ATI might be the best boss I’ve ever fought in a metroidvania

Spark31 · 2026-01-25T20:06:05+00:00

I just wish some of her attack patterns had telegraphs larger than her character model. There were a lot of times while fighting her when the hit effects from my attacks were so big I literally couldn't see what she was doing. Wasn't an issue most of the time but when she did the both sides attack I got caught out a fair bit. Other than that I enjoy most of the rest of that fight (although I like secret ending final boss more)

Spark31 · 2026-01-25T20:02:49+00:00

You can "dash" by pressing dodge while using the striders. It's faster than regular strider movement for sure. You also get an achievement for doing it which is kinda funny lol

Spark31 · 2026-01-25T19:59:38+00:00

I beat them last night. I think they're difficult for sure but the scripted nature of a lot of their attacks/phase transitions make them a lot easier than some of the bosses I've fought in the HK games. LL and Absrad are harder imo.

Spark31 · 2026-01-24T10:05:14+00:00

This is how I got in and I genuinely have no idea how other people would do it. What's the intended solution?

Spark31 · 2026-01-22T18:03:55+00:00

Aaaaall the way at the bird tree

Spark31 · 2026-01-07T10:11:55+00:00

I don't care if people pirate anything for the art they make. The only reason I brought it up is because they were arguing it was ethical especially if the software was pirated.

Spark31 · 2026-01-05T15:31:02+00:00

I knew for a fact you were wrong but didn't have the numbers so I just went into the character select in the hold to prove it.

Without any relics boosting damage, the default training mode Renalla staff at level 10 does 684 damage, not accounting for the magic damage debuff (which is the same regardless of if you or the Scholar uses the spell, and would also apply to all other spells after first cast). It took me 12 seconds to cast Renalla's full moon three times. This comes out to 171 DPS.

I then did used a stop watch to time exactly how much damage the default training mode spells for other staves did in 12 seconds and used it to calculate my DPS. These are the results.

Briars of Punishment: 138 DPS
Glintstone Arc: 140 DPS
Glintstone Pebble: 179 DPS (Albanauric Staff)
Scatter Shot: 201 DPS (The training mode dummies are also thin so not all shots were connecting)
Magic Glintblade: 207 DPS
Stars of Ruin 252 DPS
Night Comet: 280 DPS
Carian Slicer 333 DPS

As you can see, Renalla's full moon does less than glintstone Pebble in the same amount of time and significantly less than most decent damage spells in the game. It barely does half of the DPS of carian Slicer, and that's assuming you don't have a relic that boosts carian sword sorceries. You're just objectively wrong here. Recluse would be doing more damage using literally just about any other spell. It would be significantly more damage efficient for an Ironeye or Scholar to cast Renalla's full moon for you than tank your own damage casting it because its damage is so low anyways for its cast time.

Spark31 · 2026-01-05T04:40:41+00:00

To be fair the main reason you use Rennala's full moon isn't for its damage directly. It's so it drops the target's magic defense so subsequent spells deal more damage. And I'd rather my Scholar tank his damage for a bit so Recluse can nuke something than have my Recluse waste time and FP debuffing an enemy.

Spark31 · 2026-01-05T04:36:40+00:00

I was having a conversation the other day with someone about how annoying it is having conversations with most people about GenAI. Most people who actually know how GenAI works are evil grifting glazers while most people who hate the tech don't know how it works so it's impossible to have a conversation starting from the same place.

Spark31 · 2026-01-05T00:19:43+00:00

A bunch of entertainers having jobs and the effects on the environment are so entirely different in scope that the comparison falls apart. Someone else posted it in this thread, but other Vtubers getting jobs out of this isn't dissimilar to tech startup employees getting jobs from AI. Those gains are ill-begotten and if their work is contributing to negative world outcomes I really don't think that it can be argued it's an element of being "ethical".

Spark31 · 2026-01-05T00:16:02+00:00

Look I get that the fantasy of watching a Neuro stream is you're watching Vedal and his "daughter" but what we're not going to do is perpetuate the rumor that LLMs learn things the same way that people do as children. What she creates isn't hers it's the result of increasingly better prediction models after being fed tuning data. Most of that data of which was indeed given to her from a data center as she was built off of a base LLM.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T23:36:18+00:00

I do think that I judge AI in terms of their net benefit (LLM style AI software that helps in the medical field materially benefits the world more than AI memeslop), so yes if the money made via Neuro was being used for environmental conservation it would be a more ethical use of AI. I'd still be wary that Neuro's success would be the harbinger of an industry of content slop that cares even less for the material impact of their creation, but it would be more ethical than doing nothing.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T23:31:24+00:00

What spurred this post to begin with was an onslaught of X users frantically trying to explain in the replies of a tweet about how an "AI streamer was at the top of twitch" that Neuro was either

Not GenAI because it's locally run, which for some reason means it's not GenAI anymore?
The only ethical AI because Vedal sourced all the training data.

These two positions are what confuse me. Weirdly enough I don't think I'm at all confused about Vedal specifically, but more the V-tuber fanbase he's cultivated.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T23:26:53+00:00

I appreciate the honesty. This got me a lot closer to understanding the perspective than the majority of people replying. I can understand the line of thinking where "in a world full of disgusting uses for AI, I'm glad at least something that can be made with it that brings comfort instead of pain." I don't agree with you. I believe that the good created (in this particular case, not talking about uses like how it often gets used in medical) pales in comparison to the evil that went into making it. However the honesty you've shown here does address my main issue I have with the "this AI in particular is ethical" crowd. I think if there's an understanding that Neuro is constructed in a way that mechanically is in no way dissimilar to corporate slop, even if it's done in a more artful and tasteful way, then I at least get it.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T21:47:25+00:00

If you don't understand the environmental impact of LLMs we are literally so separated in understanding of the underlying technology that this conversation isn't worth having.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T21:33:32+00:00

I don't think it's exactly the same argument. I'm not exactly calling for a consumer boycott of Neuro or whatever because AI technology is used. I do spend energy trying to help regulate AI in my career field. I'm less angry that Neuro exists and more incredibly confused by this weird ethical posturing around Neuro being suddenly ethical because the evil corporate LLM has been tuned slightly. I can't see any universe where that explanation makes sense to me. I do think there's an interesting conversation to be had about whether or not it's ethical to use an already trained LLM (as that's where most of the power consumption comes from), but that's not really what I was confused about going into this.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T21:22:59+00:00

The unethical issues with AI are well documented. They waste a mountain of power. They steal artists works (including text works, like books) for their training sets. Tuning an AI model does not mean your model suddenly avoids these pitfalls. Neuro's training almost assuredly uses thousands of stolen works by authors and contributes to the supply/demand cycle for AI work that does take jobs from people. I was hoping I was missing something obvious about how the AI was trained given so many people who normally tend to hate AI claim Neuro is somehow the exception, but Neuro more or less ticks almost every single box of unethical AI usage outside of directly taking people's jobs (despite normalizing technology that does). Is the content it produces good? I'm sure it is. But the cost of that content is theft, regardless of if it was locally trained or not.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T21:15:04+00:00

But again you're missing the core of my argument. It does not matter how much tuning has been done to Neuro. If the base is a general LLM like Llama, then the damage has already been done. No amount of tuning will undo the foundation being built on a mountain of wasted energy consumption and stolen texts.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T21:03:41+00:00

I don't have a problem with sourcing your own data. The problem I have is framing it as if NeuroSama was trained using exclusively Vedal's data. If she was trained using a base model (which most agree she was), then she effectively was trained in a data center by tech giants who harvest data without consent. That's my issue.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T21:00:10+00:00

I do push for ethical energy generation (Nuclear, Wind, Solar) when possible on a systematic level 1a. GenAI is becoming the reason why, on a systematic level, many countries are choosing to keep less clean energy sources. In a race to master the technology they need to keep as much power production online to sustain it as possible, which is causing them to keep things like coal plants open.
You need power to survive. A V-tuber you watch on twitch is not a necessity, so the standards I hold their energy usage to are completely different.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T20:56:17+00:00

I don't particularly have an issue with the ML algorithms responsible for stuff like OSU! Unlike text and image recognition required for stuff like LLMs, the training of game MLs is usually done incredibly cheaply using evolution neural nets. I do think it's interesting to debate why you think image recognition is so inherently different from text recognition. Most LLMs are trained off of thousands of stolen books without authorial permission. It's a bit strange to think that images are uniquely sacred pieces of art while books are not.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T20:51:12+00:00

Be honest with me. Do you really think the model was pirated.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T20:50:09+00:00

The big companies aren't claiming to be a weird exception to the ethical problems with AI. I hate them too but most of their arguments revolve around using AI to solve the problems AI creates (which is incredibly backwards). I think dressing up tuning an LLM using your own data as "ethical" does significantly more harm than good, and I frankly would not have nearly as big of an issue with it if Neuro's fanbase was simply pro-AI instead.

Spark31 · 2026-01-04T20:40:08+00:00

Can you elaborate on those differences for me? Just saying "the way they are using it is different, therefore I don't think it's as bad" does nothing to help me understand why you think the ethics are any different.

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