I know the title is a bit alarming, I’m sorry about that, it’s nothing bad, but I’m finally getting close to the end of Tales of Zestiria. You might be wondering why I’m talking about it instead of just keeping things going until the last episode but this is the first of my Let’s Play series to go over 100 episodes. When I sat down to play it this weekend, after months of inactivity because of the country hop, and saw the endgame zone, I was ecstatic.
You can’t believe how long I’ve been waiting to get here. Because even if I left it very close to the end before moving, there was still so much to see to actually meet the final boss, Heldalf.
But things aren’t so simple. In my latest recordings (about 10 episodes to be honest), I managed to reach not only the last boss but its final form. Because it’s a JRPG, of course he’ll have a final form. But I couldn’t kill it. The difficulty spikes so much and the fight is so amazingly gimmicky that you end up in an almost impossible situation. The fight itself uses a mechanic you rarely see outside of MMO raids: DPS Check. The boss starts channelling an attack and you need to stagger him with your assault, which depends primarily on your Blast Gauges and your weaponry. After failing at the boss a while I realised I didn’t have the right stuff to fight him. I was using the same weapons for over 10 levels of content. There were better ones out there, but locked with some obnoxious requirements.
Back in episode 70-ish, I met a Turtlez speaking of a place called Katz Korner but I didn’t know how to reach it. After failing with Heldalf, I tracked it down and found a store there. Now, if you’ve been watching my LawfulGeek Plays Tales of Zestiria series, you’ll know that in this game the more you buy and sell from a store, the higher their levels are. Well, if you get that store to level 4 by spending ludicrous amounts of money or selling your stuff for paltry sums, you’ll get access to the best weapons in the game. For the second best, you need to get all stores in the cities (excluding Katz Korner) to level three and unlock the Mithril quest. This doesn’t give you the weapons, just the ability to buy them and they are quite expensive, even more after you’ve spent most of your money buying, selling and fusing weapons to raise merchant levels.
That’s what I did during this last weekend. I only recorded reaching Katz Korner and fighting another impossible boss there—which wrecked me—but the rest of this nonsensical grinding I’ve left out of the process because to be honest, it’s boring and I don’t want to make you go through that. I have enough trouble as it is getting people to watch the episodes without including grinding footage. I have to admit though, I spent an embarrassingly long time just listening to the Katz Korner theme:
But once that is done I’ll be able to tackle Heldalf properly and get to the end of the game, and that’s the other reason I’m writing this piece.
Once I finish Tales of Zestiria, the Monday and Friday games will share the Wednesday slots, because I need to find the next big game to play that day. I want it to be a long one, another big RPG, one that will perhaps take me another hundred episodes to finish—though I’ve been considering making the episodes for future super-long games twice as long to get to the end in perhaps half the numbering.
But it’s not just Tales of Zestiria that’s about to end, but also Darksiders. I’ve already finished the game and recorded all the remaining episodes. As soon as this one ends, I’m going to continue on with Darksiders 2 and Death’s adventure, to play the full series.
Yesterday I missed posting the Tales of Zestiria episodes on YouTube, so now I leave you with them today! Enjoy.
