Game:

Counter-Strike: Source (2004)

Duration: 1:19:24

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1

This dungeon is absolutely no joke. Although I'm not sure whether the incredibly large number of mistakes I made during this segment speak to that effect or against it.

Why is this dungeon so much harder than everything up to this point? Well, 1/4 is that I can't cheese it. Bio Blaster wiped the Battle of Narshe and Zozo. I could turtle through the Burning House and Cave of the Espers. Which leaves this as arguably the third dungeon where I need to actually figure out an appropriate action for the circumstance that I'm in. Although personally I'd say that Mt. Kolts would also fall into that category, so perhaps the fourth.

The second quarter of problems here is that the enemies are almost all dangerous, with no breaks, except the annoying yet easy Gargoyle. In other dungeons I can often prepare for the one encounter that I know will give me trouble (such as the ProtoArmors in the IMRF, or the Rhinox in the second half). But here I have to build a strategy that can deal with the Ninjas, who can become incredibly dangerous if they counter me with Vanish, but also need to be killed quickly, so I can neither tank nor rush them easily. I need to beat the Behemoths, which can nuke my team quickly with Meteo. Djinnis aren't nice either, since they can Lifeshaver a character to death and heal themselves at the same time, which means that if I lack a focused offense they can destroy me. Dactyls and Brainpans are a little softer, since although the former has Cyclonic, it struggles to finish me off itself, so it needs a partner to fulfill that role. The second dies fairly easily, so it doesn't always manage to do much with its ST moves that incapacitate a character. And there's the Dragon/Gargoyle, which are relatively easy to deal with. Such a large variety of actually dangerous enemies means that I actually need to identify the fight ASAP to use the correct method of disposal.

The third issue is that this dungeon is simply long. I was playing for over an hour here, although I'd like to point out that mistakes were made that made even this dungeon longer than it should have been. The thing is, things get exponentially worse the longer a segment is. If the segment is 15 minutes long (relatively short for this playthrough), I may think I'm not sure about A, but I can do either X or Y and it will work out either way. But in a segment gets this long, it starts to get to the point where I'm not sure about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I or J any more. Determining what is what at this point is tricky because A, E and F may be the only things actually wrong, but I can't check E, forget about F, think I'm paranoid about A and for some reason I mis-evaluate J, thinking that went wrong when it didn't, so I focus all my efforts on fixing that when it's actually fine. And I can't do something that works in all cases either. In this segment in particular I essentially lost half of my grip on reality halfway through; the only thing keeping me going was that there is some decent room for error, and that I could only realistically mess up 50%-75% of my pre-planned strats.

While many people may have come to the conclusions above, the fourth is something that most not familiar with the mechanics may have missed, and it's something that has little effect on a normal player, but an enormous effect here. Every other area in the game can only contain four encounters, while this area contains 16 due to its unique property! This makes it four times as difficult to determine which encounter is which, and we've previously established that I need to know this. My only saving grace here is something that is generally considered fairly tame by Floating Continent standards. Sketch allows me to not only know that an enemy is in the encounter, but also its placement on the field. It doesn't allow me to identify all 16 encounters (15, if we subtract the Dragon, who gives himself away for me. :) ), but it allows me to narrow it down substantially, since I did my homework beforehand on how to figure important things out as quickly as possible. I said enough in the video, so I'll leave it there.

(more is in the comments)

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