Could this be the end of Palworld?

I really love Palworld, the game. It just hits on all cylinders for me. I love base building in any game that allows it, from EverQuest II to Valheim to V Rising to Palworld. I love capturing, breeding and raising pets. I like forming teams. I like raiding. I love virtual pets. I love sharing an online world with friends.

There is just nothing I don’t like about the game. I guess the only really unhappy fact about Palworld is that while I am playing it, I am not playing any other of the wonderful games sitting dormant in my Steam library or on my bookshelves. And ultimately, there is no end to this kind of game. There’s always more interesting Pals to breed, better gear to get, more bases to build and so on.

But there is an end, of sorts. Steam has a bunch of Palworld achievements. Completing all of those could possibly set me free to play other games.

The last four achievements on my list were to craft 20,000 ammo, construct 2,000 Pal spheres, collect 40 journal notes left by various NPCs, and to defeat all the tower bosses on hard mode.

Well, the first three are time consuming but not really hard; your basic wooden arrow takes almost no resources and counts toward the ammo; the most basic Pal sphere, again, easy to make, and the notes achievement just requires having the map open on another screen and finding the ones I hadn’t yet found.

The tower bosses, though.

With the latest expansion, there are six tower bosses meant to be taken on in order from about level 15 up to level 55, the last and highest level one in the middle of the new island of Sakurajima. These are not too tough; there’s usually a specific Pal who can resist their attacks and defeat them. Many players only use Pals for their passive effects and do all the damage themselves, and this works, too. They tend to be more milestones than barriers.

Hard mode, though, is something else. All the bosses are now level 55 and come with even nastier attacks. Some of them come with additional NPCs — sometimes a lot of them. The PIDF boss in tower four comes with a squadron of gun toting NPCs. The last two hard mode bosses clone themselves after a certain point — two copies for the Shadowbeak (fifth) tower, and three copies for the sixth (Selyne) tower.

I didn’t have a huge amount of trouble dealing with the first four, but Shadowbeak just kept burning me down. Watching other people’s videos made it seem easier than it was to keep out of range of its attacks. I tried the Chillet/Gobfin strategy. I tried the Bellanoir Libero strategy that did so well in the Ultra fight.

I was just torn apart.

I needed to finish this game, and the ammo for the quad guided missile launcher was expensive and time consuming to make, so I really couldn’t afford more failures. Especially since it took ten minutes and expensive food to get my dead Pals back to fighting shape.

So… I went into the options and raised the damage I did to Pals, and lowered the damage they do to me.

Is it cheating? No, it’s in the game. Is it hardcore? Decidedly not.

But I did it, I cleared the final two bosses on hard mode, and now I am done with Palworld.

Well. There is Blazamut Ryu Ultra to defeat. So maybe one more time, one more boss. I, of course, will return those damage settings to their defaults, because the secret to the raid bosses is team building. I think I can handle that.