Mega Man X5 Boss Rush - No Dash/No Damage/Minimalist (Part III)
Part III.
Individual boss comments:
Shadow Devil mk5: Okay, now things get complicated. Grab a soda.
It's hard to come up with a Mega Man gimmick I hate more than Devil fights. It's a complete mistake to include this bastard in here (or anything past MM1) at all, but if you're gonna vy for iconic bullshit from your past, at least don't half-ass it: the added ability to duck takes a lot of bite out of what's in honest contention for some of the worst boss design in this series, so I'm doing things the MM1 way to really expose how unreasonable this boss's patterns get. No ducking. Just your good ol' fashioned jump and shoot buttons.
You could make the argument that I'm intentionally exaggerating problems by willfully ignoring a mechanic, but after a point this asshole transcends the usefulness of ducking anyway, and if it's such a get-out-of-jail-free move (it isn't, in terms of the long haul), it makes the bloated nature of this boss's design even more pointless!
Most attacks and patterns speak for themselves. Two are special cases.
The Devil has a variation on a certain attack that is the definition of a nightmare. Past half health, he will sometimes pause in the middle of an assault and leave two halves of himself on either side of the room. If he decides to shoot pellets at you from even heights, it's more needless padding than it is added threat, as they always repeat whatever pattern was used to set up the pincer. If, however, he starts lancing blobs asymmetrically, you are FUCKED. FUCKED. FUCKED.
This attack is brazenly the hardest to avoid in the game under normal circumstances. Dodging it on reflex, ducking or no ducking, is essentially laughable. It just can't be done consistently. The only hope is to memorize the pattern, which is mercifully, true to the original Devil, the same every time. One half does the inverse of the pattern that sets up the pincer, and the other half's pattern is distinct from any other in the fight. Crucially, the fact that it is the same pattern every time means the setup is the same every time, so you know it's coming before it starts. The problem is your free space in all this fast-paced clutter is a fucking labyrinth. Dodging it all with jumps took some serious brain scrambling, and a seriously large number of attempts. It is OBVIOUSLY a memorized pattern, as there is literally no way to go about the attack on reflex alone. It just won't happen.
The second is his Wily Tank form. What this meant, at first glance, was impossibility. You can't jump over him. If you hug the corner of a wall, he jumps into you. You cannot even walk under him between his hops. You can (quite rarely) eek out a battle where he'll never use his tank form (hell, I just about had it happen here), but come on, that's the lame approach.
For whatever incredibly stupid reason, I never bothered checking out the details behind his body's hitbox. And lo and behold, bad detection wins the day again. Black Devil isn't actually considered solid until shortly after his entire body forms. This beautiful fact allows me to walk to the wall behind his body, which completely avoids the first phase of his attack, and allows me loads of space with which to manipulate his jump, as he always tries to land on you.
And that's my courageous tale.
Rangda Bangda W: Oh God, it's another 'experience'. Grab a shotgun.
Of all the things in X5, besides Sigma's purple cubes, I thought this would be the deal breaker. How in Christ's name was it possible to deal with the red eye without dashing? I thought dodging it WITH dashing was impossible for the longest time, for Christ's sake.
I put this battle off above all others. Even when I'd moved on to X6, I did every single one of those, including spending ages trying to figure out how Shield Sheldon/Nightmare Mother would work, before I even bothered trying Rangda. That's because I'd approached all of this with the presumption of Rangda being bluntly impossible; not out of difficulty, not from lack of proper approach, just by the books impossible.
The issue? Well, how about the fact that I've never fought this Egyptian reject on Level 1? By crashing the fuck out of the colony before ever setting foot into a stage, by sucking absolute ass before crawling into those boss doors, level 1 will leave his health just BARELY small enough to make destroying the red eye possible before its stream of projectiles hits you. This isn't a complex thing, it isn't even a difficult thing. It's a depressing example of how thickheaded I can be about a series I invest so much bloody thought into.
Maverick Zero: Pure sex.
Tracks used, in order:
Venetian Snares - Hajnal
F-777 - Lost Dynasty
Naoto Tanaka - X vs. Zero (because really I mean come on now)