Normally the level 2 boss fight against Valentine takes forever as The Clawed Girl: 4 brief moments of attacking with about 12 seconds of waiting between each.

In my most recent Hard Arcade PB (see in-game leaderboard replay) I unexpectedly got a 3 cycle fight, saving 12 seconds.

The strat? Move close above and to the right of Valentine and attack from there. That gives an extra hit or two per cycle, finishing her off 3rd cycle instead of leaving the usual sliver of health. Super easy, super consistent. Testing suggests other positions might work as well, but I'm not clear on the specifics. The 'normal' strat of attacking from the left always gives 4 cycles from what I've seen.

So... anyone know or have a guess what's going on? I'm curious what the underlying mechanic is here in case it could be useful elsewhere.

I just tried it and it works on Very Hard mode as well. There's 2 things I could think of that are causing this. The clawed girl's attacks seem to have a grey and blue hitbox on them.

This is what it looks like with hitboxes enabled.

I'm guessing the blue hitbox might be a sweetspot that deals more damage.

The only other thing I could guess is that this is a glitch similar to what the laser rifle does, where if you hit an enemy at point blank range with it, it does double damage for some reason.

On this note, I also realized that when fighting the rival's van in the same level, attacking the driver does slightly more damage than attacking the rest of the vehicle. I might look into this on other bosses later.

Edit: I just checked on all of the bosses on challenge mode and the epilogue, and couldn't find anything else

I just looked at the recording frame by frame and found that the attack sweet spot, however it works, actually lands ¤more¤ hits of the usual speed and damage, by attacking over a slightly longer period of time.

Specifically, based on an initial look at a couple of slowed down recordings:

¤ The Clawed Girl attacks consistently once every 8 frames (~1/8 second), each doing 1 tick of damage against Valentine.

¤ Attacking from the left, Valentine's shield reforms (first smoke appears and all damage is blocked) after about 1 second. 8 attacks hit.

¤ Attacking from top right, Valentine's shield reforms after about 1.2 seconds. 10 attacks hit.

And now I'm maybe even more confused, because why would the timing of the shield regeneration change? Or what other things could be going on that would indirectly delay the shield regeneration by a fraction of a second?

Anyway, definitely curious about anything else you can come up with, both on this and other Clawed Girl tech.