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.