I suppose unsurprisingly the boss battles of the third hub of the post-game dungeon in Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness for PlayStation 4 are an even bigger difficulty spike than the regular enemies, or at least I'd say so for the one I've been attempting. I've been trying to beat the Anima forms of my playable characters (that is, I have to battle shadow versions my own party, minus Relia) in the first of the Terpsichorean Interlude areas (that's seriously what they're called; the game's pretentious vocabulary strikes again), but I keep losing practically as soon as the battle begins. I've repeatedly gone to the Metal Scumbags to grind, so now all my party members are roughly around 180-190 (out of 255, the traditional max level in Star Ocean games). It's annoying because, unlike the fifth and final boss of each hub, I can't save right before the boss fight. I have to navigate four floors populated with regular enemies to reach the Anima fight, and after using my gaming time for a few nights on the same sequence of events (traverse the floors, lose on the boss fight, gain some more levels), it started to all feel rather tedious. So I decided to take a break from that and finish off the last three outstanding quests I had.

I finally started using Synthesis, which itself is...not so great. To get anything good enough to make it worth your while, you really need to max out the specialty and fill all six slots with stuff. Endlessly scrolling through the menus to pick things out is also tiresome. It's best to just use stuff you can buy (after you've racked up so much fol that money is no object). Filling the slots with items you can buy 99 of at least gives you a fair number of attempts before you have to mess with more menus. The results are random selections out of whatever range of items the quality and impurity values of the items you picked qualify you for. So basically, it's like the random item creation of Star Ocean 2, but instead of only using up one or two items at a time, you're blowing through six items, and you don't have songs to improve your odds of getting something good. Gotta love when, for your six items, you get one of those six items back or some cheap item you can buy in any town, like a Fresh Sage. But Synthesis is the only way to get a number of things. I needed Marbled Meat and Empyreanase for quests and item creation, and now I'm trying to get enough Lezard's Flasks for all the recipes needing those.