Grimrock

What a horrible, dreadful, unimaginative ending to an otherwise pleasurable experience.

I don't know why developers always succumb to the feeling that every game has to feature a "grand climatic finale" (in other words, long, tedious manual work for the player). Blackwell Epiphany did not have one, and I am so thankful for it.

However, the lack of creative juices toward's the game's end is obvious. The old but tried cliche about four elements - passable, huge-ass dragon in the end, okay, could be.

So how do we "amaze moar", ask the devs themselves? Here is a "fresh" idea - throw in a practically invulnerable, constantly teleporting, self-cloning monster with huge array of spells. That could do - it will kill the player in seconds. Hmmm... perfect, but the people will get frustrated, so how to balance it out? I got another "fresh" idea - instead of homing on the player like every other monster including the little flies, let him move around randomly like an idiot.

Powerful, intellingent, old, almost omni-scient wizard, and moves about like a moron. Good design? Not a chance.

So, people, I have had enough. I am leaving your game unfinished, I will not do the tefious fingerwork. Hell, the dragon took long enough, but at least it did not cheat (other than being a huge sack of hitpoints).

I always like clever challenges, but I have no time for stupid, tedious ones. As a Japanese saying goes:

"A bowl of delicious soup was spoiled by a few grains of bird droppings."

If I was to write a review of your game in one sentence, that would be it.

I really enjoyed the fight with the dragon (or lindworm rather, whatever that is), as it was a truly large monster that occupied more than one square, it was also a pretty epic location.
I would have like to fight him more though, instead of the monster rush (the final wave was pretty cool though).

But yeah the true final boss isn't too great. Its just too much; the invulnerability shield, mirror images, random teleporting, spells that makes you wish you made an all lizard party, oh and a really confined arena with pits and other bs.
Sure it's challenging, but it isn't fun like the rest of the game. Not to mention kinda anti-climactic to fight this powerful wizard (who lives in a frikking castle) in a place that I can only describe as a rape-dungeon.

kamamura wrote:\So how do we "amaze moar", ask the devs themselves? Here is a "fresh" idea - throw in a practically invulnerable, constantly teleporting, self-cloning monster with huge array of spells. That could do - it will kill the player in seconds. Hmmm... perfect, but the people will get frustrated, so how to balance it out? I got another "fresh" idea - instead of homing on the player like every other monster including the little flies, let him move around randomly like an idiot.

You could just use your brain... While I didn't know what the fight would be, I knew there would BE another fight. So I went in prepared, face tanked the bastard, and didn't lose a single person and killed him in about a minute or two. It was easier than the Dragon fight before hand where I was forced to move away from the invincable boss to fight adds that put up more of a fight. Annoying. I killed the dragon boss before he summoned the second wave of enemies on my second run through the game to go fight the final hidden boss.

Just because you are unprepared, and get your ass handed to you because of it, doesn't mean it's impossible, hard, or cheap. Just means you need to get better.

There used to be this thing, back in the olden days of gaming. You know, called challange. It's where a game seems impossible till you tried again and again, got better at the game till you could finally beat it? Maybe you need to go play on Easy, or Normal. It would probably be a whole lot easier then.

If I recall correctly, you can also kill him without either of those things as long as you can approach him in melee from the side once; when he turns towards you, dodge his attack, then hit him from the newly opened side, repeating until he dies.
But yeah, it's easiest to just make rage potions with all your remaining falconskyre and kill him in two hits with the resulting +1000 strength bonus.

The Island master was very hard indeed, only reason I was able to beat him was that I had saved every healing crystal I had found. And this was on easy. I think he should have a bit less health.
otherwise I liked him. Especially when open space made the dragon abit too easy. The difficulty level gap was too bit big. Strangely enough I finally found a game where I needed to use all the epic one-use stuff I horded (and still I complain), usually in all other RPGs you never need to use the found potions and stuff because you become so epic and end bosses are a easy

This fight was irritating in some respects but I found the lindworm fight harder because of the extra enemies. The key to the wizard fight is to hit him while he's transforming from his trickster form to his wizard form. With a charged Bane and ancient claymore attack I managed to take off a large percentage of health and then before he could start moving I started to strafe around him, alternating attacks so he couldn't retaliate. In the end I took him out without getting damaged (on my third attempt after figuring out his moves).

And that was on hard...

While I agree to a small extent regarding the last fight, the OP sounds a lot like someone that just rage-quit and maybe needed to take a few breaths before posting. Then again, forums are a place to vent. I would probably rarely read them if I was Almost Human, unless I was feeling too good about myself.

Was there a trick to the final fight? I feel like there is. My thoughts:
Overall, I found the dragon fight pretty easy. I just ignored the adds at a certain point and DPS'd down the boss. The final fight took me about 45 minutes though and lots of reloading.

Yeah, this fight definitely felt easier than the Lindworm fight. Against the Lindworm and his hordes, I had to retreat across the rooftop several times to cast Heal or distribute potions. Against the Trickster/Island Master, I just cast Ice Shield (lowest resistance across all my characters) and beat him up. Clean and simple. He also ate pretty much every cannon ball the game offered me.

His positioning actually seemed semi-intelligent, to me. I'd beat him up a little, then he'd teleport out of the room I was in and wait for me to come to him. Makes sense that, if I was obviously winning, he'd want to lure me someplace where he has the initiative again. When he started doing mirror images, there were several times that he trapped me against a wall with them, making his fireballs impossible to dodge.

to the OP:
That really just sounded like you found the fight too difficult and cumbersome and then in that same breath you said it was in-inventive and not inspired.
Honestly that kind of wording and obviousness really does not fuel an argument that the fights need adjustment or a new creative approach.

As for a final boss in any game... seriously they are always somewhat let downs just because it means the game is over.
Or it means the boss i so bloody hard you might have to be patient and practice enough to beat it.

I have read many posts on how hard those battles were and I do not understand it.
I played the game 3 times all the way through. 2 times I fought the Island Master. Even on my first playthrough they were not difficult at all if I was patient and moved around and utilized what skills and items I had.
It is all about timing and they left great amounts of time (more so than LoG 1) for boss type fights. There is always a strategy for a smooth and successful fight. On the Island Master fight if that guy tracked you then that would be insane. His entire fighting strategy is clones.
Tracking where the real opponent is based on his movements you can see from another room was fun for me.

There is no such thing as a perfect boss but the Lindworm fight and the Master fights were both well done and well executed in my humble opinion.

I agree in part with the OP. The final fight was really underwhelming and mechanically questionable. At first I thought it was the old - "kill the clones, boss drops his invulnerability shield - hit him - shield goes up again - kill the clones - rinse and repeat". This would have been boring, but the actual mechanic was even worse - "look I am invulnerable now - hey and my shield doesn't have visible HP - so just guess what to do...".

Also, I have to agree that a generic dungeon was a rather mundane place for the grand finale. As my party was mainly ranged with the exception of a minotaur barbarian, I ended up luring the boss into one of the 2x2 rooms - blocked his way with forcefields and stopped him from multiplying - and hit him with Bane every 10 seconds - *yawn*.

In my opinion this otherwise superb game deserved a much better final fight - or none at all (just stick with the Dragonrider showdown on top of castle nex). Still one of my favorite games this year.