Digimon Hacker's Memory No Digivolution Part 8: Akira Hosaka (MegaSeadramon/Dinobeemon/LadyDevimon)
12Challenge playlist:
• Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker's ...
The battle against the world's self-proclaimed best hacker. 8 videos into this challenge (and nearly 8 years of interrupted uploads smh), we have what is currently the hardest battle of the run. Akira Hosaka seems to have dabbled in Shin Megami Tensei before facing us, as his buff/debuff game is remarkably strong.
Using an all-Ultimate party, the boss has a strategically rich gameplan. It involves buffing up to be offensively and defensively stronger while simultaneously healing off the damage suffered. LadyDevimon has Aura for potent AoE healing, which can only grow stronger with time, in longer battles actually almost doubling in potency as a result of her spamming Mental Charge Field on the party. This also buffs up her own special, not to mention MegaSeadramon's, causing the MT damage of the former to be devastating and the latter to easily secure OHKOs against any vaccines present in the party. She can also increase the opposition's team over time, causing them to get even more turns in against us.
MegaSeadramon is no less overpowered, buffing the enemy party's attack and debuffing our defence, causing even a simple status attack to deal major damage (Idle Bubble can lull unsuspecting targets to sleep) and setting up Dinobeemon for harshcore wreckage. Dinobeemon is Free-type, meaning it's capable of eventually scoring OHKOs (especially if its critical rate has also been buffed up) by using its special Hell Masquerade after an Acceleration Boost. The latter seems to also synergise well with its Cross Counter skill dealing double damage until its next turn, which does come fairly soon. Attacking Dinobeemon last seems like a reasonable enough conclusion, as we don't want to make the hardest part of the fight even harder.
I initially had a gruesome 14-minute clear recorded of this, one that focused on prioritising taking out LadyDevimon and whose Aura extended her longevity for a frustratingly long period of time, but it's focusing on the unconditional OHKO machine MegaSeadramon that proved to pay off on subsequent attempts, cutting my clear time nearly in half. Not having any Vaccines in the party and focusing on Virus-types that accrue damage against the boss also made the strategy way safer in the early stage, which doesn't have to drag for anywhere as long as a result. When MegaSeadramon is striking a resistance with its Lightning Javelin special, its paralysis proc may kick in, which doesn't happen when it's outright OHKOing, so that's yet another status ailment to heal off in this one.
Plant Guards DX 3x are an accessory option for the Digimon in use, cutting Hell Masquerade's damage by a whopping 90% but losing a lot of the offence from the accessory attack/crit stack. When full-team revival is as easy as it is in this game, getting KO'd here or there is nowhere near as devastating as it would be in any other game... if just one Digimon is standing.