Shadow of Hope is way too hard...

[alhexx]

Up to this boss, the game was pretty much a walk in the park for me, but after dying about ten times while trying to beat these snakes, I have to say that this fight is just unfair. The fight against the first snake is pretty easy, but once the twins appear, it is pretty much a flawless-or-gameover battle -- if you get hit one time during the "red-bubbles attack" you get pretty much no chance to your regenerate health -- and since health is equal to ammo in this game, it is almost certainly an instant game over at this point. I managed to beat one of the twins once, but I got absolutely shredded by the other one's amok attacks afterwards...

Call me whiny if you want, but the difficulty of this battle is completely off-the-charts when compared to anything before that fight, which is a serious balancing issue...

[MimicMachine]

Something doesn't seem right here.
I feel like I had plenty of chances to heal in the second half of the fight. I actually felt like the first phase had been harder and some earlier bosses gave me a bit more trouble.
Well maybe any of this might help.
Red bubbles can be safely attacked and fill an unbroken bar a little bit.
You can always switch out of siren mode to heal or quick drop.
Sometimes you have to gamble on heals even if you might give up damage or think you won't make it.
Last one is that the timed press recharge is a full heal and breaks the game. I'm not good at it but if I learn what attacks will break my shield I am more likely to get it.

I hope I was any help

[MadmanOfArkham]

The ammo equals health mechanic is pretty stupid in my book.
OP is right in this fight requires perfection, especially after you kill one of the twins, then one hit and boom, you are screwed as you have no way to regen your ammo/health.

Dont know who thought that was a ingenious or smart mechanic, but its a bs mechanic to have.

[LL Cheese Z]

I think the boss itself is fine. The issue is just in the game mechanics.

Originally posted by MadmanOfArkham:

The ammo equals health mechanic is pretty stupid in my book.

I don't like the ammo = health mechanic either, but I feel it's fine. ...EXCEPT FOR THIS BOSS. It basically makes you have to waste a golden opportunity to attack some times when you have to heal instead of attack while the snake is sitting there, waiting to be pounded.

But yes, I did not like this boss and felt the healing/ammo mechanic needed to be changed. At least let us reload/heal while in mermaid form. Also, having a consistent gauge to reload to full heal would be nice, instead of it being randomized. Would potentially speed things up in this fight, but definitely in general.

[danielanavi]

The third part is the hardest , because the snake is too fast and it s difficult to predict the next attack and when you get damaged it s over , you don t have the time to recharge unless you get the timing to instant charge ammo.
i think also that this boss need a little nerf

[alhexx]

After some 10+ more attempts I have finally managed to beat this boss. It seems that pretty much the only way to survive the "red bubbles attack" in the second and especially the third phase of this boss fight is to continuously keep dashing in siren form in a diamond (45° rotated square) pattern and NOT waiting for the red bubbles to appear before initiating an evasive dash...

I think that the boss fights need some rebalancing. I'm somewhere around 50% completion and up to now, the overall difficulty of the game has been actually quite fair, except for the "Shadow of Hope" and "Shadow of Despair" bosses -- the latter one also took me 10+ attempts to beat, because the phase where you have to fight the boss in the small sub-surface room while it spawns those green orbs is also one of those flawless-or-death fights...

I didn't have any real issues with any other boss up to now though; it always took me 3-5 attemps for each one -- and I don't remember dying during one of the side-quest-related mini-boss fights even once...

[hickname]

For me, third portrait boss was the hardest - it took me 5 or so tries before i got the mechanic, then another 3 or 4 to defeat it. Also, this is the only boss with unavoidable attack (kind of).
I got to final boss, but waiting for patch because memory leak ruins it.

[Mr Tamburino]

its bug time there for him .. cant fight without apino ... i think i miss only this for bestiary and for my last blue note ..

[Grampire]

I dunno, I disagree. This was the first fight I thought was pretty cool and made you pay attention to the mechanics. This was the first boss I felt like really put up some resistance.

I took them down on my second try - was surprised by the second phase with 2 heads which I thought was cool.

During the second phase you can swim under the horizontal snake strike, drop down out of mermaid form and heal shields before they retract after attacking. There's plenty of time to do this, so if you make a mistake you just forgo damaging the crystal bands foe one cycle.

Shadow of Despair definitely had a lot more going on and was less intuitive, but I still got him 2nd try. The bottom lair part was just jump roping in the center of the room after taking out the red orb. The timing isn't too strict, you just have to time your double-jumps correctly and thankfully it's a pretty large window.

------

I think the dev should be careful about providing too much space between attacks. I think there should be a bit of challenge and tension if you screw up at the wrong time - otherwise the mechanics are worthless and there's no consequence or benefit for following them.

Also, I personally love the ammo mechanic - and it gives you a few options in combat and gives the game a bit of unique gameplay flavor. You can use it in tandem with your melee attacks to stack damage or you can play more conservatively and store it for shields. There's a cool risk/reward dynamic that I think is a somewhat refreshing "gamey" mechanic.

[Verga.Tron]

I died 6 times to this boss. but you know what I did? I learnt its very simple patterns, paid attention and concentrated on the fight. By the 6th time, it didnt even touched me. Again, you people want movies, not video games.

[Limimi]

I find this boss preposterously annoying, but the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanics are only a minor problem compared to the major one - how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long the boss takes to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ start! Why could I skip everything every other person has done in this game, but I have to sit and watch this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing hiss at me over and over again? The thought of sitting through that ♥♥♥♥ again after the eighth time I've died in the third phase just makes me play something else.

Originally posted by Verga.Tron:

I died 6 times to this boss. but you know what I did? I learnt its very simple patterns, paid attention and concentrated on the fight. By the 6th time, it didnt even touched me. Again, you people want movies, not video games.

I died a bunch to diz boss 2 but den I beat it! U dummies! Just beat boss! duh! neway thats my walkthrough for dis game, just play it until u finish, and if u die try again until u dont. your welcome!

[Cyrodeus]

I ended my last play session right before attempting the next required boss after this one and have also beaten Ulf, who I believe is optional. I'd definitely consider Shadow of Hope the toughest boss so far. My tips to anyone else who reads this thread while having trouble with it:

45 degree dashes are indeed your friend as the ramming attacks will always only ever be horizontal or vertical, never diagonal.
During the attack with all the projectiles, you can get the hand to that shoots lasers (not the energy balls) to leave by touching it. As it always seems to appear on the left side the first time the attack is used and then alternate right and left, you can basically remove it as a factor by bee-lining to the corresponding corner as soon as the attack starts.
This fight really seems to be a gate that you need a certain minimum amount of proficiency with radical acceptance (the timed light recharge when you run out) or you are going to be stuck. It may be worth it spending a minute or two just practicing that if it's giving you trouble.
I find it best to play aggressive with this fight. By spamming both melee attacks and light blasts when the snakes are vulnerable, it is possible to 2 cycle each phase. Wouldn't surprise me if someone is capable of one cycling the phases with better timing.

The fight is tough and a bit frustrating. Took me over an hour worth of attempts. My laptop can be a bit of a potato, so it doesn't even always run the game well. As for the the broader discussion of the mechanics, I think the light as your ammo and armor is an interesting idea though it can trivialize certain things as you practically don't need to worry about getting hit if you can do well enough with radical acceptance. Having infinite ammo provided you can time acceptance or have somewhere safe to recharge does mean there isn't really much incentive to melee the more dangerous enemies. Still, I think it works out well. Only real problem, and this may just be my computer not running the game well, is that I'll sometimes seem to get hit multiple times by one attack. It may chew through my light and take a unit of my HP, or straight up instakill me. Shadow of Hope's charges seemed to be one of those instakills as often as not. I had to get pretty good at frantically dashing diagonally.

[Cheddah Slammer]

Personally while I think Shadow of Hope took me maybe like 12 tries, most of it I felt like my fault. Like several times I pressed the wrong button and fell out of the mermaid form. However once you learn to be good at the Time press Recharge Mechanic, none of the bosses, minus one, are hard because the power is broken. The only boss that's hard was the Duck boss which took me over 35 tries, because they took away the Time Press Recharge Mechanic, and gave you an auto recharge, which frankly is worse because you have to wait before it starts recharging.

[#yolo #swag #fierce #wow]

I came here to complain about this boss. You do actually have time to heal... kind of. The problem is, it's luck of the draw on the third phase (one of the two snakes left), because if the last attack is horizontal, you can't safely descend to the ground to heal, because it takes too long to hug the bear. You only have time to do it if the last snake attack happened to be vertical. (EDIT: This is not really true, see below.) If it's not, you have to dodge *another* eight very fast attacks in order to *maybe* get another chance to heal. I actually probably could have one this last time... except that I didn't have any meter left to shoot the crystals, so I had to try for a risky heal.

Compounding the issue is the design problem all multi-phase bosses in all games have to contend with: if you die at all, even on the last phase, you've gotta do it all over again from the beginning.

I'm getting better and I'm sure I'll get through it, but I am not enjoying this fight and I am surprised it survived playtesting as-is.

EDIT: I beat it on the next try. Some advice for anyone having trouble, about how to exploit the fight mechanics:

Phase 1 (one snake): Relatively easy. If you do need meter, don't forget you can dash through the red balls on the hand phase to get some meter back. This can put you in a good position to shoot the crystals when the snake head attacks.

The snake always attacks where you are, either vertically or horizontally. If you need to hug, try to stay more than your character's height off the ground, so that if he attacks horizontally, you have room to dive down, shift forms, and heal. If you don't, and the attack is vertical, you can't safely descend. (If it's vertical, it doesn't matter.)


Phase 2 (two snakes): Similar, but harder. One snake always attacks diagonally and one horizontally, so it's even more important not to hang out at the bottom, because then you *definitely* won't have the room to drop to heal or even to attack the crystals. Use the same approach so you have room to heal on the floor if needed.

Phase 3 (one snake): Rapid-fire attacks, which are very scary at first, but since a 45-degree diagonal dash will always get you safely out of the way, you can actually just feel the rhythm of the attacks and dash diagonally without even having to process which way the attack is coming from. I swam back and forth on the same 45-degree line the entire time. But again, make sure you leave yourself enough room at the bottom in case of a horizontal attack.

Now that I've beaten it, I agree that studying the mechanics makes this fight much easier, but the low margin of error -- you have to have meter to do any damage at all, one hit takes away all your meter, restoring your meter is dangerous, and you will die if you take two unshielded hits through the entirety of the fight -- makes it very frustrating.

[Bectrox]

Originally posted by Cheddah Slammer:

Personally while I think Shadow of Hope took me maybe like 12 tries, most of it I felt like my fault. Like several times I pressed the wrong button and fell out of the mermaid form. However once you learn to be good at the Time press Recharge Mechanic, none of the bosses, minus one, are hard because the power is broken. The only boss that's hard was the Duck boss which took me over 35 tries, because they took away the Time Press Recharge Mechanic, and gave you an auto recharge, which frankly is worse because you have to wait before it starts recharging.

The fight against the Logon Duck is quite an endurance test. You can evade the attacks if you keep hitting once or twice and not more. Usually the dive got me, because somehow I could not read its forecast, but the rest was more a matter of concentration than difficulty. As soon as you evade long enough you can take one more hit to your shield, so whenever you get hit, do not attack right away, just get out of the way for 2 seconds.
I concentrated on evasion and hitting now and then until I defeated it rather accidentally.

Shadow of Hope still required more attempts of me, but both bosses are fair in a way. I think I could beat them much quicker now and I agree that Shadow of Hope seems less dangerous after the duck.
Both have a different issue, though. You cannot bypass the snakes while the duck is optional (in theory, not sure how the final boss fights w/o the last upgrade). But you have a save point nearby in contrast to the Logon Duck.
Personally, if it is load & repeat, I am mostly okay with having to try multiple times (let's say up to 10-20). But when you first have to cross the country to reach the boss, I might stay at the safe point after a few tries and open a beer.
I mean if you are marked as boss in real life, you got to have a safe point close by, right?

Originally posted by #yolo #swag #fierce #wow:

I'm getting better and I'm sure I'll get through it, but I am not enjoying this fight and I am surprised it survived playtesting as-is.

These things are hard to judge. I got frustrated there, too, to be honest. But in the end, I succeeded and completed the game. It depends on what you expect. Fortunately, I had no crashes until the final boss, so I could only blame myself. And there are patterns you can learn. Knowing when to step back and when to recharge are the key to this game's bosses.
I think it is part of this genre to have bosses that require some patience. Soon enough in this game, the mechanics outplay the common enemies, except maybe for very few situations with lack of room for maneuver. So the challenge comes with the bosses.
One could argue that the broad range of difficulty or rather the difficulty spikes make it a bit undecided on who the audience is. But in my experience, many games have some frustrating part where you really wonder if the developers' car broke down when they got fired and divorced on the same day and had no other way than to share their hate with the world. So yeah, in retrospect, Shadow of Hope was quite an obstacle to overcome, but also an achievement in itself.

[Bectrox]

I am almost through with my second playthrough. So far most bosses beaten on first attempt, with one I died by stupidity and Maelzel also required a 2nd attempt. But for Shadow of Hope and Logon Duck I still had to come back three times (defeat on 4th attempt).
So both are on a par if you ask me. However, Logon Duck requires more endurance while the snakes require quicker reflexes.
For the latter, you have sufficient time to "heal" in between the attacks, but you have to be perfect at dodging after you got hit until you get the chance to.

EDIT: I defeated the final boss once more, two attempts in this run. Which means Shadow of Hope was still worse than all the other bosses (for me). My reasoning is that this time I knew before what awaited me each time so the argument that over the game you get used to the controls more and more does not count anymore.
Maybe they should have made it an optional boss...