I beat the game at 89% and on a new save there’s no expert mode

I beat every boss now I’m at the devil do I have to beat him to get expert

Just Bought Cuphead. Without any Knowledge about the game, should i start with the Expert Difficulty?

i wanna test my skill. what do you guys think?

I guess I should just try and probably will, but I’m curious what my ~14 hour regular mode completion time means after just beating the devil this morning. (He was tough! Took me a couple hours.)

Am I kind of average skill based on that? Is expert mode achievable you think with another 10-20 hours at it? I realize it isn’t a science but trying to get a sense of if it’s achievable for normal people with reasonable time like me, or more for speed runners and very good reflex players.

There's an easy way to make expert mode available without having already completed the game. Maybe it's my OCD, but I prefer to do an expert playthrough on a different save file. I want to recollect all the coins to get that experience, and manually fill up the list as I play (rather than just update checkmarks to stars). I want the two save files to represent two different playthroughs.

Simply open your save file in a plaintext editor, do a ctrl+f for _isHardModeAvailable and you should see "_isHardModeAvailable":false. Simply change the word false to true (be careful to only change that, don't change anything that comes before or after the word false). Just save the editor and you can now play the game on expert mode right away! :)

On Steam at least, the save file is located in C:\Users\(your account)\AppData\Roaming\Cuphead.

Credit to this commenter for pointing this out to me!

I finished the game a couple days ago on regular mode and loved it, thought everything about it was pretty good and since everything was pretty manageable on regular, I figured I'd go for the platinum. I start out with the expert mode trophy and after doing all bosses except the ones on isle 1, I can confidently say that expert is a lousy boring mess. It absolutely sucks and feels like shit to play. Now I understand the difficulty is increased and it is supposed to be harder, obviously, but this is truly pathetic. The amount of spam and boring shit they added to these fights makes it feel like I'm bashing my head into a brick wall every second. Its incredibly disappointed as I did enjoy the regular game, but expert is just a master class embarrassment from the devs in game design. Seriously I have no desire to touch this game ever again once I am done with this boring ass mode except to play the dlc on regular mode. If I wanna challenge ill go elsewhere to better made games that make challenge fun and rewarding, something that cuphead just isn't.

TLDR: Spam and bs nonstop is lousy and boring to play. Stop the dick riding and go play a good challenging game like Hotline Miami.

I did this by having expert mode selected for a boss on an old save, loading a new one (did this on co op but I don’t think that’s related), then when the choices simple or regular came up neither were red and I clicked A and suddenly I fight a much more difficult root pack then normal, then I see the flag golden cuphead and check the list for it to be a star and I’m js like “what the fuck-“