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HideofBeast

Wily 2

Nov 6th, 2011
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  1. We close with a level that acts a decent summary of the entire hack, a set of ambitious ideas realized satisfyingly sometimes marred by a lack of proper proofing or simply knowing when to say enough. Unfortunately, the boss fight occupies the latter company, curtailing on a bit of a whimper, but the section leading up to that fight goes a long way in ensuring a satisfying end.
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  3. Before we get into either of those, though, we have another idea that's not new in the strictest sense but that I can't remember any meaningful examples of from the series itself. This is an enemy gauntlet through and through, and it is impressively brutal. I think this level was started as an excuse for PureSabe to dump every cruel and inventive enemy tag team he couldn't fit elsewhere, because nearly half the game's roster finds its way into these arenas and they are all at their absolute worst, which puts this hack near its absolute best. This is a superbly crafted sequence as far as serving its intentions.
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  5. The way this gauntlet is designed is to spawn the next enemy or group of enemies based purely on triggers built into the destruction of ones onscreen. This means that if you know how the order is going to play out and who will trigger what, you can go a long way in making this affair less painful for yourself. Enemies will either fall from the holes in the ceiling, enter from either side of the room or materialize near the perimeter. I feel the need to stress that as relentless as this gets, it remains fair in the strictest terms, and that's all I ask it to do to keep your mistakes acceptable instead of disheartening. You will be making them, by the way. Lots of them. This might be the most effective use of damage-based difficulty I've seen in a Mega Man romhack.
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  7. There's an important distinction between tackling a situation with farfetched tools and having those tools made inadequate, and the hacker has taken great care to insure things never quite tip into that territory. It is exceedingly unlikely you will tackle an assault like this with the buster and get through unhurt by virtue of reaction alone, and you should expect when playing this yourself to either abuse weapons as they were meant to be abused or to take hits. You should expect to take them anyway. That kind of prohibitive difficulty in avoiding damage works specifically for this situation because it's exactly the point. This is a challenge of survival, and you don't, as you might otherwise, feel cheapened by making it through by the skin of your teeth. Again, the critical balance struck is that nothing is blatantly beyond you to avoid or destroy without foreknowledge. It's just really damn close.
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  9. Mapping out equal parts reaction and strategy for these arenas took a long time emerging, and were this randomized in anyway, the aforementioned care in design might eventually see me through on reaction alone, but it would be up there with the worst of anything I've attempted. Luckily, it isn't random, and so significant familiarity can breed advantage, of which I take all I can. The first room is handled in such a way that projectile-prone enemies are dealt with before their fire gets a chance to complicate the room. As the theme of this room is primarily enemies that lead you, either with their shots or their bodies, it lends itself beautifully to a deliberate approach and you can eliminate the bulk of your worry from a reflexive standpoint just by having a decent outline of what's coming, meaning I can waste more specific memorizing on rooms that demand it.
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  11. This next room demands it. This is about throwing every flier under the sun your way, and as Cossack 1 so kindly reminded us, flying enemies in Mega Man share company with the deadliest. This fight is littered with pipis and homing birds, and complicated by bugs that fly straight like projectiles in and of themselves and bugs that release randomized bullets directly above your head. This equates to complete chaos without a very measured order of destruction, and besides necessitating strict memory, it also demands decent reaction time, because you can't afford much in the way of a missed shot before these enemies unleash what makes them so difficult to avoid damage from. Throughout the assault artillery-based enemies routinely punctuate the fliers and underscore the need for a quick hand even further. Can it be done by ear? I'm sure it can. But I'd rather live to see my 40th without concerning myself over a romhack.
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  13. Room 3 is an oddly eclectic assortment of enemies but seems to be following the metric of slow-moving enemies contrasting themselves with fast projectiles or delayed traps. This sharp contrast in enemy behavior and combination makes this room a bit of a breather because it's always fairly self-evident what should be taken out first, and there's little in the way of quickdrawn threat upon an enemy immediately upon entering the room.
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  15. Room 4 is the water room, and it starts off simple enough by dropping the game's various hoppers your way, whose somewhat delayed nature gives you ample time to destroy them, especially the bastards from Mega Man 3 now faced with a much obliged charged shot. When water fills the room things get serious. The frog drop is one of the easiest to trip yourself up with because those babies are released on the drop and are as annoying to manage as they always are. After this is a good showcase of how much variety is afforded enemies designed with Mega Man's water physics in mind. These things follow involved paths on their way to contact you, which the nature of Mega Man's slowed movement is meant to compensate for. Throwing the bucket at you murks this compensation considerably.
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  17. The next room is the hardest in the gauntlet to manage, an entirely met-based army which means surrounding you with enemies who are hard to avoid on their natural merits, and giving you little recourse other than crackerjack reaction to know which met is which, and which pattern of bullets you're going be preparing for. This would easily be the most memory-intensive section if not for a simple trick that goes a long way: leaving a specific met type alive near the beginning of the sequence ensures that met type will not spawn for a significant portion of the gauntlet, which is critical because it is the only met that takes more than a single shot to destroy. Cleaning up its brethren at the end is nothing complicated, and the experience sullies itself with an atrocious finish.
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  19. Taking an enemy concept that's already botched and doubling it up in a room with hindered jumping is such an over-elaborate attempt to crossfuck you it baffles me by its inclusion. This isn't only impossible to manage with the buster, it's impossible to manage damageless with almost any special weapon you're granted, which is indefensibly obtuse. Dodging two specific sets of projectiles with spikes hugging your free space while HP goliaths are slowly closing that gap on you isn't going to happen for the best of us. The single and only solution to crawl out of this without a hit is to abuse one of the repurposed Rush tools, the Rush Cannon. This is basically the instant-kill weapon, and it deals more in damage than any one enemy or boss has for health in this game. You get two uses of it before the bar depletes, and it's prevented from abuse by giving nearly every boss in the game an amusing counter. That's an important thing to keep in mind for later. As it stands, we clear this ugliness as quickly as possible so we can forget it was there and move onto to some fun.
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  21. This final bout of deadly platforming doesn't afford you much of a breather, and some of these jumps are as specific as it gets within reason. That's not the real attraction here. What is is the complete love letter to Gradius that follows. It is assuredly a love letter, from obstacles to enemies to the background. Making it through this labyrinth without a hitch is no mean feat, and the general rule of thumb is, the less mets encountered, the better your life will be. I take the path that grants me two things: as few mets to dance around as possible, and enough weapon energy pickups to refill Rush Cannon for reasons that will become readily apparent soon. It's worth noting at this point (since the scale has finally tipped enough to make it relevant) that PureSabe was considerate enough to build an Energy Balancer directly into his game. There's not much to comment on specifically obstacle-wise, as it's kind of an awesome blur. The boss door shutters are the trickiest parts to adjust for, and the spike room near the end, which is not instant death, comes close.
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  23. We close this hack off on a low note, and a another sad reminder that as broken as this fight is, it's no worse than things that've already been committed to official games in the series. In this instance, I'm thinking specifically of the Holographic Mega Men from Mega Man 3, who PureSabe seems very interested in replicating the impossibility of for whatever harebrained reason. A tribute to the original Copy Mega Man fight in theme only, this completely inconsistent bastard shares far more with the AI of 3's offering than 1's. Copy Mega Man has all of your actions, and chooses between them with absolute abandon. He can slide, jump and fire uncharged pellets in any frequency, any order, for any duration, and it makes this fight completely unmanageable. Reaction time doesn't begin to account for if he decides to arbitrarily jump and rapid fire in your direction or slide six times in a row to trap you at a wall. The instantaneous nature of your moves transplant onto your opponent to make him bluntly undodgeable through either reaction or planning, and what he does has absolutely zero to do with your actions. He's entirely his own random assortment of nonsense. The luck that would be required to actually eek out a successfully damage-free buster duel with this boss is past the point of bothering, neverminding that he has a second form.
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  25. The only solution to this stupidity is to take advantage of the fact that he's the only boss in immediate memory that's both susceptible and fully vulnerable to the Rush Cannon, such that it kills his first form in one hit and saves you the insult of seeing him in action.
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  27. His second phase doesn't have such an easy out and took an eternity just to expose itself as possible. What this gimmick entails is selecting four weapons which Copy Mega Man will steal to use against you, while being left four to fight back with. Rush Cannon is out of the question because, being that this round is all about fighting your own arsenal, it will teleport to Copy Mega Man out of confusion and be launched your way, killing you. Which I'll admit got a laugh out of me. The most obvious problem with this second form besides no longer having a get-out-of-bullshit free card is that nothing about the boss's AI has changed. He still jumps, slides and fires whatever weapon he has selected completely unpatternized, so the key to the fight's doability winds up being that he will cycle through his first three weapons in the order you let him steal them, before choosing randomly after a completed cycle. This means we can develop an extremely specific set of circumstances that bring the battle a usable measure of consistency. Ironing out this approach took more experimenting than I care to clock, and it works like this.
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  29. Giving Copy Mega Man Dust Man and Bright Man's weapons first affords you attacks that are halfway workable during the heavily specific assault you're going to be directing his way. The first works by creating a stream of moderate length that sucks Mega Man toward his counterpart and imitates Dust Man's version of the attack should the two of you connect. This leaves Mega Man prone to contact damage before he breaks out of his container, but far more important than the minutiae, leaves Copy Mega Man's only direct danger being contact damage, and that's where the beauty of our weapon of choice comes in.
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  31. Hell Wheel is an incredibly versatile and powerful weapon that operates quite closely to how it does for Skull Man. When you initiate it, Mega Man will gain extreme momentum and start automatically skating along the ground as if he were on a board. All you control during this are his directions and jumps, and it ends only when you decide to end it, or when you hit a physical obstacle like a wall. The best part of this attack with relation to Copy Mega Man, though, is that the boss's invincibility also precludes you from taking contact damage when you run through him. This serves you until a fourth of his health has been taken, by which point slow-firing lightbulbs provide the only tangible worry, and it isn't much of one.
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  33. By this point Copy Mega Man will have switched to the third weapon you offered, the Drill Torpedo, which is critically one of only two left that offer you any reasonable chance of dodging. The fourth weapon should be the H.C.R. Boomerang, which is harder to deal with but within the realm of doability. With any luck, he'll switch to a less threatening one by this point instead, as he does for me here. The weapon we use to finish off the last half of his health almost makes this ordeal worthwhile, and it's Toad Man's.
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  35. Toad Man's is a shoutout to the Final Fantasy series, and is in fact the Toad spell from those games. It will transform enemies on the screen into useless frogs who move around laboriously waiting to be squished, and it just so happens to work on Copy Mega Man, considering he's you. Casting this with regularity completely neuters his physical threat, and the only remote danger are the weapon shots he gets off between castings. To do the deed, we are quite literally going to step Copy Mega Man to death. This is immeasurably satisfying after the absolute hell he put me through figuring him out, and I couldn't have asked for a more picturesque finish than the one given to me in this successful run.
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