Earlier this year, when I played through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (a truly French title for a game, one that commits what I tend to consider a sin of implying a franchise with a first installment by giving an original work a subtitle, as if it were a sequel) I found it to be thrilling and challenging, but while I got stuck on one or two bosses (the first fight against Renoir was very tough for me) I generally found the overall challenge of the game to be pretty reasonable.
Then I hit Simon.
I'd literally gotten past all the other really tough post-game bosses, like Clea or the souped up Lampmaster you fight after visiting the three workshops. But Simon was just, like, an order of magnitude tougher - the moment that truly broke me was when I finally thought I'd beaten the guy, only for him to reset to phase 2 with full health and a more relentless series of attacks.
I wound up cheesing him - finding a build online in which Maelle boosts her damage to absurd degrees, partially aided by Sciel empowering her and using Intervention to let her go again, which was enough to let just a single Stendahl wipe out the entire health bar.
These new bosses are tempting me to do the same.
Farming for Chroma to buy everything off of all the merchants, I actually hit level 99 on every character (the cap,) so there's no way to reduce the difficulty on these challenges simply by generally getting tougher.
As far as I can tell, the new bosses are:
(Spoilers Ahead):
Osquio, a malevolent version of Esquie, found in Verso's Drafts (the primary new area for the DLC). Osquio is honestly not that tough in his first phase, especially if you have the HP and Defense to withstand a couple missed parries (he does hit pretty hard, and as with all of these, the attack patterns are tough to learn). The thing that really makes the fight tricky is that in the second phase, he not only takes away all of your healing tints, but also starts inflicting a new debuff that reduces each hit you make (not counting counters) to 1 damage, consuming a stack of the debuff for each strike you make. Thus, if you can dodge or parry at least most of his attacks, you can get by with abilities that do a lot of hits.
The really frustrating thing, though, is that while I've gotten him through both phases several times now, when you get him down to near zero HP on phase 2, he'll do a gradient attack that you must parry or the party is wiped (without even a chance to call in the backup squad). Given that it takes like 15 minutes to get to this point, practicing the gradient parry is not, like, easy to do. And the timing is really unclear - I've tried using it right when the giant apocalyptic orb is about to hit us, or when the screen first turns black and white, and I just cannot ever seem to get it right. Here, I feel particularly justified in using a cheese build just so I can rush ahead to that point and figure out the timing. I feel like I've paid my dues in actually fighting the rest of the fight fairly.
The other bosses (as far as I can tell) are in the Endless Tower. Finally, those canvases up on the platforms serve a function, letting us challenge each of these particularly nasty bosses. And they are nasty.
Duolistes (a little pun there - you fight two Duelistes) share a health bar and can do tag-team attacks. As far as I can tell, there's no real trick here - you just have to deal with foes who unleash like 12 attacks in a row (sometimes throwing in attacks you need to jump over just to trip you up). I haven't worked on this one all that much.
Chromatic Lampmaster is the only one other than Osquio that I've really pushed all that hard. Of course, the Lampmaster was always a little tough, punishing you for failing to shoot its lamps in the right sequence (Energizing Shot feels very important here) but on top of that, it also gets to add extra hits to its attacks by lighting up other lamps that need to be shot. When the lampmaster does the little light puzzle sequence, he'll also turn out all the lights and thus any attack you make agains them is an auto-miss, so you may as well prioritize hitting them lamps. If you fail the light puzzle, either by getting the sequence wrong or just not shooting them in time, its next move will be a three-attack combo that will exhaust the party (which makes it extra hard to shoot the lamps again - seriously, you hit a bit of a death-spiral). To add insult to injury, the lampmaster will also do a big three-burst AoE (with a somewhat tricky feint on the first two bursts and then an even longer feint on the last) that inflict the Dizzy condition, making it that much harder to shoot its lamps. And guess what? When you get it to zero, it resets to full health and I believe will also do its dizzying burst thing more frequently. I hit that second phase once and had to step away.
Clea Unleashed I've only done once, but she seems to be immune to damage and summons lots of Nevrons like she does in the Clea's Atelier area. The attacks hit like trucks and are hard to parry, but I think, like the other version, you probably have to parry everything, so... hoo boy.
And then, finally, there's a harder Simon that I have not even bothered with yet.
I love this game, and I wanted new content for it, but boy, this DLC is so brutal that I might just have to leave it up there with things like Dark Souls III's Ringed City and just accept that I might never actually beat these freaking things. (I did get to Darkeater Midir, but boy howdy did I not ever feel like I made serious progress on that fight.)
Honestly, what I really look forward to is a new game in the same style, resetting to a lower challenge and less complexity (the Lumina system is cool, but also gets so insanely complex that I honestly kind of feel like it starts to take away from the game when you both can and are expected to stack like 25 different effects on each character).
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