Submission #8426: CoolHandMike's Arcade Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters "Rescue Roll!, 2 players" in 03:09.36

Megaman 2 Power Fighters

• This arcade fighting game supports two players. It has 3 routes each with 7 unique robot bosses. The route this tas takes is Rescue Roll.

Main Tricks / Glitches

• Damage Stacking – On a frame they are vulnerable you can stack as much damage as you can hit them with. Note that you can only switch to another weapon once the previous weapon is off the screen or after a set cooldown. This can be tricky since after stunning the enemy robots will have an area that nullifies all projectiles with a couple exceptions like Stoneman or Slashman's ability.
• Weakness Avoidance – In this game weakness for robots have an incredibly long animation that lasts for several seconds, and on top of that they get knocked up into the air afterward. On the same frame you hit the enemy with a weapon it is weak to you need to hit it with a different weapon or pellets.
• Air Knockup Avoidance – Similar to the above trick but you need to use a “weak” weapon. This means 4 damage or less. This is the preferred strategy unless it is the finishing blow on an enemy.
• Jumping on Landing Gives More Distance – On landing from a jump the player's horizontal movement is massively reduced. Jump on the landing frame to avoid this.
• Orb Despawning - At the end of the battle if you can hide the character and move him off screen then the orbs will despawn and the bonus section will start asap. Results in a total of 200 frames of improvement. It is not always faster or possible to use this.
• Danger Zone Next Action Vulnerability - So regardless of difficulty once the boss's health is reduced past the halfway mark it will be available to take damage again more quickly than usual. Usually attack the frame before the cutscene and then shortly after it ends they are usually vulnerable again. This seems to carry over to bosses that do not have the Danger Zone cutscene even active.

Players

• Bass and Protoman are chosen for this run.

• Protoman is chosen because he a very fast ground dash, his powerful charge move that only knocks enemies slightly up, and his normal charge attacks are fast and seem placed more forward on his character so he can attack faster.

• Bass is chosen for his speed and airborne utility which comes in handy in the final Wily stages with the big bosses where their weaknesses are high up in the air. It allows for slightly faster wins. He is challenging to use however since his dash is quite unique with a lot of caveats. His dash is in a slight parabolic arc and unless you cancel the dash by pressing in the opposite direction he will easily dash into enemies. He can also use the dash twice if you do it on the ground since if you cancel it he can then immediately use it again. When you cancel it he has several frames where he is airborne and you will need to wait for him to land to jump again. Also the arc of the dash can make getting orbs on the ground difficult, but it is also possible to use the arc to get falling orbs over a wider area. Bass's shots are slightly slower than Megaman, but he makes up for it with the fast dash. His special move, which is done by charging up, then holding up and releasing the attack button is a somersault attack which does decent damage. Protoman's special is used to reduce the height of the knock back. That attack is only used on the first stage. Bass would normally get a terrible companion from the little helper robot in the form of a wolf type robot that only allows you to use the normal attack, but the enemies are defeated so fast it does not appear.

The Route “Rescue Roll”

• As you defeat robots they get more health and are more aggressive. After the first three robots are defeated they get a Danger mode where they can get some additional moves. In this Route Roll will give allow your special moves to have double the amount of energy and thus double the usage. Roll will appear randomly, but we only need her to appear near the end of the list in time for Shademan. She appears the earliest possible after Stoneman is defeated. The cutscene only lasts for a couple frames since it is skipped.

• After defeating a robot each stage has these orbs that drop down randomly. Getting a good pattern is important to save time since the round only truly ends once they are gone.

Elecman

• Elecman has lots of jumps but he dies in three rounds of attacks so none are seen. Here Bass and Protoman's power attack are used to stack damage as well as to make sure the last hit is stacked to prevent a high airborne knock back from Bass's somersault.

• The biggest reason for this route is Elecman which has a power that shoots three shots out at once that can each hit. Furthermore it can fire rapidly and this comes into play on several robots that have some moves that allow for rapid hitting. Elecman's attack his also considered a “weak” attack that will not knock up an enemy into the air unlike Stoneman or Slashman's abilities. In casual play this ability would not be the best since unless you are extremely close and all three shots hit the enemy you cannot use the ability until all shots travel out of the screen area. In addition, Wily 1 and Wily 3 are weak to Elecman. Weaknesses all do double damage.

Stoneman

• Stoneman would have been a good choice as the first robot to beat since Elecman is weak to his ability, but he ends up being about 20-30 frames slower due to just how useful Elecman's ability is. Stoneman has some moves that shield himself so those are manipulated to not appear. Ideally Stoneman walks towards you which saves a couple frames, but it ended up being slower to manipulate that to come out.

• Stoneman's ability is great second only to Elecman's. It is a persistent attack that travels along the ground. It is considered a “strong” attack type so it would cause airborne knock back, but when used to attack on the same frame as Elecman's ability the enemy will only do a normal short ground knock back.

Slashman

• Slashman is chosen third since he does not have any really exploitable weaknesses. His weakness is to Diveman's ability and there is always a better option then using that garbage ability. Slashman later on has lots of jumping attacks and jumping attacks are all removed here since hitting a robot in the air always causes the airborne knockback not the quick ground knockback.

• Slashman's ability is an close range ability that does decent damage (6) but is considered strong so it does airborne knockback. However the move has some strange momentum preservation characteristics that make is hard to jump and then get back to the ground quickly since if you use it while increasing height the slash will continue to propel you upwards up to your max jump height. The slash also lasts a long time and has a long cooldown as well.

Cutman

• Cutman is weak to Slashman and this is used to destroy this guy quickly. He normally can be very time consuming since he can jump into some kind of alternate dimension or something. He has an abusable attack where he jumps into a cut in reality (wow) and then will not flinch, but it costs more time for it to start up. It also only appears after his danger mode activated and by then he only needs two rounds of hitting to be defeated. Jump attacks are all manipulated out. Cutman is manipulated to the left side of the screen for the orb respawn trick and it is 23 frames faster since the orbs will fall sooner.

• Cutman's boomerang-like ability is difficult to use due to it being fairly slow and the arcs it travels in can be sluggish in coming back to you. However this aspect is used in Wily 1 Yellow Devil to stack damage.

Shademan

• He is manipulated to use a move where he will retreat to the back then start using his blaster. He is vulnerable every 8 frames and is weak to Cutman's ability. Getting in extremely close allows the player to avoid the attack and attack at point blank range.

• Shademan's ability fires a shot that can bounce off the walls of the arena, and when once collides with your character the next Shademan shot will do double damage. It is fun to use but it does not get much use in the run since it is fairly slow and weak. Also the later bosses usually do not allow your character to be right near the wall to allow stacking. Also the powered up version of the shot is considered strong so it would do a airborne knock back.

Diveman

• This robot has one water bomb attack where he does not flinch and is vulnerable every 8 frames. Placed him last because he has max health of the robots and is weak to Elecman. He has 128 health, but he dies quick since once the attacks start doubling he takes 36 damage every 8 frames.

• Diveman's ability is the worst. Extremely slow to start, only two shots are allowed on screen, and the homing does not activate if you use it when the enemy is stunned. Also the ability only does 3 damage and when the homing is active it sometimes will decide to go in strange directions. It is possible to damage stack this but any other “weak” ability is a better choice.

Wily 1 – Yellow Devil

• It has a lot of different attacks and most of them hide his weakpoint so he becomes invulnerable so lots of manipulation here. He has jumps, but like other robots if you can strike him a frame before he jumps he will do a ground stagger. Here Cutman gets a lot of use to stack a couple hits on the same frame. Use Shademan's ability to bounce a shot off a wall to stack an additional hit since at that position Cutman's ability was too difficult to stack. End up using Slashman's ability right at the end since the positioning was not letting me stack other hits and was short a couple hp points. Yellow Devil is weak to Elecman so each attack using that does 24 damage (4*3*2) which stacks up quickly.

Wily 2 – Wily Machine

• The main manipulation here is to prevent an attack where his weakpoint moves up. Here I delay an attack from Bass using Slash right before the Danger mode which allows me to stack an additional attack.

Wily 3

• Here the main point is to avoid any air knockback so weaker weapons are used in addition to Elecman. Elecman is strong to this Wily and it takes two rounds to defeat him. For those curious the IGT on the credit screen is 42"36. Before the orb despawn trick the IGT was 41"76.
• Note: I am finishing this input on the last frame right before Wily dies as personal preference.