FreshFeeling Gaming

On June 9th, we finished the game!


All that was left in the playthrough was the Celestial Castle and the final area for the "A" ending.

I picked up from where the last session ended, going into the Sunken Shrine, on April 24th, 2025. I was trying to stream this, as normal, but ended up with a ton of technical issues so the video below is partly from the stream and partly from a local recording, edited together.



Doing the Sunken Shrine was weird. I recounted how my first memory of this game was a friend playing this game when it was brand new and struggling to figure out the area; I felt so proud when I quickly remembered how to adjust the water level, and after a while realized I could push that one floating slab. And then, I forgot that I could jump repeatedly underwater to "swim"... which was a hangup for like 20 minutes. Augh.

The enemies were fun. The giant eyeball fellas here have that ability to revive another enemy every turn, resulting in fairly slow but strategic battles. They are also very generous with their experience rewards.
 

Besides the swimming, the puzzles weren't that bad here. I remembered the parts with the floating crystals fairly well. Some of the platforming parts took tries, but nothing too egregious.


The boss was some kind of spirit fella who, unfortunately, started casting a great magic.


We've identified the issue where an enemy casting great magic fully locks the game, so I needed to be strategic here. Unfortunately, in several trials, it seemed that this boss always got the first action in combat and also cast great magic on turn 2. I needed to find another way to beat him. It turned out the Holy Water of Mithra was the ticket, as it can one-shot him. There are only a couple of bosses in the game, especially this late, who are vulnerable to this, so I wasn't too worried about having to depend on this... although I would've preferred if there were some other option.


Among the artifacts we retrieved for finishing the dungeon was the Tear of the Cosmos. It has no purpose as-is, but can be transmuted into a Holy Water of Mithra. Huh.


We finished chapter 6 and did the sacred phase. The alternate version of Lucian in Valhalla is doing just fine... although he seems to be starting some trouble.
 

As chapter 7 began, I checked Valkyrie's Seal Value and I chose to train up and transfer Lorenta to meet Freya's needs. The Seal Value was in an adequately low position before transferring anyone.


Since we were tasked with getting Lyseria, I went into Arkdain Ruins for the third time. I forgot that we have to fight her, although it's quite easy. She had a nearly invisible sliver of health left after turn 1.
 

Next, we went to the Tombs of Amenti. I used an Eye of Heaven in the early going and realized... this place is huge.


The enemies here were plentiful and easy, even the huge knight fellas who are called Dullahan.
 

I figured out most of the puzzles. The part with the heads that teleport you earlier in the dungeon got frustrating enough after many, many attempts that I savestated once to nail down my location. I don't like doing that, but man - all the while I was talking about the awful repetition of a time-consuming, not skillbound activity with no reward. Game design concepts came up a few times in today's dungeons, actually.


Everything after that point was easier. The dungeon's other thing it does over and over again is hide a chest on top of a doorway and put a trap in it - usually a monster. None of the treasure was actually very good at all, with the exception of a suit of Mithril Armor.


We got to Akhetamen (the pharaoh fella) at the end. I was excited for the fight; among enemies he's actually got some of the best characterization, animation and voice acting in the game.
 
He also uses Seraphic Law, a great magic.

Uh oh.

I wrestled with finding solutions this one for quite a long time. I did at least six attempts, checking if the spell was guaranteed, trying to take him down quicker (which didn't go well largely because Reflect Sorcery was in play), and even using that second Holy Water of Mithra. Sadly, I couldn't find anything that got me particularly close.

Noting that the Holy Water of Mithra subtracted roughly 2/3 of his health, I knew if I could get him down by one third I could win. However, I absolutely could not reason a way to get there.

For the first time, I considered using the Valkyrie toggle button that's built into my script during battle instead of just using it in menus for transmutation purposes. I figured, if I start the battle as Lenneth Valkyrie and then swap in Jayle, maybe that will avoid the great magic issue. Well, here's something we haven't seen much:


I swapped Valkyrie back into Jayle... but unfortunately, her graphics don't change back... and seemingly, neither do her stats. So the fully unequipped level 1 Valkyrie with 1000 max DME was in the fight. When I accessed menus, her name would appear as Jayle and her equipped weapon even showed as Gram, but she wasn't actually using it. Obviously I'd broken things pretty badly here.
 
Valkyrie basically died almost every turn, revived via Lucian's Auto Item. Despite her uselessness and the bizzarre half-Jayle/half-Valkyrie state, great magic no longer crashed the game!
 
I noted her "uselessness" above. At one point, I attacked with Valkyrie and I believe it was fully ineffective. Her number of actions doesn't even display on her square button icon. So, I am going to continue as if this doesn't compromise the run; after all, we had a thief, a white mage, a black mage, and an utterly useless, mostly-dead stand-in where the knight should have been.

This useless, mostly-dead stand-in didn't make the fight easy. If Jayle were properly present, this may have gone differently. However, Akhenaten has the Heal spell, and Heal is proportionate to max DME. Even though I was stable and had some offense, I couldn't outdamage his healing, with him getting back to full health every 5 turns or so. After a few cycles of this, I decided it was worth it to bring out the big guns.
 

Interestingly, because I had toggled Valkyrie back to Jayle, Valkyrie didn't gain any experience from this battle: it all went to Jayle.
 
This helps validate my decision that this didn't violate my rules and makes me hopeful about any other mandatory great magic situations I might encounter.

The treasure here wasn't particularly exciting, but I kept it all anyway.

These three dungeons - well, two of the three - took a lot longer than I would've expected. Hopefully we'll get a good chunk of chapter 7 done next time.

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After a bit of a hiatus - but not nearly as long as some of the breaks I took before 2023 - I was back to playing Valkyrie Profile with a knight, a thief, a white mage, and a black mage. This play session was on April 7, 2025.
In the prior session, we finished chapter 4 with the Tower of Lezard Valeth... and there were a few things that really didn't go well with it. There was nothing too disruptive this time.


The first thing that happened in chapter 5 was Mystina's recruitment sequence... which is roughly 15 minutes long with almost no input. Delightful.