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This update is based on gameplay from December 14th and 15th. It might be worth a note that the event this is associated with ended on December 15th!
As of the previous update, I had just upgraded to my final classes. In fairly short order, I went to the Crystal Desert.
I didn't do any levelling up after getting the new classes, so although it had some positive statistical impacts (well, arguably given this game's strange damage mechanics) I hadn't learned any of the new abilities. This was odd to me because I finally did some grinding in the last session, doing nearly everything through the seventh Benevodon by level 33 and getting to 38 immediately after. Either the damage mechanics were working against me bigtime, or there was a gigantic difficulty spike here. I think it may have been both.
Anyway, we got to the dark Mana Stone. I had to use a few Cups of Wishes along the way.
I had said in the previous post something like: if you haven't played this game and there's any chance you're going to, stop reading, because the Benevodon battles are actually pretty interesting setpieces and you oughtn't spoil it for yourself.
Well, this final Benevodon... surprised me!
I have played this game before through maybe the first few Benevodons, and people used to talk about this game so I kind of knew how Dangaard, Fiegmund and some of the others worked in vague terms... but I've never actually played this part. If I'd ever seen the dark Benevodon before, I certainly forgot it. It is very creepy and cool.
I had also complained about this game a lot at the beginning, but honestly it gets way better as it goes. I wish it didn't take this long to get good, but this part was exciting!
Zable Fahr.
This boss was creepy! I did my usual scheme of applying some random saber and then buffing with items. This made the fight feel pretty manageable. It didn't take me too long at all to get the face on the right down.
Oh, awesome we won!
WHAT THE HELL.
This third creepy face joins in, revives the other two, and has really nasty attacks including Annihilate / Death Spell! This fight really picks up in ferocity. I had said I used some Cups of Wishes on the way here. I literally ran out!
This boss worked exactly the way it was designed, I guess. It was generally really creepy but also delivered on the surprise factor. A little after the third head showed up, I decided I should focus my attacks on it. I won, but barely.
After exiting the fight, I didn't realize there was a path to continue so I got back on Flammie only to realize I was supposed to stay here. Ah well, I needed to buy some items and stuff anyway. You can bet I bought 9 Cups of Wishes! Really, I should've gotten more.
Coming back through the Crystal Desert, I finally gained level 39 with everyone. This meant we started gaining abilities, though the first few new abilities aren't very interesting. Angela gets single-target, mid-level spells, Duran gains the ability to multi-target his existing sabers, and Charlotte got this:
It would be a bit longer before we'd gain anything really exciting.
There was a lot going on for me personally and professionally during the 1-month span of this event. I'll elaborate on that later, actually, but I had been really busy this month. From here on we're talking about gameplay from the afternoon of December 15th, the day the event ended, and I didn't want to have another event like FF7 with Jobs 2023 where I missed the deadline by a few days. This was me desperately rushing to finish the last few areas of a game I've never beaten. Grinding did not feel like an option!
Before we got very deep into Dragon's Maw, Duran and Angela earned level 40.
The enemies here were really tough. This included nasty combos of special moves, especially from the Dark Knights, and the Peeper enemies - while among the fastest to defeat - had a really annoying instant death attack. The instant death effects in this game drive me bananas, especially since there's no means to guard against it (again, the equipment system is bland).
We met the Darkshine Knight here.
With our item buffs we were pretty well set, we just had to keep our hit points nearly full at all times to survive his sword techniques.
While I wish I had it just slightly earlier, this battle resulted in Charlotte gaining level 40 and the Dark Curse spell.
This is going to change the way we do business!
In Dragon's Maw, I actually started using Dark Curse in random battles from time-to-time when I could pick out a single strong enemy, like a Black Knight.
I eventually wandered into a battle with Harcypete. Here we were able to make excellent use of multi-target Stone Saber as well as Dark Curse, which made the fight extremely easy. Angela's buffed Earthquake spell was doing over 800 damage.
We won! The nice thing about this as an easy boss battle is that, while there don't seem to be any golden mana statues around, we get a full heal from the bosses.
The bad news is that a full heal doesn't matter when you can be hit by a random idiot's Quakebringer attack for 600 damage.
After this, I had to find Harcypete again. I realized that the bosses here were gating certain passageways with statues but the wayfinding was awful. It actually took me some time to get back to Harcypete. Before the next boss, I was already down to 5 Cups of Wishes - although every so often I'd find another in a chest.
While this was generally really annoying, as pretty much every death felt cheap, it did result in my learning a bit of strategy. I had realized that when you cleared a screen of enemies, all party members get up and status effects are cleared. I learned that I could strategically leave rooms to revive characters.
We were level 42 before the next boss.
This is nice because the next boss is our digging friend Jewel Eater, and I've now got a Thunderbolt spell and a multi-target Thunder Saber.
This cute guy is not much of a fighter. I don't remember my first battle with Jewel Eater being this way, but he wasn't damaging me at all while I pounded the crap out of him on the left side of the screen. I think the only time I actually took damage was when he used his dash move to cross the screen. This may have been the easiest boss yet!
If only the normal, respawning enemies were this easy.
Around this point, we gained level 43. This meant a few exciting things: Angela gained Ancient Curse, which is kind of like a Meteor spell from a Final Fantasy game, and Duran gained Moon Saber which is almost as badass as it was in Secret of Mana.
I was saying earlier, during the Harcypete part, that this area is confusing. There were times when it was a little frustrating and given that I had only a couple of hours to beat the game, I ended up looking up a map of this place. It's the only part of the game where I checked a map! Then I felt really silly, because although the beginning is confusing and interconnected, the last few segments of Dragon's Maw are very linear.
Okay, the next boss was Fullmetal Hugger. We used Dark Curse and Moon Saber and it was very easy. Moon Saber makes the game "flow" better, actually, because you're not constantly interrupting the regular gameplay to get to the healing things in the menu and then watching them animate.
Next, we found the Crimson Wizard and he sicced a bunch of easy enemies on us.
At first I misunderstood what was happening and treated this like a boss fight, and buffed and debuffed everything. But after the second wave I didn't bother and things went nice and quickly.
In the next part, suddenly we're in a fancy-looking castle, I guess. We have to fight waves and waves of normal enemies. While these enemies are still tough, and there is still some cheapness like Peepers instantly killing us, we're level 44 now and generally a bit stronger.
I came to realize here that what the Peepers are actually doing is akin to the terrible Roulette ability in Final Fantasy games: if they happen to select an enemy with their spotlights instead, that enemy dies.
This seems like it adds a sort of fairness... except that it's still really unfair when there are no other enemies around! This is the only time I saw it affect an enemy.
I may still have been underlevelled, really, since my team is level 44 and the enemies are level 48. However, we still had a couple of Cups of Wishes and we were able to keep Moon Saber active for this entire gauntlet, which helped a lot.
Next, we finally met the Dragon Lord, who I have been led to understand is a jerk but he really didn't make that much of an impression.
Then we fought the Crimson Wizard. There's something funny with the way spellcasting times work in this game - they either continue through menus or other spellcasting animations so when different characters act there's often a sort of chain-casting effect. This meant that as I buffed and debuffed, I was hit with waves of spells! Thankfully, perhaps because of the Dark Curse in play, we stayed pretty healthy.
It took ages to get the buffs in place because of all of the spell animations, but once we did the fight was sort of hilarious. Moon Saber did most of the healing, so we all just surrounded him in a corner and bullied him to death.
Every so often he'd knock us back, but the only really disruptive thing he did was Annihilate Angela once. It was not a bad fight.
I had accumulated 5 Gear Seeds.
I wanted to use these, but as I implied yesterday while you can sort of affect the RNG for seeds in this game it takes a full save and reset, then a step to alter the RNG like a battle. I tried it a bit but honestly, it took a long time and the results I got ended up being worse than the original. In the end, I got terrible equipment from these. Of the couple that I could use, they were helmets and accessories.
I only had about three hours to finish the event in time... so no, I wasn't going to optimize my equipment.
Onward to the Sanctuary of Mana.
This area is full of Shadow Zeros and shapeshifting enemies. In general, it was enormously easier than Dragon's Maw...
...until an enemy shapeshifted into Duran and used Hollow Blade against us.
In general though it was legitimately way easier. We got to the Dragon Lord without much issue.
This boss sort of has phases but it doesn't feel too much like one of those marathon, multi-form endbosses. We applied Moon Saber, all of our buffs via items, and we used Dark Curse on the Dragon Lord (which we re-applied when he buffed).
I mostly guessed how his changing colours worked correctly, allowing Angela to damage him a lot with an opposing element. When he turned Cyan I dropped some meteors on him instead.
Although I think this screenshot was from him dropping meteor on me. It wasn't amazingly powerful.
It was a fairly long fight but never truly dangerous. We won!
I finished at about 9:30pm on the final day of the event! I quickly posted my victory image.
I think to end this - although I could arguably keep going and beat the Black Rabite or something - I need to debrief on this game, this event, and this experience as different things.
The Game: I complained a lot at the beginning but the whole thing really does get better as the game proceeds. I think a lot of the issues I raised are valid: some of the music in this game is fantastic, while other songs are pretty awful. The equipment system is about as bland as they come, aggravated by the worst RPG menu that has ever existed. Even the combat has more downs than ups, with the constant stopping for spells and specials that didn't exist in other games in the series to date. It's got its strengths though: the backgrounds and environments are consistently gorgeous and the Benevodon battles are fairly unique and interesting.
Do I want to play this game again? Mmmmaybe. I would've said "no" earlier on but the late game is much more fun.
The Event: Playing this game with a prescribed party could be sort of interesting, but I think I happened to get a fairly normal and balanced party. In fact, I think any party with Angela and Charlotte is probably going to feel nearly the same. I may have gotten unlucky on this front. That said, this party has no real deficits other than the lack of debuffs until Charlotte learns Dark Curse. I think it could be pretty fun to get a highly unorthodox party: it's possible to get one with no healing and no debuffs! I got off easy. This doesn't make much of a variant.
In the end, the time pressure I had forcing me through endgame for the first time at a pretty low level and rapid pace may have been what made this interesting.
The Experience: On a personal note, as I briefly mentioned during that one really bad play session for Final Fantasy Monster Party, a colleague of mine recently passed away. He actually died on November 15th, when this challenge began, and I signed up before I knew about him because I had some planned travel and expected to play this game on a long train ride. After the news dropped, I ended up taking over a large chunk of this colleague's work where our final deadline was December 16th! This is why the Monster Party playthrough has been a little on the slow side. It was quite a stretch to finish this game when my hours were largely spoken for.
I happened to finish what I needed to based on my own workload and that of my colleague in time to spend most of the afternoon of December 15th blowing through the game's last few areas. Not to make my retro gaming blog all emotional, but there was a sudden drop when my work commitments were done, and I'd just beaten this legendary game for the first time, and finally all of the time pressure was off. While I had taken moments to process what happened with my colleague, there was a bit of... realization when I finished these things.
This event, as run by RevenantKioku, was benefitting Trans Lifeline. It was only when I finished that I realized there was a connection here: My colleague was always really good to transgendered people we had mutually worked with, including a time when they were sort of the first to identify someone who was newly understanding that side of themselves. After I posted my #victory, I thought a donation was a way I could honor him, which I hadn't really done yet. So there we are.
This game was... okay. This variant was... a little lame. But am I glad I did it? Yes.
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As of the previous update, I had just upgraded to my final classes. In fairly short order, I went to the Crystal Desert.
I didn't do any levelling up after getting the new classes, so although it had some positive statistical impacts (well, arguably given this game's strange damage mechanics) I hadn't learned any of the new abilities. This was odd to me because I finally did some grinding in the last session, doing nearly everything through the seventh Benevodon by level 33 and getting to 38 immediately after. Either the damage mechanics were working against me bigtime, or there was a gigantic difficulty spike here. I think it may have been both.
Anyway, we got to the dark Mana Stone. I had to use a few Cups of Wishes along the way.
I had said in the previous post something like: if you haven't played this game and there's any chance you're going to, stop reading, because the Benevodon battles are actually pretty interesting setpieces and you oughtn't spoil it for yourself.
Well, this final Benevodon... surprised me!
I have played this game before through maybe the first few Benevodons, and people used to talk about this game so I kind of knew how Dangaard, Fiegmund and some of the others worked in vague terms... but I've never actually played this part. If I'd ever seen the dark Benevodon before, I certainly forgot it. It is very creepy and cool.
I had also complained about this game a lot at the beginning, but honestly it gets way better as it goes. I wish it didn't take this long to get good, but this part was exciting!
Zable Fahr.
This boss was creepy! I did my usual scheme of applying some random saber and then buffing with items. This made the fight feel pretty manageable. It didn't take me too long at all to get the face on the right down.
Oh, awesome we won!
WHAT THE HELL.
This third creepy face joins in, revives the other two, and has really nasty attacks including Annihilate / Death Spell! This fight really picks up in ferocity. I had said I used some Cups of Wishes on the way here. I literally ran out!
This boss worked exactly the way it was designed, I guess. It was generally really creepy but also delivered on the surprise factor. A little after the third head showed up, I decided I should focus my attacks on it. I won, but barely.
After exiting the fight, I didn't realize there was a path to continue so I got back on Flammie only to realize I was supposed to stay here. Ah well, I needed to buy some items and stuff anyway. You can bet I bought 9 Cups of Wishes! Really, I should've gotten more.
Coming back through the Crystal Desert, I finally gained level 39 with everyone. This meant we started gaining abilities, though the first few new abilities aren't very interesting. Angela gets single-target, mid-level spells, Duran gains the ability to multi-target his existing sabers, and Charlotte got this:
It would be a bit longer before we'd gain anything really exciting.
There was a lot going on for me personally and professionally during the 1-month span of this event. I'll elaborate on that later, actually, but I had been really busy this month. From here on we're talking about gameplay from the afternoon of December 15th, the day the event ended, and I didn't want to have another event like FF7 with Jobs 2023 where I missed the deadline by a few days. This was me desperately rushing to finish the last few areas of a game I've never beaten. Grinding did not feel like an option!
Before we got very deep into Dragon's Maw, Duran and Angela earned level 40.
The enemies here were really tough. This included nasty combos of special moves, especially from the Dark Knights, and the Peeper enemies - while among the fastest to defeat - had a really annoying instant death attack. The instant death effects in this game drive me bananas, especially since there's no means to guard against it (again, the equipment system is bland).
We met the Darkshine Knight here.
With our item buffs we were pretty well set, we just had to keep our hit points nearly full at all times to survive his sword techniques.
While I wish I had it just slightly earlier, this battle resulted in Charlotte gaining level 40 and the Dark Curse spell.
This is going to change the way we do business!
In Dragon's Maw, I actually started using Dark Curse in random battles from time-to-time when I could pick out a single strong enemy, like a Black Knight.
I eventually wandered into a battle with Harcypete. Here we were able to make excellent use of multi-target Stone Saber as well as Dark Curse, which made the fight extremely easy. Angela's buffed Earthquake spell was doing over 800 damage.
We won! The nice thing about this as an easy boss battle is that, while there don't seem to be any golden mana statues around, we get a full heal from the bosses.
The bad news is that a full heal doesn't matter when you can be hit by a random idiot's Quakebringer attack for 600 damage.
After this, I had to find Harcypete again. I realized that the bosses here were gating certain passageways with statues but the wayfinding was awful. It actually took me some time to get back to Harcypete. Before the next boss, I was already down to 5 Cups of Wishes - although every so often I'd find another in a chest.
While this was generally really annoying, as pretty much every death felt cheap, it did result in my learning a bit of strategy. I had realized that when you cleared a screen of enemies, all party members get up and status effects are cleared. I learned that I could strategically leave rooms to revive characters.
We were level 42 before the next boss.
This is nice because the next boss is our digging friend Jewel Eater, and I've now got a Thunderbolt spell and a multi-target Thunder Saber.
This cute guy is not much of a fighter. I don't remember my first battle with Jewel Eater being this way, but he wasn't damaging me at all while I pounded the crap out of him on the left side of the screen. I think the only time I actually took damage was when he used his dash move to cross the screen. This may have been the easiest boss yet!
If only the normal, respawning enemies were this easy.
Around this point, we gained level 43. This meant a few exciting things: Angela gained Ancient Curse, which is kind of like a Meteor spell from a Final Fantasy game, and Duran gained Moon Saber which is almost as badass as it was in Secret of Mana.
I was saying earlier, during the Harcypete part, that this area is confusing. There were times when it was a little frustrating and given that I had only a couple of hours to beat the game, I ended up looking up a map of this place. It's the only part of the game where I checked a map! Then I felt really silly, because although the beginning is confusing and interconnected, the last few segments of Dragon's Maw are very linear.
Okay, the next boss was Fullmetal Hugger. We used Dark Curse and Moon Saber and it was very easy. Moon Saber makes the game "flow" better, actually, because you're not constantly interrupting the regular gameplay to get to the healing things in the menu and then watching them animate.
Next, we found the Crimson Wizard and he sicced a bunch of easy enemies on us.
At first I misunderstood what was happening and treated this like a boss fight, and buffed and debuffed everything. But after the second wave I didn't bother and things went nice and quickly.
In the next part, suddenly we're in a fancy-looking castle, I guess. We have to fight waves and waves of normal enemies. While these enemies are still tough, and there is still some cheapness like Peepers instantly killing us, we're level 44 now and generally a bit stronger.
I came to realize here that what the Peepers are actually doing is akin to the terrible Roulette ability in Final Fantasy games: if they happen to select an enemy with their spotlights instead, that enemy dies.
This seems like it adds a sort of fairness... except that it's still really unfair when there are no other enemies around! This is the only time I saw it affect an enemy.
I may still have been underlevelled, really, since my team is level 44 and the enemies are level 48. However, we still had a couple of Cups of Wishes and we were able to keep Moon Saber active for this entire gauntlet, which helped a lot.
Next, we finally met the Dragon Lord, who I have been led to understand is a jerk but he really didn't make that much of an impression.
Then we fought the Crimson Wizard. There's something funny with the way spellcasting times work in this game - they either continue through menus or other spellcasting animations so when different characters act there's often a sort of chain-casting effect. This meant that as I buffed and debuffed, I was hit with waves of spells! Thankfully, perhaps because of the Dark Curse in play, we stayed pretty healthy.
It took ages to get the buffs in place because of all of the spell animations, but once we did the fight was sort of hilarious. Moon Saber did most of the healing, so we all just surrounded him in a corner and bullied him to death.
Every so often he'd knock us back, but the only really disruptive thing he did was Annihilate Angela once. It was not a bad fight.
I had accumulated 5 Gear Seeds.
I wanted to use these, but as I implied yesterday while you can sort of affect the RNG for seeds in this game it takes a full save and reset, then a step to alter the RNG like a battle. I tried it a bit but honestly, it took a long time and the results I got ended up being worse than the original. In the end, I got terrible equipment from these. Of the couple that I could use, they were helmets and accessories.
I only had about three hours to finish the event in time... so no, I wasn't going to optimize my equipment.
Onward to the Sanctuary of Mana.
This area is full of Shadow Zeros and shapeshifting enemies. In general, it was enormously easier than Dragon's Maw...
...until an enemy shapeshifted into Duran and used Hollow Blade against us.
In general though it was legitimately way easier. We got to the Dragon Lord without much issue.
This boss sort of has phases but it doesn't feel too much like one of those marathon, multi-form endbosses. We applied Moon Saber, all of our buffs via items, and we used Dark Curse on the Dragon Lord (which we re-applied when he buffed).
I mostly guessed how his changing colours worked correctly, allowing Angela to damage him a lot with an opposing element. When he turned Cyan I dropped some meteors on him instead.
Although I think this screenshot was from him dropping meteor on me. It wasn't amazingly powerful.
It was a fairly long fight but never truly dangerous. We won!
I finished at about 9:30pm on the final day of the event! I quickly posted my victory image.
I think to end this - although I could arguably keep going and beat the Black Rabite or something - I need to debrief on this game, this event, and this experience as different things.
The Game: I complained a lot at the beginning but the whole thing really does get better as the game proceeds. I think a lot of the issues I raised are valid: some of the music in this game is fantastic, while other songs are pretty awful. The equipment system is about as bland as they come, aggravated by the worst RPG menu that has ever existed. Even the combat has more downs than ups, with the constant stopping for spells and specials that didn't exist in other games in the series to date. It's got its strengths though: the backgrounds and environments are consistently gorgeous and the Benevodon battles are fairly unique and interesting.
Do I want to play this game again? Mmmmaybe. I would've said "no" earlier on but the late game is much more fun.
The Event: Playing this game with a prescribed party could be sort of interesting, but I think I happened to get a fairly normal and balanced party. In fact, I think any party with Angela and Charlotte is probably going to feel nearly the same. I may have gotten unlucky on this front. That said, this party has no real deficits other than the lack of debuffs until Charlotte learns Dark Curse. I think it could be pretty fun to get a highly unorthodox party: it's possible to get one with no healing and no debuffs! I got off easy. This doesn't make much of a variant.
In the end, the time pressure I had forcing me through endgame for the first time at a pretty low level and rapid pace may have been what made this interesting.
The Experience: On a personal note, as I briefly mentioned during that one really bad play session for Final Fantasy Monster Party, a colleague of mine recently passed away. He actually died on November 15th, when this challenge began, and I signed up before I knew about him because I had some planned travel and expected to play this game on a long train ride. After the news dropped, I ended up taking over a large chunk of this colleague's work where our final deadline was December 16th! This is why the Monster Party playthrough has been a little on the slow side. It was quite a stretch to finish this game when my hours were largely spoken for.
I happened to finish what I needed to based on my own workload and that of my colleague in time to spend most of the afternoon of December 15th blowing through the game's last few areas. Not to make my retro gaming blog all emotional, but there was a sudden drop when my work commitments were done, and I'd just beaten this legendary game for the first time, and finally all of the time pressure was off. While I had taken moments to process what happened with my colleague, there was a bit of... realization when I finished these things.
This event, as run by RevenantKioku, was benefitting Trans Lifeline. It was only when I finished that I realized there was a connection here: My colleague was always really good to transgendered people we had mutually worked with, including a time when they were sort of the first to identify someone who was newly understanding that side of themselves. After I posted my #victory, I thought a donation was a way I could honor him, which I hadn't really done yet. So there we are.
This game was... okay. This variant was... a little lame. But am I glad I did it? Yes.
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