Day 17: Ripper Roo (Crash 2)
Well now, it's been about a week since we last talked about the Crash Bandicoot franchise. What do you say we talk about another first boss from this series?
If you think back to last week, I talked about the first boss in Crash Bandicoot Warped, Tiny Tiger, my third favorite first boss in the series. To find my second favorite first boss in the series, we need to go back a game to Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back where we find Ripper Roo.
Ripper Roo is a returning antagonist from the first game, and I personally found his fight in the original Crash Bandicoot to be rather underwhelming. Fortunately, Crash 2 rectified that with an awesome rematch.
Upon entering the arena, you'll notice that Ripper Roo has adopted a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde persona, and I'm sorry there's just something really endearing about this psychotic fucker still wearing his strait jacket underneath a top hat, glasses, bow tie, and false mustache.
Lyra: (Appears)I said it before and I'll say it again, you have issues, guy (Disappears)!
Me: Any fucking way...
The fight will begin and Ripper Roo will start bouncing around the arena, using his cane like a pogo stick. Each tile he touches will turn it into a TNT crate which'll countdown from 6. Crash needs to get to a safe spot on the arena to avoid being blown up.
Eventually, the TNT crates will explode, hurting Ripper Roo and turning him into the Mr. Hyde portion of his persona. He'll bounce around the arena again, but this time each tile he touches will turn into a Nitro crate, which is more dangerous than the TNT crate as simply touching them is bad news. Memorizing the pattern when Ripper Roo does this would be beneficial as you need to get Crash to a safe spot on the arena again, because when Ripper Roo is done bouncing, he'll jump on one of the Nitro crate tiles causing them all to blow up, dazing him, and this is your chance to attack. Do this two more times and you win but be careful as each TNT/Nitro pattern get more complex as the fight goes on.
Finally, I have to bring up the music of this fight, which is a good remix of Ripper Roo's theme from the first game.
To wrap this up, Ripper Roo, while still an easy first boss, is a bit more challenging than Tiny Tiger from Crash Warped due to the amount of memorization you need to do when it comes to Ripper Roo's patterns. This is a good first boss and I can only think of one first boss from the Crash Bandicoot series that's better than this one. What is that first boss? Well...we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.