"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 in King Dice's fight as a secret phase, meant to be accessed by defeating all of the Dice Palace bosses in one run.
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.
- The Deluxe+ artbook that came with the First Release physical edition in Japan reveals why Pachi-Pachi was cut: the gameplay flow of their fight was deemed too similar to Pirouletta.
- 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. This was however later debunked.
- Despite the debug level ID being Pachinko, the localization files list "Pachi-Pachi" as their name.
- The Deluxe+ artbook also reveals other names considered for the Pachinko boss: Churippu (a direct transliteration of the katakana for translating 'tulip' in Japanese, a reference to win pockets also being called 'tulip catchers), Jara-Jara (a commonly used onomatopoeia for pachinko machines), and Koatari ('small jackpot', referring to a point reward system present in many pachinko machines).
- 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.
- The Deluxe+ artbook with the First Release physical edition in Japan reveals extra details for the fight, such as how King Dice was going to be reflected on the foreground glass paneling of the arena and how he would react if you parried one of the pachinko balls.
Gallery
