Baysha

Ok so basically if you don't know, Sugary Spire is like a role swap AU of Pizza Tower themed around candy instead of pizza and with a bunch of the character's roles changed around with each other. (I assume you already know the basics of Pizza Tower cause you're on the Smashboards profile posts.) You've got the obvious Peppino and Noise swaps, with some more strange ones such as Mr. Stick taking Noisette's role, Gustavo taking Mr. Stick's, and Noisette taking Gustavo's, with an original chocolate frog character being the equivalent to Brick. The concept of original characters in this game actually brings me to this rant's subject, The Painter.

The Painter is one of the few original characters in Sugary Spire, serving as the boss of the first of the games 3 worlds. He appears to be a muscular cyclops made out of what I think is black licorice wearing a brown trench coat with a paint brush on the top of his head. And now this is just speculation, but he appears to be a pretty confident egotistical guy, too. His boss portrait shows him with a smug smile and the world one hub has a mocking sign featuring his face. Now, a painter that is a piece of food and much larger than the main character that is also very smug and self-centered... where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, that's pretty much exactly what Pepperman is! I have literally no idea why they chose to make a weird expy of Pepperman when they're literally already using the Pizza Tower characters. Why not just use a swapped Pepperman?

"But Baysha!" you may cry out. "There are tons of Sugary Spire characters that aren't swaps of Pizza Tower ones like Coneball, Gummy Harry, whatever the Gerome equivalent's name is, The Confecti, and even the chocolate frogs you mentioned earlier. Not even touching on pretty much all of the enemies, which are pretty much all original. You're fine with those and even like them, why is The Painter so bad?" Well to that I say: "I never said that I liked them out loud and it's weird that you know that." But to answer the question, one of the reasons I'm fine with those and not with painter is that there either A. weren't really good characters for them to swap with, and/or B. they're so minor that they're basically just being changed to fit for the world. But with the bosses, neither of those apply. You can easily just swap them with each other, (which they actually did but discarded, more on that later.) and they're certainly a really major part of Pizza Tower.

This leads me to my main point, the bosses of Pizza Tower are one of it's main points of identity, they are some of the most adored characters of the fanbase, with many of them even planned to be playable at one point or another. (Even though many of those plans fell through.) Every fight oozes a unique personality through the music and the way they act and attack. What I'm trying to get at is, Pizza Tower wouldn't be the same if it weren't for the bosses. Sugary Spire's own player character is even one of them. Just discarding the original bosses in Sugary Spire is a massive waste of potential in my eyes. One of the things that sting the most is that there actually were designs for swaps of Pepperman and The Vigilante made. They were swapped with each other and their names are The Sheriff and Gumbob respectively. Both of them had complete designs, but they were just scrapped from the game. They were even planned to be playable characters. However, they are currently planned to not appear in the game for the time being. Now, Gumbob does seem to have a pretty different personality from Pepperman, so I guess they could've all coexisted with The Painter, but it's still pretty weird. But I have literally no idea why they discarded these perfectly good characters just for someone that's vaguely like a canon character, but not actually that character. If they wanted to go original, why didn't they make a character with a new personality instead of just a Great Value Pepperman? If they wanted to stick to Pizza Tower's characters, why didn't they use them?

There's only one reason I could think of doing this. Sugary Spire is being made on a much smaller scale than Pizza Tower, with only three worlds instead of five. And with this smaller amount of worlds, comes a smaller amount of bosses. Thus, there's just not enough space to fit all of the original bosses in the game, and they didn't want to exclude one of the original bosses, so they made an original one instead. I don't really agree with this, but it's a reason. But keep in mind I may be completely off in my speculation. So, how I would I go about solving the conundrum with the number of bosses? Well there are a number of ways I've thought of going about it. First, you could maybe have multiple bosses per world. World one would have Gumbob and Applejim, world two could have Pizzano (the Noise of the game) and some other character, with world three being the final boss. (This does present the problem of how to gate the bosses. But you could just have two boss gates, with the first one giving extra money instead of a key.) Another way you could go about it would be to have two bosses per world but have the extra boss always be Pizzano to really play up the rivalry factor, as I feel that aspect was kind of lost in the full game of Pizza Tower. You could also have the extra boss in a secret room, like the ones that house the unused levels in Pizza Tower. There's a lot of ways to go about it, and I just don't think using The Painter is the way to go.