This comment is part one of the boss strategies. The beginning of the stage is a softball. There are a couple Yoku block sections that are easily reacted to and a ladder that you can just hold up on. The green platforms can be horrible in other stages due to their randomness, but this one is reliable. We can always jump on it just after the enemy shot passes us, and by tapping right to inch to the right edge, we can always jump to the ladder as soon as it reaches the right side of the screen. After that is the meat and potatoes: the boss refights. Choosing a good order is important. Generally, we want to take on the harder bosses first, but it's adviseable to toss in some of the easier ones early from time to time to make sure we stay practiced. I tend to fight a boss first any time I fail to it for that reason, and Iceman was the one I failed to on the previous attempt, so he's first here. Hard Iceman is probably the most challenging fight in this gauntlet, and also one of the best fights in the game IMO. Iceman is a test of decision-making. There are a lot of edge cases in this fight, and we need to be prepared for everything he can do because Oilman can't rely on luck when he kills things so slowly. During Iceman's movement phase, he'll randomly skate left or right until he hits one of the four points on the stage that he attacks from. These spots are far-left, center-left, center-right, and far-right. Once he reaches one of these points, he'll start attacking. Oddly, the center-left and center-right positions aren't symmetrical. If he's on the center-left and we're to the left of him, we can react to him easily enough. But if he's on the center-right and we're on the right side, I struggle to react to that. This means that I'll typically jump over him when he skates from center-left to far-left or from center-left to center-right, assuming I'm on the wrong side of him. During his regular attack cycles, Iceman will shoot three staggered shots as he slowly moves either upwards or downwards. We only need to jump over the lowest shot. He'll do two sets of attacks before returning to his skating. On Hard mode, Iceman's shots will move faster as we damage him. This makes it harder to react and makes it hard to build muscle memory to dodge him, but it also means that it's easier to jump between his shots than on Normal. That's good because we need our focus for other things here. Where this fight gets tricky is the icicle attack. Iceman will occasionally call icicles from the ceiling in place of his regular attacks. To dodge these, we usually want to stay at the edges of the stage. However, if he's at center-left and we're at the far-left, we can jump over him and take advantage of a blind spot just to his right. This will allow us to get to the right side of the stage so that we can react to his attacks more easily. For a brief period after calling the icicles, Iceman will gain the ability to shoot three grounded shots, which make it a bad idea to camp in the corners. We can stand on an icicle further away from him instead. If he shoots grounded shots, they'll pass harmlessly beneath us. If he shoots ascending or descending shots, we'll need to jump over both the middle and high ones. It takes practice to do this without falling off the icicles. I've gotten pretty good at this, but in this recording I managed to botch it twice and get bailed by quick backups instead. Not a clean fight, but good enough. The hardest part is when the icicles melt. If we just stand on them, it's easy for us to drop into a shot before we can react, but if we jump to gain more reaction time, we're liable to do it too early and then have to panic to recover. To deal with this consistently, we need to keep track of when Iceman skates. The better scenario is if Iceman skates immediately after dropping the icicles. In this case, the icicles will melt the next time he's skating. If he's on the far-left or far-right, we may need to move a bit towards him so that we pass over his shots before the icicles melt. If he's in the center-left and we're on the right, we need to stand on the icicle closer to him after he shoots and prepare to jump over him since he'll sometimes manage to skate to the center-right just after the icicles finish melting. The harder pattern is if he shoots just after calling the icicles. In this case, we need to be prepared because the icicles will melt while he's shooting. If he starts with descending shots, we typically want to get into the corner since we'll get enough of a gap to deal with the icicles melting. Otherwise, as the low shots approach, we should do small jumps in place as if we were dodging them. That way, if the icicles melt while a shot is directly underneath our feet, we'll jump over it. However, the small jump doesn't overcommit, so we'll land back on the icicle in time to react if it doesn't melt. Ideally, the icicles will melt between his shots, when we have just enough time to react. With this strat, we can always react to the icicles melting. If he's in the center-left and we're on the center-right, we still need to stay close so that we can jump over. I botched this in this recording too, but got bailed because he skated left. Offense isn't too bad. It's easiest to attack when there are no icicles, as we can just toss in attacks when we're dodging without much extra effort. When icicles are up, Oilman can still attack since his shots arc downwards. If the icicles are up, we only attack when Iceman is skating or shooting grounded shots so that we can concentrate on dodging. Hopefully this conveys why Iceman is such a doozy. Fluking a win in this fight isn't hard, as it'll only take so long before we get a good pattern where he never does anything dangerous. The difficulty is in learning the fight well enough that the gauntlet as a whole doesn't become pure pain to execute. We really need to know everything above like the back of our hand. Don't worry, the other fights aren't nearly as complex and difficult, I promise. Mega Man? is next, and he's a test of reaction time. Most of the fight is repetitive, lulling us into a false sense of security, but we need to prepare to act *immediately* in the few moments that aren't. Generally, when Mega Man? is near us, he'll perform a slide attack in our direction that we can easily jump over. He'll still be close enough to do another slide afterwards, so for most of the fight, he'll just slide back and forth like an idiot while we dodge him. Ignore the way I opened this fight; I realized afterwards that a better strat is to simply walk to the left wall at the start of the fight and wait for him to slide at us to begin the cycle. Once we have him sliding, the only way he'll break out of it is if he decides to do something else in the short window before he slides again. He can decide to charge his buster, but this won't interrupt his sliding on Hard mode. He can't shoot during a slide, so we know he'll always fire right after the second slide. This makes the buster charge trivial to avoid. The real killer in this fight is Mega Man's jump. It looks unassuming, but it's by far the most dangerous thing he can do. If we jump over his slide in the most intuitive way, he'll jump straight into our face without giving us a chance to react. Because of this, my preferred approach is to jump *away* from him while he's sliding and then double back at the peak of the jump to land back where we started. If he slides, we don't need to react to it; our jump looks awkward, but it'll always make it over if we do it right. This is important because he'll spend 95% of the battle sliding, so we'll likely mess up once if we need to react to it. But if he does his jump, we'll be at the furthest point from him when he does it, so we'll have time to react on the rare occasion that he does this. We may need to improvise to get him back to the wall after that; generally, making him slide twice in the same direction does the trick if needed. If he decides to fire regular shots, he won't turn around to use them, so they aren't too threatening. The regular shots will end as soon as he touches a wall. In fact, if he starts to use them while already standing next to a wall, I'm pretty sure the attack ends before we can even see it! That said, it's important that we keep Mega Man? sliding exactly against the wall after he performs his shots. Otherwise, he's more likely to get into bad patterns and throw off the timing of our (already awkward) jumps. If he's ever a short distance away from the wall, we can stand directly against the wall as he slides to get him back into position. This is the only battle that relies on some level of RNG with the best strat I could come up with. On rare occasions, Mega Man? will do something crazy like jumping and shooting at the same time, and this strat can't account for that. He can also shoot on the same frame (?) that he touches a wall, which actually does cause him to turn and shoot at the same time. This guy just seems to resist being consistent no matter what I do...
This comment is part two of the boss strategies. Since he's Oilman's weakness, Elecman is a shorter fight, but that doesn't mean we should put him off. Remember that while a shorter fight is less likely to give us a reset, it also impacts our reset efficiency less. Elecman is a test of multi-tasking. It can be easy to forget where we are in his pattern if we pay too much attention to dodging his immediate attacks, but it's also easy to mess up dodging his attacks if we pay them no heed at all. Elecman's regular pattern is to walk between the three points on the floor that he launches attacks from. He won't approach the walls, so we don't need to worry about him ramming us. When he attacks, he'll alternate between firing a low shot or a high shot. The low shot is quite tricky to jump over due to its width, so it's best not to let Elecman use it when he's close to us. If he's in the middle (the most common position he'll fire it from), jumping as soon as he reaches the center of the stage will do the trick. The high shots can be dodged by doing absolutely nothing. We just need to make sure that we don't expect him to do a low shot and jump into it by mistake. When attacking him, sometimes he'll do a dodge shot. This can be distinguished from his regular high shot because he floats quite some distance backwards when he does it. We actually want to provoke this as often as possible since it means that we'll need to jump over fewer low shots. He also can't replace it with his lightning bolt attack (described in the next section), which is great since that's the most dangerous part of the fight. That said, don't commit too hard to attempting to provoke a dodge shot since he can't do it all the time. I don't know the exact rules, but he can't do one for a couple attacks after the previous dodge and he also can't do it right after he shoots. We can reliably provoke it at the start of the fight and after he uses his lightning attack. Speaking of the lightning attack, it's a bit tricky. First, we need to make a snap decision on what side of the screen we want to be on after it ends. If Elecman is on the far-left or far-right, we want to be on the opposite side. If he's in the middle, we want to pay attention to where he was walking. If he was walking right, we want to be on the left side, and vice-versa. This will prevent him from doing a low shot right in our face after the lightning. When Elecman starts posing for the lightning, get to the closest edge of the screen. When he does his twirl, start walking. We don't want to react too quickly to the twirl, as it's easy to jump the gun and go too early (I did this once in the video and had to pause briefly as a backup). The first lightning bolt takes about a second to come out, so it's difficult to start walking too late. The rest of the strat depends on whether we want to cross the screen or not. If we don't want to cross, we should keep walking until the first lightning bolt, wait around half a second before turning, and then turn around a second time immediately after the second lightning bolt. If we want to cross, we should just hold right we reach the opposite side of the screen, but we'll need to jump over Elecman. His hitbox is bigger than it looks, so we should jump when we're some distance away. If he's right next to us when he begins his attack, we can jump as soon as we start walking to clear him every time. He downright spammed lighting in this attempt, so you can get a good reference for every type of lightning dodge by watching this footage. The last thing to keep in mind is that his shots don't maintain a pattern of "low shot in the center, high shot near the edges". If Elecman interrupts his pattern by doing a dodge shot or a lightning attack, we need to keep track of which attack is coming next so that we don't react to it poorly. Once you've practiced the fight enough, it becomes second-nature though. Bombman is a test of our ability to manage RNG. It's easy to get complacent with the usual easy win here, but we do *not* want to repeat the previous 2-3 bosses every time he decides to give us a lousy pattern. His regular double-bombs will be thrown to our left and right. It's easiest to dodge them by staying between them and jumping to avoid the explosions. The explosion hitboxes don't linger very long, so avoiding the explosions is much easier than it looks. Trust me, it probably looks like I'm performing death-defying stunts constantly in this fight, but this is something you won't even need to think about. If Bombman has already jumped once and he's near the edge of the stage, he'll replace his next jump with a big bomb. Avoiding this is also surprisingly simple. We just place ourselves at a distance equal to the screen length minus one floor tile and wait. He'll wobble three times before throwing the bomb. As he throws, we start moving towards him. If he throws the bomb far, we've already dodged it. If he throws it close, we have plenty of time to react and pause briefly to slip under it. Sometimes the entire fight is just Bombman chucking these things and we barely have to try. Bombman's movement phase is where things get complicated. He can choose from five different options here: -A jump slightly left or slightly right -A jump to the far-right or far-left of the screen -A jump that covers about two-thirds of the distance to our position The far-left and far-right jumps are notable because it's pretty easy for Bombman to jump right into us if he decides to cross the screen in our direction. There are two bad scenarios here. The first is that we need to jump to avoid his double-bombs, which put us right in his path if he decides to jump across the screen. This is avoided using a similar jump to the one we used to deal with Mega Man?. Jump away from him while jumping over the bombs and then double back at the peak of the jump to land back in the original position. It's a slightly different jump since we can't start moving to the side until after we've gotten over the bombs, but it's still not that hard. There are a couple moments in this video where we would have gotten hit if we weren't using this strat. For the next two paragraphs, let's assume for the ease of the description that we're on the left and Bombman is on the right. The second issue is that if we're standing just to the left of Bombman, and he's too far away from the left wall, Bombman will jump in an arc that's low enough to smack us even if we're not in the air. At first glance, that seems like a non-issue. However, Bombman has a special quirk where he'll jump immediately if we're right next to him when he lands from the previous jump. In MM1, constantly getting in Bombman's face was "the strat" for beating him easily, but in Powered Up we need to be careful not to stand next to him if he's too close to the right wall. However, there's one moment when we do need to deliberately stand next to him, and that's if Bombman begins to corner us at the left side of the stage. If he fully corners us, we need to prevent him from throwing bombs since they'll be undodgeable. We can do this with the aforementioned strat of getting in his face after he jumps and forcing him to jump again. This is also fully safe since we're close enough to the left wall that if he jumps to the far-left, the jump arc will be high enough not to hit us. That's a cool piece of game design right there; the devs clearly put a lot of thought into these fights. Hopefully that description is clear enough, as it's hard to describe without a diagram. Don't get me wrong, this is difficult to pull off because you have to be very close to Bombman to provoke a jump and his jumps are hard to react to, but it's better than a guaranteed loss. You can see me attempt this strat at the very start of the fight, but I was too far to bully him into jumping (not that it ended up mattering in this case). We can do even better by attempting to prevent him from cornering us at all. This is where the jump where he crosses two-thirds of the screen matters. After the big bomb comes out, Bombman will get an opportunity to jump. If we stay far away, then Bombman can jump across a large portion of the screen and immediately corner us. Therefore, we stay close to Bombman so that he won't move very far if he does the two-thirds jump. As he begins his jump, we back away from Bombman by about 40% of our remaining space to give up as little ground as possible while still giving ourselves room to avoid getting hit if he decides to jump across the entire screen. In summary, there's a lot more going on here than it looks like in a casual viewing, and all of it matters to give us that extra edge of winning.
This comment is part three of the boss strategies. Gutsman's regular pattern is more predictable than it seems at first glance. He'll either jump forwards, jump backwards, or jump straight up. If he doesn't have a block and he jumps forwards/backwards, he'll pluck one out of the ground. This block has a hitbox, so if he's about to do this, we need to take care not to get knocked over by the screen shake right next to him. As long as we're far enough away, we can often accept getting knocked over on purpose so that we can get an extra hit in. If he has corned us near the edge of the stage, we may need to jump over the block pluck. If he has a block and he jumps forwards/backwards, he'll do nothing. If he has a block and he jumps straight up, he'll throw it, which we can easily jump over as long as we walk a short distance away from Gutsman first. If he has no block and jumps straight up, he'll use his digging attack. To avoid the digging attack, we need to be moving and jump *immediately* after he starts to emerge. I can neither react to this nor consistently time this without a visual cue, so I crafted a buffer to get it every time. First, we should move to the nearest edge of the stage, the position we'll dodge the attack from. When he starts digging into the ground, start by listening for the digging noises he makes. It's a repetitive crunching sound, and if I had to write it into text, it would sound like "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch". On the sixth "ch" noise, we want to do two full jumps, which are only done to time our next movements. When we're about to land from the second jump, we can start moving away from the wall. Right as we land from the second jump, we do a third jump that will avoid the digging attack. This needs to be repeated three times, but the blocks he throws during this attack aren't dangerous. It's also possible to use the dust particles from his digging to time the buffer instead of the sound cue if you really can't make it work, but I'd advise against that since the dust particles are slightly random. Similarly to Bombman, the most dangerous part of the fight is if he corners us, but it's rare on Hard mode and easier to deal with. If he has cornered us, we need to be prepared to run under him. We can stand a short distance away from him and start moving right as he jumps. If he does a jump backwards, we need to quickly reverse course to avoid him landing on us, but this is surprisingly easy to react to. If he jumps forwards or straight up, we need to jump ASAP once we've gotten past him to avoid getting knocked over. I'm glad that I had this trick in my repetoire for the moment in this run when it really counted. Fireman is Oilman's weakness, but that has no impact. We're already doing one damage to everything, and taking extra damage doesn't matter when we're not allowed to take any to begin with. Fireman is a test of strategy. Out of all the bosses, he is the one where I revamped/tweaked my approach the largest number of times. But in the end, I ended up with something simple and easy to execute, which was surprising since I initially thought that Fireman would be the hardest fight. When moving, Fireman just walks left and right across the stage. He'll only attack in two circumstances. First, if we get too far away from him, he'll attack us. We never want to trigger an attack this way, so we should stay close to him at all times. We have to stay within a distance of about half the length of the stage to avoid this. Second, he'll attack as a counterattack whenever we shoot. Obviously, we need to attack him, but the fact that he'll only counterattack means that we can manipulate when and where he'll attack from. The idea is to stay in front of him and only attack him from the edge of the stage. We want to walk to the very edge of the screen and tap the D-pad to turn around so that our shot will hit him. When doing this, it's crucial that we completely slam into the wall before turning since we'll slide sometimes if we aren't at a standstill when we do the D-pad tap. We can identify when we've touched the wall since Oilman will recoil slightly. Next, when the front side of Fireman touches the closest line in the floor, we need to press the D-pad, jump, and shoot at the same time. If done correctly, we'll shoot Fireman and jump over him at the same time, dodging any of his regular attacks even if he does a jump-shot. The reason for all that setup isn't just to get a clean visual cue. The main idea is to make it easy to dodge his fire wave. The fire wave will travel slowly across the screen until it hits a wall and then bounces back. When shooting Fireman in this way, he'll immediately shoot the fire wave at a wall, so we'll only need to jump over it once. Additionally, Fireman won't catch up to the wave too quickly, so we'll have an opening to jump between him and the wave to get past both of them without doing anything too tricky. When jumping over the fire wave, I prefer to keep my eyes on the space between the wave and Fireman to indentify when the opening appears rather than focusing on the space between the wave and Oilman and jumping at the last second, but either way works. To execute everything more easily, it's good to use a lot of visual cues in this battle. When leading Fireman to the edge of the screen, we can use the light patch on the central tile as a starting position and start moving when Fireman touches the wall. As mentioned earlier, using the line in the floor helps to time the jump-shot. When dodging the fire wave, we can use the icon in the central floor tile to identify where to wait for the attack. If you're planning to do this yourself, pay close attention to the video for details. As with most of the fights, it's not the bulk of the fight that's most tricky, but a rare scenario that only shows up once or twice. In this case, it's the very beginning of the fight. We start far enough away from Fireman to trigger an immediate attack. If this is a regular attack, we need only jump just before the first shot hits us and continue moving forwards so that we clear his next shot even if it's a jump-shot. It's tough, but not too bad. The worse scenario is if he opens with his fire wave. Because we didn't trigger it from the normal position, we'll need to jump over the wave twice. But worse than that, if we leave Fireman to his own devices, he'll be walking just behind the wave right when we need to make the second fire wave jump, and it will be impossible to get over both of them! To avoid this, we need to get to the other side of Fireman ASAP and then shoot him from behind to trigger the counterattack. This will position him such that we can jump over him and then jump over the wave a bit later. Shooting him quickly enough (but not so soon that he doesn't counter) and dodging the counterattack is pretty tricky, so we need to practice this to death if we're going to do this fight this late. Depending on exactly when we shot Fireman and how many shots he takes when countering, we'll need to dodge the wave in a different way. If the wave is still far away, it's best to jump over Fireman when he turns and then follow Fireman from behind when jumping over the wave. If the wave is getting close, it's best to jump over it immediately, staying close enought to Fireman to avoid provoking another attack. As with Gutsman, knowing the strat for this uncommon scenario came in clutch during this run. I was very close to shooting Fireman too late in this attempt, so I hardly had any space to get over the wave, but it barely worked out.
Oh hell yeah. I loooooove mega man challenge run stuff (I've done a few myself although nothing anywhere near this demanding) and getting nitty gritty commentary is awesome. I remember loving this one but haven't revisited it in ages, I really need too!!
Out of all the games in the series that I've played, I think this one is my favourite. Even beyond the visual design and the sheer amount of content, I think they've done a great job of making it tough, but fair, and I gained more and more respect for the game design as I learned more about it. It's a shame they didn't go further with the idea of remaking classic Mega Man titles in this format.
@@Lockirby2Oh man I need to replay this one... I have at least one other friend (who's a huge action game fan) that played through as every robot master on every difficulty, it's gotta be special to inspire this much play from y'all.
This comment is part four of the boss strategies. Boy do I need to take FarAwayTimesGaming's advice and find a better place to put these walls of text. :P The last three bosses are a significant step down from the first six. Cutman is a test of... well, a little bit of everything. He's a "jack of all trades, master of none" type. During Cutman's movement phase, he'll walk towards us if he's far enough away and jump to our position if he's close enough. If Cutman's running at us, we can just move towards him and he'll jump way over our heads. After a certain amount of time, he'll attack. This sounds simple enough, but the movement phase is the trickiest part to get right. We want to manipulate his movements so that he doesn't corner us while also making sure he attacks at a predictable time. Otherwise, this fight can get chaotic fast. The idea here is to ensure that Cutman jumps exactly twice before attacking. The time before his attack can be divided into jumping time and walking time. The two jumps take a consistent amount of time, so we only need to manipulate his walking time. I find it helpful to think about it in terms of distance rather than time though. Cutman's movement speed is fixed, so he'll always walk a certain distance in a certain amount of time. Therefore, between the walk he does before his first jump and the walk he does before his second jump, we need to let him walk a certain total distance. If we get it right, Cutman will attack soon after landing from his second jump. The video should demonstrate this pretty well. This probably sounds far more difficult than it actually is. The timing is pretty forgiving, so the strat doesn't take much effort to get a knack for. Once we've manipulated Cutman like this, we need to dodge the attack itself. Cutman can choose to do a single or double cutter throw, and we can't tell which at the outset. Either way, we want to start by moving towards Cutman while jumping over the cutter. Cutman will then jump over us and then catch the cutter before it boomerangs towards us. After the first (or only) cutter throw, we need to put some distance between ourselves and Cutman. If Cutman throws another cutter, we can react and jump over that in the same way. If Cutman doesn't throw another cutter, we can react and start manipulating his next movement cycle. Sometimes Cutman will replace his attack with a big cutter. The big cutter has more bark than bite. Just stay away from the wall, use the animation where he winds back for the throw to time the jump, and double back as soon as you've passed the big cutter. Then do it again. Easy! This fight requires more thought than usual when it comes to offense. With Oilman, I don't like shooting him as he's jumping over us since the oil slick creates a puddle if it misses, and this can cause several problems. There are three good openings IMO. The first is after the big cutter: leave an oil puddle on the floor in front of him and let him walk into it to avoid shooting him before his I-frames wear off. After the second jump during his movement phase, we can turn back and shoot him just before he attacks. And if he decides to throw two regular cutters at us, we can shoot him after the second. Shooting him at any other time caused various problems for me. After Cutman, rejoice! You've all but won at this point. Timeman is just a test of memorization. He has a fixed pattern and doesn't require any reactions at all. I gave each of the shots in his pattern names, and I'd repeat the name of the upcoming shot to myself to remind myself where we need to move to next. These shots are "Starting Shot", "Normal Shot", "Slow Shot", "Dangerous Shot", "Running Shot", and "Tight Shot". I'd go into more detail about how to dodge each, but there really isn't any nuance here. Just copy what I did in the video. After Timeman has gone through this cycle, he'll actually repeat it! This is great since it means that there's less to memorize, fewer things things that can go wrong, and no worries if we miss a few attack opportunities and take a bit longer to kill him. The only caveat is that his pattern will be mirrored each time he goes through his cycle, so don't get thrown off by that. The only true concern in this fight is the dodge roll Timeman can use on Hard mode. The dodge itself isn't that dangerous, but it will throw off his pattern, so it's critical to avoid it happening even once. He'll only ever dodge roll after he uses Time Slow, so to avoid it, we just avoid attacking him until time speeds up again. There are some safe moments to hit him even during Time Slow, but this fight is easy, so why take any risks? Even outside of Time Slow, it's critical that we avoid missing Timeman with our attacks since he's also capable of dodge rolling if he approaches the oil puddle after time gets slowed again. To this end, we avoid taking any shots unless we're 100% sure they'll connect. If we do miss, it's important to step on the oil puddle ASAP to eliminate it from the field. That may be tough and it may force us to improvise to dodge the next attack or two, but it's better than improvising the rest of the fight. With all eight robot masters defeated, it's time to face the final boss of this gauntlet: the red square enemy a couple rooms down. Since our movement up and down the ladder is slow, we only have a small window to climb up, shoot one shot, and then climb back down again. It's best to start and stop about half a block away from the red square, as we don't want to start or stop moving a bit too early. We can start moving right as the eye opens to maximize our window. The red square can crash into the oil puddle, so we don't need to try and get close enough to shoot the red square directly. If we find ourselves getting off-rhythm with our movements, it's best to wait a cycle instead of rushing it. The other rooms are mostly self-explanatory. The turrets will never hit us if we climb fast. The second red square isn't nearly as dangerous as the first. If we miss the jump from the ladder in the next room, we may fall back to the previous room and land on the second red square. To avoid this, we can use the screen transition to react and regrab the ladder before we fall too far. In Hard mode, the pickaxe Mets in the final room will jump to prevent us from jumping over them. This is also their big weakness, as the jump will reset the timer that controls when they attack. In other words, as long as we keep jumping, they'll never attack us. With Oilman's downwards arcing shots, we can bypass the shields easily and make it to Copy Oilman. The one saving grace that Oilman has is that his own boss fight is the easiest of the lot. This means that he gets the privilege of fighting the easiest boss last. In other words, Copy Oilman is a test of nerves. There's nothing difficult about this fight unless we start to panic or act strangely because we're worried about making a mistake, but that's easier said than done. Copy Oilman will start in his movement phase. During his movement phase, Copy Oilman will either jump to our position and then jump to the wall or walk towards us and then jump to the wall when he reaches us. Either can be avoided simply by walking towards him until he jumps. We'll then have plenty of time to react and get a shot in before he attacks. We then want to use the floor tiles to stand about two-thirds of the way across the room before he attacks. The goal of this is usually to prevent the enemy's oil from being placed in positions where it'll interfere with our movements, but Player Oilman can't slip on the oil anyways, so the only reason why I'm doing this here is because it's the strat that I practiced. When Copy Oilman attacks, he'll do a triple shot of oil. It's best to dodge this by standing in place and jumping straight up. This is easy. Copy Oilman may also use his own skateboard to glide across the stage, but he telegraphs this heavily, so we don't need to react. Dodging this is also easy. The only thing to watch out for is that he has two animations before he hops on the skateboard, so it's important not to panic and jump early if he does the longer one. And that's it! Hopefully this makes it a bit easier for somebody else to jump into damageless runs of this game. There aren't a ton of resources for it, so I figured I needed to make this.
![PSP Longplay [027] Rockman Rockman (JP)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YLW1UwTp3ao/mqdefault.jpg)
I don’t know why but I fw this heavily
This man has mad patiences
This comment is part one of the boss strategies.
The beginning of the stage is a softball. There are a couple Yoku block sections that are easily reacted to and a ladder that you can just hold up on. The green platforms can be horrible in other stages due to their randomness, but this one is reliable. We can always jump on it just after the enemy shot passes us, and by tapping right to inch to the right edge, we can always jump to the ladder as soon as it reaches the right side of the screen.
After that is the meat and potatoes: the boss refights. Choosing a good order is important. Generally, we want to take on the harder bosses first, but it's adviseable to toss in some of the easier ones early from time to time to make sure we stay practiced. I tend to fight a boss first any time I fail to it for that reason, and Iceman was the one I failed to on the previous attempt, so he's first here.
Hard Iceman is probably the most challenging fight in this gauntlet, and also one of the best fights in the game IMO. Iceman is a test of decision-making. There are a lot of edge cases in this fight, and we need to be prepared for everything he can do because Oilman can't rely on luck when he kills things so slowly. During Iceman's movement phase, he'll randomly skate left or right until he hits one of the four points on the stage that he attacks from. These spots are far-left, center-left, center-right, and far-right. Once he reaches one of these points, he'll start attacking.
Oddly, the center-left and center-right positions aren't symmetrical. If he's on the center-left and we're to the left of him, we can react to him easily enough. But if he's on the center-right and we're on the right side, I struggle to react to that. This means that I'll typically jump over him when he skates from center-left to far-left or from center-left to center-right, assuming I'm on the wrong side of him.
During his regular attack cycles, Iceman will shoot three staggered shots as he slowly moves either upwards or downwards. We only need to jump over the lowest shot. He'll do two sets of attacks before returning to his skating. On Hard mode, Iceman's shots will move faster as we damage him. This makes it harder to react and makes it hard to build muscle memory to dodge him, but it also means that it's easier to jump between his shots than on Normal. That's good because we need our focus for other things here.
Where this fight gets tricky is the icicle attack. Iceman will occasionally call icicles from the ceiling in place of his regular attacks. To dodge these, we usually want to stay at the edges of the stage. However, if he's at center-left and we're at the far-left, we can jump over him and take advantage of a blind spot just to his right. This will allow us to get to the right side of the stage so that we can react to his attacks more easily.
For a brief period after calling the icicles, Iceman will gain the ability to shoot three grounded shots, which make it a bad idea to camp in the corners. We can stand on an icicle further away from him instead. If he shoots grounded shots, they'll pass harmlessly beneath us. If he shoots ascending or descending shots, we'll need to jump over both the middle and high ones. It takes practice to do this without falling off the icicles. I've gotten pretty good at this, but in this recording I managed to botch it twice and get bailed by quick backups instead. Not a clean fight, but good enough.
The hardest part is when the icicles melt. If we just stand on them, it's easy for us to drop into a shot before we can react, but if we jump to gain more reaction time, we're liable to do it too early and then have to panic to recover. To deal with this consistently, we need to keep track of when Iceman skates. The better scenario is if Iceman skates immediately after dropping the icicles. In this case, the icicles will melt the next time he's skating. If he's on the far-left or far-right, we may need to move a bit towards him so that we pass over his shots before the icicles melt. If he's in the center-left and we're on the right, we need to stand on the icicle closer to him after he shoots and prepare to jump over him since he'll sometimes manage to skate to the center-right just after the icicles finish melting.
The harder pattern is if he shoots just after calling the icicles. In this case, we need to be prepared because the icicles will melt while he's shooting. If he starts with descending shots, we typically want to get into the corner since we'll get enough of a gap to deal with the icicles melting. Otherwise, as the low shots approach, we should do small jumps in place as if we were dodging them. That way, if the icicles melt while a shot is directly underneath our feet, we'll jump over it. However, the small jump doesn't overcommit, so we'll land back on the icicle in time to react if it doesn't melt. Ideally, the icicles will melt between his shots, when we have just enough time to react. With this strat, we can always react to the icicles melting. If he's in the center-left and we're on the center-right, we still need to stay close so that we can jump over. I botched this in this recording too, but got bailed because he skated left.
Offense isn't too bad. It's easiest to attack when there are no icicles, as we can just toss in attacks when we're dodging without much extra effort. When icicles are up, Oilman can still attack since his shots arc downwards. If the icicles are up, we only attack when Iceman is skating or shooting grounded shots so that we can concentrate on dodging.
Hopefully this conveys why Iceman is such a doozy. Fluking a win in this fight isn't hard, as it'll only take so long before we get a good pattern where he never does anything dangerous. The difficulty is in learning the fight well enough that the gauntlet as a whole doesn't become pure pain to execute. We really need to know everything above like the back of our hand. Don't worry, the other fights aren't nearly as complex and difficult, I promise.
Mega Man? is next, and he's a test of reaction time. Most of the fight is repetitive, lulling us into a false sense of security, but we need to prepare to act *immediately* in the few moments that aren't. Generally, when Mega Man? is near us, he'll perform a slide attack in our direction that we can easily jump over. He'll still be close enough to do another slide afterwards, so for most of the fight, he'll just slide back and forth like an idiot while we dodge him. Ignore the way I opened this fight; I realized afterwards that a better strat is to simply walk to the left wall at the start of the fight and wait for him to slide at us to begin the cycle.
Once we have him sliding, the only way he'll break out of it is if he decides to do something else in the short window before he slides again. He can decide to charge his buster, but this won't interrupt his sliding on Hard mode. He can't shoot during a slide, so we know he'll always fire right after the second slide. This makes the buster charge trivial to avoid.
The real killer in this fight is Mega Man's jump. It looks unassuming, but it's by far the most dangerous thing he can do. If we jump over his slide in the most intuitive way, he'll jump straight into our face without giving us a chance to react. Because of this, my preferred approach is to jump *away* from him while he's sliding and then double back at the peak of the jump to land back where we started. If he slides, we don't need to react to it; our jump looks awkward, but it'll always make it over if we do it right. This is important because he'll spend 95% of the battle sliding, so we'll likely mess up once if we need to react to it. But if he does his jump, we'll be at the furthest point from him when he does it, so we'll have time to react on the rare occasion that he does this. We may need to improvise to get him back to the wall after that; generally, making him slide twice in the same direction does the trick if needed.
If he decides to fire regular shots, he won't turn around to use them, so they aren't too threatening. The regular shots will end as soon as he touches a wall. In fact, if he starts to use them while already standing next to a wall, I'm pretty sure the attack ends before we can even see it! That said, it's important that we keep Mega Man? sliding exactly against the wall after he performs his shots. Otherwise, he's more likely to get into bad patterns and throw off the timing of our (already awkward) jumps. If he's ever a short distance away from the wall, we can stand directly against the wall as he slides to get him back into position.
This is the only battle that relies on some level of RNG with the best strat I could come up with. On rare occasions, Mega Man? will do something crazy like jumping and shooting at the same time, and this strat can't account for that. He can also shoot on the same frame (?) that he touches a wall, which actually does cause him to turn and shoot at the same time. This guy just seems to resist being consistent no matter what I do...
This comment is part two of the boss strategies.
Since he's Oilman's weakness, Elecman is a shorter fight, but that doesn't mean we should put him off. Remember that while a shorter fight is less likely to give us a reset, it also impacts our reset efficiency less. Elecman is a test of multi-tasking. It can be easy to forget where we are in his pattern if we pay too much attention to dodging his immediate attacks, but it's also easy to mess up dodging his attacks if we pay them no heed at all.
Elecman's regular pattern is to walk between the three points on the floor that he launches attacks from. He won't approach the walls, so we don't need to worry about him ramming us. When he attacks, he'll alternate between firing a low shot or a high shot. The low shot is quite tricky to jump over due to its width, so it's best not to let Elecman use it when he's close to us. If he's in the middle (the most common position he'll fire it from), jumping as soon as he reaches the center of the stage will do the trick. The high shots can be dodged by doing absolutely nothing. We just need to make sure that we don't expect him to do a low shot and jump into it by mistake.
When attacking him, sometimes he'll do a dodge shot. This can be distinguished from his regular high shot because he floats quite some distance backwards when he does it. We actually want to provoke this as often as possible since it means that we'll need to jump over fewer low shots. He also can't replace it with his lightning bolt attack (described in the next section), which is great since that's the most dangerous part of the fight. That said, don't commit too hard to attempting to provoke a dodge shot since he can't do it all the time. I don't know the exact rules, but he can't do one for a couple attacks after the previous dodge and he also can't do it right after he shoots. We can reliably provoke it at the start of the fight and after he uses his lightning attack.
Speaking of the lightning attack, it's a bit tricky. First, we need to make a snap decision on what side of the screen we want to be on after it ends. If Elecman is on the far-left or far-right, we want to be on the opposite side. If he's in the middle, we want to pay attention to where he was walking. If he was walking right, we want to be on the left side, and vice-versa. This will prevent him from doing a low shot right in our face after the lightning.
When Elecman starts posing for the lightning, get to the closest edge of the screen. When he does his twirl, start walking. We don't want to react too quickly to the twirl, as it's easy to jump the gun and go too early (I did this once in the video and had to pause briefly as a backup). The first lightning bolt takes about a second to come out, so it's difficult to start walking too late. The rest of the strat depends on whether we want to cross the screen or not. If we don't want to cross, we should keep walking until the first lightning bolt, wait around half a second before turning, and then turn around a second time immediately after the second lightning bolt.
If we want to cross, we should just hold right we reach the opposite side of the screen, but we'll need to jump over Elecman. His hitbox is bigger than it looks, so we should jump when we're some distance away. If he's right next to us when he begins his attack, we can jump as soon as we start walking to clear him every time. He downright spammed lighting in this attempt, so you can get a good reference for every type of lightning dodge by watching this footage.
The last thing to keep in mind is that his shots don't maintain a pattern of "low shot in the center, high shot near the edges". If Elecman interrupts his pattern by doing a dodge shot or a lightning attack, we need to keep track of which attack is coming next so that we don't react to it poorly. Once you've practiced the fight enough, it becomes second-nature though.
Bombman is a test of our ability to manage RNG. It's easy to get complacent with the usual easy win here, but we do *not* want to repeat the previous 2-3 bosses every time he decides to give us a lousy pattern. His regular double-bombs will be thrown to our left and right. It's easiest to dodge them by staying between them and jumping to avoid the explosions. The explosion hitboxes don't linger very long, so avoiding the explosions is much easier than it looks. Trust me, it probably looks like I'm performing death-defying stunts constantly in this fight, but this is something you won't even need to think about.
If Bombman has already jumped once and he's near the edge of the stage, he'll replace his next jump with a big bomb. Avoiding this is also surprisingly simple. We just place ourselves at a distance equal to the screen length minus one floor tile and wait. He'll wobble three times before throwing the bomb. As he throws, we start moving towards him. If he throws the bomb far, we've already dodged it. If he throws it close, we have plenty of time to react and pause briefly to slip under it. Sometimes the entire fight is just Bombman chucking these things and we barely have to try.
Bombman's movement phase is where things get complicated. He can choose from five different options here:
-A jump slightly left or slightly right
-A jump to the far-right or far-left of the screen
-A jump that covers about two-thirds of the distance to our position
The far-left and far-right jumps are notable because it's pretty easy for Bombman to jump right into us if he decides to cross the screen in our direction. There are two bad scenarios here. The first is that we need to jump to avoid his double-bombs, which put us right in his path if he decides to jump across the screen. This is avoided using a similar jump to the one we used to deal with Mega Man?. Jump away from him while jumping over the bombs and then double back at the peak of the jump to land back in the original position. It's a slightly different jump since we can't start moving to the side until after we've gotten over the bombs, but it's still not that hard. There are a couple moments in this video where we would have gotten hit if we weren't using this strat.
For the next two paragraphs, let's assume for the ease of the description that we're on the left and Bombman is on the right. The second issue is that if we're standing just to the left of Bombman, and he's too far away from the left wall, Bombman will jump in an arc that's low enough to smack us even if we're not in the air. At first glance, that seems like a non-issue. However, Bombman has a special quirk where he'll jump immediately if we're right next to him when he lands from the previous jump. In MM1, constantly getting in Bombman's face was "the strat" for beating him easily, but in Powered Up we need to be careful not to stand next to him if he's too close to the right wall.
However, there's one moment when we do need to deliberately stand next to him, and that's if Bombman begins to corner us at the left side of the stage. If he fully corners us, we need to prevent him from throwing bombs since they'll be undodgeable. We can do this with the aforementioned strat of getting in his face after he jumps and forcing him to jump again. This is also fully safe since we're close enough to the left wall that if he jumps to the far-left, the jump arc will be high enough not to hit us. That's a cool piece of game design right there; the devs clearly put a lot of thought into these fights. Hopefully that description is clear enough, as it's hard to describe without a diagram. Don't get me wrong, this is difficult to pull off because you have to be very close to Bombman to provoke a jump and his jumps are hard to react to, but it's better than a guaranteed loss. You can see me attempt this strat at the very start of the fight, but I was too far to bully him into jumping (not that it ended up mattering in this case).
We can do even better by attempting to prevent him from cornering us at all. This is where the jump where he crosses two-thirds of the screen matters. After the big bomb comes out, Bombman will get an opportunity to jump. If we stay far away, then Bombman can jump across a large portion of the screen and immediately corner us. Therefore, we stay close to Bombman so that he won't move very far if he does the two-thirds jump. As he begins his jump, we back away from Bombman by about 40% of our remaining space to give up as little ground as possible while still giving ourselves room to avoid getting hit if he decides to jump across the entire screen. In summary, there's a lot more going on here than it looks like in a casual viewing, and all of it matters to give us that extra edge of winning.
This comment is part three of the boss strategies.
Gutsman's regular pattern is more predictable than it seems at first glance. He'll either jump forwards, jump backwards, or jump straight up. If he doesn't have a block and he jumps forwards/backwards, he'll pluck one out of the ground. This block has a hitbox, so if he's about to do this, we need to take care not to get knocked over by the screen shake right next to him. As long as we're far enough away, we can often accept getting knocked over on purpose so that we can get an extra hit in. If he has corned us near the edge of the stage, we may need to jump over the block pluck. If he has a block and he jumps forwards/backwards, he'll do nothing. If he has a block and he jumps straight up, he'll throw it, which we can easily jump over as long as we walk a short distance away from Gutsman first. If he has no block and jumps straight up, he'll use his digging attack.
To avoid the digging attack, we need to be moving and jump *immediately* after he starts to emerge. I can neither react to this nor consistently time this without a visual cue, so I crafted a buffer to get it every time. First, we should move to the nearest edge of the stage, the position we'll dodge the attack from. When he starts digging into the ground, start by listening for the digging noises he makes. It's a repetitive crunching sound, and if I had to write it into text, it would sound like "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch". On the sixth "ch" noise, we want to do two full jumps, which are only done to time our next movements. When we're about to land from the second jump, we can start moving away from the wall. Right as we land from the second jump, we do a third jump that will avoid the digging attack. This needs to be repeated three times, but the blocks he throws during this attack aren't dangerous. It's also possible to use the dust particles from his digging to time the buffer instead of the sound cue if you really can't make it work, but I'd advise against that since the dust particles are slightly random.
Similarly to Bombman, the most dangerous part of the fight is if he corners us, but it's rare on Hard mode and easier to deal with. If he has cornered us, we need to be prepared to run under him. We can stand a short distance away from him and start moving right as he jumps. If he does a jump backwards, we need to quickly reverse course to avoid him landing on us, but this is surprisingly easy to react to. If he jumps forwards or straight up, we need to jump ASAP once we've gotten past him to avoid getting knocked over. I'm glad that I had this trick in my repetoire for the moment in this run when it really counted.
Fireman is Oilman's weakness, but that has no impact. We're already doing one damage to everything, and taking extra damage doesn't matter when we're not allowed to take any to begin with. Fireman is a test of strategy. Out of all the bosses, he is the one where I revamped/tweaked my approach the largest number of times. But in the end, I ended up with something simple and easy to execute, which was surprising since I initially thought that Fireman would be the hardest fight.
When moving, Fireman just walks left and right across the stage. He'll only attack in two circumstances. First, if we get too far away from him, he'll attack us. We never want to trigger an attack this way, so we should stay close to him at all times. We have to stay within a distance of about half the length of the stage to avoid this. Second, he'll attack as a counterattack whenever we shoot. Obviously, we need to attack him, but the fact that he'll only counterattack means that we can manipulate when and where he'll attack from.
The idea is to stay in front of him and only attack him from the edge of the stage. We want to walk to the very edge of the screen and tap the D-pad to turn around so that our shot will hit him. When doing this, it's crucial that we completely slam into the wall before turning since we'll slide sometimes if we aren't at a standstill when we do the D-pad tap. We can identify when we've touched the wall since Oilman will recoil slightly. Next, when the front side of Fireman touches the closest line in the floor, we need to press the D-pad, jump, and shoot at the same time. If done correctly, we'll shoot Fireman and jump over him at the same time, dodging any of his regular attacks even if he does a jump-shot.
The reason for all that setup isn't just to get a clean visual cue. The main idea is to make it easy to dodge his fire wave. The fire wave will travel slowly across the screen until it hits a wall and then bounces back. When shooting Fireman in this way, he'll immediately shoot the fire wave at a wall, so we'll only need to jump over it once. Additionally, Fireman won't catch up to the wave too quickly, so we'll have an opening to jump between him and the wave to get past both of them without doing anything too tricky. When jumping over the fire wave, I prefer to keep my eyes on the space between the wave and Fireman to indentify when the opening appears rather than focusing on the space between the wave and Oilman and jumping at the last second, but either way works.
To execute everything more easily, it's good to use a lot of visual cues in this battle. When leading Fireman to the edge of the screen, we can use the light patch on the central tile as a starting position and start moving when Fireman touches the wall. As mentioned earlier, using the line in the floor helps to time the jump-shot. When dodging the fire wave, we can use the icon in the central floor tile to identify where to wait for the attack. If you're planning to do this yourself, pay close attention to the video for details.
As with most of the fights, it's not the bulk of the fight that's most tricky, but a rare scenario that only shows up once or twice. In this case, it's the very beginning of the fight. We start far enough away from Fireman to trigger an immediate attack. If this is a regular attack, we need only jump just before the first shot hits us and continue moving forwards so that we clear his next shot even if it's a jump-shot. It's tough, but not too bad.
The worse scenario is if he opens with his fire wave. Because we didn't trigger it from the normal position, we'll need to jump over the wave twice. But worse than that, if we leave Fireman to his own devices, he'll be walking just behind the wave right when we need to make the second fire wave jump, and it will be impossible to get over both of them! To avoid this, we need to get to the other side of Fireman ASAP and then shoot him from behind to trigger the counterattack. This will position him such that we can jump over him and then jump over the wave a bit later. Shooting him quickly enough (but not so soon that he doesn't counter) and dodging the counterattack is pretty tricky, so we need to practice this to death if we're going to do this fight this late.
Depending on exactly when we shot Fireman and how many shots he takes when countering, we'll need to dodge the wave in a different way. If the wave is still far away, it's best to jump over Fireman when he turns and then follow Fireman from behind when jumping over the wave. If the wave is getting close, it's best to jump over it immediately, staying close enought to Fireman to avoid provoking another attack. As with Gutsman, knowing the strat for this uncommon scenario came in clutch during this run. I was very close to shooting Fireman too late in this attempt, so I hardly had any space to get over the wave, but it barely worked out.
Oh hell yeah. I loooooove mega man challenge run stuff (I've done a few myself although nothing anywhere near this demanding) and getting nitty gritty commentary is awesome. I remember loving this one but haven't revisited it in ages, I really need too!!
Out of all the games in the series that I've played, I think this one is my favourite. Even beyond the visual design and the sheer amount of content, I think they've done a great job of making it tough, but fair, and I gained more and more respect for the game design as I learned more about it. It's a shame they didn't go further with the idea of remaking classic Mega Man titles in this format.
@@Lockirby2Oh man I need to replay this one... I have at least one other friend (who's a huge action game fan) that played through as every robot master on every difficulty, it's gotta be special to inspire this much play from y'all.
12:08 what we really came here to see
This comment is part four of the boss strategies. Boy do I need to take FarAwayTimesGaming's advice and find a better place to put these walls of text. :P
The last three bosses are a significant step down from the first six. Cutman is a test of... well, a little bit of everything. He's a "jack of all trades, master of none" type.
During Cutman's movement phase, he'll walk towards us if he's far enough away and jump to our position if he's close enough. If Cutman's running at us, we can just move towards him and he'll jump way over our heads. After a certain amount of time, he'll attack. This sounds simple enough, but the movement phase is the trickiest part to get right. We want to manipulate his movements so that he doesn't corner us while also making sure he attacks at a predictable time. Otherwise, this fight can get chaotic fast.
The idea here is to ensure that Cutman jumps exactly twice before attacking. The time before his attack can be divided into jumping time and walking time. The two jumps take a consistent amount of time, so we only need to manipulate his walking time. I find it helpful to think about it in terms of distance rather than time though. Cutman's movement speed is fixed, so he'll always walk a certain distance in a certain amount of time. Therefore, between the walk he does before his first jump and the walk he does before his second jump, we need to let him walk a certain total distance. If we get it right, Cutman will attack soon after landing from his second jump. The video should demonstrate this pretty well.
This probably sounds far more difficult than it actually is. The timing is pretty forgiving, so the strat doesn't take much effort to get a knack for. Once we've manipulated Cutman like this, we need to dodge the attack itself. Cutman can choose to do a single or double cutter throw, and we can't tell which at the outset. Either way, we want to start by moving towards Cutman while jumping over the cutter. Cutman will then jump over us and then catch the cutter before it boomerangs towards us. After the first (or only) cutter throw, we need to put some distance between ourselves and Cutman. If Cutman throws another cutter, we can react and jump over that in the same way. If Cutman doesn't throw another cutter, we can react and start manipulating his next movement cycle.
Sometimes Cutman will replace his attack with a big cutter. The big cutter has more bark than bite. Just stay away from the wall, use the animation where he winds back for the throw to time the jump, and double back as soon as you've passed the big cutter. Then do it again. Easy!
This fight requires more thought than usual when it comes to offense. With Oilman, I don't like shooting him as he's jumping over us since the oil slick creates a puddle if it misses, and this can cause several problems. There are three good openings IMO. The first is after the big cutter: leave an oil puddle on the floor in front of him and let him walk into it to avoid shooting him before his I-frames wear off. After the second jump during his movement phase, we can turn back and shoot him just before he attacks. And if he decides to throw two regular cutters at us, we can shoot him after the second. Shooting him at any other time caused various problems for me.
After Cutman, rejoice! You've all but won at this point. Timeman is just a test of memorization. He has a fixed pattern and doesn't require any reactions at all. I gave each of the shots in his pattern names, and I'd repeat the name of the upcoming shot to myself to remind myself where we need to move to next. These shots are "Starting Shot", "Normal Shot", "Slow Shot", "Dangerous Shot", "Running Shot", and "Tight Shot". I'd go into more detail about how to dodge each, but there really isn't any nuance here. Just copy what I did in the video.
After Timeman has gone through this cycle, he'll actually repeat it! This is great since it means that there's less to memorize, fewer things things that can go wrong, and no worries if we miss a few attack opportunities and take a bit longer to kill him. The only caveat is that his pattern will be mirrored each time he goes through his cycle, so don't get thrown off by that.
The only true concern in this fight is the dodge roll Timeman can use on Hard mode. The dodge itself isn't that dangerous, but it will throw off his pattern, so it's critical to avoid it happening even once. He'll only ever dodge roll after he uses Time Slow, so to avoid it, we just avoid attacking him until time speeds up again. There are some safe moments to hit him even during Time Slow, but this fight is easy, so why take any risks? Even outside of Time Slow, it's critical that we avoid missing Timeman with our attacks since he's also capable of dodge rolling if he approaches the oil puddle after time gets slowed again. To this end, we avoid taking any shots unless we're 100% sure they'll connect. If we do miss, it's important to step on the oil puddle ASAP to eliminate it from the field. That may be tough and it may force us to improvise to dodge the next attack or two, but it's better than improvising the rest of the fight.
With all eight robot masters defeated, it's time to face the final boss of this gauntlet: the red square enemy a couple rooms down. Since our movement up and down the ladder is slow, we only have a small window to climb up, shoot one shot, and then climb back down again. It's best to start and stop about half a block away from the red square, as we don't want to start or stop moving a bit too early. We can start moving right as the eye opens to maximize our window. The red square can crash into the oil puddle, so we don't need to try and get close enough to shoot the red square directly. If we find ourselves getting off-rhythm with our movements, it's best to wait a cycle instead of rushing it.
The other rooms are mostly self-explanatory. The turrets will never hit us if we climb fast. The second red square isn't nearly as dangerous as the first. If we miss the jump from the ladder in the next room, we may fall back to the previous room and land on the second red square. To avoid this, we can use the screen transition to react and regrab the ladder before we fall too far. In Hard mode, the pickaxe Mets in the final room will jump to prevent us from jumping over them. This is also their big weakness, as the jump will reset the timer that controls when they attack. In other words, as long as we keep jumping, they'll never attack us. With Oilman's downwards arcing shots, we can bypass the shields easily and make it to Copy Oilman.
The one saving grace that Oilman has is that his own boss fight is the easiest of the lot. This means that he gets the privilege of fighting the easiest boss last. In other words, Copy Oilman is a test of nerves. There's nothing difficult about this fight unless we start to panic or act strangely because we're worried about making a mistake, but that's easier said than done.
Copy Oilman will start in his movement phase. During his movement phase, Copy Oilman will either jump to our position and then jump to the wall or walk towards us and then jump to the wall when he reaches us. Either can be avoided simply by walking towards him until he jumps. We'll then have plenty of time to react and get a shot in before he attacks. We then want to use the floor tiles to stand about two-thirds of the way across the room before he attacks. The goal of this is usually to prevent the enemy's oil from being placed in positions where it'll interfere with our movements, but Player Oilman can't slip on the oil anyways, so the only reason why I'm doing this here is because it's the strat that I practiced.
When Copy Oilman attacks, he'll do a triple shot of oil. It's best to dodge this by standing in place and jumping straight up. This is easy. Copy Oilman may also use his own skateboard to glide across the stage, but he telegraphs this heavily, so we don't need to react. Dodging this is also easy. The only thing to watch out for is that he has two animations before he hops on the skateboard, so it's important not to panic and jump early if he does the longer one.
And that's it! Hopefully this makes it a bit easier for somebody else to jump into damageless runs of this game. There aren't a ton of resources for it, so I figured I needed to make this.
Did you post this on mega man's 37th birthday on purpose xD
Actually, no. What a coincidence! XD Now I'm glad I was a bit slow to finish making the video.