RKS:
I attempted and finished a no energy tank run of the Fortress stages with Fate. It wasn't as hard as I thought. The first two bosses are pushovers with the right strategy and barely bear mentioning. Death is trickier, there's no really safe way to dispatch of his scythe. I found Grolla's charged up laser useful enough to do the job. Death 2 was a joke this time, I got him in an infinite (ko) loop of jumping down, being whacked by Lilli and repeating. He didn't even get an attack off, it was awesome. Dracula is someone I already no tanked before and the battle went really well anyway.
The spider's not too hard. I died once but that was due to more general fuckupery on my part than anything else. Yellow Devil was a bit more challenging, but I pulled it off in part due to a nice bit of design. Unlike most Megaman games, you don't take damage being behind Yellow Devil as he goes from one side of the screen to the other. So once the back clears out you can hide out there if you take a hit. The boss rush wasn't noteworthy; the only hard one is Freudia and I had the timestopper charged up. Now Irismachine? The first form's easy, Lust Atom and jumping do it in with minimal damage. The second form's more of a stretch, but as long as you're quick with bombing it's not hard. I got it without much difficulty, yay.
As for Iris herself? Fuuuuuck. She's the boss I've fought the least since it's easy to just blow what tanks you have left to finish the game. Her first form's not too hard, but it's really easy to take stupid hits. If you mis anticipate what attack is coming, you'll usually take a hit trying to dodge the wrong way. I ended up blowing all my Lust Atom with charged shots to make this form go quicker. Iris 2 is a cast iron bitch. Between the feathers, the background, the attacks and the teleporting the level of visual clutter is immense. This really ruins my concentration and I got a few deaths from that. Ultimately, it's all about focusing on dodging and letting Lilli do the hard work. It's not that long an effort since she does two bars of damage per hit.
Fate's gameplay is well balanced. This play session reminded me of that; the game's construction makes everything a lot of fun. It's also why I dislike Rider mode(Amid other things), it's not so well balanced for her. Speaking of Rider mode, I gave the wall another few shots. Nothing doing there, but I didn't try too hard. It's not an impossible hump to get over, but I'm not attached enough to Grolla's gameplay to bother.
