LogFAQs > #910816190

#14: Captain Brineybeard
Difficulty: 5/10
Design: 3/10
Fun Factor: 5/10

YAR. I feel like this is just about the classic of classic old school cartoon drawings. He looks like every big brute you've ever seen from cartoons of the era, with hints of Bluto and Pete and all those big loafs you know and love. The hit box here is interesting in that it is completely static and in the top right corner of the screen, meaning you'll have to figure out a good way to attack. Do you go risky and get in close, dodging back when attacks start coming? Or do you play it safe and go to the back and jump and attack, knowing you'll get less hits in but that the incoming attacks will be easier to dodge? It is a nice change from some of the other bosses that move around a bit more during the course of the fight.

What I love about this fight is the third phase, where you're dodging three different attacks at once. You have the ship spitting cannonballs, the chest dropping from above, and then combine that with whatever random attack Brineybeard himself is doing. This is peak Cuphead gameplay for me, where I'm frantically dodging attacks from all over the screen and it needs my full concentration. There is strategy to this too, where you want to bait the chest into falling earlier sometime so you can focus on dodging the other two attacks while it is recharging. I love when this happens in the game, where you get a segment and at first you're like "this is impossible" and then after discovering a couple tricks or useful patterns, it becomes completely manageable (as long as your reflexes are great and your timing is perfect).

The final phase is a nice change of pace, too, and I like keeping the chest in addition to having to deal with the new attacks. The huge laser beam, for example, is fairly easy to deal with as long as you've been paying attention to the chest but you can absolutely get hit here if you get lazy and not pay attention to where the chest is going. It is a bit of a let down, I suppose, after how good the third phase is, but there are a lot of bosses like this where the final phase is actually a bit easier than some of the ones before it (presumably because the game thinks you might be at low health and a lot of the challenge is just GETTING TO that part of the fight).

With all that said, Brineybeard overall is a tad on the boring side. This is one of those fights where there is almost no difference between one phase and the next, and while there is a huge shift for the final phase the first three are almost indistinguishable (to the point I wasn't even entirely sure what was added to the second phase of the fight until I played it several times). It adds a new attack, sure, but there isn't a big shift in the strategy here. So the first three phases almost feel like one phase, which is particularly annoying in expert where he is an absolute tank and this goes on forever. All of the best bosses in the game constantly switch things up between phases, offering new and unique challenges with each new phase and Brineybeard is a bit lazy in that regard.

And Brineybeard is essentially just a pirate, with just about everything you'd expect from the battle. There really aren't any cool twists in the fight other than the ship itself joining the fight (and becoming a whale for the final phase) and it just feels like they wrote "pirate enemy" on the design document and didn't get much more creative than that.
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