(Hey! If you've made it this far and still care about spoilers somehow, this is your sign to turn back. Seriously. I'm not kidding.)

I've made my way back to the Fallen Arm bright and early on day 16, and never have to speak to Zilex again. I decide to do one more gem crafting session while I am here and right next to a convenient shop to sell my extra gems to. The fight ahead is going to be an uphill battle, and I will need all the resources I can get.

Our target is one Magestic Mordred, whose name is spelled with a G for some reason. Our friend Mordred is a level 70 Fortress Mechon, and he is the strongest enemy on Mechonis, barring a handful of the bosses we will be facing after him. In completing literally everything else there is to complete here, we have just made it to level 70 ourselves; unless we want to grind for a good while longer, we have no choice but to meet him at his own level. This will be the real skill-check.

I am most of the way to 71, so I do fight a non-unique fortress elsewhere in the factory a few times to bump me the rest of the way up and give me what tiny advantage I can get from this. And with that, it's time to take on our most daunting challenge yet.

On my first attempt, I find that maintaining Monado Armour is a surprisingly difficult task to manage. We make it a decent chunk of the way through his health bar, but he manages to KO me; Fiora valiantly tries to revive me, but the party AI cannot comprehend that Mordred has solid collision underneath his body, and so she wastes a great amount of time running uselessly into an invisible wall and has only just figured out that she has to go around when he finishes her off. 18 deaths.

On my second attempt, I determine that my main failing was my inability to keep Armour up consistently and replace Shulk's Strength Up gem with Double Attack: a little bit of extra damage won't do me any good if I can't survive long enough to make it worthwhile, so I should prioritize speeding up the rate at which I build up my talent gauge. It feels a lot better, but it's still not good enough to keep it consistent and he decides to instakill everybody with a Titan Stamp in one of the moments where it's not active. 19 deaths.

On my third attempt, I opt to also swap out Shulk's Muscle Up gem for another Double Attack, because the small amount of defense I am getting from it clearly is not helping at all. His double attack rate is now maxed out at 50%, so every other auto-attack will now count for two. We get so, so close this time, but end up with an unlucky repeat of how the first attempt ended. 20 deaths.

My fourth attempt is a bit of a blur, because I am putting so much of my brainpower into surviving that it feels jarring when I realize Mordred is down. I wasn't even paying attention to the fact that we were trying to kill him anymore. But we've done it. There is now only one more thing to do, and I brace myself for a few tedious laps around Agniratha to find that last spring.

It is the very first thing I find, approximately ten seconds after stepping into the city.

That's it. There is officially nothing left to do on Mechonis. It's time.

It is time to begin Shulk's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Anyone who has played this game—and made it this far—will tell you the most insane part of it by a long shot is none other than Mechonis Core. This is where the stakes are at their highest, the immense scale of this game's setting takes center stage, and revelations the story has been building up to from the very beginning finally come to pass. It's a rollercoaster from start to finish, and in the moment it seems like it'll never relent.

This will all obviously remain true for this run, but there is now another layer to keep the chaos fresh.

Between all of the hypest, heartwrenchingest cutscenes you have ever seen, the only gameplay connecting them is a parade of boss fights. These all sit in a range of level 70-72, and unless I want to spend more precious hours of my life grinding out EXP against regular old enemies... I cannot overlevel for them. Like Mordred, I have to take this gauntlet on an even playing field.

Our opening act, however, sits at a pleasant(?) level 68. It's the guy who had the big stupid long boss room in Mechonis Field again, but this time there are no walls to stand behind so he can just shoot us in the face point-blank. He does Very Big Damage, it takes forever to whittle his health down, and then there's a cutscene when he hits half health and we have to do it again but get him all the way down to zero this time. If this is what we can expect against a boss who is a difficulty tier below us, that does not bode well.

The level 70+ gauntlet begins proper with our next contestant. It's Egil! The guy who has been the main antagonist for the whole game up to now, or at least ever since we learned that he exists and is the boss of the guy who was antagonizing us before. This actually goes a bit smoother than the last fight, albeit in a very "we still have to keep spamming Armour to keep ourselves alive" sense. Then he hops into his Mechon and gains a couple of levels, which gets dicey, but we just have to survive long enough for him to decide to use a specific attack and then we're good.

Except for the part where Agniratha explodes and the Mechonis wakes up. That's less good.

The good ship Junks swoops in to save the day and brings us back to the Fallen Arm to recuperate, and there's nowhere else we can actually go from here right now; we are well and truly stranded until we move on with the story. We do, however, take this opportunity to check out a new shop that just showed up in the village, which lets us upgrade a great big list of Fiora's arts that she has been stuck with weak, lame versions of. One of these is Final Cross, a very powerful multihit force-topple attack that she just unlocked in this last fight with Egil, which we have already swapped one of her more neglected arts out for.

And with that, we make it to the point where there is officially no turning back. We talk to our shipmaster and village chief Miqol to bring us into Mechonis Core, and it's back in we go.

Our docking bay is technically in a new spot within Central Factory, so it is actually not totally accurate to say this is the least eventful area in the game, unless you consider "Shulk screaming in agony for half a minute straight because something very bad is happening to him" to be uneventful. Regardless, this will actually be a brief intermission, because there is a weird missable quest in this one very small visit to this area that involves taking a transporter all the way back down to the main part of this map to build a new weapon for Fiora at the same place where we made the bomb for that vent.

I have never done this quest before, because this is actually only the fourth time I've stuck with a playthrough this far into the game. My first run through I did not know it existed, and then my second was a New Game+ run where I wasn't doing any quests and just blasted through the story again; the third was last year, where I was streaming the game to some friends over Discord and didn't want to ruin the pacing. It's really nothing to write home about: I just have to take the transporter in and walk there. You're not even allowed to skip travel at this part, so it is always this tedious even when you are not doing a dumb challenge like I am. I get some War Blades from it and I don't bother switching to them because they only have two slots.

On the way back I decide to stop into Agniratha just to say I did, because the transporter to there still works even though the city is supposed to have blown up. It... sure is Agniratha! I get outta here and get back to what I was supposed to be doing.

Our next stop on the whirlwind boss tour is the Apocrypha Generator, which is an evil ball who is making the Monado not work so good. It's a little slow-going, but we get through it fine, and the most memorable thing about it is the fact that when we beat it Riki says "Nyapakapow!" because he is just a little guy. (Sure he's 40 but that's not important.)

And with that, it's time for The Big Event. Mechonis Core itself lies ahead.

The first fight in this sequence, as in the dedicated Mechonis Core sequence, is a rematch against Egil in his Mechon. This fight is half-setpiece, because partway through we receive a vision of him controlling the Mechonis to hit Bionis for Infinity Damage, so we need to go around the arena and smash some energy controllers before the timer runs out or it's an instant loss. They give you way more time than you'll ever need to do this, and then you just gotta go whale on him. It's not terribly hard even with the extra Mechon he's summoned, who don't do a whole lot even though they're also at our level.

Once that's over and done with, we start getting through to him and it seems like everything's about to be fixed when suddenly The Problems Occur.

You remember our guy Zanza from Prison Island? I mentioned him by name one whole time, which is notable for a story NPC by the standards of this article. He is not our guy, actually, and it turns out that was just some other guy possessed by Zanza. The real deal resembles a longer-haired Shulk and is an awful little lemon of a man, because he is sour, yellow, and deserves to have his head crushed in a juicer. Also, he's God.

We have to duel him. Fiora has to duel God, one-on-one.

This fight is where the skill I have gained playing as Fiora for half of the game at this point is put to the test: Sharla's not here for support, Shulk can't use Armour on account of the hole in his chest, and I have nobody to rely on but myself. Zanza's level is unknown, and displays as a red "???". I simply have to do my best to survive.

Zanza is nasty with no defense, and the fact that opponents hit as hard as they do at this stage in the game is felt when I have no agility advantage and one else to lighten the brunt of it. Fiora's Healing Energy aura is appreciated here, but I suspect I would not have pulled through if not for the Critical Drain strat; he chips away more and more health and I'm down to the wire, and I eventually build up enough tension for a Final Cross that lands several crits just in time for an attack I'm not sure I would have survived otherwise. With his next move, he pulls out Monado Buster and concludes the encounter. If anything was ever going to make this feel as much like fighting for my life as the story frames it, this was it.

Things continue to go very south for everybody and we are granted a slight reprieve as we sprint back to Junks and get out of here, where we watch Zanza explode the Mechonis because the Bionis is him also. One of his goons follows us out into the open air and accosts us with a new Telethia, and I actually do get knocked out in this fight, but the rest of my party is alive enough that it still counts as surviving until it does its big attack that triggers the next cutscene.

And so, Junks docks back in Colony 6. We're back on Bionis, but there's just a little bit more plot to do here before it's time to say we've properly made it: a few more Telethia fights, two of which are yet more bosses that go Generally Fine, and then Shulk is back on his feet curiously fast considering he just got shot. The gauntlet is over, we've got the full party back in action and we have officially entered the endgame. Our playtime sits at 89 hours: we spent a total 24 on Mechonis. One full day! And this is a great stopping point, because god DAMN is this part of the game A Lot.

I begin day 17 with the expectation that Mechonis Core will be the peak of difficulty in this run; now that we're back here we have a great big helping of quests newly-unlocked, so we can safely just return to that grind and get enough experience to wipe the floor with Zanza when we take him on for real. And since we're in Colony 6, we might as well start by leveling it up some more! It seems like everything for level 4 needs some stuff from the Fallen Arm that I haven't bothered to gather in advance, but that should be no problem. I can just head back there and round those up real quick, right?

It's not like they wouldn't give me an option to fly back there even though Junks docks there, right?

Right?

...I cannot do that.

So! This changes things somewhat, because, uh, the vast majority of the stuff I could potentially do is very specifically here and locked behind the presence of NPCs who cannot be invited until various facilities are back up to level 4 or higher. The Rainbow Slugs are, ironically, the only thing from the Fallen Arm that I have enough of to be able to get their respective upgrade, but... given that I can't do anything else, I can't help but feel like doing so would just be a waste when I can save these for future runs with better planning. As it stands, Colony 6 is as complete as it is going to get, and its population is never going to get any bigger.

The scope of the endgame has suddenly become much, much smaller than expected. Instead of dozens of new things to whittle away my time with, we mostly just get a small handful of new quests in Colony 9 and Frontier Village. We can get one new quest here in Colony 6, wherein we are tasked with recovering ten of a collectible from Prison Island, which we are going back to by the way.

Before I settle on my decision to save the Rainbow Slugs, however, I decide I might as well go get the rest of the items for that upgrade, which you can't even access until this point in the game anyway. We need materials from Seluas, the Bionis' great big gut bacteria, and we can find them by flying into Bionis' Interior through a big hole Egil made in its chest.

We've technically been here before like a dozen times, because we briefly pass through the Third Lung between Satorl and Makna, but there is absolutely nothing going on in there so I have not mentioned it despite the fact that I've run through it more times in this playthrough than anyone usually ever does. But now there's stuff in there! The Third Lung doesn't have a way to enter the main part of the area, but we can drop down to it from there, so we've got ourselves a new (one-way) shortcut.

We make it to the end of this area and turn back before moving on, because the boss here has a bit of a reputation and I'm still a little underleveled, even though I do know how to deal with her. The new quests I can do may be few and far between, but they're still worth doing for the advantage they'll give me.

I fly Junks back to Colony 6 to begin on my way to Colony 9 when I am caught off-guard by the fact that I have forgotten the game's only fully-voiced sidequest is outside the gate here, and it momentarily sweeps me away to watch a few cutscenes for something I will not be doing until later because you have to fight a level 80 monster. I casually ignore the problems this fun new situation has introduced and continue on my merry way as before.

I get a generous helping of experience from Tephra Cave, because a new area of it opened up when the Bionis started moving and it is now packed with level 90+ monsters, so I sneak my way through so I don't get absolutely annihilated. (There's actually a way to get in here at the beginning of the game if you really wanna break the balancing.) And then it's time to come back home for the first time in forever!

Our top priority here is a quest that will unlock Shulk's fifth skill branch; everybody has one of these that unlocks upon completing Mechonis Core, but... his is the only one that actually seems possible to get in this run, for one reason or another. Reyn's, Fiora's, and Riki's all involve fighting monsters unrealistically above our level; Sharla's is locked behind Colony 6 NPCs we can't invite; Dunban's is one of those four quests left over on the Fallen Arm; and Melia's... we'll get to that. Shulk, on the other hand, just has to run back to the Ether Mine one last time and talk to someone. We don't even need to return to the guy who asked us to do it! A blessing.

From here I decide to run back up to Frontier Village to check out what's new there, and find... not a whole lot of anything, really. There is one very notable quest here, but I'm not strong enough to take it on just yet, so there's really just kind of nothing to do here. It begins to set in how anemic the new content in the endgame actually is without Colony 6 to act as its heart, and I... admit to myself that I really don't want to do quests anymore. I'm bored of quests.

First, though, while I'm here, there is something I want to verify. I save my game and talk to the Nopon who will take me to Eryth Sea.

Eryth Sea is swarming with extremely strong Telethia, which is not ideal. But more importantly, my suspicions are correct: the guy manning the transport pod is gone, because he is either A.) one of them, B.) dead, or C.) just smart enough to have decided to be anywhere else.

If I were to save here, I would not be able to escape without breaking the rules of the challenge. Eryth Sea and Alcamoth are just as off-limits as the Fallen Arm, and I cannot do Melia's skill branch quest because we get it here. I have no choice but to reload. I feel justified in my decision to stop questing here, because the world has just gotten even smaller.

So where do I go now?

Well, outside of quests, the best way to get experience is to fight monsters. And it just so happens I have a dedicated checklist of those.

And so with our shifting priorities comes our next order of business: there is a veritable mountain of unique monsters intended for you to come back to these early areas and fight once you're at the endgame. And once they get to levels this high, they start dropping advanced art books, which are the only way to fully upgrade your arts, so I have even more incentive to take on as many as I can feasibly beat. It is time to start the roundup.

I begin by venturing back into Bionis' Interior; this is where progress is, so it makes sense that this is where I can most efficiently grind my level up by fighting things I'm evenly matched with. I determine that Drakos Telethia are the worst ones Zanza ever did because they are huge and keep aggroing me on tiny walkways where there is no room to fight them. One of them is called Dark King Barbarus, who uses his ungainly hitbox to bump me clean off of the platform and into whatever nebulous acid is bubbling at the base of this chest cavity. The death counter goes up to 21.

Once I've made it through every unique here I'm about ready to call it for the night and plan to fight the boss before continuing the roundup, when a stream starts up that would be perfect background noise if I were to keep playing instead. The roundup never sleeps, actually. I take Junks back to Colony 6 and start working on the monsters on Bionis' Leg.

Here, I die a couple more times: The first is against Mysterious Barnaby, a spider who hangs out in a cave surrounded by egg sacs that have gigantic apes in them for some reason(???), and I get cornered when I forget Barnaby's four beautiful baby boys are considerably stronger than Barnaby himself. Barnaby is actually the monster I allowed to kill me way back at death #3, so this makes him the second-deadliest monster in this run after Mordred. He claims death #22.

The second is against Canyon Valencia, who I'd actually already killed once before. Valencia can drop the artbook for one of Fiora's arts that I am still looking for, so I'm repeatedly reloading my save to reroll what's in the chest he dropped, and that sometimes respawns him too; I attempt to circle around behind him for a back attack, but he is positioned too close to the edge of his cliff and his collision pushes me off. Gravity claims death #23.

I then move on to the most famous unique in the whole game, everyone's favorite guy Territorial Rotbart, who they keep bringing back in later games because he's just that iconic. Rotbart drops the artbook for Speed Shift, which turns me into a little gremlin freak, because along with extending its duration, upgrading this art also makes Fiora attack even faster. With this my full potential has been unlocked.

From here, I head back down again to Colony 9 to take out the one guy there, and also do decide to officially finish every quest while I'm there (save for Reyn's skill branch quest). By the time I'm done it's one in the morning, so I call it here.

I enter day 18 with a plan.

There are two monsters left to knock out on Bionis' Leg: one is Armoured Rockwell, who is a bit above my level but workable and has an artbook I want for Riki, and then I finally feel like I'm strong enough to handle Mysterious Barnaby's very large sons. (I have chosen to pass on Immovable Gonzalez, another guy who has come back for later games, because he is level 90 and has a spike that triggers just by standing near him.) From here, I talk to Miqol and head to Makna from the interior to knock out the monster from the one voice-acted quest I started earlier and the notable quest left in Frontier Village. My last stop then takes me to Satorl Marsh, where there is a guy named Veteran Yozel who has the artbook for Back Slash, and another large ape named Indomitable Daulton. From here I can move on.

Our first leg (heh) of this plan goes smoothly enough. Rockwell is a bit of an uphill battle, but the endgame gives you plenty of options to pull through those, and the pods that Barnaby's boys are in are so much lower-leveled than the boys themselves that they don't even aggro and hatch anymore. From there it's over to Makna where the Mysterious Telethia awaits us; I do not switch away from Fiora to deal with this thing's Soul Read, so I spend approximately an eternity standing there hitting nothing but being too good at the game to actually die and rearrange my party, and then it's dead. Cool.

Frenzied Bana is a bit slow-going, but we deal with him just fine, and I internally howl with excitement like some sort of wild beast when I see that my rewards for this quest include a Haste V gem. Oh my god I can make Fiora even faster. They should never have given me this much power, but I'm glad they did anyway. Thank you for enabling me, Bana.

When I reach Satorl, however, I run into a problem: I could manage Veteran Yozel on his own, but I have forgotten that he wanders around with a gang of like four other mooks who I definitely cannot also take with him. Indomitable Daulton is similarly in a group, and he's even stronger, though his monster type is a bit more of a pushover. I decide to change course and move on with the story so I can come back to these guys later. It's back into Bionis' Interior I go to take on Lorithia, who I'm plenty overleveled for by now.

Lorithia is a bit infamous because she has stupid high physical defense and is one of the only main story encounters who is balanced to be fought by Melia instead of Shulk, so a lot of first-timers get stuck on her for a while. That reputation and the fact that she says "YOU'LL PAY FOR YOUR INSOLENCE" over and over when you hit her are the only notable things about her, because her character is a cardboard cutout of a vaguely seductive evil woman who does not actually do any seducing. In spite of this I have recently latched onto her like a remora for reasons that, seeing her in-canon again, I honestly cannot explain. I see her concept of an extremely divorced mad scientist woman and I am compelled to realize the potential there that the writers completely missed. She's like a pet project to me.

None of this matters, because she is dead. I count three insolences paid for; I didn't even notice how quickly her health bar went down because Melia's combat loop is so hypnotic that my eyes were glued to the arts palette the whole time.

And then it's time to set off into Prison Island. Barring a setpiece map at the very end, this is the final area of the game. We made it.

The first room has a couple of the collectible we were asked for back in Colony 6, which is something called a Death Lychee. Because Prison Island has no place for subtlety there is something of a theme to its fruits, which is that they are all evil somehow. The Hell Raspberry. The Deadly Kiwi. Zanza. (I'm allowed to make this joke because I'm gay.)

We make it through to its last room in a little over an hour, knocking out all of the uniques here along the way; the one on the balcony outside of that final room, Masterful Gigapur, dies over a wall and drops his chest out of reach. From here, we just have to ring a bell to summon one more miniboss, and once we beat it we'll have the key to enter the final point of no return.

That miniboss is Dragon King Alcar, and the green boss barrier pops up around him when I move vaguely in his direction, so I have no choice but to fight him now. Here goes nothing, I guess?

Oh. Oh no. He has a spike. Oh no I'm running a playstyle that consists of "hit the enemy one billion times".

I brace myself to update my long-disused counter specifically for story fight deaths, which hasn't been touched since those two Arduns at the beginning of the game and that this guy would qualify for because he's mandatory, but Sharla does an admirable enough job of keeping me afloat while we slowly chip his health down. Eventually, I rack up enough tension to unleash a Final Cross and topple him, get the tiny bit more juice I need to fill the party gauge, and I start up a chain attack while he's still down and the spike is gone.

I have to make this count.

I open with Zero Gravity, a purple ether art; with Sharla in the party we have to play very smart with our options to get a viable chain combo going, because her options are very limited. Purple is the only offensive color I know she currently has. From here I move onto Riki and Freezinate, and then... there's a QTE to continue the chain attack with a link and go back to Fiora.

So. Something I have not mentioned about Sharla is that her talent art is not an attack like most other party members, but rather the ability to Cool Off: her gun can overheat if you use too many arts, and she can select her talent art to reset the heat back to zero. When Sharla is in this state she will temporarily be unable to act, and thus will not participate in a chain attack. By complete coincidence, I timed everything to land exactly in the few seconds when this happened.

Fiora does not have another purple art, but her talent art is available, which counts as a catch-all and will allow me to continue the chain. From there, I get lucky with another link and have Riki use Roly-Poly, a green topple art, and then get yet another link with my multiplier now maxed out at 5x damage. Because chain attacks ignore art cooldowns, I can now use Final Cross again, which also happens to be Fiora's strongest attack. It melts through like half of Alcar's health bar in one go.

The links keep coming. I'm getting stupid lucky, because these are random. Riki doesn't have anything to continue the combo, but he does have Say Sorry, which comes free with its own multiplier for every debuff the enemy has. It is a slight mistake to use this so soon, because it removes the topple, but I do not expect this to keep going and he's nearly dead anyway when it does in fact continue for two more links.

The chain attack ends, and Alcar now has just a sliver of health left. We finish him off before he can give us any more trouble. It is the coolest I have ever felt.

I save my game and see that we have just passed the 100-hour mark, right as we reached the point of no return. It's so perfect it hardly feels real. I close out the day on that note.

Tomorrow Zanza dies.

Day 19 is the finale. We have two more monsters to knock out, and then we're at the finish line.

As satisfying as my 100-hours moment was, there is work to be done: we trek back out of Prison Island, grabbing those last few Death Lychees along the way, and it's off to Satorl Marsh. Our first opponent today is Veteran Yozel, whose goons have now been bumped down a difficulty tier to something much more manageable, and I think it goes pretty smoothly even though it's enough to trigger the characters' "we barely survived that" voicelines.

Our second is Indomitable Daulton, who is two levels above Yozel; I grind a little bit against the other big funny monkeys hanging out around him to boost myself up a level and make this a little more realistic for myself. It's a bit rough anyway, because he's still a bit above my level, but I make it work. And that's all of them. That's every unique monster I want to do.

Zanza's level will still be displayed as "???" during the finale, but I know that internally he's about 83; I'm not there yet and I know by now that story bosses are stronger than anything else at their level, so I decide to resume the grind against the monsters that roam Satorl at night to get myself on equal footing with him. I run out of space for crystals one more time and do one last gem crafting session to clear it out a little.

From here, all that there is left to do is head back to Colony 6 to turn in those Lychees. I realize when I turn it in that this will have pushed the affinity here the rest of the way up to those four stars I needed for the two quests I couldn't do here before. I go start the first one up for the hell of it; I am asked to go talk to some guy in Frontier Village.

I decide I am not going to help this girl, actually. I have more important things to worry about.

The trip back to the point of no return is uneventful, and then it's finally time to finish this. Shulk returns to the lead. Before Zanza, we've got our final face-off against his favorite lackey; it's rough even with him bumped down a difficulty tier, not helped by the fact that he has a spike that does mercifully inflict paralysis instead of damage. Once again, the whole "fighting for our lives" thing is very felt.

Once he's down, we enter the very really final area. The first landmark that pops up here is, as always, a cool as hell moment, and the 3D effect makes the scale of this place even more mindboggling. This is, however, just a series of straight lines that each hold a fairly easy boss rematch, and then we make it to the end.

It's time to kill God.

I make the rookie mistake, the first time, of leaving Zanza's little summons alive and instead opting to focus in on the big man himself. They repeatedly use chain attacks on me, because that is also a thing enemies can do in this game, and I cannot keep up. I am felled by the power of a god for my 24th and final death.

Having learned from my mistake, I knock out the guardians ASAP on my next attempt, and then it's simply a fight to survive. Zanza has three phases with... a lot of health, and does a lot of damage. We are listening to his theme for a while, which is perfectly fine by me because it's probably my other favorite song in this soundtrack, but it does start to wear you down after a while. This is an endurance test above all else.

We very, very slowly whittle away his health while just squeaking by and finally make it to phase 3, where we get an extremely strong new Monado to kill him so good with. It still takes a while, but notably less so.

And then that's it. That's game.

We did it.

Following the ending and our New Game+ inventory management, our save file sits at 104:05.

We died a total of 24 times. 7 of these deaths were due to genuine incapacitation in combat; 3 happened in combat but were caused by getting pushed off a platform by an attack or an errant hitbox; 3 were intentional deaths at the hands of enemies; and 11 were caused by falling and environmental damage. The most dangerous enemies we faced were Magestic Mordred, with three deaths, followed by Mysterious Barnaby with two; the top three most dangerous areas were Central Factory, Bionis' Leg, and Valak Mountain, with five, four, and three deaths respectively.

Our "Skip It" reset counter sits comfortably at zero.

This challenge, while I lovingly call it the worst playthrough anyone ever did, has been a blast, and I'm glad it managed to transform the game in a way that kept it fresh enough for my nightmare ADHD brain to stick through an entire playthrough. It's rare that I'm motivated enough to do anything this long! Having a dedicated spot to record my thoughts as I went, it turns out, was exactly what I needed to keep me in the mindset, and summarizing them all every day probably helped a lot. It also meant I had enough to go off of to write this article! This might be the longest thing I've ever written. Seriously, this thing is approaching 19,000 words. What the hell. How did I do that.

In the end, I think that our little Fallen Arm surprise went the extra mile to turn this last act into something memorable, and for that, it was a blessing in disguise. If I'd just been able to do a second marathon of quests and overlevel as I'd originally planned, it... wouldn't have really ended all that different from a regular playthrough, because the advantage it would've given me would make the lack of defense much more negligible. Instead, I can say that I met God on an even playing field and beat him in nothing but my underwear. That's a way bigger achievement than "well, I did enough side content that it trivialized the final boss."

Because I am insane, I consider the possibility of keeping this challenge going through NG+. But my wrists are now in a state where they feel like they will snap off at a light breeze, so first, a much-deserved rest. If you've actually stuck around to read all the way to the end of this novella I have written, I hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you.