The final boss was the most difficult and frustrating part of the game for me, so I wanted to share some strategies that make it easier.
How to beat the boss
The final boss in this game is extremely hard, and I found it really frustrating. After I beat it once, I wanted to beat it again to get a different ending. But it took me two hours of slamming my head against it just to beat it a second time. Since then, I’ve figured out some strategies that make it a lot more manageable, so I wanted to share them.
There’s a demonstration video at the end of the guide if you want to just skip ahead and watch that.
To summarize how the boss works, it starts out in an “attack phase” where it floats around randomly and randomly uses one of two attacks: shooting lightning orbs, or slamming the floor (destroying some of the tiles). After a set amount of time, it switches to a “laser phase”. In this phase, the boss starts charging a giant laser attack, and a ghost flies down from the ceiling. You must touch the ghost, and they will defend you from the laser. The laser will not kill you if you’re protected by a ghost, but it will knock away one of your items (they get removed in a set order). If you don’t touch the ghost in time, the ghost vanishes, the laser kills you, and you get the bad ending. Once you survive the laser, it goes back to an attack phase.
If you don’t have all seven ghosts, then after all your ghosts are gone, the next laser attack will just kill you and you get the same bad ending as if you died normally. I don’t think there’s any point to fighting the final boss without all seven ghosts. If you do have all seven ghosts, then the final laser will leave you alive, and there’s a final phase. In this phase, you gain the ability to equip the needle from your inventory screen, and you have to hit the boss’s weak point with the needle.
Anyways, on to the strategies. The short version is:
- Use red and blue herbs until you aren’t allowed to anymore.
- Don’t rely on the jars to catch the ghosts. Instead, jump on the boss’s head when it lowers to the ground at the start of a laser phase, and jump towards the ghost when the boss’s head raises up.
- Do the fight while small. It gives you more hang-time to correctly align yourself with the boss’s head, which is important if there’s a hole in the ground during the laser phase.
- In the final needle phase, jump before shooting the needle.
You can use herbs up until after the third laser. Red herbs make it so the boss can’t damage you during its attack phase, although you can still fall off the arena in areas where the floor is destroyed. Blue herbs let you jump higher, making it much easier to catch the ghosts. However, your herb bag gets knocked away after the third laser.
The lightning orb attack is aimed at you, so to dodge it, either keep moving (so that all three orbs miss) or take a slight step after the orbs are fired (so that you dodge between the center orb and one of the side orbs).
The slam attack can either be aimed at you, or appear at one of a few preset positions. You can tell which one by looking at the boss’s shadow, but sometimes it’s hard to see the shadow quickly enough. You might walk right into non-aimed slam because you were expecting an aimed one. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a trick to this or a way to predict the type of slam – it just comes down to reflexes.
I think the attack phases are usually not that hard, but there are some nasty things that can happen because of how random the fight is. You can get unlucky and have to dodge incessant orb spam after huge sections of the floor have been destroyed.
The laser phases are the main reason I found the fight hard, because you only get a short amount of time to reach the ghost and failing means you lose the whole fight. When the boss switches to the laser phase, missing floor tiles get restored, and if the boss was attacking, the attack is interrupted, and the boss lowers itself to the ground. However, if the interrupted attack was a slam, then when the boss lowers itself, it will usually also destroy part of the floor, preventing it from restoring. This means you have to do the laser phase with a hole in the ground, which makes it significantly more dangerous. Unfortunately, these “hole laser phases” are pretty common so you’ll have to either learn how to deal with them or get very lucky.
Jars appear when the laser phase starts. I think you’re supposed to use them to gain height to reach the ghosts, but I don’t actually recommend this. Maybe I just don’t understand how they’re useful, but it seems like picking up both jars and stacking them isn’t enough to consistently reach the ghost. I think stacking jars then using the hover wand would be enough, but you lose the wand after the fifth laser. You also lose the ring after the sixth laser, so you have to do the seventh without the jars. Because consistency is so important in this fight, I would recommend not relying on the jars.
The best strategy I’ve found for the laser phases is jumping on the boss’s head. You can actually do this without taking damage, even if not using a red herb. When the laser phase starts, the boss lowers itself to the ground to allow you to jump on its head. Then, the boss raises back up. At this point, try to jump into the ghost. If you miss, the boss will lower and raise one more time. Shortly after the second lower-and-raise, the ghost will disappear, so if you miss twice you probably lose. Also, if you’re unlucky, a lightning orb will be on the boss’s head when the laser phase starts, so you can’t jump on the boss’s head until it fades away. This means you probably only get one attempt to catch the ghost. Maybe in this case, you can try using the jars as a backup plan.
The “hole laser phases” are rough because the boss’s shadow is now aligned with the bottom of the hole, instead of the floor. This makes it very easy to misjudge the boss’s position and miss your jump. For this reason, I suggest doing the entire fight as the small elephant. Even when you lose the magnifying glass, you actually remain small. With the floatiness of the small elephant, you can jump towards the boss and make slight adjustments to your position until you see your shadow align with the boss’s head. When doing these jumps, I found it easiest to jump on the boss from behind (you can go through its body). The floatiness also gives you more hang-time to catch the ghosts.
Note that for the eighth laser, there’s no ghost, so you don’t need to worry about landing on the boss’s head. Just wait around until you get laser’d.
Finally, the needle phase. You get a fair bit of time for this, and I’ve personally never failed it before. I think the main trick is that you need to actually jump from the peak of the rising platform, then shoot the needle. If you just stand on the rising platform, I don’t think it gives you enough height.
You can also quick-kill the boss by equipping the needle during its dialogue and standing on its head. As soon as the dialogue ends (it’s invulnerable before that), jump and throw the needle. Pretty funny if you can pull it off.
Below is a video of me defeating the boss. I don’t use herbs in the video, so that you can see more examples of how to get the ghosts without herbs. I got a lot of hole laser phases, but I still managed to win, although I had a scary moment where I missed a ghost and fell in the hole.
Note that this video contains some minor spoilers for secret items. If you haven’t reached 100%, you might see some items in the UI and inventory that you haven’t discovered yet.
