Ender Magnolia: You have to parry to get by in this one

I've been complaining about this game lately and the difficulty spikes that it has in it but honestly it is such a good story with such amazing music, scenery, sound effects etc that I can't just stop playing because I feel as though certain parts of it were made in a very lazy fashion. Since that last boss that pissed me off so much I have ran into two additional bosses that have been of a similar spike in difficulty meaning it is MUCH more difficult than the areas leading up to it.

Something that is not pointed out at any point in the game that I think is worth noting that honestly, has made the game much more bearable for me is that they do not focus as much as they should on how important it is for you to parry in this game and how some of these fights seem nigh on impossible if you choose not to.

src

Here is a screengrab of the first boss where it became evident to me that there was no getting past this guy using the techniques that the game had taught me up to this point. You have a "dash" that ignores all incoming damage as part of your arsenal, however, this dash only goes about 1/8 the distance of this swing and you will take pretty large damage if you are in any part of it. It simply wouldn't be possible to get to the guy using all the other techniques.

src

The first time I ran into this dude was a real surprise to me because he is inside of one of the towns and this is normally, and always has been in Ender games, a place where you never even see combat. When the fight began I wasn't sure it was real, then when he started whipping my butt I thought that it might be one of those things that games often did in the past where you aren't actually meant to be able to win the fight. I toyed around trying to learn his attack patterns anyway in the meantime then got killed, only to be restarted at the center of town.

My assumptions about him being something you are supposed to lose was wrong and my initial reaction was "you have GOT to be kidding me!" During the fight which I only took semi-seriously because it caught me off guard I think I only hit him a few times and if you ever got close to him he would do this long sweeping attack that you can't really get away from.

I tried again, attempting to keep distance from him but then he would continually throw a "fire wall" at you and walk towards you with a shield on that your ranged attacks cannot break though. After losing badly twice to him and not even getting close to a reasonable amount of damage I decided to call it a day.

The next day I looked online because I knew that going at him straight away was just going to make me mad and I found a bunch of websites that detail that they cannot think of a way that someone could possibly win this fight without using parry. Then when you watch the fight when someone skilled is using parry they make it look easy, just like all pro Twitch guys seem to.

src

There is a skill that everyone has to have already encountered at this point called "Chain Whip" and not only does it parry, but it also throws damage back at enemies in front of you or all around you depending on which version of it you select.

The thing about this skill though, is that it is not presented to you very well in game. They do not really tell you how instrumental this technique will be throughout the game and how some bosses appear to not actually be possible unless you use a parry or Chain Whip combined with your normal parry to counter very large attacks that happen too quickly in succession for you to possibly be able to dodge them.

It would have been nice if they had spent a little bit of time, even if it meant "breaking character" to inform the player that this is something you will NEED to do in order to enjoy this game. Especially for people who played Ender Lilies, it isn't evident that this game is needing you to parry ever. I made it all the way through the first game without parrying to the point where I don't recall if it was even an option.

src

one of the chain whip parries has such a large counter-attack that it is going to hit anything that is near you and by doing so it also interrupts attacks sometimes so a multi-hit combo that the boss might be throwing at you that was whipping your ass now all of a sudden has a very easy to understand solution.

Once I found this out by looking at the interwebs going back and defeating this same boss only took me two tries. It wasn't as difficult let along impossible once I was aware that certain tactics were necessary in order to get it done.

For someone that has been parrying in every game they play this might have seemed obvious to them, but I spend a vast majority of my time playing games and builds in games that don't focus on parrying because I don't like doing that unless I have to.

I'm just saying that it would have been nice if the devs had made some effort to tell you as you are playing that parrying is not only advantageous, but probably necessary if you are going to make it though this game.

So if you are playing Ender Magnolia take this advice

you need to learn how to parry to get past some of the bosses!

src

Learning how to do this has completely changed my opinion about this game including some of the enemies and bosses that before learning about this, I thought were completely full of crap.