Streets of Rage Remake v5.2 - Roo, Mania (No Deaths, No Police Specials) - SoR2 Route

I never thought I'd actually get this; after years of practice and learning the game, I've pulled off a flawless victory of the SoR2 route, without dying and without using Police Specials to skip difficult enemy waves.

Jets are normally what you'd use Police Specials on. They are capable of dealing extreme amounts of damage, and are very fast as well as difficult to hit. The hardest Jet fight in the game is the one in Stage 5. The enemies on the ground really complicate things, and you only have an Apple to heal with while trying to evade multiple Jets at a time, whereas the boss of Stage 6 jumps around so much and is so susceptible to jump kicks that you can mostly ignore him and focus exclusively on the Jets. The Stage 6 and Stage 7 Jets have full health items you can use if you take significant damage, too. The Stage 2 boss fight can also be tricky if you accidentally (or on purpose) trigger all the other enemies by moving too far to the right, but it's far from unmanageable if you do so.

Other than the Jet fights, the major obstacles to this in this run are fights involving whip ladies alongside other enemies. The Stage 3 fight before the alien horror house is tricky because they appear alongside a knife guy who has lots of invulnerability on his attacks, the Stage 6 whip ladies appear with a crowd of bikers, and the final group in Stage 8 can get quickly out of hand. I had one of the best Stage 8 elevator fights ever this time!

Roo's back attack can't be blocked, making it a safe stunlock against
almost all enemies in the game, including otherwise terrifying enemies
like Shiva or Abadede. Abadede's always a major threat since his running punch can potentially 2 hit kill you, but Roo can deal with him fairly easily, and Abadede fortunately can't do a running punch from offscreen. The Stage 8 elevator fight is risky since there's limited space to move, and he can instantly rush you any time you're not hitting him.

Time limit is disabled, with Gauge Only (SoR3 style). SoRR's time limits aren't well implemented and version 5.2 still has a bug/design issue on Stage 7 of SoR2 route where you don't get a time refill once you reach the 4 robot bosses at the end, unlike BKII/SoR2 where you did get a time refill once the elevator reaches the top (as well as after each wave on the elevator!). Because Roo is so reliant on turtling in Stage 7 with his back attack, his kill speeds aren't great, and playing with the timer on will likely get you killed unless you're really aggressive and play risky from the kickboxer wave onwards. Actually, many of the weaker characters have trouble getting through here without running out of time (assuming you don't die and a free timer refill from that). I've have a time over happen on an otherwise perfect run when I got to the Stage 7 boss with 30 seconds on the clock, oof. Roo just doesn't have the raw damage per hit to rapidly speed through enemies, especially not 4 highly mobile bosses with x4 extra lifebars each unless you get REALLY lucky like I did here and line them all up and beat them down very quickly. Unless the last elevator fights are fixed so they refill the timer to 99, I sure as heck struggle to see how Elle could realistically beat all this in the time limit in 5.2 given her severe damage nerfs from 5.1. A full 99 on the timer is about 4 minutes, so you'd have to get through the last three waves of the Stage 7 fight in that time limit. Even on this run I would've gotten a Time Over during the Stage 7 boss. Roo is otherwise more than powerful enough to handle everything else if the time limit is enabled.

Time limits in arcade games existed so one person had a technically finite game time, but most good beat 'em ups (such as Capcom's offerings) had extremely generous time limits, but a time limiton every level doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a console beat 'em up anyways. Streets of Rage Remake's time limit issues are most apparently on Stage 7 of SoR2 route, but Streets of Rage Remake has very inconsistent time refills throughout the game in general, where some places you'd expect don't give a refill, some only refill to 75, and so on. The time limit doesn't really add anything fun to the game, and it's not well implemented compared to SoR1and SoR2's much more consistent time refills. Play with just the SoR3 Gauge for the best experience.

The brief black screen after I beat Mr. X was me alt-tabbing out of fullscreen excitedly to tell a friend I'd finally gotten the perfect run. I also accidentally skipped the special Mania ending, was rather annoyed about that. Oops. :/