I was briefly adrift in Mega Man 9.  I completed my immediate goals, which were a legit no-continues clear of the main game and an any-means-necessary clear of Hero.  After that: a little bit of Superhero, some baselines in Time Attack, some Endless….

Endless Mode in particular fails to delight.  It’s a series of segments, each 5-10 screens big, thrown at you in random order, with bosses at certain milestones.  You’re scored based on how far you survive, in number of screens.  Brilliance is scattered throughout the segments, remixes of the best sequences over the life of the Mega Man series.  But there is no sense of ramping up as I progress in the mode; it doesn’t get any harder.

I’ve found the wind and set a course again: all-buster boss clear.  That is, I’ll use specials to pass stages, but I’ll fight each of the Robot Masters with the peashooter alone.  That seems a bit arbitrary, written out, but it made sense at the outset.  I’m not going to use e-tanks or the 1/2 damage jobby to pass any of them, which would make it fairly trivial.  Well, ok, maybe against Plug Man.  Because fuck Plug Man, that’s why.

Progress so far: 5 stages clear.  Magma, Plug and Tornado remain.  Hornet Man was the roughest so far.  Had to practice a spell to work out a viable strategy for him, which I guess I’ll bury beneath the fold.  You have only yourself to blame for the tedium of reading it.

The accursed bees.  With the Magma Cannon, one shot kills all three.  With the buster, it’s two shots per bee, and I never managed to kill even two of them before they start to move.  So I gave up on bee-killin’ and just focused on dodging them.

If I leap just as the third bee is spawned, they’ll zoom high, and I can run underneath, towards Hornet Man.  We’ll say he’s on the right for the example.  Jump over him, just in time for the bees to pull up behind me.  Then turn back left again, jump over the bees, and follow the boss closely.  The bees zoom off stage right, but they’ll have one last dash, and I can get hit in the back if I’m not well left at the time.  After that dash, they leave the screen, so get in position to repeat with the next set.  Popping the boss with buster shots whenever I can.

We can have confidence that there are better strategies for buster-only-ing Hornet Man.  (That’s right, “only-ing”.)  I’ve watched a few MM9 speedruns, but never any buster-only stuff, so this is just what I stumbled upon.