Oof... yeah, this boss feels impossible, especially for me. I don't have the reaction time for stuff like this. I rapidly hit the point where I can see I've stopped improving and I'll have to cheat if I want to see it through to the end. Since it won't be a legit kill when I'm up to coming back to this, I'll keep secret anything I see afterward for courtesy's sake. Gaining credit for the password was legit but I'm unsure if people want that one shared, since it's still skill-based instead of dependent on RNG.
I'm at least content with redeeming myself by eventually beating hard mode Tartaros legit a couple days ago!
My best go saw me ALMOST getting a perfect phase 1 (was dinged by a light arrow shortly before the transition) but I don't see how those wind waves can be dodged. Even with him halfway across the screen, me buffed with speed, and moving perpendicularly away, I couldn't seem to avoid them. That move alone guarantees a wipe if I can't damage him fast enough, which I can't because I spend too much time running away to reliably hit him.
As a result, my main damaging attacks had been Meteor Storm and Chaos of all things - water and earth arrow specials both persist on the field and hit hard, making them good if I can line them up with the boss. Then I'd try to keep him on the same horizontal row so they keep hitting him. Lastly, I pushed the phase transition at the end with Wind Blade while dumping my magic bar into Laser.
Edit: Oh, also, a bug report from the lead-up.
Float refuses to work here if you land on this strip with the switch. I had to F6 to get unstuck. I think it's the eyeball thing, but it doesn't try to zap me down like all of the others do. Maybe its function is still going off but the cross blocks remove the lightning effect?
This was definitely a one-run dungeon for me and I don't know if I have it in me to do it again, but it also occurred to me that Pall / Loammi might be able to hover-blink through some of it and I wonder if they can go out of bounds, like in the Witch's Realm.
Edit2: HOLY SMOKES THAT WAS AMAZING
Like yeah I wasn't legit but I'm still really happy (and scared) that I got to at least see the content.
I might need to, as Holm's defense penalty is working against me here. On the other hand, his magic regen is pivotal for me getting out most of my damage without actually getting too close to him, even if I still manage to feel starved of it in between trying to keep up double Enhance buffs, an attack bonus, and Poison rolling at once. Dracus might be a better compromise if I give up using mana on Laser (since his primaries don't interrupt his regen) if I devote it entirely to keeping my speed buff going, but I liked the faux-poetic theme of me starting my Yuurand journey with Vanice and ending it with Holm.
I do like the thematics at play! But yeah, Holm's defense penalty is hard. The Crimson Haze status clamps al your stats down to a max of x1, so characters who trade one stat for another tend to have a hard time.
The boss's self-healing is massive, and seems to happen entirely before it's possible to end the intermission. Am I correct in thinking it's a way to thematically lengthen the first phase without simply piling more onto the HP bar? I got the sense that the boss's "real" health is determined by the number of projectiles that turn gray instead.
There's more to it than just that! He' not guarantee to do the self-healing. At a certain length into the fight, he chooses to either do meteor storm or heal, depending on his HP. While healing prolongs phase 1, it depletes much more of his stamina, and you ideally want to get that to 0. You can have it depleted in phase 2 and render him unable to do most of his nasty stuff, and it really pays off at the end.
Since I was still nervous about the requirements to enter Eden's End, I micromanaged the entire run up to that point such that I got 100% collection and the labyrinth master dead with "0 deaths" in a hair under 1 hour (quit without saving, also done if I felt I spent too much time doing stuff between saves). I initially didn't know what would trigger the final area, so I copied the save file and ended the run, saw it didn't work, reloaded and beat Pall on his hard mode, copied and aborted again, went back and spent another half hour collecting all 8 skulls and killing *those* bosses just in case they counted too, and only then did I think to tap the flower. Played the new area the same way too just in case deaths (or too many) could evict me, though clearing it added another hour. So TECHNICALLY it's currently a deathless 2:30:00~ run as far as the save file knows, but it was anything but in practice!
Ha, that's pretty great. The actual requirements are quite lenient. If I recall correctly, it's <50 deaths and <3 hours to collect all skulls and ingrain on the flower. Once you've reached it, there's no eviction.
Wait is that password a pun...?
It's mostly a play off a phrase Evan quite liked in the past, but it doubles as a pun.
Oof... yeah, this boss feels impossible, especially for me. I don't have the reaction time for stuff like this. I rapidly hit the point where I can see I've stopped improving and I'll have to cheat if I want to see it through to the end. Since it won't be a legit kill when I'm up to coming back to this, I'll keep secret anything I see afterward for courtesy's sake. Gaining credit for the password was legit but I'm unsure if people want that one shared, since it's still skill-based instead of dependent on RNG.
I'm at least content with redeeming myself by eventually beating hard mode Tartaros legit a couple days ago!
Hey, hard mode Tartaros is no joke. That's truly an impressive achievement. I'd say don't feel bad if you can't beat this. There's a debate about whether this or the hardest variant of Stellar Sea's superboss is the toughest fight in ZC, but in either case, the gulf between them and basically everything else is massive. Reaching it at all is impressive. Reaching a certain point in the fight is worth a hefty amount of praise.
My best go saw me ALMOST getting a perfect phase 1 (was dinged by a light arrow shortly before the transition) but I don't see how those wind waves can be dodged. Even with him halfway across the screen, me buffed with speed, and moving perpendicularly away, I couldn't seem to avoid them. That move alone guarantees a wipe if I can't damage him fast enough, which I can't because I spend too much time running away to reliably hit him.
As a result, my main damaging attacks had been Meteor Storm and Chaos of all things - water and earth arrow specials both persist on the field and hit hard, making them good if I can line them up with the boss. Then I'd try to keep him on the same horizontal row so they keep hitting him. Lastly, I pushed the phase transition at the end with Wind Blade while dumping my magic bar into Laser.
The trick with the wind is actually to be as close to him as possible. He can rotate it pretty quickly and is basically guaranteed to shred you if you're far away. You wanna listen for the audio cue, then get very close to him to circle around him.
Honestly, I can understand those being good spells to hit him with when you've got the MP for them. I use Chaos myself actually, but usually just once, to get earth spears and trigger his earth immunity early in the fight.
Edit: Oh, also, a bug report from the lead-up.
Float refuses to work here if you land on this strip with the switch. I had to F6 to get unstuck. I think it's the eyeball thing, but it doesn't try to zap me down like all of the others do. Maybe its function is still going off but the cross blocks remove the lightning effect?
This was definitely a one-run dungeon for me and I don't know if I have it in me to do it again, but it also occurred to me that Pall / Loammi might be able to hover-blink through some of it and I wonder if they can go out of bounds, like in the Witch's Realm.
Welp, yeah, that's an oversight...
Edit2: HOLY SMOKES THAT WAS AMAZING Like yeah I wasn't legit but I'm still really happy (and scared) that I got to at least see the content.
Legit or not, glad you enjoyed it! The presentation on the fight really is something. Evan actually landed himself a spot on a dev team outside ZC in the past by showing off this fight. That final phase...
The laser chase with the intersecting swords is so, so freaking stressful. And the final desperation phase afterwards... man, it gets your heart rate going.
Oh yeah, and now that you've done it,
As a playable character, he can use nearly every attack he uses in the fight. Try messing with his spells - a lot are completely retooled.
I think with that, you're the first person outside the dev team to see essentially all the content Yuurand has to offer (barring some of the subscreen skits and dialogue that boss has for different characters, cuz that's cheating). Congratulations!
Yeah, I did a victory lap as soon as I unlocked him and tried everything out, haha. And now I understand why you said "five playable antagonists" earlier in the thread.
It's probably due to being beyond-sadistic tuning but what kept tripping me up is that INDIVIDUALLY, each of the attacks (or most of them) felt reasonable enough; it was just the combination of them that I struggled with handling. Like with Tartaros, curved shots are my bane and I almost always got hit by the ability-disabling debuff, which was a shame because the resulting light arrows are reflectable and can deal a chunky 500/1000 damage if I managed to bounce one back into the boss, but that was so difficult to pull off that I rarely managed it. I'd probably need 5x the health pool if I wanted to last long enough to even start learning the final phase.
I never did figure out how to disable phase 2's ultimate attack, which made things frightening even in my "turn-based" mode when suddenly I had to juggle Chaos's stationary regen buff with dodging *everything* afterward, lest I wipe. Obviously it killed the intent of the fight, but it still brought its own unique kind of tension the game otherwise doesn't offer.
Still, I've had tons of fun with this game, and got way more out of it than I ever expected to when I first dove in. Thanks again!
The thing I like the most about that boss is that it's a fight that seems like a mountain at first, but eventually you can get good enough to do him pretty consistently; my first victory was using Vanice (basically the second best character for the fight because +stats in everything and poison lets you focus more on dodging (the actual best character for the fight is fighting him with himself because he's immune to his own status effect and gets infinite MP every 30 or so seconds)) and it took a week of grinding. Compare that to a recent run where I did an entire 2 hour and 30 minute run where I took out both Venser on Sadistic and, still meeting the requirements for that boss, went and did both Eden's End and killed him with Synapse in under 30 minutes. It's not for everyone, but it's a really fun fight when you get into the groove of it; the hardest part for me is actually Phase 1 just because that's the phase where I like draining all his stamina which means I have to get close to hit him with a bunch of different elements like charging up Earth Chaos's charge move or hitting him with Ice Conduit or etc. Everything else is just a really, really scary victory lap (and I do mean scary, that laser sword circle is terrifying and it's really easy to crack under the pressure).
Speaking of, Eden's End blew me away with its complex design, even if its spiraling nature gave me a bit of Lunar Tower Dizziness. It felt like all of the labyrinths smushed together into one, but it felt like a DUNGEON instead of "just" a zone. While the difficulty wasn't really to my taste (I've done maybe 5 or so Sadistics just for the hell of it but the lion's share of my runs were all on Relaxed), I was already forewarned about that and knew it wasn't tuned for someone like me in mind, so I'm not really holding that against it. And given the way the place is designed to wrap around on itself, I'm surprised all I encountered was a single minor Float bug.
My biggest struggle was with the timed gate section; going back and forth moves you through just enough screens to respawn the enemies on the gate screen, and trying to kill them often took up enough time that the red switch would fail on me before I could make it out. I had to keep prepping for that like I would a boss, with double Enhance, Power, Poison, and let Holm's MP recharge during the sprint so I could immediately land and rain my Spaghetti-Os on everything. Everything else was ultimately a matter of patience between pre-buffing for rooms, or recovering with Chaos's regen. That one switch in the block maze screen was MEAN though, haha.
Unrelated, but does anyone remember what song plays in the Witch's Realm? It's been in my head all day again.
I never did figure out how to disable phase 2's ultimate attack, which made things frightening even in my "turn-based" mode when suddenly I had to juggle Chaos's stationary regen buff with dodging *everything* afterward, lest I wipe. Obviously it killed the intent of the fight, but it still brought its own unique kind of tension the game otherwise doesn't offer.
If you're talking about the Big Bang attack he does twice in the fight (the one the player version has mapped to Thunderwaves), you have to kill the floras in time to disable it.
Still, I've had tons of fun with this game, and got way more out of it than I ever expected to when I first dove in. Thanks again!
I'm really glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for playing!
Unrelated, but does anyone remember what song plays in the Witch's Realm? It's been in my head all day again.
Here's the original song, from Histoire. How Moosh found it, I have no idea, but man it's a good one.
I was supposed to stop, but the new Deltarune chapters aren't out yet sooooo:
Just a minor thing but coming into this room from the wrong side has you sitting on dense blocks. It's not really a problem (you can go back north anyway, and there are stairs leading around) but I figured I'd report it just for the sake of being thorough.
Also, it was a blink-and-miss-it moment so I can't provide a screenshot, but Pall's eyeball laser from his special Chaos spell won't target dark-immune enemies (kinda like how Shadow Magnet will ignore them) but its beams can hurt them anyway, if they happen to be in another enemy's firing path.
Edit:
Also, Pall can "hop" across gaps meant to be unfloatable because while the eyeball statues zap him out of mask form, he's able to move a couple of pixels first. It also won't trigger a fall once he changes back. You can see here where I'm in the lower left corner of the screen, able to scroll over to the Royal Garden or Lake of Lightning zones (not available in my current Fragmented run).
Edit2: Aha.
I wonder too!
Hahaha, I think I've found one of these in every ZC randomizer I've played so far.
Pffffffffft. That's honestly kind of hilarious. We went to a lot of work to make sure you couldn't get from that particular cutscene to Eden's End. We put less work in ensuring you couldn't break out of Eden's End, it seems.
At one point, I really thought we had Yuurand in a relatively bug free state. After your playthrough, I don't think I can say that with a straight face.
To be fair, this game has a ridiculous number of moving parts and the things I reported are spread over a LOT of playthroughs, so I don't think it reflects badly on Yuurand. It's not like my reports are "I tried to cast Wind Blade and the game crashed."
Ultimately, the Eden's End quirk is just the same bug I already reported about breaking out of the Witch's Realm. I did notice that it appeared to be impossible to leave the cutscene room once I entered it; both screen scrolling and my abilities were disabled, prompting an F6 quit-out, so it seems you were successful in locking it down. The only concern I might have is that breaking out of Eden's End might be able to recreate the "consume the wrong key" bug from the Antoine's Keep + the Lunar Tower report, and going north from the enemy log screen puts you in Jandra's room to fight her, making half of the labyrinth unnecessary.
The only bug I was never able to track down and replicate was an incredibly rare one which seemed to disable the use of one or both of the two extra action buttons responsible for your upper row of assigned spells. But it happened so infrequently (once-per-multiple-playthrough event) that I commonly forgot it existed at all, and F6 always fixed it.
Edit:
- Tartaros can kill the training dummy with a fully charged Void Hedgemon death attack, making the teleporter out non-functional. Gotta F6 out of it.
- Also I think his attack stat bonus from empty health / magic containers only apply to his unique attacks? His defense scales up like you'd expect, but regular spells still retain the -25% attack penalty.
- A room in the challenge dungeon Toy Box, two screens west of the red key location, won't display any of the keys you hold for some reason. You still have the keys and they'll reappear in your HUD when you enter another room, though.
Here's the original song, from Histoire. How Moosh found it, I have no idea, but man it's a good one.
It was a dumb rabbithole that lead me to finding it, so I feel compelled to share. I was watching a playthrough of a SMW hack that used a track called End of the Darkness from a Japanese RPGMaker game called Nepheshel. Upon giving the song a listen on Youtube, I went on a hunt to find other renditions including the original MIDI version. One version came from a sample video for an arranged 10th anniversary album the original composer put out, but the links to their site were dead by that point and no matter how hard I looked I couldn't find the full versions. Might just be lost media at this point. In the process though I stumbled upon Histoire, another RPGMaker game they worked on, and saved that particular song. Only for it to sit in my music folder for years because I never made the original version of Witch's Realm (it was planned a LONG time ago to be a true final area alongside Tartaros/Venser/Pall).
- I think a fragmented run won't assign temporary power-ups in Yuu Rand mode if the seed ends up with more than 100 item spawn locations. Instead, a few spots offer 10 coin bonuses, same as the boss rewards. My current run has 160 total coins after a full collection. Just in case it matters, it's also played in Autimecia's story mode and with the secret checkpoint password activated (because I wanted to see if anything would break by combining them).
Seed: 200, 59
Hash: ABAA CAAE AAJA ATAA TBAT AAJE AATB AAE with Yuurei and Yuurand maps entirely disabled. The Palewoods screen one room south from the boss has such a 10-coin spot.
- After beating the Riviere trio as an Eden's End boss, Rhone persists on the screen instead of despawning like other doppelgangers. I don't think anything *breaks* because of it, but he still maintains an active hitbox in his kneeling state. Something about him can be hit with Death once too, since I was curious if that would remove him.
And regarding the earlier bug I reported about the Garden of Dread's PK Thunder puzzle, it successfully casting feels inconsistent and I can't figure out a pattern to it. On my first test, the spell worked, but then I left the screen and re-entered, and the cross blocks would nullify the spell whether I was stationary or moving. Now it seems the only work if I hold left before pressing it, so it kinda works sometimes? Sorry that isn't more useful.
- I think a fragmented run won't assign temporary power-ups in Yuu Rand mode if the seed ends up with more than 100 item spawn locations. Instead, a few spots offer 10 coin bonuses, same as the boss rewards. My current run has 160 total coins after a full collection. Just in case it matters, it's also played in Autimecia's story mode and with the secret checkpoint password activated (because I wanted to see if anything would break by combining them). Seed: 200, 59 Hash: ABAA CAAE AAJA ATAA TBAT AAJE AATB AAE with Yuurei and Yuurand maps entirely disabled. The Palewoods screen one room south from the boss has such a 10-coin spot.
That is... perhaps the most interesting bug report I've seen so far. I clearly gotta give this one a look.
- After beating the Riviere trio as an Eden's End boss, Rhone persists on the screen instead of despawning like other doppelgangers. I don't think anything *breaks* because of it, but he still maintains an active hitbox in his kneeling state. Something about him can be hit with Death once too, since I was curious if that would remove him.
I'm aware of this one but don't dislike it. It's a bit weird, but I like the vibe, if that makes sense.
And regarding the earlier bug I reported about the Garden of Dread's PK Thunder puzzle, it successfully casting feels inconsistent and I can't figure out a pattern to it. On my first test, the spell worked, but then I left the screen and re-entered, and the cross blocks would nullify the spell whether I was stationary or moving. Now it seems the only work if I hold left before pressing it, so it kinda works sometimes? Sorry that isn't more useful.
Okay, I do wonder if this is maybe a version difference thing. I'll have to take a look and test it out.
Thanks again for all the bug reports! Man do I have a lot of work ahead of me correcting these.
I know how this looks but I'd still rather just report a bug than saying nothing due to over-posting worries.
I'm not sure if this room is bugged or not, but I think the item location here isn't properly spawning. It's just a coin (my last item check) so I'm not missing anything important, but I've gone over the map list so I know it's not an item finder error. I Thunder-tested it, rubbed up against all of the walls, killed the flames with Death, and spewed Magic Stream everywhere so I know I'm not missing a hidden path I'd walk under.
Found the cause of this one. This screen's boneless state won't spawn the item that's meant to appear after stepping on the switch. When I saw this room come up again, I tested it by leaving the item untouched and coming back after the zone's big skull was defeated, and now the item's gone.
