Nine Sols has become boss fight city. Jiequan was very difficult, and I poisoned him, so I imagine he’s much, much harder without the coughing fits.
Almost every move Jiequan does is a problem. The platform you fight him on feels pretty spacious until you realize Jiequan can hit you from full screen from anywhere. However, most of his attacks are easy to parry once you drill them down, but then you have to also deal with the fact that even successful parries can push you into the spikes on the side.
His one-two is the real problem, though. I had an extremely hard time reading whether he was going to follow up with the normal attack or the red charge. I know, intellectually, that the way to handle this is to charge a parry after the second hit so I’m ready for both, but getting that message to my hands was difficult. I settled on a tai chi kick to react, which would get me hit by the normal attack sometimes.
Speaking of the charge parry: this was the first fight I actually used it in. Reacting with it is so hard, but if I have a little time to anticipate, I can get the charge in quickly enough.
Which takes me to Jiequan’s second form, and in some ways I found it a little easier. When he starts teleporting, he’s telegraphing a charge move coming. His charge moves have two very different timings, so I had to get my head around that, but otherwise they weren’t so hard to charge parry.
But anyway, after many attempts, I was able to beat Jiequan and move on. And then the game immediately points me towards Lady Ethereal.
Man, Lady Ethereal. Remember how Red Candle made some horror games? They do. I loved this area. It was so cool to see the game focus more on platforming challenge for a while. It’s got the good movement, but I haven’t really felt like the platforming has been given as much attention as the combat.
Just going to censor this whole paragraph for spoilers, mostly out of laziness: And then there’s the boss fight with Lady Ethereal. This one might actually break me a bit. The first form is extremely easy, but still possible to mess up and waste a smoke on. The second form felt like the real boss, and took me a good long while to drill down. It’s bad enough that there’s three of them, but having to also find the real one out of the three can waste so much time. If there’s an obvious visual tell (besides the green charge move) that differentiates the fake ones from the real one, I haven’t caught on to it. And then, after at least an hour of drilling down the second form, there’s a third form. I died almost immediately and then decided that was a good place to wrap up for the day. That third form really sapped my morale.
Next time, more attempts.
