H'aanit was reaching the final portions of Octopath Traveler's gameplay, with only the Chapter 4 stories and a handful of optional side areas remaining uncompleted. Before diving into the highly dangerous upcoming challenges, I decided that I would take the time to visit the remaining towns in the third ring since H'aanit had still only traveled to Grandport and Northreach thus far. All of these towns have their owns side quests to fulfill and stat-boosting nuts to Purchase, plus I'd be taking the time to Provoke fight every single NPC in the hopes of them dropping additional loot. At the very least, H'aanit would gain a fair amount of additional experience along the way to help make her stronger along with the stat boosts from all of those nuts. Any one of those nuts might not make a big difference but the collective sum of close to two dozen of them certainly would.
I started out by traveling to Duskbarrow and then continued onwards in a clockwise circle from there around the rest of the third ring. I made sure to visit the optional Moldering Ruins dungeon located near the town since there were two different side quests associated with the place. The picture above was taken in there, against a random group of animated armors who were spamming this Blizzard spell. This was noteworthy due to the amount of damage that H'aanit was taking from these elemental attacks, as 600ish damage was quite a bit. This was due to H'aanit's poor elemental defense and I've emphasized in prior pages of this report how she was much weaker when she couldn't rely on dodging physical blows. Other solo characters of mine would have shrugged off these attacks by taking 100 or 200 damage, though conversely H'aanit was much better at dealing with enemy auto attacks with her strong evasion. The Moldering Ruins is one of the side dungeons that doesn't have a boss attached so I made sure to complete the optional quests here and then moved on to greener pastures.
H'aanit fought her way out to Wispermill where there was basically nothing to do until she came back and ran through Ophilia's Chapter 4 story, then made her way down to Everhold at the edge of the Highlands. There were more townspeople here to knock around with Provoke, one of which was blocking entrance into a house. These are pretty common throughout the various towns in Octopath Traveler and the player has to Challenge or Provoke them out of the way by defeating them, something that I rarely do in most solo games since I'm not controlling Olberic or H'aanit. This time I was able to use Provoke to get inside the building where another NPC had the Deathly Blade for sale. This is the rare sword that has a chance to defeat non-bosses instantly and is also the quest reward for defeating the very difficult Devourer of Men superboss. You can literally skip the super tough quest and just Purchase the same item in this town, what the heck?! There's also a quest called Star of the Stage in Everhold where the player has to use Challenge/Provoke to defeat the town's Impresario:
I've completed this side quest on every previous playthrough of Octopath Traveler... but I've always used Olberic's Challenge instead of H'aanit's Provoke. It turns out that there's a completely different dialogue sequence when using H'aanit to complete this quest: Olberic gets booed off the stage because he's such a poor actor with his wooden delivery, while H'aanit instead is overly enthusiastic and terrorizes the audience with the presence of her leopard companion Linde. It's really impressive that the developers bothered to create these two different versions of the same random side quest, something that most players will never even see. For that matter, every single town NPC has a line of dialogue when they're engaged in a Challenge/Provoke fight - and the line that they speak is DIFFERENT depending on whether the player uses Challenge or Provoke! The townspeople mostly accuse Olberic of being a maniac while they mention how scared they are of H'aanit's beasts. None of this is voice acted but it's still downright crazy how much effort went into such a minor part of the gameplay.
Once H'aanit had finished up in Everhold, it was time to teleport over to Wellspring and then make the walk down to Marsalim. The southernmost desert town is also the largest settlement in this portion of the map, with close to 30 different NPCs to interact with. Aside from the usual side quests to complete, H'aanit also had the chance to Provoke her first 10 star opponent of the game, this guard named Swordsman Yuri. I remember bringing this person along via Guide/Allure with Ophilia and Primrose in their own solo games and it would be a good test of H'aanit's abilities. The Provoke battle turned out to be pretty one-sided, however, as H'aanit was easily able to dodge most of Yuri's attacks and use Medium Healing Grapes to restore any damage that she did take. The fight mostly just dragged on for a long time because the 10 star NPCs have a tremendous amount of health to work through, something like 50,000 HP at my best estimate. Once again, I really wished that H'aanit could have simply hit this guy with Draefendi's Rage to speed things up instead of having to plink away with Linde for 2000 and 3000 damage at a time. Dragging the battle out didn't make it any harder, only tested my patience for how long I was willing to sit through the animations. (And I run Octopath Traveler at 3x normal speed so I can't even imagine how tedious this would have been at the default rate!)
The final two towns had to be reached in sequence, first Orewell followed by Riverford in the isolated southwest corner of the map. Orewell is a small town and there wasn't too much to do there but Riverford had a lot of the stat-boosting nuts available for H'aanit to snap up, along with another 10 star Guard NPC that she defeated to prove that she could. And speaking of things with 10 star ratings, there was a boss named Gigantes in the nearby optional dungeon of Farshore that she could actually Capture:
I had seen this mechanic previously back in the Tomb of the Imperator with the Behemoth, a boss that could be snapped up via H'aanit's Hunter abilities, but that enemy hadn't been practical to try and snatch. There was a save point right next to the place where Gigantes was lurking and therefore I resolved to Capture this beast to prove that it could be done. Gigantes likes to buff up its physical attack and then hit with some extremely powerful blows; H'aanit usually dodged these attacks but they did about 3000 damage when they landed. Gigantes would also break out an insane Stunning Jolt move that dealt 6000 damage for an instant one-shot after its health dropped into the red, and that was responsible for wiping out H'aanit a bunch of times. I accepted that H'aanit would die if that move appeared and she wasn't able to dodge it, instead simply knocking Gigantes down to low health and then repeatedly spamming the Capture command at low odds. The best that H'aanit was able to do was about 5% odds at max boost and most of the time I was rolling at 2-3% odds per attempt. As pathetic as those odds were, I could keep spamming them indefinitely since there was a save point right next door. I landed the successful dice roll on about the 20th attempt and now H'aanit had a Gigantes lurking in her backpack for future use, heh. That would be useful if I ever needed a really strong spear-based attack on all targets.
With every town now visited and thoroughly ransacked, there was one more optional place that I wanted to send H'aanit. That was the Everhold Tunnels which were holding this pictured Death Clever in an out-of-the-way treasure chest. The Death Cleaver had slightly lower physical attack on it as compared with H'aanit long-held Forbidden Axe, 380 compared to 391, but it made up for this slight decrease by having 140 additional points of critical strike and not having the -50 penalty to accuracy on the Forbidden Axe. It turns out that what I'd been writing about crit chance in Octopath Traveler isn't entirely true; not every attack crits by the end of the game and in fact a lot of H'aanit's auto attacks were not going critical. Swapping over to the Death Cleaver was a real improvement in this regard even if the raw physical damage was slighly lower, making this a damage boost overall when factoring in the extra crits.
The Everhold Tunnels also have an optional boss at the end, the pictured Devourer of Dreams. There was nothing to be gained by H'aanit fighting this thing but I had her do so anyway for fun. The Devourer has a Vorpal Strike ability that can cause instant death and I had to make sure to equip a Vivifying Stone to block that move from killing H'aanit. The other accessory to bring to this battle would be a Void Stone to block the dark element damage from its Eclipse ability. H'aanit didn't have a Void Stone yet though which resulted in this vicious hit for 3600 damage instead of 36 damage, ouch! Once again, I could really feel the pain when H'aanit was hit with undodgeable elemental damage. The Devourer was also only weak to sword and light element damage which H'aanit didn't have outside of Summoned Beasts and I didn't particularly feel like using those. Instead, I fired away with Draefendi's Rage even though the creature's shields were unbroken, which landed for about 6000 damage. Three such castings ended up proving sufficient to take out the miniboss, leaving H'aanit with her reward of absolutely nothing other than personal pride.
That was enough side content for the moment, time to begin the Chapter 4 stories themselves. The very first one that I wanted to try was H'aanit's own story, both because it's one of the easiest Chapter 4 stories and also because it would unlock an improved weapon for her afterwards. H'aanit concludes her tale in Marsalim where she's been informed by the Knights Ardante that Redeye is lurking nearby. After checking in with those knights and verifying that Redeye has been spotted outside the city, H'aanit is interrupted by the return of Marsalim's military forces which had previously left the city to go fight the beast. How well did their operation go? Not great! 
Almost everyone was turned to stone by Redeye aside from a handful of survivors that limped back to the city gates. The writers included a little scene of women and children screaming about how their family members had just been killed by the creature and it's a bit disturbing to watch.
H'aanit then heads off to visit King Khalim, the ruler of this desert town, where she explains that everyone turned to stone will have the curse lifted if Redeye is defeated. H'aanit also pledges to find and defeat the beast on her own, as she's the only one who has protection against its petrification ability. (Again, the fact that Redeye never uses a petrification move or requires those Herb-of-Grace items from the previous chapter makes all of this feel pretty bizarre.) The king and the Knights Ardante vow to support H'aanit who is now cast in the role of needing to save an entire kingdom in addition to her master Z'aanta. These NPCs then "fight" to clear a path for H'aanit to reach the Grimsand Ruins, which is entirely fictitious because the player can simply walk into or out of the dungeon regardless of the various cut scenes, but it's still kind of neat to see regardless. This is how we get to our standard scenario with a dungeon and a boss at the end of it that characterizes almost every story chapter in Octopath Traveler.
The Grimsand Ruins is a pretty big dungeon and my standard practice is to equip an Antidote Stone because so many of the monsters inside have poisonous attacks. By this point in the gameplay, it was taking too long to whittle down the enemies with H'aanit's auto attacks and therefore I was using Draefendi's Rage in almost every random encounter. This made the battles both faster and safer, plus with something like 500,000 money on hand it was easy to purchase an unlimited supply of Inspiriting Plums for SP restoration. The Grimsand Ruins and the Grimsand Sands immediately outside the dungeon are also noteworthy for being the only places in the game where the rare Revenant enemies will appear, the one opportunity for Therion to Steal an unlimited number of Revitalizing Jams. I ran into three of them over the course of this dungeon with H'aanit and made sure to pilfer a Revitalizing Jam from each one (before killing off Therion again so he didn't get any XP). I didn't know if I would need those items but it was certainly better to have some on hand for emergencies.
Redeye was hanging out with a bunch of stone statues conveniently right past the usual save point at the end of the dungeon. Redeye appears to be a monster made out of smoke and ash with glowing red eyes in the center of its face; H'aanit is confused by the fact that she is completely unable to sense anything about this beast. On an initial playthrough, these lines simply emphasize the dangerous situation and the alien nature of Redeye. However, after reaching the hidden ending portion of the game beyond the Gate of Finis, it turns out that there's a different reason entirely why H'aanit can't sense anything here. That's because Redeye isn't a beast at all but rather a transformed human: this is the unfortunate Graham Crossford, the traveling apothecary who healed Alfyn in his youth and authored the notebook that Tressa has been carrying around. Graham was transformed into this monstrous creature after passing beyond the Gate of Finis in a doomed attempt to bring his deceased wife back to life. There's a hint of this during the Redeye boss fight as the beast will occasionally use its action to heal your party but unfortunately there's no way to save this cursed soul which can only be defeated in combat.
The boss fight against Redeye is relatively straightforward in comparison to some of the other Chapter 4 opponents. This is the obligatory "changes its weaknesses every round" opponent, which in H'aanit's case swapped between bow / axe / bow before starting the cycle again. This meant that Redeye was always weak to one of H'aanit's weapons and had the preferred bow weakness in two out of every three rounds which was excellent news. Redeye can inflict both stunning and darkness statuses which necessitated bringing Conscious and Bright Stone accessories to this fight, leaving H'aanit with only 4700 HP since she couldn't bring her usual Empowering Necklace with its +1000 HP boost. I knew that I would be relying heavily on H'aanit's evasion in this battle and I was pleased to find that H'aanit was avoiding about 60% of the incoming attacks. Redeye only uses physical attacks and this cut down on the damage H'aanit was taking by a good margin, enough that I was comfortable relying on Medium Healing Grapes for health restoration.
Initially my plan was to use Rain of Arrows to break through Redeye's shields followed by Draefendi when the creature was broken. However, I soon realized that H'aanit could deal about 9000 damage with Draefendi even when Redeye was unbroken if it had its arrows weakness unlocked at the time. There wasn't much point in trying to cut through 9 shields just to increase damage from 9000 to 9999 and therefore I began concentrating on getting off as many Draefendis as possible. I would either use a healing item or an Energizing Pomegranate for additional boost points, then hit with Draefendi whenever the boost meter had the necessary three points. Things became a lot more dangerous when Redeye dropped under half health and went from 2 to 3 actions per turn; there was one moment where Redeye landed a series of attacks in a row and knocked H'aanit all the way down to 121 HP. I had to use a Refreshing Jam to fix that emergency but that was the only really scary moment during the battle, otherwise she was able to rely on Healing Grapes while hitting with Draefendi over and over again. H'aanit did manage to win on the first attempt with only that single Refreshing Jam consumed.
With Redeye defeated, all of the petrified Marsalim soldiers transform back to life once again. H'aanit returns with them back to town where the king wants to throw a grand banquet in celebration, however H'aanit can't stick around because she needs to go find Z'aanta and see if his curse was also removed. Her master does indeed appear outside Stonegard where he helps save a traveling couple from a random monster attack, then grabs H'aanit and picks her up in this adorable sprite animation. Z'aanta is back to his usual jovial self and H'aanit scolds that he didn't learn anything from this misadventure, but that's not entirely true because Z'aanta thanks her and explains that he wants to hear all about the story of her journey. That's how this story ends, with H'aanit and Z'aanta traveling off into the sunset together, with their respective animal companions in tow, and H'aanit telling the tale of her first great adventure. We conclude with a voiceover from H'aanit stating that this was the story of her first adventure, but it was not her last adventure, and that if you come to her village the story might change a little bit with each telling.
I have to say, I found myself enjoying H'aanit's story more than I had been expecting. It's not terribly complicated but I don't think it needed to be, hitting the right balance of a student coming-of-age story without overstaying its welcome or trying to do too much. I only wish that we had learned a bit more about H'aanit as a character since she still remains largely a blank slate even at the end of all four chapters. I think the annoyance of having to do Provoke battles with a Level 1 H'aanit during my other solo characters soured me on this character more than she actually deserved.
In any case, that was only the first of the eight Chapter 4 stories and there was still plenty more gameplay for H'aanit to complete. The whole reason why I started out with H'aanit's story sequence was the fact that finishing this one causes Z'aanta to appear as an NPC in the town of S'warkii. He has the Battle-tested Bow available for Purchase which is by far the best bow in the game in terms of dealing physical damage, sitting at 384 physical attack when nothing else eclipses the 306 attack on the Transcendent Bow of Shadows. Now H'aanit finally had a weapon that caused her bow damage to equal her axe damage instead of lagging far behind. The bow was her more important weapon since all of the Hunter abilities including Draefendi's Rage scaled off it and now she had the best available option in the whole game.
By the way, H'aanit can also Provoke fight Z'aanta although the player receives exactly nothing for winning. (This feels like an oversight, surely having H'aanit best her master should be worth something!) That allowed me to take the really cool sceenshot above where the two of them were squaring off in combat. Z'aanta was an annoying Provoke opponent because he didn't have a weakness to swords or spears, thus not being breakable by Linde. It took many, many rounds for Linde to wear him down, shields unbroken the whole time, but I took the time to claim the victory for bragging rights. Z'aanta was an excellent NPC to Guide/Allure during my Ophilia/Primrose playthroughs and I would have been happy to bring him along with H'aanit if that had been possible.
I did have to get back to the main questline of Octopath Traveler by continuing with the other Chapter 4 stories. I chose Ophilia's story as the next in line because it looked to be very easy to complete as well as unlocking some useful items after it finished. The Ebony Grotto dungeon didn't cause H'aanit any problems and it didn't take very long before she found herself confronting Mattias. I had taken the time to grab a Void Amulet from Cyrus' Chapter 4 dungeon ahead of time, pairing that together with a Tempest Amulet to block 99% of the damage from dark and wind elements respectively. This is my standard accessory setup against Mattias and it worked like a charm as usual, with the two items even more effective than normal since H'aanit was very strong against physical attacks and weak against elemental damage. Mattias even had a convenient weakness to axes for H'aanit to exploit and she was doing enough damage by now that I could use True Strike instead of Draefendi's Rage and it would still hit the 9999 damage cap if Mattias had his shields down. There was no need to spend the extra spirit points if True Strike would do the trick.
Almost everything that Mattias tried to do in this battle was readily countered by H'aanit. He will summon three groups of minions one after the other, however each time the various cultists and elementals were flattened with Draefendi's Rage. Each group of minions took two castings but they still went down fast and without doing much of anything to H'aanit. Mattias also tried to use his Infernal Flame aura which locks out the use of all abilities that deal elemental damage... which did precisely nothing against the all-physical damage H'aanit. I guess she couldn't use Thunderstorm which was something that I think H'aanit had cast once the entire game. The one thing that Mattias could break out which was actually dangerous was his Black Thunder move which deals lightning element damage and has a chance to stun the target. H'aanit couldn't wear a Conscious Stone accessory because she already had Void and Tempest Amulets equipped; she did get stunned twice in this battle though fortunately with enough health to tank through the unconscious rounds both times. All in all, it was a pretty easy fight as Mattias usually tends to be.
Completing Ophilia's Chapter 4 story unlocked the side stories in Wispermill along with the chance to Purchase a Large Nourishing Nut there. This might sound like something minor but it was worth another 300 max HP for H'aanit, something like an increase of 7% to her total health pool. I also ran around completing some of the other side quests that don't unlock until after finishing the Chapter 4 stories of individual characters, such as the one with Lianna and Eliza that grants the Bishop's Staff, the best staff in the game for Ophilia. One of these side quests is called "Again with Alaic" and involves the taciturn Alaic from H'aanit's Chapter 3 story. Normally I skip this one because the reward is only the Primeval Bow of Storms, a great weapon for Tressa that's useless for pretty much everyone else, however I figured that I might as well knock it out since I was playing H'aanit as the main character.
This is a very easy quest to complete: the player goes to Victor's Hollow, adds Alaic to the party with Guide/Allure, and then walks into the nearby Forest of No Return to defeat a weak Bandit Leader. That prompts Alaic to go into a lot more detail about his backstory: he was originally an assassin working for the Obsidians, the same group that Primrose spends her whole story fighting against. Alaic was sent to assassinate Susanna only to be stopped in the attempt by Z'aanta, after which he planned to kill himself with poison but was saved by Susanna. This provides a lot more context as far as why Alaic spends his time protecting Susanna, as a means of thanking her for saving him from the inhuman monster that he was becoming. I have to say, this was not the background I expected from this character the first time that I completed the side quest - another one of those points in time where Octopath Traveler gets a lot darker than what might be expected.
My next goal was to unlock the only piece of equipment that H'aanit needed to complete her gear setup: Mikk and Makk's Shield. This is by far the best shield in the game for any character running an evasion build though unfortunately it does require completing both Tressa's and Therion's Chapter 4 stories. Tressa clearly had the easier of that pair and therefore H'aanit set out one final time for Grandport. She blasted her way through the sewers by casting Draefendi against everything that crossed her path, then I had to figure out what my strategy would be against Esmeralda. Although this boss doesn't inflict any status ailments, Esmeralda will use lots of physical attacks in succession (after debuffing the player's physical defense) and hit with various elemental blades that can lock out auto attacks and various abilities. I thought that H'aanit was reasonably well suited to dealing with these threats since her natural high evasion would defend against Esmeralda's Five Strikes and she could always fall back on her Summoned Beasts if she couldn't attack or use her physical abilities. The best gear setup seemed to be bringing double Empowering Necklackes for +2000 HP which was how H'aanit reached the 7100 HP total visible in these pictures. More total health would do more to keep her alive than anything else I could wear in the accessory slots.
Esmeralda started out the battle by locking out H'aanit's auto attacks, which was a bit awkward because I was counting on hitting her axes weakness to inflict the initial shield break. I was able to fall back on summoning an Ice Lizardman that had been sitting around in her inventory for ages, with the reptilian creature hitting 3 times into a spears weakness on the boss. Two such summons were enough to break Esmeralda and restore access to H'aanit's auto attacks, though fortunately Esmeralda shifted over to a bows weakness after recovering which was easy for H'aanit to exploit with Rain of Arrows and the like. I needed to be ready to break Esmeralda repeatedly since she would put a ticking doom clock over H'aanit's head with her Black Blade ability. Between H'aanit's bow abilities and various monsters that could hit her daggers weakness, that never ended up being a problem.
What was a problem was simply getting through Esmeralda's large 96,000 HP total. H'aanit was struggling mightily by this point in the gameplay because she kept running into the 9999 damage cap that she had few options to work around. Draefendi's Rage had no way to get past that limit and the Hunter lacks the multi-hit abilities common to many of the other classes. In any sort of non-variant game, the player would simply assign H'aanit the Warrior job until she unlocked the Surpassing Power support skill (which allows the character to go over the 9999 damage cap) but of course that wasn't an option here. I tried to be creative by using this 8 star Ettin snake that could hit twice; at max boost with Esmeralda's shields broken and her physical defense debuffed from a lucky hit by the Battle-tested Bow, that was enough to hit for double 9999 damage ticks. Needless to say, that required an awful lot of setup and was difficult to manage in practice, so a lot of the time H'aanit was simply firing off Draefendi and accepting that she couldn't do more than 10k damage at a time.
H'aanit had good luck at avoiding Esmeralda's physical attacks which I'd estimate were hitting roughly 50% of the time. The real danger in the battle therefore came from Esmeralda's various elemental blades, each of which dealt about 2000 damage whenever they appeared. This was the reason why I'd stacked that extra health and there was more than one occasion where H'aanit survived with less than 1000 HP just in time to gulp down a Refreshing Jam. The first time that I tried this battle, Esmeralda used four elemental blades in a row: Blue then Violet then Red then Blue over four consecutive actions before H'aanit could take a turn. I had never seen her do that before and the 8000 damage was enough to overwhelm H'aanit from full health. No such thing happened the second time that I tried the battle and H'aanit was able to win at the cost of several Refreshing Jams. Not bad overall and certainly a fight that could have been a lot worse.
That left the more difficult of these challenges, the showdown with Darius at the end of Therion's Chapter 4 story. Longtime readers of these reports will know that Darius is a pure variant-busting boss, someone who steals away the player's items and can only be consistently broken with daggers as a damage type, then pulls out his cheese "Call Comrade" insta-kill ability unless he's broken at precisely the correct moment. The good news was that H'aanit's monster collecting ability gave her the tools that I needed to work around Darius' nonsense and I prepared ahead of time for the battle ahead. In the screenshot above, I included her monster list highlighting the TRIPLE Cliff Birdians that H'aanit was bringing to the conflict along with another Ettin Ophidian for yet another source of daggers damage. Then I also had two different 10 star rating enemies in her backpack, the Gigantes from earlier along with a Revenant that she had acquired back in the Grimsand Ruins. For equipment, I gave H'aanit the standard Conscious Stone and Inferno Amulet items so that she wouldn't be stunned and wouldn't take damage from Darius' fire element spellcasts. Time to get down to business.
Darius always starts the battle by stealing away the player's items; they can only be regained by breaking his shields. This was easy for H'aanit to do since Darius starts out with an axes weakness, or she could toss a pair of those Cliff Birdians at the boss to break through the shields by hitting his daggers weakness (the only one that never gets locked during combat). Aside from stealing away the player's items, the other big threat from Darius comes from his Steal HP/SP/BP attacks that each deal a lot of damage and remove either health, spirit points, or boost points respectively. This was another place where H'aanit's evasion worked masterfully as she avoided something like 2/3rds of those attacks. With Darius' fire-based Hellfire and Will O' Wisp abilities blocked by her Inferno Amulet, Darius was honestly kind of pathetic and had no realistic chance of killing H'aanit. Even when he fell below half health and increased from 2 to 3 actions per round, H'aanit still wasn't in that much danger aside from needing the occasion Refreshing Jam when she had a sequence of poor luck in dodging attacks.
Therefore the one remaining thing that I had to worry about in the battle was avoiding "Call Comrade". As a quick refresher, Darius will break out this move when he falls below 25% health, instantly killing any non-Therion characters and causing a game over situation unless he's broken at the start of the next round. I was watching his health closely, and when Darius dropped close to that 25% threshhold, I made sure to set up a situation where a single use of a Cliff Birdian would break through his remaining shields. Then I needed to wait for the randomness of the turn order to line up in H'aanit's favor: the only way to get past this stupid mechanic was for H'aanit to deal enough damage to drop Darius below 25% health while also acting first on the following turn so that she could break his shields and therefore avoid Call Comrade ever appearing. This is pretty tricky to get lined up correctly, much less when playing as a solo character against one of the endgame bosses! The first time that I tried this, H'aanit absolutely would not go first in the turn order. She went something like nine rounds in a row without acting first and eventually I accidentally tipped Darius under the 25% threshhold which immediately resulted in a Call Comrade death, whoops. The second time I had everything set up correctly and hit Darius with an attack that I thought would drop him under that health threshhold, only to leave him at something like 25.001% HP remaining which threw off my timing and caused another Call Comrade death when I tried to do the setup again. This was pretty annoying. 
The picture above was from my third attempt at the boss fight where I managed to get everything lined up perfectly. Darius was sitting just above 25% health remaining and H'aanit was due to act first on the next round, allowing me to launch a max boosted Gigantes summon into his face. I was pretty disappointed at the damage, to be honest: even when hitting a spears weakness at max boost, Gigantes only dealt 4400 damage which felt underwhelming for a 10 star monster summon. A normal Draefendi's Rage would have hit for about 8000 damage here and would have been more effective. In any case, it did work and the hurled monster looked a lot cooler than yet another Draefendi: Darius yelled his phrase about "stealing your most prized treasure" followed by immediately having his shields broken on the next turn. That was all she wrote for the battle since Darius never came close to killing H'aanit aside from the Call Comrade idiocy. Once I was past that gimmick, it was an easy victory for H'aanit and my least favorite boss in the game was out of the way.
I fully expected that Darius would be the high-water mark in terms of challenge since none of the remaining Chapter 4 bosses had the same kind of insta-kill potential. Eliminating Darius also had the salubrious effect of unlocking the aforementioned Mikk and Makk's Shield, which marginally increased H'aanit's physical and elemental defense but more importantly granted her an additional 120 points of evasion. She was getting close to maxing out the evasion stat though of course that doesn't make the player unhittable or anything like that (it's a shame that the Octopath Traveler algorithms guide never managed to crack how the to-hit formula works). I also grabbed the Blessed Blazon which has +100 physical/elemental defense on it as a moderate upgrade over the Protective Necklace with +80 to each. The leftover Chapter 4 bosses would be easier than Darius, with H'aanit simultaneously having superior equipment to boot.
Lucia was one of those bosses and sheesh, she barely even registered as an opponent. Her gimmick is that she starts with 30 shields and gets more and more powerful as the player breaks those shields, changing up her AI pattern after each shield removal. My longtime strategy for this boss has been to avoid ever breaking those initial 30 shields, with H'aanit charging up her boost meter and then hitting with Draefendi's Rage against the unbroken Lucia. Each such instance of this dealt around 8000 damage and it was easy to keep doing this over and over again, which would cause Lucia to perish long before her shields ever reached zero. Lucia uses purely physical attacks for her offense and they had low odds to hit H'aanit, with my Hunter dodging close to 80% of them. I was easily able to maintain health in this battle with Medium Healing Grapes and spent a bunch of rounds using Energizing Pomegrantes to fill up the boost meter faster for the next Draefendi. This really was a total joke of a boss fight not worth expending Summoned Beast charges.
Werner is a much more dangerous opponent than Lucia and this final boss of Olberic's Chapter 4 story has been a major stumbling block for a number of my solo characters. I thought that H'aanit had the proper tools to deal with him though and made sure to bring the mandatory Conscious Stone and Calming Stone accessories to lock out Werner's stunning and terror abilities. Werner is another all-physical boss who hits very hard and will debuff the player's physical defenses with his Oppression ability to hit even harder. This gets even worse when he drops under half health and goes up from 2 to 3 actions per rounds, often able to overwhelm solo characters with pure damage. The one saving grace is that his accuracy rating on those attacks appears to be fairly low and an evasion build works beautifully here. With her 900+ points of evasion, H'aanit was dodging right around 2/3rds of the time which dropped Werner's damage down into the survivable range. She was taking 1000 damage every time that the boss struck home but fortunately that wasn't too often.
The struggle for me in this battle was the offensive side for once as H'aanit had the defensive side in good shape. H'aanit simply did not have a reliable means of dealing more than 9999 damage at a time since she continued to ram up against the damage cap. That might not have mattered when the enemies had 20k or 30k health but it was a bigger problem now that Werner was sporting 101,000 HP. I left Werner at near-break status and repeatedly hit him with Draefendi's Rage for about 6500 damage at a time. When Werner's health dropped below half, I broke his shields for the first time and then hit for the max 9999 damage strike, then afterwards kept using Draefendi as many times as possible since there was no easy way to inflict a second shield break. I had to use several Refreshing Jams for safety now that Werner was attacking three times per round but all in all this went about as smoothly as possible without H'aanit ever running into a true close call. Victory was claimed on the first attempt and I could check off her last remaining major obstacle.
I chased down the Ogre Eagle and Alfyn's Chapter 4 story next. The most noteworthy part of this story sequence was the Forest of Rubeh dungeon itself which held an Ettin Snake monster that had to be on the short list of best monsters to capture. The Ettin Snake had a 9 star rating and attacked all enemies on screen twice with daggers as the damage type; it was hard to find something much better than that for H'aanit's setup. I took the time to Capture three of them for use later on, including against the Ogre Eagle boss at the end of the forest. This enemy likes to hit with various status ailments and employs a lot of wind-element spellcasts, the latter of which was easily blocked through equipping a Tempest Amulet. H'aanit was quite good at dodging the status ailments which required the Ogre Eagle to land one of its Double Rend strikes and that didn't happen all that often. I knocked the big bird down to half health, then broke it using an Ice Soulstone followed by hitting with the pictured Ettin Snake for a little over 16,000 damage. That was only possible because H'aanit's bow had debuffed the Ogre Eagle's physical defense but I wasn't complaining. From there, I continued to hit with a mixture of Draefendis and Ettin Snake summons until H'aanit out-raced the creature's Toxic Rainbow and achieved another victory. This was another first-attempt success that never came close to a defeat.
Finishing Alfyn's Chapter 4 story unlocked two additional new axes that H'aanit could potentially equip. The first of these was the Double Tomahawk which always hits twice when using basic auto attacks; while this is an improvement if the player only cares about breaking through shields, the physical damage is so low on the weapon that it's almost never worth equipping. It was fun to test this out and see H'aanit getting three hits from a single attack when her Second Serving passive kicked in, but with each one dealing such low damage, it really wasn't worthwhile. The other new weapon was the Memorial Axe which is tied for the highest physical attack value in the game at 400. While that was 20 points higher than the 380 attack on the Death Cleaver, I favored H'aanit current weapon since it had 140 points of critical strike on it as opposed to the useless 150 points of speed on the Memorial Axe. Thus I went to the trouble of collecting both axes without actually using them, heh.
Anyway, it was time for the final Chapter 4 story and I had once again saved Primose for last. This is largely because the player doesn't get much of anything for finishing Primrose's story and Simeon's two-phase boss battle is long enough that I typically want to make sure I can get it right on the first try. I did make one change from the normal setup with H'aanit, choosing to bring the Empowering Necklace accessory for +1000 HP instead of my normal Articulate Stone to block silence status. (I did equip the usual Void Amulet in the other accessory slot to neutralize Simeon's frequent dark element spells.) H'aanit simply didn't care about getting silenced very much because she could still auto attack and use her Summon Beast command which I thought would be sufficient here. For the first phase, I concentrated on taking out the two marionette minions one at a time by breaking them and then hitting with Draefendi's Rage. The two marionettes can potentially stun your character once they fall below half health but I only saw one such attack and H'aanit dodged it. I think she had more than enough health to survive a few rounds even if she did get stunned because there was very little danger here. Simeon without his two puppets was truly pathetic and H'aanit just shot him to death with a bunch of arrow auto attacks.
Simeon Phase Two was certainly more dangerous while still going much better for H'aanit than for most of my other solo characters. This boss starts out the second phase by having all of his weaknesses other than daggers locked out, and I responded by using Summoned Beasts to knock him down to a single shield remaining. Then I had H'aanit keep plugging him with arrow auto attacks because Simeon was doing absolutely nothing to H'aanit, either casting dark element spells that hit for 10 damage or else swinging and missing on his physical blows. I think I had to use one Medium Healing Grape and that was it as my Hunter whittled away at the first half of his lifebar.
There's another shift in this battle when Simeon Phase Two drops under half health, as he goes up to 3 actions per round and starts breaking out his only truly scary move, Act of Impulse. Simeon will buff his own physical attack and debuff the player's physical defense which can cause this attack to hit for thousands of points of damage. Much like Werner, however, this ability has relatively low accuracy and H'aanit was a true champ in dodging her way past it. She was only hit a single time by Act of Impulse across a total of about a dozen uses by the boss. Meanwhile, I had initiated a shield break on Simeon and pulled out another Ettin Snake for 9000 x 2 = 18,000 damage which took out a big chunk of Simeon's remaining health. After that, I kept using more Summoned Beasts whenever H'aanit had full boost because because she was perpetually silenced and couldn't use Draefendi. Her monster cannon sure didn't care about being silenced though! I even broke out a captured 10 star Revenant as pictured above, who uses something called Impact Clock that grants the whole party multiple turns of physical and elemental attack/defense buffs while canceling out Simeon's own debuffs of H'aanit in the process. This wasn't really that practical with only a single character as opposed to a full party but it did look really cool. The only time that I needed to use a Refreshing Jam was after that single Act of Impulse landed, otherwise this was another easy victory on the first attempt to complete the final Chapter 4 story.
Thus H'aanit finished up the Chapter 4 stories in the same fashion as she'd done the first three chapters, without breaking too much of a sweat along the way. She was a really strong solo character and seemed to be well suited to handling nearly any situation, only struggling against the rare bosses that focused on elemental damage and couldn't have their abilities blocked with one of the elemental stone accessories. You might think that this would encourage me to continue onwards with H'aanit against the optional superbosses in the endgame content, but nope, that was never part of my plan for H'aanit. While I have no doubt that H'aanit could defeat a few of them, especially the Devourer of Men, she really was beginning to hit a wall in terms of running up against the 9999 damage cap. All of the endgame superbosses have health totals above 200,000 HP and it would simply be too hard to work through that with a 9999 damage limit at a time. H'aanit really, really wants to multiclass into Warrior which lets her pick up everything she needs for her character build: the ability to buff her physical attack with Abide, a massive single-target attack in Brand's Thunder to complement Draefendi, and the Supassing Power support skill to go over the damage cap.
Of course, I could simply give her the Supassing Power passive and go off and fight the endgame superbosses anyway. I did exactly that in the picture above to show what Draefendi's damage looked like when it wasn't being artificially capped, and H'aanit probably could have gotten close to 20,000 damage against broken targets with a little more preparation. However, giving H'aanit even one Warrior support skill would mean that this was no longer a pure Hunter playthrough and therefore that wasn't something that seemed worth the effort. The whole point of these solo games was to evaluate each class in isolation and the Hunter class' inability to get past the damage cap was a big, big weakness for H'aanit.
Therefore this is where we'll be parting ways with H'aanit, as I would rather have her finish on top with a dominant run against the Chapter 4 bosses as opposed to struggling against the optional endgame superbosses. H'aanit is an awesome character who very much has her own playstyle, and she'll always stand out to me for being the best auto attacker in the game. She was extremely versatile and could hit any monster weaknesses that she wanted by catching the proper critters ahead of time, even if the damage from the 10 star enemies was a bit more disappointing than I would have liked. Second Serving and especially Patience are two of the best support skills in the game and I'm definitely going to miss having them the next time that I do an Octopath Traveler playthough. This was the final report among the game's eight characters so we're getting close to finishing up with these solo game challenges - thankfully there are only 12 of them in Octopath Traveler as opposed to the 25 that I had to do for Final Fantasy 5! Until next time, thanks as always for reading along.
