What makes Maniac Tetrimidion so hard?

Now, I don't know if you know what Maniac Tetrimidion even is, let alone what game it belongs to, so I'll explain what that is, what game it belongs to, and where it is found.

So, let me explain what game it is in. If you love Tetris, then you'll probably know what Tetris Effect: Connected is, but for those who don't know what that is, it's basically Tetris as if the environment around it is in the world. For example, underwater, jewels, space, forest, desert, etc. The environment also beats to the music that plays in each of the stages found in Journey Mode.

There's also many gamemodes that can be played in Tetris Effect, tens of singleplayer modes, and 4 multiplayer modes (well, there's 5, but the 5th one doesn't unlock until you've beaten at least area 1 of Connected Mode, and while it can be played at anytime in friend or local matches, it is limited to Saturdays when the moonsets. We'll talk about this mode soon.) that can be played.

What we're going to talk about is the Connected Mode in the multiplayer section. In here, 3 players work together to defeat 3 bosses in 5 areas, with the final area having 1 boss with 3 phases. Once started, the 3 players need to fill the gauge by clearing lines. The most efficient moves to do this are T-spins and Tetrises. Once the gauge is filled 100%, the 3 players merge their 10x20 fields into one 30x20 field, and the players need to clear as many zone lines as possible with the inclusion of magic tetrominoes. When the next player to place a piece is unable to place any more tetrominoes, the team forms an attack that sends garbage lines to the boss. Unlike Tetris 99 or any battle royale, these can only be destroyed when the boss is in defense mode and by clearing lines. When the boss tops out, it is defeated, and the next boss spawns until there's no more bosses left to spawn, in which case the 3 players win. The 3 players lose if all 3 of them top out.

Now, the bosses are the zodiacs and Tetrimidion (Area 5).

Area 1 has Pisces, Sagittarius, and Taurus,

Area 2 has Cancer, Libra, and Scorpio,

Area 3 has Gemini, Aries, and Virgo,

Area 4 has Capricon, Aquarius, and Leo, and

Area 5 has Tetrimidion with 3 phases.

There is difficulty in here. Area 1 is considered the easiest to beat, while Area 5 is the hardest to beat. The difficulty is determined by how fast the boss places tetrominoes, how many lines it clears, how many attacks the boss does, and how many special techniques it uses. Now, Tetrimidion uses the attacks from all 12 zodiacs', which makes it very difficult, along with how many attacks it does. So this means all 3 players have to play more than decently to be able to take down Tetrimidion and beat the mode, but what if there was a setting to make all of these bosses even harder? Well, this is where the maniac mod comes into play!

Now, this isn't actually a mod, but it is a setting you can apply before starting the match, and while Areas 1-2 are still somewhat of a pushover, that quickly ends with Area 3, as the boss is kind of at the same speed as Area 5. This mod quickly becomes relevant with Area 4. Now, when I played this with Area 5 with 2 level 10 CPUs, some of the time I actually was able to beat Area 5, but with this mod, I can't even beat Maniac Area 4 due to how many attacks the boss attacks, the severity of the attacks, and how fast it clears the garbage lines. And the thing is, there's only a single-digit amount of teams online that actually have beaten Maniac Area 5.

This mode came out in 2020/21, but the first ever successful attempt at Maniac Area 5 happened in August 2022, taking around 1-2 years since it was released for a team of 3 players to finally beat this impossibly hard mode. Here's how it played out: (along with another attempt that is a failure to show just how hard it is)

The successful attempt is 32 minutes long for a reason. This boss is by far the HARDEST boss for a Tetris game. Just look at how intimidating phase 3 is. Now, before continuing, you should know that the more times you go into the connected zone, the more ramped up the boss will be. This is why phase 1 isn't at the worst state yet, but as soon as phase 2 starts, MY GOD, the boss clears lines as if an expert player is playing the boss, the attacks are very brutal, and worst of all, YOU HAVE NO TIME TO BREATHE (well, you could just pause the game, but you would lose time doing that, and you can't even pause in friend games). The failed attempt took half an hour to defeat phase 2 and almost immediately failed at phase 3. Just look how many times the players top out from the insane amount of attacks thrown at them. You would think it's a skill issue for all 3 players, but it's not; they genuinely CAN'T do anything about the traps they get into.

Don't even get me started with phase 3. It's as if phase 2 is beyond steroids and is in impossibly hard territory. Now, the successful attempt does get lucky and beats phase 2 rather quickly, but that's where phase 3 gets to them. Most of the time there's only 1 player surviving, and any second the boss could just easily take them down with no shame to them. This is just how frustrating it is to try to beat. In fact, there's only a very few teams that have successfully beaten the entire boss. They were only able to do this because once you EVENTUALLY get into the connected zone, the damage output to the boss is way stronger than it usually is.

I strongly recommend you play it on your own with 2 level 10 CPUs and see just how difficult even normal Area 5 is. Now, with trial and error, you could possibly beat the normal Area 5 eventually, but good luck with Maniac Area 5; in fact, even 3 level 10 CPUs couldn't beat this if you were able to make that happen. This actually requires near perfection from all 3 players, along with patience, in order to win this.

Now, could you theoretically make the boss EVEN HARDER than this? Well actually yes, there do exist a few YouTube videos showing off a mod to the game that turns the game into Hyper mode, making the bosses harder. There's even Hyper++ mode too, though these are not baked into the game itself, so you'll have to mod the game yourself to try it.

If Hyper and Hyper++ were in the official game, and you turned both the Hyper++ AND Maniac mods on, then...your chance of beating even phase 1 is 0.0000000000000000001%, aka extremely slim. I'd recommend against trying to even attempt it, as the boss would probably be at 3.5 PPS right from the get-go.

Anyway, hope that adds a boss to your hardest bosses tier list if you count Maniac Tetrimidion as a boss. Peace out!

(Also, fun fact: the videos you watch on Google Sites count towards your YouTube history! I'm not even joking; just look in your history tab, and you'll find the two videos that played on this page (if you did click on them). I just wanted to say that in case you suddenly see Tetris videos in your recommendations.)