It has been two years since the Elysium supercomputer and Babel tower were destroyed, and the Reverie Corridor shut down. How is an Elysium mech still operational? Lapis was the only Elysium creation that survived, and only because her AI got inserted into a different body. Rean and everyone else faded away. Or is this supposed to be a mech made by some other company but is reusing Elysium models?
More gorgeous Marchen Garden levels.
It is strange that the final dungeon music is lackluster compared to the
penultimate dungeon's theme. The penultimate dungeon also had more urgency and felt more climatic as you were running to fight one of your party members and then fight the big bad who had been wrecking havoc all this time. Whereas here you get dropped into the dungeon and there isn't any real urgency and it seems like you are just running to go meet up with a friend, Ouroboros bad guys not relevant to the current plot show up to pad time, and then you get to the end, meet your friend and have a long chat and then he declares that he is obligated to fight you.
The final boss' 1st form has a cool design. Reminds me of Dragonoid from Bakugan. His basic Zolga-Grendel form is also cool too.
The final boss fight is pretty novel. During the first phase, I was caught offguard when the boss' turn came up and he used an ability that transistioned the game to action combat and I had to dodge his attack on short notice. Once enough time passes, you can go back to turn based. Pretty neat.
Next, once you get his HP down far enough, he then starts teleporting you to flashbacks of prior boss fights across Kuro 1 and 2, similar to the Garrosh fight at the end of Mists of Pandaria. Then you get spat back out and fight the boss again in the third phase. The third flashback fight with Melchior is pretty amusing, as Melchior can just summon shadow clones of himself over and over half a dozen times in a row before his AI picks a different action that delays him quite a bit. So you want to wait until he picks that different action and gets delayed, and then switch to Judith and pop your AoE S-craft to bewitch/confuse all of the shadow clones and make them fight each other (since Chaos Van can't one shot the Shadow Clones with a single S-craft. They have too much HP).
I liked how he could summon adds continously throughout the fight. The difficulty in Trails boss fights tends to be frontloaded if there are adds to deal with, and then once they are disposed of it becomes a simple tank and spank. CS3 introduced enhanced states to try to make bosses become more dangerous as boss battles went on but it didn't really amount to anything, and bosses in Kuro don't use S-boost just for the stats or the effects, only to pop an S-craft.
I got the boss down to 3k HP left, enough that my next basic attack would finish him off, when he popped an S-craft, but then it turned out to be an elaborate cutscene where Van ripostes the S-craft and kills the final boss. Novel.
This is the most elaborate Trails fight in the series, and the transitions between phases are seamless. Interesting to think that Falcom was able to whip this fight up in less than a year after releasing Kuro 1.
It is strange how the first phase theme sounded like the Erebonian Divine Knight/Great Power final boss themes with the latin chorus, when the lore of this boss has nothing to do with the DKs/Great Power. I did not like how the fight theme for the third phase was a bad anime opening theme song. Falcom did the same thing with Kuro 1's final boss' second phase two. I hope this will not going to continue in future installments...
It is sad that these two side characters are more endearing than most of the main playable characters.
I cannot believe that Rixia was allowed to get up on stage at a school festival in that outfit.
I wonder how much money Falcom spent on the dance scene. That wasn't just animations but also higher than average lighting placement and camera movement.
Seems like Falcom gave up on choices, or couldn't figure out to whip up something like Kuro 1's chapter 5 again in under a year. In the first Kuro game, you got some choices/branching paths in chapter 5 and were allowed to pick which organization you wanted to party with (hero Bracers, evil Chinese mafia, evil cool supervillains, or crazy cool ninjas), and the game gave you the meaningless choice of deciding whether or not to kill or spare the filler villains (though like Suikoden 1 the game tries to guilt you into sparing them). There was no such stuff like that in Kuro 2, the only choices being at the end of the sidequests like whether or not to put Lashkar into a public hospital or get him a back alley doctor, or to direct illegal immigrants to the Bracer guild to be protected from deportation or to go into hiding.
