I'm at the first boss now and it's a healthtank.
Just tons of healthdots for me to whack away at while he bombards me with attacks that take off half my health.
Is that what this game is? Will I just have to fight every boss for 5 minutes while perfectly dodging all their bullshit?

People are singing this games praises in the reviews but all I've seen so far is cheap difficulty and aggravating game design choices. For instance, can my guy please not spend forever to slowly stand back up after dying in a game with insta-deaths?

Please tell me there is at least some trick to each boss that I can figure out so I can take them out fast.
Please tell me this is a better game than what it looks like to me now and the beginning is just awful.

Hey don't scare me!
I was just about to sing the game some praises after #@$ching about it being broken for controller support.
Galaxy auto patched it this morning and I can play it now. Only a few min in to it.
It seems so beautiful!
But I have yet to reach a difficult enemy.

Spoilery answer... maybe?





I've beaten two bosses so far. The game got a lot better for me once I got the first few upgrades and stopped being afraid to teleport back and forth. Looking for the hidden "gold" caches so you can buy more stuff makes all the difference. I'm not sure if I agree with this design choice, bying things vs. finding them zelda style, but trying to beat bosses without buying new moves is not worth it.

Once I beat the first boss it was smooth sailing from then on. You gotta find the tempo of the game. And I would never call any of this "cheap" difficulty. It's like dark souls.

After getting in further, yes, all bosses are in fact healthtanks but the difficulty varies wildly between "brutally unfun" and "this isn't that bad, I can do this".

The thing is, "brutally unfun" is blocking your progress to "this isn't that bad".
So as you might have guessed, the difficulty curve is basically nonexistant since the hardest boss in the game is one of the 3 you can run into first and nothing after will ever come close to it again (which is a good thing fyi).

*MINOR SPOILERS*


Which one gave you the most trouble, out of curiosity? The biggest headache for me was a tie between the East and the North; once I got the gun from the North, the difficulty dialed back a little.

North by far.
West is only "hard" because of no i-frames when dodging so you can't "dark souls" it and because of way too large hitboxes. He's really just cheap about things that shouldn't hit you hitting you anyway.
East is totally managable and you should go there first.
Everything after that suddenly has a sane difficulty and are a bunch of fun actually tough but fair fights.

I'd agree with that for the most part.

To spoil the fights for those wondering why:

East (Frog) : Only a two stage pattern, and unlike North and West it just gets faster as you fight without actually changing. This boss also has the only "vulnerability" that I've found in that he'll fall over if you get him near the exploding adds.

North (Bird) : The weirdest difficulty curve I've seen in a boss fight for a while. Starts off with a seeking ground attack and basic projectiles. Part way through the ground attacks get bigger and faster, as well as smaller birds coming in to distract you. This part is frantic and hard as hell. The best strategy I had was to just eat the hits and burn past it. The third phase causes the bird adds to go away and the ground attack to become an easy to dodge pattern, making the end of this boss fight a cakewalk.

West (Swordsman) : Both the least fair, and easiest to cheese. He starts with a leaping, seeking dual-slash which will kill you the first time you see it. Fortunately I came into this with both the dodge-chain upgrade, and the projectile reflection upgrade. Dodge out of the way of the slash, just walk out of the way of the spikes, and reflect his shots back at him. Long and boring fight at that point, but the only reason to fear damage is framerate jitters.

North boss in new game plus (which drops you down to 2 max hp instead of 5 and changes literally nothing else) is double hitler. At least in the regular game you don't have to start all over chipping away at the bajillion hp whenever those random will-it-be-diagonal-or-not phase 2 crosses clip the very edge of your massive hitbox.

The birds didn't bother me all that much; I just stayed in the center of the room whaling on the boss and adjusting my aim slightly to attack the birds as they got close. Any that were left over were either easy to kill with a single shot or were taken out by friendly fire. The third phase actually gave me more trouble because of the shift in the way the ground patterns acted.

just wanted to add - if you are tired of this horrible, long "get up" animation you have to endure every time after you die - spam Z (sit key) while game is loading!

I'm at birdy. I must admit that given the number of retries, the death + boss intro animations starts to get a bit annoying after the 10th retry.

Spend some time collecting bits. If you pick up the charge attack and the dash-shield, for example, you can reduce the swearing and bleeding thumbs rate by a whole bunch with any of the bosses.

Or if you prefer focusing on guns, you can go with reflect and dash-stab, maybe (a lot harder, imo, but works. Specially well to the east). You can afford either of those combos with the bits from just one area, before you can open the gates.

But you have to go and look pretty hard for hidden areas to get anywhere with the bits-budget. Think maybe that's the one oversight the game-design has. That you're sort of story-pictured into believing you're a bit stronger than you are at the beginning. Because the difficulty curve says the game probably has been designed so you should run around for a while in the forest, go back and get some upgrades, and then take on the first boss. Story, on the other hand, leads you to engage the first boss as quickly as possible. But you're going to struggle an awful lot on the bosses without any upgrades (unless you cheeze it with the utterly graceless, but very effective attack cancels). Specially the charge attack. Almost necessary to get that - unless you feel like dodging an instant death attack from any of the bosses.. oh.. perfectly 20 times in a row, instead of 5.

It's still possible to do it without cheeze, but you're kind of a sadist if you encourage new players to beat the first boss without any upgrades :)