Rena went ahead and got a level in Customization to craft the Emprezia. She kept a Kaiser Knuckles that rolled Poison on it, but sold everything else. Then, she leveled up Art until it was level 8 with Rainbow Diamonds, and started putting the rest of her SP into Effort. She also maxed out Body Control, and was close to maxing out Sidestep. I put one perfunctory point into Hasten Speech and Concentration, and would only invest further in them if she suddenly had to rely on her damage spells, which I seriously doubted.
Energy Nede certainly was a huge step up from the Ell continent, especially since the particular strip of land connecting Centropolis and North City drew encounters from both the Cave of Crimson Crystals and the Field of Might. The latter dungeon in particular was quite a ways away and so drew rather overleveled enemies for her. While her damage was good, it took a while to grind them down, and their strikes were quite ferocious. Her stack of Blueberries got chewed up swiftly, and after just three battles with these warriors, she was reduced to holding five of them! She hoped to get the Ring of Might as soon as she could.
I also remembered that for her full offensive setup, she would eventually need to give up her Meteor Ring. In preparation for that, she went back and forged a Dragon's Claw. She also put on the Pixie's Bracelet, I discovered that it was more useful than it appeared. It had a chance to grant items, not just crafting materials. Of course, for any serious fight she would switch back to the Chain of Might, but why not take advantage of it?
The Psynard was a fairly trivial fight, as usual. However, it was hitting her for almost half her health with its regular hits! And this was with Guard on. Rena's poor armor was clearly beginning to show here, and she needed to remedy it quick.
Heh, that certainly would do! :D I forgot that the Cave of Crimson Crystals had an Eagle's Shawl, and that did go a fair distance in alleviating her defense woes. The Cave itself was fairly routine, with the flying stingrays being the only thing giving her trouble due to their speed and flight.
Oh, and yes, Dias is there. I picked him up just because I thought a party of her, Claude, and Claude's arch rival would be funny, I never actually used him.
The Arachnovias were fairly simple, though their buffed health and HP draining aura meant that she had to use a few Refreshing Syrups. Next was the Field of Might, and she went ahead and bought a Wizard's Armor. She also switched to a combo of Meteor Ring and Berserker Ring for fights, being able to finally craft it from a guild manual.
I noticed that the sword wielding warriors here were weak to light element, and that made Star Flare actually worth casting, it hit them all for about 6600 damage, and usually a fair bit higher! This was pretty risky though, and she often took tons of damage casting it. Guess she finally had a use for Hasten Speech after all, heh. She got it to level 5, and swapped to a spare Star Necklace whenever they appeared in large enough numbers. She invested a token point into Breaker and saved the rest of the points for upgrading Star Flare, all her core skills had already been fully upgraded.
The Field of Might actually proved thrilling this time, as she kept frantically running around enemies looking for suitable places to cast Star Flare in. I was quite entertained by how they played out, even though they dragged for a bit. I also discovered that spells would apply any effects enchanted on a weapon, including poison from Stink Gels and petrify from Melt Potions. This made her spells all the more powerful, though unfortunately every other enemy seemed to resist the more powerful status afflictions.
Rena retrieved the Ring of Might from the dungeon, and swapped to the same loadout for the Guardian as last time - Blazing Knuckles with Dark element imbued, Berserker Ring and the Ring of Might itself. The fight went well, until it got to his final phase and started spamming Exterminate. This move covered its close surroundings quickly and hit her for almost all her health! She had to rely on ranged damage of some sort, and Star Flare, even with an upgrade, wasn't cutting it - the Blazing Knuckles lowered her magic too much, making it look very unimpressive. I was stumped on this for a bit, until I figured out a solution:
The two paintings, "The Scream" and "Starry Night" both casted spells, Demon's Gate and Shadow Flare respectively. Both spells were darkness elemental, and thus hit on its weakness. Even with her mediocre magic stat, they were hitting fairly hard, and shaved off about 100k~ health. After that she had to rely on her magic, which made the fight drag on quite a bit, although she was never in serious danger. I would definitely endeavor to make the next battle with it shorter, however.
She tackled the Field of Courage next, and it was fairly simple and easy overall. If a character can tackle the Field of Might, they can certainly tackle this field too. For the Guardian, she made a few adjustments, swapping out the Wizard's Armor for extra intellect from the Eagle's Shawl, and taking up the Under Guard formation for its huge(though gradual) offensive boosts. She also took her Hasten Speech to level 7, after all every other core combat skill had been maxed already, and the faster casting speed couldn't hurt.
The fight went as normal, until the final phase. There, she drank a Mental Potion for its 40% intelligence boost and began hurling the two paintings frantically. That did the trick, she got it down at around eight paintings remaining.
The Field of Wisdom was, relatively speaking, easy for a change. Her Dream Crown halved wind, which took out most of the danger from the wizards here. I say most, not all - while their actual spells didn't do anything, their fireballs could still petrify at range, and in fact she did get stoned more than a few times. The rest of it, including the Guardian Hand, was a breeze, and before long she was done with the place.
The Field of Love was a different story altogether. Not only did the wizards there cast Shadow Flare, requiring Reflection to be cast, they also hit her pretty hard, and could inflict all status ailments with their fireballs! Every single fight involving more than one of them was very arduous, and she only got through those with a LOT of maneuvering and Blueberries. Lavarre was at least fairly simple in comparison - layer all the buffs, get rid of her Sunbreakers, then wail on her. She did have a weakness to light, but there was no realistic way to use Star Flare against her, she would just chew up Rena if she tried that!
There wasn't much to report until the showdown at Phynal. Rena patiently rebuilt her formation bonuses by invoking Hoffman Ruins' encounters again, then went on to fight the game's final string of bosses. Barchian caused a bit of an issue by hitting her for around 9100 damage, but she easily resolved that by equipping a Moonlight for more HP. I thought of taking down Zaphkiel with Star Flare, but even with all my best efforts, it wasn't putting out enough damage. She settled for buffing herself up and hitting and running, and that, thankfully, did work quite well. Damage spells are mostly just too slow in this game! They improved on many aspects of the combat, but this still remains a large issue.
Jophiel was handled by the exact same tactics as Zaphkiel, as was Metatron.
For the Phynal bosses, Rena retrieved this:
This was basically a beefier Meteor Ring, giving her two extra hits instead of one! It was only available right before Phynal, unfortunately, but it was definitely a good fit for her. She was getting a lot of mileage out of basic attack buffs for sure!
The Zadkiel-Camael-Raphael trio were a complete doozy. They were a big mess of beams, multihit damage auras, and instant death moves. Square Shift 1 was practically essential for this fight, there was just too much danger of stunlocks. This fight tested her dodging and positioning skills to the max. I don't think any other fight gets as chaotic as this, not even the ones in the Maze of Tribulations.
Rena methodically approached it, taking out Camael first, then Zadkiel, and finally Raphael. This represented how difficult they were, individually, in ascending order - and Raphael healed her, besides. Fights like these, where the enemies could outmatch her in speed or negate her advantages entirely, were her worst ones, and I was glad to see this fight done.
That was her most challenging boss fight for a while: she got constantly healed by Michael's spells, and that, along with her buffs, made that fight quite a bit more simple. Lucifer healed her more than anything. Frankly, the random succubi minibosses in the tower were harder than these two fights, simply because they debuffed her speed greatly and had ridiculous evasion! A rather poor showing for the Wise Men!
Gabriel stood imposingly as her final challenge. As I've covered before, he's mainly a spellcaster dabbling in all sorts of magic. Two of his big spells, Star Flare and Southern Cross, were negated by her Robe of Deception. The Dream Crown made Explode heal her. She could also stack Reflection and Witch Powders to cut his spell damage by 1/4, so those weren't that much of an issue.
However, he was almost as fast as a hasted Rena, and moved around a whole bunch in his second phase. Furthermore, he often emitted a nasty close range damage aura, that often did too many hits to be resisted. Especially when he buffed himself up with Angel Feather! That, combined with his buffed stats in general, particularly his higher evade, made her fumble quite a few times, as she rarely had any safe windows to attack and he would dodge her blows most of the time.
Eventually I figured out a solution. Linear Motion, the very first battle formation, gave a hefty 50% bonus to her hit stat, and that was enough to overcome his evasion. Haste also stacked with Ointment of Veda and that allowed her to outspeed him again, instead of merely being tied with Haste on. Of course, that was only part of the story; she still had to punch through his 2 million+ health, and that was no easy task!
It took a whole load of patience and care to get her through, especially since Divine Wave could come at a very short notice and often killed her from full health. I finally dropped putting on any defense buffs, and just stacked attack, spell damage reduction and speed buffs. That started working out, as she spent less time vulnerable casting stuff, the very nature of Divine Wave meant that defense actually did little against it. After one long, nail biting showdown, she finally defeated him.
Rena was a very interesting character. She started out quite weak, but once she got good weapons, she proved to be a very capable and agile fighter. I was wrong about her being slower than Claude; she couldn't chain attacks as fast as him, but attacked noticeably faster. And that's a good tradeoff, because while she didn't chain as many hits on weaker enemies, she also avoided getting targeted by stronger ones, which made melee viable even later on. Her equipment selection was decent overall, she lacked good armor for a while but eventually got gear with elemental absorbs and nulls on, and those are actually far more valuable than defense in the final few boss fights, especially since most of your offense is expected to come from accessories. It's weird that she couldn't wear a decent chunk of the caster gear, but that didn't matter much in the end.
I was kind of disappointed by her spells though. Don't get me wrong, her buffs were amazing, and did a great job carrying her through the game. But all her damage spells, with the exception of Crush, did very middling damage for when she got them and took way too long to cast. Star Flare got some application at least, but without a weakness to target, it too looked very pedestrian. And of course, it simply couldn't be used against any enemy agile enough to hit her multiple times during its casting, and dangerous enough to kill her in three or so hits. Guess which enemies I just described! The healing spells at least had some decent utility on Galaxy, before their long cast times became a huge liability. But on the whole, she was a pretty fun character, and arguably stronger than Claude, surprisingly.
I'll do this challenge with Celine next. See you then!
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