Limbus Company - Baba Yaga (Ch2 boss)

It actually reminds me a lot Library of Ruina before the passive overhaul.

Limbus Company is the sequel to Library of Ruina (a game i absolutely love, as evidenced by this youtube channel). This time around, PM went with making a free-to-play gacha RPG game for mobile and steam (cross-platform account merging is broken right now though). Limbus Company has many of the same combat mechanics as LoR did, minus the deckbuilding component. Whether or not that's a good thing is completely up to you you felt about the deckbuilding (i loved it, but i can deal with it not being in this one).

To get this out of the way, yes there is a gacha, yes it's impactful, yes the odds are pretty bad. A 3* identity (currently the max) has a 3% chance of dropping, and they're pretty powerful in this game. By the end of chapter 2 though, I had enough resources to do like 60 pulls and PM is giving away a free 3* from the launch event, so it's not too difficult to build a decent party.

The combat system this time around has some key differences from the LoR system. Every clash is now split into a clash and damage phase, one happening after the other, meaning that clashes are now winner-take-all. Every attack in the game has a base value, a coin count, and a coin bonus. During the clash phase, both sides will take the base value, and perform a coin flip for every coin on the attack, adding the value of the coin bonus for each heads that is flipped (so a 3 base with 3 coins at +1 will roll at minimum a 3, and at maximum a 6). Once a clash resolves, the unit with the lower roll loses a coin and then they clash again. This clash phase continues until one of the two clashing units runs out of coins. During damage calculation, the winner gets to deal damage once for each remaining coin they have, attacking for the base amount and flipping one coin during each damage instance. The coin buffs persist between each coin flip, so in an ideal scenario a 3 base 3 coin with +1 could ideally roll a 3-4-5 for a total of 12 damage. Stagger is also back, but instead of it being a different gauge, it's a set threshold on each unit's health bar (works mostly the same otherwise though). There's also a bunch of nonsense about elements and critical hits and whatnot but that's secondary.

Baba Yaga is the chapter 2 end boss and probably the first one that puts up a decent amount of resistance. Baba Yaga is a fight that has 4 waves and is a straight damage check. The enemies have a buff that indicates the number of turns you have until Baba Yaga shows up and murders your party. The primary challenge of this boss is turn economy. The enemies in the final wave have 10 actions to your 5, which makes stagger a very real concern for the party. As a result, this boss becomes mostly about picking the right battles, utilizing stagger properly, and timing your EGOs to maximum effect.

The most important thing about this fight is understanding how to pick battles. All of the enemy attacks in this fight boil down to two broad categories:
Low base, high coin count, low bonus. These can be countered by skills that have a high enough base to ensure that you almost never lose clashes.
Low base, single coin, high bonus. These can be countered by skills that have a high coin count, since the enemy is unlikely to roll their bonus three times in a row.

You also want to be able to predict when an attack is likely to stagger an enemy to avoid overcommitting resources to an attack that's going to get canceled anyway. You're extremely starved for moves in this boss so committing them in places where they don't have value is going to be a problem.

Minus a few quibbles about optimization and some really weird bugs (some cutscenes play twice for some reason), I like the core systems that I've seen so far even if I'm a bit underwhelmed by the content at the moment. I'm hoping that the game really gets off the ground later in the game the way LoR does in Urban Nightmare. The gacha system is honestly a turn off, but I haven't hit that wall yet, so I'll have to report back if I do.