One Legged Man in an Alien Wrestling Contest: Let's Play Hybrid Heaven

[Timrod]

“I fear not the man who has skipped leg day to work on his core. I fear the man who has skipped core day to work entirely on his right leg.” - Bruce Lee, probably

“Oh yeah, I played through that on stream. That one leg was really strong by the end.” - Ryan

Hybrid Heaven is an incredibly unique RPG released on the Nintendo 64 in 1999 by Konami Computer Entertainment Osaka, or KCEO. KCEO was a spinoff studio of Konami who developed, among other things, both N64 Goemon games and International Superstar Soccer 64 (which would later be bootlegged into Ronaldinho Soccer 64 and become a meme when Vinesauce streamed it). It was re-absorbed into Konami in 2005.

The game went through two development cycles: there was a beta version (which as far as I’m aware has never been found) that was shown in the January 1998 issue of Next Generation which had a completely different plot and wasn’t so much an RPG as it was a 2.5D fighting game. The beta was developed for the N64DD, which was the N64’s ill-fated disc drive add-on that never released in the west. My guess is that once KCEO saw that the N64DD was doomed, they opted to strip the game down for a cartridge release.

The game is thematically similar to Metal Gear Solid 1, and that’s no coincidence. According to that magazine article, Hybrid Heaven was KCEO’s attempt at outdoing Kojima at his own game. While it didn’t review nearly as well as MGS1 did (it got a 4.1/10 from Jeff Gerstmann when he was still working for GameSpot and a 7/10 from IGN), largely because of the plot being kind of dumb (though I’d argue not much dumber than MGS) and because of a lack of environment variety that was most likely a consequence of the N64’s hardware limitations.

I’d argue the game’s only real flaw is the lack of a tutorial and the fact that it has a number of mechanics that are never explained anywhere, leading most people to play it in a way that I think is different from what was actually intended. It took until someone datamined the game in 2021 to figure out how a lot of it worked, and I’ll be taking advantage of that datamine.

This was another game Ryan introduced me to (along with Aidyn Chronicles, also on the N64, which I did an LP of), and he has kind of a funny history with it: I remember him playing it in like 2005 on Project64 only to discover that the game would consistently freeze just before the final boss. That has since been fixed (and Project64 thrown in the dumpster of history) so I should be good to go.

I will once again be joined by my small army of PNGtubers, and will probably get some art from Salty Vanilla.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Welcome to Hybrid Heaven. I think the title gets dropped once in the game, but it’s kind of a weird title given what actually goes on in it. Kind of like how Sorcerer is a movie about a truck.

: Like Aidyn Chronicles, Hybrid Heaven doesn’t have a battery save and relies on the N64 Controller Pak to save.

: This game also supported the Rumble Pak. Just in case you’ve never personally seen one, the N64 controller only had a single add-on slot in the back, so if you did choose to use the Rumble Pak you’d have to switch it out any time you wanted to save or load.

https://youtu.be/A5X_00E7Bzs

: This game has voiceacted cutscenes and no subtitles, so I did a recording of this so you can see it in motion. Don’t worry if you’re someplace you can’t watch, I’ll transcribe it like I usually do.

: This probably would’ve been pretty weird if you were playing this on a CRT. Unfortunately, I’ve never played this on a CRT.

: We cut to Johnny, who is sitting naked in what is apparently his apartment in New York City.

: I bet this is what all men do when they’re alone.

: The TV changes from cartoon noises to a news broadcast.

: “The U.S. and Russian presidents revealed today that they are all but ready to conclude talks on the reduction of existing nuclear arsenals and are prepared to ratify the historic agreement that promises to be a giant leap towards world peace in New York City on the 24th.”

: “President Weller is expected to arrive in New York City tomorrow and attend the ratification after some last-minute discussions with the Russian president, who is scheduled to fly in on the same day.”

: “In a press conference yesterday, a confident President Weller stated to the media that on the coming 24th, the United States and Russia should be delivering a very merry Christmas present to the world.”

: Two things here. First, this technically makes Hybrid Heaven a Christmas game along with Parasite Eve.

: Second, this is how you know this game was made in the late 90s. Right around this time, it was believed that the US and Russia were going to sign START II (STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty). They sort of did, but pulled out before it went into effect.

: The reason you’d know it’s the late 90s is that New START (the successor to START I) just expired in February and every policy analyst out there has pointed out it’s unlikely another START will exist unless China agrees to it.

: In the background, you can hear a doorbell ring and the water shut off.

: I have forgotten what the guy in the suit’s name is, but Johnny answers the door in the nude.

: This feels like a Hallmark Christmas movie gone off the rails.

: “We shouldn’t be seen talking so I’ll be brief. Let’s go over this one last time. The substitution of the President will be executed the day after tomorrow in New York City.”

: Yes, they one-upped Kojima by making a SNATCHER RPG. Yes, I’m aware Kojima had already made a SNATCHER RPG for the Sega CD.

: “You are not to leave the President’s side no matter what. Everything depends on that moment, when there is no one but our operatives around him. If we miss this chance, it will throw off the timetable for the invasion.”

: “We can’t afford any mistakes. One more thing: don’t forget to make contact with Mr. Diaz in New York. He’ll bring the tools and the weapons you’ll need. That’ll be all. Let’s make this work.”

: “But man, put some clothes on, will you? And don’t forget to act like a human once you’re over ground.”

: “Johnny? Are you there? I guess you’re out again today. Maybe you’re busy, but.. are you doing okay?”

: “Well, it’s Christmas soon. The year’s almost over. Johnny.. you haven’t forgotten our pact, have you? That we’ll meet again this year under the Christmas tree in DC on Christmas Eve? I don’t care how late you show up, just meet me there, okay? I’ll be waiting.”

: It’s incredible how close Johnny’s girlfriend is to Rose in MGS2.

: “Anyway, call me again when you get in.”

: Johnny deletes the message.

: Meet Johnny’s girlfriend. I have forgotten what her name is.

: And this is Mr. Diaz. Diaz is our protagonist.

: The men in black have voice lines here, so I’ll find an icon for them.

: “Mr. Diaz, he’s here.”

: “Johnny? It is you, isn’t it? Why didn’t you recognize me? Is it just someone who looks like him?”

: The camera does a close-up on Diaz, and you can hear a distorted voice saying “Shoot… that man.. kill him…”

: If they’re going to blame it on a demon, I don’t whisper like that.

: Johnny, or.. Not-Johnny, I guess.. starts evaporating once he hits the ground.

: “Why did you shoot?”

: “Not now! There’s something wrong with Mr. Diaz. We’ve got to get him below ground.”

: “There’s a witness!”

: “The evidence is gone. There’s no trace left.”

: The men in black grab Diaz and drag him off.

: Diaz hears whispers in his head again and starts struggling.

: Diaz has the upper hand, but then hears Johnny’s girlfriend say something I can’t quite make out.

: Once Diaz gets near the ground, he starts floating.

: And now the game has started. You can see Diaz’s HP bar in the top left.

: Diaz has a gun called a Defuser that only works on robots and some other inanimate objects.

: Hitting one of the drones (or getting too close to it) will cause it to go into an alert state and fire a laser after a few seconds.

: The devs at KCEO realized what they were working with and made it so that you don’t need to be precise with the defuser: as long as you’re somewhere near the target, it’ll hit even if they’re clearly a bit to the left or right.

: The next room has a tech in it who will teach us about Hybrid Heaven’s primary roadblock.

: No, I’m not talking about how “interact” and “jump” are bound to the same button, or how Diaz has a jump that would put an NBA star to shame. That’s a secondary roadblock.

: Those are some ups.

: Here’s our primary road block: the code key. We’ll see how it works soon enough.

: Down the ladder, there’s a door with what looks like a slot in it on the left. This is a code key door.

: Of course the guy upstairs gives us an expired code key. We need to find a machine to update it with the new code.

: The next room is another hallway with some drones in it, and introduces a new kind of drone.

: These drones will shoot at Diaz if he passes through their light. You can sometimes walk around these, but most of the time you just shoot them.

: At the end of the hallway is a room with a machine in it. This is a code key machine we’ve been looking for.

: Another room with some drones in it. This one has a pit in the middle to jump over.

: We’re going to ignore the NPC and get on the elevator. The NPC only tells you how to use the defuser.

: This hallway is a little annoying if you get turned around because it’s full of drones that respawn every time you leave and re-enter.

: Right across from the elevator is this room, with a chest hidden behind some boxes.

: This gets us a healing item. I didn’t show it, but I’m playing on Hard rather than the standard Normal difficulty.

: There’s another door on the opposite side of the elevator that leads to a ladder. Before we go down, let’s take a look at how the stats in this game work.

: You can see that we have offense levels for each limb, plus “body” and “head”.

: Similarly, we have defense levels for each body part. On my first attempt at this game, I went all in on Body. I’ll show you why that’s a bad idea in a bit.

: We also have a move list. The last part is something we won’t do much with until several updates from now.

: We know four punches and two kicks, plus a short list of techniques.

: Down the ladder, we run into a “puzzle” of sorts. You can see the drone and that big, glowing box up there.

: If we climb up, there’s a laser grid preventing us from going further.

: Shooting the box destroys it and reveals a switch, which we can also shoot to lower the lasers.

: Down below is our first save point. Save points restore all of your HP, but I used one of our spare life chargers to heal some damage I took from the drones.

: The next room is in the middle of a big hallway, and one of the doors is locked. We’ll take the one on the opposite side.

: Another laser grid. Can you guess where the switch is?

: Past that is this big egg thing, and this is where the game actually begins.

: Diaz interfaces with this cube, which gets angry at him in alien gibberish.

: An alarm sounds, but nothing else happens. Let’s backtrack.

: That’s all it took to kill him?

: This thing is called a Spica, and now it’s time for our first fight.

: Let me briefly explain how combat works. The Power bar works a lot like ATB in the PS1 Final Fantasy games - it increases when Diaz isn’t doing anything, and fills slower when you’re moving around.

: You can hit A to attack as soon as it reaches that white line, but you don’t get a full power attack unless the bar is filled completely.

: Before the bar can fill, the Spica steps forward and attempts to attack. We get three options: Step, Guard, and Counter.

: Step is a guaranteed dodge if you’re far enough away. Guard takes the hit (unless it would miss because the enemy is too far away) and reduces damage but doesn’t work 100% of the time.

: Counter only works if you’re way higher level than the enemy and interrupts their attack with one of your own.

: In this case, I take a step back (you can pick the direction) and dodge the punch. You typically don’t want to do that, and I’ll show you why.

: Our bar fills up, and now it’s our turn to attack. You can pick from punches or kicks - techniques are a little different and usually require you to grab the enemy first.

: We do some damage and the enemy is sent flying. The game doesn’t show it, but we also get experience to our right leg and to the R Middle Kick move.

: And that’s the strategy, right? Just use one leg over and over until it’s so overleveled that it kills everything.

: You can do that, and that’s absolutely a valid strategy. Ryan beat the game like that on stream, using nothing but one leg.

: However, if you know about the 2021 datamine, you know that you want to level either both legs or both arms equally. We’ll find out why much later when we have access to combos.

: The enemy then uses an Upper L Hook, which I intentionally get hit by. Why? Because in this game, getting hit with moves is how you learn them.

: Notice, by the way, the icon in the top-right with the red torso. The enemy’s punch damaged Diaz’s torso, which stops us from using it.

: I mentioned earlier that my first playthrough went all-in on techniques. Techniques all scale off torso level. If your torso gets damaged, you can’t use them.

: We get a letter grade after every fight, with the highest being SS. Getting an S or SS usually gets you an item.

: We also learn Upper L Hook and Upper R Hook because I got hit by it, but we don’t learn Mid L/R Hook because I dodged that one.

: Some moves (usually techniques) require you to get hit multiple times to learn them. Techniques sometimes require special activation conditions (like being on the ground) and can be hard to get enemies to use.

: Now I’ll reload this fight and show you how techniques work. First, you have to grab the enemy. This is done with the Z button.

: If you’re grabbed, you also have three defensive options: Take Fall (works like Guard), Escape (rarely works but dodges the attack), and Counter.

: You can see that the enemy is stunned, which allows me to get a second attack in for free.

: There are also techniques that require you to be behind an enemy and grab them to use.

: Techniques are really powerful, but are risky because most attacks tend to hit the torso. You can see that they also cost Stamina to stop you chaining them too hard.

: After our encounter with the Spica, we end up in what is apparently a bioweapon storage facility.

: There are enemies in the cells who will get up and bang on the glass if you get close.

: The only way forward has a shutter that’s mostly closed. All we have to do is crawl under it.

: You can see in the distance that there are little robots on the floor. Those are land mines. They’ll chase you and explode if you get too close, but you can usually run past them with no trouble.

: We pass through a command center room which tells us how to bring up the minimap. I’ve already done that.

: The next room is our introduction to enemy spawners. Most enemies don’t respawn once killed, except for rooms that have a spawner in them. This one spawns Spica.

: Because I reloaded to get both the Mid and Upper Hook punches, I take this one down with kicks before it can do anything.

: This gives us enough EXP to level up. If you look closely, you’ll notice there’s a tiny bar underneath the Power bar - at higher levels, you can store Power bars to use multiple attacks at once.

: This hallway has a lock that has to be shot off. You don’t see too many of these from what I remember.

: I’ve seen this one before. The alien’s going to burst through the damaged bulkhead, so you blast right through it before it can try.

: This enemy is called.. a Pollux. Yes, I have Salty Vanilla on it already.

: Pollux has the Middle Side Kick and Low Kick abilities. We’re going to need Low Kick eventually.

: One thing I got to show off in this fight that you don’t normally see before getting multiple power bars is using moves on downed enemies.

: When prone, your defense options are limited to rolling to the side and trying to counterattack. In this case, the enemy was already stunned and does nothing at all.

: Unfortunately, Low Kick is one of those moves you need to get hit by multiple times to learn. We’ll run into plenty more Pollux before long.

: In the next room, we run into this thing. This is called Seginus, and it is primarily a grappler.

: It starts combat by backing off and charging its power bar.

: Once fully charged, it runs in and tries to grab you. If you mash A when this happens, you can get an attack off instead.

: Techniques HURT. On this difficulty, we can take exactly one without dying - a second will kill Diaz.

: I defeat it with techniques instead of kicks, because it will guard every kick you try to hit it with and usually counter with a grab.

: There’s a switch on the wall we need to shoot to progress.

: There’s a save point here, so I’ll call it an update just to get one out. Next time, we’ll go through Area 1-2 and fight our first boss.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Let’s continue into Stage 1-2. For some reason, the developers label every area using an old-fashioned world and level number. The official name for World 1 is “Bioweapons Storage Facility”.

: Down the hall, we can see a guy on a terminal.

: This is a Clone Man. Clone Men have access to a variety of moves we’ve already seen, including hooks and the low kick.

: They can also heal themselves for 100 HP instead of taking an action. Fortunately, they can’t out-pace our damage.

: We get a level up and a new punch I’m never going to use.

: Down the hall, there’s a warehouse with boxes stacked against one wall.

: We can climb up the boxes by jumping - the game is very good about mantling and will almost always ledge grab if it can.

: The upper ledge is guarded by a line of drones. You can either shoot them from below or just sidle past them until you find an opening.

: After shooting that red switch, there’s a door off to the left with a new enemy in it.

: This thing is called a Naos, and it’s kind of like the Clone Man we just fought in that it uses both kicks and punches.

: When it 's knocked over, Naos drops healing items. It can also heal itself multiple times, which makes it a little annoying to fight early on.

: They’re also worth a ton of EXP and I get the Low Kick off this one, bringing us to two out of the three kicks I’m ever going to use.

: Back in the warehouse room, there’s a hidden path up this way.

: We need to jump over and climb onto the box, shoot the drones down, and then sidle over to the door on the other side.

: This leads to a bunch of boxes and a green switch we can destroy. There’s a really annoying jumping puzzle as well, but I’m not touching that because it’s not worth doing.

: If you head away from where we fought the Clone Man earlier, there’s another door.

: This leads to a room with a drone in it that has about a 50% chance of being in a position where it instantly shoots you when you walk through.

: We’re now in a big hallway with stairs on either side. We can go up or down, so let’s go down first.

: That weird looking grey thing is a locker.

: Opening it gets us our first ranged weapon. Guns in this game are single use, but are the only way to attack an enemy without being next to them.

: There’s a Spica down the hall, and at this point something interesting happens.

: I’ve been alternating between left and right kicks to keep Diaz’s legs roughly equal, and in doing so manage to damage both of the Spica’s arms.

: So now what’s it going to do? All it’s got are punches.

: The answer is that it switches to a much stronger High Kick. I take two of these on purpose.

: We now have all the kicks I need to finish the game. My plan is to level up the two Low Kicks (L/R), the two Mid Kicks (L/R), and the two High Kicks (L/R) while ignoring almost everything else.

: This is the easiest way to pull off something later, when we have access to combos.

: There are two side rooms in this hallway. One is just an item room, the second leads to a second Naos fight.

: We get yet another new kick. The Side Kick moves are also useful for doing something later, but they’re not really any more efficient than the regular kicks.

: This room has another Pollux on the ceiling, but we already know all its moves so I just kill it as efficiently as I can.

: The far side of the room has a code machine and another locker in it, behind a barrier you have to crawl under.

: If we go back to the main hallway, we can take the stairs going up now.

: This room has a Seginus spawner in it, and a code key door.

: I ran into some weirdness here: as it turns out, damaging an enemy’s torso doesn’t stop them from using grabs or techniques.

: One drone hallway later and we’re at the first boss.

: Procyon has a mix of punches, kicks, and throws.

: At the start of the fight, all it’ll do is approach you and give you plenty of time to kick it while it goes for a grab.

: After it takes a couple of hits, Procyon will start using this attack, which has a deceptively large hitbox and knocks Diaz down and back. It doesn’t do HP damage, but it does do torso damage. This is one of the first fights to punish you for technique use.

: Staying out of its grabs isn’t particularly hard unless it manages to follow up a green fire attack with one. Fortunately, the fire knocks you back far enough that it’s unlikely to happen.

: If you’re using punches or kicks, Procyon really isn’t hard. If you’re using wrestling moves, this fight is hell.

: This cutscene kind of doesn’t make sense if you think about the positioning involved.

: Pff… nothing personnel, kid.

: “Failure in us Hybrids, the new human race, cannot be accepted. The invasion plans that were going smoothly could fail altogether because of you.”

: “Are you out of it that bad that you can’t even remember that? It isn’t easy switching an analogue with a real overgrounder.”

: “The Master has been working towards this President substitution project all this time.. are you trying to end it all in failure?”

: “A liaison shooting a comrade.. it’s beyond my comprehension. You’ll pay dearly for this, Diaz!”

: “Hunter, what about the plans…?”

: “As you know, Diaz, who lost it, shot and killed the copied analogue of the Secret Service man slated for substitution.”

: Oh look, the three forbidden words. They don’t let you use “as you know” anymore. I stopped in the early 17th century because I was ahead of the curve.

: “However, everything will proceed as originally planned. Kevin, the presidential aide, will now perform the kidnapping and substitution of the President and support the plan.”

: “And with that, the power to control the entire world. So it won’t be long now until the time comes when we rule the earth…”

: This is how you know these guys aren’t thinking hard enough. If I wanted to be President all I’d have to do is run.

: I’m not letting you run for anything.

: “I don’t particularly want to lose those amazing physical abilities of his. Do something about adjusting his consciousness and cognitive processes after examining him. I’ll leave you to take care of it.”

: I wish I could say this is the only guy I’ve seen with a literal boner for world domination, but…

: “So, Diaz. Managed to hang on to your life at least. But you won’t be able to get out of having your thoughts tweaked by a little brainwashing. Bite the bullet, buddy.”

: “Hey you. I’m sending Diaz up to the adjustment room. Take him to the pod. We’re moving him to Floor 10 right now!”

: “Get with it, Diaz! You released a biological weapon in the confinement cell block! How many comrades do you think died because of you?! Just come back and do as you’re told!”

: “Mr. Jerry! It’s too dangerous to use a gun inside an underground shelter!”

: “I know that! If you did your job, this wouldn’t happen. Here, take him away to the pod now!”

: “What! That’s impossible! …why? Why isn’t it moving? Floor 21 is Dr. Bross’s research floor. Why Bross’s floor of all places…”

: “Send a transmission to Bross. Tell him to capture Diaz! Tell him that he can use Diaz as a research subject.”

: “All he has in his mind is research. Make sure to tell him so.”

: “Who cares what happens to Diaz. He lands a plum duty like liaison with the overground and still loses it.. oh man, wish we could go overground earlier!”

: This floor is a direct homage to Resident Evil. Most of it uses fixed camera angles and the game switches to tank controls.

: Is he supposed to be some kind of nonbinary Joker?

: I think they did change his design a bit from the boxart, where he’s wearing what looks like a one-piece swimsuit and stockings.

: “But I don’t want to be troubled. The square Jerry says I’m to catch you. Not that what Jerry has to say holds any interest for me, but it’s a bit different when I get to use you as my guinea pig.”

: “Experimenting with just normal clones has been such a drag lately… sorry, but it’s a blast to be able to experiment with someone like you, Diaz - a hybrid in top athletic condition.”

: “Hey! Isn’t it huge! It’s so much more powerful than you. Don’t even think of fighting it. It’s really none of my concern what happens to you with this experiment.”

: The game gives you a few seconds to get oriented, but I already know where we’re going.

: This enemy is a Gomeisa, and is an upgraded version of Seginus that is also all wrestling moves.

: I eat a Bridge Suplex to the face. If I remember right, this was the move I used on my first run where I tried to wrestle everything.

: Behind the Gomeisa are some boxes. I’m only bothering to show this because one of them has..

: A Ring Eraser. These items are the only way to run from combat.

: Down another drone hallway, we run into another new enemy. This is Mekbuda.

: Mekbuda uses kicks as its primary form of offense, and has a really high defense against being grabbed.

: At low HP it will try to use an item to boost its attack.

: Now we’re on the other side of the big hallway we first encountered the xenomorph-looking thing in.

: It’s hard to show in screenshots, but there’s a raised hallway up on the right, and as soon as you get near it the game goes into tank controls mode.

: Getting run over by the monster does 40 damage or so.

: This Naos is here entirely so you can restock on healing if you need it. You can run right past it without fighting.

: Leaving the room with the Naos puts us on the other side of the closed blast door we saw, and gives us a tiny path to the elevator that’s honestly kinda hard to make out.

: The monster simply jumps down after us.

: If they’d been following building code when they built this place it wouldn’t.

: We then get another tank control screen. We need to reach that platform with the lights around it.

: What’s funny is that people complain about the yellow paint thing being endemic to modern game design, but this game came out in 1999 and has it.

: Of course, the game spawns the monster directly behind us and I have to juke it after taking a bunch of damage.

: Climbing up the ledge brings us to the only part of this game I would genuinely consider to be badly designed.

: See that ledge Diaz is facing? That’s a death pit. Dropping into it instantly kills you. The thing is, we’re still on tank controls, so pressing up on the stick makes him go into the pit instead of back to the wall.

: Must suck if you forgot to use a savestate. You did remember to savestate, right?

: …No.

: Get a load of this guy.

: Instead of falling, we can go to the right for more healing and a door.

: We’ll use this save quick and keep going. I’m sure nothing will randomly fall on us.

: You might notice something different about the UI. There’s a little red bar underneath the power meter. We now have a second power bar.

: If you have more than one power bar (at least one fully charged and another that’s over the white line) you can perform a combo.

: This lets you do multiple attacks while the enemy is paused, which helps bypass things like Naos’s healing.

: You can also save combos for convenience. I’ll keep this one until we get some more power bars.

: This hallway has a ton of mines in it for some reason.

: As soon as we go through the door, we run into yet another new enemy type. This thing is called Kitalpha.

: If you’re doing a punch build, Kitalpha has a couple of moves you probably want.

: Arm Bar is one of those moves that’s way stronger when an enemy uses it. I got really confused when I played this the first time because I didn’t understand why I couldn’t use it even though I learned it.

: The reason is that Arm Bar is a technique you have to use when your opponent is on the ground, but enemies can use it from a standing position.

: This room has one of those locked doors you need to shoot to open.

: Of course, as soon as you get close, the monster comes out.

: This room has a bridge that retracts from behind you. I think it’s possible to fall to your death here, but I’ve never had it happen.

: And finally, this room. The bridge retracts from the far side, and you’re not intended to make it across.

: They had the budget to put rails around this death pit, but not the other one?

: This must be the part they showed the building inspector.

: We then get a sequence where we’re chased by the monster down a long bridge.

: The end is probably going to trip you up because it abruptly switches to tank controls.

: “I’m glad I made it in time to meet you. You must be very surprised and confused of your situation right now.”

: “Meaning that what you see, yourself, is not the real you. We are in New York, underground in an area called Manhattan. I heard our enemies saying this.”

: “…In any case, we must leave this place. Do not worry. I am not your enemy.”

: They’re adorable.

: “What is the matter? I see misgivings in your heart. I cannot blame you for feeling it. I will tell you something of myself.”

: “Our planet is in another nebula far away from this star…”

: “In those cases, we would enter hibernation capsules and await arrival at the destination in stasis. Such was the case when we traveled to this planet… but we had a traitor among us.”

: This is what happens when they don’t do all their tasks.

: “We were all made to sleep several extra decades longer than we were supposed to. When we awoke, we were under a dictator’s rule, forced to assist an invasion.”

: “Have you seen the ceiling of this underground shelter? No, you have not seen it yet. On the ceiling is a huge saucer shape: that is our starship. And this underground shelter is what we use during stays in other stars. It is usually stored inside the starship.”

: They managed to fit all this into one of the densest cities on the planet?

: “However, it has already suffered many subversions of its original design by the traitor and the clones he created. We are, in all probability, far more advanced scientifically than your civilization.”

: “And of course, the traitor has the same body of knowledge. The traitor harvested the cells of this planet’s inhabitants, created copies of you humans.. in other words a clone species of the human race. And he controls his creations absolutely.”

: I’m going to cut a bit of this only because the Gargatuan explains the same “replace the President” plot that we already know about.

: “We really cannot comprehend how someone who could plan an invasion of another planet came to be born of our people. On this planet, there is this force that turns organisms belligerent.”

: “Now let us go. It is not safe to stay here.”

: Again, I’m going to skip some dialog because it describes things we already know: that the Johnny who died on the subway platform was a clone.

: “It is possible you still do not recall anything. But don’t worry. In a short while, we will return you to your original form - your memories, your everything. We will never insert strange programs in you again. Please do trust us.”

: Where have I heard this one before?

: “We traveled to many planets to collect all kinds of samples. But it has always been a strict policy of ours to refrain from interfering with other ecosystems, cultures, or politics on these planets.”

: “This time, we had no choice but to do exactly that. We found it necessary to fight in order to prevent further damage to this planet. However.. as absolute pacifists, we have never experienced a battle.”

: “We needed the help of the people of this planet. That’s exactly when we were able to rescue you from the enemies who abducted you from above ground. We do not have the strength, but we have the brains.”

: “It is hard for us to beat the enemies, but abducting them was not impossible. Capturing and imprisoning one called Diaz was not that difficult either.”

: This part has always seemed a bit weird to me, since the Gargatuans are apparently incapable of violence yet managed to capture the real Diaz.

: The game never explains who Diaz was or why the traitor wanted to clone him.

: “We made a temporary recording of your memories in a mnemonic device, and inserted a program in your brain to allow you to act in such a way as to sabotage the enemy’s plans.”

: This is a direct reference to the film Johnny Mnemonic, which hit theaters in 1995 and is kind of a quintessential bad sci-fi film. It had Keanu Reeves in it and was bigger in Japan (to the point where it had a separate Japanese cut) than it was in the US.

: “The fate of this planet is about to change.. but there is nothing more we can do. All we can do is aid you, a native of this planet, to the limit of our powers.”

: “I do not want to sound irresponsible. I am not exaggerating - you are the last hope for saving this planet.”

: I’m amazed the gargatuans have the ability to dress themselves in the morning.

: They have a machine for that.

: I want to light them all on fire so badly.

: I’m going to summarize the rest because this is a long-ass cutscene.

: Johnny goes into the tank and the coating is slowly removed while he has a vision of his girlfriend. Try not to think about how the aliens took a white guy and put him into hi-tech blackface.

: The funny part of this is that even with the suit, you can see that Diaz is significantly taller than Johnny is.

: Jerry explodes a wall and captures the gargatuans before the process can complete.

: Of course, the gargatuans had a plan for this. The plan is to blow everything the fuck up. I’m not entirely sure how Diaz survives this.

: And now we’re in World 3. We’ll do that next update, when we start running into guys with guns.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’re now in World 3, which is the Clone Storage Facility. This area starts with a gauntlet of fights.

: This thing is a Muphrid, and it knows a couple of kicks we don’t have - namely the Low Front Kick and Mid Front Kick.

: It also knows Arm Bar and Bridge Suplex, and will use them if its legs get injured or when it’s at low HP.

: Continuing past that room, we can either go down the hallway or into the side rooms, which have fights in them.

: The first room has a Mekbuda in it, which dies quickly to the kick combo.

: The second room is a spawner. It’s pretty easy to get turned around after combat, and given that all these rooms look the same it can be hard to tell which way is progress.

: Just after that is a code machine.

: This is a Dubhe, which can be either an extremely easy fight or a nightmare that hits you for a ton of damage.

: Dubhe tends to stay at a distance, and if you’re lucky it’ll do that the entire fight. If it does attack, it has a kick that can do over 100 damage if not guarded.

: You can go back to the hallway as soon as you have the code key updated and take this ramp to another part of the level.

: This room has a big unkillable roomba that spits fire. It’s pretty easy to avoid.

: Ah damn, they stole my idea.

: The door to Johnny’s left is progress, so let’s go that way.

: The door on the left brings us to another code key door, except we don’t have the code to open it.

: Instead, we’ll use this conveniently placed ladder. There’s a Pollux on the ceiling, and I should probably take a second to explain scaling in this game.

: We can hit this Pollux for over 100 damage per kick, yet it takes maybe one fewer kick to kill it than it did in World 1.

: The reason is because every enemy in the game has a huge stat spread that scales with you. This makes leveling certain things (limb defense) counterproductive.

: Raising your limb defense makes the enemy’s limb offense go up, and since offense out-scales defense it’s generally bad to level limb defense.

: I also asked Salty Vanilla to draw a very different Pollux trying to wrestle. That’s in the works.

: With Pollux presumably wrestled somewhere by his boyfriend, we can take the ladder.

: This takes us to another hallway with four doors. The first one on the left leads to an otherwise-empty room with the code machine in it.

: The others lead to a fight with a Mekbuda (first door, right), a Kitalpha (second door, left) and a Spica (second door, right).

: I fight them all because there’s a save point right around the corner.

: Before we continue on, let me show you what happens if you take the other door back in the room with the fire roomba.

: Instead of making progress, you wind up in a big circular room with nothing in it.

: Except for one of these guys. These are Men in Black, and they SUCK to fight.

: Men in Black are the first enemy that has access to a ranged attack. Technically, Dubhe (the weird tentacle-faced thing) has a ranged poison attack, but I don’t think it can use it yet.

: Other than this fight, there’s only one reason to come in here and it’s not really worth it.

: If you look up here, there’s a breakable box. There’s a chest on top of it that we can’t see which will drop down into a room past the code door we skipped.

: Past the code door, we run into a room with a bunch of mines in it. These ones are upgraded and do 60 damage if they hit you.

: To the right is a chest on a narrow platform with no apparent way of getting to it.

: Getting to that chest is progress, and we need to climb this scaffolding to get there. Even sped up, it takes over a minute to get there because of how slowly Johnny moves when hanging on it.

: It’s only once you climb all the way over that you can see this chest hovering on a block in mid-air. The chest isn’t worth it because it’s suspended over a death pit and the nearest save point was back where the code machine was.

: If you choose to get it, you want to stand right here and walk off the edge.

: Several minutes later, we’ve climbed over to the other side of the pit.

: The drones drop healing items, and there are two lockers on the side with guns in them. You can probably guess what’s coming up.

: There are five breakable Metroid tubes on the left with signs we can read.

: The tubes for the Press Secretary and two of the presidential aides are empty, while the ones for the CIA director and Secretary of Defense are still full.

: I bet the evil aliens would be better than the current administration.

: The pod for the defense secretary is probably full of whiskey.

: You might’ve noticed that there’s a code key door at the end of the hallway. We need to duck into a side room quickly.

: There’s an Onion article here somewhere about how the aliens couldn’t make a president as bad as the current one.

: As I was writing this update, the New York Times put out a profile on a guy named Victor Marx who won the GOP primary in Colorado for their senate race.

: Victor Marx claims he killed a man at the age of 7 and also claims he can exorcise demons over the phone.

: My first reaction was “I don’t think the aliens could have made something that dumb”, and then my second one was “Wait.. is this The Dark Id?”

: This is actually a neat little bit of level design - you’re unlikely to notice the code key machine here on the way in.

: Beyond the code door is a single Muphrid that we demolish in a couple of kicks.

: This sure looks like a boss arena, but is in fact merely a reference to Metal Gear Solid.

: Remember that scene at the very beginning of the game when Ocelot comes down the elevator?

: Johnny is no Solid Snake, that’s for sure.

: “Weren’t you killed in the station by Diaz? What’s going on here? What’s happening? The clone of Johnny Slater no longer exists…”

: Couldn’t he just say he’s a second clone they made after the first one died?

: Not likely. The fastest alien cloners take weeks to work, and those are pretty much permanently reserved by the A-listers. Superman has three of them.

: Wait, are you a clone?

: They tried cloning me back in the 80s and it didn’t work. They told me it’s the same reason they can’t clone Wolverine.

: Now, you’d think we’d be in for a boss fight, but..

: “I can figure out why you’re here. Those Gargatuans.. never know what they’ll do if you don’t keep an eye on them.”

: “Well, I guess I can’t keep hiding that I am not the real Kevin, your superior. My pride doesn’t allow myself to use the term ‘clone’.”

: “Johnny, don’t even think of resisting. I know you’re working for the Gargatuans and causing trouble. But again, you must understand what you’re up against. It’s us, the Hybrids who were born to rule all humans.”

: “And you know what! I have bad news for you. Ha… ha ha… I was sent to switch the President - and I’ve succeeded!”

: “Of course none of the stupid humans are aware of what’s happened. The human race will be manipulated to the utmost, and a new era in history will begin.”

: “The substituted President will begin a worldwide invasion with the strongest military power in his hands. I think it’s safe to say this planet is ours now, and the entire human race is to be placed under our control.”

: Johnny spends around a minute doing this very awkward duckwalk forward.

: You might notice that we now have three power bars. Normally I’d do a combo, but for this particular fight we want to stick to single kicks.

: The reason is that this particular Man in Black is extremely trigger happy even compared to the non-miniboss versions.

: After taking a shitload of damage, I get a three-hit combo off. This will be the new primary combo until I get access to four hits.

: I didn’t get a cap of it, but the enemy took something like 20 turns to my 4.

: There’s a save point up ahead, and we’ll need it because the next part is pretty bad if you’re not playing on an emulator.

: We run into a new kind of drone. These ones drop bombs on you if you go underneath them, but they take so long to do it that if you just run by they’ll never hit you.

: There’s not much to say about this part, it’s just a lot of climbing.

: Again, this part is a lot of traversal. The drones in here drop items and there are mines on the floor.

: This room is effectively a roulette wheel. The door we’re closer to right now has a Dubhe spawner behind it.

: It didn’t happen this fight, but this Dubhe can and will poison you even at melee range. It uses a couple of new kicks, including the High Side Kick and High Front Kick.

: The other door has a code machine and a ladder in it. Make sure you don’t miss the code machine.

: Here, we run into a Naos that for some reason has incredibly high stats compared to normal ones. It’s faster than Johnny and charges power at roughly 4 times the rate we do.

: Kevin detonates this bridge, forcing us to go the long way around. World 3 is one of the longest in the game, with 6 sub-levels.

: This room has a spawner in it and we want to avoid fighting if we can. This thing is called a Mira.

: Mira will happily stand still while you charge your power meter to full, because the second you run in it starts spamming poison breath.

: Poison does a shitload of damage (I think it’s something like 50% of max HP) and ticks down at a rate I can best describe as.. you know the rot lake in Elden Ring? Like that.

: We reach another code door shortly afterward.

: And now we’re in the room Kevin was in. There’s a save point we can use because there are more annoying fights coming up.

: “What loads of fun you are. How about it, Johnny? Is the beauty of our plan evident even to you?”

: “I saw several stories and movies created by your race when I was above ground - and I must say I was surprised. Does this planet’s race really believe that those flashy and utterly ludicrous interplanetary wars could ever occur?”

: Tell that to all the assholes writing “Hell invades Earth” plots. What would I even do with Earth?

: “Very typical of a primitive and foolish species that you are.. brute power holds no meaning in an invasion of planetary scale.”

: If this game released any time between 2022 and today, people would assume this was commentary on the AI bubble.

: “So it follows that all of you, living on this planet and caught in primitive delusions, have no future!”

: I mean yeah, it’s a stock market bubble just like the one that popped maybe a year after this game released.

: Right after this hallway is a three-room gauntlet with a Dubhe spawner, a Mira spawner, and a second Dubhe spawner. I avoid the first two and then get fucked up by the third one.

: Then there’s a final room with a Muphrid spawner, which is a decent grind spot because there’s a save point right on the other side of the door.

: The door on the far end has a code door behind it that we can’t open.

: There are a couple of doors and a narrow hidden passage up here.

: The one on the right is a grind room that isn’t as good as the one with the Muphrid in it.

: This is a Peggy Hill, who is effectively a Man in Black who is slightly less likely to shoot you.

: Peggies can’t combo, but they can try and knock you down and follow up with a stomp.

: You’ll notice through the window that there’s a yellow laser grid. Let’s heal and go into the other room.

: It’s just another Man in Black. This should give you an idea of how many actions enemies are getting compared to me.

: And here’s the yellow switch.

: This opens up the path behind both of those rooms, which is on the far left of the upper platform.

: “You want to keep on listening to me? Then fine. What shall I talk about? How about talking about your girl? Yes, let’s talk about Holly. An intelligent, beautiful woman who works at the U.N. headquarters in New York - don’t I know a lot! Surprised?”

: This part confuses me a bit, and it makes me wonder if it isn’t the writer didn’t mistake the Rockefeller Center christmas tree for the DC one.

: Holly works for the UN, and Johnny is ostensibly going to be in New York because that’s where the president is supposed to be for the conference, but she wants to meet him under the christmas tree in DC.

: “I have data on her in the memories I inherited from my original. I don’t know if you remember, but she was there when you killed your own analogue, you know…”

: “She’s not waiting for you anymore. You’re the only one waiting to see her. She thinks you’re dead. And with humanity’s fate sealed, Holly’s life will end too, in all likelihood.”

: “I’m sure you would love to tell her that you’re alive, and then protect her.. but that isn’t happening. You know why? Because you’ll die alone, down here in the bowels of the Earth!”

: This room is a small maze that’s easy enough to navigate. Kevin taunts Johnny one more time by saying he could send another Johnny clone to Holly.

: I skipped a lot of text, but Kevin unveils his true form and we get a boss fight.

: Kevin is fucking bullshit. In most cases, if there’s distance between you and an enemy when the enemy goes to hit you (and especially if their attack happens while you were already in the process of moving away from them) they can’t close the distance and miss.

: Kevin can initiate an attack and then run halfway across the room to hit you. As far as I’m concerned, avoiding him is probably impossible outside of a TAS with one exception - you can dodge his grabs.

: Kevin can also heal himself for almost the full damage our combo does to him. He’ll only do this at low health, but it’s annoying as shit.

: By the way, he also has a mechanic that a few other enemies (I know Muphrid can do this) have where hitting him does damage to your limbs. Notice that in this shot, Johnny’s torso is damaged but nothing else is.

: This is the same combo, and by the third hit Johnny’s leg is damaged even though Kevin never got a hit in.

: I’ll stop this update here, because there are a couple of long cutscenes coming up. Next time, we’ll save the president.

[Timrod]

Summary

: After the fight with Kevin, we wind up back in his office, where there’s an easily-missed key item on the desk.

: To get it, you have to shoot the box and then jump on the desk, which is a little awkward to do.

: It’s hard to capture in stills, but there’s a flat blue light orbiting the president in a clockwise fashion.

: “The enemy is trying to remove all of the President’s memories. They probably intend to move the information into the false President above ground. As you can see, they’re right in the middle of the process.”

: “I’ve been trying to reverse the device flow and rescue the President.. but it looks as though it’s locked against access unless you have the memory card.”

: If you missed the card, the game will make you go back and get it.

: That’s not how the actual cloning devices work. They back up brain copies to these big tape-like things that are made of lasers.

: It takes days and has to be precise or else the memories get all screwed up, like the four months one of Superman’s clones spent where he forgot how to speak English and spoke entirely in backwards Kryptonian.

: “Good! I have access now. I am channeling the President’s memories back to him.”

: The light turns yellow and starts spinning counterclockwise.

: “The memories that were momentarily removed should be back as well. Our hideaway is nearby. We should head there first. It’s possible the enemy is already aware of its existence, but it will at least be safer than here.”

: “The President is all right. He’s suffering from temporary shock, but he should be fine very soon.”

: The gargatuan hideout has a bunch of chests in it we want to open before going back into the room with the president. This is because they refill after the next cutscene.

: “It looks like we’re the only two people from above ground here - there’s no need to be formal with me. I heard pretty much everything there is to know from the aliens - I mean the Gargatuans.”

: “To have a clone of myself, a fake President, seize control of the United States in this critical period just before this peace agreement with Russia.. I suppose the enemy chose this time intentionally.”

: “But we must somehow, no, we must at all costs return to the surface. Is there any way to combat this extraterrestrial terrorist force seeking to gain control of Earth?”

: It’s funny how this sounds like something you’d hear post-9/11 when 9/11 was still two years away.

: “Johnny - you may think us self-centered, but we must ask you for your help. We would like you to use your abilities to return us our Navigator. Once the Navigator has been rescued and returned, we can activate the ship, compress and store the subterranean shelter, and forcibly salvage the situation.”

: “And if this succeeds, we would like to remove ourselves beyond the atmospheric envelope in order to avoid inflicting further damage on this planet..”

: “Hrrmm… Johnny, what do you say?”

: Not shown: Johnny having a brief vision of Holly.

: “Let’s fight alongside them. It won’t only be for them - not only for them and ourselves. We will fight for the people of the United States..”

: “The problem lies in the location of the Navigator’s prison. He is imprisoned in the deepest level of this subterranean shelter, directly under its central tower.”

: “Not only that, but there is only one entrance leading to the place where the Navigator is imprisoned. It seems there are elite guards positioned there.”

: “Unfortunately, as far as we know, this entrance is on the opposite side from where we are. Therefore, you must pass through enemy facilities to get there. The enemy will probably tighten security against your coming. Be careful.”

: We’re now in World 4. There’s a save point and a couple of harmless drones that exist solely to drop healing items in case you need some.

: This part of World 4 is a big ring broken up by enemy encounter rooms. Our goal is to find the path to the center.

: The first of the central rooms has a new enemy in it. This is a Capella, and is generally pretty harmless compared to the wide variety of poison and gun users from World 3.

: Are they called that because they don’t have battle music?

: We kick it so hard that it explodes.

: This room isn’t the right one - you can see that the door to the center is locked.

: The outer ring has lockers in it that are blocked off by a laser wall. These rooms have either a Man in Black or a Peggy in them.

: If you go one room to the right of where you start, there’s a code key machine in front of the locked central door.

: And on the other side of the ring is a code key door.

: We then go down two elevators. I’m not sure why the developers felt the need to do this when they pretty clearly could’ve just used one, unless it’s something weird with the N64’s load speeds.

: The second elevator brings us to an annoying filler room. The drones in the middle drop items when killed.

: This area has two hallways, each of which is blocked off by a series of laser walls. You have to go to one side, find the switch to lower the lasers on the other side, and then repeat.

: Each one has a Man in Black at the halfway point.

: The best way to fight these guys is to wrestle them to the ground and then use any remaining power stomping them out. Stomps do around 100 damage compared to 75-90 for our usual kicks.

: At the end is another drone hallway that drops items.

: We then go down a second elevator to..

: A second ring-shaped area that is identical to the one we just passed through.

: The first room has a Man in Black in it, and you’ll notice that we now have access to four-hit combos.

: We’re going to use this combo until we reach the maximum of five hits. The only reason I have it laid out this way is because I want to make sure L Low Kick reaches maximum level.

: You can see that we’ve long since capped out the two Middle Kicks and R Low Kick, so all we have left to cap is L Low Kick and the two High Kicks.

: After going through a second identical floor, we reach another elevator and a save point. We’re about to go up against an extraordinarily annoying mini boss.

: This is Muhlifain, and it is INCREDIBLYannoying.

: Muhlifain’s AI has two phases. In the first phase, it walks around aimlessly and occasionally uses a rocket punch. In the second phase, it tries to get up close and punch.

: If you try to hit it while it’s moving aimlessly, it will dodge almost everything barring the last hit of a combo.

: You have to wait for it to get close, at which point it’ll probably get a hit off before you can hit it.

: After yet another elevator, we run into the final robot of this area: Pherkad. Pherkad is effectively Muhlifain without the rocket punch.

: You can see from how much HP I’m missing that this thing hits really hard, and it’s also almost impossible to get a hit off on it without getting hit first.

: If I was on the development team, I’d have made it so that you can stun the robots with the defuser in order to get hits off without them running away.

: You can see on the minimap that there’s two exits from this room. We want the one that goes to the long, thin hallway. This is even more kind of pointless busy work.

: The hallway is full of flamethrower traps, which can’t be destroyed. You also can’t jump the flames, because they’re placed in such a way that jumping over one will almost certainly cause you to jump directly into the next one in line.

: The solution is to simply walk through the traps themselves.

: That actually kind of makes sense.

: You wouldn’t think so when you realize how much heat those things are probably radiating. Thermodynamics is scary.

: Aren’t you immune to physics?

: Of course. That’s thermodynamics though. Completely different thing.

: Thermodynamics is a branch of physics.

: Have you tried telling that to the fire and lasers?

: This hallway is really long even on fast-forward. KCEO invented the Metal Gear Solid 3 ladder climb.

: At the end is a room with another robot in it. You can see the orange switch in the background - I abused savestates to not fight the robot.

: Now that we’ve gone all the way around that bridge just to shoot a switch, we need to run all the way back across and go through the other door.

: This leads to a lava pit where the camera does the Crash Bandicoot thing and has you run toward it. The steam jets coming out of the walls do 200 damage if they hit you.

: At the other end is a code machine. If we hadn’t destroyed the yellow switch, there would be a laser wall right behind it.

: The door we need is in the room with that robot. We don’t need to run all the way back because there’s a shortcut.

: Surprise, there’s another robot. I dodge this one too.

: We then need to go through a second steam room to get to a switch.

: The two lockers have an Offense Raiser and Defense Raiser in them. These are permanent stat buffs.

: And now we can progress to the only thing that could possibly be more annoying than melee combat against a robot.

: This is a shoot-em-up fight where we have to use the defuser.. with tank controls.

: I understand why this fight exists, and the reason is because KCEO wanted to do something approximating the Metal Gear REX fight from MGS1.

: The thing is, this fight sucks. It’s far from a save point, you have to be up the robot’s ass to shoot it, and you have to actually aim at it.

: It also has very short windows where you can actually hit it. The red bullet attack you saw up above is one of those - you can hug the left wall and shoot it during that.

: You get a short window before it starts launching rockets, but that doesn’t usually end well because it fires a homing projectile with the rockets.

: This feels like a Resident Evil boss fight in a game about wrestling aliens.

: As a final fuck you, the robot shits out a few dozen homing mines when it dies.

: We get a save point which really isn’t going to help much. You’ll see.

: First, the game throws another Man in Black at us. These are less overwhelming than they were, but still really annoying to deal with.

: This is another series of copy-pasted hallways, and now I’m starting to understand why I dropped this game the first time I played it.

: More flamethrowers, except these ones track your movement.

: And then we get to these. These are rocket pods, which fire masses of homing rockets that are nearly impossible to dodge.

: They also respawn, so you can’t kill them and then save to restore all the HP you lost killing them.

: There’s a Man in Black here that I kill offscreen.

: This is the last part of World 4, and is also the most annoying.

: We have to do a full lap (or two laps, if you want all the items) of this place, which is navigated by crawling on these conveyor belts.

: Each of these rooms has a Muhlifain in it, and I’m not fighting any of them.

: These two lockers have guns in them, but the switch to turn the lasers off is on the other side of this loop.

: The game loves stacking drones right near doors.

: One of these robot rooms has more lockers in it.

: We could skip the green switch altogether, but I wind up fighting a couple of the robots anyway so we’ll just keep going ahead.

: That green panel to the right controls the conveyors. You can leave it alone, or you can switch it to make your trip back more annoying.

: The code key machine and the red switch are in this room. We’ll hit the red switch because there’s a shortcut to the red laser room from here.

: Back in the green laser room, we get a Flame Shot SP. These are like normal Flame Shots except they fire three times.

: Thank fuck that’s over.

: Next time, we’ll do World 5 and part of World 6, which is another long one. We’ll also get access to the full five-hit combo and I can finally explain that really well-hidden mechanic you have a roughly 1 in 43 million chance of discovering normally.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Let’s slide on down to World 5, which is the shortest one in the game. World 5 is titled “Underground Shelter Lowest Area”.

: The real Diaz is down there, standing on top of an apparently dead gargatuan.

: “I came all the way out here without telling the others, to try to bring back the Navigator. Damn! I was so close. I guess I’ll need you to do it…”

: “The rest - the rest is up to you, Johnny. You must.. get the Navigator..”

: After the cutscene, the game puts us in this room. You can’t see it from the default camera angle, but there’s a save point just off camera.

: There’s not much down here apart from some drones and chests to replace all those items we lost going through that godawful robot shithole.

: Then there’s a wavy bridge over yet another death pit. This one’s at least fair because it’s pretty hard to fall into and you’re not locked into tank control mode.

: We fall down a couple of small holes and wind up down here. This is a gauntlet of sorts - there are four rooms with enemies in them and we need to kill them all.

: The first fight in this ring is the most difficult. This is a stat-boosted Kitalpha with some additional wrestling moves who will almost constantly try to grapple you.

: I take quite a bit of damage but hit it with a piledriver a few times, which does it in pretty quickly.

: Each one of these rooms has a button that opens only after the enemy dies. The button lowers one of the force fields over the exit.

: The rest of the fights aren’t that interesting. They’re mostly against World 1 and 2 enemies who don’t pose much of a threat.

: That includes this new enemy, which is called a Cebalrai. Cebalrai moves very slowly and even though it has really long legs, it’s actually a boxer.

: You can just kinda shuffle away from it while your power charges, wait for it to catch up, and then unleash a combo on it.

: It’s really nice having fights where the enemy doesn’t get 14 attacks to our one.

: We then get taken down to another nearly identical floor and get to do more fights.

: This thing is called a Mebsuta, and it’s kind of hard to see because of the bad lighting.

: Like that one pig enemy, Mebsuta will also use an Offence Booster to raise its damage. Unlike the pig enemy, Mebsuta has Kevin’s ability to clear half the room after starting an attack.

: Not only does getting hit by this thing suck, but it also has the robot “fuck you I dodge” thing where it’ll no-sell most kicks and punches.

: This is where the Piledriver comes in handy. It can’t dodge that.

: The other fight on this floor is Sargas. Where Mebsuta uses an Offense Booster, Sargas uses a Speed Booster instead.

: Sargas’s AI is a lot like Cebalrai’s - it’s super slow and tends to go for grabs. All you have to do is get a combo ready and let it step right into you.

: I also discover a speedrun technique for this area - if Johnny is near the button when the fight ends, he’ll automatically interact with it once the cutscene is over.

: And guess what, it’s another copy-pasted fight arena. This floor also only has two fights on it.

: This is Alkalurops, which is the third of the stat booster trifecta. It starts the fight by using a Defense Booster.

: Alkalurops knows a couple of moves I tried to learn but couldn’t - one of them is the Knee Twister, the other is a move called the Back Drop that only works if the opponent is on the ground.

: There’s a save point here, so I’ll just go ahead and use it.

: The other room on this floor has a Dubhe in it that is of the type that won’t spam poison. I was trying to learn a couple of moves off it (namely the Back Spin Kick) but it refused to use them for some reason.

: Before we leave, there are some buttons next to the elevator. They’re in the previous area too, and I went back and got them from an earlier save.

: This gets us some guns and life chargers, which we’ll need coming up.

: We slide down here, and now it’s time for a boss rush.

: There’s a door on the left and a door on the right. We’ll take the right first, because the boss on the left sucks and I want to have the five-hit combo before we fight it.

: This is Polaris. It’s one of four elemental-themed bosses in this last part of World 5.

: We have a couple of Flame Shot SPs, so I use one and it does around 600 damage.

: Polaris’s main attack is a breath weapon that is surprisingly easy to dodge. Other than that, it has some basic punches and kicks and a tail sweep.

: This opens up another part of the big circle and lets us fight another boss. We’ll go to the right again.

: This is Algol. Algol’s primary gimmick is that it’s invisible unless it’s attacking.

: We’ve finally got all five power bars, and now I can finally explain that mechanic I’ve been wanting to. This is the one that took until the game was datamined in 2021 to discover.

: There are 14 punches and 20 kicks in this game. Assuming you can do a maximum of five hits and that there’s no limits on how many times you can repeat a single move, how many possible 5-hit combos can you make? This will be on the test.

: The answer is 45,435,524. Of those 45,435,524 possible combinations, there are 44 that are special. That gives you a 0.000097% chance of finding one on your own. Still better than playing the lottery.

: To get these special combos, you need to perform them once in the editor and then save them. This probably lowers your odds of finding them naturally even further.

: If you use the saved combo instead..

: You get a special combo finisher that does about double the damage of a normal hit.

: There are four possible combo finishers: Rising Uppercut, Charged Punch, Jumping Axe Kick and Rolling Savate Kick. Each one is roughly the same in terms of power.

: On a side note, the Rolling Savate Kick is an actual wrestling move taken from a French martial art called Savate.

: This is Rigel. Rigel is the second most annoying of these bosses in that it has a projectile attack it will spam if you’re more than one step away.

: This time, instead of going for the Rolling Savate Kick, I make up a new combo. The reason is that your kicks have individual levels that are capped until your other kicks level up, and all of our standard kicks except for the High Kicks are capped right now.

: This gets us the Jumping Axe Kick.

: And finally, we have this fucker. This is Antares, and it has a combination of all the other boss’s moves.

: The problem is that it’s hard to dodge the breath attack because it has a standard ranged shot that it will follow up with if the breath attack misses.

: I then build our third and final combo. This one uses the side kicks and front kick to help build levels for the middle kick.

: And there’s the Rising Uppercut. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do the Charged Punch with just kicks.

: And now we’re in World 6, the Bioweapon Factory.

: The first room is a re-fight that we demolish now that I have access to combo finishers.

: The second room is full of flamethrowers, including one behind this destructible box. Just don’t destroy the box and you can crawl under the shutter without taking damage.

: Canopus is an absolute non-threat of an enemy. He’s one of those “very slow but slightly stronger than average” types.

: It has a new technique that we don’t need. I only even bothered getting hit by it because we’re so close to a save point.

: We fight another one of these things, which dies after two Rolling Savate Kicks to the face.

: This next room has a code door in it. You can guess what we’ve got to do.

: This room has a flamethrower on the right side, so we can stick to the left and get the code machine and a couple of chests.

: The room on the end is a re-fight and I don’t care about those anymore because we’ve got access to combo finishers.

: This is Cor Caroli. Cor Caroli is another invisible enemy, but moves significantly faster and charges power significantly faster than Algol did.

: The answer to everything is the Rolling Savate Kick.

: We get another room full of drones. That little round room you can see is a save point.

: There’s a blue switch playing Meccha Chameleon on us, so I shoot it.

: The other route leads to this thing. It has a name, but I’m calling it a Barney and no one can stop me.

: Barney has ice breath, which will freeze Johnny on contact and let him get a second hit in for free.

: Once it starts losing HP, it gets VERY grab-happy. Barney moves pretty fast and can potentially stunlock you to death.

: It can roll Johnny over on the ground. I’m not sure why it does this or what purpose it serves.

: We go through several uninteresting drone hallways, ending with this one where we have to dodge two missile pods.

: There’s a mandatory re-fight with an up-statted Muphrid that manages to get a couple of grabs off.

: And now we have this guy.

: This thing is a Beid, and is supposedly hidden somewhere in Area 2. I’ve never found it there.

: Beid is a grappler who can easily stunlock you to death with wrestling moves.

: “Toe and Face Lock” isn’t what this move is actually called - it’s called a Toehold Face Lock, and looks like this in motion. In reality, it wouldn’t do much because it’s specifically designed to look painful but is actually a cover so that the person on the ground can communicate without it being obvious to the audience.

: Toe and Face Lock is something you’d see on Onlyfans.

: Beid can also use the back spin kick, but trying to learn it here is risky because of the grabs.

: This one fight took me like half an hour. Beid’s grab range is far longer than it should be, and if he gets a grab off there’s a pretty good chance you get stunlocked unless you survive multiple roll attempts.

: We at least get the High Front Kick out of this, which is useful because it’s part of the only combos that can get the Rolling Savate Kick out with only one leg.

: The next room has a save point in it, and I’m going to stop here for now because we’re about halfway through World 6.

[Timrod]

Summary

: The next couple of rooms are boring so I’m going to skip them. It’s a really easy laser puzzle where you use an elevator until you find the switch you need.

: At the top is another drone hallway. Going left from the door leads to progress, going right leads to a fight with another up-statted Naos that I don’t feel like fighting.

: We can then go to the third floor and unlock a code door.

: The next few rooms are re-fights with Area 5 enemies. I also figured out something here that I hadn’t earlier, which is why Johnny’s legs kept getting injured on attacking.

: As it turns out, that isn’t an enemy thing - it’s a really dumb and bad mechanic the developers put in to force you to level the other body parts.

: Limbs level up based on how many times you’ve hit something with them, and eventually cap out if one or more of them goes too high compared to the others. If you attack with a limb that has reached level cap, it has a chance of getting injured every time you use it.

: I set up a quick combo that is just Upper Right Hooks and get the Charged Punch. This levels up Johnny’s right arm pretty quickly.

: We could also level Body, but that’s incredibly risky. Even if you manage to get a grab off without the enemy immediately attacking, there’s a good chance they’ll win the struggle and slam you for 300+ damage.

: The next room is another one of these assholes. We’re just gonna kick it to death because trying to punch it is a fool’s errand.

: The next room has a save point, which we’ll need because there’s some bullshit coming up.

: First we get a re-fight with a Beid, which is a lot easier because the room is huge and you can circle around it pretty easily.

: I then go back a couple of rooms and do an optional re-fight. Because we’d been at level 11 on both legs for so long, I had actually reached the requisite number of kicks to level up, so I had to pick up a couple of quick levels to stop injuries.

: We then run into the final enemy of Area 6, Gacrux. Gacrux is another enemy I really don’t want to deal with. Why, you ask?

: That’s why. Gacrux’s AI sits far away from you before sprinting at you and using a punch. Due to the fact that it’s sprinting, you can’t dodge.

: I say fuck it and use a ring eraser. This thing isn’t worth fighting.

: This hallway has a couple of missile launchers in it. Nothing we particularly care about.

: “If this isn’t corrected, all shelter functions will be paralyzed!”

: “D…Dr. Bross?!”

: “What a surprise - it’s no other than Johnny Slater, the man who was masquerading as Diaz. So humans are capable of throwing a few curve balls.”

: “I have to say it even took me by surprise. Thanks to you, Diaz just hasn’t been the same since.”

: “He’s stolen the navigator!”

: “What!? The Navigator… I see. So that’s how it is. The Navigator control system of this shelter, the Gargatuan starship. And therefore this core control system of this shelter, which is essentially a division of the ship…”

: “Hence, the disruption in the balance of power, the decrease in energy reserve. Damn you, where did you hide the Navigator!”

: I like to think that if you listen closely you can hear George Wood in the background of this shot.

: “Hah! You are a cut above the rest! You’re a real fun guy, Johnny Slater! Seems a shame to kill you off. I definitely want to keep a copy of you.”

: “Bross, just get him now!”

: “I’d like this tough little overgrounder to participate in an experiment of mine first. There will be a lot of interference if I put in a request for him later.”

: “Bross! Your experiment can wait! Do as I say and capture Johnny Slater now!”

: “You high-ranked type hybrids fail to grasp certain things. One of them is that I was specifically engineered for superior scientific abilities, and as such, these valuable experimental samples are incredibly fascinating to me!”

: I’m going to cut that a bit short because it’s more of Bross gloating before making us fight his Man in Black. Compared to World 3, they’re still annoying but not quite as bad.

: Johnny’s right leg levels up again, which means I’m going to need to grind punches the next time I have a chance.

: There’s a save point in the next room we’re going to want to use because this next fight SUUUUCKS.

: Bross dumps Johnny down a trap door and releases two of his bootleg xenomorphs.

: The red-ish one can spit fire.

: We then go into tank control mode. The white crosshair is where the xenomorph from World 2 is trying to go, and the red one is where the fire spitting one is going to spit.

: The first part of this fight is easy. You run in a straight line and eventually the World 2 xenomorph will run into the fire. The fire stays on the ground for a bit so it’s not that hard to pull off.

: What IS annoying is that if the World 2 xenomorph runs into the fire while you’re close to it, it can run you over during a cutscene. This can potentially damage you multiple times without you being able to see what you’re doing.

: Eventually, the first xenomorph dies. Now we need to fight the red one, and this is where the fight turns to shit because the game wasn’t designed to do this.

: Once the red xenomorph is alone, it’ll start charging AND spitting fire. We need it to charge into this door a bunch.

: There’s just two problems here. The first is that the red xenomorph’s hitbox is gigantic and around 80% of the time it’ll probably hit you on its way to the doors even if you’re not directly in the path - you can see how far over Johnny is in that shot.

: The other is that it has a minimum distance it needs to charge before it will hit the wall, and sometimes it’ll stop just short.

: This fight fucking sucks.

: After five hits, the red xenomorph falls down an elevator shaft and dies.

: We then get to fight Bross, who makes a blatant Metal Gear reference. This fight also SUUUUUCKS and honestly made me want to drop this game.

: Let’s pretend we’re doing this fight the way the game has taught us to: we sit back for a bit, build up power, and then use a combo when he gets close.

: The first thing Bross does is use one of every stat booster. If he does this, you’re fucked.

: Bross’s power meter charges something like 2.5 times the rate ours does. Once he finishes his third and final stat booster, he’ll start spamming Ice Shots.

: These are not only a guaranteed knockdown, but also a guaranteed stun.

: At this point, he’ll run over and stunlock you to death with wrestling holds.

: So now let’s say you’ve learned something from your first attempt and haven’t just put the game down entirely because there’s no save point between the double xenomorph fight and this.

: You run up and immediately kick Bross in the face and stay in melee range at all times so he doesn’t buff or shoot you.

: While eating attack after attack, you charge up and unleash a combo finisher on him.

: Yeah no, fuck you, he pulls out a full heal. At least now we know how much HP he has.

: I believe he’ll only pull out the heals if he’s under 40% HP, so I use five regular kicks (one at a time) and then charge up and combo finisher him.

: This is the only way to finish this fight in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re on an emulator, you probably want to blow guns on him until you know how much HP he has, then reload a state and plan from there.

: You might recognize this spot. This is the outside of the gargatuan hideout from World 4. The rest of the game is backtracking through places we’ve already been.

: The chests here have restocked for a third time.

: “I work at the White House. I’m like you and the President - I was abducted, then the Garga - the Gargatuans rescued me.”

: “The President was with me until just a little while ago. But men in black came all of a sudden and took them away… and left me here alone.”

: “If I move, there’ll be an explosion. There’s a bomb at my feet…”

: KCEO walked so that Metal Gear Solid 5 could run.

: “I’m sorry.. .but I did tell you it was a trap.”

: “Johnny Slater.. I have you now.”

: “But Diaz, we caught Johnny Slater and you aren’t reporting it to the Master? We’re not allowed to do things the way we please like that.”

: “And besides, I - I don’t feel comfortable with killing this overgrounder named Johnny…”

: I have questions. Why would they even need that if all the clones are already adults with perfect copies of their original’s memory?

: “But maybe this is how it should be. Hybrids aren’t robots. We wouldn’t exist without the Master, but we naturally have our own emotions and different personalities.”

: “I learned that when I was humiliated by this man. And.. I decided to trust my own feelings, yield to its overwhelming flow instead of suppressing it.”

: In a longer form game (preferably with less outright bullshit), this could almost work as a plot. Imagine if like, instead of the “Johnny disguised as Diaz” part at the start, you had a cutscene where Johnny meets the real Diaz in one of those storage tanks.

: You free the real Diaz, get a bit to know him, and then get separated when Johnny first meets the gargatuans and they get sent away on different elevators.

: Then you meet the fake Diaz, get to know him, and slowly see him change from being merely an evil clone of the real one into a different person with the same memories.

: “Just killing him isn’t enough for me. I want him to suffer, to be completely defeated and humiliated, and then die.”

: “Sorry I used you as a decoy, Anna. I’ll take it from here.”

: It could work even better if the real Diaz is kind of an asshole and the fake one hates himself for it.

: “Best actor Johnny Slater?”

: "Let us finish up between you and me. You humiliated me, and it is payback time. Your turning into me was where you made your mistake. I am a vengeful man who will not forget the humiliation.’

: “This gun without the limiter of the Flame Shot SP will burn you up in a second and not even leave any ash. Let me enjoy watching you burn up in flames!!”

: “But you know. You will never make it out of this underground shelter! It’s not over yet.. I swear I’ll be the one to put an end to you.”

: We’re now in World 7, which is a re-tread of World 3.

: There’s a blue laser fence here that we have to disarm. The switch is in a room off to the side with a single missile launcher in it.

: The Dubhe that was down here before has respawned, and I need a few arm levels so we might as well kill it.

: I do one punch, level up the right arm once, and then wrestle it to death for a body level.

: The up-statted Naos has also respawned.

: The reason I’m grinding body a bit is because I’ve read in speedrun guides that punches and kicks scale off both their limb offense but also body level.

: The bridge Kevin blew up is definitely worse for wear, but is full of drones that drop Life Charger Ls when destroyed.

: Not shown: a room with that one asshole enemy from last update that I used a ring eraser on. I ran past it.

: After an extended hallway, we run into that one room from earlier with the two side rooms that had Peggies in them.

: The closest one has a robot in it, but I destroy it with little difficulty now that we have several more leg levels.

: The other room has no fight and a button in the back we want to press.

: The room we opened up has a tunnel that goes up and down. We want to go down first.

: …And it’s one of these things.

: I dodge it without too many problems.

: Behind it is a room with a code machine and two guns.

: We could go up the tunnel to progress, but we don’t want to do that just yet. Instead, we want to head through this door. This is the one we chased Kevin through in World 3.

: There are a bunch of super drones in here that drop healing items. I’ll take as many as we can get because we’re going to need them.

: This room has permanent boosts to every stat.

: Taking the low road through the tunnel puts us back here. The code machine is in the same place it was before.

: The room right behind it has one of these yellow guys, who I planned to use for punch grinding.

: It gives us what is probably one of the rarest moves in the game: the Knee Kick. This is a move you can only use if you counter an enemy attack, which almost never happens.

: We’re now back in that room with the fire roomba. It’s hard to see, but the roomba has evolved into a bird thing that drops bombs on you.

: The door to progress is locked and takes something like 20 shots to open. The devs were really phoning it in here to extend the game.

: I mean, admittedly so am I. I’ve realized how boring this LP probably is, because the game itself is about twice as long as it should be.

: This thing is called a Zosma, and like most late game enemies it fucking sucks.

: It has poison breath because why wouldn’t it? It doesn’t help that you’re in a cramped space with no room to dodge.

: It also has an auto-grab that can’t be countered. I die here and that’s about as much patience as I had for this game. We’ll come back to it next time.