If You Get Stuck in Hall of Malice

[wildfire393]

After using The Cog in the Hall of Malice, it activates, and locks you out of using the Grail while inside.

If you have not opened the normal door to Hall of Malice, and have only been there through the Corridor of Blood, it's VERY possible to get stuck and find yourself in a bad situation. There's a Grail Tablet directly below the activation room, and if you overwrite your only/primary save, you are now trapped in the Hall of Malice.

Take a deep breath, and don't panic. You're in a tight spot, but it IS possible to get out.

Start by going Right from the room you're in, and you'll encounter ths Sphinx boss. The easiest way I've found to deal with him is to stay on the upper platforms and throw Earth Spears straight down on his head. His sole mode of attack is creating energy rings which are fairly easy to dodge from directly overhead. When you've finished him, go ahead and save again.

The next part is going to be a little tedious. You're going to want to farm up enough green orbs so that you're within 60 of a heal. This may require loading your game, killing a few enemies, and then saving and restarting.

Once you've hit that point, it's time to proceed to your second challenge. Go Right from the Sphinx room and you're in a relatively safe room. Make you way through it and go Down. There's a boss here but you can ignore him, just cut straight left and drop down again. This brings you to your second boss, Phaia.

Phaia is kind of tricky, but two tips make her a lot easier.

1) First stage: Your shield can block her giant green death orbs. You can take no damage from her first stage by standing at the far right of the platforms 2 or 3 platforms down, taking a swing at her as she goes up and a second swing as she goes down, then backing up a few steps and turning around to shield her blast.

2) Second stage: Only one of her or her boar are vulnerable to damage at any given point. When they fly across the screen, sometimes, but not every time, a purple soul will fly between the two of them. Whichever one ends up with the soul is vulnerable until the next swap. Mostly this means you're going to be hitting whoever's on the Right, but sometimes they will trade places without swapping the Soul and you're going to have to change sides. Wail on whoever is currently in possession of the Soul and you should make quick work of her.

Grab your orb to heal full, and brace yourself, because this next fight is a doozy.

I'm sure he has a real name, but i'm going to call him "Giant Crab Bastard". He floods the screen with tiny bubbles that deal 4 damage, shoots lasers that deal 12-16, and swings his claws to deal around 80. Occasionally, he will jump up, swinging both claws, and then he extends his eyeball for a few seconds, and it shoots two beams before retreating. Colliding with any part of him deals a huge amount as well.

You'll notice the ladder on the left is open, and you can go down! Unfortuantely, the Corridor of Blood door is sealed until you beat him. However, while you are on the bottom screen, the fight continues (you will hear the occasional beam sound and you can see him tense his legs and jump) BUT, crucially, bubbles do not spawn.

The winning strategy I found was this:
Hang out on the ladder at the very top of the bottom screen. When you see his legs tense (which will always come at the end of a cluster of 2 or 3 beam sounds), start climbing. Jump up to the middle row of platforms, run to the middle a few steps to the left of where the eye extends. Jump (just tap the button so it's a short jump or his beam hits you) and swing your katana. Do this a second time. Then, after landing, swing your katana a third time and you should catch the eyeball retreating for a third hit. As soon as that swing ends, immediately book it to the left. You will take 1-3 bubble hits but should be able to get back down to the ladder without taking any beam or claw hits. Repeat until dead. Executed perfectly, you should be able to kill him taking only ~150 damage. This assumes you have the Vajra but no relevant software combinations. If you have the Edged Damage combo or the increased Invulnerability Frames combo they are exceptionally helpful here.

Hopefully this helps anyone who makes the same mistake I did.

[Juno Brier]

I made this same mistake too in my run.

It was very fortunate I had the foresight to buy the Angel Shield first.

[King in Yellow]

Stuck here for hours, no Angel Shield or anything. What kind of retarded level design is this? You can't even walk back to the tablet after each fight. ♥♥♥♥ this level.

[Broso]

Yeah this is basically this game's version of the Dimensional Corridor, but that one at least didn't have this kind of lock in scenario.

[Freudia]

Originally posted by King in Yellow:

Stuck here for hours, no Angel Shield or anything. What kind of retarded level design is this? You can't even walk back to the tablet after each fight. ♥♥♥♥ this level.

It is this game's Dimensional Corridor. Dimensional Corridor functioned extremely similarly to this, with the one exception being that you weren't ever really in a situation where you couldn't leave the area, since once you got into it, you had an exit that spat you out into the Endless Corridor open.

The two changes I'd personally make to Hall of Malice is just make the door at the top open as part of the cog activation and not due to a Heaven's Labyrinth 'puzzle', and very slightly nerf Karkinos or whatever the dumb crab boss's name is, because that crab is quite a fair bit unreasonable to do at the end of a gauntlet branch. Phaia isn't bad, just annoying (and time-consuming), but the crab is really obnoxious, mostly because if you do fall down getting back up is way more frustrating than it should be.

[SOMETHIN BEAUTIFULS GONNA HAPPEN]

Yeah, this is the worst thing they've ever designed. They ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up bad here. If you're like me, and got here without either the silver or angel shield, Phaia is a pain in the ass. Here's what I did to trivialize her fight:

Run into the room and stand right here: https://i.imgur.com/hNQuFdu.jpg

Jump over 2 of her attacks, and after the second one jump onto the top right platform. You should get there right as shes arriving to get hit. Get 3-4 hits in, and jump back to your spot. Rinse & repeat.

You can do the same thing when she phases, you just have to be more patient and try not to get hit when they go across the screen. The HP bar is also a lying sack of ♥♥♥♥, so don't put too much stock in it.

[Sakura Hana]

That's an interesting strategy for the crab, what i did is kept jumping over his eye and threw down an earth spear right at it and kept doing so, if i saw him ready to attack me with a claw i would use the 2nd jump to back to the platform, unfortunately this strategy makes it kind of insane to dodge his jump attack other than trying to gain iframes from a bubble/caltrops so it doesnt hit you, when his eye was up then i just used whip on him.

But yes i made the same mistake of being locked up in there.

[「Kei-Chi」]

Yep, just got stuck in here too, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crab, on the upside i found out that if you have enough caltrops you can pretty much wreck Phaia with shower of em from above.

[King in Yellow]

If you have a ton of earth spears the crab can actually be cheesed!

Stay on the top screen (where the crab is), on the ladder. Whenever the crab stops shooting and gets ready to deploy its eye, you have enough time to climb up the ladder and throw one or two spears. Rince and repeat.

It takes forever but if you do it well you can't get hurt (except by a random bubble but they only do 4 damage so it's no big deal).

[Dan]

Originally posted by Freudia:

Originally posted by King in Yellow:

Stuck here for hours, no Angel Shield or anything. What kind of retarded level design is this? You can't even walk back to the tablet after each fight. ♥♥♥♥ this level.

It is this game's Dimensional Corridor. Dimensional Corridor functioned extremely similarly to this, with the one exception being that you weren't ever really in a situation where you couldn't leave the area, since once you got into it, you had an exit that spat you out into the Endless Corridor open.

The two changes I'd personally make to Hall of Malice is just make the door at the top open as part of the cog activation and not due to a Heaven's Labyrinth 'puzzle', and very slightly nerf Karkinos or whatever the dumb crab boss's name is, because that crab is quite a fair bit unreasonable to do at the end of a gauntlet branch. Phaia isn't bad, just annoying (and time-consuming), but the crab is really obnoxious, mostly because if you do fall down getting back up is way more frustrating than it should be.

Getting to crab wasn't hard. You can skip the skull, Phaia is easy (and bugged to keep dropping EXP orbs, so you can enter crab with full life). Even with Lamp of Time and 3rd whip, crab still had a good chunk of life left. Easily the worst boss of the 11 children.

[Armored Chocobo]

Originally posted by Dan:

Originally posted by Freudia:

It is this game's Dimensional Corridor. Dimensional Corridor functioned extremely similarly to this, with the one exception being that you weren't ever really in a situation where you couldn't leave the area, since once you got into it, you had an exit that spat you out into the Endless Corridor open.

The two changes I'd personally make to Hall of Malice is just make the door at the top open as part of the cog activation and not due to a Heaven's Labyrinth 'puzzle', and very slightly nerf Karkinos or whatever the dumb crab boss's name is, because that crab is quite a fair bit unreasonable to do at the end of a gauntlet branch. Phaia isn't bad, just annoying (and time-consuming), but the crab is really obnoxious, mostly because if you do fall down getting back up is way more frustrating than it should be.

Getting to crab wasn't hard. You can skip the skull, Phaia is easy (and bugged to keep dropping EXP orbs, so you can enter crab with full life). Even with Lamp of Time and 3rd whip, crab still had a good chunk of life left. Easily the worst boss of the 11 children.

I'd add a Hot spring and make it so the individual rooms re-open after you kill it's miniboss.

I'd make the Skull stop near the end of the platform and back up after a while.

Karkinos takes forever to die to the point that you MUST cheese him or he'll just whittle you down.

Dimensional Corridor did the "lock out" thing, too, but it was fun and not a pain in the ass.