#after finishing up with all the Pockies and Rockies

[rakumel]

Raku Plays Her Faves: Pocky and Rocky

Part 5: Battle With Black Mantle, and The End!

Last time, Pocky and Rocky stormed the Gorgonzola goblin fortress, defeated a mad vampire scientist, and freed their Nopino goblin friends. They've accomplished a lot, but haven't found the big bad Black Mantle himself.

...yet.

But to really set the stage, you MUST hear the background music for the final level, which I've posted here.

I loved it instantly back then, and it's still one of my favorite background music tracks today. And while he may be an asshole that made all our friends go crazy, Black Mantle knows how to decorate a fortress. Just look at this:

Green curtains, dragon heads, and whatever's going on with that floor. There won't be much of a chance to admire the decor, however. The toughest soldiers in Black Mantle's army will be out in full force, including skull-faced horned mages, knights that wield lances, spiders that shoot laser beams when they catch sight of you, and whatever this fire-breathing monster is.

As badass as it looks, unfortunately it's kind of a pushover. It only fires when it's straight ahead of you - all you have to do is step to one side. It'll stop and hop sideways to get in front of you again. Step aside again, and it repeats its actions. You can keep going side to side and it'll never get a shot off, while you get hits in the entire time.

Right outside Black Mantle's room is this possessed set of armor. You might be tempted to use a bomb to finish it off quickly, but if you have any left by this point, save them - you'll need them for the final battle. Besides, this guy's pattern is so predictable and exploitable, you really don't need bombs.

First, it floats back and forth across the room. If you stand directly in front of it, it'll shoot something at you, so if you need to cross in front of it - and you will, repeatedly - slide instead. Shots won't go through its shield, naturally, so you'll want to hit the sword side. To keep that side exposed as much as possible, get directly to the middle right of the screen - stand directly in line with the boss. This will make it float much faster toward you. Then quickly get to the bottom left corner, which makes the boss float slowly again, and fire for as long as you can. Repeat as necessary.

After some time, it will shoot fire with its shield - it always starts with the shield - and you'll want to just walk away from it, not slide. When that stops, it'll attack diagonally with its sword. This one, you DO want to slide to avoid. Then it floats around again for a bit, then repeats its attacks. Very easy, just kind of tests your patience.

And speaking of testing your patience, there he is! Finally, it's time to throw down with Black Mantle himself. If you've got two bombs saved, use them to destroy those statues on either side of him. Not only will the statues constantly fire at you, but they're generating a force field that's keeping Black Mantle from harm, and he'll be firing at you too. Don't put up with that. Make him come out and fight!

Once he does come out, it won't be easy, but like most bosses in this game, at least he does attack in a set pattern. First, he fires random shots that bounce off the walls and are sometimes hard to avoid. Then he tries to trap you with what looks like two pieces of his mantle. He telegraphs that pretty hard, which is good, because you want to avoid it. If you get trapped, you can't move, and will likely get severely damaged by his follow-up attack, a massive lightning blast that tracks you across the room.

Just don't get hit by the end of the lightning blast - you can actually slide under the rest of it without getting hurt. Also, don't do what I frequently do, and get hung up on the corners of the room. After he's done with the lightning, Black Mantle cycles through his attacks again, always in the same order.

Even though he's predictable, Black Mantle can still be tough because he has a lot of health, and by this point you may be pretty worn down from everything else. You may not have much health left yourself, or maybe you got hit enough times that now you're down to just your basic long-range attack. There's also not a whole lot of room for mistakes, in fact just not a whole lot of room in that tiny space period.

But hang in there, get your shots in when you can, and after what seems like forever, you'll defeat him.

And once Black Mantle's defeated, his curse is lifted for good. Just in time too, it looks like. Poor lil' Doughnut Goblin.

Even the Gorgonzola goblins start coming around. Yep, they were under Black Mantle's spell, too.

And they just sheepishly pack up and go home.

"They were good little goblins after all," says Rocky, which tickles the hell out of me for some reason. The skull mages, the haunted armors, the fire-breathing hide-plated monster things -

* Just Good Little Goblins.*

Hey, honestly? I can buy that.

Our heroes go home too, after a job well done - Pocky back to her shrine, Rocky and his friends back to the forest.

A nice transition from sunset to night before the credits roll.

Oh? What's this? Apparently Rocky wasn't too tired to bring over a midnight snack. And apparently Pocky wasn't asleep either. Geez, you guys, I wish I had a tenth of your energy.

At least it looks like it's a nice clear night out. Good for stargazing, or possibly...wait, it's panning up....

...moon viewing, complete with pixel art and logo.

And that's it, y'all. Simple story, but lovely graphics and music, solid gameplay, and still not a bad way to spend a couple hours. Hope you enjoyed revisiting this game along with me. Even though you know how it ends now, I hope you give the game a try yourself someday, just for the experience - which to be honest I can't really convey with pictures and text, or even a whole video. (I tried XD)

By the way, this is the game that Pocky and Rocky: Reshrined is a remake of. I still haven't finished that one yet, but I've gotten far enough in to see that not only have they improved the graphics and changed up the enemy attack patterns, but they've also added a twist to the story. I'm very interested to see where they go with it.

While that wraps it up for this game, sometime soon I'd like to take a similar look at the sequel, Pocky and Rocky 2. So keep an eye out for that...plus, well, one way or another I'd like to finish the remake and share some thoughts on that.

[rakumel]

Raku Plays Her Faves: Pocky and Rocky 2

Part 1: The Changes

Happy New Year, tumblrites! At least, I hope it will be.

Anyway, today I'll be discussing the sequel to Pocky and Rocky on the SNES. If you don't know anything about what happened in the previous game, no worries: you don't need to have played it to understand what's going on here. It's more of a new episode or a self-contained story rather than a continuation.

While the basic gameplay is mostly the same, the developers made some noticeable changes, with mostly okay results. I wouldn't say it was a huge improvement, but they didn't ruin anything either. Gameplay's fine, is what I'm saying.

Before getting into the story of the game (there's not much, really), I wanted to go over some of those changes that they made.

Since the gameplay is a little different from the previous game, the first stage is just for practice, to help you get used to the controls. You can skip it completely if you want to, though.

Pocky still uses cards as projectiles and her wand at close range. But screen-clearing bombs are no longer a thing, and they took away the ability to slide. (They also took out the ability to charge close range attacks, but I personally never used that, so I didn't miss it.)

What they added were partners. At the beginning of most of the levels, you can choose one of three friends to accompany Pocky. You can find up to four more throughout the game. Each has their own abilities, both on their own and in a couple new mechanics.

One of the ways Pocky uses her partners is through the Magic command. What this amounts to is Pocky merging with her partner temporarily in order to use special abilities, some more useful than others.

By default it's mapped to the A button; press it to merge, press it again to revert back to normal. If you don't revert back after a few seconds, the game does it automatically, but penalizes you by taking the partner away for a short while. (You also come apart and lose your partner for a bit if you get hit by an enemy while merged.)

It's almost exclusively used to get items that ordinarily Pocky couldn't get to by herself; it's never needed to, say, remove an obstacle that keeps you from progressing though the game. So theoretically, you could finish the game without ever using Magic. If you made that choice, I wouldn't blame you. Aside from the whole "taking possession of your friend's body" deal, the animation for it looks kind of painful. The partner is flung up off the screen, then lands right on Pocky's head. Not sure if the rainbow effect is the result of magic or a concussion...

What am I saying, of course it's magic. This is a cartoony, cutesy game. None of that stupid realism here.

Which is a good thing, because Pocky can also just straight up hurl her friends at bosses. If the throw connects, the friend turns into an animated graphic (usually a column of magic) and delivers a short burst of rapid-fire hits to the boss for lots of damage. If you miss, her friend just bonks against the wall, sees stars for a second, and disappears for a little while.

Being Pocky's friend sounds like a rough business. I can see why they didn't appear in any other games. (Which is too bad since they're all pretty cool, but I'll get to that in the next part.)

They also added these shops in most levels, where you can stop to buy powerups and keys to open locked treasure chests. The prices get increasingly higher as the game goes on, though. In a few of the shops you can also buy hints on how to defeat an upcoming boss, but they're usually not worth the price.

They also put in a couple of auto-scrolling levels. The first one, Demon's Corridor, Pocky rides on the back of a guardian lion (or "Mad Dog" according to the game) through a long covered bridge. It's not too terrible - a little difficult because it moves fast, but entirely fair.

But the second, Dragon in the Sky, tends to be a lot harder for kind of a dumb reason. Don't get me wrong, flying through the clouds on top of a dragon named Gordon is awesome as hell. But Pocky can move around a little bit on the dragon's head, and this can actually be a problem when you're just trying to move the dragon sideways to dodge a ghost or enemy fire. It would have been better (imho) to have Pocky just stay in one spot and turn as needed.

That's about it for the major changes. (Well, aside from the password system, but you can get through the game in like, a couple of hours, so it's not really necessary.) But I don't really like the game because of those, or even for the story. What makes the game for me are the little characters that Pocky meets along the way.

I'll introduce you too, in the next post.