Pachi-Pachi
"Cling cling, clang clang, Your bell has rang!"
—Pachi-Pachi, Death screen
Pachi-Pachi is an unused mini-boss in Cuphead that was originally going to appear on one of the board game spaces in King Dice's fight.
Description
Appearance
Pachi-Pachi is a pachinko win pocket that bears a resemblance to The Devil, with a slightly bigger nose and eyes and wheels under their base that moves them around the bottom of the stage.
Personality
Very little is specifically known about Pachi-Pachi's personality, apart from the fact that they seem to enjoy talking in rhyme, as evident by their unfinished death screen.
Battle
In the intro before the battle begins, Pachi-Pachi turns on their ears, grows two horns in the top of the head and their nose, and begins to fight Cuphead and Mugman.
Pachi-Pachi would move across the room, occasionally shooting a beam of fire through the hole of their head. It could easily be dodged by moving the opposite way as Pachi-Pachi, as it shortly disappears 3 seconds after it is fired. Balls would drop from the top of the arena, which would cause the platforms to tilt. As the boss took more damage, they would move faster as more balls started falling.
Pachi-Pachi's death animation would have consisted of their eye-popping out of its socket, starting to explode while rocking back and forth.
Trivia
- One of the reasons Pachi-Pachi may have been scrapped was to not make All Bets Are Off! unfair, or to so the spaces were accurate to the board King Dice uses.
- It is also possible that Pachi-Pachi was scrapped to keep the minibosses in All Bets Are Off! accurate to the time period; while Pachinko has been a popular game in Japan since the 19th century, examples only began appearing in the United States and elsewhere by the mid-1970s, some 40 years after the game's time period.
- Pachi-Pachi is by far the most complete of the unused bosses still present in the final game's coding, having a complete set of fully-animated sprites (including intro and knockout sprites) and a near-final stage design.
- Pachi-Pachi might have been intended to be used on spaces 10-12, along with The Light and Card.
- Despite the debug level ID being Pachinko, the localization files list "Pachi-Pachi" as their name.
- Pachi-Pachi's name is based from the word Pachinko, which is a type of mechanical game originating in Japan and is used as both a form of a recreational arcade game and much more frequently as a gambling device.
- Pachinko, as mentioned above, as the name of the debug level ID.
- Pachi-Pachi's death screen quote mentions the phrase "Your bell has rang", which is a slang term referring to someone getting a concussion. It may also be a reference to a tolling bell, which is commonly used in media as symbolism for the death of a character, or to a ring bell in boxing, which is rang whenever a round ends or when one of the boxers is knocked out.
- Pachi-Pachi resembles Squidward Tentacles from the popular TV Show "Spongebob Squarepants".
- As of patch 1.1.4, attempting to select Pachi-Pachi in the debug mode will softlock the game due to their assets having been removed from the game's data.
Gallery
Cuphead fighting Pachi-Pachi
Pachi-Pachi attacking
Knockout sprite
After finishing an attack
The PLACEHOLDER platform
The fire beam that Pachi-Pachi fires
