Mega Man Four Hounds - Intro Stage [No Miss Challenge]

Buster Only, No Charge, No Damage, No Miss.
Attempts: • Mega Man Four Hounds N... (2 hours and 12 minutes)
So the recently released 4H demo is pretty hard, or so they say. Well, I checked it and indeed, it is pretty damn brutal. And honestly, I love it. This is not a game where you can scrape by through a stage taking hits and getting a lucky health pickup. It's all about learning and improvement. From my experience, after just beating a stage once you're almost guaranteed to already have the skills for a relatively clean low damage run. I've never been so happy to hear the stage clear jingle in my life.
Seeing the massive gap between the first and second playthroughs of a stage, I was motivated to take the learning to the extreme and attempt the mythical No Miss challenge - a sadistic upgrade on the Buster Only No Damage run that adds a whole extra layer of planning and requires you to know the stage inside and out. Who knows if I'll actually get to completing it, considering what the Robot Master stages do, but it's worth a try.
Now about the stage itself. It's only the intro stage but there's already plenty to worry about. It's heavily built around the mechanic of charge shots breaking shields and is chock full of armoured enemies. Something you definitely DON'T want to deal with in a run where charge shots are forbidden and getting a shot blocked is a loss. Much of the run is therefore about dancing around and through the enemies instead of facing them in combat.
It's a bit tight but jumps over Joes on flat ground are definitely doable. By far the most annoying enemy are the purple flying fuckers, they pretty much all require a careful plan to deal with them. The room at 0:50 took me approximately way too many damn attempts before I found a consistent setup. The stage gets much easier past the checkpoint, at least until the boss that is.
The giant spider is quite a piece of work for an intro boss. To start off, you're at the mercy of RNG on whether or not it'll spawn eggs - if it does you can pretty much kiss the run goodbye. You also have to avoid getting cornered at all costs, cause that's also a guaranteed loss when it shoots those cannonballs. On top of all that, you have to be extra careful with your shots because it can deploy its blocking fist at a moments notice. You'll have to fire a lot less than it seems possible, or you risk a block. The webs don't do damage but to make the run presentable I made it a rule to avoid them as well (and those throughout the stage).
That's it for this stage, and it's a piece of cake compared to what follows. God help me.

[@ClownBoi]

programer here for 4h and just... dang man, thats fast

[@retropixel1272]

I can't imagine you going through Scorch Woman and Static Man while doing that No Miss Challenge

[@woodfrog9614]

Did a bit of attempts on both. Scorch seems doable with the right setups and a lot of practice on the boss. Static... might have to wait for the final game lol

[@retropixel1272]

@@woodfrog9614 Well. there's gonna be a Next demo that Improves it. Hopefully Scorch's stage got toned down, also after listening to Napalm Man's theme. I'm surprised that you are continuing The Sequel Wars, and i would really love to see how MM5 Turns out

[@moisehurtadosaez4229]

Hey woodfrog can you upload the boss fight theme of the megaman four hounds intro stage PLEASE!!!

[@raycastello2532]

Beautiful. Are you going to do something like this? It was very cool this classic look as an option

[@segamkiii]

This demo had arranged music?

[@woodfrog9614]

Yes, you can enable it in the audio settings. it's pretty cool.