The title is probably translated badly. Well, it was anyway it'll I punched it into google translate. Names! I got all the characters' given names down, and then they throw family names at me. Is there a way of telling which words are names...? Also, google translate is scarily good at this.
Alice and Marisa are really low level. Like, lower than Remilia's level. They are now my two lowest level characters at 59. So they're getting switched into the main leveling party, which is now pretty fluid other than Lithos, for her extreme normal-enemy slaughtering abilities. The leveling party is now Alice, Lithos, Remilia, Reisen, and Cirno with Marisa in the back. Alice uses Little Legion to keep everyone alive while everyone else uses all-targeting Spellcards. Cirno has pretty good odds of freezing the enemies before they get an action.
Next up is Satori
◊, if for no other reason than she's at the top of the list. She listed as Satori and her pets, so I'm expecting a triple boss battle. Her location is the Palace of the Earth Spirits, 1st Basement Floor. Well, that was descriptive.
Did I mention that I hate the Palace of the Earth Spirits? Because I hate the Palace of the Earth Spirits. Most of it looks like this
◊. You can't see me because I'm inside a wall. Most of the dungeon is like this, you just have to run into every wall because half of them aren't. You eventually sort of unconsciously get the logic behind it and can intuitively guess which ones are walls, but then of course they throw as many curveballs at you as possible. I'm not going to fully explore this place again, if nothing else because the heal point is too far away from a lot of it. Oh, but I should, shouldn't I? Grah.
After quite a bit of wandering around, I encounter the boss
◊ and decide that I'm going to try to kill them rather than continuing to explore this place. Being a triple boss, the kill order is even more important than usual. There are permutations this time around. Recalling what they did last time as a general guideline, I decide to kill Rin first. She used to have the ability to revive Utsuho, so if that carries over it would be silly not to kill her first. Utsuho also did bad things in critical, which I want to avoid for now. I have no particular thoughts on Satori at the moment.
Satori can cast all-targeting magic reflect, which I noticed before I ran away from the initial encounter, so my party is set up with primarily physical attackers. Mokou, Lithos, Remilia, Reimu and Sanae. I use the standard defensive buffs and focus on Rin. Her HP plummets pretty quickly. Presumably they all have less HP because there are 3 of them.
The fight goes swimmingly at first. I can deal with their damage and Rin's about to die. And then Satori heals her to full. And petrifies my entire party. Oh yeah. That. Revised plan: use resistance buffs and target Satori first.
Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to run away because I didn't see the death coming, so I lose a random obsidian drop that I had forgotten to save and the boss has now moved so I have to explore this entire place again. Which is not without incident. If there's one thing this game has taught me, it's that you don't mess with angelic robots
◊. Seriously, that's actually a thing in this game. Angelic robots tend to have about 50% Divinity and will charge up light elemental death beams. However, I'm consistently reckless about these things, so I try to kill them anyway. It doesn't end well. I never found Satori again in the first place though so I guess it didn't matter.
Back on the boss front, I get the basic feel for their abilities over the next few fights. Satori herself has primarily defensive abilities. She does the aforementioned magic reflect and heal, and that's about it. I never saw her do the petrify again, either that or she missed. Possibly it was in response to one of her pets getting low. Her normal attack usually targets Remilia and never hits. Actually, Remilia never gets hit by any physical attack. Hehe. I'm starting to see the point of Remilia. Glass Cannon with high evasion.
Rin is actually the most dangerous boss for most of the fight. This is because of her ability "Cat's Walk" which hits the party for about 400 physical damage and causes confusion (which is silence for both physical and magical abilities). That sounds like less damage than previous bosses, but there are three of them this time. She also has Hellfire, which is an all-targeting fire attack that she started favoring nearer the end. It's weaker than Cat's Walk though, so I'm not sure what the point is. Possibly to buff the fire gauge for Utsuho? Mokou does that well enough on her own, thank you very much. Rin has very low physical defense.
Rin's last ability is kind of pointless but interesting. If any of your party members dies, she can revive them as a zombie under her control. Unlike Charm, which favors physical attacks, Control does vaguely intelligent things, like buffing the enemy. You can cure it though, so in another sense she's just reviving our party members for us.
Utsuho is pretty harmless for most of the fight, but ultimately is the one it revolves around. Her primary ability is Puchi Flare which just hits the entire party for ~150 fire damage. Sometimes she does a single targeting fire attack for about 250 damage. Neither of those are really a problem. The problem occurs when she's the last enemy left. Then she spams Giga Flare for 900 damage to the entire party. Which I can actually survive nowadays, on the tankier characters when buffed with extra HP. Not when she does it every turn though. Utsuho has very low magic defense, although that's mostly irrelevant, and pretty high evasion. Reimu can do magic damage when she's not healing I suppose.
It isn't quite as simple as killing her first though, since when she's in critical she does Mega Flare, which only does around 500 damage. Still very dangerous, but can be survived long enough to finish her off. Hopefully anyway.
The basic flow of this fight is Satori -> Utsuho -> Rin. I suppose there might be some reason why you don't want to leave Rin alone either, but I never found out. Many of my strongest physical attacks are random-targeting multi-hit, which means that while they will prefer hitting the target you select, some of those hits will hit other targets randomly. So the overflow damage, combined with her reduced physical defense, brought Rin into critical by the time I managed to kill Satori and Utsuho. Rin and Utsuho died within one turn of each other. I'm just going to pretend that that was both A) necessary for the win, because it'd be more interesting, and B) completely and totally planned on my part. Let no one claim otherwise.
Now for cutscene! And it's actually different this time. First of all, this isn't the new part but every one of these cutscenes starts with the defeated bosses going "Ugh"
◊ in their idiosyncratic ways. I'm showing you this picture though because I really like the image of Utsuho lying in the cart. Here she is lamenting
◊ the fact that she's always being shown like this whenever we encounter her.
As for the actual difference in the cutscene, it starts with the usual stuff, except Reimu taunts them with "isn't it shameful to be possessed by evil spirits when that's kinda, you know, your job? You live in Hell!" And indeed it is shameful, because they do know what's going on
◊. Shock~! You mean we aren't just recruiting random people just because?!
The malice is similar to that given off by a former prisoner back when this Hell was still in operation. Rin and Utsuho remember it, and it's a terrible terrible power. Etc etc. So we're dealing with an escaped prisoner of Hell. The real Hell, used to punish sinners after death and all that. Of course, all I can wonder at this point is how this is going to transition into the tea party ending. There're a lot of words like evil and darkness being thrown around here, which I'm not sure entirely fits into the setting. Anyway, Satori comes along with us of course, and designates Utsuho and Rin to manage the Palace of the Earth Spirits while she's away.
This
◊ is their management style. In case you can't tell, they're scarfing down cucumbers at the front gate. Months old cucumbers that I gave them in the previous game. Also, last I checked there was a huge pile of paperwork
◊ on Satori's desk. I think I feel sorry for her now.
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