Can You Beat Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Without Battle Commands? - LibraScope

[Music] welcome everyone to my second ever challenge video i'm sure many of you have already seen the first one about beating kingdom hearts 2 without keyblade combos considering it absolutely exploded while i was writing the script for this one anyway i figured it might be fun to do another challenge and see how that goes to be clear i don't want to become a challenge run channel however these videos are still something i'd enjoy doing more of every once in a while i'm not interested in doing challenges that are frustratingly difficult nor solely ones where i'm trying to find out if something outlandish is possible to accomplish i'm not gamechamp3000 i love watching videos like hers but i'm not a fan of creating them i instead want to focus on finding challenges that are enjoyable in similar ways to just playing the game normally but that flip the mechanics on their head challenges that push the game without leaving fade up to grinding luck or extremely obscure exploits i want to find challenges that myself and the people watching can find fun to try not just watch that was the mindset for my original challenge video too it's less about accomplishing something great and more about doing something rewarding and interesting that any of you can give a shot if you think it seems interesting in comes this video i'm not really a fan of birth by sleep i find it extremely broken and repetitive despite this i still have a font nostalgia for the first time i played through it while testing endlessly for more challenge videos i could do i decided to try and see if there was a way i could make bbs more balanced and therefore more enjoyable again for someone like myself well i can't say this challenge totally fixes bbs's mechanical issues i can definitely say that the game gets quite a bit more balanced and for me enjoyable when played this way as you no doubt already know based on the title the way i've decided to play bbs today is without command or more specifically without battle commands it's pretty common knowledge that your deck of battle commands is extremely overpowered in this game particularly when using certain command types so playing without it should be rather interesting to say the least a few rules before we start rules i should know that you're free to adjust however you see fit if you decide to try this for yourself do whatever makes it more fun for you rule one is simple i'm not allowed to activate any battle commands in my deck obviously some of you might be wondering why i'd even equip them if i'm not going to activate them well rule number two i'm still allowed to equip level and meld battle commands for the sake of unlocking abilities making money or for anything else that doesn't activate them rule number three movement and shot lock commands aren't battle commands so they're allowed sure excluding them would be more difficult but that doesn't sound particularly interesting for a video besides people have already beaten birth by sleep's toughest challenges without any of these options on critical mode at level one nothing i do could top that so i'd rather have some fun pushing the other mechanics on offer giving them some breathing room they didn't originally have rule number four we'll be playing on critical mode but not level one lower difficulty simply aren't likely to provide the necessary challenge to flex my other options well also note that i'm personally choosing not to look at any speed run strategies or anything like that for this video feel free to share speedrun strats you know of in the comments that you feel would have helped or any other strategies for that matter but please don't act like i'm dumb because i chose not to ruin the fun by researching optimal strategies myself remember after all the whole point is to make the game interesting to experiment with and explore not obliterate the mechanics with perfect routing and finally rule number five i have to complete the story with every character as well as the final and secret chapters nothing optional is required because most of the optional fights in this game are broken and i'm not interested in putting myself through that obviously that means the entire game will be spoiled if you haven't played it yet you have been warned before we start a couple of notes about how this is likely to pan out firstly though in reality i did these playthroughs one at a time starting with aqua then ventus and finally tara we'll be jumping between the characters to compare them more directly i started with aqua in particular because i suspected she'd be the middle ground between ventus as the most difficult and terra as the easiest you see birth by sleep has a huge problem with damage scaling it doesn't really scale anything at all that means even when leveled properly it's not uncommon for nearly every physical attack to do just a single point of damage when playing as ventus and aqua aqua can find a way around her chip damage problem later with her high magic skill as long as she's not fighting an enemy that teleports out of attacks and she can also use the ventus d-link which when leveled up affords us the haste ability making her combos extremely fast tara meanwhile hits much harder than the other two and can use the ventus steeling likely making him by far the easiest for most of the run ventus though he's mediocre stat wise and can't use his own d-link leaving him rather slow and vulnerable most of the way through this makes fighting optional mobs along the way easier said than done with no cure spells or healing items at her disposal it's really easy to get knocked out forcing us to reset to the beginning of a room when each enemy can take upwards of three combos or more to dispose of because of our extremely low damage output large rooms can sometimes take up to a half an hour to clear safely losing that progress by dying sucks meaning that we sometimes have to skip a lot of the mobs making us under leveled at points and potentially making our damage output even worse than it already was i therefore occasionally had to grind a bit though i only ever made up for the level deficit that was caused from running past entire realms of enemies rather than grinding to the point of being overlevelled early on battle commands will level slowly meaning melding will be slow but eventually every character will want to have hp boost combo finish boost finish boost defender combo plus air combo plus damage siphon second chance once more and the finish command heel strike okay so when we start the prologue we first have to make our way down to the tutorial area and learn how to control ventus before we can pick from the trio first we learn how to smack things with our keyblade directly afterwards we're asked to use command obviously though we can just ignore it and so when we start we're immediately thrust into the character select screen we could do a tutorial prologue but all it does is give us some story and teach us how to use the mechanics which we already know it provides little value and is optional content so we skip it as i said before i decided to go with aqua as our first character though all three characters begin the game at the mark of mastery exam which provides little of interest or value since it legitimately just requires hitting orbs for a few minutes while it's probably possible to lose this fight it's not likely so whack away aqua's first world is the castle of dreams we keep our starting commands equipped to get a head start on leveling for future melding well we could immediately leave the foyer toward the courtyard enemy mobs in the foyer are for the most part fairly weak meaning we can take advantage of this chance to gain a bit of experience but more importantly we want to try and level up our dealings d-links level up more or less randomly every time you kill an enemy in a d-link there's a chance that they'll drop a star which will level that specific link up you need two stars to level it fully which will also change the finish command for that d-link aside from the extra abilities like the ventus d-links aforementioned haste d-links also offer a full heal when you enter them this can be exploited if you're not currently using a d-link while exploring because you can enter one at low health get the heal and then exit it consuming almost none of your link meter while you can only re-enter another d-link when this meter is full again defeating even just a single basic enemy will usually give you the necessary meter to fill it if you're actually using d-links be aware that you can't stay in them forever while you can keep them up for quite a while by defeating enemies eventually the meter will start dropping faster and faster until you can't possibly keep up so it's generally better to drop out every once in a while otherwise you might have to fight a decent chunk of enemies before you can use another link exiting and re-entering a world will fully fill it though if you're near a save point luckily i got haste pretty quickly which in particular made the bruiser on first easier since i could usually get two whole combos off before they had a chance to attack this also meant that there was a high chance i would stagger the bruiser as well effectively stun locking them we're left to our own devices for most of this world meaning it's up to you whether you want to grind the corridor or courtyard both of which are more dangerous but more lucrative than the foyer i spent some time trying to level up the ventus and tara d-links eventually getting ventus's other ability auto counter and tara's first ability overdrive which raises aqua's strength when her hp falls below 25 percent well potentially useful right now that's far too dangerous since again we have no easy way to heal and since bosses don't drop d-link orbs to recharge the meter we can only enter d-links once during most bosses meaning we have to be a lot more deliberate in our use of the system once we're past the forests we enter cinderella's house skipping the cutscenes places us in a mini-game of sorts where we're tasked with escorting jacques across a pretty large room between two massholes this at first seems like it might be difficult because we simply can't put down enough damage to easily deal with all of the enemies unless we're completely perfect in our execution however there's actually an exploit we can use to trivialize this section you see jacques will continue making progress as long as the enemies don't spawn to stop him in his tracks under normal circumstances players are likely to follow close by jacques to keep him safe however if we instead take out the first few enemies and then fall behind we never get close enough to the rest of the enemy mob locations for them to spawn that allows jock to just run right past them then we simply catch up and finish the mini-game after this we've already reached the boss of the world the cursed coach because of our low health inability to freely heal with cure potions and the fact that we're likely already doing just chip damage this boss can be a threat thankfully its patterns are fairly simple to avoid if we have patience shot locks are a good way to get free damage and should be used more or less whenever the shot lock is full enough to max out the attack you're invincible during the entire attack and if unlike me you already have it leveled to at least level 2 it will do an extra attack at the end to further boost damage output otherwise your main goal is simply to wait for one of the boss's more direct attacks to start and then you block it and do the scripted counter doing so will often stagger the boss dropping hp orbs and giving you the chance to do a bit of damage yourself it's up to you whether you want to use your ventus d-link specifically to put out more damage or if you want to wait until you need a heal occasionally the boss will spawn a few mob enemies but as long as you don't get too close they don't actually do anything in this case i decided to keep the d-link for the heal and ended up not needing it defeating this boss finishes the world and gets us the stroke of midnight keyblade birth by sleep was rather regressive with how it handled keyblades making them primarily just increasingly powerful beating rods however early story keyblades will usually either add a bit of magic or add a bit of strength but rarely both as such early on we want to focus on strength since we'll primarily be hitting things with physical attacks later on aqua can do a pretty decent job with magic centric keyblades but for now it's best if we do everything we can to avoid chip damage stroke of midnight itself just makes critical hits more likely so we equip it once we're prepared we enter dwarf woodlands after arriving and grabbing a few treasure chests nearby we head to the command shop again while we're not using commands for combat it's still nice to get a head start on melding all i could afford though was a single thunder so that's what i grabbed since i mentioned exactly what abilities we're going after at the start i won't bring up each time we can meld a new ability or what we're going for that's up to each individual player anyway since you're free to go after whatever abilities you have them materials for in the next area we find more chests and fight some optional mobs in an attempt to level our remaining dealings terra and cinderella the following screens and by that i mean the entire rest of the world are more of the same not having a single required fight along the way so we play it by ear the only major thing of note here is the danger that this boss can pose to us and how much progress you can lose if you enter the boss right after clearing out the previous screen this section takes a while to clear out and if you're struggling with the boss and decide to do some grinding or melding to help you'll quickly realize that hitting continue instead of retry undoes all of your progress on the previous screen so if you do plan to clear it out for experience make sure to head back up top to the exit and re-enter the screen so that your checkpoint is updated to reflect that i initially tried this challenge back in like october of 2020 and ended up stopping right here because that happened losing me about 30 minutes worth of experience so don't make that mistake the boss itself spirit of the magic mirror hits rather hard and can easily kill you in less than a second making it a serious threat however as long as you're paying attention you should be able to avoid a hundred percent of the damage it dishes he basically has five major attacks the first one sees him going high into the air and then diving down to crash through you this is probably the attack you're most likely to survive next is a variant of this where he'll start zigzagging toward you depth perception on this attack can be a bit difficult because of the background but it shouldn't be too challenging to time a guard you can spam the cartwheel for total invincibility but that seemed kinda cheap this early on so i avoided doing so the third attack sees him diving in and out of the ground shooting slow projectiles that can confuse you this isn't too big of a deal but it can make countering once he's done very difficult the fourth attack has the boss duplicating itself and surrounding you you cannot escape it first instead just find the one mask that has a ripple under it when it comes out of the ground this mask should also be the only one that's smiling keep it in your sights when they stop spinning they'll all shoot fireballs at you being aqua means we can use the barrier block to negate them all then rush over to the smiling mask to punish the final attack is similar except you'll find yourself in between two infinite walls of masks spam cartwheels so that you're moving faster than they can aim to easily avoid the fireballs as you search both sides once again the correct mask that you're supposed to hit will be smiling getting to the mask fast enough after any of these attacks will allow you to do a couple of combos of punishment shotlock isn't worth it this time since it takes too long to dish out though we can still use the ventus steeling as both a free heal when necessary and for his insanely quick combos winning gives us the snow white d-link and the treasure trove keyblade this keyblade has an extra point strength so we toss it on enchanted dominion once again starts with very little fanfare the first few screens are ones we're just allowed to run through and while you can try to level up here it's rather dangerous for aqua because of the amount of damage maleficent's little guys can do eventually we reach our first mandatory fight in a while which has us defeating a bunch of these guards with uh hold on with uh prince philip apparently yeah okay so with prince philip by her side what seems like an insanely difficult fight turns into a much more manageable one philip does a lot of damage to the enemies and when he's knocked out he'll wake up pretty quickly so while you can help him here and there by poking enemies it's honestly best to just stay out of the way entirely you see in any battle where you have allies by your side using d-links is inexplicably impossible this means our only way of healing is through health orbs and we can't speed our combos up by using the ventus stealing meanwhile unless your shotlock is a high enough level to acquire targets super fast by this point even this is a bit too dangerous to use consistently so just focus on staying out of the battle where possible after this we get an even harder variant with error guys shooting from above and dudes throwing rocks the same idea still applies however you just have to be extra careful when you get the chance to team up do so allowing you to progress further if you're lucky this won't take too many tries and along the way we can get a new shot lock absolute zero once that's done there are a few more screens we're free to explore at our own pace before the boss depending on how you look at it we're either luckily or unluckily graced once again with philip's presence for a fight against dragon maleficen this is probably the first real challenge since again with philip buyerside we can't use the ventus steel ink as a heal or to speed up combos you can't even use cinderella's regan ability if you have her d-link leveled up this means we have no way to heal whatsoever you've gotta run what you brung as they say and prince philip doesn't do near as much damage this time around though it's still decent after a few failed attempts i decided to go do some leveling since despite being at the boss of the third world i was still only level five so i went back to the first world and grinded a bit until i reached level 8 had the bubble blaster shot lock maxed out and had a few combo pluses immediately after the battle starts rush to the side of maleficent if you don't get too close to her leg she'll usually use fire breath that will completely miss you hopefully your bubble blaster is at least level 2 by this point because this gives you the chance to fully charge it which will do a decent chunk of damage if she instead uses her set of double stomps or her single giant stomp you're gonna have to be a bit more precise with your shot lock charge but it can be done nearly every attack maleficent does can one or two shot you even if you've leveled a bit so be careful if you're lucky you'll eventually get two shot locks off at some point philip will beckon for you in the center of the arena quickly get behind him because maleficent will soon shoot fire breath burning everything but what's behind his shield to a crisp to stop this attack philip will ask you to engage in a quick time event doing so launches aqua up in the air where she can smash down on maleficent's face to stop her stank breath from flooding the arena at this point you should have enough time for another shot lock if you have the focus gauge for it when maleficent is at about half health she'll take flight once again head toward philip who will eventually have another quick time event ready for you this time the attack leaves aqua on maleficent's back allowing you to get in a couple of combos before you're forced off after this the majority of the time maleficent will briefly land and do a couple of swipes before then taking flight again this process simply repeats until she's done for you still have to be careful because she can take you out so quickly but since it's safe to combo her whenever you're on her back you're also able to regain some focus gauge for more shot locks if you can find an opportunity to charge one beating this world awards you with the fairy stars keyblade this drops your strength back to what it was before you equipped the treasure trove but it offers you an extra point in magic at this point that's not particularly useful up next would normally be radiant garden but first i think we should take a detour to compare how the other two got on in their versions of these three worlds let's start with ventus who after hitting a few orbs begins in dwarf woodlands remember ventus is less adept at magic than aqua but is supposed to be slightly better with physical attacks this should theoretically help us since we primarily have to attack with our keyblade but in practice for most of the game ventus actually ends up still struggling with chip damage thankfully he also has a really powerful dodge just like aqua's but his block is more traditional meaning he has to be facing an enemy to successfully guard against their attacks i'd argue in some ways ventus is the hardest of the trio in large part thanks to the fact that he can't use his own d-link meaning we have no options to massively speed up our attacks still further lowering our damage per second it also makes enemies like the bruisers more dangerous because our basic combo finishers rarely stagger them and because those finishers have such a long cooldown before we can guard it's very likely they'll retaliate before we can do anything about it our first task in dwarf woodlands starts when we reach the heart of the mine and are tasked with finding all of the seven dwarves hiding in boxes and such hitting boxes the dwarfs aren't in will spawn adversed but that's not too big of a deal this goes by pretty simply afterwards we're free to go through the rest of the world at our own pace eventually we'll come across snow white and the game asks us to escort her through the woods unversed come from all angles and many of the trees come alive to attack this isn't as easy as when we escorted jacques because i couldn't figure out a way to get snow white to run ahead without unversed spawning and stopping her so this time we actually have to escort her chip damage is by far our biggest enemy here but snow white can offer us a reaction command that blasts away enemies for a fair chunk of damage and that seems to immediately defeat the tree enemies we just barely make it out on our first try thankfully meaning we don't have to do the whole section again once we're done with that it's time for the world boss already the mad treant our shotlock is relatively useful here since the boss isn't particularly mobile as long as he doesn't jump i decided to use the tara d-link just in case i got to low health and could use his overdrive ability to boost damage that never actually happened though because the boss didn't really put up much of a fight a few of his attacks are dangerous like when he reigns bombs down on us but more often than not he chose to do not much of anything allowing me to repeatedly knock him out for free health orbs with that done so is the world itself next up is castle of dreams once again there are a few screens we're free to explore however we please in time we'll be asked to find a bunch of materials for cinderella's dress this requires us to explore the entire world pretty thoroughly but we can do it however we'd like once that's done we're legitimately already at the boss lucifer the cat i figured this boss might be a bit challenging because lucifer loves to leap onto shelves and then pounce on us dodging this can be a bit precise if you're not just spamming the roll but for the most part kitty plays nice our leveled shotlock did loads of damage and the ball of fur doesn't really retaliate when we smack it in the face probably the easiest boss we've done so far last up for ventus before we move on to terra is enchanted dominion we aren't actually forced to do anything specific in this world until we're most of the way through it where we're asked to defeat a mob of maleficent's cronies by ourselves this means d-links are allowed but these guys can be dangerous enough that it's smarter to save that option for a heal i eventually chose cinderella since her area of effect finisher seemed like it would help a lot thankfully it did just that after going through a maze and watching a few cutscenes we're at the final fight with maleficent herself using the absolute zero shot lock on her does enormous damage even when it's still level one getting it off though is difficult since she loves to teleport around this massive arena but overall she really doesn't do too much offensively that we can't easily avoid meaning it's just a matter of time until she goes down as long as we play relatively safe the best place to use your shotlock is when it asks you to do a button pressing mini game which if successful will put maleficent to sleep for a few seconds this can see you shaving half a health bar off or more once she's done with we grab the fairy star's keyblade and move on before we switch to terror though we have one more fight with venetis in the badlands fortunately we don't do awful damage to vanitas with our combo attacks unfortunately he often refuses to sit still long enough for us to land more than even a single attack before he teleports away this battle more or less has two phases the first phase sees us alone with phineas it ends when we take a certain amount of damage we are then healed as mickey joins us and the battle restarts it's best to try and do as much damage as you can to venetus before mickey shows up because that damage is retained but ours isn't it effectively serves as our one and only free heal because mickey's presence prevents us from using d-links what's more shot locks in this battle range from being fairly okay at putting down damage to completely useless there's no rhyme or reason to it either since it all depends on whether venetis feels like dodging everything or not luckily since i'd finished aqua's playthrough before venus i had a bit of a plan in mind i left the battle went and leveled a few of our commands to melt some abilities and also leveled something else birth by sleep has special finishers that will show up if you max out the command bar but didn't use any battle commands to get there as you fulfill certain requirements you can gain more of these finishers over time well it turns out ventus is at the point now where he can gain the most useful finisher in this run heel strike simply using second chance or once more to survive 5 attacks that would normally defeat you while you have the airflare 1 finisher equipped will unlock heel strike heel strike heals your character for a decent amount of hp twice across the finisher doing both heals guarantees that you'll leave critical hp even if you only had one hp left that then reactivates second chance and once more and this happens whether or not you actually hit the enemy with the attacks in both the playthrough with terra and with ventus this will become a powerful part of our arsenal though with aqua i didn't get it until much later so i leveled commands and mailed them to get second chance and once more and then use that to unlock heel strike before heading back to the venitas fight for round two whenever mickey is about to get attacked and work close by we can press square when prompted which will teleport us in front of mickey block the attack and then allow us to activate a special attack called avenger rush this pretty consistently dishes out a large amount of damage he can also occasionally call you over to do a spinning energy attack burst of faith that is far less consistent sometimes venetis just stands in it and takes damage other times he teleports through the entire time and still other times he'll never enter it to begin with what's more exiting it is so slow and clunky that using this can be dangerous because venetis will often cue up several attacks while you're recovering from burst of faith mickey himself will also do okay damage and can survive for quite a while before going down once he does though he'll be down for like 10 seconds or so which isn't a long time but can be dangerous since venitus will focus entirely on ventez venitus's attacks are mostly pretty easy to avoid as long as you're not in the middle of a combo when he uses them combos are incredibly dangerous thanks to his teleports so the best option is to slowly time your combo hits so that you can easily catch a teleport before you get stuck in another attack animation and get punished his most dangerous attack is his dark fireball the base fireball can do a decent amount of damage if it hits you but once it separates speeds up and starts homing in on you getting hit will pretty much always guarantee a death so try to stay close to venitus and roll around him when this happens because the homing properties of the fireballs aren't strong enough to keep up vanitas slash attacks are generally really easy to avoid if you're playing a safe meaning his only remaining option is to jump into the air and shoot dark lightning at you your goal in this fight should be to focus on staying as safe as possible poke fanetas where you can and if possible gain access to heel strike and then save it for when it's necessary you can hold on to heal strike by shifting more heavily toward trying to get shot locks the avenger rush counter and letting mickey do some of the work particularly if you've got flame salvo leveled a bit it should do a decent job of whittling venitas down this is definitely the most difficult battle we've seen so far but it's more than doable for winning we forge a d-link with mickey and now we can finally move on to tara whose first world is enchanted dominion again after he hit some glowing orbs for a minute or two tara is a bit different from the other two in that he hits far harder but he has a much less exploitable dodge his dodge actually has recovery frames meaning using it flippantly will likely get you killed thankfully though he has the ventist link which turns him into an absolute monster so we start by leveling that as fast as possible thankfully we get it leveled fairly quickly in this run once we reach the castle we gain another d-link this time with maleficent because tara has the brain of a wild air case heading back down into the main hall area sees us meeting face to face with the boss of this world already wheel master this battle might have been an actual challenge if we were anyone else but tara in the ventus steeling puts out so much damage that we can absolutely decimate him i would say we still need to be careful in terms of our health but each part of the boss we destroy spawns enough health orbs for a large heel so it's less about being careful and more about just not being as stupid as tara often is once again beating this world gets us the fairy star's keyblade it exchanges one muscle for one brain so we throw it in the trash next up is castle of dreams and immediately we're forced into a fight where we need to defeat a bunch of unversed if we're not safe about this this fight can actually be more threatening than the last boss particularly if like me you were trying to level the maleficent d-link to see what it offered so just be careful and you'll be through in no time once that's over we're free to explore until we get to the top of the castle steps this is the second worst part of the run for me remember how we had to escort jacques with aqua and snow white with ventus yeah here we're escorting cinderella the trick with jacques yet again doesn't work meaning we have to do it legit but we also can't use the ventisty link since cinderella is with us that means we're greatly underpowered for this section since we can really only rely on our combos and the limited amount of shotlock uses we have cinderella does afford us an area of effect counter if enemies get too close similar to avenger rush when we fought venetis this counter titled last dance is really powerful the problem is that enemy attacks still often bypass the block that activates the counter meaning to use the counter cinderella will likely still take damage it doesn't sound particularly bad at first the biggest issue besides last dance not working how it should is that there are actually two parts to this escort mission the hallway and the main hall and cinderella's damage is persistent between them even if you fail the second part and retry this means to succeed you have to try extra hard in the hallway to keep her damage as low as possible and then hope that the bruisers don't spam their butt slam attack over and over this part isn't impossible so much as it's just a broken mess that relies on luck if cinderella was made temporarily invincible immediately after an enemy attack activates last dance it would be fine but as it stands you just kind of have to smash your head against it until it works out when that's finally done with we can explore and level some more on our way down a side hall to reach the balcony overhanging the dance hall once there we reach another boss symphony master yet again tara with the ventus d-link totally dominates this fight so much so that the only strategy i employed was to enter the d-link and then pick off the instruments before going for the conductor done in 30 seconds beating this world gives us the cinderella d-link and the stroke of midnight keyblade again this keyblade also throws out our muscles so in the garbage it goes moving on we have our final visit to dwarf woodlands after tara falls for the manipulations of another villain we're tasked with finding snow white all the way across the world defeat enemies run past doesn't matter until you get to the first mandatory fight in the forest clearing area the only part of this fight that's significantly more dangerous than previous mandatory encounters is the fact that it includes a lot of bruisers at once and a few hair razors who can put out a lot of damage very quickly if you're not careful but other than that if you're feeling impatient vent is d-link to decimate them all if you want to make a bit more leveling progress and don't have all of your d-links topped up like i didn't though pick one and play it a bit more carefully since most of these enemies also drop d-link orbs feel free to drop out max out the gauge and then re-enter a d-link for a free heal once that's done we head back to the magic mirror chamber to confront the boss the spirit of the magic mirror the same tactics apply here for terra as they did with aqua except that tara has to be a bit more careful since he lacks the barrier block and the benefits of the cartwheel dodge but once again he just puts out so much damage with or without the ventist link that this fight is trivial i chose to save the d-link just in case i needed the heal and ended up not using it because the battle was over so swiftly once again for winning we get the treasure trove keyblade finally we obtain a keyblade that doesn't deplete our strength so we equip it purely because an extra point in magic can only help now that the world order for every character lines up from here on we're going to go world by world highlighting the differences between each playthrough and what each character struggles with the most so radiant garden is next serving as the midpoint of the game where all three characters meet for aqua this means running through several screens until she eventually meets up with mickey and then they're set upon by a wealth of unverse to defeat the hardest part of this is the circle of mandrakes that appear which have some of the most frustrating projectiles in the series if you're in the wrong spot when you get hit by one the next one can easily be in the perfect rhythm to stun lock you and the next and the next until you're finished what's more you can't use your shotlock on them if they're buried underground i sort of did this bit the difficult way trying to get them all out of the ground and deal with them one by one but in hindsight the better option would be to cartwheel by all of them to scare them out of the ground and then use your shotlock on them all at once while they're vulnerable still this battle is relatively easy at this point if you're smart or careful in your approach beating it unlocks the mickey d-link for aqua and the destinies embrace keyblade this raises critical hit chance keeps our strength the same and raises our magic by one so it's a no-brainer next up we had a cross-radiant garden to fight a boss alongside tara and ventus this boss has several attacks that can decimate us but if we focus on our shotlocks we can actually do loads of damage to the different parts of its body once we defeat part of him it will drop lots of health orbs to keep us alive if you stay careful many of its attacks are easily avoidable meanwhile while we can't use d-links ventus and tara hit like trucks and revive quickly after being taken down so the only real thing you have to be extra careful of is the attack where parts of the boss start spinning around the arena like a top this can be hard to judge come at you fast and will almost always guarantee an instant death if it hits you with aqua though this thankfully isn't too difficult to dodge through after this fight we have the final fight in the world a solo fight with vanitas aqua has done such low damage up to this point that it has been necessary to skip a lot of optional enemies through the world so as to not risk losing large chunks of progress through the bigger screens thankfully we can make up for that with the mickey d-link which when fully upgraded offers double experience growth so i grind a bit to get to a level that makes sense for this world as well as to get a few more passive abilities through melding namely my remaining combo pluses and air combo pluses venetis here is more or less identical to when we fought him with ventus the difference being that we're a bit stronger and since we're alone we can use d-links thanks to aqua's barrier block as long as we don't spam the combo button we can catch him and retaliate with counter-blast most every time he teleports away and attacks since his wilyness and the amount of health he has drags this battle out a bit i saved the ventistylink mostly for healing using this link is so fast that we can pretty consistently get swaths of attacks off on venetis before he teleports but we also recover so fast from attacks that even when spamming we're still able to dodge away in time and while the d-link's original finisher is probably a bit more effective air dive gives you a bit of a breather and allows you to get a few more hits in if you're lucky though be careful when you're leaving it because you'll likely be so far away from vanitas when you land that he'll immediately use his homing fireball attack which can still wreck us if all of the fireballs land with patience you'll take him down as ventus our first fight is with the mid boss this goes about the same as it does with aqua since we still can't use d-links here and our dodge is still extremely powerful but thanks to heel strike this fight ends up being even easier than it was last time whack away at him don't get greedy and you'll be done before you know it after this we head back to the town square for a fight with a bunch of unburst this fight isn't particularly noteworthy so there's not much value in discussing it after a few cutscenes the world is finished giving us the frolic flame keyblade which boosts ventus's magic by one while keeping his strength the same good enough for me you might think tara's version of the world is the hardest because of his gimped dodge and while ventus is easier i wouldn't say tara has a harder time than aqua terra just does so much damage that sometimes we don't even get the chance to do anything stupid enough to put ourselves in danger anyway right once we enter the world we're immediately thrust into battle with unfirst this fight is really similar to the one with ventus so there's not much to say after trekking back to the reactor area we're once again fighting the mid boss the top spin attack is certainly still dangerous but honestly our dodge launches us far enough that it's painful recovery isn't too much of a detriment in this battle this boss is down before you know it thanks to the strength of terra's attacks combined with the universally high damage output of allies finally we head back toward and past the town square to eventually meet face to face with brig brig is about as difficult as vanitas was with some attacks that can do decent damage fairly quickly and a similar emphasis on refusing to sit still getting his patterns down is the main thing here because once you do most of his attacks are fairly easily avoidable we have access to d-links but they're better saved for a heal here many of briggs attacks just require a well-timed block to defend against which will also often do a fair chunk of damage to our opponent by reflecting his projectiles back his way and whenever breg is in his sniper's perch shooting down at us if we sit in the right part of the arena we can catch him with counter hammer as he comes back down whenever he starts charging up a dark powerful shot we can charge up a shot lock of our own sometimes this does damage sometimes it doesn't but it will always avoid the attack so it's worth doing particularly if you already have access to damage siphon to easily refill your focus meter if you take damage when this fight is over we get the dark volley shot lock with the midway point of the game done we can finish off the rest of the disney world starting with disney town thankfully we can just skip talking about disney town though since the only thing that's required of any of the three characters here is that they do their respective minigame none of which change in this run from a normal playthrough after that is olympus coliseum which takes a bit of explaining but is also relatively short for each character all three characters end up in a forced fight with unversed right at the start aquas is at the coliseum entrance with tara and ventus fighting down in town for the most part while the mob configurations are different the enemies themselves are the same types this ultimately means they can all do the fights mostly in the same way aqua is stuck with hercules by her side meaning no d-links and the same goes for ventus who has both zak and hercules but since he's the only one with heel strike right now he actually has the easiest time the buccal bruisers can be a bit tedious to take down without commands and the axe flappers have a similar ranged attack to mandrakes meaning they can really put the hurt on us from off-screen but it shouldn't be too big of an issue overall right after this fight tara gains access to a second finisher allowing him to go for heel strike so he takes a slight detour to grind out some melded abilities including second chance and once more for that very reason aqua will still have to wait for me to wise up a bit next up are the actual arena segments which for ventus is really just an easy iron smashing mini game the genuine arena fights with terra and aqua though are surprisingly tight at times because the timers were designed with the use of commands in mind however they're still very much possible if you're smart about it both characters have slightly different round configurations and identical rounds will sometimes appear in a different order it's not important to go through all of them though the hardest part is knowing when the right time is to use shot locks and the ventus dealing waste shot locks on an easy set of enemies and you might find yourself without enough focus meter when you really need it and the d-link you enter carries through each round but not every round has enemies that drop a lot of d-link orbs this means over time your dealing gauge will start dropping faster and faster eventually forcing you out of the link requiring you to refill it to re-enter a new link which you might not have time for again if this happens at the wrong time you're screwed i found shotlocks are the best against a large group of enemies here or if you're worried about enemies like the spider chests which can go underground for an eternity making progress essentially impossible terrell will also just kind of have an easier time in general because again he puts out so much damage after this ventus will have to fight a swarm of jelly shades which can be a bit dangerous if you don't have heel strike but we do so it's fine tara likewise has two fights with zach the first one is a joke in the second one he can put down a lot more damage a lot faster but with heel strike the ventis d-link if we really need it and her own high damage output he's of little threat to the smart player aqua's fight with zach immediately heads into the harder phase however the ventus d-link is so fast that he can hardly get in an attack edgewise she then has to face ice titan and hades at the same time well you could go for hades first ice titan loves to spam icicle projectiles so being anywhere but directly under him is kind of a bad idea that being said when you're under him he likes to stomp around for huge damage so this fight is a bit of a delicate dance that requires careful use of the block and dodge to survive as long as you leave hades alone he'll largely leave you alone until ice titan is done for because it's so easy to get hit it's best to save the ventus d-link until you really need the heal particularly because it's unlikely to last through both ice titan and hades even when hades is the only opponent left he doesn't do much but his attacks also put down a fair amount of damage and he's invincible whenever he's glowing red i ended up running out of my d-link even though i was trying to conserve it and having to carefully finish hades off with shot locks he just kept spamming invincibility forcing me to wait it was very close but not too challenging the important thing we win from this world is the mark of a hero keyblade which boosts strength by a large amount and also makes crits more powerful as we head into deep space ventus and tara are both assaulted tara needs to survive against a swarm of jelly shades not too dissimilar from the ones that ventus just fought and ventus has to deal with a much bigger enemy known as metamorphosis both of these are just set pieces and so there's no real threat once inside the ship aqua has to fight a few on verse to move on standard practice at this point and there's not much to note the same goes for the fight outside with the glidewinders and the mandatory unversed fight after that after some low gravity platforming we finally reach her boss gantu with stitch by her side gantu puts up very little thread he actually ends up being one of the easiest bosses thus far with the largest difficulty being how awful the camera is when he gets close to aqua there's no particular strategy here just damage him and avoid his attacks it's that simple the fight was so easy in fact that i ended up not even getting hit and beating in my first try when the world is over aqua receives the hyperdrive keyblade and she's the only one who will use it at this point her magic is becoming enough of a threat that the bonus stats in that area are worth the slightly lowered strength shotlocks should start decimating things now ventus actually has a few screens of freedom before he gets to his first required and versed fight this is in a cramped hallway but it's still nothing to write home about at this point in fact from here forward unless a mob fight is particularly noteworthy let's just skip it in this case that means we're going straight to the boss the monster we saw earlier metamorphosis this fight is one that i was a bit worried about well he doesn't have a lot of health metamorphosis is really fast and can hit us from off screen pretty easily if we're not paying the utmost attention it's also a bit difficult to fully charge a shot lock against such a quick target the boss can occasionally go invisible preventing lock-on thankfully using stitch's special command can make the boss visible again without much effort and after that the fight is more or less guaranteed none of tara's exploits here are really noteworthy either until he reaches his own boss experiment221 and the only reason this fight is noteworthy is because it's a boss but so is tara as long as you ignore his dumb brain and just focus on his buff-boy muscles and ability to shoot darkness from every orifice so this battle is over before you know it last up for the disney worlds is neverland as aqua we really just need to wander around until we get some cutscenes before heading back to the camp we started at to face venetis again after a couple tries that didn't pan out particularly well this is where i finally decided to see why i hadn't gotten heel strike yet remember that i technically did all of these playthroughs with each character one at a time and aqua was the first so at this point i couldn't quite remember why i hadn't unlocked heel strike only once i was reminded of how it's obtained did i fast track it for ventus and tara later i guess that's the downside of making a challenge video about a game where you have a million different optional abilities you can try out rather than getting them all in a set order as you progress like in kh2 anyway for this fight with venetis i re-equipped the mark of a hero keyblade since he can so easily avoid shot locks which is my primary source of magic damage so having more strength is probably better here his attack patterns aren't particularly different from the other fight other than now having the ability to dive underground and chase you occasionally popping out for an attack after the final dive he'll reign a bunch of fireballs randomly in a pretty large radius this attack isn't particularly dangerous and yet for some reason i found him quite a bit more difficult here than back in radiant garden or when using ventus i think he might have a higher chance of teleporting away mid combo here and he does more damage when we make a mistake still the same strategy applies either way meaning persistence and patience will see us succeed after that the world is over for aqua earning her the peter pan d-link the pixie pedal keyblade and the stormfall keyblade after a few extra cutscenes play out while the pixie pedal offers a large magic boost stormfall isn't that far behind well not cutting into our strength quite as much so we go with the latter we're not completely abandoning combos ventus's only note where they fight neverland is right at the end when we fight hook though similar to experiment 221 it's only noteworthy because it's a boss hook can do decent damage to us but he's also extremely easy to knock into the water doing so forces him to take crocodile damage and then he stands around in the center of the arena for a bit allowing us to get in a few free attacks he can block some of our attacks if he enters a certain stance which forces us to take counter damage but otherwise he's a pushover because our combos and the crocodile both eat him alive after a plethora of cutscenes we gain the lost memory keyblade which we equip partially because of its monstrously powerful stats and partially because it's one of the better looking keyblades in the series tara also again only has one noteworthy fight neverland which asks him to square off against peter pan like a total peter's heart honestly isn't in the fight because while he can take out nearly half of our health with a single attack he mostly just flies around doing nothing but being a punching bag we then have another brief fight with a bunch of jelly shades before the world just kind of ends shortly after we get the ends of the earth keyblade and the pixie petal we equip the former purely because it boosts magic without depleting our strength though we won't keep it on for long from here forward is where things can start to get hard tara's story in particular turns a complete 180 and ends up easily the most difficult of the three before everyone goes to the badlands for their respective final confrontations though dumb brain tara has to confront the person he got the dumb brain from erikas this fight starts us in the dark impulse command style meaning it's one of the only times in the entire run where we actually get to use a command style at all unfortunately while it does good damage it's not particularly safe since ericus can freely and randomly just break through any of our combos for an unjustified punish so instead we have to tiptoe around him focus on blocking him and countering to max out dark impulse and then use its finisher to get it out of here erikas has two attacks where he'll charge up projectiles of sorts one of them has him spawn a ring of spinning blades around himself before he shoots them all out and they home in ontario you have to kind of hope you're in the right spot to block them correctly doing so will do a good amount of damage to erikas as you reflect them back but it's not uncommon for some of them to sneak above or around your guard wrecking your health and ensuring the rest of them also hit you the other charged attack has him shoot several orbs at terra when you see the tell for this get up close and reflect them all back at him these are the safest attacks to use to really damage erikas his combos and dash are really dangerous and he can often spam them back to back to back he then has two sort of desperation moves he can use the first shoots spoked lasers out that rotate around him this is a good chance to get in a shot lock for some free damage the other spawns fire pillars that start chasing you this attack is pretty easy to avoid but it's extremely unwise to go on the offensive during it erikas also likes to just stand around and do nothing but stare at you menacingly baiting you into attacks you don't want to take if you want to avoid being countered into oblivion and you can't use d-links here either for some reason making this fight a pretty serious war of attrition still if you just pay attention don't get greedy and stay a safe distance away eventually you'll come out on top it's not easy but it's doable once that loser's dead we gain the chaos ripper keyblade which has such awful magic that it actually takes two points away apparently defeating the og dumb brain just makes tara's dumb brain dumber but in return we get 5 extra points of strength over our second strongest keyblade definitely worth it now we're finally to the closing sections for each character all that's left for the main game is the final boss gauntlet that's unique for each member of the trio the question is whether or not the heightened difficulty of the fights will overcome our bag of tricks or not thankfully there's nothing in the actual badlands section that's mandatory meaning we can skip straight to the bosses themselves once again we'll do aqua first whose initial fight is with bragg this version of break is a bit different from the one we fought as tara earlier he's got a new desperation move where he shoots a normal projectiles at us teleports a bunch and then appears at the center of the arena and shoots a bunch of dark projectiles that can't be blocked this attack isn't a particular threat as long as you don't try to block the dark projectiles in exchange he seems to be missing his sniper perch attack otherwise he's more or less the same only he hits harder that means he's actually easier since we're using aqua with her superior dodge and guard options doubly so since aqua's magic is so high now that her prism range shot lock does literal bars of damage if you hit all of the props even moderately well we're also free to use the ventus d-link if we really want to though with heel strike as our finisher i'd actually recommend against that braig similar to vanitas likes to freely teleport out of combos and gank you meaning it's probably better to just use the d-link for a single heal if you're super desperate and then immediately drop back out let brag hurt himself with his own projectiles and use your shot lock when you have an opening and he's done for up next is vanitas ventus with the keyblade and mickey by her side once again this is relatively similar to our early fight with venetis and the badlands while playing as ventus the catch he teleports out of attacks a lot less now making this version arguably easier than the others even heel strike does great damage to him now because he just tanks it on top of the heels we get his movements are more chaotic and obviously he hits like a freaking train but since he forgot how to dodge we don't have to play his dumb games anymore the only new attack that i saw that was unique to this version of the fight is one where he rips off cloud by dashing around the arena with his keyblade pointed forward his other changes are ones we'll get into in a later fight where they're more relevant mickey asks you to join in on burst of faith regularly here since the arena is a lot smaller than the last benitus fight he was involved in meaning you're nearby mickey enough to activate it more often this can both do minor damage and keep you safe from a few attacks so go for it it also fills your focus gauge which allows you to shot lock him into another dimension whenever you're done playing around once the cutscenes are over you'll know that you didn't fall asleep at the wheel and start cheating at the challenge if your most used command style is nothing at least that's the way it works for aqua and ventus's main stories we'll get to why terra is the exception a bit later which some of you might have already caught on to anyway next up is ventus whose first battle is just against plain old venetis the main new addition here is the attack we've all seen a million times in cage three where vanitas summons a surfboard made of dusty keyblades he shoots some projectiles at you occasionally while he's up there but otherwise this attack just kind of wastes your time a lot of your time oh my god is it over yet it goes on forever seriously this version of anita still knows how to dodge though so he has to be fought the old-fashioned way phonitis here ultimately has a really low health pool meaning this is clearly just a teaser and as expected once he goes down we're met with something that's supposed to be harder unfortunately osaka team underestimated how frustrating it is when bosses can arbitrarily teleport out of your attacks and how much more enjoyable slash consistent slash easy a boss becomes when they don't do that near as often this version of venetis more or less has a completely new moveset he'll power up and then do a slashing combo that ends with him sending an energy beam in the shape of an x at you he'll do spin attacks he'll do sets of jumping dashes surrounded by energy he'll do extended combos that have consistent moments where he teleports and then seamlessly continues the onslaught and he'll on rare occasion teleport out of your combo and do something similar to the aforementioned spin attack however most of these moves can be blocked for a huge vulnerability period and a bunch of command meter charge allowing you to use heal strike regularly for tons of damage and free health this fight might seem like the hardest version of venetis at first but trust me it's the easiest once you learn him the next part though is the one that had me worried this challenge was actually impossible this isn't really supposed to be a boss so much as a set piece victory lap where you clash energy with venetis a bit before ultimately taking him down unfortunately there are two major problems here firstly if you lose you have to do the previous fight again making it pretty tedious to finish and secondly we're automatically thrust into a gimmick command style the venetis command style with a bunch of bespoke commands to use your ultimate goal is simply to get your command gauge all the way up to use a finishing attack at first i thought you'd be required to use the commands to raise your command gauge after all your commands don't fail the gauge at all thankfully this turned out to not be the case unfortunately not using them makes this battle very very rng heavy because you're completely at the mercy of what vanitas ai wants to do he must have heard us making fun of his inability to dodge because here he starts dodging like crazy not really through teleports but rather through extremely fast unblockable slashes and dashes our goal is therefore to use our one remaining option to raise the command meter shot locks if you're lucky he'll play ball and go into an energy clash quick time event that's easy to win this will fill the command meter around a third of the way if you're not lucky he'll go into one of his attacks dodging the entire shotlock and wasting a large amount of the focus meter on top of that your command meter will start depleting if you don't keep on the offensive since we can't heal here we only have so many chances to use shotlock before we're out of real options he can just tank our combo attacks shrug them off and then knock our lights out and again physical attacks don't actually fill the command gauge so physically attacking him is only useful as a last resort in order to gain a bit more focus meter this fight was a nightmare and was easily the most annoying bit of the run dethroning the cinderella escort mission succeeding is only a matter of time and persistence but boy is it not a fun time having to redo the previous fight over and over just for a shot at this roulette wheel of pain the only thing i didn't try that in hindsight might have made it more consistent was not charging my shotlock all the way i realized right at the end of my successful attempt that you can just immediately enter the shot lock after you've charged it a tiny bit and it will still cause the same clash effect doing it this way the whole time should mean that you end up having several more chances to get benitus to take the bait regardless when it's over we've won and once again we can see ventus has zero command styles entered i guess the venita's command style doesn't count finally we have the tara segment if that venitas fight we just did is the most frustrating part of the run this fight ends up easily being the hardest part of the run to start we have a fight against venitus for the billionth time this round though he's with xehanort the old man mostly just stands there if you leave him alone but the opposite isn't true if you target him first so go after venetis initially thankfully tara's damage output is so high and we are so accustomed to this battle that venitus falls apart at the slightest glare after that we're just left with xehanort by himself xehanort must be where all of the villains learn to teleport constantly though he's so old that he only does it on occasion this means consistent damage is really easy to find his attacks are rather slow as well and he doesn't have a lot of options a few spells that can be easily dodged a couple of combos that can be blocked encountered and he'll occasionally throw those gross dusty keyblade corpses at us but once again tara lifts at the gym daily so this fight really is quick and easy one of the least threatening up to this point it's only after this fight that things get brutal this fight against tara zayn or was the one that took me the longest across the game probably around two hours well we do decent damage either way so does terra nort on a technical level most of this battle is actually pretty easy to deal with even though there are some small inconsistencies with it that frustrate me personally many of terenor's combos and attacks can be blocked encountered for large amounts of damage as well as a boost toward getting an easy heal strike however this is only really true if terra north decides to stagger from the block which is inconsistent sometimes blocking an attack will send him reeling sometimes blocking the exact same attack will see him blazing right through it into more attacks there's no way i could find to know which he'll do meaning you have to be extra careful and tediously slow with your counters or you'll get hit terra nort does do some other attacks like a more powerful combo that uses the dark impulse command style and its finisher he can also summon giant earth spikes dash around like we can with sonic impact and use dark volley projectiles the latter of which can thankfully be reflected back at him if we get caught by any of these attacks we're usually caught by the entire barrage which will all but completely deplete our health thankfully he's still consistent enough that it's rare that this will end up in failure before you can put together a heel strike to undo the major part of the damage unfortunately this is all complemented by two other options terranor has that can make the fight infuriating when you have such limited healing options firstly terra nort can freely heal away some of the damage you've inflicted using curative spells i like that we're effectively fighting a pseudo version of our own character therefore i was actually hoping he would only have cure if you came into the battle with it as if he stole tara's kit along with his body how cool would it be if he could only use that spell as many times as you had it in your command deck but no he just has it no matter what and i think he can use it like three or four times total healing the equivalent of his entire health pool over the course of the fight if you let him the other problem is his meteor desperation move which as far as i could find is only avoidable using one tactic getting off a shot lock however when you try this he teleports around everywhere to avoid your lock on you also have to enter the shotlock at the right time don't time it right and you're down to one hp basically no matter what of course all of this is contingent on you not getting hit by the meteors while they're popping out of the ground which don't seem to have any tell that allows you to avoid them so they'll sometimes just appear out of nowhere sending you to one hp early and guaranteeing that if you don't get the shot lock off at the right time you're done for the shotlock doesn't even really do anything either because like earlier venita's fights he'll just dodge through it all but even if you do get the shot lock off the recovery period can allow terra nort to send dark volley projectiles or unblockable attacks your way potentially tagging you and ending you before you can really do anything it's extremely frustrating because you don't have access to d-links here for a free heal once he gets to half health teranort can use this meteor move basically whenever he wants meaning on rare occasions he'll more or less use it back to back before you get enough time to gain a heel strike to get above 1 hp again there is a chance i was doing something wrong here that would have greatly helped even the odds but i couldn't find a solution regardless eventually i did prevail after leaving to grab dark screen and fire screen to lessen his damage dealing potential slightly as you'll see tara's end screen says that i used dark impulse 14 times which was purely because he was forced into it at the beginning of every arachis fight but other than that not a single battle command was used now that all of that is done we only have two more short post-game chapters to tackle these had me incredibly worried particularly after that last fight with terenort since we have to face him again so i started off final chapter by grinding with awkwabi so that she was no longer under leveled and i got her access to things like dark screen and fire screen thankfully while the first fight with terenor here still took a few tries it wasn't as bad as the one we just did once again due to her barrier block and cartwheel heel strike is still really easy to get if you focus on blocking and countering the counters do a decent amount of damage as does heel strike in fact if you can catch ternor in the middle of an attack heel strike can sometimes do nearly a whole bar of damage alone and using your shotlock does massive damage too particularly with the keyblade we get that's unique to this chapter breitcrest which offers us an enormous pool of magic fair strength and makes crits more frequent and more powerful terra norte can still heal himself a few times and still uses a variation of his meteor attack but that's of little threat considering we can just cartwheel through it it also does far less damage for some reason possibly since this is only phase one of the fight once you beat the standard terra noir fight we face the one that's more like ansem or terra north's kh3 form with the chained heartless backing him up this fight would be a lot more brutal if it wasn't for one caveat as long as you catch him right this form doesn't dodge a single hit from your shotlock allowing you to take out half of his health with a single use granted if you do it at the wrong time he'll dodge literally all of it but at least that's more consistent making timing it a part of the challenge rather than leaving it to dumb luck he also just sort of takes whatever damage you dish out with other attacks making damage dealing as a whole pretty consistent as long as you can stay alive he can still avoid flinching and randomly start an attack you can't dodge but i'd argue that's kind of your fault for being greedy most of this form's attacks rely on the heartless backing him up whether it's shooting at you from underground like a missile shooting a pair of energy pillar attacks at you or throwing a pair of dark orbs simply swiping at you when you get too close or briefly grabbing you allowing terenor himself to start an inescapable keyblade combo he also has a rather weak desperation move of sorts where he transports you to another dimension to throw a bunch of energy balls at you until you can make it to tara's body and hit him surprisingly we can use the ventus d-link here which makes you question why you couldn't when playing his lingering will or when fighting aircase but considering the damage output of terra noired in this fight it's once again smart to relegate the d-link strictly to a heal and maybe a combo or two if you're feeling spicy you really don't want to go long without the ability to use heel strike still because he's so unwilling to avoid damage in this phase this fight actually ends up being easier than the previous one with that chapter done we only have the secret chapter remaining where aqua is lost in the realm of darkness with nothing but ericus's keyblade to keep her company luckily this keyblade gives us the same enormous boost in magic that the bright crest did but also gives us an equal boost to strength meaning it's a damage dealing powerhouse this chapter isn't particularly complicated since we only have three generic enemy types to fight and then a single boss as we explore we'll run across pools of darkness when we get close heartless start pouring out namely shadows neo shadows and the occasional dark ball they can really do a lot of damage but they tend to bunch up making it easy to both gain access to heel strike and to dish out mountains of damage with it defeating all of the enemies from a specific pool will usually expand the level in some way giving us the chance to explore more this takes around a half an hour or so before we finally reach the boss of the chapter darkheid when the battle starts darkheid will stalk us from the shadows eventually the screen will go red and show aqua in slow motion from dark heights perspective guard will block his attack once he gets close and then we can counter blast to punish he'll do this a few times before really showing himself shot locks do more damage than ever here with the first blast alone from prism rain doing around 2 bars of damage at around level 35. darkheide jumps around a lot and attacks quickly so if you're at low health you need to be ready to guard at a moment's notice greed is exceedingly dangerous here so take your time try to focus on getting heel strikes for safety and use shot locks whenever it is safe this is more difficult than it sounds particularly when dark height starts duplicating himself and attacking multiple times in succession so it's not like prism reign is an easy gimme and thankfully it doesn't need to be because other than spinning slashing and throwing the odd dark orb dark hide doesn't really do much that isn't predictable or able to be countered by a skilled player at some point he'll enter a desperation move where he spins around the arena and then dashes through the center a few times which can be dangerous if you're playing around but cartwheel consistently and he's harmless this is when he'll duplicate himself meaning he's much more capable of taking you down if you let him hit you just play carefully and wait for an opportunity to attack just three or so shot locks will take him down from full health even less if you've been getting in some good pokes and heel strikes along the way eventually dark hide will go down and the run is finally over i can't say i'm particularly surprised that this challenge was possible nor that it was largely so easy as i said up top birth by sleep is a hilariously broken game with the right options which is why i tried to avoid just spamming nothing but rolls cartwheels and shot locks and instead tried to include other options but it's a bit of a shame the ventisty link is also so powerful because some of the others have abilities i would have liked to have utilized more but i never got a reason to do so still when you remove options like magnet thunder mine square cure and the various surge abilities birth by sleep does get a fair bit more strategic relying on actual mechanics instead of press triangle to win was more satisfying than a usual play playthrough and actually made the fact that you're effectively playing through the same exact game three times a bit less noticeable the differences between each playthrough stood out more when i wasn't using the same exact tactic with every character in every fight and hopefully now that the game is being ported to pc full-scale mods can push it much further than hacks of the psp version ever could've in a few years we might be able to see a version of birth by sleep that's truly great mechanically no caveats like this required you could obviously push this challenge further if you wanted like i said in the beginning people have done no ability no command level 1 crit runs but i think this is a fair compromise that makes the game a bit more strategic and demanding without removing all of the mechanics and options and turning it into a tedious test of very exact precise movements and ai manipulations the only thing i missed was command styles if only because i think strategizing around them could have been fun but even using ice cream to enter them is technically against the rules which is unfortunate still this was a decent ride nonetheless before you go if you're interested in other kingdom hearts content i have a review of kingdom arts 3 from when it was released i revisit it when remind came out to discuss the new update remind itself and critical mode and if you somehow didn't see it i also have a cage 2 challenge where i try to beat the game without using keyblade combos if you're interested in other square games i have a plethora of videos on final fantasy like a review of final fantasy 7 remake a review of the original final fantasy vii and more beyond that there's six plus years of content you can check out ranging from editorials on indie games to reviews of big budget titles anyway what did you guys think are there any challenges like this you think would be fun to try is this challenge something you think you might want to try are there any strategies you know of you think could improve on what was done here without making the game play itself sound off in the comments below and i'll see you next time you

Channel: LibraScope

Views: 40,287

Rating: 4.9050331 out of 5

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Id: Jx3TUkFPRjQ

Length: 78min 45sec (4725 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021