YMMV / Pocket Zaurus

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Aegi, which look like miniature Sphinxes, are found in great numbers inside The Sphinx Maze. They are small and fast, and take three hits to kill. They also jump around endlessly, making it hard to hit even with upgraded boomerangs. Additionally, the level design in parts of the Sphinx Maze make it difficult to attack them without taking damage.
  • Sphinx Souls, also found in the Sphinx Maze. Only the gem the ghosts surround are vulnerable, but with their large size and their fast speed, it is difficult to hit the gem to kill it, forcing you to either run away from it or waste a precious Flash Attack to kill it quickly before it saps your health away.
  • Before the Sphinx Maze, you encounter little hooded enemies called Jabbas. There are several varieties of them, where they attack you with rocks with unpredictable trajectories or wheels, or with spears as a totem pole of four of them. However, the most annoying of the Jabbas by far is the Straw Jabba. When it appears, the screen scrolling stops and it enters the screen from the left side. It then lowers a long straw directly onto your health meter and siphons your health away. Not only do you have to get at the Straw Jabba before it literally sucks your life away, but it appears in locations that are hard to get into to attack it. It is easy to lose your Super Zaurus mode from this annoying enemy if you are caught unaware.
  • Mads, hooded enemies in the second part of Enchanted Land who throw spears at you, have the annoying ability to duck underneath your boomerang attacks. They can be killed by properly timing your boomerang attacks, but often, they are accompanied by flying projectile shooting enemies. This forces you to waste a Flash Attack on them if you are impatient.
  • Unicorns, in The Age of The Gods, fly back and forth horizontally on the screen, often above your horizontal position, and shoot projectiles that block your shots downwards, making it difficult to attack them from below.
  • The Cerberus, found in The Age of The Gods, takes a truckload of hits to kill and shoots highly damaging fireballs in random directions that block your own shots.
  • Dragons, also found in The Age of The Gods, take a lot of hits to kill, are only vulnerable in their head, absorb your shots elsewhere on their body, and rapidly shoot fast fireballs that deal heavy damage to you. The saving graces of Dragons are that they do not move and their fireballs can be destroyed.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Drakkuras, those flying imps that sometimes hide in item-carrying Bottlanodons. They are small and move fast, and are hard to hit if you have only the slow boomerangs in Hashimoto's regular form. There is one point after Future City's Time Capsule section that one Drakkura appears and advances towards you just as you are being dropped off from the Time Capsule, often resulting in you taking an unavoidable hit.
  • Tarantulas hover through the air in erratic patterns. You first encounter them at the beginning of the first stage of the game, The Land of Dinosaurs, when you do not yet have the fast boomerang attacks of Super Zaurus, making them hard to hit. They also spawn near areas with many spider webs, which absorb all of your attacks, making attacking them very difficult.
  • Illes, flying spear-throwing imps in The Age of The Gods, often fly out of your reach and attack with fast spears once they reach the left side of the screen. Luckily, their spears can be destroyed and they themselves are fairly large and easy to hit, going down in three hits.
• Goddamned Boss: Demon King Burial/Belial, the boss of the Enchanted Land stage. His first form is straightforward. After taking enough damage, he will split into four parts: a mouth, a crawling finger, a bouncing eyeball, and a top hat. Each of these parts have to be destroyed in a specific order; the other parts are completely invincible until a specific one is destroyed. Players who fight this boss for the first time can become frustrated unless they figure out that the body part they must destroy is the one that is shooting projectiles at them.
• No Export for You: This game was never released outside of Japan. In May 2015, however, it received an English fan translation with all of the level name signs translated into English and given the name Pocket Zaurus: The Swords of the Ten Kings.
• Retroactive Recognition: The guy you play as in this game is named Hashimoto. He is based on Shinji Hashimoto, a young Bandai employee who helped create the Pocketzaurus toy line. Who would have known that the unfortunate nerdy guy who got turned into a goofy dinosaur would go on to work for Square Enix, and be one of the two people^note the other being Tetsuya Nomura who were in an elevator with a Disney executive to bring to life the Kingdom Hearts franchise?
• Scrappy Mechanic: Unusual for a side-scrolling platformer/shooter, the pop quiz questions are triggered by going to specific parts of the level. However, sometimes you may trigger a pop quiz in the middle of a heated fight with several enemies, causing all action to stop and enemies to disappear, only to reappear after the pop quiz is over. This can sometimes lead to cheap hits if you end up forgetting where all the enemies were before you triggered the pop quiz.
• Scrappy Weapon: Hashimoto's regular form's boomerang attack. He can throw only two very slow boomerangs at a time, compared to Super Zaurus' three fast boomerangs at a time. The slow boomerangs often miss enemies that are small and/or fast, and, against a certain boss, makes the boss fight much more difficult.
• Squick: In the Future City stage, after the Time Capsule section, you will encounter a town area with a Cafe in it. Entering the Cafe will trigger a cutscene in which a Drakkura serves you a cup of coffee, which completely restores your health. As you are drinking the coffee, the Drakkura will comment that the coffee is made with beans that are his "????". Later on in the town, you trigger a pop quiz that has the chance to ask you this question:

  What is the "???" mentioned in the Drakkura coffee shop?

  [B] Poop [A] Punch ^(Answer) The correct answer is [B].

• That One Boss: After the first boss, General Black Zaurus, who is a straightforward boss fight, you encounter later bosses who have completely different gimmicks to fight them.
  • Great King Tutankham, the boss of the Ancient Egypt stage. The fight takes place in a chamber that consists of three giant sarcophagi of King Tut. The sarcophagi attack with erratic projectiles that move in completely random directions and are impossible to predict. The sarcophagi cannot be damaged by any of your regular attacks. How do you deal damage to Tutankam? By placing items that look like a baby pacifier into the mouths of the sarcophagi. Did we mention that the erratic projectiles are shot out of the mouths? Additionally, with all three sarcophagi attacking at the start of the fight, the screen becomes filled with erratic projectiles, making it very easy to take damage. Compounding the difficulty of this boss fight, in order to successfully place a pacifier into a sarcophagus mouth, you have to line up the pacifier with the mouth almost exactly and release it via the attack button; simply throwing the pacifier into the mouth from a distance will not work. To make matters even worse, taking damage while holding a pacifier will make you to drop the pacifier, forcing you to run over and retrieve it, possibly taking damage from the projectiles in the process. If you drop a pacifier and it goes off-screen, sucks to be you, as you have to wait for a new one to respawn in a random location in the room. The most difficult sarcophagus to "pacify" is the one on the far right; it is very easy to miss your mark and throw the pacifier off-screen, forcing you to wait for a new one to respawn. Finally, the icing on the cake of this frustrating boss fight: you have a time limit, and if you take too long in the fight, the boss will kill you instantly, no matter now much health you have, whether you are Super Zaurus or not, and no matter how many sarcophagi you destroy, necessitating starting the whole fight over again from the beginning.
  • Emperor Green Zaurus, the boss of the Age of Gods stage. Green Zaurus resembles a large two-headed snake. The boss fight begins with him offscreen, summoning water geysers that are completely untelegraphed and appear in completely random locations on the screen. Unless you are constantly moving and are aware that his geysers appear at set times during this phase, you will get hit. After the initial water geyser attack, Green Zaurus enters the room from the bottom and begins shooting fireballs at you. Fortunately, his fireballs can be destroyed by your boomerangs, but like Great King Tutankham, none of your regular attacks can hurt him. You have to wait until his fireballs hit one of the sconces on either side of him; which generates an item that looks like a Christmas wreath. Grabbing a wreath is an exercise in frustration and tedium, since the wreaths follow a different physics routine than the fireballs (being that the wreaths arc much more slowly than the fireballs), so you have to clear the fireballs out in order to grab the wreaths if you do not want to take damage. The wreaths are the only thing that hurt the boss, and you need a total of six wreaths, three for each of his two heads, to defeat him. You must throw the wreaths directly at his heads, otherwise, they will pass harmlessly through his body and necks, wasting a valuable wreath and forcing you to go through the extreme danger of retrieving another wreath. The main reason why players would want to minimize damage against Green Zaurus is, if this stage is the penultimate stage before the Final Boss, they will be taken to the final boss fight without being able to recover any health after a boss fight in which taking damage is almost guaranteed.
  • King Bug the Great, the boss of the Future City stage, when you are regular Hashimoto Zaurus. As Super Zaurus, you can easily cut through King Bug's mooks and damage him in his weak spot. However, without the fast boomerangs that Super Zaurus has, good luck on destroying his mooks before he hides his weak spot. King Bug dies with only three direct hits, but with your slow boomerangs in regular form, actually landing a hit is extremely difficult.
• That One Level:
  • The entirety of the Sphinx Maze in the Ancient Egypt stage. It consists of eight floors filled with Demonic Spiders, precise platforming, and path memorization. Each floor has three doors; only one of them will advance you to the next floor. The other two will lead to dead ends or send you back a floor. On the eighth and last floor, there is a door that will take you all the way back to the beginning of the first floor. At the end of the Sphinx Maze is a fight with That One Boss.
  • The Trap Room after the movie theater in the town area of the Future City stage. Entering the Trap Room, you are sent to a pitch black room filled with Goddamned Bats and no indication of where the exit is, becoming almost a Pixel Hunt in order to find the exit.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Flash Attack, which is basically a full-screen Smart Bomb. You can carry only three at a time, and these items are very rare. You usually end up using them when the screen is filled with enemies, but some parts of the game force you to use one if you are not quick enough to deal with the threats with your regular attacks, and one enemy in the Sphinx Maze can be reliably killed with it, but is very difficult to kill with boomerangs. Also, one optional area in Future City needs one to be used in order to enter it.

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