[Xillia 2] Ludger Solo: Big Steppa

My brain is still fried. Big Steppa is quite literally built different. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I wanted to fight this frog partially to derust, but also because I always thought it (and it's less colorful cousin in X1) were pretty funny. Little did I know how much of a clown Big Steppa truly is. For the purposes of comboing Big Steppa, he possesses the following traits: • Contrary to his name, Big Steppa is very small, smaller than most humans • He is super heavy, limiting most forms of knockback • He has an absurd amount of Iron Stance. It feels comparable to WP. • He will break upon landing more than 5 elements in a power combo In isolation, these aren't anything I haven't dealt with before, but the combination of these traits makes Big Steppa really obnoxious to craft a combo for. A lot of my artes, like Swallow Flight or Fearful Wing just don't work properly here becuase of how heavy he is combined with him being tiny, causing a bunch of hits to whiff. Then you have the Power Combo limit. To keep the combo interesting, I have to optimize low % weakness multipliers (somewhat) and reset after hitting 4-5 elements. I want to avoid using OTG resets because I don't want to give this thing the opportunity to refresh its Iron Stance by hitting the limit. Sword and Hammer L1 normal, as well as Meteoric came in handy here due to their ability to ignore weight. Things get wierd after the second reset, though. Some takes I've had the previous power combo somehow continue and then expire around the time I hit Mine Collapse. Other times he just randomly gets all his Iron Stance back despite being in midair hitstun from Freezing Eruption (the ! doesn't even pop up...he just says no and walks out of the combo). But most of the time I do get the follow-up shown here. Technically breaking Big Steppa is beneficial since you get a huge DPS window...but it's also boring and feels lame to just hit something that's just lying there. That said, it feels wrong to not showcase it, so I decided to have it be the "finisher" for this fight. Hopefully some impromptu backwards hitboxing was enough to make that part of the "combo" interesting. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Chapters] 0:00 Big Steppa 1:00 Results ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Restrictions] 🐸 Ludger Solo 🐸 Unknown Mode 🐸 No Damage 🐸 No Menu Usage 🐸 No Power Charge 2 & 3 🐸 No Immunity Skills/Equipment ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Modifications] 📝 Removed other party members 📝 Set Ludger's Max HP to 1 (to offset water weapons healing me) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Stats] 📈 Ludger Lv. 52 = Big Steppa Lv. 52 ⚔️ Atlas (Water) 🔨 Hades Mallet (Water) 🔫 Romulus (Water) 🎩 Striped Hat 🧥 Tactician's Coat 💍 Accel ✨ All stat/damage increasing skills equipped 🎓 Triple Crit ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Music] 🎵 Metro Mayhem - Level 1 - Frogger's Adventures: The Rescue