game eater blog

The main thing we were watching out for from here on out was enemies who cast great magic, which ruins our day. It was bad, but not that bad! I also didn't fall out of the sky before the boss, which is a big treat.

The enemies here weren't bad. I dabbled in using my Valkyrie-toggling script to use Dimension Slip part of the time, but I still fought a few fights, like the Forager.


I got 4 or so of those high-risk, exploding treasures above pits before deciding I wouldn't push my luck further until after the boss. The butterfly room wasn't too bad.
 

Unfortunately, right around the final save point here, I encountered this big red bozo who hardlocked the game by casting great magic.


On the next pass through that area, I mostly just used Dimension Slip. I got to the boss, Genevieve, who I call, "unclean thing".

I tried to be strategic, taking out her cronies and then keeping her health around half so she wouldn't cast great magic. This also meant using Reflect Sorcery at the start of the fight to mitigate her numerous spells. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out on the first attempt. We crashed again.

For my next attempt, I re-equipped a little bit. This included putting Power Bangles on both Jayle and Lucian, and a Magic Bangle on Gandar. I also swapped Gandar's spell of choice to Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt has a very long charge time, but I can cast from the menu early in the fight.

This happened to work.
 

The treasures were adequate here; the Armor of Aleph is nice, and Jayle put that on. As I left the Celestial Castle, I tried to get one more chest in the area with no floor. I was not very successful, falling out of the castle entirely. I just decided that was fine.

I did my last spiritual concentration and watched a huge pile of cutscenes that culminate in the "A" ending's final area. This includes fun parts like this:
 

It also means we get to fight Hrist with Brahms. This is sort of interesting because this is the single fight in the game where a typical player might encounter the great magic softlock issue. I won't, though! In fact, my normal team is here.
  

There are still more cutscenes. Some are just... enormous lore dumps, but a lot of it is pretty fun and/or interesting.
 

With that... we're proceeding to the final area for the "A" ending, Asgard Hill. There are really only three required fights left, and although I dodged several of them I didn't bother with the Dimension Slip.

The first major obstacle here was Bloodbane the sword-eating dragon. I happen to know he casts Gravity Blessing, so I was ready for a tough fight. I'm not sure if I got lucky or what, but... it wasn't.

  
This fight was profitable. Everyone levelled up, we got an Angel Curio, and we got the Demon Sword "Levantine". This sword is actually better than Gram for most purposes, so Jayle wielded it. We fought a few enemies heading up the hill, but there was nothing really noteworthy about it. I was nervous about some of the floating cloud-type enemies using great magic, but I took them out in one turn and avoided that issue.

The next stop was Fenrir. I wasn't expecting magic from Fenrir, so I didn't use Reflect Sorcery and there was no other special preparation, really. It was on the easy side.


Around this point, I went to the final save point. I took the opportunity to get some status images.

Jayle has made a good knight. She is definitely the bulkiest, and has good RDM mostly due to her Armor of Aleph. However, she isn't generally the best physical attacker and she doesn't do much to protect the rest of the team. It's hard to meet the knight archetype in this game... but I don't think that's a matter of which character I selected to be the knight.


In the plot, Lucian is currently dead. In my game, he's thieving it up. While there's not much that makes him distinct from Jayle other than Shining Bolt, Shining Bolt has really helped Lucian act as a useful thief for our team. Like with Jayle, I don't regret the choice of character to be the thief, although I do wish the characters were more distinct.


Mages are quite similar functionally and statistically in this game, but Shiho is as good as any. Really, I am quite glad I picked her: I like that she didn't start with an offensive spell and only had supporting abilities. She was perfect for the archetype. She absolutely died the most... which I guess is white mage-y.


Gandar was also quite effective as a black mage. I enjoyed his spell selection (only having to replace one) and appreciated his slightly elevated spellcaster stats. He pulled his weight just fine.


Lenneth didn't participate in a single experience-yielding battle... other than arguably the Akhetamen fight. Kinda. Partly. Most people agree she's the best character, or close to it, but we certainly didn't need her except as the game demanded. That said, my Valkyrie toggle feature that I've discussed briefly made it so we could go ahead and use the Creation Gem and Creation Jewel and someone could conceivably say that breaks the purity of the situation. To that I'd say: those items were never the difference-maker, as nice as they are. The only real barrier was... great magic.

On a related note:

The final battle of the "A" ending has two phases where the first is sort of a scripted battle where you struggle to damage Loki.
 
Then Loki tries to get the Valkyrie to kill her friends and they destroy the world and then she suddenly gets super powerful and they fight again.

Loki's damage in both phases is quite savage. He's got some kind of damaging wave thing that does about 30000 damage to the party. I dipped into my Noble Elixirs a bit here.
 
But... it turns out the real show stopper here was - unsurprisingly - great magic.

I think Loki may have some regular great magic, but he also has a special attack called Dragon Orb. I'm not sure what exactly it was that crashed the game, but something did.

This meant doing the first phase plus the very, very long cutscenes again (during which I took a break). I wasn't going to mess around with this a second time so I used my Valkyrie toggle to make it so Lenneth joined the battle and then got partly replaced with Jayle, becoming completely ineffective in battle but negating the crash potential.

You can actually see that the second time I went through the cutscenes, having pressed the "V" key to replace Jayle with Valkyrie, my partners that appeared during Loki's villainous monologue were different.


In the final battle, Valkyrie normally gets force-equipped with the Glance Reviver, which is quite a good sword. I decided to unequip the Glance Reviver...

...then used the "V" toggle to mostly replace Valkyrie with Jayle (note the name at the bottom)...

...and then I equipped the Glance Reviver to Lucian.


Consequently, I've got one completely ineffective character, who has Valkyrie's stats, Jayle's equipment, and Jayle's voice... with different names in each of the two combat menus. I just won't use her! But this does mean Lucian has become pretty strong.


Now, when Loki uses Dragon Orb, the game doesn't fully lock up.
 

Despite my shenanigans, the fight wasn't trivial. After all, I was fully down by one character. Valkyrie/Jayle literally died pretty close to every turn, getting revived with a Union Plume and thus not acting. The attacks were also strong, so I had to spend some of Lucian's turns throwing out Noble Elixirs.


We still had a few Noble Elixirs left when we won, though.
 
It is funny that in this relatively obscure, hard-to-unlock but canon ending there's basically no ending at all. I didn't take any pictures after the boss fight, because this is kind of just the end of it. That said, you can watch the little bit of ending and hear some commentary on the run over the credits at the end of the video. It mostly aligns to what I said about the characters just a few paragraphs up.

This game is... more flawed and less fun than I remember. I still like it. I still like the idea of a "worst character" playthrough, too, although it's hard to want to do that with the great magic lock-up bug in effect. I don't think I'm likely to play this again anytime soon.

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