a post
I like the concept of speed-building a hack with C3 resources, as it can be a cool showcase of all the stuff that was released. I wanted to give this a try even if I am not the most skilled Kaizo player.
I enjoyed the short but intense levels of
"no name®" very much! It can be tough to get through the increasingly precise obstacles, but the levels are short enough to not be exhausting. The difficulty curve felt well planned out, though I would agree that the final level, "meta crystal" was a noticeable jump in difficulty. The final boss felt easier than "meta crystal", but I wouldn't say that this hack is in need of rebalancing. I got all the Dragon Coins and found some of the portrait rooms. Didn't find any portraits in the boss level or "rendering ranger r2".
Back to "meta crystal": I think most of the difficulty comes from some of the really precise jumps, or maybe I have a hard time properly jumping off the vines. Did anyone else find the first "Beans Dolphin" jump to be really difficult? I eventually figured out a trick to do it consistently, but ouch.
The final boss fight was definitely a highlight in this hack. I'm not sure if the boss is even a C3 resource, but it's a great way to wrap up the game. I like that the boss attacks are all related to the previous levels, and once you become familiar with its attacks, you can become more confident to attack and kill the boss faster. Even the stupid little things like
">:(" "no" "my attack" "dead" and even
"orb" are silly enough to get a laugh. There was one instance where the boss' "my attack" spawned clouds that were really high up, which made it just about impossible to jump to the next cloud, as the player doesn't have enough room to avoid hitting the ceiling. To be fair I couldn't get it to happen again.
Also the giant fire guys are really cool 🔥🔥🔥
Dragon Coins are used in a cool way! They're not saved unless you get all five in one shot, so it works as a nice "no death" challenge to the player.
At times, I did find myself thinking "wait, that's it? the level's that short?" but I guess that's a byproduct of making sure the hack is ready for C3.
Minor nitpicks: The mist in "mega man v" hides the saws. I will admit that I don't remember exactly how to fix this. I think there's a way to push layer 3 behind layer 1?
I think I would have preferred to have easily-skippable midpoints over having silently triggered midpoints. If you die after the midpoint in a Dragon Coin run, you lose your collected Dragon Coins, so you have to quit to the map screen, then hold R to clear out the midpoint. While there thankfully IS an option to clear out the midpoint, making it so that the midpoint can just be skipped without triggering it would be the quickest way for the player to deal with it. I mean, I guess it's just a few extra seconds to clear out the midpoint, so whatever lol
While it's not a mind-blowing groundbreaker kind of hack, sometimes you just want to sit down and play some difficult Super Mario. I'd recommend this hack to anyone who wants a sampling of Winter 2022's C3 resources. In particular, it's a good hack to see Abdu's C3 sprites in action.
