Astro Boy - Omega Factor [Hard] Part 17 {Final Stage} - World's Greatest Adventure (NO DAMAGE)

► Playlist with playthrough:    • [GBA] Astro Boy - Omega Factor  
Action starts at 00:22. And timestamps below too.
Anyway this is the end. For real.

Took me a whole week to finish the beast of a level, no thanks to that motherflipping last section. Oh, how much I hate, HATE that part...

Beginning - 00:00
Level Start - 00:22

Boss list:
* Magnamite - 03:59
* Artificial Sun - 05:13
* Carabs - 07:10
* Sharaku Hosuke - 09:25
* Garon - 13:23

Last segments:
* Saving Earth - 17:58
* Ending - 20:03
* Post-credits secret - 27:55

The final stage doesn't play around. It has the toughest shoot 'em up section, a boss rush and the final boss all in one long, action filled pack. The level itself wasn't the problem here, the last segment, the one you play after defeating the real final boss was... Read more below if you want to know the whole story.

After doing this all I have to say is... I'm dead sick of the music that plays until you fight Sharaku.

Speaking of him, this is the final duel against Elmer Fudd's evil eastern cousin and he has a new nasty trick: Death Mask. Sharaku will activate that thing as soon as you approach the center of the arena and Death Mask will fire a beam pillar that will instantly kill Astro if it so as much scratch him.

Death Mask's activation is proximity based, as soon as you approach the central area it will activate and fire, but if you keep your distance (not easy given Sharaku's penchant for using attacks that forces you to move a lot) Death Mask will not fire.

Sharaku is still nothing to sneeze at, the fact he makes the central area of the arena a death trap can REALLY throw you off and make you fly right into one of his attacks. Combine that with his other instant kill, the falling rocks, and you got a recipe for a very hectic fight.

Garon comes right after him and is one of the most obnoxious fights in the game. You can only hurt him when he exposes Pick, his core, and he's almost always attacking whenever he does, so you need to be careful.

Garon can throw rocks at you, fire projectiles and do a ground pound attack, the last one is an instant death attack if it connects, moreover the hands can hit you and the attack lingers for longer than it looks, so it's very easy to get caught off-guard by this thing and get thrown to the game over screen.

The biggest issue with Garon is that the Shot Super is useless against him. Even if you hit Pick with this he won't be stunned and will retreat back inside Garon, so the Laser and Punch Supers are generally more preferable unless you need a instant invincibility to avoid damage.

After defeating Garon you have to travel through a segment full of debris and survive until the in-game counter reaches 47 seconds. This is easier said than done since this fucking segment is kind of random with how the debris fly and I lost more attempts to record this damn thing in this segment than I did fighting Sharaku and Garon, I'm not even kidding.

Unrelated to gameplay: It still bugs me how and Pluto comes to help Astro since they've never met in this timeline. The robots and Sharaku taking control over Death Mask are (sort of ) explained by his ability to control robot minds in "Lost World", but Pluto just comes out of nowhere here. Hrm.