Collection VN Others Unity Completed VenusBlood HOLLOW International [v1.0.3 + Fandiscs] [Ninetail & Dual Tail]

[Gazael]

So, I am massively confused. I downloaded the parts, since it was safer cause my internet is kinda wonky, but how do I install the game now? The file types are nothing what my pc recognizes

 

[Penitensary]

Playing Very Hard, I'm starting to find that enemy formations somewhat lack variety.

Ah, also another question: I lack the last two tactica. With these stats in the final chapter, I assume I'm boned for that playthrough?

From what i recall reading in the thread, the last two tactica require you to make a playthrough on the highest and second highest difficulty available, since you need the starting Law/Chaos bonus in order to even make it. I think it was something like 115 required out of 116 total, including the starting bonus?

 

[Duke Greene]

From what i recall reading in the thread, the last two tactica require you to make a playthrough on the highest and second highest difficulty available, since you need the starting Law/Chaos bonus in order to even make it. I think it was something like 115 required out of 116 total, including the starting bonus?

Yeah, I could have gotten about 9 more points by going normal Chaos instead of True Chaos and playing Thanatos instead of Very Hard. But honestly, I had to abandon the True Chaos mission because there was no way I could have beat even one of their divisions with my teams so Thanatos will have to wait a little bit.

 

[DuniX]

Can somebody clear up if godly physique self-destruct effect reduction works for the whole squad or just the unit it's on? Can self-D barrier be stacked with it?

It's not a barrier so it works like a wall.
How it works is it's additive if it's on the same unit, including godly+barrier+wall, and it multiplies if it's barrier from another unit.

 

[HHLONG]

hey guys, on ninetails site, I see the VBHI ver 1.07, do it work on the patch 1.03???

 

[Duke Greene]

hey guys, on ninetails site, I see the VBHI ver 1.07, do it work on the patch 1.03???

Yes. Just copy the patch you download from their site and overwrite.

Edit: Completely unrelated, but does anyone else find hilarious how one of the best tanks in the game is a pregnant loli?

 

[Fid9]

So, I went full chaos, 50 points and no law...

Origin game over, wtf is this? Okay I don't save very often, that might be my fault, I don't read walkthrough, that might be my fault.

But what on earth triggers this?! now that I read the walkthrough I lose my mind even more, it didn't say anything about it. Seriously, givemebackmytime!!

...

Well then, now that my rant is over, what did I miss? minimum law points?

 

[Duke Greene]

Did you pick "it's too early"? That choice is an automatic Game Over.

Edit
Finished Deus Thanatos (no Berserk yet and I still need to make a Thanatos run of the story to unlock the final Tacticas), some random comments:

• Some enemy setups seem designed purely for sandbagging and wasting your time, denying you S+ rank.
• Every single bataillon should have a division with Terrain Null because enemy setups have Fool's Lie everywhere.
• Conqueror Loki is by far the worst unit to fight against.
• Putting Sylvia in a division solely designed to reduce cost of tactical skills just to spam Celestia can work wonders.
• For some reason the devs seem to be under the delusion that the Ciel map is easier than the Ishta map. I don't know what they're smoking. Innocents and their palette swap are far, FAR more dangerous than other endgame units. Saint Iris likewise blows Voracious Vergius out of the water entirely.
• Recovery is absolutely ubiquitous, just to make sure you can't ever oneshot anything.
• I'm currently clocking 130 hours, probably because I don't use a walkthrough
• Getting ore for high-end equipment is incredibly obnoxious.
• I think Deus mode is slightly inferior to Frontier's Battle Royale. It's less of a clusterfuck of factions fighting each other and ofc no Niddhogg just appearing from nowhere to wreck your shit. It's still mighty fun for how out there the enemy teams can be though.

 

[Fid9]

Did you pick "it's too early"? That choice is an automatic Game Over.

No choice. Just dragged me to karvia(?) scene and game over.

 

[desmosome]

Getting ore for high-end equipment is incredibly obnoxious.

Kinda why I quit after Thanatos Deus Berserk 3. I just didn't feel like grinding out the final drops and determined I saw everything there is to see other than doing the final ultimate team building with everything unlocked.

 

[Duke Greene]

No choice. Just dragged me to karvia(?) scene and game over.

You're probably missing something then. I have no idea what though. Is Sylvia awakened? If you have so many Chaos points she should be, but if for some reason she isn't maybe you don't qualify for any route due to your points. But you would have gained a few Law points then... very weird. Did you cheat your points by chance? Maybe Anora's affection also has something to do with it.

 

[Zelos-sama]

No choice. Just dragged me to karvia(?) scene and game over.

In that case you were probably in a SLG then lost what is considered the main base. That's the only thing that I know to give instant end game (the Karvia scene is generic for any kind of dead end).

 

[Duke Greene]

Off topic but has anyone here played Brave? Am I right to assume the Evergreen Princess is really Leona?

 

[Duke Greene]

Okay I guess it's time to stop. Finished Thanatos, B2 Thanatos and B5 Hard. Strangely B5 Hard was more difficult than Thanatos (up until Onikage's Ambition at least, since it's where Deus mode stops on Hard) simply due to the sheer stat bloat. I don't want to go for B5 Thanatos, I already spent too much of my life on this. Like, fuck, 158 hours...

Enjoyable ride though.

 

[Some Guy 9001]

Anyone got any ideas how to unlock the one missing thing? I've done all the chaos route stuff, law route stuff, I have all CG's, so I did all endings (albeit not all on the same save...) only thing I can think of is Deus Thanatos, Elixir wars.

 

[Iexist]

Well, I've been spending way more time with this game than I honestly expected. I stuck my nose into Frontier too, because I genuinely love the Venus Blood art-style and tentacle stuff in general, but I remember giving up partway through and just relying on a save to watch scenes and stuff. Some of it was simply because I have too many hobbies and sinking hundreds of hours into a single game just doesn't work out well for me these days. However the rest of it was simply the fact that parts of the story didn't mesh well with me.

I like Leon a lot more than Frontier's dude. Even if he is his own many-greats-grandfather or something...

In any case, worried about something similar happening with Hollow, I first grabbed that one save from... uh... page 18 I think? Dropped it in, went in the game, deleted ALL the save entries, checked that CG and stuff is all there, and then started a new game. On Easy. Because I didn't think I'd be hooked this much. I also spent probably way too much time reading through all the 50 pages of this thread and learning about all the stuff I didn't know, or had forgotten since Frontier. All the Nulls, AI abuse and so on.

That means starter army, but I could still get the 1 mil gold and magic. And Doris, for some reason... Might be a bug of some kind. In any case, there's gonna be a lot of rambling here, so Imma gonna use some dropdowns.

Spoiler: About the Gameplay + Questions

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Spoiler: About Story and Scenes - Obviously, this has legit spoilers

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Spoiler: About Experiments, Grinding and Cheating

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Lastly, as a conclusion to this extremely lengthy post that's too haphazard to be a review (also fuck the terrible review interface), I want to thank ShinV for all the resources and informative posts he provided. I definitely wouldn't have been able to enjoy Hollow as much as I did if not for all the info and clarifications that you provided.

 

[Duke Greene]

For example, it was mentioned some pages back that Tiny Physique and Godly Physique stack. How? The former increases damage taken and provides a dodge chance, the latter decreases damage taken which includes Self Destruct damage. Wouldn't they sorta cancel each other out? It makes White Maiden Anora VERY confusing. Cuz sure, 4 hits out of five simply won't hit her, but how does the damage work out for that one 5th hit? Or more if you're just plain unlucky?

Tiny Physique and Godly Physique stack multiplicatively. Godly Physique reduces damage more than Tiny Physique increases it so they don't cancel each other out. This is why WM Anora is so good: she gets 80% dodge chance that can't be ignored by anything and still enjoys really high damage reduction. High values of Lethal Critical can still kill her though. Also, you really want someone with Terrain Null in her bataillon because Fool's Lie is a death sentence for her. That being said it's hard enough to get high values for both skills that it really applies only to her.

Absolute Cure is supposed to block all status ailments, but it doesn't (or it seems like it doesn't) block all debuffs. I take it that some, like Seal, are meant to still hit even if you have Absolute Cure?

Yep, Seal bypasses Absolute Cure. You can't do anything about that. You can cure Seal with tactical skills but since it forbids you to use them, if your entire division is sealed, well, you'll have to tough it out. As far as I'm aware nothing makes you immune to Seal.

Are some synergies just not meant to work out well? For example, all forms of Tsubaki have Lightning Boost, but it feels like there aren't enough Lightning type units to build up a good Division that doesn't have this skill end up as a wasted slot. Or rather, it's not that there aren't enough with the lightning type, but rather, those that are have no synergy around this type, or with Tsubaki's other types. Granted, the other elements don't seem to have that good of a synergy either, except fire and poison, and the former is mainly because of Cheerful Gal Sylvia and Dragon Bride Julia (75 Boost Fire between the two of them+20 Command fire from the Bride if you unlock her title) add in Suzu as the tank with 20 more Boost Fire and you have a good base for say, using Elza as an attacker. (Though I think Elza's better in a dedicated Dragon Squad).

Lightning types are more common near endgame. Seiryu, Fana, Corrupted Fana, all of them are lightning types and provide Lighting Boost on their own. It's admittedly not as easy as Fire to build around.

I think someone mentioned that Hard Berserk 5 might be more difficult than Base Thanatos. Is this actually true? Does that mean that if you can beat the former, you can beat the latter? As far as I understood, Berserk just adds levels and stat-dumps on units, but doesn't change the difficulty's formations, units or skills. As far as I've seen, skills are more important than stats in the long run and a good Division/battalion hits way above its apparent stats. Shouldn't Thanatos Divisions be much more tricky to manage?

It was me. Yes I found Berserk 5 Hard more difficult than Thanatos because the +100 levels given to all enemies make the stat difference between you and them massive. Enemies on Hard still have decent skills and sometimes decent equipment too so it isn't like the baseline for Hard completely sucks either. It was particularly notable for postgame units (like Vanishing innocents, Menace beasts and Filth damned souls) who tend to have very good skillsets and base stats even without equips.

How Feasible are attackers that don't have either high to near-max counter-resist, or some variation ranged attack/dimension slash? It feels like if you don't have high counter-resist, the attacker pretty much commits suicide on higher difficulties, but you definitely need at least one of those in a division whenever you see units with Evade floating around. Dragon scales can help, but not if the unit you're trying to kill has Dimension Slash, I think... Does DS apply on counter?

From my own experience, counter damage is absolutely bonkers at high difficulties. If you don't have very high counter resist then you must have Dragon Scales (Dimension Slash doesn't apply on counters) if you don't want to kill yourself. But Dragon Scales requires you to actually do good damage to work so those Vanishing Shells with insane Fatal Resist and Hardy Physique will still kill you on counter without DS... and DS triggers Evade. High difficulty play can be obnoxious sometimes

Now for your part about story... tbh I found story and characters to be significantly worse than Frontier's in pretty much every way. While Law route is very shonen manga at times Chaos was incredibly disappointing, with a brutish protagonist incapable of any creativity in his corruption and character arcs cut short. I found Nachtu to be the only redeeming feature of the route, he's at least halfway entertaining compared to big dumb "I eat everything" dragon.

 

[desmosome]

Just a few things to add. So 95 godly and 80 tiny would look like this 1*.05*1.8 = .09 = 9% damage taken. If you give her max godly, which you should, it's 3.6% damage taken.

There are A LOT of things to build against in high difficulty, and counter is one of them. How to not die to counters. Best way is to have dimension slash + high flank attack to bypass some evading assholes like Lucifer. Not many units can do this, and dimension slash by itself is fine as well as far as not dying to counter is concerned. You need a non-dimension attacker for backup in that case. For non-dimension attacks, You need damage mitigation via some combination of hardy/godly/slayer def/counter resist. If you can add some dragon scales, even better. Dragon scales by itself will not be reliable. The more damage you can mitigate and the more damage you deal yourself, the more effective dragon scales would be. Eliza is generally safe from any counters with her 90 counter res, 80 slayer def, and 100 dragon scales + her great damage skills. Someone like Sallya does enormous damage so her 100 dragon scales + 40 godly is enough. There are some other top tier ones for non-dimension attacks and a bunch of passable ones that might occasionally take too much damage and mess up the whole formation. For end game, ranged attackers are not real attackers. They have the same weakness as dimension slash (evaders) while not having the additional damage boost. Ranged attack is a defensive skill used to prevent weak units from dying to counters needlessly.

edit: If you could get 100+ parry and high deadly resist, you could parry the counters. I can't really think of any unit that has this combination while being able to do damage other than Loki. He is a special case really... I just used him as a pure parry tank though, rather than as an attacker.

 

[Iexist]

-SNIP-

Hm... I can see what you mean with WM Anora, especially if the dodge from TP can't be reduced by Flank Attack. That said, her gearing options aren't particularly great and her title doesn't help with her major issues either, even if Action Boost IS nice for slower divisions... Her tactical skills look pretty good too. 50% stat boost is pretty insane, and she also has a 35% stat reduction for the enemy too on another skill. Plus Action boost.... Might actually be worth running her in a high strat support division. Though I'm not entirely sure what options would be good for that because Yuni and/or Vestalis are better used with Iris who might not have stat boosts that are as good, but has stronger skills overall. Not to mention that she just plain murders anything that doesn't have ungodly high Evade...

As for the Seal thing. Hm. Dauntless is the only way to prevent that from happening, by the looks of things, but I don't think ANY gear has it as a skill and wasting a title for something that should only ever hit your tank anyway seems like a waste. The only tank unit I know for sure that has amazing tactical skills in every way is WM Anora anyway....

For the Lightning thing, I have two of those units, and I'd have to check the conditions for Corrupted Fana, but overall, still doesn't look like there'd be particularly good synergy. Oh well, it would have been absurd to expect all types to have some kind of team. Plus, some types have teams but are too weak anyway, like the Human type which just doesn't have really strong units. Which fits with the lore I guess, and who wants to play humans in a tentacle focused game anyway? XD

When it comes to Hard B5, that's interesting. I was able to beat it, though not mastering, with a number of divisions that I wouldn't consider perfect by any means, and it didn't seem that bad. Admittedly, that might have been partly because I performed liberal Gula abuse to lower the rift between divisions stats. Yuni ftw. Also had Naryu in the lead division with that one R12 item that basically grants you Fool's Lie 4 when mixed with her innate 2. Of course, sniping the FUCK out of anything with Terrain Null or Fool's lie was a priority.... but that's what Elza's for in another dragon focused Division. Max Spell, Self-D and Strat Barriers on the main two as well. Shelling was tad of a problem... but not a huge one with all the healing.

That said, I genuinely don't know what it'd take to S++ Hard B5... I also did it in the Normal Law Route, which is admittedly easier, even if friggin' Dragon butt and his Double Slay all could counter Elza for 300-400 damage, per attack, it wasn't anything the division couldn't heal at the end of round.

Still, this does mean I should be able to work something out to work my way through Thanatos with my bum-rush strategy meant just to help me unlock titles and characters. Not trying to high-score anything after all. The trick I found is having a defensive battalion for that one objective that you can't lose which absolutely refuses to die and which preferably doesn't take too much damage so you don't waste resources healing them. Ideally, you don't want them killing off enemy battalions completely either, because the AI doesn't seem to heal them in between turns and doesn't replace them unless they're wiped. That makes follow-up attacks easier and buys you time until your attacking Battalion can smash the objective point.

-SNIP-

That's honestly really interesting, and very annoying. Especially when there's crap like that one Seraph that has 100 Evade innately, which means you absolutely need an attacker that can smash it, because DS won't. Or I guess poison field. Hm... I guess a poison division could also serve as an anti-Evade measure as long as said Evade is not on a Poison/Undead unit... Like say the Evergreen Princess which is also a good tank in general. I suppose I won't have to worry about anything like that unless I do Deus, which I'm not sure I will. Dunno if any of the unlocks there interest me.

For now I'll rely on Elza for my main battalion. She's in a division that's basically an entire cheerleading squad of dragon girls that are either boosting her up or making sure that other things can't kill her, and that she gets healed up from what things there are that can actually damage her on counters. Which is usually only bosses. Probably a tad overkill to have all the Liese's and her Awakened mom in the same division... but it gets results and helps the other division with DG Leon sweep more easily... so I guess that's fine.

Now I just have to figure out a good 3rd Division that can properly keep up with the first two and improve the other three Defense divisions and I'll be golden... at least as far unlocking all the stuff I want to make my own version of the Divine murder everything Division with Iris as the core murder-machine.

The thing that bothers me the most is honestly the fact that the AI of your units is just as stupid as the AI of the enemy units. So after the initial target of whatever attack you start is murdered, you only have very minimal control over what a division hits next. The fact that Initiative isn't fixed further complicates things, because there's no way for me to guarantee that, for example, in a Division with Elza and Eden, Elza will always go first to kill an Evade unit and soften things up and then Eden can sweep.

Also... is it me, or does Elza just hit harder than Eden when both have similar amounts of boosts? Though Granted Eden can stack up more attacks and/or AoE more easily, but I feel like that doesn't matter as much when Elza's hits just seem much stronger in general. Not to mention that Elza can get away with lower tier gear. I dunno... maybe Eden works better on things much harder than Hard B5 where her stacking of DS and HS matters more. Or maybe Max Power attack and Wild Fang simply have a bigger impact than it seems. Or maybe it's that one title I messed up on Eden... but not having 40 Lethal Crit doesn't feel like it should have that much of an impact..

 

[Duke Greene]

Deus is significantly harder (and more interesting imo) than story mode. You also kind of need to do it in order to unlock several good units via the Key of Destiny. As for Eden, she has Terrain Null and Dimension Slash as leader skills, which is really worth that limited spot imo. Her equipment options also allow for really optimizing her damage and she counts both as dragon and insect unit, meaning she benefit enormously from Altered Liese and her Princess Self-sacrifice title (75 Dragon Boost + 75 Insect Boost). I almost want to play Lagoon just because she's a main character there...