(WARNING: A lot of words about how awesome I am ahead. May cause you to believe that I am really self-centered, when actually I just really like talking about game design. Also I'm Brentai.)
I think my biggest accomplishment with Exquisite Knorpse is the fact that you guys keep talking about bosses as if it were a completely normal thing to have in Knytt Stories. Sirius Chamber (it was actually supposed to be just SIRIUS but the combination of only appearing in allcaps text and next to the word "chamber" kind of altered what people ended up calling it) was one of the first things I built for the original Exquisite Knorpse, basically right after I played around with Castle Assaram a bit to learn the system. I immediately went from "How to I use this?" to "How do I break this?", which is kind of my standard behavior towards anything that comes with an editor (see also: the Airy-Go-Round and Molgera stages from SSBB, all the weird experimental crap I left on OmniLudiCon, etc.). The idea I most liked was implementing what is recognizably a boss battle within a system that does not provide any sort of meaningful context for such a thing. Despite the relative simplicity of that particular room and the fact that it relies almost completely on random elements, I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out.
OTOH I have to wonder if the paradigm shift of "non-combat exploration only" to "boss challenges DO exist" isn't less because I designed the original EK bosses to be such and more because I repeatedly insisted on calling them "bosses". I mean yeah, Sirius Chamber is basically just the finale of The Machine with a bunch of crap shooting at you, and God of Fire is literally nothing more than an anthropomorphized obstacle course. When you get down the technical specifics of it, they're nothing more than standard challenges with a unique bit of personality and way more fireballs than usual. Then again again, that may just be the specific definition of a boss. Hrm.
At any rate, my obvious goal with EK2 was to complete the paradigm shift. YARR, HARR BE SPOILARRS!
[spoiler]So Mizu-no-Kami is honestly nothing special. When I sat down to put together Murasa I made a conscious decision to focus more on atmosphere and setting than on raping the player with my flaming designer cock. The more I fleshed out the setting though, the more I required context for it, which is sort of how the Word Train at the beginning got out of hand (though at the same time I had made the conscious decision to make it ponderously long, because I thought it was funny). Once I got to the Sea God blah blah blah part though I realized that I was almost obligated to make the connection to God of Fire, and also I had just so happened to have discovered the awesome "tidal wave" effect by accident as I was dicking around (also the third screen, if you don't use the hologram you'll see what the homing shots are supposed to do, which is sort of form this cool orbit around your platform). So I sort of went with making him almost a homage to GoF despite the fact that I was trying to make a more relaxing area. And then he turned out to be puss-easy and the slapdash escape sequence was the real challenge, OHHHH WELLLLLL.
Anyway yeah obviously my real pet project with this Knorpse was uhhhhh "Box Monster" (it's supposed to be Dark Force from Phantasy Star II but apparently not too many recognized that sprite, probably because it's from the end of a game so unfair it makes EK2 look like Kirby). Box Monster was my absolute, probably final breaking of the Knytt Stories concept. It made the player actually attack and kill a creature in a game where the concept of direct combat specifically does not exist. Also I implemented a health bar, lol. There are unfortunately a ton of things about the final product that I'm not 100% happy with, but I did manage to accomplish, in my mind, the one thing I had set out to do: make the Knytt Stories engine my bitch.
Also, at least three other contributors added their own "bosses" and nobody batted an eyelash or even said "You took that idea from Brentai", so clearly my campaign has met with some amount of measurable success. And it inspired the Knorpse's best joke.
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