Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

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"That's what it means to live."


Thank you to @mystearia5441 for the thumbnail!



Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:05 Duke 1
3:49 I would die to fulfill my promise.
5:00 Duke 2

Game Modifications:
-Used Arte Sphere mod by Sora3100


Closing thoughts on the run:
Holy shit, it's finally over... lol. I do love this run, but this run took so much out of me as a Tales player. I don't even think my Judith is THAT insane but to get to this level I had to put so many hours in. The first two bosses I recorded were Zagi 1 and Goliath (the first two bosses on the boss refight menu). These extremely easy bosses took me around 50 hours for me to get a satisfactory take of since I had to learn so much about the character and the game. Of course, the amount of effort I poured into the run is also what makes me incredibly proud of it as well and I hope it showed in the gameplay.

Judith has always been one of my favorite characters to play in any video game. It was a childhood dream of mine to become good at this character and I think that, with this run, I've managed to fulfill that childhood dream. In this sense, this Judith run is one of the purest passion projects on my channel. I don't think I could have given so much to a run like this one if I didn't care so much about it.

This run definitely had its struggles though. I don't think I've ever been as burnt out of Tales as I was after beating Alexei. That fight literally made me not want to look at anything related to Tales for like 1-2 weeks afterwards lol. That being said, I'm very happy that I was able to see this through to the end. I've tried learning Judith many times in the past and I gave up multiple times because the challenge of learning both Judith and the game was too difficult. This time, I made sure that wasn't the case and I believe that's something I can be proud of.

I did also want to speak a little bit about Vesperia as a game a little too. I was a bit down on this game going in since I knew the boss mechanics were a bit... strange. Despite this, I ended up having a lot more appreciation for the game. There's a bit of a narrative among runners that Vesperia is a bad game and it's kinda funny to meme on since it's so popular yet so flawed. But I do think that Vesperia is a very skill expressive and fun game despite it having some issues. ToV can be one of the most rewarding Tales experiences if you're willing to learn the boss mechanics and play around some of its jankiness because I genuinely believe there's so much to explore here. Hell, I'll probably re-do this run someday because I feel like there's more I can do on Judith. Until then though... thank you guys for watching. I always appreciate you guys!


Strategy:
Duke 1:
There are three things that make Duke annoying:
1. His artes move him all over the place. This makes his artes difficult to punish because they mess with the axis A LOT.
2. He has a teleport "attack" that can be used as a random and a knockdown tech-out. This teleport is extremely similar to Muzet's Emergency Warp, it gives Duke i-frames and teleports him to a random point on the map.
3. He has unlimited KD tech-outs like Flynn. This actually isn't that bad compared to Flynn since the tech-out rate is way lower, but this does mean that he can potentially teleport out whenever I knock him down with an arte.

With these three things said though, Duke isn't too bad. I just need to be careful of his range in neutral and when he uses Havoc Heaven as his KD tech-out. While he can use this tech-out anytime I knock him down, it is possible to react to it and dodge it with a touch-down, jump, or Moonbeam depending on the positioning. It's also not super likely for him to tech-out since his KD tech-out rate is so low. This means I can pretty easily combo him once I get a stun despite him having potentially infinite KD tech-outs. I do think punishing Havoc Heaven with Moonbeam is the way to go though. This attack moves him around a bit so fixing my axis with Moonbeam is crucial.

Duke 2:
Largely the same as Duke 1. He does get two new artes in Punishing Divine Flash and Punishing Decend (yes that's how its spelled). Punishing Divine Flash is very dangerous since it comes out deceptively fast and has a fairly long range. Also, this attack completely ruins the axis since he moves around a ton after the lasers come out. Punishing Decend is usually not threatening, but I did almost get hit by it here... my air dash i-frames saved me though lol.

Honestly, the hardest part of Duke 2 is the mental damage of having to sit through the first fight and the cutscenes again to get to him... this is why I'm not doing Duke 3 (and because I don't have the Devil Arms on this save).

BGM:
Theme of RENA - Star Ocean 2
Liela Xea - Atelier Sophie