Cossack 1

Cossack 1 concerns itself with another of those gimmicks that works in theory but not quite in execution. Nonetheless, the veritable shooter section this gimmick concerns itself with is designed solidly and interestingly enough for me to forgive the control issues and call this a good stage. It wears out its welcome entirely on the boss, but we'll be there in due time.

Things start off alarmingly tepid given the chaos we've come to expect from this hack, which I guess mirrors Cossack 1 from the original Mega Man 4, but... why would you want that? None of the enemy placement in this first section screams threat, with only two unique introductions in the form of a retooled grasshopper and a cannon that hearkens back to the splitters from Bomb Man's stage. That's neat, but doesn't really service any challenge with the warm opposition we're presented.

Soon after another welcome Beat appearance we encounter the first unavoidable roadblock enemy in this game, and he's been given some nasty upgrades. The nature of the snow makes sliding under any high jumps impossible, so you're stuck slugging it out, and this time, he's got ammunition. Either lobbing shots directly at Mega Man or firing delayed sequences of high and low missiles, this guy can combine these attack patterns for some tricky maneuvering. Honestly, this handles just fine as a pseudo-miniboss fight on its own merits, but again, the problem falls to his ridiculously high health. There is zero purpose to letting this get as long in the tooth as it does. He really could've benefited from having his bar cut to about a third of what it is. I don't bother rapid firing him like I usually do because it's just for show; he's got a slight invincibility that precludes doing a sizable amount of damage at once, so a moderate pace is just fine.

Immediately after is the real meat of the level, an extended homage to Gradius with incredibly clever enemy use and a real improvement in ambition and fun over the dull Rush Jet segments from Mega Man 8. Unfortunately, that bolster to the design mars itself with a decline in good control. The first half works just fine because the Balloon is very speedy in the air and turns on a dime. The tradeoff is you can't charge your shots, so Eddie previewing what's coming in from where is very considerate and very necessary. Things start off hectic and grow from there, and you need a really sharp management of positioning and timely firing or you will be overwhelmed by what's flying your way. The enemy configurations and timed releases on display here are beautifully handled. With completely unchanged Mega Man enemies, crafting a believable, enjoyable shooter section is no mean feat, but he pulls it off. By far the most immediate threat in this entire gauntlet are the birds from Mega Man 7, who level off with you and fly your way fast. They're summarily unavoidable unless you disperse them prematurely by breaking their line, which you absolutely want to do.

The dragons are not-so-immediate but equally dangerous, and whenever they enter the screen, you'd better line yourself up accurately. If their body segments take too much damage before their heads, the heads will separate and eventually beeline for Mega Man's position which is much deadlier than it sounds given their strict hitboxes. Especially during the latter half, but we're not there yet. Other than that, it's enjoyable to just watch the thought at play in these enemy applications and combinations therein. My favorite is the use of shield attackers as your standard follow-the-leader shooter enemies that serve more as physical obstacles than things you need to micro-manage. We even get the requisite massive ships that take more punishment to do in but still fall like cakewalk. I can't stress enough that from a design perspective, this stage is a heavy success. Best of all, unlike Mega Man 3, a death here is never really going to see you run out of weapon energy as drops are so very common and the balloon eats up its bar so slowly. Besides, the miniboss at the start is in all likelihood going to drop enough to fill an empty bar completely if you do happen to be low. Soon into things, though, we go through an entertaining but pointless sequence that leaves us with a tool more restrictive than the one we just had to deal with a harder gauntlet. What the hell?

Shadow Man makes his final (well, as of this point in development) appearance channeling Superman hilariously ineffectually. He pops your Balloon only to forget you have a flying dog and then uselessly attempts to do something about his screw up before you send him into the abyss with four easy shots. The sequence? Cute. The consequences? Not so much.

Rush Jet is an inexplicable downgrade from the Balloon and I have no idea why it was coded the way it was for this level. It caps at about half the speed, and to change the direction Mega Man is facing, you need to physically jump and face the opposite direction. That's inexcusably dumb. The saving grace is the ability to fire charged shots, which actually provides a lot of use for this next, more hectic half of the shooter section. The enemy placement is still as thoughtful and as devious as before here, so why did he feel the need to sully the fun by giving you a less useful tool to manage it? I don't understand.

Speaking of the second half, it does not fuck around. Enemies come in from both directions with alarming frequency and in much crueler combination than before. The very first portion is among the trickiest because the rate with which the Mega Man 7 birds fly in versus Rush Jet's speed makes it very easy to get overwhelmed by what you're attempting to manage and eat a few hits. The flying penguins from Toad Man's stage are really just there to psych you out. The pipis and crows? Not so much. By the way, I love that cross-section of pipis near the end of the bird assault. Afterward, enemy placement starts getting more deliberate and less frantic, with slowly homing ones in tricky positions, shield formations and a proclivity for bullets to start littering the screen. The final sendoff is a finger-blistering blue dragon with a lot of health, so start firing early if you want to avoid a chase.

Now we reach a boss whose inspirations are greater than what we're given to work with. Introducing a bullet hell fight while on this lumbering thing is thoughtlessly overwrought. Now, the gimmick behind this boss is hard to cipher and worse yet, shoddily coded, but you're supposed to realize that the majority of his barrage is just a graphic. During the three increasingly chaotic phases of this fight, the moth will use two very distinct patterns of bullet fire simultaneously, and only one of them is physically dangerous. The problem is that even given this foresight, it's a horribly designed execution, and you're still faced with a tool that's too slow to comfortably service a battle of this nature. For one, the illusory nature of his distracting fire is glitched. To test and make sure I wasn't crazy, as the hitboxes on these bullets has indeed been drastically lowered, I started launching myself into the bullets from his apparently fake configurations, from save states, in every position I could. Not once would I take damage from them, whereas the 'real' ones hurt consistently every time. But every now and then, a few of the bullets from his secondary pattern will be randomly real. There's no proclivity involved, it's absolutely random which of these bullets will be the exceptions, and I've tested it time and time again to come up with an answer, but all I have is that this boss is a programming nightmare.

There are so many ways this fight, which is a promising concept, could've been handled better. For one, the sheer lunacy involved in tracking shots during the last phase of the fight makes distinguishing which are real and which are fake a task not fit for the human eye. It's a nightmare of strained vision and I have zero clue why he didn't give the two distinct bullet types two distinct colors. Second, and more obviously, the Rush Jet just isn't enough to handle the involved nature of this fight. Dodging the unique projectile from his eyes or his stinger becomes a matter of memorizing an optimal approach instead of the reactionary affair it should be, just by nature of having to compensate for your sluggish movement. Taking these two factors out of the fight in his least threatening phase is essential.

From there, things just snowball into a bigger and bigger clusterfuck of inadequacies on your part. To delve into specifics, his first phase involves a fake eight-way shot followed by a slow moving physical bullet fired at Mega Man's position. This is a harmless enough concept that's complicated by the involved nature of dodging his two unique attacks, which means you want to nullify them as soon as possible. His second phase involves firing a tightly-packed fan of fake bullets and a fast moving straight line of real ones directly at Mega Man with rather speedy regularity. Keeping in constant motion is typically enough to nip this one in the bud, but as the moth's large sprite and bizarre motion are this battle's final complication, you want to be very sure you're in an absolutely ideal spot before you hurt him enough to trigger the final phase, because it's the definition of overwhelming.

The moth now fires a dense oval of fake bullets and a 'shotgun' configuration of real bullets at semi-random spacing and speed. You'll always be granted a so-called opening between these shots you can snake through, but they are fired at intervals far too rapid to properly dodge the entire gamut, so finding these gaps and establishing a strict rhythm to be between them is essential. Meanwhile, the sheer number of bullets cluttering the screen makes tracking his primary firing incredibly difficult, not to mention adding a greater opportunity for one of the fake bullets to just decide it wants to materialize and hit you. The less time this phase is given to mess with you, the better, and it's too much at once to really be called consistently doable. It's more like taking your best guesses and hoping they work out for you. I definitely couldn't sit here with my approach and see a successful run any more than every fifth fight or so, not even by nature of bad luck like Dust Man, but by nature of being way too ill-prepared to dodge such a strict and rapid assault.

To really drive a nail through the coffin, I found out soon after recording this successful run and moving on that you can trivialize this entire mess of bad programming by hugging the extreme left of the screen at all times, which will, due to the bullets' minute hit boxes, have them vanish from the screen before they contact Mega Man's hitbox. That means all of them. What an awful, awful boss.