Here's another addition to my ridiculous list of ideas that should've never seen the light of day. In this fight, I seek to defeat Maha Ganeshariff using only the Triple Rod's pogo attack. The pogo is usually reserved for scenarios in which Zero has the means to easily descend upon his foes: jumping over short enemies, ascending walls then skyrocketing down, and pogoing off boss projectiles are all methods to gain leverage and directly attack bosses with the pogo. None of these are applicable to the portly elephant in the slightest; his arena is flat and empty, bereft of terrain and walls to utilize, and the only projectiles you can pogo off are his bombs, during which he's invincible thanks to his rolling.
However, because Maha was evidently built by Spalding, Zero can use the Triple Rod pogo to perform a two-step jump off of Maha's circular body and up to his head, which is his vulnerable point. The problem with doing so is that the hitboxes you need to strike on Maha's body for this maneuver to succeed can be tricky to accurately strike. Building consistency for the positioning and timing to perform the Triple Rod’s downward strike to initiate the pogo on Maha is rather difficult. Despite his rotundness, Maha can be surprisingly agile at times, quickly initiating his attacks, and consequently, frequently shifting the position of his hitbox.
The other irksome part of this equation is that pogoing with Triple Rod is significantly more awkward than with its successor in Z3; it requires a fair bit of finesse for even the lightest challenges, and when the demand for precision goes up, the difficulty increases exponentially. As you can imagine, having to land over 20 non-trivial pogos to defeat Maha completely transforms the battle into an unrecognizable affair, and an immensely frustrating one at that.
Concerning luck, the best you can hope for is that he spends the majority of his time stomping around, but even then, you still have to be sagacious with your spacing. After pogoing off Maha’s head, you can choose to double back or leap over him and land on the other side. Typically, leaping over Maha is only advisable while he’s stuck in the middle of the screen; cornering yourself is unwise. The advantage that leaping over bestows is that it forces Maha to waste a couple of frames turning around, making it less likely to get intercepted by a tusk boomerang on the way down; Maha has an irritating propensity to fire them the moment he recovers from flinching. If you happen to cross over Maha’s head after he throws a boomerang, be aware that it’ll come barreling toward you just after landing, so you’ll need to jump again to evade it. This can create a sticky situation where you jump over the boomerang incoming from the opposite side only to get caught by a second or even a third tusk thrown directly at Zero.
Maha’s spindash offers no chance at offense, so gallivanting around during this move is purely for showmanship. As mentioned, you can pogo off the bombs he tosses out while rolling along with Maha himself. Maha’s metamorphosis into a wrecking ball has a few interesting quirks. Just like his Wheel Kirby imitation, you can pogo on the invincible part of his body during this attack. Furthermore, the cord he latches himself onto is composed of multiple segments that act as target points for players to pogo from. This allows Zero to ascend high into the air while simultaneously slicing the cord, forcing Maha to emerge. You’ll land a strike on Maha’s head while falling from the cord climb; a stylish and expeditious counterattack.
Lastly, there’s the matter of circumventing Maha’s heinously time-wasting E. Honda slaps. Normally, the Buster is your ticket to ending this snoozefest sometime this century; obviously, the nature of this challenge precludes its usage. It’s quite fortunate that it’s possible to pogo off Maha’s hand while he attempts to slap Zero silly, however, the hitbox you need to strike with the Triple Rod is even more nebulous than all of the other shenanigans described thus far. It’s a bit confounding; despite the slap animation suggesting multiple small shifting hitboxes, there’s ostensibly a single large, persistent hitbox that slowly travels forward with Maha present throughout the duration of the attack. This is revealed by the final two instances of the “slap pogo” where Zero bounces upward while contacting absolutely nothing.
Overall, this is the single longest amount of time I’ve spent fighting any boss in Zero or ZX thus far. The number of things that can go awry from a positioning and timing perspective is monumental. Adding to that are potential misinputs that result in a diagonal strike, nullifying the pogo-only aspect of the challenge, and the general problem of hoping for an entertaining pattern.
Will I ever fight Maha like this again? No, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
Thanks for watching! Questions and comments are welcome as always.