Topic: Plots to Make Fun Of: Seven of 'Em! -- Let's Play Saga Frontier! (Read 38457 times)

R^2 · « **Reply #200 on:** March 19, 2013, 06:50:32 PM »

What a twist!

Good fucking question. But he doesn't tell us.

End of... like a couple of chapters! Why didn't I get an interstitial before?

R^2 · « **Reply #201 on:** March 21, 2013, 06:45:44 AM »

We have most of the rings, and only one place left to go. But once you finish it you're whisked straight off to endgame, so you'd better make sure you're ready before you even start (not to mention how ridiculously hard some of the final trials are). Unfortunately, monsters are some of the grindiest characters in the game, and I've got five of 'em for some damn stupid reason.

Every skill absorbed is a tiny HP bonus to the monster character. I have a checklist that I am slowly working through, and after it's reasonably done for each character I still need to find them a decent form to take on the last boss with. So it may be a bit before I can give the LP a solid update again.

But sometimes I am glad the game autotargets enemies for you. Who's who in this screenshot?

R^2 · « **Reply #202 on:** March 22, 2013, 06:44:36 AM »

Or maybe I can get sick of grinding and say "eh, fuck it" and shoot for endgame. We'll see how that goes.

In some Shingrow Ruins I started finding Spinxes, from whom monsters learn SphinxRiddle. SphinxRiddle then causes your monster to turn into a Sphinx, a dedicated-caster type midgame monster. They're okay.

...but not as good as SuzakuJr, a form that demands FireBarrier. You learn FireBarrier as the rare drop from, yes, Suzaku. It sure is a lot of fun grinding rare drops over and over again, huh?

Hooray, look at everyone surrounded by flames. That certainly didn't take way too long and way too many save states.

Dullahans semirare drop is DeathGaze, which is the last attack Riki and Cotton need to take the form of a Mariche. It's one of the best monster forms in the game, but it takes all four Gaze attacks to get it -- that's four ability slots you need just to maintain your shape.

R^2 · « **Reply #203 on:** March 22, 2013, 06:50:25 AM »

Eight rings down, one to go.

It's the Lord Ring, so it stands to reason you get it from...

...the Ring Lord.

Yep, there it is.

Not when I can send you through an excruciating fetch quest first! There are eight keys in Virgil's Palace. Go get 'em all.

R^2 · « **Reply #204 on:** March 22, 2013, 06:53:49 AM »

In the first room, a mouse is keeping the key in a barrel. Open the right barrel for the key. Open the wrong barrel and get into a fight.

The next room is Pac-Man. Collect the moneybags, fight the slimes. The key appears when you get the last moneybag.

The next room is bowling. Clear the monsters out to get the key. Step on switches to have pillbugs roll around the room, and if they hit a monster (by SHEER LUCK or by loading state until it works), that's one monster you don't have to fight.

This is the second-worst room in the Palace. You can't see the safe path over the spikes, it's invisible -- you have to follow where the woman is walking. If you step on a spike, you get into a fight.

The worst part? In order to get onto the path in the first place, you have to disregard all common sense and run at the spikes from the entrance. You'll leap over the first few tiles of spikes and land on the invisible path.

It takes almost as long as getting SuzakuJr forms for everyone.

Blessed simplicity! The key is in one of the graves. Check the wrong grave and a skeleton appears in the room. Touch it to fight it.

Single-elimination tournament. I had to fight a bunch of Manticores and a set of Living Armor/Living Musket/Living Gloves.

A... game show.

He names an item, then another item. You have to guess if the sale price of the second item is higher or lower than the first. If you get it wrong -- you guessed it -- you get into a fight. Get it right enough (or power through all the battles) to win the key.

(These are more interesting fights than usual because your whole party is transformed into Rocky monsters -- even humans and mecs get changed.)

R^2 · « **Reply #205 on:** March 22, 2013, 06:58:08 AM »

As you step into the center of the room, the lava surrounding the platform surges toward you. It's a fight! A fight with...

MagmaSlimes!

MagmaSlimes always attack with MagmaTouch, which does 0 HP damage.

...and 1 LP damage. They attack your LP directly, every turn. MagmaSlimes are faster than Mariche and Suzaku forms, so while I don't know their precise Quickness, you can damn well count on losing 5 LP scattered among your characters every turn before you get to try to kill them.

Whew, that could have been t--

YOU SON OF A BITCH.

There are thirty MagmaSlimes in this fight. Each time you kill one, another immediately sprouts up in its place. Check the Max LP for all my monsters, here -- no way we could survive more than five rounds of that abuse.

Oh yeah, and remember: if your scenario protagonist runs out of LP, the game ends immediately.

R^2 · « **Reply #206 on:** March 22, 2013, 06:58:48 AM »

I struggle again, with better forms for everybody...

nope.jpg

R^2 · « **Reply #207 on:** March 22, 2013, 07:03:15 AM »

You, the robit. Come here.

We're gonna do this with a second-string party so Riki isn't present. Then we're going to build that second-string party out of Mecs, who have an abundance of LP, and Gen, who has twice as much LP as most monster forms and 2GaleSlash (which nicely replaces Riki's MagneticStorm). Thunder gets to stay because his OgreLord form has 10 LP, Kylin gets to stay because he has ReverseGravity.

Turns out the sword skill Deflect can block MagmaTouch, which means Gen can protect Thunder and Kylin a little. It's a long fight, though, and eventually Kylin drops.

Boy am I glad you don't have to grind to get mecs up to par.

And after all that, you don't even get to absorb any decent monster abilities, because the MagmaSlimes count as BigSlimes for determining what abilities you get, and BigSlimes have the same skills as plain ol' regular Slimes that you can fight in the Koorong sewers at the very beginning of the game.

Anyway. That's all eight keys. Now to go see the Lord of the Rings (you had to know that joke was going to happen eventually) about his Lord Ring.

R^2 · « **Reply #208 on:** March 23, 2013, 02:32:30 PM »

And then we take on the Ring Lord himself! He says it'll be fun, but he ain't the first Mystic Lord I've had to beat up in this LP! Bring it on, Pimp Throne Guy!

Hah! I will, because that's how I win fights!

I hit him so hard I made fireworks go off! Ha!

B-but... he didn't take any damage...

Yeah, this isn't a straight-up fight. It's a contest to see how good you are at forming combos. So in the longest, grindiest quest topped off by the worst possible dungeon, the cherry on top of Riki's shit sundae is a goddamn combo pop quiz.

You might, should you not have the sort of guides I'm using for this LP, go back to Koorong where the easiest enemies spawn and just bruteforce some combos together. I'm sure glad I don't have to do that again!

You only get one turn for free. As of the second, Virgil starts attacking back.

If he's supposed to interrupt you, though? He failed.

It's a race to get to ten points before Virgil stomps you. 3-person combos get two points, 4-person combos net you three, and 5-person combos five. Virgil can't stand to watch the same combo twice, but if you switch up just one move or break up a five-hit combo into just a four-hit, you can still get points for those. I won this match with Feeler-Feeler-Feeler-Feeler-Feeler and Feeler-Feeler-Feeler-Feeler-IceSmash.

Oh, and the DSC counts as a combo by itself, so if you get any humans to learn that, you can slowly but surely get the points you need to win.

All right! Nine rings!

R^2 · « **Reply #209 on:** March 23, 2013, 02:39:05 PM »

The group teleports in.

You can talk to everyone, but the other lummoxes don't know where you've been and your party is just gawping at how much of a shithole Margmel is.

It's hard to see, but there are nine motes of colored light circling Riki now.

Elder: You did it. Now, save our Margmel.
Riki: I thought you were going to wish for us.
Elder: No. You are the savior.

Graphic problems with the emulator prevent me from screencapping the part where Riki says "Hear my wish! Margmel, BE REBORN!", but Riki says "Hear my wish! Margmel, BE REBORN!"

It's kind of a neat visual effect. Individual background elements are picked out and sort of painted over, until the new Margmel replaces the old.

R^2 · « **Reply #210 on:** March 23, 2013, 02:48:49 PM »

Welp, we're done here. Margmel is saved by wishing on an ancient artifact, and nothing ever goes wrong with that sort of thing.

What? Just because you've never seen a green countryside before and it looks a little garish, you don't have to react like that. Sheesh.

Oh. Lummoxes are disappearing.

(And nothing of value was lost...)

Riki: What do you mean, Mei-Ling?
Mei-Ling: Margmel's being reborn, just as you wished. But those who weren't there are disappearing.
Riki: That's no good.

sonic.jpg

Mei-Ling: You're so naive, Riki. How could you ever believe a magic ring would grant your wish? These rings are just traps for selfish men. Someone or something made them and scattered them over the regions to absorb their lust.

If you look closely, Mei-Lings hand has a black glow.

Mei-Ling: You can rule all regions with it.
Fei-On: Mei-Ling! Are you out of your mind?!!
Dr. Nusakan: I knew it.

Nusakan plays it cool.

Riki: Please, stop. I take back my wish. I don't care about Margmel. Just bring everyone back, Mei-Ling.
Mei-Ling: Thank you, Riki. Thank you all for helping me get the ring. But I don't need you anymore.
Fei-On: Mei-Ling, stop. What's the matter with you?
Dr. Nusakan: She's under the spell of the Black Ring.

Ha ha, hope you didn't make the mistake of, like, keeping the first character to join your party with you through the whole game or anything! Because she's gone now, replaced by someone you probably haven't trained at all for the final battle.

Because if you haven't caught on yet, the game hates you for playing Riki's quest, and wants to punish you for it at every turn.

R^2 · « **Reply #211 on:** March 23, 2013, 02:56:11 PM »

As you'd expect from a Master Ring with eight subordinate rings, the MasterRing monster calls eight subordinate monsters to fight alongside it. Using the rings has a monster's silhouette flash on the screen, but since I never had to use them even once in this LP I don't have screencaps of it. The summoned beasts are the monsters you see if you use the rings.

Monsters have really lousy healing abilities. Didn't pick up MagicHeal or LifeRain from fighting a Unicorn back when they spawned? Toooooo bad! So I have Kylin set up LightShift to power the Photosynthesis I put on everyone in my party. Photosynthesis restores a little HP at the end of every turn if you're in a sunny area, and LightShift makes your current battle a sunny area. (DeathSynthesis and DarkShift would do the same thing.)

The good news is that MasterRing, like Orlouge, lets his underlings do most of the attacking. And his underlings include a Mariche who uses exclusively Gaze-type attacks and a GhostRider who really likes to use Supersonic. The MasterRing itself likes to use Lullaby and Oscillation, and another underling is a Lich who is fond of Scream.

Back in Manhattan during the Schemer Ring quest I bought everyone in the party a HarmoniumEarring to null all sonic attacks, so I don't have to worry about Supersonic, Scream, Oscillation, or Lullaby. I also bought everyone a PurpleEye, which nulls all Gaze attacks. So no small number of the enemies' turns are wasted doing moves everyone is immune to. So that's pretty cool.

After beating up on MasterRing and his cronies a bit, all the monsters run away. Victory?

R^2 · « **Reply #212 on:** March 23, 2013, 03:01:50 PM »

Nothing so easy, alas. The MasterRing itself has fled, leaving me to fight only underlings for a while.

It came back as soon as I beat one of the monsters into submission. It brought back the GhostRider and the Mariche, too! Between my awesome endgame forms, defensive equipment, nulled enemy attacks, and Photosynthesis regeneration, I don't have to worry about healing at all.

And uh, you realize the very last scenario I was in was a forced tutorial on how to string together giant combos, right?

Anyway, you want to beat up enough monsters that they're not interrupting your combos, but not all of them. Beating individual monsters slightly raises MasterRing's defenses, but not any great amount. And MasterRing has a powerful hits-everyone-for-hundreds-of-damage attack when all of its underlings are gone, but knowing that I left the harmless Mariche alive until...

Mei-Ling vomits up a tiny sparkle, which bounces away a bit. It's underneath Cotton-as-Suzaku in this shot.

If you know how to handle it -- namely, HarmoniumEarrings and PurpleEyes, and not killing all the monsters -- MasterRing is the easiest final boss in the game, hands down.

R^2 · « **Reply #213 on:** March 23, 2013, 03:06:45 PM »

Mei-Ling: I... I lied to you.
Riki: It's the Black Ring. It's not your fault.
Fei-On: Sorry, Mei-Ling. It was my fault. If only I'd kept my eye on you.
Dr. Nusakan: She seems fine. The Curse of the Black Ring is also gone.
Elder: But, it's all over for Margmel.

...WHAT.

WHAT.

"Gee, sure sucks our entire home region is screwed. Guess we'd better move!" DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH TROUBLE YOU COULD HAVE SAVED ME BY DECIDING THAT BEFORE I WENT ON THIS GODFORSAKEN RING QUEST

YOU UTTER SHITHOOKS

ARRRRGH

R^2 · « **Reply #214 on:** March 23, 2013, 03:15:38 PM »

And then Riki runs around throwing the rings away so no one can ever collect them again. The Lord Ring is thrown into the frozen snowfields of Mosperiburg, because man, fuck Virgil and his whole palace.

Another ring goes into Owmi harbor, so expect a scenario coming up to include a megalomaniac water mystic who found it.

To rub it in that everything Riki accomplished in his entire quest was a giant waste of time, other rings just go straight back to their respective owners.

Thunder gets one too, for some reason. He's not even a mandatory party member like...

Dr. Nusakan.

Well, that's not even remotely ominous.

Sei returns to his tomb, and Gen takes another ring back to Wakatu for... some reason. Hey guys, remember that suicidal guy who was going to pawn the ring for some cash to give himself some reason to live? Maybe we should go back and, like, talk to him.

It certainly can't be any worse an idea than returning a cursed ring to be put on sale in a busy retail shop. Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, Riki is stupid.

The Black Ring he throws into one of the blighted fields of Margmel, to be destroyed when the region implodes in on itself or however it is whole regions die.

God, am I glad that's over.

R^2 · « **Reply #215 on:** March 23, 2013, 04:18:26 PM »

We certainly haven't seen this picture of Riki's ass quite enough.

Mei-Ling will help you gather the rings, b-but she's not doing it because she likes you, okay?

Dr. Nusakan is one of my favorite characters, inasfar as these paper-thin single-note guys are "characters". His is my favorite characterization gimmick, I guess.

Not sure why Sei gets official character art, but he did.

Virgil, lacking the throne that makes him so pimptastic in-game. Surprise, a mystic is willowy and bishounen.

Obligatory "alternate art style" shot.

I wish I knew what a "monkey's paw" means!

Beat Bandit · « **Reply #216 on:** March 24, 2013, 05:37:48 AM »

That is a bear with snakes for hands fucking a bull.

Why can't anyone in your party take that form?

R^2 · « **Reply #217 on:** March 24, 2013, 06:54:08 AM »

That's a chimera. It only requires the skilll GasFlame to transform into, and several of my characters learned GasFlame at some point. I never saw it; though, because monster transformations are needlessly, incomprehensibly complicated.

patito · « **Reply #218 on:** March 24, 2013, 10:41:52 AM »

Quote from: Beat Bandit on March 24, 2013, 05:37:48 AM

That is a bear with snakes for hands

Excuse me, it's called fisting.

R^2 · « **Reply #219 on:** March 24, 2013, 01:02:52 PM »

Four down, three to go. And I'm done with the race scenarios, the three remaining characters are human.

Dear My Country (Ending ~ Lute)
I like the Yorkland music.

Ma: Don't treat me like some old woman. I'm not so old I have to be worried about. Work hard, Lute.
Lute: All right, Ma.

Lute: See you, Thunder. Be strong. Take care of Ma.

Every character gets a rename screen at some point, but Lute's is semi-noteworthy because his Ma calls him by name before it comes up.

News:

Author Topic: Plots to Make Fun Of: Seven of 'Em! -- Let's Play Saga Frontier! (Read 38457 times)