All my RF2 problems are on stage 3 right now. Oh, and 6 sometimes. And then occasionally 7 when I pass 6.
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Last stage of Nikujin before the final boss fight. I never would have cleared it as designed. For some short definition of never. The whole stage hinges on impale-jumps. When you jump on an unalerted enemy ninja and press down, you impale him with your sword, for an instant kill. If you immediately jump, you get extra height. Reading over that description, I find it fails to convey the giddy joy of the act. Try it, see if I lie.
There’s a section of the stage where you’re expected to drop into a room, do an impale-jump to hit a switch, then a second to leave the room. The tricky bit about it is not alerting the second guy. Once alerted, the jump is sabotaged and you have to retry the stage. Or at least I assume that’s how it was designed. As it is, I found that you can both trigger the switch and escape the room using wall-bounce jumps instead. So I just kill the dudes, sparing countless retries.
On clear, the game scores you on the time to clear each stage. There will be no further discussion of the matter. I imagine most readers passed over the phrase “countless retries” earlier quite casually. If you have not played Nikujin, or similarly designed infinite-lives games, you may lack a frame of reference for recurrent doom.
For those who do pursue the game beyond the clear, there are a number of speedrun videos out there, including one faster than this that played like hell for me.
