LogFAQs > #949730188

^Ah, glad it was supposed to be hard! And I figured the step count in the menu was there for a reason so that makes sense.

First stop today is Doma Castle, which has... nothing at all. Nobody around, not even any monsters. I'm here for a while before I try resting, which progresses the plot. Cyan doesn't wake up with the rest, and we follow some Dream Stooges into his head (That's a thing I guess! Sure.). This is another unique dungeon, starting off with just Terra on her own trying to gather the others and move ahead in this non-linear realm. The stooges are not a difficult boss, but there's an order to them. One Curas the others so I try to take him down first, but then another one Arises him so he's clearly the priority target. These guys are no threat, Sabin can punch through anything these days.

After they're down we are suddenly back on the Phantom Train! Cool! There's some treasure chest puzzles here and the enemies aren't pushovers, but no plot stuff (I was anticipating Siegfried!) and after messing with the switches in the engine room we step out into an entirely different area I don't recall seeing before. And we're all wearing Magitek Armour! Notably Terra has more abilities than the other two, and again we have to navigate the non-linear space around us. I'm enjoying this, they've done a good job with putting unique spins on dungeons so far in the back half of the game.

Finally we end up back at Doma Castle, where apparitions of Cyan's wife and kid show up to get us to help him. We witness a few of Cyan's memories around here, he's clearly still torn up with guilt/regret over what happened. It's nice that they don't have him magically cured of his grief after that one epiphany earlier with Lola, of course he's still hurting. The one taunting Cyan is a monster named Wrexsoul (Shepardsoul), and here's our second boss fight.

He helpfully tells us his exact strategy, we just need to carefully kill one of our party at a time until we find the one he's possessed, then he's vulnerable. Again this isn't much trouble, cool gimmick though. Cyan gets some more closure from his wife and kid (I guess they're meant to be real but you could read it as this all being in Cyan's mind too which is nice, allowing himself to move on), and we get Masamune (which isn't as good as the weapon I already have on him!). We also acquire Alexander, and with him access to Holy.

Next up is the only dot on the map I don't think I've been to yet, which is the Cult of Kefka. Hey, Strago's here! ...Seemingly a part of the cult himself, he doesn't engage with us. I bring Relm and that does the trick, he snaps out of whatever trance he was in and rejoins us. How did he wind up in that cult? What is the deal with them anyway? Hopefully we'll find out later. There's a thief here who scams me out of 100K Gil to tell me about a Weaponsmith in Narshe (Think this is the Ragnarok guy, but this does remind me I need to go back there as Fiop suggests) and an Ancient Castle underneath the desert in Figaro?? I hope he doesn't mean Figaro Castle. I consider save scumming here but I have plenty of cash and it's possible that talking to this dude is what triggers one of these things, so I leave it.

The main purpose of this location is a very tall tower where you can only use magic (flashbacks to that one dungeon in V! Aaah!). I set up a team of Mages but I'm not really well equipped for this, Terra and Celes are the only ones I've been building up. Nonetheless we head up the tower, very slowly. Each battle here can take a while, I quickly decide that equipping the two Reflect Rings I have and bouncing spells off them is the way to go but we progress at a pretty slow rate here. There's no escaping and no EXP gains, and the enemies are pretty tough and each has their own gimmick. I wonder if I could cheese this with Mog and his Relic...

Progressing up and up we get a few nice sounding items and a couple of encounters with some very friendly Magic Urns which heal our MP sometimes. Many floors up I enter the item room to discover a Holy Dragon, again they really do a great job of making each of these dragon fights completely different! Thankfully this guy isn't too bad, he doesn't have Reflect up himself and many of his spells bounce off the girls. I have Celes use her fancy new Ultima spell for massive damage, and we get a Holy Lance for our troubles.

Sadly this run comes to an end in a pretty anticlimactic way, the Level 90 enemy + friends group is a bit much for me right now and we get wiped out. Until now I've been a fan of how the Game Over system in this game works, it's great at not making you feel like you've lost a ton of progress. But we had no EXP here, so we lose aaalll of our tower progress- AP, items, even the dragon. Ugh. Salty runback time, I race back up the tower via the power of annoyance and get back to the Dragon, then just climb back down to be safe and record progress. I'll have to come back here later!

That's pretty much all for today, I do head to the forest where the Brachiosaur lives and encounter it twice- the first time it Ultima's us to death and the second time we have it on the ropes but it Snorts everyone away at once. Charming. We do Mug a Ribbon from it, but not the relic colliding is talking about. Ribbons are usually super useful though so I'll take a spare! I also do a couple Coliseum fights, and this thing seems pretty dang trial and error for now- some of the rewards don't even seem to be better than the item you wager, and it's a crapshoot whether Sabin will just beat an enemy down or waste time doing useless Blitz moves before they one-shot him with a super attack.

So we have a new lead with the Ancient Castle, and I need to do the Cult Tower properly. I'm still missing 11 Espers, 3 Dragons, Deathgaze and one character, so there's plenty more to do yet! There's also Ebot's Rock to figure out (maybe taking Strago and Relm to Thamasa will help), and Narshe to go back to.

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Slowly becoming a Final Fantasy aficionado. Currently playing: FFVI
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