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.
: 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.
: “Mr. Jerry! It’s too dangerous to use a gun inside an underground shelter!”
: This floor is a direct homage to Resident Evil. Most of it uses fixed camera angles and the game switches to tank controls.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: …No.
: 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.
: 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 going to cut a bit of this only because the Gargatuan explains the same “replace the President” plot that we already know about.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: I’m amazed the gargatuans have the ability to dress themselves in the morning.
: 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.