At first I was worried someone had replaced Snow with a sinister robot because against all expectation he appeared to be taken aback by the raw crazy that saturates every second of Bayonetta instead of reveling in it, but I guess on second thought he was probably just surprised about the game actually being pretty difficult?
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EP:
I was really hoping someone would open that scene with "Good to see you again...sister," but it just didn't happen.
So who wants to tell him?
Ahahahaha.
So that bit now makes sense, needless to say (although I was still right about every protagonist so far being, if not actual royalty, then aspiring/failed royalty). Put R-man on hold after the second stratum to grind through NG+ Thage just so I didn't have that hanging over me. Killing Doom Shade as the ending unlock requirement is pretty dumb considering he says the same things whether you kill him or not (and geez there's a map I'm happy not to ever see again). The final boss actually could've been a little scary with Thage since breaking the barrier requires special attack usage? Thage being a squishy mage who is immune to healing and whose special attack is a melee move, not promising putting her right in front of FINAL BOSS POWER. If the boss was smart he could really ruin your day when you move in to break his protection (because MC death = game over here). Fortunately, the boss is not smart and decided that since he still had spells in stock he should damn well use them on someone across the room.
AI in Eternal Poison seems to do this all the time, like if enemies have any spells at all remaining then they're scripted to use them up before resorting to melee. This can result in some really stupid stuff like Unseelies constantly alternating between casting their defense/regen buffs because they can't have both active at once (a new physical or mental status will always overwrite an existing physical or mental status) from the start of the fight until they're all out of spells. It's pretty good about optimizing its damage output against your party, but this too is something you can use against the game once you figure it out. See above with the final boss prioritizing its spells against a random merc purely because he has no MDEF to reduce the damage (whereas sensibly punching the MC instead might result in a smaller damage figure but could also genuinely produce a crisis situation). Also any time you want to lure an enemy into a combo, just put the two characters you want to set it off perpendicular to one another, with them facing forward the same direction. Because striking an opponent from the side or rear gives a damage bonus, the computer will always obligingly march right in between your characters to hit the one with the exposed flank (allowing you to then do the same to the enemy, except super combo powered).
Pretty neat game in general, but yeah, not the sharpest AI I've ever seen.
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Touhou Labyrinths: Wound up beating the final boss after all. Looking for something mindless to do during dinner last night, decided to go grind for levels. Honestly not too bad (insofar as grinding can ever be "not bad"), at least at proper endgame, because the top floor randoms are all just one enemy at a time dropping stupid amounts of experience and Money
(that is actually the currency in this game: "Money.") Vicinity of forty levels over what the game recommended and still barely pulled through. Party was: Meiling, Remilia, Sakuya, Wriggle, Momiji, Kasen, Yuugi, Utsuho, Reimu, Sanae, Reisen, Alice. (Despite having 3/4 of the SDM team present, I forgot to give any of them the team bonus skill. Stupid oversight.)
This was not an ideal party. Wriggle I guess chipped in by getting poison to hit a couple times but this was really a drop in the bucket given stupid huge final boss HP pool, and her raw offense sure wasn't adding much. Reisen could've/should've contributed the valuable service of counteracting the boss's buffs, but she died almost immediately. Alice contributed nothing whatsoever
(note this isn't generally true, she's useful against randoms). Momiji/Yuugi should've added more since they're usually powerhouse melee fighters, but somehow couldn't here; just having the same base attack power as Remilia doesn't mean you can deal damage like Remilia, because git gungnir scrubs. As usual Remilia probably accounted for more than half the party's damage output. Remilia is crazy fucking broke. Kasen sorta able to keep up just for having the right element to hit weakness at least. Otherwise, Sakuya spams haste (she wasn't capable of dealing damage even after powerlevelling), Reimu/Sanae buff and heal, Meiling is a roadblock. Utsuho brought ITD, which is nice in theory except the boss resists the element. Still, damage cut to like a quarter or whatever is still more than some people can do (because it is a number bigger than zero) and wound up making a big difference at the last minute after everyone more important got ID'd.
Oh yeah, boss likes spamming ID. It's tied to his favorite MT tech that can also straight up murder some people through raw damage if the numbers go too swingy (bye Reisen). The status odds are not high, but this is still a huge problem when it's a persistent threat over the duration of an absurdly long fight. He also likes having multiple power-up stages that full-heal him. And buffing DEF/MDF 100% because lol you thought grinding out thirty levels would let you reliably deal damage again, sucker. Then because I had no one who could counteract enemy buffs I just had to turtle them out and hope nobody got ID'd while waiting. Same dilemma for taking time to recharge MP after every time the boss decides to wipe everyone's MP stores to zero (fuck you). At some point he summoned support dudes who had too much DEF for anyone to deal damage but fuck you, that's what I have ITD for. And at low health he thinks it's cool to break out the parasitic healing (god there are way too many awful gimmicks crammed into this one fight). When victory happened it was pretty much at the last possible second, 2/3 of the party dead, tank/damage battery/dedicated healer all gone,
percolations resource exhaustion imminent, boss about to get a turn and probably frag the few battered survivors.
Normally that kind of victory is pretty satisfying, but not so much when you had to grind for an hour just to make that much feasible. For any postgame content I will just assume recommended boss level should be read as 50% higher than actually displayed because I don't know what they were thinking suggesting this fight was remotely possible any lower than I was.
Oh yeah, there is postgame, of course. I don't know how much of this I'll bother with. I found a boss rush and got the Great Question's mask for it because referential game is referential. There is a ton of extra dungeon out there but the randoms are obscenely obnoxious (and like 1/3 as rewarding as the easy ones on the top floor). Killed a few of the scrubbier optional bosses but most obviously well out of my league. I did finally get the capacity to assign sub-classes to everyone in the cast, at least. These are pretty neat; the extra offensive techs they open up generally don't seem too special, but the passive skills synergize with existing skillsets in some pretty nice ways, like making Orin the infinite MP factory.
