So here we are at last… the final battleground, where Magilia and the Black Mage will fight for the fate of everything. Will the universe be destroyed? Will it continue on as before?
The answer to all these questions and more… Right now, on MapleCaptors Magilia!
The Black Mage is
the boss of what is now considered MapleStory's midgame. He's got four phases to go through, each of which having a metric ton of HP and regularly spawning shields that prolong them even further. He's a boss so powerful that he is the
only boss in the game which provides us with 60 minutes to fight him. Magilia should be facing him in Story Mode—a MUCH easier proposition—but we're not doing that today.
Magilia, if you would?
Right. When everything is on the line… That's when I have to call in the REALLY big guns.
The world is at stake… But you'll get through it! Because you're Angelic Buster!
Right… Let's do this.
Angelic Buster Magilia Mode Modification, Geeeet HYPE!!
Alright… Just this once, my other self.
Attacks here will place a Curse of Creation or a Curse of Destruction on us. If we get hit by both at once, we'll instantly lose a life, so be careful!
I mentioned before that the Black Mage has four phases, and this is
technically true, but the first phase is actually against this pair of Knights who are guarding him. The Black Mage himself sits in the back-center of the shot and watches over the fight. There are only a handful of important things to know about this phase:
Foremost, the White Knight's attacks all put us under the Curse of Creation. The Black Knight's attacks all put us under the Curse of Destruction. If we ever get both at once, we instantly lose one life. Lives are tracked using a special emblem.
Any time we would lose a life, one of the red crystals on the outer two layers is removed instead. The red dot in the center is us, and if it's removed then we're out of the fight. This gives us a total of 12 lives to handle the entire boss fight—this is more than any boss since Magnus, but in exchange Black Mage can take 2-3 lives away in an instant if we aren't careful about avoiding his curses.
The second thing is that
nobody plays phase 1 "correctly." The
desired solution here is to split the two knights' aggro up so that neither party gets hit by both knights at the same time. This means nobody gets hit by twin curses (in theory, anyways), and it allows us to slowly whittle the Knights down over time.
Soloing changes this. When soloing the strategy becomes "Burst the enemy then run and hide in a corner." This lets us avoid their attacks entirely outside of our Burst window, for which we should have the enemy bound and unable to attack. That is how we would have to do it if we were soloing on a character like RenRenBunBun, my second strongest with roughly 80 million Combat Power to her name.
Lithza, my main and our representative today, does not have 80 million Combat Power to her name. Lithza has over
400 million combat power, a chip on her shoulder, and working Angelic Buster music.
Lithza does not have to respect this fight.
This is a problem for the Black Mage, because he is one of the fairest fights in all of MapleStory.
Hope, from me to you!
We lead off with a special move known as an Ascent Skill, a special 6th job move that is
not implemented in v251. Every class has their own version of an Ascent Skill, and they all have several points in common: On activation they give us a 3 second iframe, they ignore all special enemy defenses (letting them do things like deal full damage to Gloom), and they will hit every enemy on the screen for Big Damage.
There are a lot of other minor things to how they work, but they aren't really important unless you're worried about minmaxing how much damage they do—and you shouldn't be, because this game hates you.
Angelic Buster's Ascent Skill, Surprise Encore, starts off with her signing the camera and dealing a ton of damage to both of the Knights. They
share an HP bar, so attacks like this are particularly effective at damaging them.
Surprise Encore is also one of a handful of special Ascent Skills. We can press the button again any time within 30 seconds of the initial activation.
Say cheese!
Doing so gives us a second 3s iframe window, and deals additional damage to the bosses. This means Angelic Buster's Ascent skill (like most of her skills) gives her a bit more survivability than the average.
This one-two combo knocks the Knights' HP down to 27.5% immediately.
So we immediately do it
again. 
Ascent Skills don't have a cooldown in boss fights. Instead, we get three total uses of the skill to spread out however we see fit over the entire course of the battle. Once all our Ascents are used, they're gone for the rest of the battle—we can use them offensively to rush out a ton of damage, or defensively as an oh shit button that gives us 3 seconds of invunlerability.
Using it against the Knights is technically both of these things; fighting them solo is a one-way ticket to getting chain juggled by the curses and losing a lot of lives.
Anyways, that's the first phase done in exactly three button presses.
Black Mage is kind of a midgame boss now—not because he isn't
difficult, but because endgame characters can just do
this shit to him.
With a flurry of chains, we move into phase 2.
You don't know what I've seen. The chains constricting this world…
I've seen a careless god, and people without a purpose. Come, Adversary. It's time to meet your destiny.
Let's finish this now.
Careless god? People without a purpose? You sound like you've been talking to the same guy I have this whole time.
Mayhaps.
I just want to say for the record that I have nothing to do with the Black Mage's whole thing.
Don't you have a fight to narrate?
Right, right, back to it. Phase 2 puts us against Black Mage proper, and we can already see one of his attacks: the chains. He fires these off in sets of between 5 and 13, and two patterns can be going on at the same time. Like Lucid's laser patterns, they will hone in on where we are and require constant movement to avoid. They deal ~15% HP damage and on hit will hit us with the Curse of Destruction—hereafter referred to as Black Curse.
These also show up in Part 1, but not in the first ten seconds.
Two seconds later, he then hits us with a status effect that removes our field of vision for up to 6 seconds. Given that we have to dodge things in order to keep from getting both curses on us at once, this can be a problem—
but it usually isn't. This is because it has a ~60s cooldown and can only be used once per phase; usually early on in his pattern. Because of this, he doesn't usually have a lot of attacks of both types on the field.
You'll almost definitely get hit by chains and take Black Curse, but the Curse of Creation—hereafter referred to as the White Curse—has attacks that are slow enough that we'll be able to react to them once the blindness lifts as long as we're positioned properly.
We have the second half of our Ascent Skill, though, so we can just iframe through the end of blindness.
After the blindness resolves, I drop Decent Holy Fountain to the right of the Black Mage. Playing to the right around this spot is optimal for fighting Black Mage, because it's the best spot to respond to Meteors.
I do not feel like explaining Meteors yet, but that's why everyone sets up here.
After setting it up, it's time for our first Burst Rotation. Before Ascent Skills this burst was used during phase 1, meaning we'd be stuck in this phase for about 2 minutes at minimum. That's no longer a problem, so we can set it up now.
The Black Mage, meanwhile, is using another attack, his spikes. Those ominous spines on the ground will fire up into large spikes, each one covering the whole area it's over and dealing damage + inflicting White Curse. We can see these even when blinded due to their position, so when they hit we can dodge over to the far left or far right of the screen—they will never appear there.
We, however, do not have to care. This is because Lithza has a Genesis Weapon.
Genesis Weapons are special superweapons that are given for doing a
whole lot of very specific bossing, and are the equivalent of Zodiac Relic weapons in FF14 or Legendary Weapons in WoW. They come with two unique abilities. The first of these is a flat 10% increase in Final Damage, period. The second is a bonus 10 second iframe with a 2 minute cooldown—Lithza is using it here, and you can kind of see the white bubble around her that shows she's invincible. This means we can use it to either set up our Burst safely (what we're doing here), or to extend an existing Burst Rotation's safety net out another 10s. This means that between 10 seconds of Bind, 10 seconds of Genesis iframe, and 10 seconds of idol privilege we now have an
incredibly safe Burst available to us whenever it's time to go nuclear.
This isn't
completely true here, however, as the Black Mage is immune to normal Binds completely. We can only lean on our iframes for safe Bursts here.
…Mostly. Because Origin Skills are supposed to be another tier of power entirely, their Binds are special and work on anything in the game—immunity be damned.
It also absolutely
chunks this man's HP, and at this point I'm actually waiting for him to begin another chain pattern before popping my Sparkle Burst iframe.
I get what I want, with the chains inflicting us with the Black Curse. Both curses last for 5 seconds on hit, they each have their own set of effects when they're active. For the Black Curse, it makes us take 15% additional damage any time we are hit. We also can't use any potions to heal our HP while under its effect, but my build for the Black Mage involves abusing Fountain (which works just fine) and a Full Heal 5thjob Special Node that gives us a 100% HP heal every 30 seconds when using a skill. We will not be dying from HP loss in this phase.
More importantly:
it increases our Final Damage by 10%.
What is… this music? This divine sound…
Like the set list, do you? Then let's call destroying the world a day and have ourselves a concert!
Never… The path we are on cannot be resolved so easily, child of dragons.
Wait, is that some kind of like, destined thing I don't know about?
I think he means you're literally a child of dragons. Novas, dragons, remember?
Oh right! I've been so wrapped up in the Magical Girl Idol part of my backstory that I forgot the
dragon part of it! Silly me.
The Black Mage has a number of other attacks in this phase, like summoning a pair of black orbs that track us and do Black Curse, a couple of things we'll see again in Phase 3, and a full screen attack every minute that forces us to run to the left, right, or center of the screen before filling everything else with lasers that instantly kill us, also giving him a special white HP bar that acts as a shield on his real HP.
But that doesn't matter here.
Against the might of a fully realized magical girl, the Black Mage can't last a single minute before falling to pieces.
The end of the world approaches.
That brings us to the meat of the fight—Phase 3.
Ahhh!
*huff* *huff* What is this place?
It felt like I was pulled into something…
Geez took you long enough.
Orchid?! Have you been-
Fighting all this time? Yeah, of course. But my attacks don't seem to affect him. I can barely make him flinch, and it doesn't seem to last.
...What? I've been MELTING this guy. He's super weak.
I guess the Adversary gets cheat codes.
So it looks like you get to end this thing after all. Can you handle that?
Yeah.
The Black Mage? He's practically a god at this point.
Let's go. I'll get my revenge, and you can save your dumb world.
Struggle if you must.
We're immediately thrown into Phase 3, and the Black Mage is already using a pair of attacks at the same time.
What about the cowboy? Are we just ignoring him, or…?
He's from a star force pity system that's
not implemented in v251. Pretend he isn't there.
Alrighty!
As for his attacks, the first one is his weird expansion animation. This doesn't deal damage, but instead pulls us closer to him so that he can follow up. The second attack is the Meteors I mentioned back in Phase 2—this attack shows up in both phases and works identically.
Meteors fall from the top of the screen going from right to left.
Upon landing, they will roll either to the right or the left. This is why we want to avoid the left side of the screen in Phases 2 and 3, the raining meteors makes dodging everything remarkably difficult and any hit we take will inflict us with a White Curse. This is
particularly problematic in P2 due to how hard it is to dodge the chains, but White is the worst curse to have at this point in the fight by a large margin.
This is because every part of the fight has its own annoying to dodge Black Curse attack. In this phase, it's these lasers! They appear as points of light with a cross-shape to show their range and then fire off, and come in two varieties: Blue and Pink. Blue lasers deal 20% of your HP, and the Pink ones deal 50%.
We also get to see the Black Mage's shield. A couple seconds after the fight begins it spawns in, and it works like Magnus's blue zone—as long as we're outside of it we only deal 50% damage to the Black Mage, and our healing is only 50% as effective. We
have to stay on top of him to deal meaningful damage.
This works fine, until the Black Mage makes this stance. When you see him starting to move like this, you need to be ducking immediately. That's because this is his most troublesome attack.
The Black Mage, holder of untold magical power and the ability to see through time itself, has a
kick as his most problematic attack. This is because he understands that no matter how strong a wizard you are, eventually you will have to kick something in the face.
This attack inflicts White Curse, knocks us back, and
freezes us in place for a moment. This can combo into either one of the lasers to give us a pattern that almost guarantees an instant life loss, and since triggering this effect
also locks our skills we can quickly wind up stuck in a situation where we can't easily stop ourselves from bleeding out lives quickly.
Phase 3 is the hardest portion of the fight, and where most failed runs die. However, it's also remarkably fair. Any time we do lose a life, it's our own fault.
Also, Orchid technically helps us through this phase? Despite her best efforts she deals a total of 3b damage per line, though, and she attacks much more slowly than we do.
Because of the kick, this phase has a sort of flow to it. First off, we want to drag him over to the right again. This is because the center of the screen has a lot of random other things inside of it, some of which I don't actually know what does because I always drag the Black Mage over to the right like this!
There's like, orbs, they reverse controls or slow you? They're annoying, just drag him to the right!
After that it's a simple my turn-your turn kind of flow. Between every kick, we can fire off five casts of Trinity—six if our timing is perfect.
So five, unless you want a boot to the head.
Then, he starts an attack. If it's a kick, we duck. If it's his suck-in attack, we can get off one more Trinity, then wait for the kick to
start, and then we duck.
It is important that we bait the kick, because he will not use it if there isn't a target to hit with it. If he does not use the kick, he will instead do something else—and his only other move that requires a casting animation is summoning more pink lasers, so it's basically always
that.
Meanwhile, mechanics happen and it's our job to react to them as necessary. Dodge the lasers if we can, and over here on the right there are only two attacks we really need to worry about for most of the fight. That explosion is
not one of them—it's the Black Mage creating a platform. These platform-creation explosions deal damage and add a White Curse, but they don't spawn over here on the ground floor of the right side.
You're on the right side, right?
Right.
Now THIS we have to react to.
The red explosion on me?
No, that's related to the White Curse, I'll explain in Phase 4.
The… spikey red orb, then?
No, that's the thing I mentioned that goes from down to up slowly, and never gets this far to the right. Which is where you should be in this boss. On the right.
The important attack is the raining white orbs, which drops in a consistent pattern at a consistent rate from one side of the screen to the other. They deal damage and inflict a White curse, and are in Phases 1, 2, and 3. To avoid them, we just have to walk through them.
To do that, I generally wait for the one
next to the orb I'm under to explode on impact with the ground, then I hit my Pink Pummel to dash into safety. This works to avoid the attack, but it's important
not to use a dash move to get back into melee with the Black Mage.
If we do, the odds are very high that we'll mistime it and wind up dashing in on him as he starts winding up a kick, getting a boot to the head for our trouble.
Do not dash in on the Black Mage. Walk. Just walk.
Or play something else, that's honestly the smarter move.
And now… we have a problem.
At regular intervals (either 1 minute or 2 minutes, I forget), the Black Mage will perform a screenwide attack, and in this case he is using the "down" attack, as we can see from the orange energy around him. This is very inconvenient because we need to jump, have Black curse, and the Black Mage is
still allowed to attack during his screenwides so if we jump right now we can't blink-hover high enough to get out of kick range—if he kicks, we're going to eat a lifeloss, eat a skill lock, fall on the floor, and die to the screenwide while stunned!
My plan instead is to walk to the right and then upjump, and if I die I die.
I die. Honestly, a perfectly acceptable outcome—better one life than two. In hindsight I could have dashed
during the startup from BM, then I would have been fine to upjump and hover out of his range. Alternatively, he could have used his "up" attack, visible by a white aura that flows upwards, which I can completely negate by abusing Soul Resonance's 2s iframe.
But it's fine, we have enough damage that we could sit here and let the death timer tick towards empty while waiting for our Burst Rotation to be off cooldown.
So we do that.
I've got 53 seconds on cooldown, though?
That was due to a mispress. I need to swap back to RoR using a ring swap button we have, and we can only do that alive.
Ring swapping is beyond the scope of this course, as it was
not implemented in v251 while also being removed soon from current-day maplestory for being annoying as hell.
Ahh, got it.
Revive and hit the ring swap button (visible by that red ring over Lith's head).
Black orb right overhead! Is that a problem?!
It's me. Don't worry about it.
Walking back into range (and ducking to avoid the kick, because
it is all about the kick), we start laying into the Black Mage again. Every time he uses his up or down screenwide attack, he's given a white HP bar that acts as a shield on his actual HP. Weaker parties back in the day could only break this on burst, meaning the rest of the fight was just waiting for cooldowns to be allowed to scrape away at the boss's HP again.
Speaking of Bursts, ours is up. Chaos erupts around us, but I let the genesis iframe rip and set up in perfect safety. There are players who swear by using the genesis invincibility to
extend our Burst window instead of just using it to set up safely, but they do not play this game as a joke.
I do not intend to be good enough at dodging and weaving buttons that I will ever need it, that would require I try—which, to be clear, is exactly the same as losing.
I would appreciate you trying when
MY LIFE IS ON THE LINE!!
You've got eleven left, it's fine.
Our Burst knocks the Black Mage down a peg, eating through most of his remaining HP while we're invincible. We also get to see his other center orb attack I mentioned earlier, the orb circled here. It zigzags slowly down the screen and will Black Curse and some status effect on hit… I don't remember because I haven't been hit by it in years—it can't make it over to the right side of the screen.
You
did set up on the right side of the screen, right?
Meteors come after this, and we have a very easy way to avoid them now. One of the platforms the Black Mage can create every rotation is up here in the top right, and it's really handy when it shows up. We can grappling hook up on top of it, and stand there to avoid the Meteors. Black Mage can still kick us so we have to react to it—but we can do that with a simple jump and nothing comes directly from above here except meteors—which aren't raining while the meteors we need to dodge are rolling on the floor, so this is actually a foolproof strategy.
Shortly after, he summons his Angels of Darkness. This comes complete with a text popup to let us know it's happening, and he calls out 1-6 of these little staticy guys that shoot energy balls in a predetermined direction towards the center of the screen. They cannot be damaged by us, and their energy balls
are on the background layer, meaning that Black Mage and all of his effects can cover them up.
This is not a problem, because we set up on the right side of the screen and thus we are out of range of every one of the Angels' shot lines. As long as we're over here and staying up close and personal with the Black Mage, we can really ignore half of the fight's mechanics.
Speaking of, that shield sure has gotten smaller, huh?
While the Black Mage does his "up" screenwide attack, let's talk about it.
As the fight goes on and his HP goes lower, the Black Mage's shield shrinks twice—this is its smallest form, and at this point we have to be basically
right underneath him to be doing full damage. This is a fight that encourages you to get really comfortable with weaving in and out of his multitude of kicks and just fearlessly pound him into the pavement—doing so lets us sit on a spot like this and avoid many of the troublesome mechanics while speeding through the fight.
The "up" screenwide resolves by a bunch of white orbs forming at the top of the screen. They fall down, covering
everywhere, and explode on contact with either a platform or the ground to kill anyone nearby instantly.. Because the entire attack comes out quickly, we can avoid it with Soul Resonance. If we weren't playing the best class in the game and had no iframe to burn on it, we would instead have to stand under a platform and pray that we don't catch a stray from an orb beside it landing too close to us.
Anyways we die because I started Reso too early and ran out of the 2 second iframe before the balls stopped landing. Oops!
With the boss having shown us all his tricks I decide now is the time to use my last Ascent skill on him. This burns through ~12% of his HP between the two hits, leaving us with not a lot left to burn through before we're out of the hard part of the fight.
This is also where I get impatient, and that's a bad thing because impatience in the Black Mage fight means you eat deaths.
For instance: here we are under White Curse, with Meteors coming at us to deal bonus damage and a laser spawning nearish to us. The correct answer here would be to have already dropped a Fountain, and to run forward slightly and tank the meteors while drinking—this lets us avoid the laser, live through the meteors, and stabilize our position from there.
Instead, I reflexively upjump the meteors and right into another waiting blue laser.
This costs us
two lives at once, from the Curse crossover and also just dying outright. This in turn causes me to tilt, which feeds into the vicious cycle of P3. It is a
fair fight. It is also not one that we can afford to play
badly.
So I hop right back in to melee while he's doing his suck-in attack, and see the white orbs falling alongside knowing that this attack will be followed by a Kick. The plan is to avoid the meteor right next to me, then dash out of the way and duck.
I misjudge the distance of the first orb and get bonked, that's White Curse.
At which point I duck to avoid kick, and see a laser spawn right on top of me. Unfortunate! What do you do?
Honestly at this point I should probably just sit there and suck it up then get back to work. Oh well. But that's not what I did.
I stood up.
Standing up let the Black Mage kick me. I'm already White Cursed, so I can't get it
again. This goes and shoves me back and out of the way of the blue laser, preventing me from losing a life even though it stuns me for a second. This is a remarkably clever move!
…Except there's another blue laser right where he shoves us, so I lose another life.
Walking back over, pink lasers spawn. I try to jump over them with the right timing to avoid them (since I'm Skill Locked from the Curse crossover that's my only option).
Goodbye, child of dragons.
Ahh, beans.
I did not respect the kick.
The resulting shot rockets me to the left and through a purple laser, and then a
second purple laser.
So we die, again,
again.
This sequence started at 55:55. By 55:42, we have lost a total of five lives. That is how quickly a Black Mage Phase 3 can spiral out of control.
Anyways I respawn and abuse my 3 seconds or so of courtesy invincibility to throw Lithza right back into the fight, because everything seemed to be calm enough to try and get back into a rhythm.
Lithza does lose one more life to a kick that knocked us to the left instead of the right due to poor positioning, meaning we then ate a shot from an Angel of Darkness that added on a Black Curse for the Curse crossover.
But I do manage to land my Soul Resonance properly on the next up screenwide, avoiding an additional death.
I then pop Burst to get rid of the last 5% of his HP. This was a waste. I should not have done this. It was foolish. But we're out of Part 3 at last.
Part 4 starts with white energy gathering into the center of the screen.
It then explodes in a big bang that drags us all into the Really Final Battlefield For Real.
Space itself seems to be changing…
Well, yeah. Genesis is about to begin. After that, everything becomes nothing. Listen, when he's weakened, you've got to summon up the power of the Adversary and deliver the final blow.
The power of the Adversary? But…
Are you really this dense? You failed before because the Seal Stone only activates off of powerful determination. So get it together and focus! You‘re the only one who can stop this now. You have to be ready to sacrifice it all. Even your life.
I'll do everything I can to end this, even if that means giving up my life.
Good. Then…
Orchid?
What? I'm just... gonna rest... a bit…
Orchid?!
Orchid falls over. She's been fighting constantly since just after Darknell, after all.
This void... Am I the only one left...?
Phase 4 starts with a curveball: each member of the party gets to fight their own copy of the Black Mage, with all of them having a shared HP gauge. There are some quirks to how it works, and you're not
really alone as buffs from a Bishop can hit you if you'd be standing in range, but this is a solo fight so that doesn't matter.
We've also been given an NPC button skill like with Will or Lucid, introducing a key mechanic for this last phase.
When we start the fight, our character will have either a white or black aura placed behind them at random. If we are white, it is of
vital importance that we press that NPC button… once.
This changes the aura to black, and now we never need to press it again.
Ikaruga is a Japanese Shoot 'em Up game originally released to arcades in December 2001. In it, we fly around using a ship that can change between black and white at the push of a button in order to avoid complicated patterns of bullets—we become invincible to the color of bullet whose aura we have.
Seventeen years later, MapleStory would go on to copy this mechanic
exactly for the climactic final phase of the climactic final boss for its entire main storyline.
Because of that, all we really have to do is go into Black aura to become immune to Black shots (and also dodge all Black curses). The only things that can hurt us most of the time are tiny White shots that deal 10% HP damage and White explosions that deal 50% HP. He'll randomly slow us, but that doesn't matter—we cannot be hit by Black attacks, we cannot get Black cursed,
we cannot lose lives to Curse crossover any longer.
As for tanking, we can do that remarkably well thanks to the effects of the White curse and our good friend the Decent Holy Fountain.
White Curse has three effects. First of all, it lowers our final damage by 10%. Secondly, it periodically spawns an explosion on us that deals 15% HP damage. However, in exchange for this it restores our life by 4% every second.
The only way we can die here is if we get careless and eat an explosion before running facefirst into a pattern of 4-shot stacks of White bullets.
I immediately get careless and eat an explosion before running facefirst into a pattern of 4-shot stacks of White bullets.
Anyways, Black Mage has White and Black bullets and they come out in a number of patterns. Most of them are just circles around him with varying levels of thickness, and one of them is the aforementioned 4-shot stacks, targeted right towards where we are standing.
Like so.
Umm… what about the trees?
Oh right. Those. Every 30-35 seconds, the Black Mage will do a screenwide attack. Branches appear that are either black or white, out of portals that are also either black or white. We have a Black aura, so we want to be standing in a black one when the attack resolves.
The wrong color will instant kill us, so just don't stand there.
It also spawns a white HP shield. You have now seen every part of this fight.
The entire battle from here consists of sitting on fountain, drinking until an explosion or 4-stack of white bullets pattern starts coming our way. We then avoid those (or drink through them but that can be risky as we can run out) before returning to fountain.
Lastly, we swap sides of the field when the Black Mage is between 4-stack patterns if he gets too close to us. Wait for bursts, fire as available, focus on not dying.
That's it. That's the fight.
Most of the time, if you make it to Phase 4 you will win the fight. This is even true for me, and all the white and black and effects kind of give
me a headache, which makes things a little harder than it should be.
I've learned to deal with it by letting my eyes unfocus like when I'm playing a shmup, preventing them from straining and letting me maneuver around well enough to get through it.
Our Origin's off cooldown so it comes out here again, letting us fast forward through most of the Black Mage's HP bar through sheer damage.
The game then slows down from Frames per Second to Seconds per Frame again, and right in time for a 4-stack pattern to come flying at me.
MapleStory is a game made by Nexon, a company with ~5-10,000 employees.
There is no excuse for this, and if I could mod the game to fix
this lag, I'd do that too.
Anyways, the Burst deletes most of Phase 4's HP, and we're out in about two and a half minutes.
Upon being defeated, the Black Mage curls up on himself and then disappears.
Orchid! Orchid!
This must be stopped. The Genesis Crux will be revealed. And if he returns to the Genesis Crux, that will be the end of our world.
That big black ball is the Genesis Crux. It serves as the treasure box in the Black Mage boss fight, and I didn't get anything noteworthy from breaking it open.
(Only the true power of the Adversary can destroy the Genesis Crux now.)
The screen is shaking as Bad Things loom on the horizon, despite us kicking the Black Mage's butt. Somehow.
How does THAT make any sense?!
Like this is the first time we've done a boss fight that ended in us somehow still losing. Remember Will?
Ugh, don't remind me.
Yeah, he sucks. Anyways.
QTE!
Once again, the power of the Adversary shines gold for a moment… then explodes. Oops.
I failed? But why...?
Gaah!
And then the Genesis Crux rumbles harder as the screen fades to white.
Nngh…
Magilia is knocked flat once again as the glow recedes.
No, I can't... not yet…
Another QTE! This one is special, it requires a
lot of presses and the gauge also regularly lowers so it feels like a little bit of a struggle.
One more time…
That's the thing from when the Black Mage attacked earlier… Magilia, you're being turned into Erda!
No! This can't be!
Did you think that you had escaped the path?
…Oh!
You will not live to claim the true power of the Adversary. That is your destiny. Your future has been decided.
This very moment was destined? Even this? Even now? Black Mage! What…
The Black Mage's essence flows into the Genesis Crux, until he fades to nothing.
He disappeared into the Genesis Crux… So... this is how it ends? Was my determination... not enough? I couldn't even take one step off the path of destiny…
…Oh, so
now you're not going to say it?! Liar.
No, you did. Just one step. though.
This voice... Tana?!
You do have the determination to see this through.
The world needs you. Everyone is counting on you to stop this. And we don't need someone who's given up.
Ah!
So what matters is not the will to sacrifice…
But the will to survive.
The Adversary's Power fires up.
And the Genesis Crux starts shaking everything even harder.
Ah!
It's returning!
Get back!
Orchid tries putting up a shield or something, but everything fades to white.
Video: vs Black Mage
Oh… I feel different.
You won't escape the Light of Annihilation!
Prepare for the giant's attack!
No damage! I think it's out of range!
How are the preparations going?
Aye aye. I'll find a way.
It would seem we have no choice.
Have you lost your mind?! This bucket‘s barely holding together!
Wait, so... All ships should push forward, except the flagship and its escorts? Did the Empress give this order? Where is she?
Enough.
Yep, that'll do.
Magilia!! Oh, we're saved!
We're done... analyzing the Core…
......Magilia......
Don't give up!
The giant is moving again!
Empress. We have to get out of here.
It's hopeless. The engine is scuttled, and the giant's closed back up.
I've been waiting a very long time to meet you, you know.
Zzz... Hmm…
Ah, Angelic Buster. I came to see Tear, but I guess that's not happening.
102,228 
That's my girl. Clean up everything, alright?
