Part 18: Chapter the Eighteenth

Chapter the Eighteenth, in which there is some doubt about exactly who was defeated.



Now that we've got the final MAGI, it's time to visit the Celestial Palace. It's actually a pretty neat looking building although now that I look more closely I can see that the center top portion looks like part of Ashura's Base...and the part below that looks like it could have been ripped from Odin's Palace. Eh, no reason to waste good tiles I suppose.



Captain! Were you alive?

It was a surprise to us too.

Apollo! Using the power of MAGI is too dangerous. Listen to me, Apollo! Stop it!

For me? HA! Who do you think you're talking to? Besides, it's too late! I already used the MAGI! Now wait and see what happens!

Can't say we didn't warn him.








Fry's got some Karate under his belt with a low use count, as well as XCalibr where we can't see it. The Glass Sword isn't going to be used here, and the Sun Sword has another use in mind. Lela's got a Heal Staff with 15 charges. Zoid and Bndr haven't changed since the last time.



Dad's still got all of his gear, although probably the most useful thing he's got is that Heal Staff. Actually, looking at him I just had an interesting thought about breaking the game...hmm.



Apollo is a very boss. If you think about it, he's probably one of the earliest examples of a boss that had story triggers and plotline interwoven into it. That makes this fight quite ambitious for the time...but this can also cause players problems.



During this phase of the battle Apollo has the effect of Aegis on him constantly. You can't damage him with direct attacks like Fry and Bndr are trying.



Gun attacks and non-elemental magic, on the other hand, do damage just fine.



Anything else is going to have this kind of effect. However, the important part of this fight is that you can't kill Apollo until the story will let you. As a result, it helps to have a number of attacks to use that you don't really care about. For the next few rounds, we're using these exact same attacks while Apollo babbles on. The important thing is not to waste anything important.



We know that this is blatantly not true.



But your suit is still terrible!



I can only imagine him being a preening jackass the entire time while he's being mind-blasted and shot in the face with a magnum.



Finally things start popping.



Apollo's new form appears more rotund, has a weird wings/horns things on his back, and some claw feet. Maybe his suit turned into the loincloth? I just don't know really.



The sudden switch gives him a surprise attack. If you recognize what's going on you can plan for it, but it's still a bit of a crap shoot dependent on your agility as to when everybody goes.

Round One



Fry whiffs at a bad time. The most notable change with his new form is that he loses his Aegis protection. He still has a pretty tough defense, though.



He also keeps his elemental resistances, but still takes some damage from Lela.

Damage to Apollo: 620

Round Two



Apollo opens up his next round with Flare, which combined with the attack on Fry previously knocks him out.



Dad's use of the Heal Staff is too little and too late, although it helps recover everybody from the Flare. He's pretty much going to be using this for the rest of the battle, so if you don't see him in a round it's safe to assume that's what he'll be doing.




Bndr switches to a laser to get around that defense, while Zoid and Lela go to their strongest attacks.

Damage to Apollo: 1758

Round Three



The fact that Bndr attacks first indicates that Apollo's agility is about at the same level as his.



I consider any single attacks on Dad to be a waste of Apollo's turn since his use of the Heal staff will easily make up for that.



Apollo really has a decent magical defense as well. I think this round I had Zoid try an elemental spell just to check and make sure that Apollo kept his resistances. Unfortunately, he did.

Damage to Apollo: 2584

Round Four



Part of me wonders how Zoid got his attack in first.



I I'm not sure if he's actually got any other attacks than the Masamune and Flare.



I think Lela's slowness is probably one of the things I wish I could have done a better job with.

Damage to Apollo: 3743

Round Five



Due to the constant damage that lasers do, it's actually not a bad strategy to equip most of your team with them and blast away. The unfortunate thing about Zoid's attack is that he only has so many uses of Whirl.



Attacking Lela is a similar waste of a turn for Apollo, even more so than attacking Dad.



The funny thing is that now I can't remember if I switched out a new flare book for Lela.

Damage to Apollo: 4891

Round Six



One thing I haven't mentioned is that Bndr suffers a great deal more from Flare than anybody else. While Lela, Zoid, and Dad are taking about 500, Bndr takes more like 700. Selfix has done a lot to keep him in the fight since he also gets less back from the Heal staff. After fighting for so long, however, he finally goes down to this Flare.



Damage to Apollo: 5669

Round Seven



This is the end of Zoid's usefulness with Whirl, but at least he's done about 1500 damage to Apollo.



Fittingly enough, Apollo nearly finishes him off now that he's nearly useless.



This makes it a good time to use the power of Heart. The final MAGI has the power to revive all your dead party members with full HP once per battle. It's nearly a necessity for this battle. Now everybody's back in action.

Damage to Apollo: 5995

Round Eight



Apollo does his best to set us back a step now that he's got a full field of targets.



Pretty standard at this point, although I think this might be the end of Lela's flare spells.



Fry starts using Karate on Apollo. The damage isn't impressive at the moment, but it's not very much less than anything else he could be doing. Zoid's doing something else, but I believe I missed the screen cap on it.

Damage to Apollo: 7052

Round Nine





Now the big three have taken to exchanging hits. Fry's Karate isn't really a great replacement for Lela's Flare, but it's something.



Since Zoid can't attack, he's now relegated to making sure that Bndr keeps in the fight.



Lela switches to using her Heal Staff to keep everybody healthy.

Damage to Apollo: 7669

Round Ten





With two heal staves going and Zoid's cure spell on Bndr, we're comfortably staying ahead of Apollo's damage. The question is, can we do enough to him before we run out of staves?

Damage to Apollo: 8305

Round Eleven





It's kind of weird trying to figure out the way the martial arts work. The damage increases every couple of steps downward apparently, but there's a small amount of variation in each attack. Almost there..

Damage to Apollo: 8906

Round Twelve





The final hit for Karate is a huge step up. I think it's the biggest hit we've done so far. This thing has been a slog match, and no mistake. I should have had the Karate down to 1 use before coming in to this fight.

Damage to Apollo: 10050

Round Thirteen




As you can see, the damage Fry dealt with XCalbr is higher than what he did with Karate, but not enough to make up for for that final hit on the Karate. Then, something strange starts to happen...





Fry just sounds so very smug telling Apollo that he's screwed it up.



I think he nearly swears at Fry's dad here and then proceeds to attack. At this point it's pretty much over, but the fight will continue.

Damage to Apollo: 10709

Round Fourteen



Dad has run out of Heal Staff uses, so he has to switch to offense. I probably should have switched him to a new Heal Stave. Apollo really does dodge very well.




One final set of attacks (luckily, as Bndr is about out of Laser shots.)




This is a particularly gruesome end, but I find it fairly appropriate. Now, an interesting question here is whether or not I actually beat him. The fact that he went into his explosive mode just after I hit 10,000 damage to him seems to suggest that this might be a threshhold. However, I've seen various estimates of his HP, with some being up to 20,000. The trick here is that you don't have to hurt Apollo to kill him. Given enough time, he'll self destruct because of his imperfect MAGI. If you can't win any other way, having two people using heal staves every round once he transforms will generally enable you to last long enough for the plot to kick in.



Lesson learned. If you don't have Heart, you will explode.

Now, tell me if this makes any sense:



It's okay that the developers want Dad to have a big damn hero moment.




However, I have a couple of problems with this.

First off, it's an explosion. He somehow managed to block an explosion from hitting four people at once? The way the messaging is written almost makes it seem as though he jumped in front of each individual separately as the explosion reached them.

Secondly, it wasn't necessary as written. The damage he blocked for each person was nowhere near enough to kill them. If he's going to make a heroic sacrifice, go ahead and inflate the numbers! Let me see him block over 1000 damage (which I know full well the game can display) from each of them so that they would have been obviously dead without Dad taking the hit.



Somehow this message seems...wrong.

Next time: Aftermath. Is this the end?