Cuphead

Cuphead is a run and gun game developed and published by Studio MDHR. It was initially released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One in September 29, 2017. It was later available on macOS on October 19, 2018, on the Nintendo Switch on April 18, 2019 and on the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2020.

A DLC called Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course was announced on June 10, 2018, and released on June 30, 2022 in all platforms.

Plot
The game follows the titular Cuphead and his brother Mugman who, in a deal with the Devil after losing a game at the his casino, are quested to repossess the souls of runaway debtors as payment for their loss.

Why It Likes To Roll The Dice

 * 1) The main game selling point is their graphics, that resemble with authenticity multiple rubberhose cartoons from the 1930s, such as the Mickey Mouse, Talkartoons and Felix the Cat, making it stand out from other games. To add better style, the game's animations and graphics were designed with traditional animation cels.
 * 2) *The landscapes and backgrounds, which were made with watercolors, sculptures and stop-motion are extremely detailed, well designed and fantastic.
 * 3) The gameplay is really fun, incredible and action-packed, and has plenty of challenges in it reminiscent of that of Metal Slug, Contra, Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier. Some bosses require the player to use a plane, making these levels more like a Shoot em'up rather than a Run and gun.
 * 4) *The controls are very tight and responsive and allow the player to move, attack in eight directions, dash, jump, parry, change weapons, lock the character to attack in a specific space and attack in movement.
 * 5) Great soundtrack directed by Kristopher Madiggan and his orchestra, with plenty of jazz influences and instrumentation, some memorable ones are "Floral Fury", which has a samba vibe, "Honeycomb Herald", who has a calm and serene vibe and "One Hell of a Time", that fuses multiple boss themes in one.
 * 6) All of the characters, despite having little dialogue, have their personalities explained in unique ways by their attacks, their game over phrases, background details, movements and actions. This includes the protagonists, the NPCs, the bosses and even the antagonists.
 * 7) *Cuphead is a positive happy-go-lucky but impulsive person that due to his greed gambled away his soul.
 * 8) *Mugman is Cuphead’s cautious and more calmer twin brother that is always there for his needs.
 * 9) *Elder Kettle is the brother’s caretaker that helps them throughout the adventure by advising them.
 * 10) *The Legendary Chalice is a powerful but clumsy being that gets trapped in the Mausoleums. After being saved, she gives the player a Super Art. As Ms. Chalice, she is playable.
 * 11) *King Dice is a deceitful and manipulative person who acts easygoing on the exterior, that also serves as the Devil’s right hand man
 * 12) *Chef Saltbaker is a kind, later cold-hearted chef who tricks the duo, so he can get the ingredients to make the Wondertart, and take over the Astral Plane, but reforms in the epilogue.
 * 13) *The Devil is a prideful liar and cheater that manipulated the weaknesses of our protagonists to gain Cuphead and Mugman’s souls.
 * 14) There's a ranking system that judges the player based on the time it took, the number of hit points you ended with, the number of parried attacks and the times you used special attacks, giving the game a lot of replayability.
 * 15) It is full of personality, all the bosses have really unique and distinct designs, but also have some elements based on multiple beloved cartoon characters from the 1930s and 40s, other video games and multiple franchises, such as Werner Werman being based on Jerry from the Tom and Jerry cartoon, Sally Stageplay’s third phase being inspired by Kefka’s final fight from Final Fantasy VI or Ribby & Croaks resembling Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter and Rash & Zitz from Battletoads. These also attribute to their fights, giving them more variety.
 * 16) Addicting and challenging boss battles, with really fun twists in their fights and progressively become difficult as they take more damage. Their patterns aren't very complex or random and fairly easy to remember which attacks come.
 * 17) Plenty of unique shooting options. There are nine main weapons (with 3 coming from the DLC), that allow the player to do different attacks and each with a different EX movement:
 * 18) *Peashooter: The standard weapon that has medium attack and long range.
 * 19) *Spread: It has a powerful attack but short range.
 * 20) *Roundabout: Medium attack and allows the player to attack backwards.
 * 21) *Lobber: It has a strong attack and medium range. Bounces two times before disappearing.
 * 22) *Chaser: Low attack but high range, as it follows the enemies and bosses.
 * 23) *Charge: If you hold the attack button, the attack will increase. It has slow rapid fire.
 * 24) *Crackshot: Shooting it straight deals good damage. It can break into an aimed projectile that does less damage.
 * 25) *Converge: A 3 way shot that pierces through enemies and bosses.
 * 26) *Twist-Up: A shot that deals average damage and goes in an arced pathway. It has rapid fire.
 * 27) The charms in the game have singular features and aid the player in different ways:
 * 28) *Heart & Twin Heart: It gives the player extra hit points (One if it's a normal heart and two if they are Twin), but weakens the attack.
 * 29) *Smoke Bomb: It will make the dash invisible and the hitbox untouchable.
 * 30) *Coffee: It slowly fills the Power Meter.
 * 31) *Parry Sugar: It makes Parrying immediate and easier to activate.
 * 32) *Whetstone: The first party will transform in an axe and causes damage to the enemy.
 * 33) *Astral Cookie: Lets the player play as Ms. Chalice, gaining access to her double jump, dodge roll, and parry dash.
 * 34) *Heart Ring: Restores a hit point for the player's first, third, and sixth parries, although parries before regeneration of all 3 hearts don't generate super meter cards.
 * 35) *Broken Relic: Lets you unlock the Angel and Demon Boss.
 * 36) **Cursed Relic: When you defeat the Angel and Demon Boss, this activates, replacing Broken Relic. It reduces your HP to 1 and randomizes the player's weapon every time they stop shooting. However, it gives you the effect of Coffee, Smoke Bomb, Whetstone, and Heart Ring, but they vary in terms of how many points from bosses you achieved.
 * 37) ***Note: You have to use the Cursed Relic to gain points.
 * 38) ****Defeating an Inkwell Isle 1 Boss gives 2 points, an Inkwell Isle 2 Boss gives 2.5 points, Inkwell Isles 3 and 4 bosses give 3 points, King Dice gives 1 point, and The Devil and Chef Saltbaker give 4.
 * 39) ***Coffee isn't present when you have 0-3 points, but 4 points activates Coffee, giving it a 13% charge rate, getting double the charge rate at 8 points, and getting triple the charge rate at 12.
 * 40) ***Smoke Bomb activates for every 8th dash at 0 points, every 5th dash at 4, every third dash at 8, and every other dash at 12.
 * 41) ***Whetstone follows the same pattern as Smoke Bomb, activating for every 8th parry at 0 points, every 5th parry at 4, every third parry at 8, and every other parry at 12.
 * 42) ***For heart ring, you generate 1 HP for the 3rd and 4th parry with 0 points, the second, third, and fourth with 4 points, the first, third, and fourth with 8 points, and the first, second, and fourth with 12 points.
 * 43) **Divine Relic: Activated when you get 16 points. It doesn't reduce the starting HP, but it still randomizes weapons, but you get the full benefits of Smoke Bomb, Whetstone, and Heart Ring and the Coffee effect charges at a 52% rate.
 * 44) After completing each Mausoleum, the player receives a Super Art, an powerful spell that requires the Super Meter to be full. The Super arts are:
 * 45) *Energy Beam: Attacks the enemy in an horizontal line, dealing great damage.
 * 46) *Invincibility: Allows the player to be invincible for five seconds.
 * 47) *Giant Ghost: Makes the players spirit to leave it's body and attack in the direction the player is moving, leaving the heart that can be parriable.
 * 48) *Super Bomb Morph: Exclusive to airplane bosses. Transforms the player in a bomb that deals massive damage by contact or if timer runs out.
 * 49) Ms. Chalice has her own Super Arts too!
 * 50) *Spiral Pillar: Attacks the enemy in a vertical line, dealing great damage.
 * 51) *Shield Pal: Summons a flying shield that will take one extra hit for you.
 * 52) *Ghostly Barrage: Launches a spectral volley, dealing great damage to bosses.
 * 53) Parrying is a pretty unique feature. It allows the player to disable one of the enemies’ bullets and gives you a boost in the Power meter, that allows the player to do an EX attack (that only requires a fifth of the meter) or a Super Art (that requires the power meter to be full).
 * 54) There are multiple unlockable modifications if you do various things:
 * 55) *If you defeat 15 bosses in an A- or higher, you unlock the Technicolor visual.
 * 56) *After doing all the Run and gun levels without killing any enemy, you will unlock the Black and White visual.
 * 57) *After you finish the game for the first time, you unlock the “Expert” difficulty, which makes the enemies faster and gives them more HP. If you do everything correct, you get the S grade and complete multiple achievements.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The physical copy of the game doesn't actually contain a disc. Instead, you just get a download code. Luckily, it makes up for it by including one of five animation cels, as well that Studio MDHR has confirmed that, after the DLC releases, the physical copy will contain a disc/cartridge.
 * 2) Due to the high difficulty of it, some of the boss fights are pretty hard and frustrating to beat and based too much on trial-and-error, which will cause players to rage. Dr. Kahl's Robot (the most infamous among the fans), The Devil, Grim Matchstick, Chef Saltbaker, and Rumor Honeybottoms are perfect examples of this. While there is a simple difficulty mode, you unfortunately cannot progress with this option and must deal with beating all of them in normal difficulty to complete the game and sometimes, though rarely, there is no simple difficulty at all.
 * 3) Some of the power-ups are unobtainable until you buy others, meaning that you will get some that you will truly not want or need, this is mainly the case with twin heart and whetstone.
 * 4) There are various glitches that make some stages either impossible or bizarrely easy to beat. The Mugman army glitch (a duplication glitch that allowed the second player to duplicate their character) and the fast weapon glitch (a glitch that made the weapon change to a certain speed and making them immediatly fire) are great examples of this.
 * 5) What can make the Run n’ Gun levels frustrating is that there’s no checkpoints, meaning if you mess up and die near the end, you have to start all the way from the beginning, and this makes playing the game more tedious rather than more difficult (especially when you are trying to get a Pacifist rank). Thankfully, these levels are optional.
 * 6) Playing multiplayer in the Run and Gun levels can feel a bit uncomfortable as both players need to be close to advance, to the point of sometimes the advancement can be slowed heavily.
 * 7) Widely considered to be the most infamous part of the DLC, if the player beats the Anteater of The Moonshine Mob in Bootlegger Boogie, a yellow sign reading "KNOCKOUT" with flies appears. However, this is a fake knockout and the players must defeat the Announcer Snail. This caused reactions of many people thinking that defeating the Anteater could complete the level only to get trolled by the Announcer Snail especially if they have 1 HP and die in the last phase, and to add insult to injury, the death quote, "Surprise! Forgetting about da boss ain't wise" essentially breaks the fourth wall as if it knew players would fall victim to this.

Ratings
Two weeks after it came out, Cuphead sold over one million copies worldwide and by July 2019, it sold over four million. By it's second anniversary, it had been sold five million times. By July 2020, the time of it's release in Playstation 4, it reached 6 million sales.

Entertainment Weekly placed Cuphead fifth on the list of its "Best Games of 2017", while GamesRadar ranked it ninth on their list of the 25 Best Games of 2017," and Polygon ranked it 14th on their list of the "50 best games of 2017." In Game Informer 's Reader's Choice Best of 2017 Awards, the game won the "Best Microsoft Game'' and "Best Co-op Multiplayer" categories, while it came in third place for "Best Action Game." The website also gave it the awards for "Best Microsoft Exclusive in their "Best of 2017 Awards," and for "Best Bosses in their 2017 Action Game of the Year Awards. EGMNow ranked the game at #2 on their list of the 25 best games of 2017, while Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation ranked it third on his list of the Best Games of 2017. The Verge named it one of their 15 best video games of 2017.

In the week of September 14, 2019, the album Selected Tunes from Cuphead topped the Jazz Albums Billboard charts.

Tips

 * Some bosses feature secret phases that change some of the stages. This bosses are The Root Pack, Djimmi The Great, Sally Stageplay and The Howling Aces (the latter of which appears only in The Delicious Last Course DLC).
 * To activate the Secret phase of The Root Pack, you have to not attack Ollie Bulb, sparing him and he leaving. This will make Horace Radiche appear and fight alongside Chauncey Chantenay.
 * To activate Djimmi's Secret Phase, you have to shrink between phase four and five, making Mini Cuppet appear rather than the original one. This will make phase four to be skipped, but phase five harder.
 * To activate the Secret Stage of Sally Stageplay, you have to land on the prop cherubs, which will make the chandelier on the background fall on Sally's husband and end Phase 1 suddenly. Phase two will change have nuns attacking the player, rather than Sally's kids. After the end of phase two, to the deity versions of Sally and her husband will be fought at the same time, and on the final phase, while gameplay remains the same, the actors in the background change from Sally's husband and kids to the Pastor and one of the Nuns seen in Phase 2.
 * In The Delicious Last Course DLC, to activate the secret phase of The Howling Aces, you must cautiously damage the Yankee Yippers without knocking one of them in which they emmit a gray smoke in their jetpacks. Doing this you're fighting Chinook Saluki with the Yankee Yippers and she does not flip the screen.

Trivia

 * The game was in mh:crappygames:development hell for 7 years.
 * The original story was going to be a little different from what we got: Instead of going for each one of them, the characters were put on a tourney and fought each boss in a round respectively.
 * The game's DLC was announced to be released at the end of 2018 or middle of 2019, but was delayed numerous times until 2022 due to the developers wanting to avoid crunching the quality and due to COVID-19.
 * Some bosses and weapons that were scrapped from the main game are featured on the DLC, the most notable examples being the Spider Mobster featured in Bootlegger Boogie being a rework of the scrapped "Giant Spider" boss, and the Light Bug's main attack in the same level being reminiscent of the scrapped "Light" boss.
 * Bosses like Cagney Carnation, Beppi the Clown and Cala-Maria, the song Floral Fury and the PS4 trailer have spawned internet memes.
 * The game became really controversial after it's release when game journalist Dean Takahashi took over 10 minutes to finish the tutorial, making a lot of people question the gaming journalists capabilities.
 * The game was to have lots of cut content due to reasonable budgets, however once Microsoft started taking control, the plans for cutting content was cancelled and also made the game Xbox timed exclusive for some time.
 * Similar to other characters like Travis, Altaïr and Vault Boy, Cuphead is a Mii costume in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Like Sans and Shantae, the costume also includes a song, that is Floral Fury in this case.
 * Cuphead, Mugman, The Devil and King Dice appeared at the event “Ready? Wallop!” as Spirits.
 * The Moldenhauer Brothers were primarily inspired by the works of Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, ranging from the likes of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the lucky Rabbit (the main inspirations for Cuphead's and Mugman's designs), Betty Boop (Cala Maria is based on her figure) and Popeye (a boss in the game, Captain Brineybeard, is inspired by Bluto's appearance in the 1936 short Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor).
 * During the 1st King's Leap challenge against the Pawns, the Latin American Spanish death quote is "Pasito a pasito, suave suavecito, me llevo la victoria, poquito a poquito" which is a clear reference to the reggaeton song mh:thehorriblemusicandsongswikia:Despacito from mh:thehorriblemusicandsongswikia:Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and mh:thehorriblemusicandsongswikia:Justin Bieber (only in the Remix version).
 * The secret phases of The Root Pack and Sally Stageplay originally went unused in the main game, but both were added in later in a patch.
 * The game was mainly responsible for the phrase "It's just like Dark Souls" due to its notoriously high difficulty being similar to that of the Dark Souls franchise, the phrase also became an internet meme.

Videos
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