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Update 103: How Not to Design a Boss Fight – Part 1: The Wake-Up Call



Oh boy. Where do I even begin with this?

Let’s start with the positive. I absolutely love the aesthetics of the boss fight. The Abyssal God has my favorite design out of all the post-game bosses in the entire series. The music that plays in the fight is fantastic and really fits the boss. And the presentation of the fight is something no other Etrian Odyssey game has really matched, what with the impactful transition from the first phase to the second. That moment of silence upon taking down the first phase, followed by the change in soundtrack from To Fall is Fair to Call that Dreadful Name, all while the camera slowly pans up and you realize just what mess you got yourself into. All of that could have made for a memorable and fantastic experience had the fight been designed well. Unfortunately, that is where the positive impressions end. Now we must dig through the negative, and oh my god Atlus, what the hell were you even thinking with this fight!?

Alright so you’ve made it to the very end. Only one thing stands between you and beating the post-game. The Abyssal God is the final challenge mountain of UTTER FUCKING BULLSHIT that you must overcome to accomplish this. Most people who make it to this point don’t even try to fight it with their party they’ve been using through the entire game and opt to use a cheese party instead. And honestly? I cannot fault them at all for doing so. Trying to give it a fair fight, is a fool’s errand. Not without knowing the rules anyways, and this fight goes a little beyond "look up the attack pattern" most EO superbosses like to impose on the player.

Okay so this game was released in Japan on April 1st, 2010. For a long time, there hasn’t been much documentation on how this boss operated aside from like one part of the fight, which had a fixed pattern that most people knew about. The rest of the fight was a complete mystery, but there was one thing that people agreed on regarding the boss. It wasn’t worth fighting fairly and you were better off cheesing it. Now I decided to take a look at the Abyssal God’s AI myself to see if that those complaints were unfounded or not, and I finished extracting the AI on February 1st, 2017. So almost 7 years after the game was released. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say that those complaints were pretty justified, as the behaviors I discovered were designed in such a way that makes it nearly impossible to fight fairly without the correct bits of knowledge. If you do know how to take it on, it's not too bad but the fight is still frankly kind of a mess no matter which way you look at it.

But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. Let’s just break this down one by one. The Abyssal God has two phases you have to go through. Let’s start with the first phase.


Abyssal God
Level: 80
HP: 10000
STR: 85
TEC: 85
VIT: 71
AGI: 63
LUC: 72
Attack Type: Slash
Exp: 0
Description: N/A
Item Drops: N/A
Damage Multipliers: Slash: 10% Pierce: 10% Strike: 10% Fire: 10% Ice: 10% Volt: 10%
Ailment Multipliers: Curse: 10% Plague: 10% Poison: 10% Sleep: 10% Confusion: 10% Paralysis: 10% Blind: 10%
Bind Multipliers: Head: 10% Arm: 10% Leg: 10%
Other Multipliers: Stun: 10% Death: 0% Petrification: 0%

Skills:

Magma Ocean: Uses the Head. Deals 350% TEC-based Fire damage to all party members. Has a base hit rate of 150%. Has an action speed modifier of +0.
Ice Tempest: Uses the Head. Deals 350% TEC-based Ice damage to all party members. Has a base hit rate of 150%. Has an action speed modifier of +0.
Proton Thunder: Uses the Head. Deals 350% TEC-based Volt damage to all party members. Has a base hit rate of 150%. Has an action speed modifier of +0.
Regenerator: Uses the Head. Revives a Tentacle on the map, restoring 1000 HP to the Abyssal God, and subtracts 20% from its physical and elemental damage multipliers. Has an action speed modifier of -3.

Flags:

No Codex Entry: Do not register this enemy into the codex.
Kaishaku Immunity: Prevents Kaishaku from activating against the user.

Oh, were you hoping to make things easier on yourself by taking Kaishaku to bypass its Instant Death immunity? Too bad, all of the Abyssal God’s forms specifically has a flag to stop that skill from going off entirely against it, making that skill completely detrimental to have for this fight. Unless you're looking for Bloody Lance procs or something. Moving on...

The first phase only has these three skills which can kill your entire party if you don't defend against them properly. A Hoplite with all three Anti skills or a Zodiac with all three Prophecies are required for this portion of the fight if your damage is lacking, or you decided to slack off on killing its Tentacles for whatever reason. It uses them in a specific pattern depending on how many Tentacles you've killed. If you've killed all eight, it'll start off the fight incredibly weak, with only 2000 HP remaining. And the less Tentacles it has remaining, the more damage it takes from physical and elemental attacks, up to 70% extra damage taken! Though Almighty attacks always do the same damage no matter how many Tentacles remain. Now at the end of each turn, the Abyssal God has a chance to use Regenerator to set you back a bit. When it uses Regenerator, it'll recover 1000 HP, but also gains some damage resistance each time it does so, eventually reducing your damage by 90% once all 8 Tentacles have regenerated, and will stop using Regenerator once that happens. The attack pattern also changes to the one listed in the table below:



The amount of effective damage you have to deal to kill this phase is shown here, and killing all 8 Tentacles gives you plenty of leeway to get past this phase. This table is a simplified version of its behavior, so here’s the actual AI script in full:

AI Script posted:

This phase is also on a time limit, as once you get past 20 turns, it will stop following any patterns and attack the party randomly. Which means that it effectively becomes enraged and you're completely screwed if you aren't close to killing it, so turtling through the fight to whittle it down is really not an option. But that shouldn't happen unless you went straight into the fight without killing any Tentacles. It doesn't really matter if you fight the Abyssal God without killing any Tentacles or killing all eight, nothing much changes in the end. Though if it takes you more than 20 turns to kill this form, quite frankly, you'll have much bigger problems to worry about. But I'll get into that later. Anyways, this part of the fight is mainly there to make sure you solved all of floor 25's puzzles, as it is nothing more than a roadblock. The real fight starts after you killed this form.