Difference between revisions of "Gate 303"

The theme of the level is straight-forward: Go through a session of elecbeam traps, shoot the miniboss guarding a key at the end of it, then proceed. At first I thought the approach of killing the miniboss right in front of the gate seems a bit strange (Maybe to prevent players from damage boosting everything?), then at the last session, random selected enemies start to drop keys too, to open the 5 gates at "Gate 303".

This could have been a very neat concept if the player were to be assigned a task to scavenger hunt for the keys, but as the current stage goes, you only have to kill all the enemies on a linear path to get everything needed.

Nothing much to say about the stage otherwise, a lot of the enemies don't really pose a threat (some even very happily scroll themselves off the screen), and it just seems like you wanted to fit every minibosses into one level.

Try not to make your levels feel too linear, adding in more platforming and enemy challenges could also help spice up the player's experience.

This all sounds fine, in theory. The main problem, and this is quite a severe one, is that enemies that hold keys *respawn*. Due to how keys work, this allows you to obtain an infinite amount of keys from a single enemy. This infinite key trick leads to other odd effects, such as the key hovering over Mega Man waiting to be collected if you already have 7 keys, as well as allowing you to skip Gemini Man completely as the Energy Element is within the room, but guarded by a key door. Plant Man cannot be skipped similarly as the boss doors lock. The only other minor issue is the unfitting midboss selection, which seems to be "all of them". It could have done with some edits of other midbosses to fit the theme.

Now, the thing that makes the level infuriating rather than merely “meh” is its boss fights. Now, I can forgive the lack of a boss corridor, meaning that when you die you respawn inside the first boss room. And I can ignore that putting two Robot Master fights one after the other without a health refill or checkpoint in between is a lazy way to add artificial difficulty. No, here’s what astonished me. In the room before that, with the five keys, one of the enemies that drops keys is a Docron Spawner… which can respawn. So you can just keep killing and respawning it to get an arbitrarily large number of keys, which you can use to skip the Gemini Man fight altogether. Uh… whoops? I’m kind of glad such a glaring oversight is in the stage, because otherwise I’d have very little to say here.

The stage starts out well enough: pleasantly backgroundy music, unremarkably but competently used vanilla graphics, and a few simple challenges with a very gentle learning curve. I like the use of the Elec beams as a less punishing alternative to floor spikes (though it looks odd to have the beams overlap with the floor; either give them more space or hide them behind a higher-priority floor tile). Combining them with Guts platforms is a decent idea, and WAIT THAT'S A SOLID WALL NOT A BACKGROUND TILE OH THE ELECTRICITY IT HURTS.

Suddenly, the exceedingly gentle learning curve is gone. It's never demonstrated that Guts platforms can pass through solid walls, so it's an even worse shock (literally and figuratively) when you're dumped off. It's not long before you're thrown into a tricky timing challenge involving sliding, falling a fair distance, and dodging Sniper Joe bullets—none of which has been required previously in the stage—while also avoiding an Elec beam trap. And I should mention that the Elec beams across the stage are inconsistent about whether they fire constantly or are on some kind of timer.

One enemy after another is introduced in a way that assumes the player already knows how to handle these foes. Never seen a Shield Attacker? Too late; you got hit. What's a Pandeeta? It's that thing you almost fell on, which is now shooting you at unnecessarily close range. Worse yet, these enemies are never seen again. I can easily imagine an inexperienced player getting smacked around the entire stage, never truly understanding how to deal with all this pain. Fortunately, the stage is a wholly appropriate length, and checkpoint placement is good.

The last area before the bosses is simultaneously the best and worst part of the level. On the one hand, it's a neat idea to have the player clear out every last bad guy in a large room to collect enough keys to proceed. On the other hand...the whole room is a mess, with enemies all over the place and no real structure to the challenges. Not to mention that the key doors come AFTER you get all the keys (a recurring theme here), which kind of defeats the purpose of having key doors. Although it is easy enough to avoid the enemies and then need to backtrack to get the keys, but that also feels like a waste. Tease the player with a locked door, THEN let them look for the key.

At least there's a boss fight behind all those locked doors...except it's the same Plant Man fight we got in MM6. Devkit bosses are fine, but do SOMETHING to set them apart. Bringing in those Elec beams or Guts platforms might have been good. Cutting the second boss fight also would have been good; Gemini Man is pure padding, and the lack of a checkpoint at the start of his battle is a bit of an oversight. There's no thematic connection between Plant Man, Gemini Man, and the rest of the stage...though the stage doesn't really have much theming to begin with.