Cuphead - Dr. Kahl in 42.60s - Version 1.1.5 - Charmless - No Nukes

Channel:

Grondious

Subscribers:

2,120

Published on April 24, 2023 8:13:39 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fil0zVtQLTs

Game:

Cuphead (2017)

Duration: 1:02

683 views

36

So happy after what I think has been nearly 4 years to finally my first ever 42!

DISCLAIMER: I will go over some of my strats/optimizations used in this fight. Most of this is not new but I will detail some of the things I am going for. I am also using a mod to see the hitboxes and bosses HP and an in-game timer, this video is meant to show the strategy and what's possible.

To start the fight, I quickly mini-plane straight up so I can start shooting the antenna, then I want to get close to the antenna so there isn't as much bullet travel time and I very quickly swap twice to let out a mini-bomb and get back to bullet while carefully tracking his antenna with my gun as it sways up and down. If your DPS is on point here you can reliably kill the antenna before it would laser you and then can move to the other pieces. I do use mini-plane to move quickly while having mini-bomb equipped which lets the cooldown of the mini-bomb start ticking down while moving to the lower parts.

Here I use a couple mini-bombs because the splash damage can hit both parts and I go for the "TAS EX" which is where you do a bullet EX in an extremely precise position between the 2 remaining parts of Kahl and it can sometimes get stuck in that spot and repeatedly tick on them, dealing a ton of damage. I got the true "TAS EX" in this one where it essentially stuck around until the parts were dead (along with me mini-bombing them).

This "TAS EX" is something I might not go for in real runs given that it's very hard to pull off and can be unreliable, but for the sake of breaking a new second barrier on this boss I opted to go for it here. If I didn't go for this, I would just try to do 5 mini-bombs on the chest and 5 mini-bombs on the stomach to kill those remaining parts.

Then I bullet down the heart a bit while baiting Kahl's bomb away, then I go in and finish him off with a Luigi swapped mini-bomb EX (Luigi swaps are just when you press EX and weapon swap at the exact same time to continue being able to shoot while doing an EX move).

I clear out the 2nd bomb and get in position to fire a bunch of bullets into phase 2 and make sure to have my mini-bomb cooldown refreshed as well so when he flies into me and I damage boost, I can let out that mini-bomb quickly too.

I then swap to mini-bomb for a bit of its cooldown so it's almost ready to fire, and then I go down to where Kahl will likely be and do a luigi bullet EX to hit Kahl as he comes back on screen, and since he's moving with the bullet EX it ticks a lot of times and ends the phase quick. To finish the phase I have my mini-bomb at this point almost ready so I let it out to hit him as he escapes to go start phase 3. Then I back up and mini-bomb Kahl's last bomb here to clear the way.

In phase 3 I bullet him down while closing the distance and let out a mini-bomb that I refreshed the cooldown of after destroying the last Kahl bomb and then do a Luigi mini-bomb EX for good damage before he starts shooting sparks. This part is about memorizing both the blue and red spark patterns as these are consistent assuming your PC does not lag. When you take parries does change where the sparks can end up so you need to be specific with how you time getting parries and navigate this.

I just continue on with shooting him with whatever weapon and EX move best fits the situation while getting what parries I can hoping to damage boost past the 3rd wall and continue doing that until he's dead. This phase is extremely difficult to deal with the bullet hell while optimizing your damage as much as you can and parrying everything.

There is, to my knowledge, a new optimization I implemented some here using an obscure and complicated game mechanic to gain some extra damage here. When Cupheads mini-bomb blows up, the splash damage portion of it expands a bit and then stops at a point as a full sized circle.

In Dr. Kahl's last phase he has 2 hitboxes, his person and his ship. Now normally the splash damage from mini-bombs would only damage him once even if it hit both hitboxes because they are "shared" hitboxes in this case. But if your mini-bomb splash starts off only hitting one of the hitboxes, the mini-bomb splash fully expands and then in that moment, the bosses other hitbox moves into it, that splash will actually damage the boss again (and mini-bomb splash is half of the damage of the mini-bomb so this is essentially a 50% damage increase).

So if you hit mini-bombs on his face, as he's moving up on the screen, or on the lower part of his ship as he's moving down, the other hitbox you aren't hitting will move into the splash at the right time and make use of this mechanic to gain an extra splash hit.

This is pretty precise and also really hard to do much of while managing all the other insanity in the fight, but I tried to get as many of these double splash mini-bombs in as I could to help finish him off.

Watch me live at - https://www.twitch.tv/grondious

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