Why does hcbailly hate cockatrices

I am glad that you enjoyed bits of it in the end. The various remakes that came out later made money and experience more plentiful, nearly eliminating any grinding required. Most of the later FF games will end up like that, usually with some side-quests or bosses that are far more difficult than the actual "final boss" to reward grinding and strategy while making the quest and story progression less frustrating for casual players.

Masamune was a legendary swordsmith in Japanese history; the "Masmune" sword that you found is intended to be a katana equivalent to Excalibur. I imagine Japanese players had a bit of the same confusion in reverse when they found Excalibur! Re: the utility of black mages, they are more for blasting down the tougher random encounters than fighting bosses. Your ninja didn't have the stats to make his black magic useful compared to just attacking, but for a black mage the low and mid-level spells are useful throughout the whole game.

Love the dialogue, to the point, but with just enough flavor. Monster portraits are also really well drawn. You can tell they had some experienced graphical artists. Kary is a mistranslation of "Kali" as in the multi-armed Hindu goddess. So yep, it's a she. I'm assuming you didn't stumble upon Warmech. We'd definitely have seen a screenshot if you did. If I remember correctly, Warmech shows up in Skykeep.

Also, there have been crazy persons beating the game with just ONE white mage. I think the only run that hasn't been successfully completed was the single thief run. Though that was years ago, so someone might have done it by now. Warmech is indeed a rare encounter in a single small area in Skykeep.

Most players won't see it because of this unless they specifically know where it is and repeatedly fight there until it shows up or they get extremely unlucky.

It's a very rare encounter I want to say a 1 in 64 chance or something, but I'm not sure on the exact number. WarMech is often considered the first "optional superboss," a boss harder than the actual final boss that you can fight just for bragging rights.

This pattern would become much more visible in later games in the series. So I did it with no save states. The opening is rough, but then you get to the Peninsula of Power and can take advantage of the fact that a hard reset of the console puts you on the step of the encounter table where you will roll ZomBulls and of the non-undead enemy.

So you tent, hard reset, get the encounter, and hard reset if a non-undead spawns or the fight goes badly. If you win tent and hard reset to repeat. Combine with a little bit of level save scumming to get the handful of agility upgrades needed to guarantee I can run from all fights and it came down to just not getting screwed in the Ice Cave. And rolling well against Chaos at the end. Good thing the Masamune is equippable by everyone.

For maximum pedantry: WarMech is found in three of the possible encounters on that long thin bridge just before Tiamat. Also, all three encounters are located very late in the encounter table, so you're not going to see it unless you try to find it or somehow enter the Mirage Tower after a fairly long session without doing a full reset-restart of the system.

I mean, it's not a mistranslation of "Kali" per se; they seem to have been avoiding "Marilith". Also, the big giveaway that Kary is a she is surely the fact she has boobs I seem to recall encountering Warmech way back when I first got the game in Most likely I was grinding right before the Tiamat encounter, because that seems like where the best XP would be.

Probably worth comparing this to those weird games that all used joystick controls in a more full-featured rpg experience. Given the limited range of buttons here it's probably for the best they didn't try adding a bunch of extra complexity that would drag everything down. Not that it isn't missed, mind!

And please continue to do that! I think the main value we find in you covering these games is your perspective coming from CRPGs. Oh, sure; I was thinking of some of the c64 games or was it amstrad? I've no idea how they thought having like twenty different commands with only one or two buttons was a sensible way to make a game.

I wonder what would have happened if console makers had introduce controllers of modern complexity with early titles.

Would we have latched onto them as intutively as we do now? I think it's more like once you rule out a keyboard, there's only so many controls you will ever need for the types of games that can be made on that hardware. What kind of game are you gonna make for the NES that needs two triggers, two bumpers, four face buttons and three directional inputs?

You weren't going to be moving through a true 3D space, so looking and movement were synonymous. You probably wouldn't have a need for quick inventory slots, or multiple kinds of melee attacks. Typing is useful to any game at any technology level because typing is infinitely versatile.

There's only so many gameplay applications for buttons and analog sticks, and it took a while for consoles to get access to games that required that extra level of control.

I really, really don't like controllers. But maybe that's because I don't use them regularly so whenever I take one into my hands it feels like a foreign object. The last time I seriously tried to play with one was 10 years ago, when I graduated high school and we had a gamecube in the recreation room. I really sucked at using the thing. It was either in or In one area they had a couple of consoles running the console port of Risen 3, and I was curious enough to take a controller and try it out.

It felt extremely awkward. I don't mind specialized controllers like joysticks for flight sims and space combat games or driving wheels for driving games , but controllers seem extremely awkward to me and I just don't see the point. It's not like they can do anything that mouse and keyboard doesn't do better. Some early consoles had controllers with a lot of input - the Intellivision phone pad, or the Atari 's Star Raiders controller come to mind.

In the end, I think cost was key. Every input costs money, and when you're looking at millions of units even the tiniest of costs adds up. So they limited the controls to the smallest number that was practical. What seems to have driven the button count up is arcade ports of fighting games. Arcade machines, of course, can have exactly the inputs that the game developer feels necessary, and a good fighting game needs quite a few inputs in order to have enough complexity to work.

Sega responded with a 6 button pad, and the next evolution was Sony adding an extra pair of shoulder buttons to the SNES pad as part of the ill-fated Nintendo Playstation project. Later, two analog sticks were added, and you have the originator of every major controller in use today. My only controller experience was when I had a NES in mids. This year I got an Xbox controller and found it extremely unwieldy. Though having hands small hands didn't help either - my trigger fingers could barely reach triggers.

Just to add to Gnoman's summary, the extra shoulder buttons on the PlayStation pad were supposed to be used for movement in three dimensions, before they introduced analogue sticks in a later revision. They made it work because they had to, but there are frequent suboptimal controls using select oddly or an awkward combination of buttons or forcing you out of the action to navigate menus.

Or they just never coded in an action that could have made the game better. Modern retrogames that copy the style from that era have no trouble using up the extra face and shoulder buttons. I think the SNES controller is really the minimum, even for the 2D era, and while it might have been too far a leap forward at the time, the NES would have been better off with it. So that's already a big step forward. If I remember correctly, you can do the Castle of Ordeals as soon as you got the canoe.

You just exit the boat into a river which leads there. And yes, playing as four white mages is difficult and has been done. The hardest way of doing something like this is a single thief playthrough get your other characters killed immediately. That one is next to impossible and requires save scumming to get max stat gains every level. I assume "single thief" or "four thieves" means not getting them promoted to ninjas along the way? Yeah, it is possible though not advised to complete the game without obtaining the promotion.

You end up not being able to equip most of the weapons and armor found after obtaining the airship, although I believe the Masamune is still usable. I usually see them allowing promotions. I believe that single thief is so hard WITH the promotion that trying without it would be actually impossible.

It's really the grind before Astos that's the problem. And Kraken 2, but that's an issue for every solo. Some assorted notes I took as I read through the entry: - "KARY" was actually just a marilith in the original Japanese, they scrubbed the name in the English version probably for TSR copyright reasons. Later official translations of the game restored the "Marilith" name. So yes, "her" was correct. I forget how you're supposed to be pointed in that direction or if you're expected to stumble upon it.

The only part that's random as random as a computer can be is the initial value of the counter after each battle. I'm looking forward to the final post and also more Ultima VII! You have enough healing power to outlast most enemies, so it's typically just a matter of outlasting them by focusing 3 of your party on healing while the other one focuses on dealing damage.

Glad that you had fun with this overall, but the frequent encounter rate would wear me out so quickly, I'd drop the game before I get even 10 hours in.

My tolerance for frequent trash encounters, especially random ones, has really gone down in recent years. Going forward in JRPGs, you can expect that grinding to be a constant feature, but become on average less obnoxious due to: a many games with a less troublesome encounter rate; b combat itself becoming a little deeper and more entertaining; and c character progression becoming deeper, so that frequent combats mean frequent interesting character progression.

But that's still relative. Grinding remains a strong feature of most JRPGs through to today, and even new games coming out this year don't necessarily succeed in making it fun. Any games in the genre that don't have grinding? I always wanted to give the genre a chance but all the games I tried had something offputting in them. Too frequent random encounters and grind with a relatively simple combat system, and all conversations with NPCs were lengthy cutscenes with zero player input.

All the ones I tried have a hands-off approach to conversation where you approach an NPC and then the conversation happens automatically, with no player input whatsoever. No grind and no puke inducing anime. Wizardry series is highly popular in Japan, so there is metric ton of JP exclusive Wizardry games. Shin Megami Tensei has some cool things about it too, especially the plot and a few endings in each of the games.

The thing is, Japan wasn't so big on dungeon crawlers, so those are in the minority of the games for sure, but there are some open-world JRPGs too Metal Max series - essentially wacky post-apocalypse, for example. I generally like what JRPGS are trying to accomplish, but yes most of the time they seem to fall short of the mark. Combat is maybe simplistic but not easy, and can be automated. Honestly, well-balanced JRPGs really shouldn't require grinding, if you're not going for ridiculously overpowered postgame bosses or anything like that.

If you fight all the random battles consistently and pay attention to how your abilities work, you should be at roughly the power level you need to deal with the next event in the plot. When RPGs require terrible grinding, they're probably either really old and poorly balanced early Dragon Quest , or designed specifically for niche gamers who genuinely do enjoy grinding Disgaea. You'll occasionally see a bit of grid-based movement in a standard JRPG— Radiant Historia comes to mind—but you are correct that any serious grid-based planning like Final Fantasy Tactics would usually be marketed as strategy RPGs.

I'm not aware of any JRPGs that use dialog trees extensively. Final Fantasy II kind of tried to do it, but it's just not a mechanic that really works well on console platforms. Newer games will sometimes give you one or two branches in long conversations, but they tend not to affect the flow of the scene all that much. I guess people in Japan who like complicated conversation trees will probably be playing visual novels instead, which are their own massive genre and tend not to have many RPG mechanics.

No amount of grinding will really help you defeat Werdna in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord if you haven't devised the correct strategies to efficiently handle that battle and get lucky with the turn order and Werdna not deciding to just smack you with Tiltowait. And even in Dragon Quest I'd argue that the only entries that "require" any significant amount of grinding are the first two.

Funny you should mention Wiz 1. I remember thinking it might have been an idea to grind until my characters all had enough HP to survive a Tiltowait when I played it Iron Man, when in the end I was forced to reload once.

More likely the way would be to swap your front and back lines with mass class changes once you get to level 13 or 14 or so, so your mages can benefit from having HP typical of fighters. Grinding on Murphy's Ghost is how I beat Werdna after my first party wipe at him. Essentially all fighters to level 13, and then change them to spellcasters, then bring in my actual front line. Grinding is a very Japanese thing. Consider in the 80s, before internet, before globalization, before the bubble economy burst in 90, the typical Japanese person career path was measured in decades, and life itself was a grind.

In a way, these JRPG represented what they fantasize about: keep grinding away maybe one day they will achieve greatness. There was something oddly satisfying about putting in the hours and watch the characters dose out points of damage. Entirely different from the western gene where being able to making a witty rpg choice is half the fun. The formula for random encounters is this: Generate a random number and add it to a base value.

This is the number of "steps" until an encounter. Different terrain depletes this at different rates. You'll never fight a random encounter two squares in a row due to the base. You can also exploit the counter by depleting it before taking the stairs to a harder area. There are also fixed combat squares with a predetermined monster formation.

These are often in front of chests or choke points, but they can occur anywhere. The Cthulhu-like mages at the end of the swap cave are like this. These unmarked fixed squares can make it feel like the RNG is cursed sometimes. You can exploit these when grinding to force back to back encounters. Some notes: Warmech's a special boss fight that can only appear on the bridge to Tiamat in the last level of the sky fortress.

He's quite difficult and you get nothing special for winning. The 4 white mage challenge run is indeed pretty tough, but honestly 4 thieves was the hardest of the "all one class" challenge runs back when I did em. Thieves are just so mediocre and there's no great way to grind em up. Having black magic would've made certain areas a LOT easier; Lightning spells utterly wreck sea creatures and hey, there's a whole sea area.

Fire is ruinous to undead, including Lich, and those various ice monsters in the floater cave. The fire monsters in the volcano don't like being frozen. Tiamat can be literally instakilled with the right black magic spell.

Black magic also, paradoxically, gets the best buff in the game: Fast, which works similarly to Haste in DnD based games.

The canoe was given to you by the sages that stand in a circle. Calling fighting random encounters in order to gain experience grinding is begging the question. As is clear from your review of the original Dragon Quest, the loop of slowly leveling up by fighting is not something getting in the way of the gameplay in that game -- it is the gameplay.

Final Fantasy has a lot more going on than Dragon Quest,t but it's still designed thiswthis because its implied audience up believes that leveling up really fun and the quest is window dressing that gives it some color.

Calling it grinding misses the point. Sure, some people enjoy the gameplay loop of repeatedly seeking out and overcoming the same challenge in order to obtain some reward, but what's the problem with referring to that as grinding? It seems to succinctly communicate exactly what's going on.

Is there a better word? Grinding is when you actively seek out random encounters or respawning fixed encounters to get more XP. Grind is when the game throws random encounters at you every second step. Terminology aside, Thecla makes an interesting argument: that s players regarded plot points including fixed encounters and NPC dialogue the way that we regard cut-scenes today: interesting ways to break up the action, but not the reason that we play the game.

Running around and fighting random combats was for s players the equivalent of exploring the open worlds of, say, Red Dead Redemption or Assassin's Creed. Occasionally, you check in with the next main mission, but really what you want to do is explore, shoot caribou, and make money.

What do you think about that argument? Either way, I don't think that "grinding" necessarily has to be pejorative. I prefer games that allow it, in fact. It has a pretty well-established definition of meaning "deliberately seeking out random combats so you're tough enough for the fixed combats. I like a challenge in my CRPGs, and I'd rather reload a couple of times and prevail with a normal leveled party, rather than grind for levels.

I disagree with Thecla; it's not how I remember it. My recollection of the Bard's Tale games, for example, was that I really liked the special encounters, and was disappointed with the third one for having so few of them. Same with the Gold Box games; it was the difficult set encounters and the large battles in Pool of Radiance I really liked, while I detested the copy pasted random encounter in Gateway to the Savage Frontier.

And it was already an open world game. A better analogue for me is the jumping puzzles in Half-Life; now that's what I call mood killers. I think Thecla was specifically talking about console players of the period. Naturally, I don't need to ask for opinions about whether computer RPG players played like that.

I agree that the percentage of RPGs that require grinding is small. I don't find myself complaining about it very often. The opposite--hitting level caps well before the end of the game--is a much bigger problem. I'm persuaded that the term isn't necessarily pejorative, although a lot of people do use it that way. I'm more trying to argue that we should keep in mind that a game with a lot of combat isn't necessarily designed that way because they designers wanted to pad their content or didn't have better ideas - it can be because they believed it was fun.

It's hard to get into the minds of players more than 30 years ago, but we can see what game makers thought they wanted. I remember reading complaints about the frequency of random encounters in Final Fantasy II US in video game magazines, and disagreeing because I liked getting to do all those fights. That game, by the way, is tuned to require almost no grinding and is more fun if you play it straight through.

I don't remember Dragon Quest II or III well, but I played IV a lot and it does not require many extra fights to succeed and seems to be intended for an audience more interested in storytelling.

So within just a few years the emphasis of these JRPG designs had changed. On the other hand, the original Final Fantasy assumes that you like doing a ton of fights and that leveling up is inherently fun. There are still a lot of JRPGs coming out that cater to this play-style, although they usually cordon it off into the post-game for players with old fashioned tastes.

If you were only five combats away from your next level-up, or your next spell, or buying the next weapon, it was fun to grind. Or if the next power-up was an hour of grinding away but you really couldn't progress without it. Phantasy Star was very linear in that there was no amount of "playing cleverly" which would eliminate the need for frequent and exhaustive grinding.

It was an inherent part of the game, not an option to adjust to the difficulty, and that's pretty representative of the approach of most of the JRPG genre, particularly from this era. I say this to explain my approach. Good games support multiple ways to play them, and no way is wrong if you enjoy doing it. And grind isn't inherently either content or fun in all cases. I love leveling up as much as the next guy, but repetitive grinding of random encounters is just tedious and wears me out.

It drains all the fun out of the game. I enjoy RPGs for the hand-placed encounters Baldur's Gate 2 has some great encounter design, some encounters in Temple of Elemental Evil are great, and Knights of the Chalice is good throughout , not for the repetitive random ones. Same with Diablo-style games, slaying your way through enemy hordes is really quick there unless the enemies have bloated HP pools, in which case the game becomes tedious and boring. I also don't mind Arcanum's combat at all, everyone says the game has terrible combat but in real time mode it's over so quickly, it's pretty much a non-issue.

The main issue with JRPGs is that they combine grind with lengthy wastes of time. It becomes even worse in newer games than in the old ones: fancy unskippable animations for each attack, spell, even for chugging a potion. Where a fight against 10 orcs in Might and Magic would take 20 seconds, sou can spend 2 minutes on the same fight in a late 90s JRPG because of all the fancy animations slowing the gameplay down.

That's pretty much the opposite of fun for me. The whole idea of level caps is to make grinding psychologically unnecessary. I guess whatever you do it will make some players unhappy Yeah, I don't think 'randomness' is essential to grinding. I think the important element is repetitive sameness. It's facing the same challenge over and over again, one you have already bested and you know exactly how to beat again, for which there is no tension over the outcome.

You are pretty much on autopilot. But the draw is the reward cycles for putting in the work. And you can see this in other genres, like watering your plants every day in a farming game. It's not just about fighting monsters for XP. So a game can use randomness but not be grinding as long as it's paced to keep things fresh and provide a steady stream of new types of challenges. Fighting combats with no character development is like working for no pay.

Very few games would offer optional fixed encounters as an outlet for grinding; most fixed encounters are in service to the plot or one of its quests. A lot of first-person dungeon crawlers include a similar fixed fight as an homage to Murphy's ghost, too; for instance, all of the Elminage games have the statue of Avi performing the same role.

The Dragon Zombies in the Citadel of Trials are also a popular choice. My best interpretation of the ending, based on just having read the Japanese text, is this. In an original timeline, there was a fight between a renegade knight named Garland and some local warriors over a princess, and this happened to be exactly at the locus where the four constituent powers that form the world converge. Garland's anger created a disharmony with the four powers, and that led to space and time being twisted and sending him back in time.

He then used the power of that locus from the past to divert the four powers to himself and make himself immortal. With the powers thus diverted, history changed and the normal world was suddenly turned mad. The four powers resisted this by creating the four Crystals "ORBs" and choosing the most convenient people to take them and go fix the problem. And with Garland defeated in the past and the time loop broken, everything, including Garland, went back to normal.

The text does make a big deal out of the fact that no one consciously remembers those events or the battles that righted them, but there was some kind of echo in everyone's hearts that inspires them to maintain harmony with the four powers henceforth, or something. It does feel like a very Japanese fable to me; the basic theme they're trying to convey seems to be that a tiny act of disharmony in the wrong place sent the whole world into chaos.

On which note, the four "fiends" are just called four Chaoses in the original text. There's no particular explanation of what exactly the final boss is; I assume it's just meant to be Garland with superpowers. Bonus hate points for being Gold Medusa heads and their ability to stone you.

Screw those guys. Impossible to combo, and god help you if you are one of the archers in this series, you will never be able to hit them. I especially hate them in Abyss, where they go "defenseless" read as sarcastically as possible when hit by magic, which actually just makes them more-or-less invincible, as they cannot die while defenseless. Makes a whole lot of sense, right?

Koitsu wa mirai wo takusu eigo no tsurugi da! User Info: MadDewg. Arrei posted Got to love the star ocean 2 version of being stoned, lol. I like my left nut IGA, come through for me. More topics from this board Is there some intelligent way to play this game? Where can I find a Pink Emerald? Side Quest 3 Answers Where can I find porange and napple?

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This is because of the status effect stone. I know this is because of the mythology, but it just irks me. Hate to say it, but I actually missed out on Mad Thunder. Is it obtainable later in the game or did I really just miss out on the only opportunity to grab it?

It is obtainable later, but it's much better getting it off of Iku. Thanks to Weekend, there is no skill you can miss for Satori originally you could not refight the final boss, and that meant that you missed out on a skill if you had not learned it from an earlier boss, but you can refight it now.

Just save or reset and the first thing you encounter will be that formation when you return. So yes, it is very easy to get those skills. I just don't care too much, chasers or no chasers. Maybe it's changed its filter definitions? I don't know. Alright, I know it's really noobish to say this, but could someone please explain to me how chasers work?

I do not get it at all, and I feel like not using those make Nitori completely useless. Hanzo K. First, you have Nitori set a chaser. For this example, we'll say Fire Chaser. Now, you have someone like Patchouli use a fire-element spell like Agni Shine, and Nitori will follow it up with a fire attack of her own that hits the enemies who were damaged by the previous spell.

Satori's apparently good for triggering Chasers as well. Youkai Quest: Unknown Adventure. Okay, simple. Let's say she uses Fire Chaser.

If someone uses a Fire attack, she will attack the same target with an attack whether its physical or magical I don't know for sure that is Fire elemental. If the target is dead, she obviously won't follow up, and she cannot follow up if she has been inflicted with a status that would cancel her turn. She can only follow up in this manner once per turn the Chaser effect is a Quick effect, and we all know those only last until the end of the turn , although if you put more points into her Invention tree the amount of times she can do this per turn is increased.

So, if she had her activation count boosted by one and is using Thunder Chase, for example, she could follow up Patchouli's Spring Wind and Marisa's Stardust Missile on the same turn. The only thing about chasers I don't know is if they are physical or magical attacks and which buffs boost their damage. They are physical, but they don't carry most effects from Nitori's equipped weapon.

They ignore some def and have perfect accuracy. Skills that hit multiple times on a single enemy will also be chased for the same amount of times, although the damage is heavily prorated for multiple hits on a single target with one move e. Slash of Eternity. Using a weapon with added elemental damage or Byakuren's elemental enchants will allow it to be chased.

Chasers are pretty weak if the enemy is not weak to the element, but it's highly effective if they are. Nitori is still good for more then chasers, though. Guns are strong and carry slayers, and her elemental attacks will get stronger if she's elementally buffed for that element, which in combo with her weakness damage bonus becomes pretty strong. Later she gets camo skills that are nifty.

So, ready for super-long update time? I sure am. I've been waiting for this for a longggggggg time now. Third Volume- Finale: The End? So, let's finish this! There are a lot of bridges in Bhava-agra. It's also somewhat cloudy. The puzzle from before returns, only it's a lot more annoying. I'll admit right here and now, I used the guide on the wiki, because it would take a lot of trial-and-error otherwise. That gate on the left is the main obstacle.

By carrying out a specific order of switch flipping detailed here , you'll unlock the gate and move on the the next portion of the stage, which is really short and has an extremely easy puzzle in it. This wasn't my first encounter, but I lost the first picture somehow. All of these enemies are new. The Preta up top is weak to Fire and it doesn't really do much. The Shisa right in the middle is weak to Fire yet can buff the enemy party and set up Starlight Barrier, which makes the enemy immune to the next attack.

Not fun. Again, use Wind of Protection and you'll be fine. What the hell are those things? In the back are a Master weak to Dark, attacks twice per turn physically and a Mountain Man weak to Dark, attacks with magic. Essentially they're like the enemies from the Netherworld.

And a Brontosaurus. I don't know what it's weak to. Just run. Looping around a certain way unlocks this path back to the beginning.

You need to go flip a switch in a room above and then travel back through here and through that gate that I showed off in the last update that we couldn't go through. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's basically it. Huh, it's not as bad as I remember it. Maybe I just hate backtracking.

In the meanwhile I go here and pick up the first set of recipes you get for defeating a certain amount of enemies. There are a couple of thresholds you want to get, so check often.

We also get Last Moriya! Some formations can be received by doing certain things, like getting certain people to a certain level or revisiting people we defeated. I'm not really going for all of them because most of them aren't really great. There are a few I am probably going to get. So, those are a Raijin and a Fujin.

I swear they were in Chrono Trigger at the Ocean Palace. Whatever the case, they whack you with stuff. Physical attacks, mostly. I don't know what they're weak to. After doing all that looping, we finally unlock those gates. Thankfully the hard part is over. Oh, hey Tenshi. So, uh, you need a rock-throwing lesson? I've got the perfect tutor Well, that's why you chased said tutor all throughout Gensokyo despite the fact he annoyed you, caused you to drink some funny potions Kaguya made don't ask , and brought you on a merry tour of the Underground, by "merry" I mean absolutely insane.

But enough of that. If you hadn't thrown up all those gates, we'd be here sooner. We're coming. And you might not wish we did. Uh, you could just take it easy on us. We've been having a rough day. Well, it's hard to chase a culprit without knowing who it is.

Plus you were on the suspect list from the first minute. We can't let that happen, can we? Well, we were already playing it That midboss fairy is against some people, although I'll deal with it later. Not now. Alright, basically have as many Electric attackers as possible. If you want Byakuren with Elemental Weapon, go ahead. If you want Patchy or Marisa or Nitori, knock yourself out.

Just make sure that Alice is in the party and has the Continental Shield on you should have gotten it within the last couple of stages, either Youkai Mountain or here as well as good ol' Spectrum Mystery. Yup, you're as good as cornered.

Be a nice girl and give up. Yeah, you're the only person in Gensokyo we haven't beaten up yet. Which she confirms. Well, good to know we're all on the same page, even if flipping it over changes what it says. Reimu, your gohei cannot handle that much bending. Yup, we're pretty pissed, alright. Although I'm not one for malice or hatred. Funny thing, those words. They're more important than you'd think. The only other people who did that were Eirin and Kaguya, and it turned out they were lying.

How can we be sure about this case? Upon mentioning Kaguya You knew? Oh, right. Again, you don't really belong here. Then again, when doesn't Tenshi do that? Despite being, you know, not a real Celestial. Don't piss me off further. It's been a really bad day gamewise.

I give you absolute permission to beat the everloving shit out of her. Who doesn't? Tenshi is a bitch. I don't hate her as much as Kanako, but she's low on the list. No matter if ZUN says she was being bullied or not in SWR, she still caused that just to amuse herself, and that angers me. Thank you, Byakuren. She notes that there are apparently different types, which is true. Tenshi came here illegally. She should have been carted off by assassins by now, but she's beaten the shit out of them all, which is why she's still here.

Hell yeah. No one touches a youkai unfairly on Byakuren's watch! Yeah, that's a good question. Because you were bored? So, you're not going to tell? Sadly, Satori can't do a thing. Again, I'm sorry. She's way older than me, that's for sure!

Whoa, settle down, Satori. No need to go there. She did. That's something I expected Reimu to say, but okay Just get off the subject.

Yeah, enough talk, let's fight. Yep, she is. For you, yes. For me? Not so much. We don't like keystones! Or kaname stones! That's Reimu for you. Well, finish off isn't exactly the right word, but sure. Let's end this! I'm not afraid of the Sword of Hisou! Bring out all my worst temperaments! It won't do a damn thing! This battle uses that same song as the battle with Eirin and Kaguya. And yet this battle is much easier.

Start out with Spectrum Mystery set to Earth, and She'll use this, which will be reduced to nothing, thanks to the Continental Shield and Spectrum Mystery. Essentially, she's weak to Electric and Dark, so spam those until she's dead. Nothing too major. If she uses Drill, then she'll use Magnum Stone Shower again. Just wham on her, heal when necessary, and you'll be fine.

She also has this I didn't actually take a picture of the attack , but Marionette Parrar makes it pathetic as well. That was surprisingly easy for being the culprit. Yup, we're done! End this! You were a pushover. Iku was more of a threat than you.

Yeah, that's masochistic. We ask her to end the incident. Neither did I. Repeat that. Stop moving, damn it! We WILL beat you mercilessly! For once, I approve of Strawberry Bose Reimu's brutality!

Wait, huh? You know the real culprits? You know, of all of the people who knew, you were the last one I'd expect to say anything. I get it, I get it. Alright, who is it? Yeah, we know that. Just tell us. Don't interrupt her. Go on Excuse me? Aquatic gods? What is this, Marine Benefit? Well, not exactly So Patchy was right the first time!

We must haven't looked hard enough. Do you know why they're doing this? So you don't even know? Yeah, this isn't a good day. Yeah, gods. Gods are never fun to deal with. You are completely right, Satori. We've got a long way to go before those gods are taken care of. No one shall escape Reimu's wrath. It's like Asura's Wrath, except with more frills and little girls. Yeah, but we must have missed something.

The forest is a large place, after all. Yeah, that's a bit strange. The one place no one would suspect! By the way, Genbu's Swamp is a canon location. It was a possible location to fight in back in SWR. Err, this place looks strange. And what's with the person in the turtle shell? Err, Bio? The really good spell from Final Fantasy? Oh, it's a Pretty strange aquatic gods we have here And by the way, the one in the turtle shell was the one in the brown robe from earlier, and the one with the tail was the one in the white robe and bunny ears back in Eientei.

These were the people tailing us the whole time. Wait, you were the one who roughed up Chen? You're the first one I'm going to take down, then.

It was. It was terrible. The truth hurts. I already am afraid of you. Well, it seems like we certainly have villains here. You sort of destroyed the mountain a little. Who's this Lithos? Err, okay If Lithos is anything like this "Sis" person, things aren't going to go so well Biotopos, huh? Well, Bio seemed a little short for a name. So, Biotopos, Anastasis, and Lithos, huh? Sounds vaguely Greek Yeah, the jig's up.

We're on to you. I don't like the term "play. So that's what this place is? Is it underwater or something? Great, so we're expected. That's always fun. You freak me out, Anastasis. Euryale and Stheno!? You mean the three sisters from Greek mythology who were turned into monsters by the gods?

So, that means Lithos is Medusa Oh great, they've got mooks. Shouldn't you just have sent them out to spy on us and not, you know, you? That's a really interesting thing you can do with your pipe there, Biotopos. A blowfish, shellfish, and octopus, respectively. Some's some seriously long arms you've got there, Matsuba. She's a crab, by the way. Why're you working for them? Don't you live behind the Hakurei Shrine still? A ceremony? What kind of ceremony?

So, we're going to have to o through them before we can deal with the Gorgons, eh? Not a problem. Just more things to bash. Alright then, whatever. We're pretty strong. We've already taken down everyone else in Gensokyo. A few newcomers aren't a problem. And here's the location of the next area. But can we make it through the new area of the Forest of Magic to reach the Gorgons? Find out as we go through the final Volume, Volume 4! Yep, we've still got a ways to go before this is over.

It'll get a lot worse very quickly. If you didn't know there were three Gorgon sisters, I must question your knowledge of Greek mythology a little bit. Then again, a lot of people only know Medusa I guess I can't judge too much. Fun fact:iirc Biotopos is pronounced Viotopos.

Oh you, words. I think a lot of the stuff you didn't know the weakness to was weak to Earth. It's a hard to remember element, and most of the stuff weak to it isn't obviously so. Example:The Spartoids you're about to encounter. Yes, I know it's pronounced with a "v". It's kind of strange, though. I just don't really know the peculiarities of Greek language. It's what I get for knowing only English, some Latin, and a tiny bit of Japanese.

Quote from: Validon98 on February 12, , PM. Okay, thank you, then. I feel as if I need it In other news, you mentioned Poison Shield. I see that formation a lot. The problem is I really don't understand the condition.

It's to kill an enemy with Toxin not Poison and then use the healing circle in Garden of the Sun with Alice as a leader, right? If so, what the hell inflicts Toxin? I didn't get that formation in my first run, and it seems to be like the formation I use constantly in DoD, which is a good formation. I swear, out of all of the statuses, it has to be Toxin It's either a high-end Sanae weapon I can't get yet, or getting Poison Hand for Satori and having her hit something with it while her IND is at crazy-high levels.

Should be easy. Or not. The hardest part was just getting Poison Hand. Afterwards, it was easy. And I also encountered a Yukkuri, killed it, and got a Yukkuri Medal.

On my first try. You can get it with Poison Art just fine. You just have to equip poison boost gear Venom Rune Clothes from youkai mountain, the poison resist accessory, The Green Eyes and use Hyper Trigger, along with the obvious ind bonus gear and Trauma tree pumping. You don't need all of the poison boost gear on either, it's just that I know you should already have all of it. But, you got Poison Hand already anyway, so :V. Something's been killed dead by Toxin, and that's all that matters.

On another note, I swept through Stage So I have screenshots. What I don't have is the time to do the update, because I just had a large amount of homework dumped on me, and it all has to be done.

So, I started playing Touhou Mother. Heading to Eientei for the first time. Dealing with the exploding trees. I must learn to mash the "z" key faster! Fourth Volume- Part 1: Reconstructed So, we're returning to the Forest of Magic, hopefully with less battery acid. But before that, I went to go get Poison Shield.

Okay, that's enough with the raocow references. Time to get serious. It has a new theme. Selene's Light would be it. I think it's the only PC song in the game.

Also, is that a Mario pipe at the bottom? What is this, Super Marisa World? Yeah, there's weird shit everywhere. No shit, Sherlock. They note the life energy here is at crazy high levels. Well, the Gorgons or at least one of them can manipulate life, so it makes sense. Pretty much. Why they need to do that, I don't know, but they did it, so You don't. We know from that cutscene that Anastasis was the one who beat the shit out of Chen, which means she must be oni-level strong.

That's not good for us.