nolshru

the boss in question was Evra, the Undying - reached through a combination of use of the buckler sidearm and keri the wisp in my playthrough

I was kind of wanting to go for the masochist achievement, because it generally seemed silly and fun, and so I did here, equipping three beastium relics (draining, warding, and the one that allows for healing to restore joules as well) when taking on this boss - this was an incredible mistake because this boss was really hard, but like, we decided to go for it anyways because like, we're definitely patient enough to get through this, even if it takes a few hours of attempts, and at least it would make for a fun story

so, Evra the Undying is a fight that I suspect that we were fighting slightly earlier than intended due to the facts that the ads took 2 attacks to kill - they would die in a single attack if we landed a tipper, but that was somewhat difficult to do reliably *faster* than just attacking them twice, which was also taken to be largely ineffective due to the sheer number of them spawned making it largely useless to kill them separately as the boss would summon more very quickly, and instead, they were guided around the arena, baited into small spaces and either instantly killed by use of a boss's charge attack, killed by way of Evra's attack that orders them to all die in an attempt to charge into you, or ignored as they would be in a different part of the arena to where the boss would be, and so a few hits could be taken on the boss

a lot of this boss's attacks were very hard to reliably dodge - the attack in which a circle of skeletons were thrown would occasionally break and give extremely difficult to dodge patterns if the player was positioned next to a wall when the attack was initiated, causing them to bunch up and be extremely hard to dodge - especially if the attack occurred several times in quick succession, the attack with predictive skeleton throwing over 4-6 skeletons thrown was also relatively challenging for reasons that predictive attacks often are, the ball of light attack used when the boss was below about 60% health was often difficult to predict whether it would go up or down as it looped around, and if it looped down when Mina is positioned at the bottom of the arena, then it would follow the bottom wall back, meaning that it wold occasionally follow in slightly strange, very flat and almost boomeranglike patterns as it flew out in a straight line and back along the same path

the 1h30m of attempts that this fight took were still extremely fun, but we're also people who are sufficiently patient to want to spend 600 or so attempts grinding out Infernum Devourer of Gods - I don't know if doing this boss like this would be especially enjoyable for the ordinary person, but yeah, I liked it a lot - this was really fun

we beat it primarily through use of waiting until a hit could be made with the dynamo lantern, as this reliably dealt a fairly large chunk of damage when paired with draining beastium (we also had joule syringe equipped to be able to spend hp to use it), or whipping it if the opportunity did not feel like it safely allowed the use of the lantern, and warding beastium in combination with revival spark allowed for quite a lot of effective hp, even without the ability to heal really since both beastiums other than draining dramatically reduced the ability to do so

we are not especially skilled at video games, so the video of the boss clear does not show especially clean gameplay, but it does show that we did it, and we did have a lot of fun doing it, so yeah :D

also, aparently I forgot to record audio - oops :P

Mina's Grave was an incredibly cool section - it was extremely well developed and did a lot of very interesting things - a complaint I had earlier is that Mina wasn't asking questions, and that the game didn't seem to be acknowledging this as a flaw, and, yep, the game acknowledged this as a flaw here - the fact that she's killed several actual people without stopping to really think about that *is* brought up here and just, yeah, neat payoff :D

the trinket combination in question is draining beastium, plasma jug, and joule syringe - they aren't super powerful together really, other than joule syringe allowing draining beastium's main downside to be diminished, and plasma jug allowing joule syringe's main downside to be diminished, but they are incredibly fun to play around with - spamming out high powered sidearms without really much concern is really fun

the section in question was Coltrayne Peak - I do think that this and Bone Beach are probably intended to be done later than the other areas due to the extra requirement to access the former and the difficulty of finding the latter, and the fact that they are significantly more challenging than the first two areas that we cleared - I really enjoyed Mirren as a boss fight - I think that a lot of the attacks served as very enjoyable displacement tools with how the fight reasonably restricted the player to a small patch of the arena, and I really enjoyed a lot of the ideas behind the attacks here - this is the only real time where I found myself actually enjoying the ice gimmick as it *did* add a lot to the fight - having periods of the map in which dodging attacks is significantly more challenging was very interesting

I think that the frozen horror was a little less interesting as a fight - I think that the idea here of just being a very hectic fight in which things are hard to dodge because of the ice was just not especially enjoyable, and I would probably call this my least favourite boss of the game so far - I just really didn't enjoy this fight or find the way that it used any of its mechanics all that interesting

the Locomotress was a really cool fight - thematically awesome and genuinely very challenging - there were a lot of moving parts and dodging them all was very challenging

Bone Beach was a pretty cool area ! I really like when video games have a Meat Realm, and this was a pretty good Meat Realm - I like that the Meat Realm was mixed with the beach and the industrial mining area - that's a cool combination of themes