- The fighting Arcade game Metamoqester, also known as Oni Ninja Master made by Banpresto, pits one or two human players versus a fighting cpu monster.
- Metamoqester features large monsters that can end fights in a couple hits. In coop mode the cpu ramps up its aggressiveness as well as its powerarmor moves and counters.
Playable Characters
- The three playable characters are Tenchimaru, Kaiohmaru, and Yukihime. The characters have a mix of weak, medium, and hard attacks that can be done while standing, running, ducking, or jumping although ducking and jumping attacks do not differ from each other. Each character only has three input special moves, with two of the specials being harder hitting.
- Kaiohmaru is the heavy build character and can be used to cheese most fights. He has an incredibly powerful Dragon Spin move and if used correctly can almost one shot an enemy cpu once it starts grinding away the health. The Dragon Spin special is viable since it is an air special, and due to the fact the AI cannot break out of multiple hitting moves in the air, it is the best option to quickly take out a cpu's health. To make Dragon Spin even better, you can jump and use Dragon Spin in mid air which gives Kaiohmaru additional height. Dragon Spin will do continuous damage until he hits the ground and extra height mean extra damage. Yukihime's special Raising Exclamation is about half as strong, but would be the next best option. His Hard Punch running attack can be used to hit multiple times and shorten distance quickly.
- Tenchimaru is the lightweight character with very underwhelming attack power in almost every regard. However his standing Hard Punch attack does the second highest damage with good recovery. The AI does not cheat as badly when using standard attacks so his hard punch attack can be strung together to get as much damage in before Kaiohmaru's Dragon Spin is ready.
- Yukihime is the medium build character of the game. She has the second most powerful move in the game, Raising Exclamation which can do 50%-60% damage if used at the right spot in a fight. However due to how the move does lots of damage in tiny hits, it ends up costing a lot of time. In addition the game temporarily freezes whenever anything takes hits or blocks. The AI also will basically cheat to prevent both human player characters from using their specials on it. Yet another mark against the move is the narrow scope of the attack and the excessive downtime after using it.
Enemy AI
- Enemy AI behavior is really quirky and downright irritating at times. Each enemy has about three to four moves they can do. They usually have weaker but near instantaneous attack, a harder hitting counter type attack if they get pressured too much, a high damage special, and maybe a movement type special.
- The enemies will slowly ramp up the moves they choose the more you pressure them. It is a constant battle to manipulate them to not counter, jump out of the corner too early, or use the movement special or hard hitting special moves which have powerarmor. Enemies can be stunned if hit with enough hits in a short amount of time. Weirdly enough the stunning seems to only count the number of recent hits, so even if you hit them with lots of hard hits over time it is much harder to stun them. Enemies outright cheat in coop mode where they do not respect their own stun status or "taking damage" status. The only time they cannot cheat is if they are already in the air. Enemies react immediately if there the game sees both players doing specials around the same time and will hunker down and block until both moves expire or immediately attack. It is possible to get specials to hit at the time, but the setup does not seem worth it.
- Enemies are extremely attracted to players that jump in the air that they will almost always immediately follow them up and attack them. Attacking the enemy and manipulating them to jump up at the airborne human character at the right time is key to beating these enemies quickly.
- Certain enemies have strange behavior. Brocken can sometimes in a single frame suddenly be behind you if you are close to Brocken. IceBiter is a mess of hitboxes and collision boxes where sometimes you can be next to him and the next frame be pushed a fourth of the screen away from him.
- This Arcade game has no other difficulty settings that could be set.
Some other Resources
- A tas by ULTIMATE PLAYER【TAS】 of this game that shows off the characters:
- Human Speedrun in 4m35s with Commentary
Gengoroh
This shows the basic strategy for every enemy except the last boss. Chose Tenchimaru to be further away which works out better for the Dragon Spin setup. The idea is to pressure the enemy into a corner. Getting them into the corner is important since enemies, despite being massive hulking monsters, are incredibly bouncy. Hitting them once can knock them across the screen in some cases. Keep them busy with Tenchimaru does his hard attacks while Kaiohmaru is winding up the Dragon Spin move. Then manip the enemy to jump up towards Kaiohmaru. Especially in coop mode, enemies will outright cheat and just decide to block or jump out of stun status or being hit. But while jumping they cannot do either of those so they are forced to take the hits. The Dragon Spin move is extremely good for this strategy since it will keep hitting the enemies for 12 damage every hit, and it keeps hitting until Kaiohmaru hits the ground. The most damage I was able to do with the move was 108 damage out of the max health of the enemies 128. However we do not want Kaiohmaru to land the finishing blow since the "special finish" banner extends the round 100 frames. We have to maneuver Tenchimaru to land the final blow which in many cases requires some enemy HP management so he can finish it off.
Titicaca
Titicaca has some cool 3d effects, and is one of the cooler looking bosses. He stands very tall and Dragon Spin can start hitting him almost immediately once it starts up in the air.
This enemy has a strange bug where they will often get turned around facing the wrong way. This is detrimental since if you hit them they get massively knocked back away from you.
IceBiter
This boss is honestly a hot mess. Of all the bosses this one seems like the least tested and least respects his own status. IceBiter gets many extremely fast moves and almost all of them except the weak punch get powerarmor. His high damage ground icicle special can do up to 90% of your health, which then stuns you, allowing for the boss to followup, which is a OHKO in most cases. The boss has bizarre, and varying collision boxes that will move nearby characters around. If Tenchimaru is standing near the boss and if the boss moves Tenchimaru can be pushed completely out of range. IceBiter has a powerarmor jump move that can damage you in the air once he lands on the ground.
Brocken
Brocken is one of the more well behaved bosses alongside Gengoroh. Although her exploding high damage special is near instant, and she has that odd bug where she can suddenly appear behind you, she does not have some high evasive special which reduces tasing complexity.
Victle
Victle has the same large vertical hitbox as Titicaca and Dragon Spin just grinds away at it. The only tricky part is that Victle tends to jump straight through the Dragon Spin and getting the right angle.
He has some detrimental bugs that seem to happen easily. He has that unusual bug where he can suddenly appear behind you, he tends to ignore stuns, and he can face the wrong way if you hit him near the wall.
FuseHime - Final Boss
Metamoqestor has a strange last boss for a fighting game. It is less like a fight than trying to pin down a bouncing ball that moves through your characters and shoots out lightning. After getting hit she becomes invulnerable for a time as well which makes Dragon Spin not worth using at all. FuseHime constantly tries to move to the center of the screen to do a full screen lightning attack and taking advantage of that and pining her in the corner works very well to keep doing damage. Once she is in the corner overlapping the hard attacks by Kaiohmaru and Tenchimaru on the same frame maximizes damage since otherwise one would be waiting for FuseHime's invulnerability after getting hit to wear off. Another benefit to getting to the corner is to avoid those effects in the center of the screen which cause lots of slowdown. The slowdown is still present, but mitigated if you are off center.
One bug with FuseHime is where if you hit her just as she does the full screen lightning attack the human players take no damage, but they do get stunned. The visual for the lightning attack also continues as though it went off properly.
Potential Time Saves
- If it was possible to manipulate them into being susceptible to getting double teamed by Kaiohmaru and Yukihime early on with both of their specials going off at once while the enemy is jumping up might be faster, but then Fusehime would be slower due to Yukihime having a weaker hard attack plus the additional slowdown from more hits from the Rising Exclamation. Kaiohmaru and Yukihime as is, my best was less than 60 frames slower than Kaiohmaru and Tenchimaru when testing on Gengoroh so could be possible.
Samsara: I've always wanted to see a TAS for this game, and I am absolutely not disappointed in the result. Metamoqester's about as brutal to play as it is to pronounce, and this TAS just makes a complete joke of it. Brilliant stuff all around. Accepting!
