...Erhem. So, a boss. Neat! Lackluster explosion aside, the production values were pretty good in this one – kinda surprising, since the centerpiece of it were some sprites taken from a top-down zelda game.
The intro is... weird. The room looks cool, but I don't really know what the point of it is. Could have been an opportunity to hand out some rings that couldn't be held as reserve during the fight itself, but you didn't really use it for that, and nothing about the intro directs the player's towards where the boss appears – the exact opposite, it directs your attention to the outer areas of the arena since it expands from a compact space. So as an intro, it's not really doing much of anything for the experience...
And then it replays unskippably every time you die. Please don't do that.
But, on to the actual meat of the fight – the boss was organized into three rounds(how traditional!) of 2 phases, each representation of which was mostly identical save for some changes in HP, and maybe attack duration though the randomized elements make that hard to determine. The extended length doesn't seem to do much though, since the plentiful rings on the phase 1 arena mean that long-term attrition can't happen. If the player is going to be bled dry by a thousand cuts, it'll have to happen fully within one of the instances of phase 2... but I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Phase 1 takes place on the castle rooftop arena, which is essentially just flat, with two dimples (hi gargoyles!) and a few slants out the outer edges, since the invisible walls cut you off before you can reach the edge of the roof. As mentioned before, there are multiple sources of rings up here that can be held in reserve, so there's not much the boss can do to kill at this point... but, let's take a look at how he tries:
Idle – Walks directly towards you. Slowly. Gives no indication of timing or type of forthcoming attacks. If you don't care about your guard bonus, just wail away at him – you can always grab rings from the arena if you need to, in the event that an attack starts up unexpectedly.
Attack 1 – He fires large-ish, speedy projectiles from his amulet.
Solution (survival) – Run away. While traditionally you'd have to stay perpendicular to the firing angle as you move, these projectiles have a limited range and will dissapear, so just getting far away will keep you safe.
Solution (counterattack) – Circle strafe at medium range and knock him silly when he stops firing – the delay between shots is too short to hit him in between them.
Failure modes (penalty is normal damage):
- Attacking during the attack, or just being unlucky with when he decides to start the attack – notably, he can launch it immediately after the last one finishes.
Attack 2 – pumpkin ghost fires concentric circles of short-range fire for a brief moment before jumping at you, and firing some more while shaking the screen.
Solution (survival) – Don't stand still. Just moving a little bit after he jumps will be sufficient to not get hurt.
Solution (counterattack) – Wait for the landing, then jump over the flames, or spindash underneath them. Latter is more consistent, and if possible should be used for all attacks during phase 1 in case this boss attack is used suddenly.
Failure modes:
- Jump attacking as knuckles
- Making contact in the middle, rather than the peak of a jump
Not getting hurt in this phase, in otherwords, can just boil down to running away and not interacting with the boss. The arena is large enough, and the attacks themselves have no momentum or pressure to stop a stalemate like that. Method of attacking the boss is ordinary, and nothing to really talk about.
After a few hits though, the body of the ghost dissapears, and you get sucked in (but not the gargoyles, awww.), starting phase 2 for that round. Phase 2 takes place inside the head, in a circle divided up into four slices that crush shut and then slowly open back up on a timer, and a central point where the ghost resides, either protected by a pillar while you have to deal with the crushers, or opened up with the ghost shooting lines of directly aimed ATZ-ish fire.
Survival solution for the crushers is just to move when you notice them closing where you are. The counterattack solution though, which easily makes up the coolest interaction in the fight, is to try to hop inside of the crusher right AFTER it finishes so you can attack quicker when the central pillar opens up, as the ghost is elevated a bit from the bottom of the arena and so can be difficult to strike before he begins shooting.
The shooting itself can be avoided with “grazing” circle strafe, where you wait for the projectiles(which are slow, in this instance) of each stream to finish firing before moving out of their way, to conserve space. Done correctly, and you can stay very close to the ghost for either when he stops firing, or when you decide to take a shot at hitting him in between streams.
Depending on whether or not the ghost gets extended flashing time or shuts the pillar (I'm not sure what triggers either of these things to happen or not happen when you hit the ghost) though, you can deal most of the needed damage the instant you land inside the arena by just rushing in and attacking before he does anything. Phase 2 ends in 4 hits, so you might not be there long if you get lucky.
Unfortunately, during any firing phase, you can just speed things up by getting hit intentionally and counterattacking during your flashing frames. The worst thing that could happen is that the side where your rings fall gets crushed so maybe you lose some of them.
After those 4 hits, you're spat back out for the next round.
So, what's good and bad here? The intro falls flat, and the 3-round system doesn't accomplish anything except adding a bit of tedium since the fight, and in particular the attack solutions, broader strategy and failure modes do not change between each round. Once you've learned the two phase, that's all there is to see of it.
The arena design for phase 1 doesn't compliment the attacks, which are basic and rely on being close to the player to be effective, and don't affect the fight outside of their duration. Phase 1 winds up being pretty much forgettable, with the screen-shaking in particular coming across as “look at how powerful this is supposed to be” when there really isn't anything to see, except perhaps the gap underneath the circles of fire.
Phase 2's arena, on the other hand, is the centerpiece of the fight. From a thematic angle, the silly fun of fighting -inside- of the boss is novel to SRB2, its only previous showing that I can recall being the final boss of The Emerald Isles, though I rather suspect your inspiration was Mario and Luigi, rather than than Kuja's stone golem replica. The disorienting nature of every surface pulsating and squeezing shut and open is exciting, but not so confusing as to be unfair.
From a gameplay perspective, the coolest bit here is how the ghost is slightly elevated and has to be hit at the peak of your jump as sonic, but is most -optimally- hit by standing on a just-crushed slice of the stage as the central pillar opens so that you can short-hop into him. Guessing when this will happen, and monkeying around on the moving floors to get into the right place at the right time despite how you can't jump directly to a just-opening segment from a fully depressed floor was engaging and fun, but not a required action for the boss, so many players may never have tried that out.
The single “explicit” attack of this phase is effective, if slightly annoying – you're often in an enclosed space, so you have to stay aware of what the floors around you are doing to know which direction to dodge in before, or unless you figure out the grazing circle strafe maneuver. The elevated position of the boss lets you move straight backwards if things get to hot, at the expense of possibly losing a shot at attacking the boss. Since there are no rings in this phase, you can feasibly die to regular damage, or to the crushers, especially if you get tunnel vision with the ghost, or hit while your segment is closing up.
Unfortunately though, the attack isn't really
diverse. Every attack in this fight except for the crushers, and the final phase version of the green fire(which lasts long enough that you could run out of room if you decided you weren't going to move side to side ever) can be survived in the short term by moving away from the boss, and
every attack can be survived without giving up counterattack positioning with circle-strafe, with only minor variations and the bright spot of jockying for height among the crushers while waiting for phase 2 to become vulnerable. It's the same puzzle given a different coat of paint, again and again.
A bad intro, good presentation,
some but ultimately insufficient attack diversity, a bad arena and a good arena. It's not an awful boss, just not an especially good one. My advice is twofold:
Look at the coolest part of a boss idea, the most fun thing that you've put together about it (like say, the shifting arena in phase 2 and how you can try to use that to your advantage in a natural, platforming-centric way), and
double down on that. When you've got something fun and other stuff just isn't measuring up that much, make that part the focus!
Secondly, picture each boss's attack as a puzzle, with different solutions depending on if you're just learning it and don't want to get hit, if you want to counterattack, and depending on context. You're cramming in multiple puzzles in the same place, so you want them to have different solutions, and possibly different penalties for failing them – furthermore, you want there to be some variation on the solutions and ways to fail the
same attacks depending on the context, such as if the player is close or far, or if some part of the arena is in the way, etc. This will make the fight feel more dynamic and less repetitive, and challenge the player to recognize and execute the correct reactions to a given situation.