La-Mulana - Wishbringer

[Crow]

you paused through it like 5 times but when you get to this room you can see the pedestal in the background being raised up, that's the tell

also viy is absolutely as awful and terrible as he looks. i almost quit the game because i got so frustrated trying to beat him.

the sequel managed to have an even worse boss somehow, though

[Tenlade]

while you can drain like 3/4ths of his hp at the start if youre reallly good and fast with the whip, viy is usually one of my top candidates for "forget this, just use the gun " boss.

Viy is also vulnerable when his eye is half open.

you can also kill the little demons to delay his eye opening as well.

Question: Is there a method for the One Arm / One Finger achievements for Viy that doesn't involve a bunch of face-tanking?

you can still use the sheild to block projectiles in a one arm/finger run so its just a matter of blocking the projectile, jumping to the eye and stabbing it, then jumping away.

[Voltgloss]

Question: Is there a method for the One Arm / One Finger achievements for Viy that doesn't involve a bunch of face-tanking?

For those unfamiliar: the achievements Draexzhan's asking about are achievements for beating all of the guardians and the final boss without using subweapons. One Arm is doing so on normal mode. One Finger is doing so on hard mode.

In my opinion, the four most important elements (in no particular order, except that the last one is a spoiler) are:

- Using the better-air-control-during-double-jumps method described by FPZero above.

- Patience later in the fight, when Viy starts angling the laser and destroying more of the platforms. Rather than charge the eyestalk every time it emerges, I prefer towards the end of the fight to wait until it extends WITHOUT the laser first having been fired, so I have far more intact platform space to attack it.

- Relying on the Silver Shield, which can be used for the One Arm / One Finger achievements without repercussions. It can block the small fireballs launched when the eyestalk extends AND the small beams fired by the extended eye.

- Facing this battle with better damage output and better defense than raocow currently has. Both of which is possible.

[Voltgloss]

also viy is absolutely as awful and terrible as he looks. i almost quit the game because i got so frustrated trying to beat him.

the sequel managed to have an even worse boss somehow, though

Spoilers for the sequel:

Which boss? If you're thinking the boss of Icefire Treetops, that fight has changed significantly and is much fairer after the most recent patches.

[Sebby19]

@Parama: Oh wow, I didn't even notice myself during the video.

It's a good thing the area underneath Viy led to the Chamber of Extinction, and not some infinite lava pit.

[Awoo]

But then he used the gun on Sakit.

And he felt guilty afterwards. And never touched the gun after that, despite facing much more frustrating bosses.

He probably just doesn't like juggling more than one weapon at a time.

Isn't that called using skill

Let's hunt down the person that suggested that and stuff bananas in their closet

If it's Donkey Kong that would be a real treat

So will raocow ever use the gun again? The ammo is super expensive but he's still got 4 shots and he did go out of the way on the Sakit fight to save them...

[Sebby19]

Here's is Viy's full size, as promised. Image from the original's manual.

[S.N.N.]

Spoilers for the sequel:

Which boss? If you're thinking the boss of Icefire Treetops, that fight has changed significantly and is much fairer after the most recent patches.

Would have guessed Echidna, who was a total shitshow of a boss. I couldn't beat her without the gun, whereas with the boss of Icefire Treetops, you could at least hang onto the wall and not fall into the bottomless pits.

[Kleetus]

As for Viy's lore, I'll leave that to someone else.

Did someone ring?

Viy (Вий) is an antagonist from Nikolai Gogol's story of the same name. In the story, a witch takes posthumous revenge on her killer by summoning forth demons. The demons are lead by Viy, a horrible creature whose eyelids are so long that he requires lesser demons to prop them up to see. Mortals die from terror by looking into Viy's eyes. Gogol explained that Viy was a character from Ukrainian folklore, but this was just for flavour, scholars agree Viy is an original character. The story is popular in Eastern Europe, having multiple movie adaptations.

Вий.jpg (21.86 KiB) Viewed 7148 times

Viy the movie.jpg (18.65 KiB) Viewed 7148 times

Viy in THREE-DEE.jpg (30.05 KiB) Viewed 7148 times

The miniboss was Thuderbird. La-Mulana's Thuderbird is most similar to the Algonquian version. Here, Thuderbird rules the upperworld. Thuderbird's wingflaps create lightning which he hurls at underworlders to keep them in line.

[Crow]

Spoilers for the sequel:

Which boss? If you're thinking the boss of Icefire Treetops, that fight has changed significantly and is much fairer after the most recent patches.

Would have guessed Echidna, who was a total shitshow of a boss. I couldn't beat her without the gun, whereas with the boss of Icefire Treetops, you could at least hang onto the wall and not fall into the bottomless pits.

nah i meant surtr, glad to hear they made him not Literally Just RNG

[Filbi]

Let's hunt down the person that suggested that and stuff bananas in their closet

plot twist: it was Donkey Kong

[Validon98]

Viy's just kind of the worst in general and manages to win one of those "hard for the wrong reasons" awards. If there's any boss to use your "free" clip of bullets on it's this one (and maybe Sakit too but Sakit can be put off until you get stuff like chain whip and whatever, in theory at least), and even then Viy has enough HP to just barely survive an entire clip.

[ZephyrBurst]

Using sub-weapons or not is viable and no shame in any method. Also I approve of the facetank method for most bosses in La-Mulana since almost all of them are kinda bad. (Don't actually do that to the remaining ones, you won't have a good time doing that.) Viy and Bahamut I feel are the most jank due to the game's weird jump mechanics.
Except for,

Baphomet, Tiamat, and final boss. Those are good. I honestly just facetanked Tiamat on my first playthrough, but after doing a randomizer, I realized she has a lot of structure and noticeable telegraphs.
Likewise, (sequel stuff)

Echidna does too, which again I didn't really catch on a first playthrough. Doing the 'One Finger' achievement, I realized she's just as structured as Tiamat.

Regarding the mention of Surtr above. I honestly like his release version with the pit better. They replaced the pit with lava and now there's approximately 10000x more falling rocks. The new version is fine and a lot less 'trolly?' than the release one, but I just kinda laughed way too much during my first attempt that lasted all of 5 seconds due to the pit. There's a certain experience and learning curve that I like about the boss that will be missed for anyone who didn't get to play the release version.

[Crow]

@zephyr he was not the slightest bit fun. that's all there is too it. anything to make him less unfun is an improvement

[raocow]

when things open up but almost immediately shut you down

[CrappyBlueLuigi]

@zephyr he was not the slightest bit fun. that's all there is too it.

hard disagree

(la-mulana 2 spoilers, since that's what's being talked about right now, for anyone not reading spoilers)

the pit and the way the rocks work is objectively unfair in a lot of situations with surtr, but at the same time i walked out of my winning attempt against him satisfied because i figured out how to deal with the rocks over the course of dying over and over, and i figured out how to comfortably space myself to get a lot of good hits in on him when his face was in the foreground. surtr telegraphs everything he does so hard it's absurd, so it becomes a game of switching between "get in and smack the shit outta him" and keeping an eye on what ground you're standing on and how that ground will change in the next five seconds. i found it really engaging!

i'm not trying to say "hey, stop saying you didn't like the boss and had an awful time with it", i just had fun with it and don't want "this boss is objectively awful" to be the only narrative

[Voltgloss]

when things open up but almost immediately shut you down

Every La-Mulana player can relate.
Take heart; you continue to make tremendous progress, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

[ZephyrBurst]

when things open up but almost immediately shut you down

After the Viy kill and your ending the video with "So much opened up." I kinda figured this comment was coming. It was around this part of the game that I was also stuck roaming for what seemed like forever.

To the above LM2 stuff:

I can see him not being fun for a lot of people, I feel it's a borderline bad boss, but with how LM wants people to approach bosses, I'd have to say both versions (pit or no) are fine. Things like using the whip or axe to hit overhead rocks when your playable space is limited helps. Realizing the walls can be grappled, and one that helps with accidental floor breaking is turning off the Vajra.

[Arctangent]

honestly i just feel like a lot of the bosses are really clear about whether or not aggressive melee combat is meant to be an effective strategy against them

like, there have been several that had significant "hang" time where their hitboxes are easily covered by the arc of at least one melee weapon. but then you have cases where there are a lot of times where you could technically hit them without subweapons, but doing so takes a huge amount of precision to not get hit back. that doesn't read like the primary way to defeat them - it reads as a way to reward opportunistic players who already have a strong grasp on the jump with a quicker boss kill

la-mulana is a hard game for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that it expects the player to be critical, attentive, and resourceful, and it has high expectations

[Alice]

Even the useless Caltrops could find a use here!

What do you mean useless? Filling Viy's eye with caltrops is very effective and using them to get down ladders quicker is absolutely useful.

Would have guessed Echidna, who was a total shitshow of a boss. I couldn't beat her without the gun, whereas with the boss of Icefire Treetops, you could at least hang onto the wall and not fall into the bottomless pits.

The last couple guardians were all bullshit in their own way. Surtr was the least shitty for me simply because I accidentally found a way to manipulate his moves before an update that made him fairly easy. Echidna pissed me off most. It's like they looked at Tiamat and went "how can we not only make this harder but also take all the fun out of the fight?" I wanted to like Echidna since Tiamat was my favorite guardian in the first game but she was shit and the only reason she wasn't the worst guardian was because they insisted on trying their hardest to make Hel and Surtr awful. Entire game felt like they used Hell Temple as the inspiration for the game rather than what actually made the original fun.

[Crow]

honestly don't remember hel or echidna much which I guess means I didn't have many problems with them. jormungandr sucked too iirc but him and surtr were the only bosses I remember not liking much

[Voltgloss]

La-Mulana 2 spoiler: I agree with (and had similar experiences to) ZephyrBurst regarding

Echidna

.

[Draexzhan]

raocow didn't see Lemeza's father, but if you listen carefully you do hear a whip crack.

Actually, if raocow had gone to the sphinx room from the Spring in the Sky instead, you would get a brief glimpse of Lemeza's dad dropping dropping down the water drain.

Also, question,

is there a hint somewhere that indicates that the Tower of the Goddess would be accessible from the surface now, and if so, where is it?

[Reverning]

It's not just Xelputt, every dialogue npc has different lines for items currently equipped.

Although in this case, I don't think Mulbruk or the Fairy Queen have lines for dad's talisman.

oh boy I just realized what raocow needs to do. Because raocow already explored shrine of the mother, he has no reason to go back and just assume lameza's dad will be there

[repairmanman]

raocow got me back into playing la mulana 2

I can't believe that such a major bug, that when the gate of the dead is flipped you can't interact with the seals, is still in the game. I literally cannot finish the area.

lemeza's dad?

the plot thickens

he forgot to equip the talisman before talking to xelpud >.> edit: he did it!

oh yeah, he can do the dropping pillar thing in the shrine of the mother now. or at least touch the pillar and then talk to xelpud and then go back to it