so I beat the labyrinth of galleria "main game" final boss last night. I beat it four times!
the entire time through, I thought about that blog post I linked in yesterday's entry that kind of boils down to "there is so much going on with this game and I don't know if I love it or if I'm stockholm syndromed"
me too! anyway I'm postgame now. as I thought, this is not postgame. this is just game
(light mechanical spoilers for galleria below the cut)
after a lot of gamefaqs and, regrettably, steam forum searching yesterday, I spent about 5 hours executing on The Build That Would Save Me, the ultimate weapon against a nine-segment final boss that casts Die about nine times per turn: an infinite amount (six) of screaming nonbinary cannon cat maids stunlocking the boss into inaction.
in practice, the party composition was
- 2 covens of cannons
- 1 tank coven (actually tanks)
- 1 tank coven (actually heals)
- 1 mage dps guy with a femme hairstyle who presses No, YOU Die every turn
the nine segments of the final boss each have a venn diagram's worth of weaknesses, such that if you cycle through all 3 elements of spells, you'll eventually knock out seven of the nine parts. the eighth segment requires certain physical types of damage only covered by my tanks and cannons, and the ninth is just immune to everything, except for my mage's weapon, which has the special enchantment "do 6000 damage to the final boss but for real" (the final boss has like 600k HP).
my plan was to just chip at the boss forever with this little pea shooter, but imperfections with Plan Stunlock (namely, that my tanks ran out of aggro draw and my cannons would sometimes not move fast enough to stun the boss before it actioned) required me to go back to the drawing board, or more accurately, the weapon fusion machine, where I dumped more poison status effects than god into my cannons such that I'd have great odds to poison the ninth segment (which as I accidentally discovered is vulnerable to status ailments!) for 20k tick a turn.
in practice it made the fight this really interesting catharsis where for the first few turns as the boss ramps up, you're going completely guns blazing to disable as much of it as possible and keep the balance of power in your favor before it slips away irrevocably, and then, for the last 30 turns or so, you're chipping at this one last segment an incredibly small slice of health at a time (you can't see the lifebar) and hoping that you don't hit any bad rolls that disable your "DPS" because you forgot that it takes Management Points to use items and you didn't put any revive spells on your team because "heal Faint" is not "revive", what are you playing, Pokemon
and then the boss explodes and you pump your fist really hard for climbing a wall that is, for all purposes, unreasonable to put at this point in the game, but not impossible, and then you load your save data and find out that you're still Right Before The Final Boss but with all the items that the final boss drops.
and you're like, what? so you beat the final boss again to make sure you're not missing anything that would lock you out of progressing to "postgame" (the ending you get at this point in the game I'd best describe as "well the world isn't going to end but things are not satisfying for our protagonists"). it goes a little easier, which makes you feel more assured in your planning. still no postgame.
you scour the gamefaqs guide. you look over the steam forums. no hints of "do this or else you can't continue". you think "maybe I have to do things the Appropriate Way and do all the fetch quests and get the Earthbound Pray spell that makes the final boss vulnerable in the intended way". you spend three hours teleporting in and out of the labyrinth farming 26 funny gems and a bunch of other stuff. you cast Pray. you do 1,000,000 damage to the boss instead of 20,000. now that's what I call numbers. still no postgame.
you start trying to figure out how to search Galleria terms in Japanese and which Japanese wikis are clickbait and which are genuinely useful. instead you accidentally stumble upon gamefaqs's Q&A page, where someone is having the same issue as you. the reply says "did you make sure to collect all the trinkets from part 1?"
I am missing one trinket from part 1. it is behind a breakable wall in the corner of the second floor of the second dungeon. there is no indication I was missing this trinket unless I went into the Key Items pocket and manually counted them
the answer continues, originally in the Japanese version you needed to have 100% of trinkets to finish part 1, so the part 3 restriction would be trivial. but the English release changed the required of trinkets for part 1 to just be A Lot%, so whether intentionally or not, part 3 catches people off guard.
there is additional dialog in the ending cutscene if you get all the trinkets, so there is a conditional there at least; but if memory serves (there is no footage of this online), if you don't get all the trinkets, there's no obvious "if only I had ONE more macguffin" line.
you run down to the store (the dungeon) to do your shopping (trinket collecting). you go back to fight god. god is probably more sick of you by now than you are of it. you deal 700,000 damage. you finally get the opportunity to save your clear data.
Continue your search for just a bit longer?