Last time I covered the first two levels, Numnum Falls and Kirb's Palace, including all the weird enemies and glitchy bits in those. Now, it's on to the next level... Gomamon Forest.
Wait, Gomamon Forest?? That's an odd combination of critter and environment... an aquatic Digimon and a very much not-aquatic area. Hmm.
...ah, that's why -- there are no actual Gomamons here at all, just Darno, a character I made up in 3rd/4th grade who wears a weird full-body cloak thing made of what looks like Gomamon fur (which actually had its "white with purple markings" pattern long before I ever knew about Digimon, interestingly enough... Darno's outfit was pretty much the same even in the original drawings of them from 1995 or so, which was before Digimon even existed in Japan.)
If I'm remembering right, in my old crappy OHRRPGCE game from the early 2000s (
The Kirby Lands) Darno became annoyed by people comparing his appearance to a Gomamon, so I guess sticking him in a "Gomamon Forest" is a bit of a joke.
A bit of glitchiness, caused by a giant robot dog appearing where a solid block was. Whoops!
Almost to Darno's room, and I'm preparing by switching to Kirby Dance, which can kill him in one hit for some reason (when fully charged, anyway.)
And there it goes -- a giant Kirby-face-shaped energy blast headed straight for him, as blobs of Gomamon Goo rain from the sky (see my "looking back at
Goma-Mario" post for a full explanation of Gomamon Goo.) Apparently Darno's "looks kinda like a Gomamon" thing became his defining feature here, unlike in
The Kirby Lands (and more recent game ideas) where he mostly fights using Kihlah.
Darno's sprites were apparently never finished, as when he's summoning a shield of Gomamon Goo in this fight he spontaneously turns back into Wood Man. Also, he'd probably look a lot more Darno-like if I had switched the brown and the peach/flesh-tone type color around.
Yep... Leaf Shield is replaced with Gomamon Goo.
And now on to Stupid Tower, where the next boss is... a robotic version of my evil clone/twin Edwin. His sprites are not as heavily edited as some of the previous bosses (Chef Eato in particular), and he'll sometimes glitch up and cause fragments of Crash Man to appear, but his intro pose works fine.
This place is changed around a good bit -- colors are very different, music is different (it uses the first Dr. Wily castle theme), and the map arrangement is different too. Also, there's floating Chiba Balls here just like in Kirb Man's level.
This room is a bit odd, as that moving platform doesn't stay on the line and instead floats off to the left and then up and around.
Using the Bugar Lift item to cheat my way through this one, rather than waiting for the other platform. XD
And here's... a really odd-looking enemy that seems to be made up of a tower of awkward blocks, one of them with an eye in the middle. I remember that in earlier versions of this hack, this enemy would fall apart if you shot it, but at some point that just stopped happening and I have no idea why. The same was true of the "spider and fireball" enemies in Numnum Falls; for some reason their weird reaction to Robert's booger shots just randomly stopped happening at some point.
And here the sky randomly gets less-dark.
...before getting dark (and starry) again later on, when you reach Edwin's room.
Edwin doesn't actually fall down that pit in the middle, instead walking right over it as if it's not there. It's only a hazard for Robert.
Throwing a Stupidi Bomb, though unfortunately it's hard to see since I screenshot-ed it so early in the throwing process. They've got "^_^" faces with buckteeth, though, as you might be able to see a little bit of here.
And of course, with only a third of a lifebar I didn't quite manage to beat him that time, so I had to try again. Here's also a really clear view of the "BOOGER POWER!" message you get when starting a level.
Edwin is extremely weak against Chef Eato's Triple Fork technique, as you can see from this screenshot of his explodey-circles and one of the leftover forks. XD
Yay, now I can throw exploding balls of stupid, too! XD
I'm not sure why the letters on these screens (like "-C-" shown right here) never got replaced with the same symbols used in the weapon-select screen, or at least with appropriate letters. Some of them still end up working (I noticed that
Flash Man's "F" and Grakker's Banan-
Freeze sort of matched up), but mostly it's just like "uh, why's that random letter there?"
Speaking of Grakker, here he is! Well... sort of. His name is there, but the picture is clearly just plain ol' Flash Man. I know I
did edit Grakker's sprites into the game at some point, but apparently that was in a later version than the one I still have.
Banana Land is
really weird. Everything constantly flashes between pitch-black, black with blue outlines, and bright yellow. You can
kinda tell where the actual gaps are, but it's a little tricky at times. Thankfully there are few (if any) bottomless pits in this level.
Using a Stupidi Bomb to blow up that weird pink bubble wall thing. Sadly, Robert's Stupidi Bombs are just Crash Bombs with an S on them, rather than the bucktoothed ^_^ face that Edwin's version had.
And Grakker's room is very weirdly designed, with a ^ formed from single blocks and a tiny platform in between (which you'll usually slip off of into the pit if you end up standing on it.) Speaking of pits, Grakker
can fall into the pit here... but it just sends him back to the top of the screen, weirdly enough.
Yep... down the pit, then back to the top of the glowing banana block pyramid.
Speaking of bananas, dancing ones appear over the screen whenever he activates his Banan-Freeze. They're actually a Nummorrian fruit known as Grappuyo (which were introduced to the Guraoo homeworld by K'hyurbhi explorers a long time ago), but they
look like bananas.
Speaking of looking like bananas, Grakker himself would look a bit like a giant green banana if I had actually changed his sprites. He's actually a Guraoo like Darno, though, the difference being he wears a green guraleaf cloak rather than a furry one.
A few fully-charged Kirby Dance hits later, Grakker is dead...
...and I can
get equipped with Banan-Freeze. Yep, now Robert can also summon the dancing bananas to freeze everything around him.
Also appearing at this point: the third and final of the little support items, the Bugar Climber.
And now it's time for Cruncho, the cyborg Barney-like thing who I completely forgot I had actually edited the sprites for. He's pretty much completely unrecognizable as a Metal Man edit, too.
His level is the Kickme Fake Animal Parts factory. Apparently making fake kitty ears (including the radioactive ones) involves a whole lot of gigantic gears and conveyor belts?
BOOGER POWER.
Some very odd sprites here. The big spiked squishers appear to be... a long stick with spearheads or something tied to it chandelier-style. Weird.
Also, their chains stick up through the bottom of the screen when they're positioned too high up. Whoops! XD
The drill things that used to come poking up through the floor here are replaced with tiny orange Kirbys, which attack with their tiny little spears. I think these would've been a bit more appropriate in Kirb Man's level, but... oh well.
Formerly little jester-looking guys, these are now Puckerthoos -- basically pink/purple Pikachus with lipstick, which appeared in all of the various versions of my Pokémon ROM hack
Dopémon. (Maybe I'll do one of these posts on that one someday...)
Rolling Num seems to be the only thing that works on those bucktoothed things, so there's Robert blasting one with a glowing red-orange Numnum.
And here's Cruncho!
He does a weird disco pose before the fight, of course.
It only takes a couple hits with fully-charged Kirby Dance to kill him if I remember right... unfortunately, it's very hard to actually hit him with it because he jumps up and down non-stop. Also, the sawblade type weapons he originally used are now drills... unfortunately awkward-parallelogram-looking drills, but still. And looking at this screenshot, I notice there is
one fragment of Metal Man's original sprite still unedited... oops!
Triple Fork doesn't work on him at all -- the forks shatter on impact.
Gomamon Goo also doesn't do squat to him. So... pretty much the only way to beat him reliably is to use the regular ol' rapid-fire booger shots.
...which actually finish him off fairly quickly.
And now I get equipped with Crunch Drill. I know it says the much more generic-sounding "Drill-Shot" on there, but I'm pretty sure that's only because I didn't want the words to run together (like CRUNCHDRILL) on the screen -- the attack's name is and always has been Crunch Drill, not Drill-Shot.
Next time -- the last of the "regular" bosses, and then on to the Dr. Willy... err, I mean Dr. Dragonite... stages at the end of the game!
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