Almost thought I would need to grind money in town to learn one of those judo attacks in order to beat this level... I like the challenge though. The boss wasn't anything special, just took a few tries to learn his patterns, but I kept getting to him on my last
7th level, now we actually get to Izumo which is where the wiseman tried to send us in the first place, to look for this white mirror... This level has birds that drop bombs from overhead. The town area is so small and cramped with enemies it's almost impossible to earn money here to restock my armor/pizza.. but fortunately the sidescrolling section here is pretty easy. It's a water-based level, the water acts like quicksand so it's easy enough to jump out if you fall, and the bomb-dropping birds are much easier to avoid here. The boss here is a dragon, very easy pattern, not a problem at all.. after beating him Goemon finds the water mirror, which talks and says that Princess Yuki has been taken to Ryukyu Island.
8th level, Ryuku Island. this town section involves buying a translation book since most of the villagers here, including the lord of Ryukyu Castle, speak in another language. That means having to grind enemies for money... There's a bunch of hidden passageways near the castle that have money and gold cat dolls... all of this is necessary because the sidescrolling section coming up is the hardest part of the game. After getting the translation book, the king tells you about a secret passage that leads to where the bad guys are. This hidden passage isn't available until after he tells you about it..
Now onto the sidescrolling section... The first couple rooms is just some simple obstacles that you can get by easily with the right timing. Next there's a platforming section with tons of hammer throwing enemies and instead death pits.. I died here tons of times, but later found that it was easiest just to run straight through as fast as possible. if you stop to kill enemies, you'll most likely keep scrolling the screen back and causing them to respawn.
After that is a miniboss that looks like a toy block tower thing. It has a very predictable pattern where it moves left and right one block at a time, and you just gotta jump ontop of its blocks to attack its head...
Then, the bridge disappears and Goemon falls down into a mine cart, which leads to this section with these moving circular platforms. Some of them move on their own, others move very fast when you are standing on them and stop when you are off them. This part took me a few game overs as well before I was able to get through it consistently. By now, I had enough practice that I was able to make it through most of the level without getting hit, and could now get to the boss with all my armor.
Princess Yuki is tied up on a platform, and as soon as you jump onto it, the boss appears underneath you and the platform starts moving in a square pattern around the boss... and you have to hit his head to make him topple over. The spike ball hands are the only thing that hurt you, and they move along with him as he starts toppling left and right.. falling off and dying instantly is mainly the only thing you have to worry about here.
Next is the 9th, final level. Yuki gets kidnapped by the leader of the bad guys who disguised himself as the emporor, and Goemon gets put into the castle prison. Yae comes and helps break you out.. this part of the game reminds me a lot of the last levels of the earlier NES/GB games. You can entire prison cells and talk to people here, and some of the prison cells even have shops and dojos... one of the jail cells has the emporor tied up in it. He tells Goemon the location of a hidden passage in the wall of the first prison cell at the beginning..
The secret tunnel leads outside to the last sidescrolling section of the game... this section seems like it's literally a direct nod to the "Mr. Goemon" arcade game, where you run across rooftops avoiding hoards of enemies.
Then you meet Yae at the top of a hill, she says that the bad guys are making counterfeit money and have used it to make Ryukyu Castle into a flying castle. Then you jump up some cloud platforms to reach the flying castle, and enter it for a couple of boss battle rematches, then the final boss... This shogun guy riding some kind of beast, and shooting arrows at you. First you have to hit the arrows back at him so that they hit the beast's head.. then after the beast is killed he starts rolling around the room and is really hard to dodge...
I tried several times to beat this boss, but just couldn't dodge his rolling consistently.. I decided this is where I'll actually grind for money in the prison area and get the invincible judo ability. With this ability, which costs a mesely 10 scrolls, Goemon swings his hair around like a rocker, and damages anything he touches. Once I got the 2400 ryo to learn the ability, and got to the shogun boss again, beating him was a piece of cake with that.
I'm glad I was finally able to beat this game. Aside from that last boss I did everything else the most legit way, by practicing the levels over and over until I got good at them, rather than grinding money to learn the game breaking judo attacks. This was definitely the hardest Goemon game I've played yet.
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