OMORI ROUTE, Part 5: THE ABYSS and ABBI'S TENTACLES
HUMPHREY is back in his pond during ONE DAY LEFT, at the very bottom of DEEPER WELL. He's still hungry, however, and speaking to him will trigger the FEED HUMPHREY side quest. Give him the GIANT CHECK from MR. JAWSUM, over at LAST RESORT, and HUMPHREY will open his mouth and let you back inside.
There are a number of things you can do inside HUMPHREY. We'll start with the three 'sea witches', who are currently... uh... incapacitated. Use the main 'elevator' in HUMPHREY (the big HUMPHREY node at the entrance) to descend to the area where you fought the sisters. Now you can access their labs, and each of them is inside. They all look a little... blobby. Each one needs you to track down parts from their respective areas inside HUMPHREY:
- MARINA'S OPERATION requires you to retrieve RAT MEAT from the LAB RATS in the northern wing of HUMPHREY. You'll have to travel a few screens into the area to find any.
- MEDUSA'S EXPERIMENT requires you to retrieve SNOT from the SNOT BUBBLES in the eastern wing of HUMPHREY. Sail to the second screen on your raft and you'll find them floating around.
- MOLLY'S ANALYSIS requires you to retrieve SCRAP METAL from the WORM-BOTS in the western wing of HUMPHREY. You'll find plenty of them in the red portal.
Finding just one piece of each of these items will fulfill the mission parameters. Return to the sisters for their respective rewards. MARINA will give you a FINGER, MEDUSA will give you a MYSTERY POTION, and MOLLY will give you HIGH HEELS. (And in case you're wondering, using the MYSTERY POTION turns OMORI into a girl. Temporarily.)
The SWEETHEARTS
In addition to helping MARINA, MEDUSA, and MOLLY, you can also run into their three SWEETHEART clones while exploring HUMPHREY. Each one of them can be battled, and defeating each will earn you an achievement:
- ROBOHEART is located in the western section of HUMPHREY. You'll find her in the final room of the red puzzle area. Step on the top, right, and left teleporter pads in that order to reach her.
- MUTANTHEART is in MARINA'S lab, through the northern door on the lowest floor of HUMPHREY. Choose to FIGHT her when prompted.
- PERFECTHEART is standing in the corridor connecting the three labs, on the lowest floor of HUMPHREY. (She's also bossing around SWEETHEART, which seems appropriate and correct.)
BE WARNED! While you can stumble into the fights with MUTANTHEART and ROBOHEART and still come out on top, PERFECTHEART is in a whole other league. (There's a reason her name is in the article title.) Make sure you heal your party and save before you take her on.
ROBOHEART
Of the three SWEETHEART clones, ROBOHEART is by far the easiest to defeat. Her attacks focus on one or more of your characters, but none of them have the oomph to endanger any of your party members. She can also heal herself, but you'll quickly outpace her capacity to restore her own HEART. Watch out for ROBOHEART to explode as she runs out of health.
MUTANTHEART
This seems cruel. MUTANTHEART is a bizarre, sad creature, and she wants your party members to feel very specific EMOTIONS. At the beginning of your turn she'll mention an EMOTION, and any characters who do not match that EMOTION at the end of the round will be instantly knocked out. Problem is, MUTANTHEART will also use moves to change a single character's EMOTIONS, so at least one member of your team is going to end each round getting knocked out.
You can either play this fight carefully or try and rush through it. Playing carefully requires one party member to be slower than MUTANTHEART, which means either HERO - at lower levels - or AUBREY with the SWEETHEART BUST equipped. Have the slowest character use an item that changes the whole party's EMOTION to what MUTANTHEART wants just before the round ends and she'll be satisfied. Otherwise, just change EMOTIONS so most of your party won't die and use your strongest attacks to try and rush through the fight. You'll likely lose most of your party along the way, though if you're belting out attacks like RED HANDS consistently you should reach the end before MUTANTHEART can wipe everyone out.
PERFECTHEART
Whoa nelly! The difficulty sure spiked on this one! PERFECTHEART is the closest thing OMORI has to a superboss, and can wallop your party if you aren't careful. A combination of overwhelming offensive capabilities and strong defenses, PERFECTHEART can reduce a character from full health to near-death in a single turn, if she wishes. PERFECTHEART uses the following attacks:
- PERFECTHEART 'decides' to let a character live. This reduces them to a single point of HEART, regardless of how strong they were.
- PERFECTHEART steals a character's HEART, doing damage and sucking health off of a character for herself. PERFECTHEART can do the same for a character's JUICE, only she steals all of their JUICE, not just some.
- PERFECTHEART uses her soulful song to inflict 175 points of HEART damage on the whole party. This makes her SAD and everyone else HAPPY. HAPPY is ineffective against SAD, so...
- PERFECTHEART unleashes her wrath. This inflicts heavy damage on the whole party, and randomizes everyone's EMOTION.
Once you've depleted roughly two-thirds of PERFECTHEART'S health she'll restore herself to full. Past this point she will only 'unleash her wrath' when it's her turn, badly damaging your whole party and randomizing everyone's EMOTION. This leads to utter chaos.
The first half of this battle is manageable for a variety of different strategies, as PERFECTHEART usually targets only a single character at a time, and when she does go after your whole party it probably won't be lethal. Use AIR HORNS or KEL'S MEGAPHONE SKILL to take advantage of PERFECTHEART'S SAD status and pummel her with your strongest multi-hitting attacks. Lowering her DEFENSE early in the fight is recommended, as is her ATTACK if you can manage it. Make sure you keep everyone's HEART nice and high as you get PERFECTHEART down to the end of her own health.
Once you reach the second phase of the battle you'll have to set yourself into a pattern. Make sure at least KEL is faster than PERFECTHEART - CHARMS will boost him up, if not his raw level - and use him to heal away the effects of her all-hitting attack on your party with strong items. Order OMORI and AUBREY to do as much damage as they can during their turns, weather PERFECTHEART'S attack, then either set HERO up to heal your characters again with his SKILLS / items, restore everybody's JUICE with items, or change your team's EMOTIONS to something more beneficial than a random hodge-podge. At the very least you don't want anybody to be SAD, as PERFECTHEART'S attack will almost always fully drain their JUICE. Use OMORI'S RELEASE ENERGY FOLLOW-UP whenever you get the chance, and otherwise just keep smacking PERFECTHEART until she goes down.
(Having trouble with PERFECTHEART? Understandable. This fight is a numbers game. Leveling everyone at least close to 50 helps, as does getting ABBI'S tentacle items from THE ABYSS. You should also consider picking up items from DINO'S DIG that will affect the whole party. WHOLE PIZZAS and DINO SMOOTHIES are recommended. Good luck!)
BOSS RUSH
The final location of note in HUMPHREY is the BOSS RUSH. If you head to the west wing of the whale, where you deactivated the huge thing of dynamite, you'll find a lift tube on the left side of the room that was previously inactive. It will take you to BOSS RUSH now that you've reached ONE DAY LEFT.
Run by BOSS himself, BOSS RUSH pits your whole party against beefed-up versions of all the bosses you fought previously in OMORI. You'll need to survive a gauntlet of your former foes, without breaks for healing, to complete BOSS RUSH. It's a fun final challenge - and if you're playing any of the console versions of OMORI, it's your only opportunity to put BASIL in your party. Interesting! We'll look at BOSS RUSH in greater detail in the next article.