#pro strats

Last year, I unveiled an accomplishment that I was particularly proud of at the time: a perfect run of Plague Knight's boss battle from Shovel of Hope without resorting to the Phase Locket. Not only did this feat kickstart other perfect runs I'd eventually go on to pull off, but it wouldn't have been possible without the practice that went into it.

In said post, I make a passing mention about how it took me anywhere between two to three hours to finally nail a damageless run against Plague Knight, to the point where I had memorized his attack patterns and what phase of the fight came when. And, to its credit, it's still a pretty solid performance!

But anyone who knows me knows that my perfectionism knows no bounds. Now that I knew that I was capable of perfect running one of the most unpredictable bosses in the game, I began to wonder: could I beat Plague Knight without taking damage faster than my original time of thirty-five seconds?

Well, if the above video is any indication, than yes! It took oodles of practice to get a run a swift as this one and have the whole run fit into the Nintendo Switch's thirty second limit video capture— at one point I had a pretty good fifteen second run completed, but with the way I recorded it, it was missing a few frames in-battle and wouldn't have looked good edited together.