Game:

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance (2012)

Duration: 1:03:05

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Spellican was actually not so bad once I figured out that even if you cant kill his brooms, you can just watch them to see when they are charging up their lightning strike and block it which works well enough. He's still a long fight, but due to the way his stagger works if you catch him in just the right way you can combo the ever loving shit out of him chaining staggers for a bit and shave of several bars at once before eventually he'll teleport out. I'm not sure what causes it, but it's not a glitch he does it regularly, just not consistently. If I had to guess he probably has some stagger resistance value and once it's reduced to zero by taking enough sufficiently powerful hits he becomes vulnerable and takes full hitstun for a little bit because that's how several other bosses in this game like Xemnas and YX function. The reason you don't normally get to take advantage of it, if I had to guess, is because due to his poor design he probably just teleports out of his vulnerable state most the time if you dont lock him into stun the second his stagger armor is broken. That's all just theoretical though, I honestly have no fucking clue why he just decides to get the shit combo'd out of him once in a while, but we dont question it we just take the opening and thank RNGesus that it happened.

Commantis was just lucky. He took many tries and ultimately it was just a fortunate attempt. It's not like theres no skill or effort involved, but by far the most effective and likely to succeed tactic was just mindless aggression since trying play passive and look for openings gets you nowhere. Luckily with the amazing support of Lord Kyroo and the power of End of Pain I didn't actually need to level grind to an ultra high level to beat commantis so that was nice.

Julius was super daunting at first and I was certain he would require level grinding, but surprisngly he was relatively manageable while still being at the intended level for him (50, according the games own code he is level 50). For Sora he's a lot easier than as Riku since Sora's counter does really good damage and makes getting staggers easy. In fact I'm certain that if you wanted to you could get an infinite loop going with Sora's counter, I didnt do that, but I'm sure it exists. Riku was harder because due to the way damage gets soft capped in this game at high levels its always better to deal more hits so Sora's counter gets to hit the damage soft cap on each hit to deal really respectable damage overall whereas Riku's counter deals a single soft capped hit for pretty pathetic damage. The solution is I had to use Shadow Strike, riku's weird secondary counter attack that hardly anyone ever uses since it's confusing and odd. But it hits several times like Sora's counter giving Riku the edge he needs for this fight.

It was actually fun learning to use Shadow Strike, basically from what I understand of using it, how it functions is not actually what it claims. It's not about pressing the button before you get hit, it's about pressing the button while there is an active hit box in your vicinity. I think how it works is that if you press the button it checks in a certain radius around you for any active enemy hitboxes and if there is any it activates Shadow Slide instead of block. So basically instead of trying to press the guard button just before getting hit, the more consistent and safe way to trigger it is to space out an attack that last for a little bit and press the button from a slight distance while the attack is still going on. It's kinda janky, but it's actually pretty cool and I wish it was more worth using in more situations but sadly it's just too complicated and niche to be worth using most the time. But I'm sure it'd be fun tool for trying to ultra optimize fights.

Anyways my time with KH3D is totally over now. With this playthrough I finally did all the stuff I had skipped on previous playthroughs. I finally learned the TWTNW boss fights and did them justice which I'm really happy about. I finally did all the special portals and flick rush. And I got a really nice fight with Julius and even learned and applied Shadow Slide/Strike in a serious fight where it was actually a necessary tool for success. Oh and I finally used the Kyroos in a playthrough, I love the frogs. Anyhow there's like literally nothing left I want to do in this game. I came into my playthroughs of this game thinking it was really bad because the story bosses are boring except commantis who is cringe and the endgame bosses are cringe and julius is cringe, but now I have a certain respect for it. The story bosses can be pretty plain, but a lot of them can at least border on mid they arent wholly worthless, just not crazy interesting. The endgame bosses, aside from Xemnas, are actually decent especially YX, and Julius is actually pretty fair and somewhat fun, its just his repetitive patterns and the seemingly RNG lightning that make him a bit annoying.

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