#1029 Virtual-On Oratario Tangram (DC) Bosses (1/3): Tangram gameplay.
0Gameplay of the final boss Tangram in the Dreamcast port of Sega’s Virtual-On Oratorio Tangram.
A huge thanks to Accel Rider X for his help with this; I couldn’t have done it without him.
A few days ago, I reached 2500 subscribers. Goddamn, halfway to three thousand! Thanks so much to every who's been subscribing and watching recently; I gained a surprisingly large amount of subs this month than I usually do, so it's great to know more and more people are getting interested in the channel this late into the project.
Here’s a somewhat superfluous video. But hey, if it can be done, why not. Not even I thought that Oratorio’s bosses would be vaguely playable, presuming that they would just crash the game after being accessed. Nope! If you want a testament to just how good Sega’s programming was in this era, look no further than this video.
Oratorio Tangram has three bosses in total; hidden boss Ajim, mid-boss Bradtos and final boss Tangram. Bradto and Tangram are both giant bosses, which means in all likelihood they should have crashed the game and been completely unplayable under human control. Instead, they’re both surprisingly playable. Sure, you have to spam the attack buttons repeatedly in order to defeat the opponent, and their models block out more or less your entire field of view, but who cares, they’re actually playable! That said, they nearly always have a tendency to crash the game at some point, either causing it to hard reset or, if on emulator, for the entire thing to crash. It sucks, but I suppose it was to be expected.
There’s really no point to playing as Tangram. Unlike Jaguarandi, which was a unique and decent experience, Tangram blocks the screen so badly you can’t even tell what’s going on most of the time; even worse than it was Z-Gradt, somehow. I mean, if you want to access this for whatever reason then be my guest; I’ve had a tutorial vid on how to do so on my tutorials channel since 2017. Personally, I just found it tedious trying to play as Tangram simply because of how unstable the whole thing; NullDC is already a pretty flawed emulator and prone to crashing, but it’s certainly made worse by trying to make something which was unplayable suddenly playable within it.
That said, I think the world can always use another mad, bizarre video like this. It just makes the world a weirder place, and sometimes that’s a good thing. Tangram isn’t really what I’d call a great boss; I don’t really like any of the Virtual-On bosses because of how temperamental they are both to play as and to fight against, and I don’t like gimmicky bosses in general, but Tangram at the very least is so weird that he can be enjoyed for that reason alone. Because why not have a boss like looks like a rejected Angel from Evangelion.
So, the reason I was able to do this was because a long-time viewer called Accel Rider X informed me a fair while back about someone discovering a secret test menu in the arcade version of this game. Before that, I simply couldn't work out the character values for this title, and they weren't listed as they were in the arcade version of the first game. And, really, this was something that didn't need to happen, but I'm still so glad that it's possible, if only for the ridiculous novelty of it.
Up next, we take a look at Bradtos.