Since launching in 2004 in the title Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, Demi-Fiend has always defaulted to be in the top of the most difficult hidden bosses in history.
Perhaps for modern gamers, Demi-Fiend or Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner seems a bit strange because these are names that appeared more than 15 years ago (2003, 2004). Those who love Megaten surely know Demi-Fiend is one of this series’s symbols, the main character in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. In simple terms, Demi-Fiend may represent the end, destruction, rebirth, or slavery, at the player’s option.
Demi-Fiend appears a lot in Megaten games as a guest or a hidden boss. Still, the most famous is that this character is present in Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, with the game’s strongest boss – even the most horrible has ever appeared in the whole history of JRPG. In comparison, the most difficult bosses in Dark Souls are just desserts, appetizers if compared to Demi-Fiend.
Is Souls-like the craziest game genre that has ever appeared in the past decade? Souls-like can be considered a core change of the action game. This seems to be due to the community pumping too much rather than its real value.
The most demanding boss in human history
First, to face Demi-Fiend, players need to complete the game once and start over in New Game +. Of all the guides and FAQs of the time, the first sentence every gamer had to memorize before meeting Demi-Fiend, was to max out all stats, max every skill possible. Of all the hidden bosses that have appeared, perhaps only Demi-Fiend is rated at the required level of 99 (maximum), but that is only a tiny part.
Demi-Fiend has a too bizarre mechanism that prohibits players from using absolute defense skills, in Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner has Null (disable), Drain (steaming) skills. Passive and Repel (counterattack) damage taken. If any character dares to wear these skills when entering the match, Demi-Fiend will immediately launch Gaea Rage – a full-target attack with 10,000 damage (your maximum blood is 999), until all your party is dead.
And yet Demi-Fiend also resistant to almost all damage in the game; the only exception is Almighty and Earth, meaning the player has very few options to fight it. You need to max your level and max your real skill because only the last levels can touch Almighty attacks that can kill the boss.
Then Demi-Fiend will not fight alone; it will always have two children accompanied by the task of buffing and debuffing to weaken the player. Each time one is killed, the next round Demi-Fiend will immediately summon a new one. This is not random but follows a rotating list, a total of 6 such. Now comes this good repertoire, every three summons, the next Demi-Fiend will immediately use Gaea Rage, which means you will have to survive 2 Gaea Rages if you want to fight won this match.
And to increase the misery, we will heal their owners if Demi-Fiend drops half a bottle. Fortunately, they only heal once. The developers also count that the player will intentionally not kill the followers, so Demi-Fiend cannot use Gaea Rage, so they have set a counter. If a student survives 30 turns, It will automatically kill itself use Recarmdra (full health recovery for Demi-Fiend).
Demi-Fiend has too terrible damage; almost all of its normal attacks are wide-area and effect, not to mention they also have a critical hit rate. In Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, every time a character hits a death or weakness, an additional bonus will be awarded, with Demi-Fiend being given two consecutive passes; after a few hits, you will have to pump blood, resulting in insufficient damage to kill it quickly and subject to Gaea Rage.
The match against Demi-Fiend revolves around a single proposition that is how to survive through Gaea Rage; of course, the game does not play so bad that the entire way of life of gamers, there are three ways to fight this attack:
– 1: Evade naturally (probably less than … 1%).
– 2: Use the Close Call skill (it will automatically retain one health when the character receives fatal damage, affects only one whole game).
– 3: Use Null Sleep (this skill will automatically dodge all attacks if the name is in a Sleep state).
Japan and the most popular games globally: Part 4 When people feel sad, people will relax. When the gaming experts find they will prepare limbs and start calculating to communicate with each other.
Never win if not lucky enough.
Ignoring the natural dodging problem, even if you use Close Call, you still have almost no way to play with Demi-Fiend. Because almost certainly the whole party will activate Close Call in the first Gaea Rage and the sentence easy to see is the second time to get something to live? The only way – emphasizing that the only way to survive is to bring Null Sleep and calculate the Demi-Fiend’s summoning cycle because, at the 3rd and 6th summons, this boss will summon skilled disciples. Domina (has a chance of causing the entire party to enter Sleep).
The player will have only one of these students to use Dormina, and then right after is Gaea Rage, and you will have to press your stomach and pray to God to make some way for your party to get Sleep because that is the only way to live survived this damned attack. This is why Demi-Fiend is the most challenging boss in history ever to appear because it requires calculating and training, but luck is also an essential part of the victory.
That’s not to mention that if you’re unlucky, even if you get hit by Domina and then Sleep, the affected person will still be able to wake up the next turn, then die with Gaea Rage. Finally, to increase the attractiveness, the easiest way to hit Domina is to make the Luck index as low as possible, and the lower Luck, the easier it is to kill the death hit from Demi-Fiend.
Luck plays a huge role when fighting Demi-Fiend; everything in this match is in the balance of 50/50 because Demi-Fiend’s followers often use Mudo and Maha-type skills rate of killing the character immediately). On a nice day when your party eats 1 Mamudoon and dies completely, it should be quite inhibiting. That’s why the player never wants Demi-Fiend’s followers alive, but the more they kill them, the closer the Gaea Rage door becomes – a vicious circle that does not end.
A match with Demi-Fiend usually ranges from 40 to 60 minutes, a considerable amount of time compared to an RPG game. It requires you to concentrate absolutely to calculate the right turn. It’s much more challenging than being bossed in Souls-like games because boss battles like this are fast and you get reset always, and for Demi-Fiend, it’s too long a big deal.
Imagine in those long 60 minutes, and you miscalculate a turn or unlucky to die out after 30 minutes of tryhard break; that feeling not fun at all, mainly when it depends on luck again. The soundtrack when fighting Demi-Field is used for the monster battles in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne; it implies that for this boss, the player is no different from clash battles … random encounter.
Because of such an unbelievably tricky level, Demi-Fiend has a temporary tactic called vile to make it easier for people to handle him, mainly if it does not depend on luck. This tactic, called the Red Star (after the nickname of the person who invented it), revolves around “keeping” how Demi-Fiend does not use Gaea Rage. A small trick here is that if you use debuff spells on Demi-Fiends the next time the band will solve it, the debuff mustn’t be counted as a turn in the counter.
Because of this flaw, the player can take advantage when Demi-Fiend summons the 3rd demon, Pixie, then accepts to survive a Gaea Rage. From here on, Pixie will always use Megidolaon; you have to count the number of times until it no longer has enough mp and starts debuffing. After a few turns like that, Pixie will run out of mp and be considered useless. The battle will be much easier because Demi-Fiend cannot continue to use Gaea Rage, as well as one of his two disciples is broken, but it is still a long and tiring process of over 60 minutes of torture. Physical strength. Even after having the Red Star because there are still very few people who can afford this boss, it was evident that not everyone is good at counting turns with such patience.
Among all the rankings of the most challenging bosses in history, Demi-Fiend has always been honored to have a slot even at the top. Its popularity goes beyond the boundaries of the game Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, as well as a benchmark for any gamer who can overcome this near-non-human challenge.
