Part 45: Character Write-Up - Massimo

Time to talk about the resident Large Party Member!

Massimo

The first proper, full time melee attacker party member. He won't get anywhere fast, but he'll definitely get there and then beat things to death on arrival.

Weapon Type: Lances (Combat Damage)
Starting WE: 20%
WE Gain per turn: 25%
Action Trigger: Berserk Charge - Heavy Damage + Status effects to one target. Improves as you hit certain total amounts of damage dealt with a single use, first improvement at 3000 damage and the second at 10000. More WE = more time to button mash for more damage and other effects.
Elemental Resistances: Takes 150% damage from all elemental attacks.
Force Metal Slots: 2
Starting Immunity: 13
Hyper Mode: Glint Armor
Hyper Mode Benefits: +50% LE, +25% Power, Armor, and Shield, +50% WE Gain(bringing his gain per turn up to 37%), 100% Counter Attack rate against single target attacks. Allegedly it also reduces the extra damage he takes from elemental attacks, but I can't find a solid confirmation if it does or not pretty much anywhere. EDIT: Courtesy of Bisby doing science that I don't know if will get picked up for the archive, turns out the elemental defense part is in fact false due to the strategy guide lying to people either by accident or by way of things changing between time of guide writing and time of game release.
Hyper Mode Turns: 3

The closest RPG character archtype I could theoretically think applies to Massimo is the Berserker or Barbarian - Big guy who takes a lot of damage and also vomits out damage like a cruise missile. He's definitely a weird take on it though, with his fairly decent defensive stats and massive health bar... but he's really slow to do pretty much anything and is weak to all elemental damage. He can't even Action Trigger on his first turn... which is a shame, because if you can button mash like a champ you can definitely just use him as a siege weapon to obliterate things. His Massimo Plus Force Metal is a decent option for the full stat boost and 25% counter chance, but later on in the game or even sooner depending on your playstyle if you find other Force Metal you want him to use more. Massimo's Action Trigger also upgrades as you do more and more damage with it in a single blast. The first two bars it has by default are for raw damage and bonus status effects, but once you unlock the third bar that can give it an 80% critical hit chance things start getting bonkers. The fourth bar is even crazier, adding up to 12 additional hits that'll total up to about half the damage of the initial blast if you can fill the bar all the way. Also as Bisby helpfully noted, Action Triggers take on the elemental properties of the character's weapon, which for Massimo leads to some spectacular results.

Massimo, to me at least, doesn't really stand out in gameplay besides his Action Trigger. It weirdly makes him kind of an inversion of Spider, who gets to do cool stuff if he DOESN'T use his Action Trigger. The counter off of Massimo Plus can help, and it's pretty funny to watch Massimo scoot his way over to whack the enemy that triggered it, but really you want him to Action Trigger as much as possible so feeding him Build Speeds to fix his lack of ability to get more turns to charge WE faster is a good idea. Also his rather ridiculous amounts of LE as he gains levels means that even with his vulnerability to elemental damage, he can and will just power through it to stay in the fight before you really need to worry about burning Sub Tank energy to patch him up. It's actually kind of a shame he didn't come with something, a Sub-weapon or a Force Metal, that causes him to be targeted more by enemies - he'd make a pretty decent meat shield just with his titanic health bar.

Though as a personal note I enjoy the fact that in combat, Massimo attacks not by walking over to enemies, but by like using the Hover Skates from like Mega Man Legends 1 to scoot towards the enemy, hit them with his halberd, then hover moonwalk back to the player's side of the battlefield. It caught me off guard at first in how funny it looks, but it's become one of my favorite things about Massimo as a character.