GRAD Revengeance difficulty fresh start- ludicrously cheap or not?

[XDarkSephirothX]

What on earth is up with this boss when you're doing revengeance from a fresh start (meaning you don't retain tems from a previous playthrough), every time I try to fight them some cheap BS happens:

-One of the giant explosive containers blows up while off the screen and a chunk is propelled into my back because of the random physics they have, I get knocked over and a stunlock is started when the GRADs also start hitting me.

-I try to slice one of the homing missiles to get health and so that it doesn't blow up in my face, one of the GRADs skates in from off screen and my attack is deflected by it, they stunlock me to death before I can recover from the deflection animation.

-I get trapped in one corner of the room because they blew up all the explosive containers and their debris blocked me in that corner of the room, then suddenly out of nowhere one of their attacks comes flying towards me and I have no room to dodge it.

-Both of the GRADs go side to side with me, use their high movement speed to ensure I can't get behind them and barrage me with attacks, I can't dodge it coming from two angles because I need to move to the side of one of them to dodge the attacks, which I can't do because there is one to each side.

-I'm parrying the "foot spin" attack, the other GRAD decides to shoot bullets at me, causing me to PERFECT PARRY THE LITTLE BULLET, my counter attack goes through the GRAD doing the spinning foot attack without damaging it (apparently because GRADs can't take damage from counter attacks unless you countered their own attack) and then I get hit before the counterattack animation ends.

-I perfect parry an attack from one of the GRADs, one of the big homing missiles is fired by the other GRAD and hits me before I can recover.

-I go into the general vicinity of a wall which causes my camera to spazz out randomly and face the wall, causing a battle between my mouse and the game to commence for control of the camera (I know locking on will fix this, but I can't keep the camera on both GRADs if I do that and the fact that there are two enemies will make the camera change targets constantly every time i move my mouse 1 inch)

-I cut the cannon of a GRAD off with blade mode, but because it already went into the attack animation of firing the cannon it proceeds to fire projectiles out of thin air.

-I get hit by *something* while the entire screen is completely covered with smoke and fire causing me to be unable to see anything.

-Raiden gets caught on something (what that "something" is, I didn't know, he didn't appear to be making physical contact with anything) and dragged across the entire room.

It doesn't help that I had several parry problems I didn't get for the rest of the game here either, but that might just be me getting confused because I'd fought them for so long:

-Sometimes my parry just plain won't come out, even though I press the parry about half a second before the attack strikes me raiden won't parry, or he'll go into the parry animation and get hit anyway.

-Perfect parry timing seemed broken, sometimes I'd wait right until an attack was about to hit me, then it was just a regular parry, other times I was mashing parry rapidly before the attack even came out and it would be a perfect parry.

-Mashing parry didn't help with the parries not coming out, even though I could just mash parry in the direction of attacks to parry any other attack (even fast attacking bosses like monsoon)

I won eventually by trying to use one GRAD as cover from the other's projectiles (Which was very ineffective because they move about so much, but it was better than trying to dodge both their attacks at the same time) and perfect parrying their shield attacks (Regular attacks did ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, almost no damage at all even when they were EMP stunned).

I eventually got a run where they used the health-dropping missiles enough to tank through possibly undodgable attack combinations and "my cover" didn't skate about too much or go near the walls (therefore causing the camera to spazz out, naturally), the last one tried to cheap my out by hitting me with a projectile immediately after using Zandatsu on the first one before my camera could reposition itself and then just skating about shooting projectiles instead of stopping to let me hit it, but I won.


Now, I have never seen anybody give an answer on how to do this from a fresh start, all the advice involves killing the first one extremely fast using endgame items like wig or ripper mode (neither of which I have), even with my highest upgraded blade I could possibly have at this point it still took about 6 perfect parries to down the first one, can some extremely skilled player please tell me how to do this, or is this just there to tell people to GTFO if they're trying a fresh start Revengeance run?

[neon.wir]

I happened to have a new game on Revengeance from a while ago leaving off at mission R-02, so I decided to give it a whirl. I managed fine. It took about an hour or so of retries, but I ended up squeezing on by with a B rank. No upgrades. I recorded it for reference, but then I remembered youtube existed and found someone else already put up a video going for the S rank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLOwRwR5x20bY0l8iMaOlqwWsTw7x-GCqL&v=LI8myPxLzd4&feature=player_detailpage#t=685

Unfortunately, a major issue with playing MGR well is just whether or not enemies happen to behave favorably for your situation. The GRAD boss fight in R-02 on the Revegeance difficulty setting is easily the worst fight in the entire game (maybe second to Armstrong in Jetstream Sam's DLC) and no matter how good you reallly are at the game, it will largely be based on luck whether you do well or not. The game itself is not balanced well for playing through on Revengeance on a new game either, so that doesn't help.

[XDarkSephirothX]

Originally posted by Neon:

Unfortunately, a major issue with playing MGR well is just whether or not enemies happen to behave favorably for your situation. The GRAD boss fight in R-02 on the Revegeance difficulty setting is easily the worst fight in the entire game (maybe second to Armstrong in Jetstream Sam's DLC) and no matter how good you reallly are at the game, it will largely be based on luck whether you do well or not. The game itself is not balanced well for playing through on Revengeance on a new game either, so that doesn't help.

Eh, that's what I was worried about, it does in fact look like the guy in that video got very lucky (they used their shield attacks a lot and didn't spend most of the fight skating about). Oh well, I'm past it now and hope I don't run into any other fight like that (I fought two grads at the start of the next chapter but they were both the weak non-boss versions).

[Miqs]

Originally posted by Neon:

(maybe second to Armstrong in Jetstream Sam's DLC)

He isn't as bad as people make it out to be. You can really cheese him with charge attacks.

[neon.wir]

Originally posted by Miqs:

Originally posted by Neon:

(maybe second to Armstrong in Jetstream Sam's DLC)

He isn't as bad as people make it out to be. You can really cheese him with charge attacks.

He's a total pain in the ass during that latter half of the battle no matter how you spin it.