[Click here to start from the first progress log]

I’ve officially finished off Azure Saga: Pathfinder, and doing so took quite a bit longer than expected. That’s mostly my fault, though, because I got sucked into some really hard sidequest stuff that required getting through comically long fights against arguably gimmicky robots. I suppose my continued indulgence of sidequests says it all, really; for how many irritating problems as I’ve encountered over the course of my playthrough, it’s incredibly difficult to have anything but affection for this game.

A story about stupidity, crafting, and robots

Okay, this goes into the “I’m an idiot” column, but it took me until the near-end of the game to figure out how certain equippable items work. Equips are streamlined quite a bit compared to some games, with each character having two slots for rings/bracelets/etcetera, with certain items opening up a secondary slot that allows you to also equip a gem. Gems mostly function to increase damage inflicted on and reduce damaged received from certain classes of enemies, so your equips tend to be very situational. That’s true of the late-game, at least—early on, simply fighting enough enemies to stay at a reasonable level can render items more or less meaningless, which is a good thing since the early party member changes frequently cause items to be unequipped. There’s quite a bit more depth here than I expected, though, and going up against optional bosses forces you to figure things out.

If you don’t figure things out, you get stuck in an hour-long boss fight like in the video above. Here’s what happened: I found this optional robot boss and was determined to bring it down, but it spammed an attack that silences the entire party and everyone was quickly wiped out as a result. In response, I equipped an item that claimed to resist the silence status onto a character named Amoz whose fury power is immortality that keeps his HP from dropping below 1 for a couple turns. The idea was that the boss would spam the silence attack, filling his fury bar in the process, and his immunity to being silenced would give him options should his immortality run out before his next fury attack was possible. Thing is, some items only confer special bonuses if you equip a certain kind of gem with them, and I failed to do this. That means that I had to use up almost all of my good items to slowly make it through.

It turns out that there are multiple optional robot bosses with their own quirks, though they all share the ability to silence the entire party (making it impossible to use unite attacks in the process). The one in the video above was the second one I found, and I made sure Amoz was properly silence-proofed this time around. The fight went much smoother because of that, though it still wasn’t pretty. Once I won, the comparatively small reward suggested that this was an easier variant. Still, I was confident that I had taken out the hardest one first and the others would be easy.

I was horribly wrong. The first one I had beaten was actually the middle child of the optional robot boss family, and this nigh-unbeatable monstrosity was hiding in an optional dungeon full of high-powered enemies. Slow and steady doesn’t cut it for this fight because this thing heals 400-500 hit points every turn. Everyone managed to stay alive during my first couple attempts, but they were doing less damage than it was healing in part because its silence attack is also capable of stunning the entire party for a turn, so I eventually quit out of the fight and decided to save it for later.

Earlier, I had stumbled across a crafting station and drooled over some high-level equippables that can be made, but I didn’t have the materials required, nor did I know where to obtain them. It was only when I came across another and decided to check again that crafting “clicked” for me. That first robot I beat was named Vesper, and it dropped a “vesper shard” and 20 “yellow shards,” which happened to be what I needed to craft an item that resists all ailments (silence, stun, etcetera).

Returning to the fight, I put this new item on Clery and made sure that Kishar and Amoz were equipped with items that made them stun-resistant. I only had one equippable to make Kishar silence-resistant, though, which meant that everyone was resistant to everything this boss could do save for Amoz being silenced. Since the length of these fights were starting to wear on me, I loaded up Cheat Engine’s speedhack and blew through the fight in under 20 minutes. Not too shabby.

The arena gives you an item, too

The item that allowed Kishar to be silence-resistant in that optional boss fight was the Beam Core, and this was obtained by clearing all of the arena fights. You can find useful items in chests sometimes, but nothing compares to the ones you get by putting in the legwork to beat an optional boss or get through all of the arena’s fights.

Bait and switch and destroy

The only reason I found the healing/stunning robot boss was because I got sidetracked in an optional dungeon. There was a door I didn’t have a key for in an earlier dungeon, so when I beating the dungeon boss allowed me to pick up a key, I immediately tried it there. It worked, and what was inside was a machine that started Synch’s class change sidequest. He needed to obtain an item in a place called the Solaris Necropolis, but I hadn’t yet found such a place, so I continued on with the story. Then I used a secondary exit in a plot-important dungeon and found it. This place has the hardest enemies in the game, though you could be forgiven for not knowing that. I wandered around for 4 minutes and 45 seconds before I got my first random encounter, and they were so powerful that running was the only option. And then I was stuck halfway inside a dungeon full of incredibly strong enemies.

These enemies are great for grinding, though. Loading up Cheat Engine’s speedhack and running against a wall near the exit, you can easily get everyone’s levels well into the 70s. The best way of doing this is to unlock the Hollow Pursuer unite attack that does bonus damage against these enemies. Hollow Pursuer requires Medeina, Synch, and Stellaire, and while I can’t remember the exact attack names that trigger it, only red attacks combine into unite attacks. That’s actually a hugely positive thing in Azure Saga: Pathfinder’s favor, because getting hit with random battles often feels less like an obstacle than a chance to continue working through a reasonable number of combinations to find new unite attacks.

Some minor problems

The final few dungeons are larger than they probably should be, and running around them can become really tiring. This is just a small slice of the final dungeon (it’s actually something like 5-6 times larger), and the combat was starting to wear on me by this point because everyone was close to the level cap of 80 and nothing in here posed the slightest threat to anyone. These dungeons are much easier to get through while using speedhack to increase movement speed, but some kind of in-game speed boost would be appreciated. Or at the very least, a way to turn off random battles when you’re 20 levels higher than the enemies you’d encounter.

And finally, another reproducible softlock. Using jewel fusion to combine gems is a cool little feature that allows your equips to scale the further you are in the game, but crafting this third-tier Sapphire softlocks the game every time. Other gems can be combined without issue and everything works perfectly so long as this Sapphire isn’t crafted. There’s already been a patch released that includes several bug fixes, though, so I have hope that things like this will eventually be ironed out.

[Click here to go to Azure Saga – Pathfinder log #6]

The post Azure Saga – Pathfinder: Progress Log #7 [END] appeared first on Killa Penguin.