NIER Part #100 - Episode XCIII: The Shadowlord

Part 100: Episode XCIII: The Shadowlord

Episode XCIII: The Shadowlord

Music: Yonah ~ Piano

We now join the Shadowlord in his chambers, which appears to be a...dilapidated auditorium filled with a bunch of road equipment... Alright, then.

Well, someone has had a bit of a growth spurt in the last five years.

The Shadowlord speaks something unintelligible to the sleeping Yonah as we fade away. I'd really like to know what the hell these jerks are all saying.

Meanwhile...

Well, at least the rest of the gang made it out alright...even if it did cost Emil his life. Understandably, the party has taken quite the morale hit due to his loss.

Nier looks as though he's ready to puke all over the floor. I guess having three of your best friends all die in the course of about ten minutes is a bit rough.

Meanwhile, Kainé just falls back to the emotion she knows best: getting pissed as hell.

She vents her frustrations out on Nier by kicking him to his feet, choking him for a bit, and then...

...decking him across the room. I wonder if a post-apocalyptic anger management and/or grief counseling exists?

Kainé pins her companion against the opposite wall and proceeds to...

...have a really weird moment where it looks like they almost make out. What happened to Weiss...? This is getting uncomfortable.

Kainé let's Nier go and starts walking onward...

"...Let's go."

"...Sure."

This is the final run before we face the Shadowlord. There are about a hundred Shades in the corridors leading up to him. But, after Emil bought the farm I was so over the Shades' bullshit that I ended up massacring the lot of 'em so hard that I got the 100-hit combo trophy. Just one more of these bastards left to go... We can't stop now.

Music: The Shadowlord's Theme

Definitely a run-down auditorium... Not exactly the place I'd expect the final battle to take place, to be honest... How do they have working electricity in here?

"Yonah..."

Nier runs toward his long lost daughter...

Of course, it's not going to be that easy. It's never that easy, is it?

Time to finish what began five years ago. Papa Nier vs. The Shadowlord.

Nier Replicant vs. Nier Gestalt. Body vs. Soul. Time for the final battle! Let's rock!

...Except despite that dramatic intro for the Shadowlord, he just unceremoniously plops out Grimoire Noir for the battle. Well....I guess it's time for the final showdown with Noir. I almost forgot about that jerk.

The Shadowlord himself just chills out up in the air watching the battle. He has an impenetrable shield up for the duration, so we need to take out his sidekick before he'll come down and fight. Fine!

"-Shadowlord?!"

"Don't speak in such a manner, fool! I am nothing like you! Strike it when it has stopped! It's c-c-c-coming!"

Grimoire Noir is a pretty damn easy fight. All it does during the battle is bounce around the (very large and easy to maneuver) chamber and crap out magic pages behind it. Said pages will explode into very slow moving magic orbs that disperse about the room.

After that, it'll just hang out over in a random corner and lets its snail paced attack do its thing. This leaves a good fifteen seconds for Nier to just wail on it (having to take out its shield first, of course) before repeating the cycle again. Occasionally, it'll summon a whirlwind of pages around it like Grimoire Rubrum would occasionally pull. But that's about all there is to the black book.

Over by Yonah's bed we can get a closer look at the crap around. What's with all the tires and oil drums...? Did the Shadowlord buy Yonah her first car for her upcoming 16th birthday next year or something...?

"N-no! Impossible!!"

And...that's it for Grimoire Wesker. Despite being the chief antagonist in the Act 1 Conclusion while the Shadowlord was little more than menacing scenery, this time around it's barely a mid-boss and goes down like a total punk. Welp, that's one villain dead. Time for the other.

With Noir's defeat, the Shadowlord absorbs his power and decides it's time to finally throw down.

The Shadowlord is extremely agile and can zip around the ground and the air like crazy. All his attacks are also rather speedy business. So, it's best to keep on the move.

The leader of the Shades has access to the Sealed Verses, but it seems to really love using Dark Lances above all else. He can almost instantly fire a half dozen in a line vertically or, more problematic, horizontally across the arena.

Despite being the big beefy strongest Shade in the land, Nier Gestalt has basically the same rules as Papa Nier in regards to what kind of attacks will send him flying on his ass. Just about any strike with a two-handed weapon seems to send him eating floor tile. On that same note, he also has the same evade roll recovery (with similar invincibility frames) as our Nier. Well...I guess that makes sense. We are kind of fighting ourselves here.

"Ugh... Naturally! I am fit as a fid-id-id-id-id-iddle... Nnnngnnggghhhh!"

Shadowlord can also block and parry Nier's attacks with his fire sword. I suppose that's a bit of an upgrade from the Iron Pipe he was wielding last time we saw him in battle, eh?

When the Prologue Nier's health dips below 50% he starts teleporting around the room similar to how the twins liked doing in the battles against.

Only, instead of just slowly teleporting to another part of the room to start up the same attack sequence, the Shadowlord will attempt to open a portal right beneath Nier and jam its sword up his ass.

Failing that, he'll try to immediately follow it up with a volley of Dark Lances and then pounding Nier's position with a downward strike. The Shadowlord's version of that attack is a bit more beefy and Nier needs to be a decent distance away to avoid the small shockwave it causes.

After the Shadowlord's health dips to one-third, an attack gauge will pop-up over him. Despite Noir and the Shadowlord both getting Attack Gauges, Nier never does any over-the-top Finishers during the endgame. The one at The Aerie was the last one. Though I guess stabbing something with a 50 foot long drill lance and impaling it twenty times from the inside outwards is kinda hard to top.

"Wait!"

Hey, look who woke up just in time for the climax. You'd think the Shadowlord wouldn't choose to fight in the same place as his kidnapped fake daughter. You know that's just gonna wake her up all cranky. That's no way to be a good fake ghost disembodied soul dad!