Part 250
Normal Mode, stage 43Final Stage: Beyond the Flow of Time
We start in the first half of the stage, which is the interior of the Earth Cradle. As before, it is a plodding stage that requires you to defeat Ansuz and Thurisaz before the real boss shows herself.
This group took a while to dispose of all the trash before Magus because of their lack of Rouse (to raise morale of adjacent units) and Replen (to restore EN to other units).
As it turns out, Shu was an inadequate pilot of the Cybuster due to his lack of Spirit. This meant he had to deliver the finishing blow on 3 Bergelmirs just to be able to pull off a single Cyflash on the rest.
I say single because I noticed afterward that for some reason Cybuster's EN was the pitiful 137 you see in the screenshot above. Level 99 Shu also only did around 4300 damage to each Bergelmir, not even a third of their max health.
Every unit should have been maxed on this save, but for some reason some units remained stuck with appallingly low EN, mainly Cybuster and Dancougar. I alleviated this on the Ryukooh/Koryuoh by throwing some Generators on it.
Contrary to Shu, Masaki did amazingly well in the Granzon. Its melee-centric P attack suited his style perfectly, and its low morale requirements and ammo-based or low EN weaponry allowed him to Worm Smasher things all day.
He was a little confused about what he was piloting, though.
It's worth mentioning that Masaki is piloting an ally version of the Granzon, as you might surmise from its low HP. Shu was a neutral/ally pilot in Alpha 1, so this is likely a holdover from there.
Boss turned out to be an incredibly amazing fit for the Nuclear Missile. It has a single range 1 attack ranked at 9999 power, upgraded higher as seen here. Boss learns Blitz, which among other things includes Accel and Valor, making this particular missile even more devastating.
Boss's quotes also fit the Nuclear Missile perfectly, insertion glitches aside.
Minmay tried.
She really tried. She wasn't about to sit back and keep letting the pilots do all the real work.
Unfortunately her lack of actual stats or spirit abilities made it literally impossible for her to hit targets or do much of anything other than soak up enemy attacks.
Tex fell under the same category. But he piloted that damn R-Gun like a champ and proved that you never mess with Texas.
Level 1 Shu Shirakawa suffered a similar problem. To make the game accept six concurrently existing instances of Shu, we inserted multiple versions at different levels, and stuck the level 1 version at the head of the Neo Granzon. This was unfortunately a case where I was forced to let the other Shu drop and keep the Neo Granzon in the rear lines when not tanking.
While some of them had useful spirits, level 1 Shu's stats were too low to do anything but soak up damage like Minmay.
Pictured: Worm Smasher's miss animation.
In lieu of having a seventh instance of Shu in the same battle, I filled his slot on the team with Dr. Kenzou Kabuto, the engineer behind Great Mazinger whose cyborg body probably cost a thousand times more than the Borot to construct.
Of these professors, Dr. Kabuto, Dr. Nanbara, and Dr. Saotome are the doctors. Professor Yumi is the only one titled Professor. Nina Purpleton never gets any such appended title, which stands in contrast to that other elusive Anaheim Electronics design genius, Dr. M. Nagano (Z Gundam in-joke, not an actual character).
As you might have guessed, replacing Shu also meant that I had no functioning pilot stats for this machine. However, the Boss Borot's resupply function still works perfectly, so the doctors devoted their time to operating a mobile supply base to support the other machines. With my recurring EN problems, this turned out to be very fortuitous as long as they stayed out of enemy attack range.
Surprisingly, Gloval was a mixed bag. The bridge bunnies obviously had no real data or spirits, but Gloval borrowed his preexisting data from Alpha 1, meaning he had functioning stats and spirit abilities.
Unfortunately for this game, I think he still has all his old voice data pointers but not all of his old voice data. When I tried to play Voltes's animations, the game would crash as soon as it loaded the fight and tried to play a voice clip.
Jack King fared considerably better. He and Timp were lumped into the Texas Mack, which is a fully functioning unit with a fully functioning pilot.
Timp has a fairly solid skillset featuring both Accel and Snipe, in addition to Soul.
Jack has lines in the battle file, and the Texas Mack is a giant robot with a receding hairline.
Akira fared pretty well, though he was convinced that he was still in Raideen.
It's certainly more manual power than Raideen, at least.
Ring was put in the Ryukooh in keeping with females piloting the dragon half. She has functional pilot data and spirits, probably from more residual Alpha data that never got used. I assume this due to her lack of Support, which didn't exist in Alpha.
Her voice files are nonfunctional and her face gets a little wonky too.
Irm has Support, and he's a solid choice for this machine with his use of Accel to boost Koryuoh's already crazy movement rate.
I could not get Mio to go "Atatatata!"
I could, however, get her to kick the shit out of things with the Alpha Boxer's silly range 1-4 kick attack. G-Sword Diver is range 1 for those wondering, and the Boxer suffered some limitations in this stage due to ground attacks being unable to target air units, which comprised 95% of the stage.
Duo did a bang-up job with what he had, all things considered.
His weapons certainly weren't much, but he did steady damage every round.
His quotes were pretty much the same, as you might imagine.
He became my designated Alert user to waste the bosses' Valor/Strike-enhanced attacks, and he did a fine job of it.
Due to the EN bug mentioned above, the Wing boys' performance in Dancougar was underwhelming. However, there was one amusing byproduct of all the finagling we did with the save file.
Apparently, it's possible to mess with sub-pilots of component machines and create a combined unit with more than 5 total members. Whether or not this could potentially create a machine with 20 pilot spirit sets will be a future test. But when we did it this way it crashed the game when playing animations, so we played it straight and fixed it to just the Wing boys.
My personal choice was going to be Sanger and Sophia in the Ryukooh, but since that got coopted by the Irm+Ring duo, I went with the Machinery Children in Shin Getter. Uruz pilots Getter-1, Ansuz pilots Getter-2, and Thurisaz pilots Getter-3.
Not that you could tell unless you looked at their portraits.
They all had skillsets similar to this. In the lower left, Thurisaz had Zeal, Ansuz had Blitz, and Uruz had Enable. That slot was the only difference between them.
Sanger is a Super Robot pilot. Ergo, he must pilot a combiner robot so super that it has "Super" in its name.
Sophia's right there backing him up. She has a full set of pilot stats and spirits as well.
Like the others, he got a little addled as to what he's supposed to be piloting, but he took to the job enthusiastically enough.
Bright and Banjou tagged each other out for this mission. Bright has taken over Daitarn 3 piloting duties for the interim.
Bright didn't have much to say in Daitarn 3 at first. Sometimes he would play lines, and sometimes he'd be blank like Ring. I kept him on bombardment duty in the Dai-Fighter to let him stick close to his comfort zone.
In the meantime, Banjou took over captaining duties for the Ra Cailum.
Although he did put his own spin on things. It must be that psuedo-Crossgate in the back of the stage making everybody so confused.
The first half ends the same as the Hard mode. I'll cover the second half in my next post, sometime this weekend or next week.