Harena

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Harena
Harena, the Nightmare Queen
Alias	The Nightmare Queen
Origin	Unknown
Occupation	Abusive Parent, Bad Boss, Omnicidal Maniacs, Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant, Hair-trigger Temper, Complete Monster
Status	Presumed Deceased
Skills	Reality warping, control over dreams and nightmares, Arcane Element, Interface Screw type Attacks not seen in any other boss in the game.
Hobby	Finding an excuse to harm something, friend or foe.
Goals	To rule over a kingdom of nightmarish fiends after all living life is destroyed.

Harena is a major antagonist in the upcoming game "E.S.W.N." by Shiramu-Kuromu. While she is by no means the Final Boss, she is, however, considered the central antagonist of the main story sections of the game. Her actions, among the other villains, stand out as having the most overall impact on the plot, to the point she effects all of the main characters at once with her goals. Infamously, she has earned many bad nicknames regarding her absolute amoral treatment of her own offspring, eagerly killing off two of the three she had and gruesomely experimenting and traumatizing the survivor. Prone to killing her own henchmen if they so much as report bad news, she is, however, smart enough to keep Tehka alive; Tehka has been the most competent of her henchmen from behind the scenes, and she takes great pain to force herself to not outright kill Tehka in rage. Many of the characters have a reason to hate her, but during Chapter 3 is when Sirryu, the main protagonist, finds his own hatred in Harena.

Witnessing the kind of villain Harena truly is at that point, Sirryu is out for blood against Harena since Harena had gone far too off the deep end compared to any of the other antagonists in the story. She is also the only villain in the story to be classified as a Complete Monster as a direct result of her behavior and goals as a villain; nobody in-game has any sympathy for her whatsoever by the time she becomes more known among the cast. Even Tehka becomes horrified of Harena after specific events occur in the story. Tehka, during the boss fight against him in Chapter 5, breaks down in tears and whining like a small child at the end of the second phase of the fight, delivering the Wham Line that Harena is actually his mother and how he completely despises her for all of the terrible things she had done to him. Harena, at this point, only dives further into the abyss by forcing Tehka into the next phase of the fight by transforming him against his own will. By this point, nobody even remotely re-considers about killing Harena due to this scene alone.

Battle Strategy

• Recommended Level: 950-1,000+
• Weaknesses: Her low Speed stat is her only easily exploitable weakness. Alchemy Element Healing Spells that can be unlocked can't damage Harena herself, but they CAN make short work of the minions Harena will use for specific parts of the fight, as healing moves damage these types of enemies due to the mechanics of the Alchemy Element itself.
• Threats: Her interface screw abilities will cause problems if you're not prepared for the sudden shifts in progressing the fight or staying alive.
• Urgent Note: The final attack used against her must drop her HP to 0% outright, because is she is still alive and at 1% HP, she will trigger an instant Game Over.
• Other Notes: Having a high Mika Link will allow the protagonists to learn Healing Spells which have an Elemental Advantage to the Impostor Party Member enemies that Harena utilizes during Nightmare Dimension.
• Trivia: If you were to scale Harena's stats up to the maximum level recommendation akin to Neo Ultimorian Grandis, she would have more HP than Grandis and the prior two bosses combined, which would be above the HP Stat Cap as well. As a result, Harena's strongest stat is her high amounts of HP, which is also why she has so many phases as well. The second highest HP would go to Final Encounter Great Mother Terranadrosus, whose high HP is justified due to Genesis' extremely potent base damage easily being capable of OHKOing lower level bosses and enemies in one foul swoop.

Much like the previous Mini-Boss Fight, you are incapable of using the Guard Commnand due to how easy it is to acquire Soul Points in such a manner. As a result, you will need to rely on damaging Harena as hard as you can to acquire Soul Points for the necessary skills to be able to be used to slay Harena with. Harena has multiple phases; 100% HP, 80% HP, 60% HP, 50% HP, 40% HP, and 20% HP. At these intervals, she is scripted to do a certain command in the battle in the middle of turns, such as her consistently increasing in power Arcane skills. If you somehow manage to reduce her to 1% HP due to failing to land a killing blow from the prior hit, she will immediately claim victory with an unknown power and you'll get a Game Over.

At 100%, her Arcane skills are weak in damage output, and she rarely uses them. This is the easiest part of the battle, as Harena does not yet try any of the tricks seen later in the battle. Upon hitting 80% HP, Harena, if she KOs a party member, will remove said party member from the party entirely to prevent them from being revived right away. If this happens, there is a rare chance of the party member in question being forced to survive against demonic versions of their team-mates who can attack them for strong damage. KOing the impostors using healing spells will make the character available in the main fight itself; Harena is invincible if you try attacking her in the "Nightmare Dimension" spots.

As her HP drops to 60%, she will use two hits from her multi-target Arcane skill, each one hitting a different defensive stat, and her Arcane Element spells will increase in strength. At this point, her sprite changes to a slightly hunched over appearance with her fists clenched in anger. Her attack animations in this state strictly involve only her hands moving and not her primary body. At 50% HP, this will trigger an instant KO against the entire party who will be trapped in the Nightmare Dimension. At this point, they are seeing multiple Harena's on the field, and only one of them is real. Attacking the real one will finish this phase of the battle.

At 40%, her dialogue will begin to outright show malice in the form of angrish. Here, her sprite changes to a helmet pointed upwards to show her face; her relatively ordinary eyes in other scenes are replaced by completely soulless, creepy eyes in this pose. Her hands will be raised in a pouncing gesture as well. Her she will use her Arcane attacks a total of three times against randomly chosen allies, and again they get stronger. At 20% health, Harena's helmet shatters to expose her face, this time appearing completely frenzied rather than simply unnerving. The gemstones that used to be placed on her helmet as "eyes" become separate enemies on the field which put up a barrier around Harena and make her invincible for as long as they persist, all the while one of the eyes will progressively increase all of Harena's Offensive and Defensive stats until it is destroyed.

Upon the destruction of the eyes of her shattered helmet, the battle will resume, but Harena completely snaps by this point. At this point, the only damage she deals for her attacks are in percentages of the target's maximum HP. If Harena is not KO'd before a certain number of turns, Harena will acquire an 100% HP damage for her attacks and outright KO the entire party and cause a Game Over. If she manages to survive reaching 1% HP, she will also cause an instant Game Over due to her extreme sanity slippage. Also in this phase of the battle, the battle music changes to a much more fast paced, panicked track that indicates how much danger Harena poses at this point.

After KOing Harena, she is noticeably the only enemy/opponent to yield 0 Experience and 0 Gold, despite the actual Final Boss yielding how amounts of these two rewards. This is done to trick players into thinking that their is no other Boss fight after Harena, as several JRPGs have a common theme of having the final boss yield no experience or currency since the game continues no further at that point, or in some cases, do not yield rewards because they are the strongest opponents faced in the entire game and thus any actual reward is pointless since it shows you are already strong enough to not need any further level grinding. Another noteworthy fact about Harena is that she is the first enemy opponent to have a unique death animation; in that her entire body begins to overload with arcane energy before she disintegrates entirely.

Design Notes

Harena is a homage to Ghadius of Klonoa: Door To Phantomile fame, especially in her physical design. Also worth noting is that while is is true that E.S.W.N. takes place during the Malevolent Era, the reason she is the only Complete Monster in the game is because "Dogma's Damnation" had or was beginning to occur during a cutscene at the beginning of the post-game story. Due to this, the Malevolent Era incarnations of the Ultimorian Deities are all destroyed, and Zenith never appears in E.S.W.N. at all. As a result, the Ultimorian Deities seen in the post-game are all from the Neo Ultimorian Canon.

In terms of similarities to RWBY's Salem, there is no actual comparison just yet; Salem was not revealed until a few years after Harena was first made known, and whereas Salem's powers are currently not known outright, Harena's abilities tend to involve a combination of Ghadius' abilities mixed in with other nightmarish villains. It is also worth noting that when compared to the Ultimorian Universe Demons and Undead, there is virtually no similarities to be made aside from her vile nature; she has control over an element that is outright lethal to the Infernal Void Demons of Ultimoria.

Trivia

• Out of the boss characters, normally the stock death animation for boss opponents is used. However, in Harena's case, her body becomes vaporized from within as she is disintegrated in a much more brutal fashion than most other bosses are.
• Her Boss Fight, in addition to the fight directly before her, are similar to the fight against Asgore Dreemurr due to the fact a vital action in-battle is disabled from use. However, it was ultimately the prior mini-boss who made the parallel and Harena merely kept the interface screw unchanged from how her minion had altered it in the first place. In addition, her son Tehka can be compared to Genocide Sans or even Asriel Dreemurr. Tehka, in his first phase, uses his strongest attacks right at the beginning and avoids damage entirely just like Genocide Sans, but switches to use some of Asriel's tactics in his second phase due to the change in appearance in this phase. The reason these references were made were simply because by this point in the story, it was perfectly in-character for the duo to use such unusual tactics.
• Her summoning the actual Final Boss was originally her ultimate goal overall; now it's been reduced to a last ditch effort in the emergency the Guardian Beasts would succeed in killing her, and thus allow her to possess Honglong as a host for the Final Boss fight.
• Tehka was originally not intended to be her son, and that Harena was not supposed to have any relatives known at all; Tehka would've otherwise been just another pawn in her plans had this been kept.
• Although Ultima, Dragora, and Grandis are featured in E.S.W.N., they do not share the title of Complete Monster alongside Harena due to the sole fact that these are not the Malevolent Era incarnations of the trio, but instead the much more benevolent Neo Ultimorian Canon incarnations. After the Final Boss fight is finished, the protagonists witness Dogma in the sky from an extremely far away distance, all but stating outright that Dogma's Damnation had just finished, and that the Malevolent Era Incarnations of the three Ultimorian Deities had been killed off already by Dogma.
• Her treatment of Tehka, originally, was much different in the earlier drafts. However, now that her role is comparable to villains such as Freeza in regards to her needlessly killing her own henchmen at times, it is clear her treatment of her son and his ill-fated siblings was as amoral as one would expect from Harena with this characterization. In fact, her outright outburst to the protagonists in Chapter 3 towards Tehka and her physical and emotional abuse towards him is the beginning of Tehka's redemption arc, as even though Tehka still serves as an antagonist later, it's very clear he's only doing so because he is suffering from extreme Stockholm Syndrome for Harena, to the point that Phase 2 of Tehka's fight in Chapter 5 involves a severe emotional breakdown where he outright begs to stop fighting entirely and is a crying mess... which Harena treats by forcing Tehka into a monstrous form to forcefully push the fight further to Tehka's destruction. This act alone caused Sirryu, who had long since held a grudge against Tehka since the beginning of the game, to outright cause Sirryu to immediately try and help a dying Tehka at the end of the fight, and then completely snaps at how Harena forcefully hits the kill switch on Tehka's life even when Sirryu is trying to heal him on his own accord.
• Harena is the only villain in the Ultimorian Universe who is not only a parent but actively engages in extreme methods of child abuse and torment for severe psychological damage. Even Zenith pretty much despises her for this (though this could be the fact Zenith has a legitimate reason for his own son's existence as being treated in a more positive light).
• She is the first Demon Category Ultimorian to wield Arcane and/or Space Element techniques in chronological history. The second and only other Demon with this trait would be Hybrid Master Neo Darigus, who had an ulterior motive behind why he wields it at all.
• If certain Easter Eggs are activated at varying points of the main story, Harena constantly gives the impression of actively stalking the player. However, a unique twist occurs if these Easter Eggs are triggered during Chapter 6, in which she is normally the Story Boss of that Chapter. Here, she will taunt the player by asking if they even felt any shred of guilt for having no choice but to fight her son, or the fact she's butchered several major faction leaders during Chapter 3's end or later. Not only that, but if you active the Easter Egg encounter that becomes available in Tehka's Playroom, and check the journals which detailed what Tehka had thought of the other characters, Harena will directly appear behind the player for a split second before instantly forcing the game to close, with the only indication it had happened is her generic Banshee shriek vocal.a