Hephaistos yelling about Athena is a lot weirder with Athena in the party. 00:00 - Intro Cutscene 00:36 - Phase 1 08:20 - Transition 09:19 - Phase 2 17:37 - Victory Cutscene
Jesus, the sound effects during the transition of Hephaistos from humanoid to an amalgamation, combined with the distorting of the voice...it is _grim,_ and I love it.
Fun fact, his voice lines is phase two are actually straight up louder than phase one, which adds to the effect imo I'd mixed it with phase one levels in mind and then phase two clipped my audio lol
I really didn't appreciate until now how clean the transition is o_o The model changes with no cuts and it goes from the shot of the mask with the flames behind it to the actual boss model so seamlessly.
The technical tricks they're using for the model swaps are pretty impressive. The way Hephaistos's transformations work is each of them has an individual model that gets spawned in shrunk when he starts transforming, growing to normal size part by part as the original model's parts shrink down in turn. The seamless transition from the transformation cutscene into the second phase is done by using the moment of darkness to teleport the boss and the camera from high up in the air back down to the arena.
imagine if the Ancients decided to throw this guy at the Meteia. he'd be feasting on roasted bird in celebration of his newfound freedom within the hour.
Interesting observation: The first raid-wide AOE, "Aioniopyr," is derived from the Greek word "Aiõnios," which means "without beginning or without end." In this context, it's most likely another way of saying Deathless.
It's a mitigation check, just like Gold Baha in UCoB. Those raidwides hurt a lot especially with the DoTs, and the towers can vary a lot so people will need to be able to adjust sometimes to the other half of the arena
![Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage) Phases I&II [BGM + SFX, Instance Cutscenes]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
