u/lilwizerd

If you didn't see my first post, I'll explain it a little here. I picked up a challenge run for the Hard Mode mod that was recently created for NNK1. The rules are simple and the challenge is brutal. I plan to make a post about my thoughts each day I do the challenge, and this is day 2 so here goes:

• Al-Khemi was hard, but not unreasonably so. He's parryable, strafeable most of the time, and hits moderately hard. He was extremely tanky, with lots of health. But, he's a glim farm, he spawns so many glims. What made him hard was that he resists water, which is one of the only good sources of cost effective damage I had. Melee still isn't good yet at this point. I died 2 times, and the fight took about 17 minutes on the successful attempt.
• I've started to notice here that being poor is really, really making things hard. I do alright against things when I am able to afford to buy gear at the shop, but when I can't, things get MUCH harder. I can't sell most of my things to buy gear either, which makes things difficult. That means that once I gain access to gambling, I expect to have a patch of gameplay where things aren't too bad, and it'll probably pick back up in difficulty at/just after shadar.
• The adamant badge is incredible, an absolute lifesaver. It adds a degree of safety to most things I do, and I bought one for every party member and every familiar that can equip one.
• Swaine's Nightmare is easy. I expected him to be like Rusty's nightmare, basically the average nightmare boss, but Swaine's nightmare only has status special moves. He is easily parried, easily strafed, and since his damage output is so much lower without special moves, Esther was able to stay alive for much longer than usual, almost the entire first half, which sped up the fight a lot. I went in slightly damaged, and with less than full hp, and beat it on the first try, and the fight took a little under 10 minutes.
• Now that I have access to alchemy, I can technically farm forage spots to make infinite sprite dews, which are a powerful healing item. However, as this is lame, I don't plan to do it unless I am well and truly stuck.
• There are icebergs blocking the entrance to Yule, preventing you from going there early on the boat. This sucks, as there is a quest there that gives you a free familiar at a decent level, which I really would have liked. They don't appear on the world map either. But, nothing really stops you from going anywhere else, even skull mountain, so I picked up a hidden star drop there, and some money from other hidden treasures as well. It was treacherous, but worth it to buy gear.
• If you thought Swaine's Nightmare was easy, then have I got a treat for you, because Shadar is literally free. 2/3 of his moves cannot hit you as long as you position correctly, and the third does 20 damage if you block. And it's easy to block as well, because you know ahead of time what move he will do based on where on the ship he teleports. you have PLENTY of time. And you don't have to kill him either, just damage him about 1/3 of the way before the fight ends. It only took about 5 minutes, making him the second shortest boss behind GOTW and like that's the tutorial so yeah.
• It's worth saying that you can only get 2 star drops the entire game without stealing or fighting enemies, so I used one on the Sid the Seed Sprite, and decided I was going to not invest into the lemur guy. I'm too flimsy to ever use a familiar that can't defend, and him even being on the team makes my allies make stupid decisions, so I plan to replace him as soon as possible.
• It's also worth saying that in the remastered version of this game, Swaine get's a HUGE nerf on his skills, where they added an animation where he throws his gun in the air before proceeding to use the regular animation as well. This makes every single one of his skills take almost twice as long to use, just way too long to be viable. So I don't plan to actually use mugshot to steal boss items unless it's a really good one that can't be obtained easily (so basically Vileheart)
• Finally unlocked all out attack and defend. It adds an incredible layer of nuance and control over battles, which is essential for how hard this is. love it!
• The Fairy Godmother's belly dungeon gauntlet(yes it gets it's own little section) was HARD. It comes down to the simple fact that regular melee hits from enemies do a lot of damage, and the numbers makes it difficult to safely deal damage. Just doing these fights against multiple enemies made me die a lot, probably 10-12 times total, which is more than every other boss thus far combined. and JUST the last fight, against the Hubber Blubber took 8 minutes. On the plus side, thanks to the burning blade found in Old Smokey, and most of these enemies being weak to fire, melee is actually good again. And Mitey easily takes the MVP spot for the day.
• Royal Jelly. Royal. Jelly. ROYAL. FREAKING. JELLY. I lack the words to even begin to describe Royal Jelly. But let me try anyway. I'll start with this: start to finish, it took just under 3 HOURS of attempts. Why, you may ask? Well, it's not because it's moves are difficult. In fact, both its special attacks give you a long time to react, long enough to even switch to the fairy and evade, taking no damage whatsoever. It's also not because it's difficult to parry or strafe, most of it's moves can be dodged completely while still being parried. It IS because this boss has a nasty little move that hits you SIX TIMES in a row, completely killing any character if not dodged, blocked, or parried (But also ONLY if parried with full health, on the first half of the available parry window). She also has an attack that knocks you down with a really long stun, and she LOVES to use these moves together. This by itself is not a big deal. You just gotta git gud right? Well, yes but actually no. Because one of the other things that makes this fight hard is how GODDAMN LONG it is!!! It's only safe to do 1 combo of damage with Mitey at a time, which is about 30-38 damage, and he has THOUSANDS of health. It is damn near impossible to play the game that perfectly for that long, and also have nothing screw you over RNG wise. Oh yeah, and ALSO when she reaches half health, she will summon E I G H T minions to join the fight. EIGHT!!! See the above line where the numbers made things extremely difficult! Your options are to either be lucky enough to get 2 golden glims to use with Mitey (which isn't THAT rare but still) and have them be close enough together to use both, or pony up 320 mp for EIGHTY fireballs to kill them. The ONLY saving grace about this part is that the enemies are a little dumb and don't understand that they have to get close to you to hit you, but they will hit you when you switch into a familiar, which makes trying to evade the boss's moves a lot harder and more damaging. My successful fight took 36 minutes to finally kill, and that time would have nearly doubled if I wasn't lucky enough to get 2 golden glims right next to each other right at the start to kill all the adds. (yeah, it was 36 mins WITH the best possible luck) I died 10 times, and let me tell you each one was soul crushing.
• On a more positive note, I think I've done a good job with conserving my items. So far, I've only used one strong coffee, one phoenix feather, and a sandwich or two, along with a loaf of bread or two

That is as far as I got. I'm going to get to do some bounties now, which should give me a nice power boost going forward. I expect that Royal Jelly will be the second or third hardest boss, and I'll have a much easier day next time. I think I'm past the worst for a WHILE. It's only 2 more bosses until I unlock gambling, which will just in general give me a huge power boost. If I were to guess which bosses are especially hard from here, I'd say Eternal Knight, the second part of the Shadar fight, and the Zodiarchy.

As before, if you want to watch the challenge and see me suffer and rage, you can find the VOD for day 2 here.

Until next time!

So you guys might have seen posts from u/theshiningstarship about their hard mode challenge, where they threw in the towel at the Zodiarchy. Well, in the comments of that, I said I would take up the challenge. So what I'm gonna do is write up a post of my general thoughts for each day. I'm streaming this all, so if you want to, feel free to tune in. I'll also post the vods of each day so you can watch those if you're curious. Today was day 1 so here goes:

• GOTW is free as always, easy to strafe and parry. The fight did take a lot longer, and he even survived the tutorial gold glim.
• The sewers were kinda crazy hard, I died 3 or 4 times just to random enemies. It was a humbling experience to need to leave the sewers after the first lantern set just to save a coffee for later.
• Hickory Dock is another easy one who is just very tanky. It's easy to strafe and also easy to parry, meaning I get lots of glims. Dock seems to start out the concerning pattern where I can't seem to do more than 2 damage with melee. I'm still sorta tanky, I'm a comfortable 4 shot at this point.
• Gladiataur was pretty hard. his attacks are very wide, meaning you can't parry him without taking a hit in the first phase, and he hits pretty hard. Just regular melee hits do about 1/3 of my health, so it's not great. If I fail to block, his skills do about 2/3 of my health. The trend of doing like zero melee damage continues, and the seed sprite starts his sweep as my best guy. I saved some bounties to level him up right after I got him, so he does about 20 damage per water bomb here. Once phase 2 starts, the fight is pretty free. his punch attacks are all easily strafed and parried so I stopped needing to constantly heal. Fights in general are dragging quite a bit at this point, but I still haven't died to a boss
• Rusty's Nightmare was the first boss to kill me, thanks to it's fast spinning attack, where each hit did about a quarter of my health. As long as you're careful though, this boss is easily no hit. Strafing for nice hits to fish for glims is quickly becoming not just a good strategy, but the only strategy, as this boss also takes 1-2 damage from melee. But Sid the seed sprite keeps his MVP status for pure cost efficiency. But it's worth noting that fights are starting to DRAG, this one took over 8 minutes on the successful attempt, faster than gladiataur but much slower than usual.
• Bashura killed me too, but not for any particular difficulty, I collected a golden glim and in the middle of the cutscene he started devastation. Feels bad man. Things are starting to REALLY hurt. regular attacks range from 1/3 to 1/2 my health, and skills do about 3/4 of my health. It's all about tight exectution now. Fight took around 10 minutes.
• For my one free tame, and one of the only new familiars I'll be able to get in general, I picked the Lagoon Naiad for 2 reasons. first, it learns the skill rise and shine, which will allow me to complete an errand later on. Second, if I am able to evolve it all the way, it will learn the skill Upsy-Daisy, which will be one of my only sources of revives mid combat, with resources being so scarce. I also saved bounties again until after I unlocked this guy so it would gain more xp
• Moltann OH MAN. Things really, REALLY get hard here. He killed me 4-5 times before I worked out how to kill him. The main issue is that Moltaan uses special moves and rarely actually attacks. This means you can't parry him for glims. And he has so much health. The only strategy I found that worked is to intentionally move in to get hit by moves and evade them to farm glims instead. This took a LONG TIME. this fight took 28 minutes on a successful attempt. Keep in mind, none of these include fail times. that's 28 minutes on just the winning try. Towards the end, I used 1 strong coffee, marking my first in battle item used this run. Sid keeps MVP status.
• And that's as far as I got today, I decided Moltaan was a good stopping point. Some things I want to mention. The post about the hard mode mod states the game is 1.5x as hard. This is not true. The game is 2.25x as hard compared to normal mode. Compared to easy mode, the gamemode I personally speed run, it's nearly 4x as hard. the amount of damage I take is nearly doubled, and all enemies have around 2x as much health or more.
• Not having starting familiar tickets is going to make this game really really hard. Mainly, I have almost no familiars. Until I beat candelabracadabra, I'll have 3 empty familiar slots. After, I'll still have an empty one. I won't fill all the slots until just before the end.
• Melee is really, really bad. Stuff simply does too much damage to justify the cost and risk aside from the parry hit. I don't know whether that will change eventually, but that's where we are now.
• I might be making this harder on myself by conserving items this much. But I feel confident it will be worth it to save as many items as possible for the later bosses.

That's all the specific thoughts I had about day 1, but if you want to actually watch me suffer, you can here.

Also wanted to say thanks to u/theshiningstarship for the challenge idea! and thanks to u/UchiR for making the hard mode mod. It do be hard. That's all for today!