Part 48: NG+ Update 20: Kokon Horay
NG+ Update 20: Kokon HorayWelcome back. After the previous update we have now experienced all of the additional content New Game+ has to offer. There are no more SOL Scenes or hidden areas to explore. There’s nothing left for us to do except fight the final few boss battles and watch the ending cutscene.
Actually that’s a lie. There’s one last challenge we need to overcome before this LP is complete, and to that end I’ve reloaded an earlier save in Centre.
From there we can access the Fairy Colony, and subsequently Kokon Horay, Dragon Quarter’s bonus dungeon.
Let’s head on in…
Music: Kokon Horay
As soon as you enter Kokon Horay you’ll notice a couple of things. The first is that Ryu’s HP value seems a little low.
In fact, every character’s HP and AP values are way lower than they should be. The reason is pretty simple - upon entering Kokon Horay the party is bumped back down to Level 1. Thankfully this state of affairs only lasts for as long as the player remains in Kokon Horay. As soon as you leave everything goes back to normal.
You may also have noticed that the D-Counter has been completely reset back to 0.00%. This is the only time the game will ever lower the D-Counter, but don’t celebrate just yet. It too will return to its real value once the player leaves the dungeon.
: This place is full of goodies, but also full of dangers!
:…talk to one of my friends, and get yoorself out of here!The Fairy isn’t kidding - Kokon Horay is very tough.
As such it’s a very good idea to use Party XP to boost everyone up to at least Level 30. The initial parts of the dungeon are fairly easy, but the difficulty ramps up significantly towards the end.
Alright, let’s get down to business. Kokon Horay is basically an endurance test. It’s less a traditional dungeon and more of a gauntlet where the player fights through each floor in turn until they reach the bottom.
Things start out fairly gently. Nuggets, Dukes and Lantern Bats make up the bulk of the enemies for the first few levels. You don’t even really need to boost your levels for this part.
Things start to get a little harder after the fifth floor. De-Volves, Baphomets and Death Cows begin to show up, and the layout of the levels begins to change to favour enemy formations.
After the fifteenth floor Minibosses like the Cyclops begin to appear.
After the twentieth floor multiple copies of them show up.
Some floors contain piñata enemies like Kanaphages and Wonder Boxes, but don’t get too excited. Enemies in Kokon Horay don’t drop anything.
Some floors are just plain goofy, like this one with three midget Armstrongs.
Whatever you wind up encountering, you have to kill them in order to proceed. Each floor is essentially one giant Danger Room.
Each floor also contains a treasure chest whose key spawns once every enemy is dead. As the Fairy at the beginning said, most contain rare and powerful items.
Every five floors you’ll find a Fairy who gives you the opportunity to leave and go back to the surface. This is a tempting prospect since most of the treasure consists of equipment that needs identifying, and the vendor trio don’t show up in Kokon Horay. Be careful though - the game doesn’t save your progress through Kokon Horay and re-entering means restarting from the very first floor. Your character levels aren’t saved either, so everyone will be Level 1 again - and you don’t get any Party XP you previously spent on them back. On the flipside all the treasure also respawns, meaning you can make some easy money running through the first few floors and selling off all the loot.
If you want to seriously tackle Kokon Horay you need to do it all in one sitting, which can be a problem since it has a grand total of fifty floors to fight through. It’s twice as rough for British and European players, since the PAL version lacks the American and Japanese editions’ Suspend Save feature. If you’re a PAL player, you have to do it all without taking any breaks.
To mitigate all of the above I’ll just show you guys the highlights of my run, including any noteworthy treasure and/or enemies I run across. The very first floor’s treasure chest contains the Present item, which raises enemy item drop rates. It’s nice, but as I said earlier, enemies in Kokon Horay don’t drop items…
The fifth floor’s reward is the Bladesmack skill for Ryu. It’s similar to Lin’s ‘Go On!’ skill in that it will always leave an enemy with 1 HP.
Completing the tenth floor grants us the Teleport skill. Every fifth floor in Kokon Horay has a skill item as its treasure.
Teleport is a utility skill that lets Nina switch places with another character. Useful for getting her out of trouble and/or as a means of saving Ryu’s AP by getting him closer to the fight.
The fifteenth floor yields the Duststorm Shield Skill.
Duststorm is a useful skill if you’re fighting melee-heavy enemies and bosses. The knockback is pretty hefty even for heavier foes, and it means they have to waste their AP getting back to you.
On the sixteenth floor Duke Knights start to appear. You will learn to hate these guys with a passion. They are by far the most common enemy in Kokon Horay and their high attack, breakable heavy armour gimmick and area of effect skills turns every encounter with them into a miserable slog. If you aren’t careful they’ll drain your precious healing items and leave you without the resources you need to tackle the lower levels.
The best way to deal with them is to use traps and the environment to stop them from reaching you while Lin plinks away at them until their armour breaks off. Exploit their low movement ranges and tendency to get stuck on corners and you won’t have as rough a time of it.
At least that floor gives you a Gold XP after beating them.
Floor twenty yields Act Delay, the final useless debuffing skill for Ryu.
Floor twenty five decides to pull a huge dick move by throwing a Duke Lord into a group of GarSnipers and Trilizards. If you don’t remember, Duke Lords are like Duke Knights, only bigger, stronger, with a better movement range…and Absolute Defence. If you aren’t using Party XP to boost your levels you’re pretty much guaranteed to die here.
Beating him nets you ‘A Present!’, Lin’s final language command. ‘A Present!’ is essentially a combo finisher - it copies whichever attack Lin used last with a damage multiplier on top, but misses if you try to chain it with itself.
It’s also part of the legendary Super Shatter special combo, which involves using ‘Hey Hey!’, ‘C’mere!’, ‘That’s It!’, ‘Shatter!’ and ‘A Present!’ in that order. You’ll need at least 100 AP and a very specific skill slot setup that requires a weapon with a lot of free slots, but if you pull it off you can kill pretty much any non-boss enemy that isn’t resistant to gunfire in a single combo.
As you descend you’ll notice the depth counter is indicating that we’re incredibly deep underground - far deeper than even EndSector. What horrors lurk in the deeper reaches of Kokon Horay?
Well, there’s the treasure for the thirtieth floor, for one - it’s the thoroughly useless Weaken skill, which Nina already has. My contempt is such that I’m not even going to dignify it with a screenshot.
After the thirty second floor Karons and other undead begin to appear.
It’s a good idea to break out the Holy Heart at this depth. Karons pack the Death spell and you really don’t want to waste your Tonics.
Things start getting truly serious on the thirty fifth floor, which pits you against three Goo Kings and three Crushedhearts.
For this floor in particular I recommend just using Dragon mode to smash everything. One Goo King is an incredibly dangerous opponent, especially if you forgot to remove your Steal skills and accidentally wind up snatching his precious Sponge. Three at once all spamming third tier magic and smashing you flat with area of effect attacks is a nightmare. Oh, and the reward is Cutspace, another useless skill that Ryu already has.
I should mention that, although the D-Counter does reset and you should therefore feel free to D-Dive much more liberally than in the main game, it’s a good idea not to go too wild with it. You’ll be needing it later, you see…
The chest on the thirty eighth floor contains a useful item called the Tracker. Normally enemies only show up on the minimap when you’re close to them - and by that time you can already see them fine anyway. The Tracker makes it so that all enemies show up regardless of how far away they are. This includes invisible enemies like Goo Prisms and Creepstalkers.
The fortieth floor is another bastard of a level. It consists of a long narrow path patrolled by three Duke Knights with four Nervemen standing on platforms on either side. If you run in carelessly the Dukes will stonewall you while the Nervemen brutalise your whole party with endless Circle Stages. The only way to win without massive casualties is to lure the Dukes away with bait items and kill the Nervemen while they’re distracted. I hope you brought some Fresh Meat…
Thankfully this time the reward is worth it.
Deathcleaver has the highest base attack power of any of Ryu’s skills, with a massive 200% modifier. It deals 10% of that damage back to Ryu himself, but that’s small potatoes compared to what it does to enemies.
Floor forty five is where Kokon Horay decides to give you both barrels, with two Duke Knights, two Duke Lords and a Pantagruel - that miniboss in Center with Absolute Defence that flips out and spams Valhalla if you get too close to him.
Speaking of Valhalla, that’s your reward for completing the floor.
After all this time Nina finally has all three top tier elemental spells. Hurray!
Floor forty six is swarming with KanaphageDXs. Fast moving, invisible KanaphageDXs with huge movement ranges that always act before you do and always cast Inferno as their first move.
Floor forty seven is a dark room full of Nervemen and Creepstalkers, with one Darkstalker thrown into the mix. Ice spells and Hazecut are your friends here.
Floor forty eight contains four Cerberuses and three Duke Lords. The former have pitifully low defence and are extremely easy to deal with, the latter will give you nightmares despite the game throwing you a bone by giving them all the Sleep status.
And then we have floor forty nine. Two Duke Knights and two Duke Lords, followed by a Gargantua and another Pantagruel. The best way to tackle this one is to book it past the Dukes and take out the two minibosses, then turn around and hope the Dukes get in one another’s way long enough for you to kill them.
Before we head on down to the final floor I’ll just quickly run through some of the equipment we’ve picked up. Kokon Horay contains every character’s ultimate weapon and shield, but all are unidentified - and as I mentioned earlier, Jaju doesn’t show up in Kokon Horay. So let’s skip into the future for a bit and have a look at what our characters can use once they return.
Completing floor thirty two nets us the ChobhamPlate+2, Ryu’s ultimate shield. Unfortunately it’s only ‘ultimate’ in terms of defensive value - the skill slot is locked and empty. Meanwhile, completing floor forty nine nets him the Legend Blade+9, which aside from looking amazing is actually stronger than the Dragon Blade+4. It’s weaker than the Dragon Blade+9, but there’s no way I can be arsed to get the 1/4 D-Ratio to compare them.
It also has a unique skill threaded to it called Great Smash.
At first glance Great Smash doesn’t seem too impressive - an overhead swing that deals mediocre damage for a Lv. 3 skill. But occasionally, if you get lucky, this happens.
Great Smash is Ryu’s instant kill move. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s a beautiful sight.
Lin’s ultimate shield, Lightweave, is obtained from floor nineteen. It’s the same as Ryu’s, with high defence but no skills. Unlike Ryu however she gets two unique weapons to play with. The first is the Stinger, which she gets from floor thirty nine.
The Stinger is basically a gimmick weapon that contains all of Lin’s ‘missile’ skills. Said skills all bypass defence so it’s not completely useless, but it has low versatility and can’t use Super Shatter.
Lin’s second weapon, the Grenade+9, is obtained by completing floor forty eight. Despite the name it’s actually a gold-plated hand cannon, and lives up to the hype by being incredibly powerful, having great range and a whopping eight unlocked skill slots - enough to use the Super Shatter combo.
Nina’s gains are less interesting, but still significant. Her ultimate shield, the Platinum Arc, is obtained from level twenty six and has no skill slot. Her ultimate weapon, the Wizard Wand+9, is found on floor forty four and has the most open skill slots of any staff. You can also find the Holy Heart on floor thirty three and the Demonscythe on floor forty one, if you didn’t get them from the colony shop.
With all that done, it’s time to return to the past. This is it - the elevator down to the fiftieth floor. What awaits us at the bottom of Kokon Horay?
Tune in next time to find out!