Part 72: The Avatar And The Emperor: The Final Insult
Here we are, at the beginning of the end. Or is it merely the end of the beginning?
Depends on whether or not I decide to LP the PSP preq—pfffaahahahahahahaaha!!! I can’t even finish that sentence. Fuck this game and everything associated with it. I’m breaking the damn disc the second I’m done with the Avatar Story.
CUTSCENE: Vellgander Rises
When you load up your clear save file again after beating Madoras on the Garmatha, you’re treating to an entirely new cutscene, specifically dedicated to setting up Vellgander and nothing else. In any other game, this would have been world-class sequel bait, but here you know nothing important is going to come of it because this game wasn’t meant to right the ship after White Knight Chronicles I’s bellyflop, it was an obligation piece to finish what little story they had to tell.
But anyway, we come into the scene back on the Magic Plane, the same place where we met the Phantom and Yulie claimed the Moon Maiden and Orren obtained the Arc Knight from.
Madoras materializes from the ether, sadly not as dead as any of us had hoped he was at the end of the storyline.
Don’t ask me how Madoras is still able to hold this form even though he’s been expelled from Leonard’s body. I don’t give a shit and the game ain’t going to explain it anyway.
You can tell that Madoras is a capital E Evil Person because he’s in the midst of perpetrating a truly heinous act: forcing more White Knight Chronicles on all of us.
Hey, dickface, what part of “YOU DIED” did you not get the last time?
Madoras: You will ALL suffer for this outrage. I will make all of you cry out in AGONY! nine-gear crow, Blind Sally, Bricoleur, Onmi, GeneralYeti, Mehuyael, janusmaxwell, PoptartsNinja, Lotish, Arcade Rabbit, Crystalgate, cdyoung, SSNeoman, Lazyfire, McDragon, No Gravitas, Sword Hunter Gil, HardDisk, Mraagvpeine, Zoig, Geostomp, RelentlessImp, Artix, ultrafilter, OminousEdge, SomeMathGuy, SorcerousHam, Rainuwastaken, Preechr, Elite, StrifeHira, fullTimeLurker, Rigged Death Trap, Brewsuke, Omobono, SelenicMartian, ManlyGrunting, The Sandman, Tallgeese, Glazius, Arbitrary Coin, Serious Frolicking, HeadGrenade, *If you made it to this one, Puts, congratu-fucking-lations!
**If I missed anyone, don’t feel bad. You should have posted more.
Madoras: Wretched she-devil…Well someone’s slightly butthurt, I see. Aww, what’s wrong Caius? Are you pissed that Cisna’s kicked your ass twice in two separate aeons of history now? Don’t be. It’s like being mad at a hurricane for flooding your basement when you live on beachfront property in Florida. Cisna is merely doing what Cisna does: destroy people.
Yep. That joke STILL ain’t dying.
Madoras: Hah! She’s a fool to believe her feeble power is enough to destroy me.Someone’s tempting fate…
*evilfistclench*
Madoras: My Empire will be rebuilt! Rising again… Just as its Emperor has risen!
I’ll give the fucker this much, Anime Satan David Bowie is one hell of a goal setter.
So then for literally no reason we cut to a fully CG cutscene of Madoras overlooking a lake in what I’m assuming is a portion of Emyn Muil that he rented out from Sauron 10,000 years ago that still technically has his name on the lease.
Something massive begins to bubble up from the centre of the lake at Madoras’s call.
Shit, maybe he’s raising C’thulu or something. Wouldn’t that be both an awesome and inappropriate thing to put at the end of a 40 hour-long JPRG shitfest?
The lake begins to overflow its bounds as whatever is rising to the surface starts displacing a massive amount of water.
Finally, it breaches the surface.
And it’s… a tower?
And now we’re ripping off Stargate: Atlantis.
So yeah, Madoras just magic’d an entire city off the floor of a lake.
I will give it this; the place looks damn impressive. Are we going to spend the next ten hours exploring a vast, haunting empty ruin of a city?
FUCK NO! This is White Knight Chronciles, remember. We’re in for buckets and buckets of
, just you wait and see.
CG Madoras hoists his Rita Repulsa staff high in the air as purple magic bullshit swirls around him.
I can’t believe Level-5 wasted all this time and money giving this stupid chucklefuck a full CG cutscene model. Maybe Madoras was intended to play a larger role in Akihiro Hino’s nebulous director’s vision version of White Knight Chronciles before getting cut for time/money/budget/animator suicide reasons and this is just their way of using an asset that was going to be dummied out and forgotten otherwise.
I dunno.
And then he lazors the city for no good reason.
Actually, no I’m kidding, he’s just trying to jumpstart its battery. The thing’s been sitting dormant for ten millennia, and has a fucking nasty case of water damage. The place is a complete write-off, but you know, it was Madoras’s first Evil Fortress, and those things carry a certain sentimental attachment to them. I can understand his reluctance to just let it go and buy a new one.
And so Madoras throws up a giant signal to the world that he’s back: an upsidedown version of the Yshrenian Imperial Seal.
Yep. Level-5 fucked one of the most basic aesthetic elements of the game.
Eh, we’re deep into the post-game now. Level-5’s in full on “don’t give a fuck” mode now, so the animators are starting to revolt against Akihiro Hino in very passive-aggressive ways. It’s sort of like PoptartsNinja’s theory that Sunrise’s animators started revolting against Hino when they realized how shitty his scripts for Gundam AGE were.
Behold: The Lost City of Not Actually Appearing In This Game, aka Vellgander – the gigantic, now-impossible-without-cheating post-game dungeon.
Again, I think this was something akin to how the Garmatha turned out: it was intended to be the massive and sprawling city dungeon featured in the CG cutscene, but then budgets, time, and incompetence got in the way leading to us getting the same five rooms repeated literally 40 times over.
Regardless of all other factors, though, after a pointless CG cutscene like this, the game’s budget is now well and truly deep in the red.
It’s a true testament to Akihiro Hino’s dazzling leadership abilities that he insisted there be an expensive CG cutscene designed to do literally nothing than tease the post-game dungeon to players, the vast majority of them never even bothered to reload the game after they finished watching the credits.
This game is shit.
Some months after the fall of the Garmatha and the end of what was already being called the “Second Dogma War” by really twatty historians and scribes, I received a curious letter via carrier Bigelow. It bore the seal of the Adventurer’s Guild, and the insignia of the Royal House of Balandor.
“Oh fuck, this aughta be good,” I thought to myself as Delvadoth handed it to me in my office.
It summed up the situation quite succinctly. Recently, the Great Mountain Lake south of the Dogma Rift had mysteriously drained and an ancient city of a massive scale had emerged from beneath the surface.
The letter called the place “Vellgander.”
The city, it said, was overflowing with walking corpses, restless spirits, gigantes, and Ark Incorrupti of all stripes. What’s more, it claimed that Emperor Madoras himself had returned to the living world and was using the palace at its centre as his seat of power while he plotted to reconstitute his empire on Nadias.
The letter concluded, “Master Orren, it is therefor the humble request of the Guild that you venture into Vellgander to investigate the rumours of Madoras’s return, and if necessary and possible, dispatch the villain once and for all. This is a matter of the utmost importance. Emperor Madoras is the enemy of the free peoples of Nadias, and cannot be allowed to continue his reign of terror. You are free to take whomever and whatever you need into the city to ensure you survival, including your Incorruptus, the use of which is normally prohibited by Guild regulations. Should you return victorious, you will be rewarded with the finest treasures the Guild has within its power to procure. Should you accept this quest, keep this in mind: failure is NOT an option.”
I had to chuckle at that one. For the longest time, it felt like failure was the only option in my life… but not anymore. This time was going to be different.
A second letter was enclosed, this one on a piece of paper no larger than a flash card. It contained an eloquently simple message in wonderfully flowing script: “Do it or you’ll live just long enough to regret it. – Queen Cisna Andrasta di Balandor, First of Her Name (PS: This letter will self-destruct it three—”
And then it caught fire in my hands and I swear to all the gods her fucking face appeared in the flames for a second.
But really now, who could argue with that kind of logic?
It’s a trick question, of course. The woman lives in defiance of logic. Still, when opportunity knocks… I’d killed the yelly son of a bitch once, it seemed only natural to do it twice over.
Right?
As I prepared to leave the next morning, I was met in the town square by Yulie and Eldore. After some warm hellos, they told me that Yulie had travelled to the village to see me, and that Eldore was keeping her company seeing as how he literally had nothing else left to do in his life now. When I explained the situation to them, they both jumped at the chance to go with me. They both had scores to settle with Madoras, and were all set for an adventure anyway.
We loaded our things into the gliders Osmund had chartered for us and set out that day for the Lost City of Vellganger.
OVERWORLD MUSIC: “The Continent of Nadias” (Disc 1, Track 15)
So after the needless CG cutscene, we’re dumped back onto the world map with Vellgander now open and visitable in the massive lake that was previously empty throughout the game up till now. If you load up a clear save file through the game’s New Game+ mechanic, Vellgander will be there at the start of the game, even as everything else goes back to being locked down by the plot.
You also get to carry over the Arc Knight through New Game+, which makes the utter bullshit of the hunt for the Moon Maiden and Past Balandor 2.0 trivial because you will have an actual Knight to use during that period the second time around.
Selecting the city’s map icon brings up the quest list for it. Eventually, this list is going to fill up with missions as you clear each section of the city. It’s pretty much identical to the online quest listings that appear when you open up a city or field’s icon on the map which I’ve been sort of hiding from you up until this point because I was trying to keep the post-game/extra-game content at arm’s length until now because prior to this point it had no bearing on the actual plot of the game.
When you select a quest, the information screen on it appears. You can see in the screenshot that it gives you a brief description of what you’re expected to do in it, the time you have to complete it, any restrictions or special requirements needed, and of course, because it’s White Knight Chronicles, all the various ways you can fail it.
The second page gives you additional information relevant to the mechanics of the quest. For example, this is the very first of eleven segments of Vellgander, and the game flat out suggests you should have a party of 6 fully developed level 80 characters to tackle it and it only gets harder from here.
You can also see “Up to 1 member(s) may use an Incorruptus” there. This means that you can use a Knight at any point during the quest. Sometimes the game will let you use two or three in missions. In quests that were made for White Knight Chronicles I which carry over into sequel, these quests say instead “Incorruptus use not allowed,” rather than do a simple thing like tweak the code to allow you to use the Arc Knight in them once you get it.
Because Level-5 is all about the
.You can also see the arbitrary score you get for completing the level in ways that the game deems good or bad. Usually the quicker you complete the quest the better the score you get. You receive a letter grade depending on how you do: D, C, B, A, and S. Failed or aborted runs aren’t scored.
And of course the game records your fastest time running the level. Section 1 took nearly 49 minutes to run. I’ll give you my stats at the end of the update for each section as well as a total time spent in Vellgander for this LP just for maximum
.
AREA MUSIC: “Chronicles of Darkness” (Game 2 OST, Track 6)
And so we begin our long tedious journey to kick the crap out of Madoras for the second straight time.
All I’ve got at my back are the giant fucking
known as the Party AI of White Knight Chronicles. Because in online quests, you only can control the Avatar character. In the online version you only control you own Avatar while other players controlled their Avatars to form a party of six human players.Here, in the offline version, you’ve only got yourself and whoever you want to pick from your party as your number two and three characters. In this case, I chose Yulie and Eldore, mostly for plot reasons. I posit that they’re the only ones who would be free/willing to join Orren heading into Vellgander.
Caesar’s busy ruling Greede.
Kara’s busy being Mrs. Caesar.
And Leonard can go fuck himself, the useless self-immolating twat. He will never, ever occupy a place in the active party again. When I modded everyone’s stats up to “post-game” levels, I left Leonard’s stats as they were when I beat the game. So he was a level 46 character in the midst of five other level 80 characters with HP numbers in the thousands now.
We start out our trek through Vellgander in the hallway between the various rooms of the dungeon. You’re going to be seeing a LOT of this hallway if you somehow manage to play through all of this shit like I did.
Orren, Yulie, and Eldore all have very power high-level weapons from the Binding Post. Orren wields the hammer Liberator, a big fuck off steel brick with the Greede insignia on its flat side. Yulie wields the Gnome Bow, one of four high level bows with an inherent elemental attack bonus. In this case, it’s earth elemental. I picked it because it was purple, and Yulie’s colour is purple. Eldore is wielding Durendal, a bastardization of Durandal, the name of the sword wielded in combat by Roland, one of King Charlemagne’s generals during the Middle Ages and eponymous hero of the Song of Roland. If you know anything about anime and JRPGs, it’s that Japan apparently has a hard-on for naming things after an obscure sword wielded by an equally obscure historical military figure. They also love to name things after her sister swords, Joyeuse and Cortana.
I think that one of the bindable swords in the game is called Joyeuse, but there’s no reference to Cortana in the game, and just as well because Microsoft has sort of cornered the market on Cortnana references, hasn’t it?
But like I said, these areas are just sort of T-shaped junctions between the main rooms of the dungeon. There’s a basic map of the place a little further down the update. At the point of each T-junction there’s a Logic Stone.
Logic Stones in online quests fulfil a number of roles they don’t in single player. You can’t heal or repair your equipment at them, nor can you change the equipment of the Arc Knight at them, but you can pull items out of your equipment bag and store loot you rack up in the quest itself.
You can also set whatever stone you’re at as a “Homepoint” so that if you die in the quest you respawn at that Logic Stone. You can die over and over again in a quest with no repercussions. However, if you die in a boss fight at the end of the mission, you will fail the quest.
The T-Junctions have these little ponds with water plants in them. It’s kind of the like the a hotel lobby. A really fucked up evil hotel lobby.
There’s one on each edge of the T-junction, and there each one has a massive mural version of the frescos from Setti’s Dogma Era History Lesson from midway through the first game.
The Athwani one is on the left, the Yshrenian one is on the right, and the massive battle one featured on the game’s title screen is front and centre.
There’s also this guy. He only shows up in on the first floor of the first section.
He’s our living tutorial on what to expect inside Vellgander.
Scholar: Welcome, my friends, to Vellgander, capital of the Yshrenian civilization! I may be old, but my mind remains sharp, and I will answer your questions as best I am able. I will tell you what I know, but much of this place’s history has been lost to time.
Orren: Some things really kinda need to stay buried. Just sayin’.
When you talk to him a list of options opens up which he will cover in something approaching depth.
Scholar: What do you want to know? Orren: What is Vellgander? …Just so that I’m not walking in here blind. I don’t actually care, by the way. Scholar: Long ago, the Yshrenian Empire built this city to serve as its capital. When the work was done, they named it Vellgander. Orren: Never would have guessed that one. 
Scholar: It is divided into several sections. If you wish to reach the top, you must fight your way through all the other sections. Orren: Because Osmund broke our godsdamn airship. Scholar: I continue to be awed that an ancient civilization managed to build such a structure. Truly, the Yshrenians far outpaced us in terms of science and technology. Orren: There’s a girl in Balandor working to fix that one. Orren: How do I proceed? Scholar: You want to delve further into the complex, do you? Orren: There’s someone I really need to kill in here… again. Scholar: Then you should investigate the magical transport located in the central area of this place. Unfortunately, you cannot reach the central area, as the transport to that location is currently offline. Orren: What, did Madoras not pay his power bill or something? Fuck, I thought this ancient technology stuff was supposed to be idiot-proof… Or at least Leonard-proof. Scholar: There are four other transports on this floor, and they must all be activated before you can proceed to the central area. The transports are powered by warp crystals; you will need to locate different ones for each transport. Orren: ’Cuz I love me a fetch quest. Scholar: The monsters here seem to travel freely throughout Vellgander. This leads me to think they posess the crystals you need. More than that, I cannot tell you. I long ago lost the courage to seek out the crystals on my own. Orren: What are those coloured rifts? Scholar: I see. You wish to know about the multi-hued rifts that you see around the complex, yes? Orren: Or, in other words: what are those coloured rifts? Scholar: They are different from the other rifts. My suspicion is that they have been locked down by a kind of magical seal. If you can find warp crystals to match this seal, you should be able to open the rift and proceed wherever it leads. Orren: Got it. Scholar: But be wary! These portals were doubtlessly locked for a reason. Orren: To keep me from getting to Madoras’s goth ass, I’d assume. Scholar: There may be treasures beyond them, yes, but I would expect to find danger as well. Orren: Why do some areas restrict me? Scholar: Ah, yes. Some rooms that connect to the central area have magical fields placed upon them. I would guess that they were put into place to halt the advance of intruders, but this is only a theory. However, of this I am sure: When mortals like you or I venture into one of these rooms, certain actions are forbidden. Scholar: For example, we may be barred from using Elemental Magic, or prevented from using a specific weapon. There are a number of different restrictions, so you should be prepared to adjust your tactics as necessary. Orren: Brilliant.
Eldore: Are you done chatting with this nerd, Niles?
Yulie: Yeah, come on. Madoras isn’t going to kill himself now… Though it’d be nice if he did.
So let’s get going through the city then.
So these wavy energy fields are pretty much soft teleporters. They let you move between rooms. These white doors are open all the time and link the main rooms to the hallways. The doorways inside the rooms themselves are colour coded to the warp crystals the old man mentioned. More on that in a bit.
So this is one of the four main rooms in the fortress. Get used to a view like this, because you’re going to be seeing this same room layout about another forty times between now and the end of the dungeon.
Midlight’s Deep this place ain’t.
Each room is colour coded. There’s four colours: yellow, red, blue, and green. Each colour also usually corresponds to an element. If you can’t suss out which one corresponds to which colour, please leave now.
All the worst enemies you’d never want to face again show up in full force here. Shadow soliders, Fishes, Elementals…
Motherfucking Skeletons.
Defeating enemies is the key to obtaining the warp crystals needed to advance to the central room of each level and then up to next level of the section.
Generally speaking, you tend to get a warp crystal that matches the room you’re in. Unfortunately, the each crystal is a random drop tied to the game’s random number generator. More on that little shit nugget coming up soon.
You can check which crystals you’ve obtained by selecting your character and opening the Quest Item tap, as seen in the above image.
In the centre of each room is the room’s warp platform. We don’t have an Amber Warp Crystal to unlock this one, so it’s just a part of the scenery for now.
Pictured: fish fuckers.
And here’s that map I promised you. It’s only the bottom half of the floor, but the top half is a mirror of the bottom. You can see the stars in the middle of each room, they denote inactive portals. As you activate each one, the stars will disappear one by one.
Here’s some elementals.
Okay then. Let’s try this again. Time to put that Ruby Warp Crystal we picked up earlier to good use.
When you activate each platform, four balls of light appear in each corner to denote its activation.
Pictured: no star.
Here’s the blue teleporter.
#2 online.
So this is what happens when you enter a restricted room. Restricted rooms are randomly placed on each level. Some levels have no restricted rooms, others have one or two.
Like the old fart in the robes said, you can have just about any element of the gameplay locked down on you. Luckily, though the placement of restricted rooms may be random, but restrictions don’t change. If you leave the room and come back it will always have the same restriction on it.
You can be locked down by weapon type usage, combos, use of both Elemental and Divine magic, Incorruptus transformation, and even item usage.
In this case, we can’t use attack magic.
And here’s another example of the AI being a pair of MENSA fucking geniuses.
If you get KO’d, put to sleep, or paralyzed, the AI usually doesn’t bother to heal you. There are spells that cancel out these status ailments which the AI can use, but this here is a special circumstance. I got paralyzed and then the AI party members killed all the enemies on the field. At which point, the AI switched out of combat mode and proceeded to just stand there while Orren shook like a Parkinsons victim.
Ordinarily this would be the point where you’d hop into either Yulie or Eldore and continue playing or heal the afflicted party member with the corresponding spell. But because this is online, you’re stuck controlling the Avatar and can’t change characters, so you’ve just got to sit there for up to a solid minute and wait for the status effect to wear off on its own.
Because Level-5 is holy shit incompetent.
How shitty was Level-5 at coding a proper party AI? There’s a spell that’s essentially the game’s version of Ensuna, a spell called Refesh that cures Poison, Sleep, KO, Silence, and Paralysis—everything but Curse, Shackle, and HP/MP Leak.
And guess what? The party AI is too stupid to cast it. It’s smart enough to cast all the other status curing spells when it detects a party member is afflicted with the corresponding status, but it won’t cast the cure-all spell when it detects those same ailments on a character. Ergo, in order to cover all your bases you need to take up nearly an entire line of your AI party members’ command bar with each individual status spell.
This game is making me pine for Final Fantasy XIII’s party AI.
Green portal online.
When all four portals are brought online with their respective crystals, you will receive a prompt asking you whether or not you want to use it to transport to the center room of the level.
Beam me up, jackass.
Also, you’ve probably seen the coloured doorways in the rooms as we’ve been going. These ones lead to rooms with various high value treasures in them, usually weapons and armour pieces which you can nab for free without having to bind them at a Binding Post. Provided you can beat the crazy strong giant monsters in the rooms.
These doors also take a warp crystal to open, and a lot of the time the game only gives you one or two, so it’s very difficult to even get in there. Clearing the room after that is also a standing challenge.
Need I remind you, Vellgander under even optimal circumstances is literally impossible to beat now that GeoNet is offline.
You come out of the teleporter in this big room in the centre of the level.
The teleporter in the centre of the room is already active and waiting for you to use it, but you usually have to defeat all the enemies in the room before you’re free to use it, because the second you take like two steps forward you will aggro all the enemies in the room and you won’t be able to use the teleporter until you’re out of battle mode.
What kinds of enemies that show up in these rooms is sort of random. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of small enemies, other times, there might be a giant enemy waiting for you when you come out of the warp.
The teleporters in the corners of the room are able to send you back to the circle rooms you just came from.
Here’s another map for context.
There’s some interesting details hidden on the walls and ceilings of Vellgander.
I don’t know how well this one turned out, but the ceilings of these central rooms are adorned with Dogma Era paintings of Madoras.
Once you’re done, the teleporter will send you up to the next floor of the section.
Did you guess that we’d be running through an exact duplicate of first level? Well, guess what!
Each section of Vellgander has five floors to it. The first four floors of each section are the same floor four times over. There are 10 sections to Vellgander, not counting the Upper Apex. You will literally be clearing this same floor layout 40 times without variation.
So good news, I’m cutting a shitton of stuff out of this chapter, because you’ve now seen pretty much 90% of what Vellgander entails.
Here’s another universal experience of trying to clear Vellgander: frustrated waiting.
This is where tying quest-critical items to the RNG (
) boomerangs around to bite you in the ass. Each level tends to assign one of the warp crystals a near 1% drop rate, meaning you can kill every enemy in each room on the level and never get it to drop. This leaves you unable to proceed because you only have three out of four items needed to move to the next part of the stage.Did NO ONE sit down and fucking playtest this game at all?
You saw the credits in the last update. You saw the QA section come up. What the fuck happened there? Did they play a copy of Final Fantasy XII by mistake and told Level-5 that the game was good to go?
You can usually tell which crystal is going to be the one the game is going to be stingy with fairly early one. Usually after the second room you clear you should have three of the four crystals in your inventory. The missing fourth one is going to be the one the game will only give you when you pry it from its cold, miserly hands.
So that leads to stuff like this. Sitting around and doing jack all for up to ten minutes as the time limit ticks away while you wait for all the enemies in the level to respawn so you can take a second stab at killing everything in order to try and get the game to maybe, possibly, eventually, please, please, pretty please, oh you fucking BITCH GIVE ME THE FUCKING AMBER WARP CRYSTAL OR I’M THROWING THE PS3 OUT ONTO THE STREET AND RUNNING IT OVER WITH MY CAR RIGHT FUCKING
After you clear all four lower levels, you’re whisked up to the topmost fifth level.
The fifth level is a randomly rotating level selected from a pool of five different maps. Usually the lower ones are chosen from two or three maps while the upper ones tend to be from the other ones.
You can also see that when we emerge on the floor we’re given a specific mission to accomplish in order to unlock the final teleporter to access the boss of the section.
Usually it’s a variation on defeating a specific target giant monster, like we’re doing right now, and killing all the enemies on the level. It’s random, more or less. Also, on the higher levels missions come with conditions which you need to abide by. Usually it’s either “Incorruptus use not allowed” or “you can only die five times” or something.
You do get a Logic Stone in each variant level to reup your items and equipment, however.
Here’s a map of this particular fifth level variation. The two stars on the far right denote the two monsters you need to defeat to activate the teleporter.
And of course, all your favourites are back in full force making it very difficult to get to the targets.
Sadly, there’s not much interesting to show off in this variation.
This time around we need to kill a pair of gigases. These guys are crazy buffed up versions of the regular gigases we’ve encountered up till now.
But because we’re cheating, they go down like they’re nothing.
And once they’re both dead, another star appears on the map: the boss fight teleporter. There are a number of inactive teleporters around the level and which one becomes the boss teleporter is also completely random.
Also, those four dark squares in room in the middle of the map? Those are trick teleporters. They look like teleporters, but they’re actually fall-through traps that send you tumbling down to the lower area of the level.
You’re given one final prompt here when you access the teleporter. Once you start the boss fight, it can’t be stopped. You either win fight and clear the level, or you lose it and fail and you need to rerun the entire mission just to get back to this point.
Going back to the Logic Stone and prepping for the fight is pretty much essential.
Unless you’re cheating.
Boss battles in the post-game quests are usually always a
“Oh holy fuck” affair. You’re usually pitted off against multiple giant enemies that are crazy beefed up versions of their regular selves, and no matter how manageable the mission up till this point might have been, the bosses will kick the shit out of you because of how strong they are.Remember, these are bosses meant to be taken on by six level 80 human-controlled characters with the best equipment they can possibly access rather than one human controlled character and a pair of bricks with googley eyes and pipe cleaners glued to them.
The boss of Section 1 of Vellgander are a trio of Ark Incorrupti, a Tier 4 sword Knight and a pair of Tier 3 spear and hammer Knights, respectively.
Ark Incorruptus tiers can be susses out by their equipment and paint schemes. Tier 1 Knights are very basic like the one we beat to obtain the Arc Knight in the first place. They’re usually flat black and have brass coloured highlights. Tier 2 Knights have mix and match second level armour sets and have an elemental sub-type usually denoted by a red, blue, green, or brown highlight colour. Tier 3 Knights have the more flamboyant upper level armour sets, the ceramic finish, and like you can see in the picture, have silver armour highlights. And lastly, Tier 4 Knights have the most advanced armour sets, the metallic finish, and gold armour highlights.
Regardless of their tier, each Knight will only have either the Steel Sword, Steel Spear, or Steel Hammer equipped on them.
So let’s meet these guys Knight to Knight.
You also get to see the curtailed transformation sequence used in online quest.
Rather than interrupt things with the brief “Verto!” clip we’ve seen up till now, instead your Avatar shouts Verto and the Arc Knight appears out of a pillar of blue light that surrounds them, not unlike how gigases appear out of a pillar of red light.
This is how transformations play out if you set them to “short” in the option screen rather than “full,” like they are by default.
All three Knights have their own attack weaknesses. Sadly, the Arc Knight with its hammer can only cover two of them.
Sword Knights are weak to stabbing attacks. Okay, we’ve got that one covered.
Spear Knights are weak to impact attacks. Also got that one covered.
Hammer Knights are weak to slashing attacks. …Fuck.
Okay. No big deal. We can still brute force our way through this.
The Spear Knight goes down no problem.
And the Hammer Knight follows suit, thus leaving on the Sword Knight—the strongest of the three—for us to deal with.
This is the worst game of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots I’ve ever played.
And then the Sword Knight goes down too.
And we celebrate with some beauty shots of the Arc Knight, the true heroic giant mecha of this game.
[VICTORY THEME]
Whenever you complete a quest the Avatar does this little leaping fist pump in celebration. The AI characters just remain still and stare at them awkwardly.
Eldore: Oh for gods sakes, contain yourself, Niles. You’re embarrassing us. Orren: After fifteen months of willingly following Leonard, you don’t to get to complain about how dorky I am, geezer.I will admit it was kind of chuckle worthy seeing six Avatars online leap up in unified celebration of their victory.
Afterwards, you’re given a results screen which gives you a whole fuckton of numbers and a big fuck off letter.
Even more numbers.
And finally a screen showing you all your swag. You have the option to selecting only certain items, taking everything, or just straight up selling them on the spot for free money.
Por ejemplo.