V.A Proxy – A Bit of Advice on the First Boss

Tips to Beat First Boss

There’s currently (as far as I can tell) no reason to fight any of the hostile robots out there other than to make them stop attacking you.

A few things to know:

If you can block an attack you can parry an attack. Not all attacks are block-able, which means not all attacks can be parried and you can figure out which ones those are by noticing that you get hurt through a block (attacks that hurt are attacks that hurt!)

When you parry you get your health back! It’s basically the only way you’re going to get your health back in combat in this game. Don’t even bother trying to use the repair function in battle, or at least not in a boss battle.

Parries are your greatest source of damage.

Everything else has draw backs: both sword styles do basically tickle damage with the slower one being easy to use and dealing twice as much damage as your faster harder to use style. Meanwhile your robot pew pew does actual scratch damage but it is incredibly reliable scratch damage.

I know the store page says you’re capable of massive damage with your speed and attack power and this is basically a complete lie. You are fast, but that speed is incredibly hard to control and you don’t do any damage unless you take parrying into account.

Maybe you can upgrade your attacks to do more than a sneeze of damage with the scrap robots drop but that’s not in the demo. Currently you are as weak as a baby fart, if you want my advice don’t ever swing your sword, it’s a trap. You should basically always be shooting your pew pews and parrying.

The actual advice for the boss

So that brings us to the first boss, he has exactly one (technically two) parry-able attacks. The attack you can (and should) parry is his long range dash where he does a million cuts in a small area. The other attack you can (and shouldn’t) parry is that massive area attack where he does a million cuts in an area the size of half the arena don’t parry that because you’ll get one parry off then be hit by the continuing damage after the first parry-able hit; maybe you can chain parries but I never tried, I just got out of Dodge.

So the problem lies in the fact that his one (safe) parry-able attack (and thus the best way to hurt him outside of constant robot pew pew) he only does from a distance. How do you bait that out? Simple, run away from him. Just keep running, preferably around the edge of the arena. He can outrun you but this just means you need to dodge while constantly peppering him with bullets.

Don’t worry he’ll eventually lag so far behind he’ll do that parry-able dash attack, in fact he’ll chain those on you until you eventually parry him or you don’t put enough distance between you and him so you can kind of guarantee some big damage there. One other thing to mention is that if you are going to try and parry commit to the block, if you parry too early and just hold the button you’ll block the attack instead and be knocked a good distance away from him so you can quickly bait him into another dash attack.

If you follow this strategy the fight is fairly safe and simple and only takes about five minutes. Though one thing to mention I did this on mouse and keyboard and had one of my mouse buttons mapped to the fire button so I could just run away, so your results may vary depending on your mouse or preferred control scheme.