Part 72: Endgame: Night Breaks Through (Gameplay)

Time to load up on tonics and hope for the best. I wonder if it's healthy to take this much medicine at once.



Nina's going to fill her inventory with as many gold bars as possible. Every time I talk about gold bars and iventory space I want to make a New Vegas joke but I can never think of anything good enough.



With Gunter's support and like 10 bottles of tonic, Corrin should be able to one round Takumi easily. Getting to him however will be a little trickier... A couple of Enfeebles would easily counterract all of these buffs so for her own safety she'll have to hang back until she can make her move.



Unless you're going for 1 turn clear, your positioning on turn 1 doesn't really matter. You're fairly safe making a map save on turn 1 so long as you've got everyone you want on the map, since if you're playing it safe you most likely won't be moving very far anyway. Regardless I've put all my good units at the front and support ones at the back. Almost everybody is unpaired initially and will only be paired up as I need them to be.






Time for Azura to sing her forbidden song... It's the exact same one you've been hearing all game! Except this time it's being enchanted by her pendant to have special powers. The final map of each route is the same song but with Azura singing different lyrics. It's no Id: Purpose or God-Shattering Star, but it's certainly not bad. Having the final map's song actually be sung by a character in-game is a pretty neat idea.



Demon Takumi is upset because his sister is singing a song that makes him lose his magical powers. Unfortunately this doesn't actually do anything in-game. Can Azura sing a song that disables enemy skills like Staff Savant? Ocean's Grey Waves seems to be multi-purpose, I'm sure there's a Silence effect in that magical pendant somewhere.



The plan: get as close as possible to Takumi and then speed Corrin to him and kill him in one round. The closer I can get, the less reliant I have to be on perfectly optimised Rescue chains. First obstacle are these Maids and these Onis - I can send someone in to neutralise the Maids, but I need her tougher bodyguards lured so I can take them out.



Dwyer Silences the closest Enfeeble Maid to create a safe approach for the rest of my squad. He's only got 4 uses of this, but I doubt I'll be sticking around long enough for running out to be an issue. If he misses here I can dance him, but the miss chance still sucks.



Ophelia steps forward to lure the nearest enemies. She will get frozen here, but she won't get Enfeebled. I'm hoping I can at the very least get close enough to take out one Maid before I start my advance...



The rest of my army waits just out of range. I accept that some of my units are going to get Enfeebled a little, but until they need to enter its range they should stay back.



There we go. I could have maybe left someone with less resistance in range to take the fall instead, but it's too late now.



Even with -20% to her avoid they still struggle to hit her. She is pretty great.



Most of the initial pressure comes from the enemies waiting in the wings on either side. Unfortunately the terrain they're standing on is inaccessible to everyone, even fliers, so I can't take the fight to them. I'm going to have to block them off if I want to keep advancing.



Takumi alternates between charging his AoE and using it each turn. Considering how hard this chapter is and how many anti-turtling mechanics it has, I really don't know why they thought they needed this on top of everything else.



Only one barrier per column is enough to block everyone behind it from taking damage, but they will be destroyed after each wave and eventually the self-destructing Faceless will start taking them out as well. They cover every column but the far left and right, which unfortunately are the columns I need to occupy to block the flanking units from the side...



Once again the Enfeeble Maid takes a Silence. I wish I had at least one more of this staff but you only get the one.



Silas is in range to take an Enfeeble here but there's no avoiding it. I don't think it's possible to advance through this map without someone taking a staff hit unless you're skipping the whole map in a turn.



Oh, Camilla does have Swordbreaker! I forgot I gave it to her. Seems like she's an obvious candidate to block off this path.



Xander will help out. He's not effective at killing the Heroes, but he's tanky enough to not die from them. These two don't get pair-up partners, I want as many units available as possible.



This isn't the best use of Spendthrift but who cares about conserving at this point. Nina won't be able to counterattack these Onmyoji, but her res is high enough to tank them.



This looks much nicer! The green zone is still a mess of debuffs, but at least my units who enter it won't get killed.



If I can put Nina or Ophelia here then they can take out the Maid while only being in range of Ninjas they should be able to get WTA on. They'll also be in range of two different Enfeeble users, but that's okay.



Takumi unleashes his AoE... This does 50% of max HP to everyone it hits. I wish it hit the enemies too, that'd make things easier.



Peri takes the first Enfeeble. No idea why, she's not in range of any enemies.



Silas takes the second. I might have been in trouble had they targeted any of my units blocking the two side paths.



And lastly, Dwyer gets frozen to the spot. He doesn't need legs to do his job!



Oh yikes, I think either of these two could have been killed if they had gotten hit with Enfeeble! I might have underestimated how much pair-up helps even the odds against endgame enemies.



Time to take out the first of these staff users. Ophelia will be in range of two Enfeeble staves and two Master Ninjas...



Very nice of her to crit and keep her dual guard gauge.



Jakob grabs a Fortify and tops everyone up. This staff only gets 2 uses and it costs a lot, it honestly was a bit of a waste to buy.



Entrapping this General is a vital part of Rescue skip strategies, he blocks off access to the boss and is very hard to actually kill through Wary Fighter. Grabbing him will aggro his buddies allowing me to take them out, so maybe I should do it?



No reason not to I guess. I've got Nina and Elise with Lightning to finish him off.



Good to know I've got a clean route to the boss if things go south. And they very probably will!



Now to Silence the Freeze user. Ideally I'd Silence the two Enfeeblers as well, but there's only one staff and it's not got many uses left.



Nothing to do but rally up Ophelia. It occurs to me I haven't actually crunched the numbers on her survival...



That's two Enfeebles for -8 to all stats. Shigure's rally half cancels it out...



Oh dear, perhaps I should have sent Nina. These guys do have Poison Strike and Inevitable End...



Ophelia only needed to dodge once to survive, but instead she dodged twice. She also missed one hit and didn't manage to crit, but just surviving is okay.



Takumi's charging up another attack and now I've got these guys to deal with. These enemies on their own don't seem so bad, but keep in mind there's a large group behind them and if I get too close then there's also the Great Masters with their staves as well...



I could take the plunge and start my Rescue chain... I'll have to run the numbers on it though and I'm very bad at working these things out in my head.



Rescuing another Rescue user and then having them Rescue Corrin seems like the ideal strat. You can see why having 2 of these things is useful!



Okay, here's the plan: Silas teams up with Jakob to give him extra movement, Forrest rescues him to get him closer to the boss.



Corrin moves closer too, gets rallied, and gets danced to move even closer...



Jakob moves ahead and rescues her...







...and Corrin moves to the boss. I guess this does count as a rescue skip... Just a slightly less cowardly one that involved a minor amount of pushing forward. Maybe with careful positioning I could have taken out the Master Ninjas and Generals and survived to push forward for a turn more, but between Takumi's aura blast and the reinforcements I didn't want to risk it.



The combined effect of Gunter, tonics, Life and Death, Elbow Room, and Swordfaire are all too much for Takumi to withstand. So many reclassing choices for Corrin were building up to this! All I didn't do was get her movement + 1 to make it even easier to reach him.



Oh no you don't. You've ended your last run, Takumi!



No Vengeance... He wouldn't have killed anyway, but that's good...



BONK



Even his own clone has betrayed him. Look, it's just standing there! No solidarity between Takumis at all.



And then he turned into water. Now who's going to mop this up?


A shitty Rescue skip as an end to a shitty chapter. Maybe if I were to sit down and grind at it for a few hours there would be a way for me to beat this chapter without a single use of Rescue and no deaths, but I'm not masochistic enough to find one. If you want to see a clear of Endgame that does exactly that and does not rely on too much RNG, this video by Zoran shows one off. I'm sure if you apply a filter that turns Ophelia's hair to black you can pretend I did all that.

I've got a few token screenshots of the epilogue I guess I could save for a final post, but otherwise that's it! The evil has been defeated. One terrible final chapter and some endgame fatigue aside, it's been fun. Maybe I'll inclue my final thoughts with the epilogue if I have anything to say. Maybe I'll even update the master post of every chapter I've completed so far, I think that's still on chapter 14. Oh and I have to make links to all my unit analyses too...

So if you take two lessons from this LP, let it be these: Odin is good, and don't do Endgame on Lunatic Classic. Don't even do it on Lunatic Casual if you don't want to, you can swap to Hard and still have a perfectly satisfying ending to a difficult campaign! For all of its faults, I like Conquest Lunatic a lot and don't think it should be ruined by a final chapter that doesn't let you save beforehand and is too overtuned in difficulty.