Can a Dev Explain the Reasoning Behind the Thunder Ring?

[Noodle-Kun]

After beating the game, I genuinely want to know what the reasoning was of implementing the thunder ring rather than keeping the block breaking ability to the Lion. As someone who unknowingly sequence broke the game by skipping the 4th boss because of the ring and and Tazmanian sword, I can only see this change as just being a more confusing change than a quality of life improvement for newcomers. My theory is that this was done for some speedrunning tech, but even if it was, your damage against the 4th boss is so low unless you play as the intended Lion that you'll likely lose more time than gain any (as an example, it took 2 hits as the dragon to do 1 damage to the 4th boss in the game, so I had to hit the boss 200 times to kill it).

[chrcoluk]

It was never limited to the lion, in the original game it was the thunder sword. However you never had to equip the sword, it effectively worked as a passive enhancement, so changing to the ring makes a lot of sense.

Also it made room for them to add the new sword.

[Noodle-Kun]

Are you sure that is correct? I'll take your word for it, but I couldn't find any video where someone was able to obtain said thunder sword and use it to sequence break such as what I did in my playthrough (i skipped the sunken ship boss and went straight to the Japanese castle)

[sronsse]

Dev here - what chrcoluk said is exactly right. Sorry you fell into that scenario which was kept from the original.

[Noodle-Kun]

Originally posted by sronsse:

Dev here - what chrcoluk said is exactly right. Sorry you fell into that scenario which was kept from the original.

Ah, I see. I think it was the fact that you can get this before doing the 3rd boss (the pirate one), that it caused more confusion than anything for me. I appreciate you taking the time to write a response and confirm!