Practicing against Mokujin Last we left off, Zerbolos decided to be the worst uncle imaginable and let Perpell be the next candidate to fight Trillion. This whole thing was just sad, and not in the 'makes you want to cry' way, but more in the 'I can't believe anyone thought this was a good idea' way. Again, regardless of appearance (Ruche and Fegor look about the same age), Perpell actually acts like a kid. She gets motivated for training by being promised snacks after, needs to be babied by her sister Ruche and uncle to stay focused, and her goal when she becomes Great Demon Lord is to turn the underworld's castle into a candy house. The characters may think she has a chance because she's still a powerful Demon Lord, but the player knows it's a suicide mission this early in the game. Oh well. I made her into a mage and completely ignored defensive stats (HP, Def, Res) since from Levia's run it seemed like a better idea to just not get hit in the first place, Trillion is easy to dodge (for now).
Perpell's final stats During Perpell's time as the candidate, we actually get more character development from other characters like Zerbolos, Ruche and Faust than from her. This may be my fault for not focusing on raising her affection and just sticking to training. We get more details about why Zerbolos became Great Demon Lord instead of his older brother Astaroth or older sister Fegor - last time the underworld and heaven fought, Zerbolos defeated the Archangel Michael in combat, proving he was the strongest. Ruche is still a bit bitter about her dad being weak, and how he became distant to his daughters after his wife died. Zerbolos takes some time to wonder why heaven hasn't taken the chance to cause some trouble now that the underworld is occupied with Trillion - they've been too quiet lately.
Perpell sealing Trillion off for a few extra weeks with her dying attack The allotted time passes and it's time for Perpell to go out. Uncle Zerbolos gives her a ride on his shoulders before sending her off to be slaughtered by a world-eating monster. I let Trillion break through our defenses twice to get more time to train and deal damage to him, and did a pretty nice amount of damage to Trillion, brought him down to 70.2% HP before Perpell finally died. Perpell's death reminded me of the deaths of certain other characters in the Conquest route of Neptune mk2, I thought Compile Heart got enough flak from their fans over that ending to make them stop pulling this shit, but I guess not. She dies crying that she's hungry and wants to go home, and Trillion crushes her with disgustingly vivid bone-cracking sound effects and red bloody screen flashes. I felt a bit sick to my stomach. For her dying attack I chose the option to seal Trillion temporarily to give the next Demon Lord more training time. Good job Zerbolos, your brother's dying wish was to look after his daughters and instead you just sent one of them his way early. He screams and gets mad like he did with Levia, but come on, you could have just told her no, this is all on you, buddy.
Vote Mammon 2016 For a Fairer Underworld Let's just forget all that even happened, shall we? Yeah, let's move on to the next Demon Lord, Mammon. As we pass the ring on to her, another unwelcome visitor appears - this time it's an injured angel who landed in front of the castle. We take him in and have Elma start looking after him while he's unconscious, the rest of us have got to focus on training our next candidate. Mammon's attribute is Greed, but as an adventurer and dungeon-diver she seems to earn most of her money the fair way, and is surprisingly down to earth. She grew up in the slums and when she becomes Great Demon Lord she wants to take care of the poor and hungry demons like the ones she grew up with, a pretty angelic objective for a demon.
Mammon's final stats I started offloading presents to her and realized that I made a big mistake earlier - each present can be a bad, okay, or good match for a given Demon Lord - one they don't like may raise affection 1% while a good one could raise it 5%. While I was looking through for things that sounded good for Mammon, I found I had two lockpick sets (perfect for an adventurer, right?) - giving this item actually triggered a special event just for it and raised her affection 25% in one go, and another 25% with the other one. Add some regular gifts along the way and she was at 100% easily, I'm sure if I had tested the presents with Levia and Perpell I could have gotten them to 100% too regardless of the whole 1/3 getting/receiving ratio if I found their 'special' present. Whoops.
Mammon vs Dragon Trillion Since the whole glass cannon build was working so far, I did the same for Mammon - almost nothing allotted to HP, DEF or RES. All into attack power, mana (to be able to cast her main attack from range), and speed. When it came time to fight Trillion, the fight ended almost as soon as it started once he hit 70% and changed form into a dragon-looking thing. The game pulled me out of the fight and gave me another 2 weeks to train while everyone fussed about why Trillion was transforming. Faust thinks it's because he finally sees us as a real threat and is evolving to cope with it. She adjusts Mokujin so that he mimics dragon-form Trillion now for us to practice against. Mammon tells Zerbolos that when she's Great Demon Lord she's going to take him as her prize and to look forward to it, what a gal.
I really don't know what I was expecting Anyway, a short weeks of training later and Mammon completely broke the game, I don't think I was supposed to do this well. In my fight against dragon-form Trillion she took him from 0.7 trillion to 0.35 trillion HP all by herself with some fancy manuevering and abuse of a stacking skill that keeps piling up damage bonuses if you don't move. The trick is that some attacks will move your character for you, and they don't stop that bonus from stacking, only regular movement does. So pumping her main attack to max while leaving the movement abilities at Lv.1 so they're cheap to cast means it just keeps stacking to the max of 200% bonus damage, and since I already built her like a glass cannon, it was brutal. Trillion changed from AGAIN (so Mammon dealt the finishing blow to both forms!) at 0.35 trillion HP remaining, turns out Trillion's true form is...this. Okay, sure, why not? I guess I have to start calling Trillion 'she' now.
You did good, RIP My luck with Mammon wasn't about to hold out for Trillion's third form, since now she starts having an even more insane amount of moves and spreads area damage effects throughout the whole map making my whole 'glass cannon' thing not so effective since I can't easily avoid it. Mammon got one hit on the final form of Trillion until her time was finally up. I had her seal off one of Trillion's final form parts with her dying attack since I seriously doubt I'll need more time with how overkill I just went. A tutorial popped up explaining that Trillion's final form cannot be run from, you can only try your luck against it once per Demon Lord, but I have 3 left so I think I should be okay.
How many JRPGs exist where angels are not jerks? Back at base, after we're done mourning for Mammon we get news from Elma that the angel who fell here earlier has woken up. It's Archangel Uriel, and he's an arrogant little brat who has the hots for Elma, but more importantly he's come to inform us that Trillion already devoured heaven's core and the human world's core. Heaven is in shambles and hanging by a thread, while the human world is already annihilated, so he's here to beg for our help defeating Trillion. He's not good at begging, what with what a haughty jerk he is, but we planned to beat Trillion anyway and he agrees to help with our training. He goes back to get some rest after everyone smacks him around a bit and warns him that if he tries to pull any moves on Elma he's going to be fed to Cerberus. He also tries to give us a holy relic, but the demons aren't too fond of it because it's so bright and holy, and we throw that piece of junk in the storage shed way in the back so it won't ruin our underworld groove, much to Uriel's indignation.
Ashmedia has more tit volume than the rest of the game's characters combined I thought the game would give me another selection screen with Fegor, Ashmedia and Ruche to choose from this time, but this time the order is fixed. Ruche asks Ashmedia and Fegor to stand down and let her go and claims to have a good reason, but she can't say what it is. Zerbolos and Faust don't want to send her out unless she'll come clean with what the reason is, but she can't spit it out, so we eventually decide to just go by order of territory controlled by each Demon Lord. That means the order will be Ashmedia, Ruche, and then Fegor last. So Ashmedia's up next, her attribute is Lust and her character so far has just been making innuendo out of every conversation, we'll see if she gets anything more interesting. Fegor's attribute is Sloth, which is fitting because she might get to be so lazy as to not even have to fight, with Trillion at only 35% it seems likely I can finish this with Ashmedia or Ruche.
Faust suddenly realizes that she's in a Compile Heart game Perpell's whole character and death left a bad taste in my mouth and I'd be lying if I wasn't a little disappointed at how easily I wrecked dragon-form Trillion, but it is fun how each Demon Lord inherits stats from the last one. It's a cheap way to elict sympathy by making you spend time with a character one by one and then killing them off, but it's effective and it's what this whole game is about so I really can't complain, I knew what I was getting into. I feel like the game is showing a lot of favoritism towards Ruche, out of the Demon Lords she's been getting most of the character development. Faust is the best girl, though.
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