Bioshocker

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,206
Sweden
The perfect final boss. I remember being 11 years old and beating it. Jumping up Robotnik's ass time and time again, with no room for error. Perfection.
 

Bioshocker

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,206
Sweden
I feel special then cause I beat Sonic 2 in like 4th or 5th grade and Super Metroid in like 6th. Dunno how I managed but I did it lol (I'm 38 yrs old now)

I was shaking like a leaf fighting both bosses on Sonic 2 thought cause back in THOSE days, Game Over is GAME OVER. No save states, no nothing. No rings just made it torture.

I had the exact same feeling. Gosh, that "no room for error" feeling. Those were the days. I've beat the final boss in Sonic 2 so many times that it's not even fun anymore, but I suck at older games in general today. My 40+ self is simply too slow!
 
Oct 31, 2017
12,215
Sonic 2 is so dang easy. I can definitely see how it'll catch you off guard because you do have to learn the patterns with no room for error, but the patterns aren't difficult and in all, Sonic 2's bosses I feel give more opportunities to hit them than any other 2D Sonic game I can think of (never really played much of Advance).

Mecha Sonic probably isn't a good boss because if left to live, I don't think there's really a way to tell if he's going to spin dash or spin and jump or if spikes will bust out of him or not, so it's pure memorization if you can't beat him quickly. But since he just stands there for a while, you only really need to know the first two or three moves he does (spin dash, flying back and forth and vulnerable, spin and jump), which he does every time. You just jump three or four times on him when he stands there and he's finished in 8 seconds or so.

Dr. Robotnik has plenty of tells, and the thing is, you can hit him in between each step he makes, making short work of him in a way you can't do in Sonic 3 or Knuckles or even Sonic 1. Unless you play with Knuckles -- I'd say he's legitimately a harder boss with him, or at least one with more patience since you can only hit Dr. Robotnik during a few spots.
 

Pachinko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
974
Canada
I played through sonic 2 dozens of times before I finally got to the end with enough lives to get through that final boss , I loved it to be honest. I cleared it legit but with only a couple chaos emeralds only once but there was a debug mode shared in the back of a game pro magazine when I was kid that made the game even more fun for me. You could spawn 7 emeralds , grab them all and then spawn 50 rings and play as super sonic for the whole game or even skip stages , it was great ! I do imagine in todays world the idea of having to replay the entire game for another shot at Cyber sonic and the egg mech if you game over is a hard sell for most but as you replayed the game and memorized the best routes , earned 30 extra lives on casino night zone and keep a half dozen continues ? It got easier and easier to make it further and further without dying or using a continue. I'm thinking I must have been able to play through to the end in less than hour at one point. I found sonic 1 and 3 to be MUCH harder games to play through , I never did beat sonic 1 without cheats. I did clear sonic and knuckles as both characters once each though.
 

Het_Nkik

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,438
So as a 7 year old, I remember getting stuck on robot Sonic forever. Took a lot of tries before I figured out the pattern to short hop into his face while he's sliding which just lets you pass through his body. And then the Robotnik fight was really easy comparatively. He's slow, and only does a few very telegraphed moves and there are a lot of opportunities to get hits in on him.

The real challenge came when Sonic & Knuckles came out. Fighting the last boss in Sonic 2 as Knuckles is how I learned that Knuckles can't jump as high as Sonic, because you can't clear Robotnik's spiked hand to hit him in the chest as Knuckles; you can only hit him when he lands and his knees bend for a second.
 

Mupod

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,945
I practiced it by using the debug mode cheats and eventually could beat it pretty easily on a 'real' run.
 

BossAttack

Member
Oct 27, 2017
43,290
I'll never forget my cousin beating these two final bosses for me and my brothers because we couldn't do it.
 

GlassCup64

Member
Dec 16, 2017
1,144
It's a very challenging fight. I agree that the giant Robotnik should probably only be eight hits or so.
 

RagnarokX

Member
Oct 26, 2017
15,853
Look at this beautiful man.


latestcb2020090503484lvc0j.jpg
Gotta love the MS on his upper arm to mimic the MG on Mechagodzilla's. They were clear with their inspiration.
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5VJs9O5_d.webp


It was planned to have even more similarities to Mechagodzilla. It was going to have an eye laser, finger missiles, and shoot a gravity bullet from its chest. Tails was going to be trapped inside it.

I always thought this one was Mecha Sonic, and the 8-Bit Sonic 2 one with the goggles was Silver Sonic.
That one was also called Mecha Sonic officially. Silver Sonic was never official.
 
Oct 25, 2017
4,915
Incredibly easy??

You can't be serious. So when you were 8 years old encountering this for the first time you thought this boss was incredibly easy and would be baffled by comments about difficulty? Like I'm sure you have discovered the perfect way to annihilate these bosses, but coming at them without special knowledge, surely you accept that this is a much greater challenge than anything else in the game, right?
Granted this was in 1992, so my memory could be betraying me, but I definitely remember struggling way more with some of the other stage bosses a lot more and I remember getting the shit kicked out of me by the Sonic 1 final boss a lot.

All of the NES, SNES, and Genesis games I really really struggled with are burned into my mind. Ninja Gaiden, TMNT 1, Gunstar Heroes, Street Fighter 2, and a ton more. Even games I rarely hear mentioned as far as difficulty go, like Ducktales and Super Mario 2, I struggled like hell with. Sonic 2 is nowhere to be found in those memories.

Now I'm curious to go and try to beat it and see if it kicks my ass 30+ years later.
 

Unknownlight

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 2, 2017
10,665
It's a poorly designed boss. It delivers the one-two punch of being basically impossible before you figure out when he's vulnerable, and then once you do it becomes a long, trivially easy and boring fight.

 

Virtua King

Banned
Dec 29, 2017
4,026
Eh, it's scary at first, but they both have a very readable pattern. For your first attempt, just be patient, honestly. Sonic 1's boss did the same thing, but it was even easier.
 

Menome

"This guy are sick"
Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,459
I would also like to point out that for the first several attempts on a small and crappy CRT TV, a friend and I couldn't even tell Mecha Sonic was shooting out spikes when it jumped. That's what we were working with. And in 50hz PAL disadvantage mode.
 

galvatron

Member
Oct 27, 2017
971
Austin, TX
Yeah, I agree with the OP.

I only played sonic 2 at length as an adult since I never had a genesis growing up. I played on original hardware and I've yet to go back and finish up that last robot boss.

My first run was with knuckles and after a bit that just seemed too broken. I was super knuckles and just wrecking the place. Restarted as sonic not to cheapen the first time finishing. Tails started getting on my nerves with being character I had to control by anticipating the AI which was screwing ip ring collection and getting me killed on a boss where tail got the final hit as I was jumping which turned off the boss' hit detection. I go flying through a dead boss into lava and die…Then I ran into known freeze bugs by getting super sonic early into a run on the original cart then switched to the sonic classics cart where I read online that it was silently patched. After that I ended up wasting all of my continues a couple of runs just failing to beat last form of the boss. I finally looked up what I was supposed to do, but just never got back around to completing the run.

TL;DR: I got gud before trying to beat the game as an adult with no save states and technical problems and the last boss make that a terrible idea
 
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RagnarokX

Member
Oct 26, 2017
15,853
It's a poorly designed boss. It delivers the one-two punch of being basically impossible before you figure out when he's vulnerable, and then once you do it becomes a long, trivially easy and boring fight.


Eh, if you know when to hit it it becomes a pretty short fight. The problem is not having rings discourages experimentation so you'll never figure out the fastest kill.

Fastest kill:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkCLaaeRhEw

Safer but still fast kill:

View: https://youtu.be/LiH6LFm7T9Y?t=158

Basically you can safely attack his chest when he first rises and then every time his legs overlap. And you can hit him as he lands.
So 5 hits before he takes off. 1 hit each time he lands. 4 hits as he walks around again. And then the final hit when he lands. 2 cycles.
 

Nali

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,685
I couldn't give an accurate accounting of what it's like to learn these bosses because they've been ingrained in my brain for decades, but Mecha Sonic is all about learning to be aggressive and DER is all about learning to be patient (until you really understand him and know one of the various ways to tear him apart too). And you'd get to that point by just trying over and over again. Game isn't that long, the more you played it the more lives and continues you'd make it there with, and the level select code was well publicized anyway.
 

RagnarokX

Member
Oct 26, 2017
15,853
I couldn't give an accurate accounting of what it's like to learn these bosses because they've been ingrained in my brain for decades, but Mecha Sonic is all about learning to be aggressive and DER is all about learning to be patient (until you really understand him and know one of the various ways to tear him apart too). And you'd get to that point by just trying over and over again. Game isn't that long, the more you played it the more lives and continues you'd make it there with, and the level select code was well publicized anyway.
The problem with this is having to input Yuji Naka's birthday over and over :(
 

AaronMT

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,642
Toronto
Z7HeRxU.png

In all seriousness, I remember it being very hard as a kid. Until you learn the boss pattern of attacks. You can "one phase" Metal Sonic by just bouncing on it before it spins.
 

greyshark

Member
Oct 27, 2017
146
St. Louis
I thought I read somewhere that the jump physics for Origins wasn't quite the same as the original games, and this made the precise jumping necessary for Robotnik more difficult than before. I beat this game as a 10 year old and did not remember having as hard a time with it as I did playing through Origins. I remember getting most of my hits on him as he walked.
 

Cromat

Member
Mar 17, 2019
677
You were supposed to die multiple times and play through the entire game again. It was high stakes. The whole game is a few hours long so this gave it longevity. Me and my brother beat it a few times but it was never guaranteed.
 

Kapryov

"This guy are sick"
Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,177
Australia
Yeah I had a lot of trouble with this as a kid - and even when replaying as an adult - as for some reason I thought you could only damage Eggman in the crotch area. Just a little tiny mistake would be instant death.
I only learned you could hit him in the chest/head area last year. I've been playing this game since 1993…

I'm much faster at beating him now.
Still easy to mess up though.

S3&K actually does something similar with its own Death Egg mech. While you can bring rings to the fight, if you die then the checkpoint is the start of the fight where there aren't any rings at all, so you'll be ringless. You can get around this in Sonic Origins by fully exiting and restarting the game though, iirc, since its own savestate takes priority.
 

Spinluck

▲ Legend ▲
Avenger
Oct 26, 2017
28,757
Chicago
i choked so hard on this a bunch of times but eventually, once me and my brother got the pattern down we'd smoke through it.

Sonic 2 was such a fantastic game.
 

smuf

Member
Oct 27, 2017
533
This was my first console game and the final 2 bosses fucked me up as a kid. I can pretty much do it from memory now though.
 
Oct 28, 2017
1,162
I honestly don't know how I beat it when I was 9. I don't think I could do it today. But yea that ending sequence was a giant pita.
 

VariantX

Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,968
Columbia, SC
It definitely felt hard by Sonic standards but we were so used to worse shit at the time that for me it was just whatever.

Yep. It was relatively fair compared to most shit back then. Its an endurance battle for sure but both bosses have either highly predictable or controllable behavior so once you get used to what they do you can pretty much beat them in your sleep. If anything this section is probably the only reason why continues even matter in this game given how rings work. The version of the eggman robo in sonic mania is a way more fun and interesting boss than the sonic 2 boss.
 

The Deleter

Member
Sep 22, 2019
3,555
In theory I could live with those two

But being preceded by this?

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I have resentment of a thousand suns towards those spinning platforms for taking away so many of my lives lol
 

Jacknapes

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,213
Newport, South Wales
Sonic 2 is such a good game. Metal Sonic was easy to get through, however as a kid i did struggle with the Robot Robotnik. Took me a while, but once i learned his pattern and how to hit it in the right spot, it was decent. Definitely harder with Knuckles

However, on the M2 Sonic, both bosses are easier as you can start each level with 10 rings and coupled with Save states as well.