DLC #185 - Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course 2

Question : When is a Delicious Last Course not actually a "Last Course"?

Answer : When a game, for whatever reason, splits some DLC content in half and creates 2 separate trophy lists for it.

The second part of Cuphead's Delicious Last Course includes just 2 additional trophies, both of which are awarded for a couple of very specific tasks.

There's nothing to preface about the content itself. This is simply an extension of a couple of Easter Eggs that can be found within Inkwell Isle IV, and will award you with a couple of trophies for your troubles.

The "A Horrible Night To Have a Curse" trophy, awarded for Surviving the nightmare, is achieved with a very specific set of steps, and will lead you directly into the other trophy within the list.

The Inkwell Isle IV map contains a graveyard with a series of tombstones lined up next to each other. You can interact with each tombstone, and if you do so in a certain order, you'll unlock a secret boss battle - The Angel and Demon. It's not a difficult fight, and once you defeat them, you'll earn a new charm - The Cursed Relic.

This is where things get a little bit trickier;

Paladin - Obtain great power.

The "Paladin" trophy, awarded for obtaining great power, requires you to upgrade the Cursed Relic to the Divine Relic.

The first thing you'll need to do is make sure the Cursed Relic is actively equipped into your charm slot. Once this is done, the Cursed Relic will be in your loadout at all times, and in order to fully upgrade it to the Divine Relic, you'll need to go back through and beat a certain number of boss fights over again with the Cursed Relic equipped, effectively levelling it up.

However, there are a couple of things to be aware of about the Cursed Relic.

Firstly, it will reduce your HP to just 1 from the outset of any fight. Secondly, your weapon choices are determined by a randomly changing, cyclical order. Each time you perform an action that involves dashing, parrying or if you stop firing your current weapon, your loadout will randomly cycle to the next weapon - and this will also be randomly selected. This point of note is the real game-changer here.

My initial plan of attack was to simply start from the beginning of Inkwell Isle IV, and go back through each of the boss fights I'd most recently tackled. They were still fresh in my memory from the first DLC pack so I still knew what to expect in terms of attack patterns and the different phases of the fight. It seemed like a sound strategy on paper, but I really struggled to make the adjustment to the randomly changing weapons the Cursed Relic bestows upon you, and I felt completely lost without the ability to tailor my weaponry to suit the strategy of the fight I was about to have.

I began this venture by going through an entire day without even beating the first boss, so I turned away for guidance and found some helpful background information regarding the Cursed Relic. Upgrading the Relic works off a background points-based system, whereby you need 16 points to achieve Divine status. These points are awarded for defeating any boss within the game, but each boss is assigned a specific number of points depending on their category. I could have switched back to the main game and beaten a handful of those bosses, but they awarded less points and I haven't played through them since I earned the Platinum trophy, so I felt like the learning curve would be too great compared to the more familiar DLC bosses.

I also found out that the Cursed Relic levels up in stages, whereby every time it reaches a certain number of points, it's benefits begin to strengthen. You can gain HP for successful parries, and dashing will also grant you bursts of invincibility, and picking up these snippets of information allowed me to go back and tackle this challenge equipped with some valuable knowledge.

So did I still continue to struggle? Yes. I generally fared better knowing I could accumulate HP by taking the time to parry attacks, and I slowly managed to gain an understanding of how to take a little bit of control of the erratic weapon cycles, but I still struggled to make steady progress. I just couldn't get used to how the flow of fights is constantly interrupted by the way the Cursed Relic makes your weapons cycle through the different options repeatedly. It created a challenging edge to a game that needs no such invitation to begin with.

Each victory felt like a big one, and in classic Cuphead fashion, there was nothing a bit of perseverance couldn't overcome. I did eventually get to a stage where I could master the weapon rotation a little bit, and effectively skip certain weapons that I didn't think were effective options in battle, and began to favour certain loadouts more akin to the normal strategy of planning for a boss fight with a pre-determined loadout.

It was a steeper challenge than anticipated, but perhaps could have been strategised better. I think it may have been more beneficial to re-learn some of the earlier boss fights and chip away from that angle, as this trophy took somewhere in the region of 10 hours in the end. All 5 Inkwell Isle IV main bosses beaten, with the Root Pack from Inkwell Isle I also beaten, as this would give me the single outstanding point needed to finally transform the Cursed Relic into Divine status.