Part 20: Neo Arcadia Tower: Rainbow Devil

Extra Stage Thoughts

The theme is "up", and it entails all the problems a vertical level has: Mainly falling down. As you can't get up without the elevator, if you can't catch up to it after a mistake, it's time to start over. Not too fun. The ride itself is completely devoid of challenge and fun, at least if you use the Boomerang smartly. Sadly, this isn't something Inti got to eradicate completely, like the block puzzles.
Second part is...spiky. Fortunately, you have plenty of room to maneuver, and Zero controls perfectly. It's still easy to bonk your head, but hey, the first part might be boring, but at least it's short. Generally, you can skip half the platforms here if you move smartly, but I appreciate that they're here. It makes the narrow spikewalk surprisingly open-ended; you never feel like they intended it to do it one way and one way only, and if you deviate, you die. That helps a lot to mitigate the overwhelming instant death. Good level design!
Final part I'm really not fond of. It just doesn't really cater to a skillset I have and which also isn't really taught well be the game. Shit if flying at you from all over, you have to take track of a little too many things at once, and when you fall down, everything is respawned and the timing on the electroblocks is off and ugh. It's not too long, but seriously, that last tank placement can go fuck itself with its offscreen sniping and the high fire rate and me falling down all the way over and over again...
Overall, this is a very short, but very hard level. I don't begrudge it for either, though; both facts work together beautifully to make this feel like a Super Meat Boy stage. A quick reload will get you to the start so you rank doesn't get tanked if you die, and as there are no checkpoints anyway...it's simply over too soon to really become insanely frustrating.
Oh yeah, and we're halfway in space now, holy shit Ô.o.

Boss Comments



Attacks

• Slither: Rainbow Devil turns into a slug (even though he's too big for that huh huh) and tries to run into Zero. It shouldn't be too hard to avoid that, kinda sudden but your reflexes should be honed for that kind of thing by now.
  
• Snot: He spins in place, shooting out little balls of itself. They always land within a certain distance and also on the walls; you're in any case, wherever he stands, save on the very top of the wall. Or you stand in-between like I miraculously manage to do in the video (it's the very first time I made that work).
  
• Splish: Turns into a skull and jumps around the room. Whenever he gets hit or after a certain time, he'll split first in two, then four parts; only the one with the Pantheon head in it is vulnerable. Each phase bounces lower, until he reforms eventually. I don't like it for a few reasons. First, you can't avoid the first part on the wall unless he starts the attack from the very middle, but it's also not too easy to induce the second on your own or predict when he's going to do it, so that sucks. Second, hitting him makes the parts fly up all the way, which is really unintuitive. Third, you spend most of the attack up in a corner waiting it out. And lastly, I just suck at dodging bounching things. Try and find a consistent way to deal with it that works for you, like my method for when he comes out of the corner (hit once, slide under, climb wall, wait).
  
• Smash (EX Skill): Shoots a huge fist forward, his body follows. Basically means that you should never even attempt using the sword.

Easily the best Devil in the series. Mostly because it is actually a varied fight with different attacks that don't suck absolute ass. I only really mind one of his attacks, read above on that, but it's not too bad, so overall good job Inti, you made a Devil that isn't atrocious. Why did you do it for MM9 then?

Ranking High

This is for later when I actually do it.




Same as before, still great!



P.S.:




I just love the Elf system .