LogFAQs > #970145987

Gave it another go. It did not go any better than last time. But more on that in a bit - firstly I'll do a recap of the badness of what happened before it. Trust me, this was abysmal. The writing here is so bad that I wrote better stuff than this when I was in 5th grade.

There's a scene by the door where Sorry magically knows Heldalf is in there. No mention of malevolence pouring out of it. No, he just automatically knows. Sorry and Mikleo just go first and the others debate whether they're strong or scared regarding Gramps, a scene that was meant to serve as a reminder that Gramps is in there. Which he is because he needed to be.

All of a sudden, Heldalf apparently has an evil plot much akin to Artorius a thousand years prior, which is precisely why he's made the Empyrean's Throne his home: Erase pain from this world. But this too would eradicate joy, and people wouldn't feel anything. Because they wouldn't. All of this came out of nowhere. Really, there'd only been a few interactions between Sorry and Heldalf before this, and we'd never really become aware of his plot because we were never made aware of his plot. No, that's not word count padding - it's emphasizing how bad and out-of-nowhere this is. He was just a one-dimensional bad guy in the way, and this felt like total fluff to justify it.

Halfway into the fight, Heldalf reveals his palm and Gramps is trapped in there. The game underscores this by having him yowl in pain or whatever and blah blah blah we'll purify you and free him but Lailah is doubtful blah blah blah what ever just countie voting. I never had much of an attachment to Gramps. I did not FEEL what Sorry and Mikleo did about him. He was only featured a small handful of times: The beginning of the game, a sidequest, the time when Rose got to see Elysia, and the flashback. I did not have the same attachment to the character that the protagonist did, which is a failure of writing. If your protagonist feels betrayed, the player should feel some of that pain. If your protagonist feels desperate to save somebody, the player should want to save that person. Maybe I've played too many games to the point of feeling apathy, but... I don't think that's it. I think it's that Gramps was simply Sorry and Mikleo's caretaker and nothing more than that.

The game attempts to rectify this somewhat after Heldalf's first form is defeated, with a couple of flashbacks, but it's too little, too late. Those flashbacks should've been something recurring throughout the game. Remember in Lastonbury when I praised the party interaction, and said I'd wished the game had more scenes like that? Flashbacks could've been a product of those scenes, too, which would've gotten the player more invested in the character motivations and added complexity. Anyway, Sorry and Mikleo exorcise Gramps from Heldalf, killing him in the process and getting them a "Well done" in his voice that makes it seem that he recognized he needed to die for Heldalf to as well. We are never told of this.

This entire sequence is just stupid, because Gramps all of a sudden is the whole motivation, when just a little before it was "Freeing the world of pain isn't the answer!" despite that not having been something shown before (one would've thought Heldalf would've been taking steps toward that goal, when instead he'd just been pouring malevolence over the world). No, they wanted to settle this score and find Gramps going in, so the waffling is just bad. Mikleo tries to stop Rose from slicing Heldalf's throat because he hasn't processed that there's no other way yet, and then he suddenly changes his mind to help Sorry bear the burden. This means Mikleo has gotten weaker as a person. Whatever Sorry does, Mikleo does too. He hasn't learned to stand on his own two feet and make his own choices and honestly felt like a more independent decision-maker early in the game.

After Gramps is exorcised and dissipates. Heldalf summons Maotelus and armatizes with him. Recall that Heldalf is fused with Velvet/Innominat but doing so has bonded him with Maotelus, allowing him to armatize magically because he can. This is our first time seeing Maotelus outside of the opening sequence so the investment is gone, which is good for someone who's played Berseria and knows about its dumb ending that didn't feel necessary.

Every quarter of the way through the fight, Heldalf starts launching this ultimate attack that insta-kills everybody in the party, meaning game over. As he does this, you're supposed to beat the shit out of him and knock him down, then fire one of the seraphs into him, taking that seraph out of the battle but severing one of the threads of his bond. The problem? I can't cause enough damage. Playing on Hard, he has 280,000 HP (I mean he is the final boss) and I need to take out 70K per "quarter." I've caused a fifth of that (14K) and it's still not enough. I think this fight wasn't properly tested on higher difficulties. Because this game sucks.

Part of me just wants to lower the difficulty to Moderate and get this shitshow done with. Part of me wants to see this through to completion on Hard as I'd planned, because Moderate would be too easy. If any of you are still reading this, please advise! All that said, Rose's third-grader level AI isn't helping much, since she'll get herself killed after de-armatizing for no reason, and that won't help my damage output. This really would be a lot better if I had somebody to play this with who'd actually be trying.

But instead, I'm gonna make another trip to Ladylake to hopefully gain another level, alongside better weapons. Current sword is a Caliburnus because that has an Arte Attack boost and the Adamantine Sword doesn't.

Just be prepared for a really scathing full review when I'm finished. Really, the best thing about this game? The music.