Part 116: Final Preparations

Chapter 116: Final Preparations

Music: Voyage To Tomorrow (Hitoshi Sakimoto)



We have a bunch of stuff to do before we jump into the final battle, so let’s do some light grinding to get our last few S-Ranks and get everyone to Level 30.




First up, Wave 3-2. This one’s gonna be a real pain because it has Gladiators in it, and they’ve been buffed with the patch. Previously, armor-piercing attacks like Demolisher Blade would go through their Composite Ceramic Armor, but now it blocks even that damage. We’ll need Limiter Removal to do any damage to them even with Nenji’s hyper condensed Demolisher Blade.



Got it.




Shu’s final skill is Inaba’s Support, which increases his WT recovery speed if a lot of kaiju are near him. 4th-generation Sentinels only really have Multi-Lock Missiles for crowd control near them, and that armament has a dramatic falloff later in the game, so this is not something we actually want to go off.



Now for 3-9.



Before we go into this one, I’m going to level up Yuki’s Quad Leg Spikes from +0 all the way to +8, increasing their POW and setup movement.



I’m also going to buy most of the Meta-Skills and Meta-System upgrades I hadn’t purchased yet. That includes Team Accelerate, Gravity, Deploy Type-98, Score Boost (only Level 1 though), and the final Score Multipliers. Probably won’t even use any of them, though.



We’re also going to max out Nenji’s EMP Attractor, which we should have done a long time ago.




Miura’s final Pilot Skill is Classmate, which raises his attack if he attacks after Hijiyama. Not great.





Next up, we’re going to run Wave 1-1 a few times to get some more experience while also resetting Brain Overload.



Hijiyama’s final skill is That’s More Like It!, which increases all his stats based on the number of kaiju on the field. Pretty okay, but it also means we’re getting swarmed if we actually get the full bonus.



Megumi learns her final Pilot Skill as well, Look Out, Juro! It increases her WT recovery speed if Juro takes damage. It should be clear by now that these Pilot Skills are mostly incredibly situational.



Unfortunately, we still have two pilots, Tomi and Gouto, who aren’t at Level 30. I’ll run Wave 1-1 once more to try to get them there.



Gouto now has his final skill, Optimally Efficient. This increases his WT recovery speed if you have fewer actions equipped. Based on the testing of epiphenom, the GameFAQs user I mentioned in the last update (check that guide out here), it’s about a 7% reduction per open slot, so if you reduced his arsenal down to one armament, you’d gain about 50% more actions from having about a 35% WT reduction. Again, Gouto’s the worst pilot in the game, so cutting skills from his arsenal isn’t actually that hard, even if we’d have to cut a lot to see more than meager returns. Interesting to think about, if nothing else.




Unfortunately, Tomi’s still not at Level 30 (and we have pilots on Brain Overload), so we’re going to do one final run of Wave 1-10.



This skill name awakened some trauma from the 2016 election for me, I think. This skill restores everyone’s EP a little when Tomi defends. Defending is a bad option unless it’s literally your only recourse most of the time, but it’s nice to make it a little more worthwhile.



And now we have sixty Mystery Points we can’t spend. Ugh.




Here's the Mystery Files we just unlocked.



Now, it’s time to go over our pilots. After reviewing all their skills, I’ve actually removed most of the new unique stuff for a lot of them because… most of it’s not great! Some characters like Juro and Natsuno get lucky, but most others are shafted. I’ll go over a lot of that in this segment, but suffice it to say that I’ve already unequipped most of those new skills in favor of old reliables that are cheaper to upgrade.

So, Nenji. He’s pretty good! The best pure damage dealer in the game, really, with his Hyper Condenser boosting the power and range of his Demolisher Blade. Seems like a good pick. Plus, his voice actor died tragically a few months back, and it’d be nice to bring him along for that reason alone. Also, who am I kidding here, you fuckers voted for Nenji five times in a row, you’ll pick him.

That said, I have removed his unique skills, because the missile barrage isn’t good enough to justify taking the EP away from his bread-and-butter Demolisher Blade usage, and the High-Performance Charger is maybe a waste when we should try to avoid defending, period.



Hijiyama, our favorite bi idiot. Honestly, though, I don’t love him as a pilot. He has the Gen 1 staples, and he has EMP Surrounding, which is better than the EMP Attractor Nenji is stuck with, but I really like Ei’s Anti-Air Defensive Flares. Nenji has those too, of course, but he has much less room in his kit for them. Also, I’m still mad about how Anti-Air Demolisher Blade works. If we’re bringing more than one 1st-generation pilot, I dunno about Hijiyama.



Ei and Hijiyama really just can’t compete with Nenji on damage due to their lack of a Hyper Condenser. Again, though, I really like the Anti-Air Defensive Flares Ei has. They’re a great tool for preventing missiles from hitting the terminal. I unequipped his Hurricane Rush and Anti-Ground Barrage because Rush Attack is free and we don’t have the space to afford a ranged attack on a Gen 1 Sentinel here.



Juro has his new Arm-Mounted Piercing Cannons, which are really good against newly dropped groups of small kaiju. That’s going to be his main tool in most situations here. He’s got some other stuff, but he’s probably the pilot I most need to play with the kit of if we decide to pick him, considering I haven’t even equipped his Plasma Arc Fusion Cutter. Reminder for everyone that if we pick Juro for the final battle, everyone in the party gets a fairly massive WT recovery speed increase that’ll really help. His other new skill is Elite Plasma Arc Fusion Cutter, which is just overkill. It’s not worth the extra EP and WT cost.



Iori’s Plasmic Wrecker is awesome, that’s really all I have to say about her.



Ryoko is going to be maybe the most burdened by the changes to Sentry Guns, given her Hyper Condenser lets her summon two at once. However, she’s still got some tools. Shield Emitter might even get us out of a jam or two. I gave up on Cyberattack Missiles, though. It’s just no good. Even if hacking the enemies buys you some time, the initial hit does almost no damage, so you’re getting no EP return from defeated kaiju. Plus, a lot of enemies will still head toward and attack the terminal even while hacked.



Natsuno, previously maybe the worst pilot in the game, now kicks ass. Both of her new skills have setup movement to allow her to capitalize on the attack boost from Warmup Run, and they’re very good skills in addition. Her main flaw is not having Super Large Missile, but both of her Gen 3 buddies have that, so it’s not a massive problem. Also, Natsuno fuckin’ rules.



Miura is fairly strong and has the good Gen 3 skills. Not much to say here, really. His unique skills are bad, but his kit is pretty good otherwise.



Tomi lacks Miura’s stronger railgun, but hers makes up for it by firing twice in a row with her Hyper Condenser. She also has Super Long-Range Missiles to soften up enemy drops, and Super Large Missile to just obliterate a group on demand. Pretty good pilot, gotta say.



Megumi’s High-Energy Pulse Laser does some work. I need to upgrade her Shield Matrix and Shield Repair, but that skill will carry her pretty far.



Yuki is a beast. Quad Leg Spikes is just fucking stupid to the point that she might as well not even have any other armaments most of the time. Thankfully, she does! And one of them is Active Cooling Device, which seems awesome!



Gouto is terrible now. I mean, he wasn’t great before, his only real skill was Interceptor spam, but now they’re a bit worse and that’s still his main job.



“Gotta put on a show for Yuki-chan…” *shudder*

Like Gouto, Shu doesn’t get a lot of benefit from the patch. He has the new Optimized Generator now though, which I just unlocked and boosts the EP cost of direct attacks (so, no Interceptors) in exchange for multiplying their power and range by 1.25. Seems… okay, I guess. His Point-Lock Missiles are a slightly less risky Multi-Lock Missiles in that you don’t have to move into the middle of a pack to use them, but they’re still pretty bad.



And those are our pilots. I’ve decided to bring back voting one last time for this final battle so that you can choose who we bring. I was thinking about having people submit ballots, but that seems like a nightmare for me to figure out how to sort and unpack, so we’re just gonna do ranked choice.

Here’s how it’ll work: Click on this link to a Google form. Since we have six slots and four generations of pilots, and I want at least one of each generation represented here for the sake of making this not suck for me to have to play, I’m going to have you rank each pilot by their Sentinel generation. Then, the last question will relate to which two generations will be represented with two pilots instead of one, for a total of six pilots. We could theoretically do three pilots of one generation and one pilot each from the other three, but that seems like a bad idea. Hopefully this isn’t too confusing; just rank them in order by ones you most want to see in the final battle. Thanks for participating, guys!