Hexblade

Funny, I intended to play entries from the latest Boss Rush Jam, but I found your entry Magical Girl Game Jam Mystic Matrix first, then saw this much earlier Boss Rush Jam entry on your profile!

I’m playing boss rush games as a study for my own boss fight game, and it was very interesting. The first bosses have very simple patterns, Boss 2 with horizontal shots at different levels and Boss 3 with vertical shots, rather slow yet require good timing and to pay attention for the pre-spell hints on the screen.

The last one suddenly switches to homing attacks that can go diagonally and that was much harder, until I realized you could hit the daggers, making it much easier. I stopped playing wildly and played safe dodging the large sword, it was much more reliable.

The art is also impressive! I myself gave up on higher dimension sprites which I found too hard to animate, but I see how you made the main character with a big sprite yet using flat surfaces so it’s not too complicated (unlike the bosses) and easier to animate. Maybe I’ll try this later. But the bosses are still big and complex, I don’t think I’d be able to draw like that for now.

The face art is also great, the dithering makes it really look vintage. It also contributes to showing the character personality, which you’d expect to be just a flat, basic character for the jam, but instead it shows confidence, is even a little cocky. I noticed the Blade Master’s face art later, I think a bug caused its face not to appear on the first line of dialogue before the last fight but after that it appears correctly and is also detailed, yet old school.

Now for some issues I found (although it’s an old jam so I don’t expect patches, but good to know):

MC design

• MC can flip direction at anytime even during a grounded attack! But the place where it was the most useful was during the air spin sword attack: it starts with a circular motion forward, then on the back side. So if you jump, attack, and flip mid-way it reverses the 2nd phase of the circular attack from back to front attack, allowing a second hit! Using this during the last boss allows you to double the hits, you can now land 4 hits and sometimes 5 if you also hit during the 1st jump, then double jump, attack, flip back, flip front, attack again, flip back. Pretty cool!
• The floaty jump then linear fall feels a bit weird but I suppose it’s OK gameplay-wise, there is no surprise where you go.
• Curse was never an issue for me. Maybe it’s a balance thing, but even when spamming attacks including the Air Spin flip mentioned above, I could never empty the Curse gauge. Now if it was well balanced, I’m still not sure if it’d be a good idea, as the player must already do a lot of effort to dodge attacks (esp. daggers/swords) and land some hits, so a careful approach is already rewarded by not getting hurt; and you’d want to reward players who are really agile and able to land many hits while dodging the attacks. But I can’t really say for sure, maybe the Curse would work in some circumstances, like the Elemental Overload in CrossCode.

Boss design

• Boss 1: I tried to do the classic “wait for huge attack and go behind it to attack it from behind” but it flips immediately when you go behind it. It looks weird considering it’s a huge mass, and even more during a heavy attack. That means the only way to escape the bug sword git is to escape farther from the boss, but then it’s not fun and takes some time to come back at it to damage it again. It’s quite common in other games where you cannot roll behind the enemy but the sword is so huge, you have to go very far and it kinda breaks the pacing.
• Boss 2: I tried to land several hits during the 3 spot fire phase, but I only got hurt. I suppose it’s better to wait and dodge (the crouch is great here, to dodge the middle or high fireball without having to jump - in my own game, the character is so small than crouching doesn’t really help, so a taller sprite makes it more useful). Unless pro gamers know a trick or too like jump to dodge a low fireball then land a hit anyway?
• Boss 3: I found it annoying at first I had to wait for a seemingly random number of thunder phases before having the boss come down so I can hit it. Turns out with the right timing, I can lure it and force it to go down every time after a thunder. But the timing wasn’t really clear at first, it seemed random as even if I would go under it a little late, it would refuse to come down. Boss 4: the sinusoidal wave fireball pattern appeared at the end, I could never dodge it correctly (always had troubles with that, as in Freedom Planet), I went far away to see it better and kinda dodged the remaining fireballs, then attacked and defeated the boss. Maybe if the pattern appeared earlier it would have forced to learn it better. Unless it was randomly picked?
• Flame system: maybe this wasn’t implemented? Or I didn’t pay attention as I didn’t see the flames go off during the fight, yet I wasn’t super fast either.
• Boss 5: daggers appearing out of nowhere are not an isue when small, but for the big sword it could be a problem if you’re mid jump and there’s no easy way to dodge it as it immediately flies at you.

Progression

• I appreciate checkpoints, this was an issue with other Boss Rush Jam games where I had to start from scratch and there couldn’t train beating a single boss. I prefer training on each boss, then do the real rush after beating the game once for speedrunning.
• The skill unlock is nice! Although I didn’t understand the Air Spin at first, I thought I had to first press Attack then Jump (but maybe I just misread)

Controls

• I tested gamepad, it didn’t work, and there was no control mapping on the page description so I assumed it was not done. Later, I discovered you had to select it in the controls settings! Since this is the first game on your profile and it’s easy to change the itch page description, I suggest that for now, you just add control layout (you can put the gamepad layout screenshot from the game) and add the instruction player must select the wanted layout in the Options. This way, no need to touch the game itself, yet players will be more likely to try the gamepad!
• I think it’d be better to just enable all control layouts unless they conflict with each other. Currently Keyboard A and B do not overlap, and the gamepad never overlaps with keyboard, so all of them could be active, so the player can just test the layouts, test the gamepad and pick their favorite device/layout. Of course for more complex games it’s okay to pick between A and B, but still the gamepad could just always be enabled.
• On my SNES-like controller, I had to use the left and top button instead of bottom and left for jump and attack resp. But I know not all game engines have great mapping (although nowdays Godot, Unity and Unreal all support button definition by placement up-down-left-right; some still reverse A and B on Nintendo-style gamepads but it’s rare that they confuse them with top and left buttons)

Bugs

• when restarting game after finishing it, the Double Jump / Air Step skill is not reset, so you can use it from the start. In fact, if it wasn’t a bug I’d say it’s clever to ahve a New Game+ when you can use all the skills from the start

It would be useful if you mentioned in the controls that holding jump made you jump higher.

i just finished the game and man was it heck of a game i hope to see this gae become an entire saga

this was actually a really cool game, I actually died on the post game section sadly but I got back and beat it again. It was worth it

The game's a little bit challenging. Though, I managed to beat the game! It was a fun game! :D

I really like the character designs , has a rich GBA feel to it and I wish there some kind of follow-up contest specifically for adding onto your existing past entries...  Call it " Replay Contest " or something...  I went on a rant thanks for readin'!