Difficulty Spike

Tonight was a night of four dungeons, eight bosses, twelve-ish puzzles, and one gigantic string of hardships.

I’m gonna try to smash all four Diablo Pillars into one thingy. They all share the same layout, boss and puzzle placements, and general story elements, so I think it can work. Each Pillar is a spiral dungeon, with a puzzle at every other landing. The middle landing is a mid-boss battle. Each Pillar is named after a member of Cocytus, so Liz and Ard don’t get one. My path was Caina, Ptolomea, Antenora, and Judecca.

Caina's puzzles are circus games. There are several shooting gallery places and a maze that goes dark. Light it up to see where to go to.
Ptolomea has boxes that you can blow up, or, what I did, just let them smash you can come out the other side. You take damage this way, but it's a lot less annoying.
Antenora has memory games to test your brain. I learned I'm not good when Simon Says gets more than nine squares in.
Judecca has you standing on a moving platform avoiding spiky balls.

The mid-bosses here were the massive difficulty spikes that tested my mettle.
Drawdo is a three headed turtle. It uses only teamwide attacks that can infect several status effects, confusion being the most likely.

Belleclare is a horned turtle. That horn can one shot Illia. Protect helps but good luck finding a time to use it. I’ll be honest, I think I got lucky here, and I might be able to say that for all of these.

Prisnum is a manageable fight. He doesn’t hit hard, but I had some minor issues here, though I can’t remember why.

Magmalizer is an embarrassingly easy fight. He’s weak to ice, but you’ll only get one shot at him before he casts reflect. He barely does damage, so he’s really out of place here. Once he casts reflect, you become your biggest threat.

And, at the end, you do battle with the namesake of the tower. Each Odessa member discusses some vague concept related to them: Purity, Honor, Love, and Life, respectively.

Caina is the hardest of the four. He has several status effect moves and teamwide attacks. All of which hit hard. When he finally dies, his key/weapon, Randolf, takes him into the Dead Zone.

Ptolomea is exactly the same as he has been. Be careful of his teamwide attack, and prepare for his high damaging single blows. When he loses, he asks us to protect his troops, and we all think he was a good guy.

Antenora was a simple task. No status effects, low teamwide damage, and healable single target moves. When she’s felled, we learn about her love towards Vinsfeld. It was all a ruse. He killed her parents, and this is her revenge. If she made him fall for her, then his heartache would be tremendous when she died. It didn’t make sense, but she explodes (?) after.

Judecca is barely worth talking about. I had Illia buff up Ashley and Brad for fun. He kills himself when he realizes he can’t do whatever childish, sadistic stuff he wants to do to people.

When we exit the final tower, Valeria calls us to say the Heimdal Gazzo is south of Sieljie. And we’ll head there...

...tomorrow.

Man, I gonna have to prepare if everything is going to be this hard. I need to steal more berries. I also need to unlock magic level two for Illia. Apparently, I’ve been able to do this for some time, but only just now learned I could while reminding myself of the boss names. And, while reminding myself of a Caina specific topic, I discovered I can find her second level special move, Extend, as well. Why is her stuff so secret?