#(he was technically wrong in 2000 but i don't really count that against him because recounts did show that gore won)

[thedawningofthehour]

In a little over a week we'll find out if we're about to have our first female president or live in Gilead.

To all my American readers who are adults and able to vote: please. Please vote. For the love of god, please. I can't fucking do this again.

[iavulture]

I just want to say... (spoilers for CoV Chaos route)

This is late because I'm already doing a CoC run now, but I finally beat my first run on Canon of Vengeance! I thought it was good, though it was kinda weak near the end; then again, that might be because almost all of my team were at level 99, save for one or two others (I think it was Belial and Yoko, who joined late and I didn't use Grimoires on them).

What are my thoughts on the endgame fights? Uh... not too bad, but I think the Tiamat fight was more difficult than the Mastema fight (the latter which, again, was made easier bc I Grimoire'd almost everyone to 99 at that point). In fact, I couldn't help but laugh during the Mastema fight, especially because for some reason, he kept targeting Metatron even though he had Repel Light and ended up getting rid of all his press turns. Eventually, he wised up when his health got low and actually knocked him out along w/ two other demons in my active party (I think it was Khonsu Ra and my souped-up Angel, who, if you've noticed in my other SMTVV-related posts, I nicknamed "Bobiel" or "Bob" for short). I didn't really run into much trouble with his Crime and Punishment gimmick because I knew his weakness and only needed to worry about landing crits, which didn't happen too often that I gave him free press turns.

I digress, but did you know that besides wanting to give my Angel a nickname that has a sort of "average guy from accounting" air, I also gave him that nickname to reference the main character of a game released in 2000 called Messiah? Which is where the old Roblox death sound came from?

(Spoilers for the ending of that game!)

(And no, that's not edited, that's really where that sound came from.)

To sum up the boss fights in CoV Chaos (badly): Tiamat = actually kinda challenging, took me a little while to deal with her health-distributing gimmick and defeat her; Mastema = an easy, almost "friendly" match between him vs the MC and a bunch of other angels (and some other guys) because pretty much everyone resisted his attacks, until Mastema got pissy and actually Great Lament-ed my team a few times (but was defeated in the end anyway)

The Lucifer fight was even easier than the previously mentioned boss fights, save for a few mistakes I made for being too confident.

On the other hand... I might've been a little bit hypocritical when I chose to go Chaos on the first run, as I ended up bringing a whole bunch of Law-aligned demons (two metal angels, three of the four archangels, two of the lowest-ranked Divines, and Abdiel (although in her fallen form)) and used and invested in them a lot more than the others. See, I've always liked having Heralds (especially Metatron) on my endgame team, which made the whole thing a bit weird since I'm practically going against what the angels would've supported. But then again, it's not like any demons (including angels) who have made a contract with a summoner can disobey them, so technically what they personally think doesn't matter, right?

So yeah... I might've taken a few pages from Yakumo's book.

Don't get me wrong, I liked Vengeance, I really did! It's just that I kinda treated my first CoV run as a "test run" so to speak, because I wanted to see how different it is from vanilla V, and I ended up getting something that was better than I expected! And given that CoV only has two routes, I'm planning to do CoV Law last after going through all of vanilla V's endings for the sake of completing everything and getting (based on what I've heard) a satisfying conclusion.

Actually, IMO, I'm glad there's no neutral ending in CoV for the following reasons:

1) I think there are already so many routes (CoC Law, CoC Chaos, Neutral, "true" Neutral, CoV Law, and CoV Chaos) that adding a hypothetical CoV Neutral just bloats the ending count

2) Yakumo bowing out and cutting off the possibility of a Neutral route in CoV; this is kind of an inverse situation with IV: Apocalypse, which is very much a Neutral game because Law and Chaos are "bad endings" that lead to the game ending earlier

3) Sorry for those who like Chaos or Neutral, but this game is clearly meant to be a Law game. I just feel that it is with its themes and what's possibly its "favored" alignment in the mainline games (since SMTI = Neutral -> SMTII = Law -> SMTIII Nocturne = Chaos -> SMTIV/Apocalypse = Neutral -> SMTV/Vengeance = Law (didn't include Strange Journey/Redux bc it's in a weird position between mainline and spin-off)).

That's all for this post! I'll be off doing a CoC run, though I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing for the 2nd run for now.