Well, I did it. I finally got around to finishing the postgame to Sutte Hakkun. Time to post my thoughts on it.
The postgame is split between “EXTRA” levels and “RACE” levels. I’ll start with the “EXTRA” levels first: they’re basically normal levels, except there are no points and you don’t have access to in-game hints; you have to solve them all on your own, and just getting the solution is prioritized over doing it in the fewest moves/save-states due to the lack of points. As for the individual levels themselves:
EX-1: The weakest of the ten. The first thing you have to do is drop the dog in the pit, then color it red before it falls into the pit since you need that red to get the block out EDIT: I misremembered: you need it to hit the color switch so you can do the drop coloring AGAIN with blue in order to reach the rainbow crystal. It’s more action than puzzle.
EX-2: The jar is a doppelganger, so you have no access to ink. Besides that, this one’s a bit tricky. Maybe not as tricky as some of the World 10 levels, but as I wrote in my first post, I can forgive a slightly wonky difficulty curve as long as it gets everything else right.
EX-3: This is where I left off on, and it still took me a few days of mulling it over to realize the fourth block and red ink are red herrings. Bleh. 2nd weakest.
EX-4: Another pretty tricky one, but as long as you take a moment every now and then to see what’s ahead and think about how the objects will act, you won’t get stuck.
EX-5: It’s obvious that once you go down, you can’t go back up, so the first thing you’ll want to do is get up to the top of the level so you can grab the block up there, only to realize said block is another freaking doppelganger, then reset the level and take a different approach. Still, even after that, this one is one of the tougher EXTRA levels as you need to figure out how to go up, push the doppelganger forward, and get back down.
EX-6: This might be the most complex EXTRA stage, as you need to keep as many blocks colored as you can while moving them around the arena towards the rainbow crystal. It’s the only one besides the third one where I had to stop playing and just mull it over in my head after going to bed, but it doesn’t have the same issue as the third one; it’s just a regular, straightforward puzzle.
EX-7: This one seems fine in theory, but the level is wide, and the only thing letting you traverse the bottom of the level (a row of spikes stretching to both ends of the stage) is a slowly-walking blue dog. I used quick-saves often here just so I wouldn’t have to keep waiting if I messed up. Also, I don’t think I mentioned this in my original post, but clear and blue dogs bob up and down a pixel, which actually affects your standing height, so if you jump when the dog is a pixel lower, you won’t be able to clear a full three-unit-high jump. Third weakest level.
EX-8: Another decently tricky one. You need to move as many blocks as you can to the top so you don’t fall through the one-way tiles, but to reach the ink jar, you have to go back down, so you don’t want to remove too many too soon.
EX-9: You need to place red blocks in the right spots with the right timing so you can take a rock up a shaft with no wiggle room in order to break the glass to reach the goal. You’ll have to take some time to measure where to put the blocks since you can’t just start with the lowest one and work your way up. It’s another good level.
EX-10: I think this one’s the fourth weakest since you’ve still got some waiting on a blue dog you’ll need to do, but its path isn’t nearly as wide, and you’ll be rid of that waiting entirely around the halfway point. There’s also another doppelganger here that you’ll need to deal with, and it just makes me wish they were their own sprite so they could be properly integrated into the puzzles instead of being intentionally misleading.
Overall, the EXTRA stages maintain the same quality as the main game. Sure, there are a few hiccups, but you can still solve all the puzzles using only your knowledge of the game’s mechanics you learned from earlier levels.
And now, the RACE levels. The first thing you’ll notice when you select them is a message saying that you can’t access the levels until you find the purple dog. Thing is, by this point, you’ll have played through every level in the main game and not noticed anything out of the ordinary with any of the levels. You can use the level preview to flip through every single level in the main game, but find nothing out of the ordinary. Turns out, the purple dogs are hiding behind perfectly ordinary solid tiles, and to “find” them, you need to walk against the wall for a second to trigger a brief cutscene, and THEN you gain access to a race level!
What’s worse, just when you think you’ve figured out a pattern for what to look for, the game changes the rules. At first, you’ll–well, at first you won’t know they’re there at all, and at second, you still won’t know what to look for…but at THIRD, you’ll think they’re indicated by 2-tile-high nooks with another, single-tile notch taken out above to mark them out, like in 1-6, but after world 2, you’ll never see another nook like it. Then, you’ll think they’ll be in regular nooks, but that’s only true for worlds 4, 5, and 7. What about 3 and 6, you may be wondering? Turns out, the purple dogs in those worlds aren’t in nooks at all, but in pillars! After I knew of the dogs’ existence and how to find them, I always gave it a token effort to try to find the dog in each world before looking it up, but I had to look up where world 3’s dog was due to how inconspicuous its hiding spot was. After that, I was able to stumble across world 6’s dog on my own, but I reached another hang-up in world 8. There was a spot in 8-9 that looked suspicious, but that was by the goal; I’d have to solve the level again just to get there, and so far, all of the dogs have been within 100 points of the start. Luckily, so is this world’s one (meaning it isn’t in that spot near the end of the level), but unluckily, its location is in a wall, suspended above a tunnel! All previous purple dogs at least had ground in front of their hiding spots, but for this one, you have to grab and move a block to the right position to access it! Worse, the level it’s in, 8-1, is symmetrical, so it’s once again in an inconspicuous location. Needless to say, I had to look this one up, too. I was able to use that knowledge to trial-and-error my way to world 9’s dog’s location, but once again, I had trouble finding the next world’s dog, and ended up looking it up. Turns out, while world 10’s dog is beside ground and has a slightly unusual setup to hint at its location, this one IS all the way at the end of the level! You basically have to beat the level twice just to unlock all the game’s content!
Also, while each world only has one hidden purple dog, they don’t correspond to specific RACE levels, instead unlocking them in order. Plus, there’s no indication on the map or stage select that shows which worlds still have hidden dogs and which worlds you’ve already found the dogs in, so if you find them “out of order,” you’ll just have to remember which worlds you skipped.
And then you have the races themselves. They’re…okay…ish. For one thing, there’s nothing like in the GB version where you can affect the opponent’s side; it’s literally just a glorified time limit. If they just focused on moving forward quickly, they’d be okay, but a lot of them still have some minor puzzle elements, even if it’s just going forward to do one thing (sometimes with a split path, meaning you have to go down the right path as well), then backtracking a screen or two to do something else. These mini-“puzzles” aren’t too hard to solve, but since the races are timed AND the game won’t even let you push the R button to look around like with every other level, you’ll almost certainly be forced to lose each race a couple times before you know what you’re supposed to do.
sigh…you know, when I wrote my original post and claimed this game to be my favorite, I assumed it’d be knocked off its pedestal by another game. I never expected it’d knock itself off.
Oh, but there’s still one more piece to this story: for every race you win, you’ll be given part of a cheat code. You aren’t told what it does or where to input it, though. There’s a selection in the options called “password,” but it turns out that’s just for copying save files across cartridges (EDIT: nevermind; it’s for submitting your high score), so where do we do it? Title screen? Nothing. File select? Nothing. Stage select/overworld? Nothing. During a level? Nothing. Once again, I had to consult a walkthrough. Turns out, you need to input the code during one of the segments in the hut, a.k.a. the tutorial, the thing you wouldn’t need since you’ve already 100%ed the game. And what does the code do? It unlocks a “view solution” option for the regular levels, a.k.a. the thing you wouldn’t need since you’ve already 100%ed the game. Jeez, how backwards is that? The most difficult, unfair thing to do in the game unlocks the ability to see solutions for the parts that actually make sense! Why couldn’t it have been the reverse, where completing all the EXTRA stages gave you a radar to find the purple dogs? Why couldn’t the races say that the code is for viewing puzzle solutions upfront? I swear, the more I find out about those race levels, the more I hate them. Heck, according to that same walkthrough, you need a certain total amount of points to unlock all the EXTRA levels as well (I didn’t know this because I had them all unlocked as soon as I beat the game), so that sucks, too.
Don’t get me wrong; I can still recommend the game since all its worst qualities are all squeezed into the postgame, all optional, but…but…
…it was SO CLOSE to being perfect, you know? I’m heartbroken….