Part 8: Metal Gear?The final update.No more from Reeve, time to just straight-up LP this game.
The Admiral gives some excuse why this mech is in this pirate game. The journal will say that it normally has treads at the bottom to allow it to move.
This boss fight is hard. No two ways about it. It's also the "second phase" of the fight, so if you fuck up, you have to fight the Admiral again. That's where the strategy is mostly located - you want to leave the Admiral fight with everyone alive and at decent health - with any sort of buff preferable. I did this fight about 7 times last night, twice again just now before getting it. It's really a tough fight. There's a few reasons for that, but lets look at the attacks first - the Old Mech will do whichever can hit most people - if an attack can't hit half, it'll do Omniblast. Some of these screenshots have the game difficulty set to low, so the damage is...inaccurate.
Crush:
This small area of affect hits for about 70% of your HP, and pushes back to the edges of the hurtbox. It will also stun slightly, if your characters survive it. It's nasty, and just there to prevent you from standing around it and beating the thing to death.
Energy Culverin (a type of cannon)
This attack has a circular area of 13 squares and does moderate damage - roughly half a usual characters' HP. It is the most easy to dodge or resist, but only comes up if you've grouped together at the edges.
Plasma Wave:
Plasma wave is a two part attack, the first time doing a small amount of damage across the entire field, then leaving behind orbs of energy, which explode some turns later to deal additional damage.
Omniblast:
Firing the cannon straight up, every character is marked to take damage in a couple turns. This includes characters who are currently unconscious, too. I didn't realize this, but it doesn't include Zoarbat summons... There's basically no way to avoid this damage - it's about 30-50% of your health. This ability will follow - which is rare for magic in this game. Normally, you set a marker and if the enemy doesn't move, they take the damage. Here, moving doesn't avoid it.
Those are the 4 attacks this thing has, plus a mountain of health. If you're lucky, and your troops are all still alive from the Admiral fight, they will definitely be taken down by the first hit of any of these attacks. While you're scrambling to revive them, Plasmawave and Omniblast aim to keep them down. The orbs left over from Plasmawave especially do that, since they're likely to go off between the time the ally is revived and before the ally can move. Omniblast will track currently unconscious characters, so if you revive them with anything less than 50% health, they'll just go down again when Omniblast hits.
The Old Mech ignores all tertiary effects of attacks. That is, Reeve's flurry of blows doesn't do anything. Pushes don't provide any damage. The shrapnel feature of Luke's arrows always miss. Mushroom and KingZultan were consistantly the only ones who could stay up during the fight. KingZultan thanks to the increased maneuverability of his features and Mushroom thanks to the tankiness of healers in this game. All of Pliskin's Ruin magic has no effect on the mech. It has no vulnerabilities to types, and is immune to almost all conditions.
So, what's the strategy? Well, Stun still works. So does Burn. Switching to Ignis Knight might not be a bad idea here - since fire effects it normally, though the ground is still not flammable. You want to give it the Burn debuff as often as possible, as it'll take damage on each of its turns from that. Stunning it is good so you can move away from Crush's range - Mushroom's anchor has a stun effect and allowed Reeve to toss out a Now! to move Mushroom away. A burning target is also weak to fire damage, so Pliskin returned to classic Scholar to just throw instant fireballs as often as possible. Blind, silence, itchy, poison, decay or any other very good debuff don't work at all - it is also morale immune.
Basically, I DPS raced it. It's too hard to keep everyone revived and bring them back and by sacrificing the turns you end up worse off than before. I gave Zultan some revive items and used those a couple times to get Pliskin back up to toss out MP recovery to everyone before getting killed again. Zultan can dodge almost everything and can move across the map more than anyone else. The guns did consistent damage as well. Luke's fire arrows kept it burning and if Pliskin, Reeve, and Mushroom were up, their attacks did a good amount of damage before they were put down again.
The same issue as the Admiral fight happens here - there's no safe space to group together and buff up, so you're looking at individual buffs instead of Mushroom's area ones.
It's a tough but very rewarding boss fight. I'm sure there are ways to cheese it better, but I'm not very good at video games, so who knows.
When you get it to zero, the Admiral calls you a fool because the Mech was running on the same power as the facility. The floor begins to collapse - he takes some pleasure knowing you'll die here with him. But then!
The Ruluorn began to glow.
Then they warp you out of the arena. I grabbed this screenshot that I thought was hilarious: they didn't warp out Zultan's Zoarbat summon - committing the creature to death in the collapsing castle.
Reeve comments that the creatures saved you. The castle in which these fights took place explodes - then the quest log comes up and the game strikes out the mission: Bring the Admiral to justice. This is decently satisfying.
Then credits roll which are mostly music credits since Sean Hayden and two other Haydens made this entire game (I believe, his wife and brother).
Beating the game unlocks 3 features:
First, you unlock 4 races to play as, listed here:
Second, you unlock Ruin difficulty. No idea how hard it is in here, but going by Alvora Tactics - it's fucking rough. Run away from fights just to get away with some XP rough.
Third, you unlock the XP modifier - which allows you to change the percent at which you gain XP. This is really nice for a second play-through - just boosting it by 50% or so makes the game a lot less grindy.
Post game:
There isn't one. The credits end with a "Thank you for playing" and boot you back to the main menu. You can reload your old saves, but there's no way to play with the Admiral dead. I dislike this, but it's fine for such an open game - there'd really be no difference.
-=-=-=-
My favorite boss fight:
Go to Precipice Gaol, sort of to the Northeast.
Inside you find a cool little dungeon with some jumping mazes and an easy fight with some Zoarbats. When you get to the bottom of the dungeon, though - there's something weird about it. It's very atmospheric, and the emptiness of the dungeon puts you on edge.
Moving forward, you notice something is watching you...
You can pull up the "l"ook function to try and figure out what it is, but...
Aspect is a returning enemy from Alvora Tactics (maybe Voidspire, as well -shrug-). As you approach, combat starts and immediately, about 8 other enemies spawn out of the darkness. This fight is similar to the Admiral's, though, in that only Aspect needs to die for you to win. You also start at low morale, and Aspect will hit anyone who looks at it with a lower morale debuff.
The fight is actually not that hard - just pile on Aspect and you can win it. Oil, wet, or slow-down debuffs are excellent to keep Aspect within range of your melee fighters. Basically ignore the chaff. When you win, Reeve gives you a little extra info:
She's understandably disturbed. I believe Hagger and Coss probably have extra dialogue here as well - though I haven't seen it myself. Perhaps, you will.
Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me...
-=-=-=-
Anyway, that's all for Horizon's Gate. I left out a lot of the exploration, as it's the best and most interesting part of the game. I really recommend you pick this one up, or if you're unsure, Alvora Tactics is cheaper and has basically the same combat system (boats excluded.) Fans also suggest Voidspire is the most "complete" of the games - in that it has a much more in-depth story than the other two. I've just started playing, and am enjoying it a lot.
You can find them on Steam and itch.io.
Thanks for reading!
Looking at the last picture it appears I'm dead and so are two of the others, does that hurt your chances against the big robot guy?
I did try to finish that run - which was last night, I think - and lost within two attacks from the Mech. It's no joke. I would argue that going into the fight with more than 1 ally down means you need to restart, but that depends on party composition, I suppose.
I should mention - when I beat this game the first time, I just turned difficult to minimum after two attempts at this fight. I thought I had over-prepared this team for it, but I was wrong - I think I'm just about on par for what is expected - the boss is possible, just takes attention and a little luck.
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Topic: Bay12 Privateering - Let's Play Horizon's Gate (Read 15626 times)