I beat Doku. It was an okay boss. It blocks your attacks, so you somehow have to deal with that. I tried attacking through him to end up behind him, and then attacking again from there. So, dealing with the blocking wasn't too annoying, fortunately.

I think that this game's puzzles are harder than its boss fights, though. It took me a little while to get past that room with the moving floating platforms. Finally, I was doing something that seemed like it would work -- a wall run jump technique, but it seemed to come short for the second wall. Then I tried doing the move from a lower platform, but one closer to the second wall. I didn't expect it to work, because it didn't seem like Ryu would be able to gain the necessary height in just two walls, but it turns out he was able to jump to a third wall.




By the way, I missed the windmill shurikens. I wonder if it's possible to go back for them.

This game is like Devil May Cry, in that -- even though there are breaks between the stages -- it's mostly one big connected game world (though you might not have access to all of it at once). Right now, I'm very close to the city (Dworku?) that was stage 4. Before I beat Doku, I went back to the area I fought Alma and found the war hammer there.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell