I’m on the “Final Episode” of Phantom Brave. Marona and Ash have fought there way through scores of battles on the Island of Evil with some help from the people they’ve met throughout the game. They’ve arrived of the big bad’s door step and all that’s left to do is take it on. Well, in theory. In reality, there’s a fair bit more game to go if I actually want to finish Phantom Brave. Why? Because I find my squad over leveled and under leveled all at the same time.
I’ve tried to take on the final scenario a few times. Without getting too spoilery, the final encounter is a two parter. I’m able to barely scrape by the first phase with Ash as long as I sacrifice my other party members and get one good damage spell off from my witch. The second part is where I’m really struggling. There are four crystals that give the boss invulnerability that need to be destroyed before I can start doing damage. All of the crystals are on opposite sides of the room. So the plan is to summon phantoms next to the invulnerability crystals, take them out, and attack the boss, all before it has a chance to pick off to many party members. There is just one problem, that fourth crystal is at the far end of the room and it will take at least 2 turns for Marona to get close enough to confine a phantom over there but that will also take her very close to the boss. No Marona, no more summoning party members. The other issue is that the boss uses very strong AoE spells so if there are too many party members standing next to each other it’s going to take them all out.
I have 3 party members (Ash, a Valkyrie, and a Witch) who can do reasonable damage to the boss per turn but I’m having trouble keeping all three alive long enough to get their shots in. Then there’s Marona who is a good 20 to 30 levels below the rest of the party so keeping her alive is a challenge.
Unlike Labyrinth of Refrain I can’t just lower the difficulty for the final boss so the question is where do I go from here? There are two options. Option one: Continue to play for a few more hours to get my party leveled up. Option two: Go watch the final scenes on Youtube and call it a day. I’ll probably go with option one, I’m still enjoying the game and watching cut scenes on Youtube just doesn’t hit the same.
After a little internet research the best way forward from here seems to be Failure Dungeons and Failure Fusion. I knew about Failure Dungeons before and have used them to get the party leveled up when I ran in to difficult scenarios.
The idea is to create a random dungeon that’s about three times your level and then use the Titlist to put a Failure title on the dungeon. This causes the enemy levels to be high but their stats are severely diminished and they don’t give XP for being killed. You might be wondering how leveling works if the enemies don’t give XP. Well, phantoms also gain XP based on the level of the item their confined in to. Since the items in the dungeon are the same level of the enemies you get a ton of XP for confining and then it’s very easy to pick off the weakened enemies. The only issue with this method is while the phantoms gain levels rather quickly, Marona get’s very little XP which has lead to my current situation of Maron being under leveled.
Failure Fusion is not something I’ve tried yet. The idea behind this method is to take a weapon whose stats you want to boost, put a Failure title on it, and fuse it with a much higher level weapon. The Failure title makes the primary weapon five times weaker and since stats through fusion are determined by the difference in primary and secondary weapon you get a massive stat boost for fusing and then even more when you take the Failure title off. The best way to get secondary weapons for this is the Failure Dungeons since the item levels will be much higher than anything I currently have. I’ll just either need a lot of mana or I’ll need to get my Fusionist leveled up more before I can do this.
I’ve got a little work ahead of me if I want to complete this one. Not to imply that it’s something I won’t enjoy. If I didn’t like the battle system and the story so much I would have shelved this game a few episodes ago when things started to get tough.
Many Welps 