Glassmaker’s Conclusion isn’t That Satisfactory

The last part of Glassmaker is finally out, and, well, it’s all over, I guess. We get to finally confront Nihil and kick his ass. Except, well, we don’t. After doing yet another dumb clue scene, we can fight our final boss. Of course, we have to spend ages scanning a room for clues first. And then we have to do a jumping puzzle based on those clues. Then you can fight the boss.

Yet again, being a Tenno in a Warframe doesn’t matter.

The fight against Nihil is simple. You dodge the crystals he shoots from his head, pick them up and throw them at the big, floating ‘clue’ crystals around the arena. Once they’re all broken, you can damage Nihil directly by… throwing more of the crystals at him.

Each phase is pretty much the same, except the second phase will have Nihil teleporting around to get close to you, while the third will have him teleporting around and firing at you from further away because he’s scared. During this fight, you are completely unarmed and have no Warframe abilities. All you have is your basic parkour stuff. You’ll need it because Nihil will destroy platforms you are standing on, and will sweep his sword across the battlefield. One hit from this sword (which honestly has a rather uncertain hitbox) and you instantly die. So you need to dodge that.

Now, there are some actual tricks to this.

Nihil is weirdly good at leading his shots. If you’re running around, he’ll either hit you or overshoot, sending crystals off into the abyss. So you actually want to stand still until Nihil fires a shot and then move, so the crystals land on solid platforms.

You can also reset pretty easily by falling off the ledge. Nihil will still try and shoot you and hit you with his sword on this temporary platform, but it doesn’t count as a failure. Only getting hit by Nihil’s sword counts as a death. Speaking of deaths, death passives (e.g. Wukong, Inaros) don’t work here, but Arcane Revives work fine. So you can have 6 revives instead of 4.

But the fight really is just dodging attacks and throwing crystals at Nihil. For a movement-based fight, it’s fine. Somehow though, it almost punishes you for being mobile, as Nihil’s crystal attacks will fly off into the void if you dodge too fast and he’ll waste time destroying platforms if you don’t stand still long enough for him to shoot crystals at you.

Once you have thrown enough crystals at him, Nihil gets, uh… captured, I guess? We seal him inside a glass bottle, like he did to many of his victims.

I suppose at least we get some satisfactory remarks from Nora.

Somehow Nora magically doesn’t get completely glassed like everyone else does. She clearly has plot armour thicker than us Tenno. But at least Nora actually starts saying some cool things. After months of “Hol’ up, I’m detecting glass resonance”, we actually get to hear more snappy, sassy Nora Night.

Nora’s not a bad character, but her lack of lines and repetitive dialogue make her easy to hate. Nearly as much as Nihil. Nihil is at least suitably evil. Nora just becomes grating over time. But this whole event was insanely dragged out. We didn’t  even get a satisfactory reveal either, since we worked out who Nihil was in the second part!

AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON THE ACTUAL CLUES.

I haven’t found ANYONE who actually enjoyed hunting clues in the last crime scene. While the first one on Cetus was okay and the others were meh at best, this one was the worst. Not only is the room really big, but everything’s under-saturated and randomized. This makes everything insanely hard to see. The clues blend in with the scene this time, and it’s awful.

But what makes the crime scenes even worse is that YOU ARE SO FUCKING SLOW. I’m a fucking Tenno piloting a goddamn space ninja, I should be able to move around and bullet jump in these scenes. Heck, having standard mobility would make the crime scenes far better AND actually make them interesting, because then you can hide clues in more interesting areas. For example, one clue is a… pile of glass. In a room full of glass.

If this whole Glassmaker thing had been an event running over the course of a month or so, it would have been fine. But Glassmaker has spanned 6 months, and this ending is almost too short. Sure, we found out who the killer was, but everyone’s still dead and glassed aside from Nora and, frankly, being trapped in a fancy bottle isn’t really a punishment for Nihil. After all, he had been trapped in Cephalon space for ages anyway. The pacing for this whole season has been absolutely awful, even if the story wasn’t too bad.

Oh well. Maybe Nightwave Season 5 will be better…