Part 5

8th Impact: It's a Kabuki Show

The penultimate stage. Pretty boring but there is one really good joke in it.

Since I just got the "Super Ultra Sexy Hero" rank at the end of this level, let me briefly cover the ranking system. Here's what you get at the end of a stage depending on your overall score. I've no idea how the Katana and Gun percentage work, I guess it's how many damage you dealt with both of them or something. Time is self-explanatory, the faster the better score. Same with Life %, it's how many HP you have left. Here's the ranks:

Chicken
Hero
Sexy Hero *
Ultra Sexy Hero **
Super Ultra Sexy Hero ***

You earn * star badges after reaching a certain rank, it's 1 with Sexy Hero, 2 with USH and 3 with SUSH. The difficulty you're playing at also affects the amount of stars, it's twice as much on Hard for example. Star badges let you unlock new difficulty levels, an alternate outfit for Johnny and an additional playable character, Sapphire. I'll cover all this after the next video, as well as the few minor differences between the JP and US versions.

EDIT: Something I missed in this video is the similarities between the last boss of impact 8 (his name is The Guardian apparently) to Echidna from DMC4. Just like him, Echidna whips her head tail thing back and forth and she summons vines from the ground that follow you around. It's so strange to see how Rising Zan influenced the DMC games with their boss designs and attacks, either on purpose or unconsciously. I haven't looked at the credits of the game in detail yet, maybe people who worked on Rising Zan went to Capcom or Platinum Games later.