone it should be commended, but they also managed to make some quite fine looking stages that are good fun to play as well, so big kudos for that. It's a huge shame that the bosses go from trivial to unreasonable to quickly - there's only two that for me hit the mark in difficulty, and that is Rock Castle's crazy two-phase laser sword armor monster and the bonerdragon. At least most of them are inventive, and the presentation is top-notch for sure.

The biggest flaw aside from the two elephants in the room is for me that they went back to wallchicken from the perfectly fine hearts-in-candles of the first game. Making the only way to heal into missable secrets is, for me, a big design misstep to begin with, but making them so hard to find that I only managed for a single one in the entire game is completely unreasonable. I mean, I obviously didn't need it; the stages aren't punishing enough for someone of my skills. But one always has to consider that this game wasn't designed for noted let's player of retro platformers Simon, it was made for kids with an actual Gameboy in hand. Having a struggling kid be denied the very basic element of recovery just because they didn't hit literally all the walls enough is just cruel. In the NES titles, you at least have a big screen where you can have some suspiciously empty corners or nooks underneath staircases where your secret sense will immediately start tingling. There's no such luxury here; my one finding basically boiled down to "I guess I can reach and whip this corner with some decoration on it, maybe". You could argue that because of my skills, I never felt huge pressure to look for the chicken, but whenever I was low on health and searched actively, I couldn't find it.

Fortunately, and that has to be praised, apart from one terrible instance the checkpointing is incredibly generous so death is cheap and you'll always get another whip upgrade afterwards. Even a Game Over doesn't make you replay the entire stage, proving that they could have just abolished the lives system in general - hell, unless I'm missing all the secrets (I probably do), there aren't even any extra lives in the game, unless you count point-based ones which I think I got occasionally. I never noticed because I never checked, this is how useless even in this old-ass game they are.

The one thing that weirds me out in regards to checkpointing is how the password system works; as far as I can tell, you only get one if you deliberately select it after a Game Over. So if you finally beat a stage as a kid and are super happy, you can't just save; no, you have to go into another stage (because you can't replay levels), and die until you get a Game Over to finally be able to make your progress permanent. That's a super weird decision and I absolutely do not get it.

And I think that covers it all. Goodbye Christopher, you earned the right to chill now! Enjoy it much like I "enjoyed" and then actually enjoyed your two games.