And with that I’m done with kh3d for now. If I ever come back to it, the only playthrough I might wanna do would be no commands, that would finally give me a playthrough where I have to get cleaner and more well thought out fights with xemnas, young nort, and AVN. At one point in time, I had planned to do both this game and BBS without commands, but I realized that the post game would be impossible like that. But after searching youtube, I’ve found proof that even the hardest bosses of both games can be beaten like that, especially if you actually take the time to grind to level 99. I had been considering doing a no magic playthrough of this game, but thats too simple so if I do play this game again it will be no commands at all.
Anyways, this fight is a bit different as Riku, not sure who has it harder. For Sora the punch combo requires better spacing and timing since if you’re too close at the start or you block too late the punches can and will hit around your guard, Riku doesn’t need to worry about that at all. However, Sora can reposition far faster and smoother with superglide which is really useful for keeping the fight away from walls and such to avoid camera fuckery. The superglide also makes dodging the buttslam move in the lightning phase (technically he can use it in the normal phase too, but very rarely and I think only if you’re airborne) super easy. With Riku using Dark Roll you can pretty consistently get away from it, but you need to be wary of the arena and how much room you have since your movement is clunkier and less fluid plus you have way less leeway due to slower speeds. Riku is also less likely to get clipped by shockwaves in the lightning phase, however strangely enough I think he’s also more likely to get clipped by lightning during the “DM” since dark barrier seems to have a longer delay between casts compared to standard guard. Overall it takes longer as Riku since he gets less staggers (Sora’s counter is great for getting staggers in this fight) and he struggles more with the lightning phase due his lack of superglide. Honestly this fight is kinda neat in that it really does emphasize the differences in Sora and Riku’s gameplay a lot more than anything else in the game. Sora’s counter, glide, and Riku’s dark barrier and roll all come into full effect in this fight making it feel genuinely a bit different with the two characters. If only their exclusive commands came in handy here at all, but no just more balloon because its KH3D and why use anything else.
Kinda mid fight. My first impression of Julius when I was a young teenager was that he was a shit superboss because he was just a Disney boss and didn’t really do anything that cool, I had hope for a more cinematic and grandious superboss that was a cool looking OC like the ones in BBS. But as I replayed the games in the past few years I felt that Julius was actually pretty good as a superboss, especially compared to the ones in BBS which I realized where mechanically pretty shitty and for a brief period of time I was convinced he was the best superboss outside of KH3 for whatever reason. Now I find myself thinking somewhere in between, he’s not bad, better than KH1 and BBS superbosses for sure, he’s probably on par with some of KH2’s superbosses. Which is honestly not an insult, KH2 has pretty solid boss quality so I guess I do consider him to be pretty alright in the grand scheme of things since I consider him to rank about mid tier among KH2’s line up. Also since my opinion on KH3’s data orgs and their fully scripted and consistent movesets has soured as of late, I actually don’t know how high up I’d put them compared to KH2’s bosses and Julius. They are more fun for the most part and a lot cooler and harder as well typically, but there’s just something off putting about the fact that you could probably literally just program a macro to beat them because they do the same stuff at the same time every single fight. Like it becomes a memory thing rather than a reactionary thing and idk memory things are really as hard or interesting as reaction things in the grand scheme of it all. That said Julius is pretty reactionary and he kinda sucks in a lot of ways, so eh. Yozora’s still really good and he’s more reactionary, I hope they continue to lean into that kind of boss design going forward.
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