Part 61: Prologue

After exiting, we find the Ark in a state of emergency with red lights flashing and the klaxon blaring.



Let's quickly check with Piu-Piu...

































Piu-Piu seems to have become one of the more sensible people around, which confuses me.

In any case...







We've seen this option before... nothing else to do but to choose it.







But we are not transported to the place we expect...













Uh-oh, I think we all know whose hand that is... I foresee a boss fight coming on (again)!









Ayup...











Yes, of course, we have to fight Cyllis AGAIN (for the third freaking time!). But first, a bit of chat...











This space will soon disappear, but you will not escape.
I will rend everything to shreds before then!
I'm not gonna let Ohm die in a place like this.
I am Olgar! I crush anything that stands in my way! And I protect those I love, no matter what!
That is the legacy of Olgar!
Words are meaningless!
Show me with actions!
You bet I will!





And now the fight really starts.





Cyllis hits like a truck...

First I decide to use a couple of Stressors. You might recall that this is an item that takes off 15% of target's current HP. This is not a bad way to start a battle against high HP bosses.







Wait a moment, what's this now, "9 turns remaining"?

Well, a battle agains Cyllis has to have a gimmick. So this time, you have to win in 10 turns or less, otherwise you're dead. This is not so easy and depends partially on luck, as you will see. Cyllis has a truly horrible new move that she can use in this battle. Depending on when and how she uses it will decide if you succeed or fail.



But for the moment, we cast a wind spell to neutralise her magic to an extent.



She can even steal our MP. This is an issue because we will be using magic in this battle in order to maximise the damage output in short time.



Wow, she really hits hard.















Thanks to our wind spell, her water magic hits for less than it otherwise would have...

And then this:









You can see based on the colour of the damage numbers that we are actually strong against this attack. I don't even want to think how much it would hit for had we not done the wind spell as the first thing in this battle!





For now we can just keep going with wind spells, they do quite a good damage.

But then she does this...





This is horrible. It really decimates your damage output to less than half of normal. Physical attacks do next to nothing, while spells still kind of do ok. There is actually an item that can remove this status effect, but do you REALLY want to waste a turn on it? Especially since when her HP is low she can use this attack several turns in a row so it could all be for nothing anyway.

So, as mentioned we will ignore this and just keep using wind spell and hope for the best...

Except...





ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

This reflect status actually includes even the elemental attack items, but... they do less damage than real spells so I'll just use one of these to break through the reflect status. Even though this game has a battle turn order system similar to Final Fantasy X or Lost Odyssey, unlike those games, it does not in fact show you the order of turns on screen, which makes strategising a little more difficult. In particular this reflect spell can catch you out after you have already input the actions for that turn and cause a lot more pain than here.



Vahti gets damaged a bit, but at least we can continue...







Let's continue--the fact that she is weak to our magic kind of neutralises the "parameters are halved" bit, which is good. Also, the "parameters are halved" effect DOESN'T stack, so if she's using it repeatedly it won't make things worse for us at this point (since we decided to ignore it anyway).





Yeah, yeah, yeah... keep on wasting turns, that's fine by me.



We are cutting it close...



...but actually we only really need one more turn!



And here we go.















And we're done. This battle is a lot harder than it looks, mainly because, as I've said, it does depend on luck a little bit.

You can watch the fight with Cyllis and surrounding cutscenes in video form below:

VIDEO: The giant mechanical Cyllis (make sure to switch it to 720px HD for much better quality!)







Oh, come on Cyllis, what now?











But look who's teleported in!

































Vieg and Vahti have been teleported away.























Well, I guess that's it for those two. You know what that means, time to say goodbye...



^{CLICK ON PICTURES TO EMBIGGEN.}


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Meanwhile, Vieg and Vahti reach their real destination...





























































































You know what we haven't seen in a while? Ending credits. These are pretty cool with some nice drawings on the side...









And that, kids, is how Olgar (Vieg) and Vahti won the Ark Arena when they first participated in it.



^{CLICK ON PICTURES TO EMBIGGEN.}


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After a while of playing these games, one learns not to trust when they say they are finished... so if we go to the scenario selection screen...



...it appears that now there is something in top right corner that we can pull on (?)... Well, let's try, how bad can it be...?







Hooboy.