And I know there was a whole sub-game I missed out.

Ending left one or two things dangling, but was nevertheless most excellent. A real, proper ending to the adventure.

Moments of frustration, yes. But in the end no boss actually took me more than two tries, as far as I remember. (I think looking for boss tips in the FAQ was a bad thing, given that I finished below the recommended level and without any of the uber-powerful items and weapons it said I should have with me.)

So apart from odd difficulty spikes and having one boss at the end of a long dungeon, it was all very well put together. Great stuff overall… as long as you’re willing to push on when it threatens to become overwhelmingly frustrating.

I only went and bleedin’ did it!

Thirty-nine minutes it took. All my skill, all my cunning. Items and abilities and spells and attacks. Omniheal! Kerplunk! Sage’s stone! Oomph! Kabuff!

I was magnificent.

Oh man, there’s not many feelings like seeing that bastard (who looked a lot like me, disturbingly) go down.

Ignore what I said earlier.

Best game ever!

Now to see the end! Well, I assume it’s time for the end after that…

I barely scratched the bastard.

I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it, either. His attacks are too powerful. If I play a purely defensive game without trying to hurt him I’d still die. He just throws more damage around than I can deal with.

So I guess that’s it. All this way and I’m not going to finish it. Sixty two hours or so and that’s it.

Really, what the fuck it the point of upping the difficulty so much at the end? It’s a long enough game as it is. It really, really doesn’t need to stretch itself out by getting you to level up for hours on end.

It’s Vagrant Story all over again. An object lesson in how to ruin a great game. Just make that last boss easier and I’d have had fond memories of a great game with the odd annoying bit in. Now I’m just going remember it with annoyance.

Okay, okay, because it’s been so long, I’ll try it one more time. Maybe the game will adjust the difficult or something now I’ve lost once…

You have been warned.

ARGH!!!!!!!!!

HOW MANY FUCKING BOSS FIGHTS ARE THERE AT THE END OF THIS GAME????????????

WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE IN ANY FUCKING WAY ANY FUCKING FUN AT ALL????????????

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Again, I say it!

ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bloody hell, really. This is just stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Okay, I’ve just checked a FAQ and I’m now at the final, real boss fight. Unfortunately, it’s apparently a much harder version of a battle I only just scraped through earlier. As I used items in that battle that I consequently no longer have, I’m not at all sure I actually sure I can win this battle, at least not without about many more hours levelling up. (I’ve been playing for about seven hours today and my main character has gone from level 38 to level 39. That’s how slowly levels come at this stage in the game.

After I got past the boss I was moaning about earlier the game got good again for a while. Why? Because it wasn’t just throwing stupidly powerful enemies at me to slow down my progress, that’s why.

Argh. Argh. Argh. Argh.

Right, okay, let’s try this boss…

If I can’t kill him after over sixty hours of playing this stupid bloody game I’m going to be even more bloody annoyed than I am now. Why? Why ruin a perfectly good game like this? It’s just difficulty for the sake of it. I don’t want to have to wander around places I’ve already been for twenty more hours building up experience and money. I don’t want to be at a complete disadvantage because I didn’t build my characters correctly right from the start, didn’t look up alchemy FAQs to get all the receipes for the best weapons, didn’t cheat the casino.

And, let’s face it, I’ve been doing fine. But why throw all these bosses at the end of the game? And that bloody test of how well you remember the story that came in the middle of them? Why? Why? Why?

Hmm, should probably go back to the top and add a spoiler warning.

I’m really not enjoying it any more.

I’ve got to the last boss – well, so I assume – and I’ve not been able to kill him. I guess he’s got multiple forms, as these bosses generally do, but I hope he hasn’t because I’ve not been able to kill the first yet.

You know, I started today’s play with a boss fight. And if that had been the end of things then I’d have really enjoyed the game. But, no, the bastard developers decided to shove in an extra dungeon – a very long dungeon, which the boss is at the end of – and a difficulty spike.

I want to have fun and see what happens to everybody in the end. I don’t want some huge challenge, especially not at this point in the game. This should be the glorious finale, not a teeth-grinding annoyance that I’m only prepared to put up with because I’ve got this far.

Mind you, I left Vagrant Story at the last, impossibly difficult, boss, but I really, really want to finish this. I just don’t want to have to play this horrible fucking last bit in order to do so.

Things are coming closer to a close, I believe.

Not there yet, though.

I must say, the story is a lot more compelling and a lot more, well, more like a story than at the beginning of the game.

Only one boss this evening. He didn’t seem to difficult, but with a few more points of damage from him on a couple of occassions it could have been different. And it took a while, because he had a lot of hit points. I really didn’t make my early game choices too well, so things are more difficult for me than they should be, I think, but not enough to really annoy me. I think that generally the balancing in this game is really very, very good. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had some sort of adaptive difficulty built in. It would explain why the boss fight strategies I checked online didn’t work for me and why everything seems to be just hard enough. Either that or my play style – explore everywhere but don’t specifically stay anywhere to level up – is the expected method of going through the game.

Ah, well, got there. And then it was straight off to a tough dungeon, with another boss at the end. So, yes, the boss I was having trouble with was a sort of start-of-dungeon boss. Insanity! Luckily, the end-of-dungeon was pretty simple, not having any annoying attacks.

After that, I was rather at a loss, so I wandered around the map for a while until going to get a hint from, er, the place you can go to get a hint. (I know I say this diary may contain spoilers, but I’ll avoid them where possible.) That pointed me in the right direction, so I went off where I’d been pointed, found some new, tougher enemies, realised it was ten o’clock and went back to a town to rest up and save.

Fifty-two and a half hours in now. There’s not a lot of the map I’ve not been to, as far as I can tell, so maybe I’m getting close to the end…

No, still not done. Not by a long way, I don’t think.

I got to a boss who slaughtered me in about six turns. Ouch. I assumed it was a battle I was meant to lose, you know, they happen in RPGs now and again. But it wasn’t. Somehow I was meant to win it. So I went back. And lasted quite a long time, but half of that was me hanging on hoping for a miracle while half my party lay dead.

So I decided to look on GameFAQs for boss tips. Before I got that far, though, the section headings made it obvious that I’d missed out a huge chunk of the game.

A-ha! That’ll give me an item I need to deal with this uber-boss!

That’s what I thought.

I was wrong. I checked the first sentence or two of the section I missed, which got me started, but I didn’t really get anything for doing it. Just a sub-quest, I suppose. I wonder if I’ve missed many of those?

I’ve gone up a level now, though, so maybe I’ll be able to cope with the boss now. Maybe. I don’t know, though. It had incredibly powerful attacks.

That’s nearly two complete days of my life.

Anyway, another five hours. Started off with a boss fight that went on ages but which wasn’t too stressful. Lots of wandering around and exploring. I did one dungeon and then got to another one, but it was proving a little tricky and my resources were dwindling, so I used Evac to get out and then used Zoom to get back to Farebury, because I’m a cheapskate and it’s got the cheapest inn. I’ll try the dungeon again tomorrow. I got to a bit where I couldn’t progress and so would have to backtrack to try and find a switch or lever or cutscene or something to let me go on.

I did die once this evening, actually. Just out in the field. Wasn’t my fault. Some enemies have a spell that goes through your entire party and has a small chance of killing anyone it touches. I’m not sure what the odds are of it wiping out your entire party in one sweep, but I bet it’s high. Not high enough to stop it happening to me, though. I lost about 3,000 gold because of that, too. It’s not like I’ve ever got much cash, because I never sell anything. You never know what you might need. And I can never remember which items are greyed out when using the alchemy pot. Anyway, I did buy Yangus his first new weapon in about thirty hours this evening, so that was nice.