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I played the end of my playthrough for this year's Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge on December 15th.
I had saved before trying the Sunken Desert which I failed at in the previous session, and I was prepared to go to the Black Omen... but I thought I'd give Sunken Desert another try. And this time, decided to tweak the party order to get Ayla closer to Retinite.
So far, I've been really particular about having Crono, Lucca, and Ayla in that order in every battle. However, I had noticed that when you view the list of Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge runs, it always shows the characters in order of Crono -> Marle -> Lucca -> Frog -> Robo -> Ayla -> Magus. This is both the order characters are first recruited as well as in line with their internal IDs.
The party order isn't considered in RevenantKioku's site, so I figured adjusting the party order is probably considered legal. With that - and acknowledging my PartyOn script isn't necessary anymore - I changed my party to Crono, Ayla and Lucca and encountered Retinite again.
So, the question is, can Retinite be damaged effectively with Tail Spin? First, we see if he can get into the perfect position...
And then we see if this attack bypasses his abundant defenses.
Well... we're in business. And really, Ayla using Tail Spin was the only thing that even happened in this fight besides a tiny bit of healing with items.
Me too, Ayla. Me too.
Although we did do the GreenDream / 990 AD scenes, the real prize here was getting access to easy Vigil Hats, handy for their good defense and status resistance.
We also re-stocked Full Tonics. We fought the Mega Mutant and immediately felt a little dumb for worrying so much about Vigil Hats when we charmed one during the fight. Another Vigil Hat was in a chest roughly halfway through the Black Omen, rendering that whole thing somewhat pointless.
The enemies here were tough at times, but not too bad. Things were probably worse than they needed to be in some cases when I kept trying to steal items using Ayla's Charm. Over the course of the Black Omen, we probably managed to swipe over 20 MegaElixirs from Ruminators.
We also got a whole lot of Speed Tabs. Before we got to the Giga Mutant, I had already maxed the speed stat for all of Crono and Ayla, and Lucca almost immediately afterward. Giga Mutant was easy.
TerraMutant is encountered quite shortly after the Giga Mutant, actually. It was also very easy.
And just a room or two later, we encountered another Lavos Spawn. We managed to steal a Safe Helm and a Haste Helm off of it. Its counter spikes from Charming the shell were powerful, doing over 400 damage to a single character, but we beat it very quickly afterwards (using Gatling Kick on its head) and it never seemed like we were in any real danger.
This brings us to part 1 of our showdown with Queen Zeal. She used Hallation on me kind of a lot; this would honestly be a pretty big issue if he hadn't stolen so many MegaElixirs. It certainly wasn't a long fight, given the kinds of damage we were outputting.
I thought I might be able to beat the Mammon Machine in a damage race by avoiding the use of physical attacks. This was almost true but not quite; we ended up getting hit with its stored energy attack once.
I didn't get a lot of screenshots of the other Queen Zeal battle, but I did manage to steal from both hands and the face. The hands have nasty counters that both require some immediate remediation, but with all of our accumulated consumables this was no big deal. This means we got a second PrismDress and a PrismHelm.
Next we did the Lavos shell. This involves it entering attack modes based on most of the game's mandatory bosses. At first, I was using Falcon Hit, which is quite fun for Dragon Tank and Guardian...
...so I kinda said "let it ride" just kept using Falcon Hit against everything. This was good for a while, and beat Zombor nice and fast, but it stopped making sense by the Nizbel phase.
Really though of these were easy - but sort of fun. I went back to Falcon Hit for the Azala fight and the Giga Gaia fight but we had lots of useful attacks for these, like Luminaire and Flare. I saw little reason to drag out the battle.
When we got to the actual Lavos shell battle, the big sign of your success is whether he one-shots somebody with "destruction rains from the heavens". That definitely did not end up being the case. We won quickly.
It's nice having Ayla because she can steal tabs, so I exited Lavos and thought I'd do the Black Omen again. However, I may have overestimated the value of doing the Black Omen more than once. We blew through it with some fastforwarding, but each trip really only got us two Power Tabs, a Prism Helm, and a few levels.
Run 2:
Run 3:
Now, oddly, the Queen Zeal space battle was way, way harder on the third runthrough. I had no real issues on the first two trips, but she had me on the ropes twice in this fight. It's funny, because I had just said with a cautious save before the Zeal fight, "Any battle where Hallation's in play can go wrong". I'm glad I did save... although we pulled out the win regardless.
Well... we're not getting any more prepared for the end of the game now. I used up all of my tabs, only to find that Ayla had maxed out her power stat! The rest went to Crono.
We went toward the Lavos Core. Like with destruction raining from the heavens, the laser doors of doom attack is a nice way to gauge the team's preparedness. Ayla took high damage but we were in fine condition. Shadow Doom Blaze, later in the fight, had a similar effect.
I remember Falcon Hit being great in this fight, so I used it a fair bit. It wasn't long at all before the arms were destroyed. And from there, it wasn't too long before we beat the thing.
When we got to Lavos Core, I once again tried using Falcon Hit. I tried other moves too, but the left piece absorbs elements like Flare, so eventually I just stuck with Falcon Hit since the left bit dies pretty quickly. This got the right bit to lower its defenses quickly and easily.
Keeping the left elements down was easy, which also greatly reduces Lavos' capacity to damage me. Speaking of damage, I had Lucca use Protect on Crono and I felt really smart about it when the center part walloped Crono with a physical hit.
I said, "Y'know, that only has to happen once for the Protect spell to feel worthwhile."
This fight never felt the least bit challenging, really. Keeping the right bit's defenses down, we were able to do over 5000 damage with Gatling Kick. With that... it didn't last long.
For some reason we had kind of a strange silhouette appear as the battle faded out. I swear this thing's actually dead.
Victory!
This was fun. It seemed a lot faster and easier than last year, and probably more fun, too. The lack of available healing did make things a bit shaky in the middle 1/3 of the game. The end part, with our abundant Full Tonics and MegaElixirs, suddenly became really easy. I like having Ayla.
I'm not sure what else there is to say about this. It's not really hard, but it's fun.
I guess if I wanted something harder it would be easy to use the PartyOn script to effectively play any solo. Hm.
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I had saved before trying the Sunken Desert which I failed at in the previous session, and I was prepared to go to the Black Omen... but I thought I'd give Sunken Desert another try. And this time, decided to tweak the party order to get Ayla closer to Retinite.
So far, I've been really particular about having Crono, Lucca, and Ayla in that order in every battle. However, I had noticed that when you view the list of Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge runs, it always shows the characters in order of Crono -> Marle -> Lucca -> Frog -> Robo -> Ayla -> Magus. This is both the order characters are first recruited as well as in line with their internal IDs.
The party order isn't considered in RevenantKioku's site, so I figured adjusting the party order is probably considered legal. With that - and acknowledging my PartyOn script isn't necessary anymore - I changed my party to Crono, Ayla and Lucca and encountered Retinite again.
So, the question is, can Retinite be damaged effectively with Tail Spin? First, we see if he can get into the perfect position...
And then we see if this attack bypasses his abundant defenses.
Well... we're in business. And really, Ayla using Tail Spin was the only thing that even happened in this fight besides a tiny bit of healing with items.
Me too, Ayla. Me too.
Although we did do the GreenDream / 990 AD scenes, the real prize here was getting access to easy Vigil Hats, handy for their good defense and status resistance.
We also re-stocked Full Tonics. We fought the Mega Mutant and immediately felt a little dumb for worrying so much about Vigil Hats when we charmed one during the fight. Another Vigil Hat was in a chest roughly halfway through the Black Omen, rendering that whole thing somewhat pointless.
The enemies here were tough at times, but not too bad. Things were probably worse than they needed to be in some cases when I kept trying to steal items using Ayla's Charm. Over the course of the Black Omen, we probably managed to swipe over 20 MegaElixirs from Ruminators.
We also got a whole lot of Speed Tabs. Before we got to the Giga Mutant, I had already maxed the speed stat for all of Crono and Ayla, and Lucca almost immediately afterward. Giga Mutant was easy.
TerraMutant is encountered quite shortly after the Giga Mutant, actually. It was also very easy.
And just a room or two later, we encountered another Lavos Spawn. We managed to steal a Safe Helm and a Haste Helm off of it. Its counter spikes from Charming the shell were powerful, doing over 400 damage to a single character, but we beat it very quickly afterwards (using Gatling Kick on its head) and it never seemed like we were in any real danger.
This brings us to part 1 of our showdown with Queen Zeal. She used Hallation on me kind of a lot; this would honestly be a pretty big issue if he hadn't stolen so many MegaElixirs. It certainly wasn't a long fight, given the kinds of damage we were outputting.
I thought I might be able to beat the Mammon Machine in a damage race by avoiding the use of physical attacks. This was almost true but not quite; we ended up getting hit with its stored energy attack once.
I didn't get a lot of screenshots of the other Queen Zeal battle, but I did manage to steal from both hands and the face. The hands have nasty counters that both require some immediate remediation, but with all of our accumulated consumables this was no big deal. This means we got a second PrismDress and a PrismHelm.
Next we did the Lavos shell. This involves it entering attack modes based on most of the game's mandatory bosses. At first, I was using Falcon Hit, which is quite fun for Dragon Tank and Guardian...
...so I kinda said "let it ride" just kept using Falcon Hit against everything. This was good for a while, and beat Zombor nice and fast, but it stopped making sense by the Nizbel phase.
Really though of these were easy - but sort of fun. I went back to Falcon Hit for the Azala fight and the Giga Gaia fight but we had lots of useful attacks for these, like Luminaire and Flare. I saw little reason to drag out the battle.
When we got to the actual Lavos shell battle, the big sign of your success is whether he one-shots somebody with "destruction rains from the heavens". That definitely did not end up being the case. We won quickly.
It's nice having Ayla because she can steal tabs, so I exited Lavos and thought I'd do the Black Omen again. However, I may have overestimated the value of doing the Black Omen more than once. We blew through it with some fastforwarding, but each trip really only got us two Power Tabs, a Prism Helm, and a few levels.
Run 2:
Run 3:
Now, oddly, the Queen Zeal space battle was way, way harder on the third runthrough. I had no real issues on the first two trips, but she had me on the ropes twice in this fight. It's funny, because I had just said with a cautious save before the Zeal fight, "Any battle where Hallation's in play can go wrong". I'm glad I did save... although we pulled out the win regardless.
Well... we're not getting any more prepared for the end of the game now. I used up all of my tabs, only to find that Ayla had maxed out her power stat! The rest went to Crono.
We went toward the Lavos Core. Like with destruction raining from the heavens, the laser doors of doom attack is a nice way to gauge the team's preparedness. Ayla took high damage but we were in fine condition. Shadow Doom Blaze, later in the fight, had a similar effect.
I remember Falcon Hit being great in this fight, so I used it a fair bit. It wasn't long at all before the arms were destroyed. And from there, it wasn't too long before we beat the thing.
When we got to Lavos Core, I once again tried using Falcon Hit. I tried other moves too, but the left piece absorbs elements like Flare, so eventually I just stuck with Falcon Hit since the left bit dies pretty quickly. This got the right bit to lower its defenses quickly and easily.
Keeping the left elements down was easy, which also greatly reduces Lavos' capacity to damage me. Speaking of damage, I had Lucca use Protect on Crono and I felt really smart about it when the center part walloped Crono with a physical hit.
I said, "Y'know, that only has to happen once for the Protect spell to feel worthwhile."
This fight never felt the least bit challenging, really. Keeping the right bit's defenses down, we were able to do over 5000 damage with Gatling Kick. With that... it didn't last long.
For some reason we had kind of a strange silhouette appear as the battle faded out. I swear this thing's actually dead.
Victory!
This was fun. It seemed a lot faster and easier than last year, and probably more fun, too. The lack of available healing did make things a bit shaky in the middle 1/3 of the game. The end part, with our abundant Full Tonics and MegaElixirs, suddenly became really easy. I like having Ayla.
I'm not sure what else there is to say about this. It's not really hard, but it's fun.
I guess if I wanted something harder it would be easy to use the PartyOn script to effectively play any solo. Hm.
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