My favorite environment in the whole game, featuring easily one of my three favorite villains, with heroes that are mostly not my favorites, but nobody I really dislike either, and no Advanced or Challenge mode to prevent me from having fun. I had a pretty rough day IRL, so this was the treat I needed to improve my mood.
Blew my Mint because I didn’t notice that Haka had been Ashclawed before playing his Rampage, but it was worth it to Undo, because that Rampage and a subsequent Elbow Smash won me the game on Haka’s next turn. For once my reaction to a round 2 Get Back In There was to not get distracted trying to deal with the Gladiators, and just focus on getting Kaargra kayoed (kayaarged?) so that we’d win at 20 favor. A particularly delightful detail: Thorathian Monolith meant no damage to the party from Rampage, but Driving Mantis allowed me to apply whichever redirect I prefer, so one Gladiator ended up taking 7 total damage from Haka and dying; that was favor point number 19, and it didn’t matter that I then elbow smashed S’sdari (my headcanon by the way is that her name evolved in the mouths of various slobbery aliens, from Fashion to Dashun to Darshin to Darri and then to Sh’Dari before finally winding up at S’sdari). I had put Found Wanting on her during the Environment turn, and letting Trial subjects die can be very bad, but in this case the game ended before Found Wanting could play another card.
PS, random thought… not that Kaargra needs to be any more complicated, but it would be kinda neat if all the Gladiators had nemesis symbols for particular heroes. Basically I just wish Haka could have done 9 damage to one particular target with that Rampaging Mantis maneuver. Not sure who in the arena would be nemeses with whom, but the Title cards give us a good starting point, suggesting that Haka’s would be Tryragon-Rex. That tracks with Haka’s early stories where he mostly just fought monsters, as Tryragon could easily have premiered as a random radiation mutant (perhaps around the time Godzilla was popular, if the timeline lines up), and later been retconned as an alien who ran away from Kaargra’s little circus the first time they visited Earth (say maybe around 1883?), and lain low until the Haka fight, which indirectly led to Kaargra making her first return visit to what she previously found to be a very uninteresting little planet.
