Another data fight down, took a break on Xigbar because he's a stupid goofball I don't wanna deal with yet. Overall I'm pretty happy with this run outside of the few impulsive guards and mashes I had.
I know KH Tumblr is more on the casual side but considering there is like *no* try hard content I'll try to appeal to the absolute lack of demand or just show the more normal players some cool stuff. That being said I wanna explain how Vanitas works a tiny bit.
Sort of Vanitas guide?
If you hate having to react in fighting games, you'll hate Vanitas.
This guy is "think fast" personified. He has many attacks that are just barely reactable which are made with the sole intention of mixing you up so you'll impulsively block or mash which will let him punish you. It's pretty awesome. He'll always have some slight cues though, for example... You can tell if he'll followup after his firaga geysers by the height they're at. Low geysers with an extremely high one at the end means that he'll do a teleporting overhead slash that you can block and risk dodge. High geysers mean that Vanitas won't followup and you can just air step to him. You can also guard the firaga geysers to reprisal in some forced damage but this route is a bit riskier since you may sometimes get a classic "Osaka guard failure". Later on he'll begin to do a long drawn out combo where he shoots out keyblades but this is reactable since his lock on icon appears before the attack comes out so you'll know when to guard.
No forced reprisal damage.
Many of Bowl Boy's attacks do not allow you to reprisal them. This may seem obvious like "of course you can't break his armor with them" but some bosses allow you to get extra damage on them by abusing the invincibility frames of a reprisal. This means that you'll be able to cancel the reprisal into a guard to get a usually guaranteed perfect block so you would take absolutely no damage while getting out some damage and getting a perfect block.
For example, Young Xehanort's tempest combo attack has two parts. You can block the first, reprisal during the middle where he's not swinging and then block the next part of the attack and reprisal that one. This is hard to describe in text but you'll just feel it whenever you play a fight like that.
Due to how dark Sora teleports after a lot of his attacks, his hurtbox is already gone by the time his fade away animation is starting up. You can see an example of this whenever I reprisal his "You Wish"; notice how he takes no damage.
Just skip the desperation move
Repressed bisexual has two desperation moves in which he keyblade surfs. But just like Birth By Sleep, you can knock him off of it- only when he's jumping onto it though. The first one is easy enough to dodge since he just throws out some ice and you have to dodge roll/avoid his keysurf charge. The other one though, I don't know. Everyone just says to skip it. So uh, skip it. When you see him summoning those keys, just thunder.
Why are you using Shooting Star? Isn't Ultima/Oathblivion better?
Yeah but I like this keyblade. Also the Dark/Light forms can be somewhat problematic due to them removing Risk Dodge (the Dodge prompt that can appear vs Larxene or Vanitas) which can be annoying in certain situations when you're trying to do things effectively. You might have also noticed or will soon notice that I don't use arrow guns. This is because it has no guard so it sucks for this fight. You'd need to really experiment to see how you need to specifically dodge these situations. Also since magic shoots from the gun and doesn't just spawn to who you're locked to, it'll be delayed when getting to the gremlin which can be problematic to prevent his keyblade surf attacks.
