Digimon Hacker's Memory No Digivolution Part 11: Spike & Shield and Dust Alliance Leaders, Piximon
Challenge playlist:
• Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker's ...
Three highlights of my chapter 11 experience, as I march on and make more progress towards finishing the game.
0:00 Spike & Shield Leader (ZubaEagermon and Duramon)
Looking up these two Vaccine-types led to the realisation that they're far bulkier physically than they are magically resistant. Employing two Data magic users and a Free-type, in lack of a third Data caster, caused me to have lengthy 3-vs-2 battle where Lillymon ended up doing most of the damage. Her paralysis procs went a long way towards keeping the enemies at bay.
7:02 Dust Alliance Leader (ShellNumemon, BlackKingNumemon and PlatinumNumemon)
These three poopy series mascots pack a whopping five different negative status ailments they will not hesitate to inflict on our party... if they're not dead to MegaKabuterimons' piercing specials and poison from the territory dispute before then. Experience shows they die early enough. BlackKingNumemon, the sole Ultimate here, can be scanned to 100% here and is recruitable after the battle. He's noteworthy for his special connecting with perfect accuracy and inflicting poison 80% of the time. Might feature in future strategies, but status effects haven't been in favour since the earlygame with damaging moves being sufficiently potent. We'll see.
11:12 Piximon & Stolen Avatar (Piximon, Chirinmon, Rosemon and WarGrowlmon)
From this point onwards, 3-vs-1 boss battles seem to reign supreme and don't really feel like boss battles when we're regularly outnumbering the opposition who they didn't even give 6x our turn number or any other ridiculous boon that was commonplace playing the original Cyber Sleuth game. But look, this battle is a 3-vs-4, and we're facing fellow Digimon instead of Eaters, too! The enemy team composition is Data/Data/Vaccine/Virus, with Vaccine Chirinmon being the healer with its Aura.
Among the many ways possible to tackle this one, I focus my assault on the two Datas in Piximon and Rosemon lest they try and tip the scales in their favour with buffs. In this very chapter, I scanned new piercers including Okuwamon and Phantomon, the latter having the special piercer with the highest modifier thus far and more SP to keep casting it before needing recovery than what the bug brute can muster. The Datas are taken out almost immediately.
I face a dilemma here - against the remaining Vaccine/Virus team, do I face the risk of being struck super-effectively by WarGrowlmon and focus on killing Chirinmon with Data-types, or play it safely and sandbag by focusing fire on WarGrowlmon while Aura keeps being used? I decide on the former and spend a single resurrection item, as 250 base power Atomic Blaster is quite the nuke. It is then WarGrowlmon's turn to go down.
Phantomon's damage makes you ponder if rock-paper-scissors is truly the way to play the game. It can easily outdamage a dedicated Vaccine hitter just striking neutrally, and perhaps a Bug (Character Reversal) strategy in the first battle in this video would've been the optimal way of going about that fight? It's something I hadn't considered, even though I played that mission first primarily to get access to its dungeon with Phantomon being scannable.
Either way, we have some scary tools in our arsenal from this point onwards.