Cuphead is famously pretty tough, but what if the team had made its achievement list even harder? In the first of a new series for TA, we think about what could have been if the devs had been even more cruel with the game’s list.
Considering how challenging Cuphead is as a game, it’s remarkable that Studio MDHR was as relatively reserved as it was with the Cuphead achievements. Sure, there are some that are a bit of a pain, but trust us when we say that it could have been way, way worse. How, you ask? Well, you’ve come to the right place to find out… welcome to BS GS.
BS GS is an original editorial series from TA where we ruminate on how rough things might have been if developers had taken their achievement lists to the next level. We’ll try to focus on specific details and possibilities rather than simple grinds — one billion kills, play every day for a year, etc. — to keep things interesting, where possible using other instances of ridiculous achievements as a precedent for what we dream up.
Cuphead: Earn an S rank on every boss
One fairly obvious way to make Cuphead’s achievement list that much scarier would be to require getting a perfect grade on all bosses. For the uninitiated, this involves completing a boss fight on Expert difficulty (A+ is the maximum grade on Normal) within a time limit (typically two minutes, and often quite tight) while landing enough parries and super attacks to meet your quota, and all without taking a hit. Well, in theory, at least — this particular grading system doesn’t look at damage taken, rather what health value you end on, meaning that as long as you have some way to add bonus HP to your total, you can actually afford to take hits and still get the S rank so