Part 42: Until nothing remains.

It is raining outside. The last time it rained in Monsbaiya was seven years ago, when Guy died. Before then, it was supposedly decades before the last time it rained.
The people in the room have their own conversations. First we overhear two hunters.

#1: In anycase, that's great. Mamoru made it to the top level.
#2: No kidding. It hurts inside to accept, but he did make it there first.
#1: Regardless, it doesn't mean I'm no longer going treasure hunting at the tower. Personally, I'm committed to continue.

Then we hear from the man and woman over on the left side. They are a married couple you see sometimes in town.
Aw, man! If only I were ten years younger.
What are you talking about! Who was it that went to the tower with that kid's father, just to wet your pants at the first level and come running home?
What did you say, you poop face!
You picking a fight with me!?

Now we hear a conversation between Aunt, Weedy, Grandpa and Wreath. They use Aunt's picture again (first time since the beginning of the game) but not Grandpa's. I'm including it anyway.
: Mamoru's late. It's already been four half days sine the monster ahead of him said [He's on his way].
: Hey look outside, a water shower! It's water, water!
: That's called rain. That's right, you've never seen rain before. I remember, that was...
: He's fine. I just know that Mamoru is okay. I believe...


There is a knock at the door. The same knock sound effect when the Unicorn knocked on the door instead of Guy.


Oh please, like you didn't see this coming.
(Uncle) He has returned!
#1 Hey, you've done it!
#2 All right, you went and did it!
Congratulations!
: Congratulations, Mamoru!
: Mamoru! You did well! Congratulations!
Fur runs up to Mamoru as well.
: Mamoru! Congratulations! I'm glad for you!
She doesn't run up to Mamoru, probably because they never programmed her too. Also, I before this update, I could not spell congratulations properly. I speled it congradulations. Now I'm getting it right.
: Mr. Mamoru, sir! This is a truly joyful moment!
She runs up too.
: Mamoru! Congratulations.
She stays behind.
: Mr. Mamoru! I'd just like to say congratulations!
She runs up. There is usually a blur-effect when she runs, to show how fast she is in her stalking. This always happens when she runs to Mamoru right before he leaves home. This doesn't happen this time.
: Mamoru! Congratulations, from the bottom of my heart!
She stays behind.
: Mamoru! Congratulations! You did it!
She runs up. If she isn't your girlfriend, she won't do this.
: Thank you, everyone || Maybe I'll stay forever.
The second choice forces Fur, Selfi, Mia and Nico (the four girls that run up again) to say their lines once more. Then it loops back to this choice.
: It looks like it's stopped raining.
The rain graphics and sound effects stop too. This is odd, I seem to recall storms in deserts lasting for days. Then again, the rain came from the Tower.


Cherrl will always appear in this scene, whether she is cured or not or has even appeared in the town yet. If she isn't your girlfriend, this is the only line she gets. And of course, they missed the place to say Azure.


This video is just Mic and Mamoru running. This takes a while, and there are a lot of names and it shows them rather slowly.
But yes, I'm transcribing the entire credits. Just a personal thank you for what still remains one of my favorite video games, bad translation, bugs and evil RNG and all. All the names are in Japanese, I didn't see a single English name on here.
If any of you recognize any of these names, let me know. I would like to mention what projects these other people have worked on if possible.

Directed by: Horio Kenichiro.


Oh, and it occasionally shows pictures of the girlfriends as well.

Scenario written by: Yamada Koji, Horio Kenichiro.
Character design by: Yamada Koji.
Monster design by: Hattori K-suke.
Background design by: Horio Kenichiro.
Assistant directed by: Inaba Haruhiko.



Programming by: HAKODATE ZIRO, Horio Kenichiro, Ogiso Kazumana, Ishikawa Kazuo, Kikuchi Yuji, KATANA-1.



Scenario coded by: Hagihara Toru, KOMA, Iwakura Kousuke, Satoh Hiroki, Kamoguchi Konji, Masuko Yashima.



Additional design by: Yamada Koji, Hattori K-Suke, Aoki Yoko, Tajima Toruto.
Movie by: Nakano Kazuaki, Imaizuni Kenichio, TADANO TSUGUO.



Music by: Hiroshi Tamawari.
Movie SE by: Imohore IMAI.
Sound programming and Sound management by: Noritada Matsukawa
Music driver by: Kiyoshiko Yamane.
Sound edited by: FLATLINE, KASAI HIDEKI



Special thanks to: Harada Masaki.
Supervised by: Yoneoka Masaki.
Produced by: Kitaue Kazumi.


The music slows down here, entering the finale.

Presented by:



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

: Hey, Mamoru! Get up. What's keeping you in bed for so long. That's no good. You sleeeeepy head! Good Morning, Mamoru.
: Who asked you to bother me. || You look cool as always.
: Don't be shy. I know you're glad to see me. Can't you be a bit more positive?
This isn't the end of the LP. There is more stuff to do. First, some special dialog. Talk to Wreath and you get this.
: You're up! You don't need to be up so early. What? Are you going to the tower? You can't get your mind away from the tower, can you? You seem like you've grown up... Yet on the other hand you're still a kid. Here you are. (A Pita Fruit is received!) Go do your best.


Here is where the Ultimate Egg and the Seraphim Sword sit. When you walk over them, they enter your inventory. More on these two later.


When you try to leave, the girls dog pile on Mamoru as per usual, but then we get this at the end.
: It's always the same.


[You can continue your adventures from here on. Please enjoy]
What a pleasant way to say You win! You can keep playing if you want!


The Seraphim Sword is Guy's sword. For some reason they call it the Seraphim sword now, instead of Soul Shooter. I'm not really sure why this is, only that it is.
But as for the Ultimate Egg...


Fun fact: You can sell the Ultimate Egg for $50,000. That's half a Casino, and $10,000 less than I get paid for hitting the jackpot on the slot machine. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the cost for ruling the world.
Anyway, "Haiku", as I'm calling him (the default name was HIKEW. Say that you understand my name), is a very unique monster. But more on him later.


First, I wanna finish the monster book. There are five empty slots, each belonging to evolving monsters. The first six slots for each of the elements are reserved for evolving monsters, like Flames, Snowmen and Clowns. The slot above them is the evolved form, like Death and Saber. I need to evolve four monsters, and find the original form of the Dragon.


I enter the tower with an empty inventory, and pick up some copper coins the unusual way. This gives me an item.


The gameshark codes to alter your inventory is very...unusual. You see, each item fills up two slots of data, one reserved for it's relative location in your inventory bag (which changes when you sort) and one for it's "absolute" location, usually in the order you pick things up.
There are also more lines for the modifier of the item, such as the charges in an orb, the heat percentage in an egg, and as you can clearly see, the bonus to a sword or shield. I just went with a simple +32, nothing too fancy, but high enough to trigger the blue light effect...thingie...


...which does not exist. Maybe the modifier isn't high enough. I go in again and change the modifier to +48. Nothing. Clearly this rumor was false after all, which disappoints me, because the guide I normally use for Azure Dreams mentioned something unusual with the Holy Sword at first, and then was edited later to mention the blue light.
It's still a very powerful sword.


Anyway, now that I get a bit into the tower, I remember why I came here in the first place. I alter some more items (taking extreme care this entire trip to NEVER sort my inventory so the codes don't accidentally overwrite other items and fill my inventory with immoveable blank slots) so I now have four Roche fruits.


And this game STILL throws eggs at me.


I need to catch a Unicorn, to get it's evolved form.


I use the Red sand on the Holy Sword to see if it changes Anything. It doesn't.


And I catch a Block...


However, when you throw a Roche Fruit at an evolved monster, you get their original form as the egg. In this case, the Dragon turns into a Kid.


I continue onward anyway, because there is one last major rumor I want to investigate. And that is Guy's ghost. The rumor is, after you defeat Beldo, when you return to floor 39, you will enter a conversation with Guy's ghost.
Now one thing I learned (from one of you goons, actually, can't remember who though) is that the RNG shifts with every step. If you savestate and throw an item at a Barong, it will spit out a random item, based on the RNG. If you reload the savestate and throw the same item after a pause, you will get the same "random" item back. If you reload the savestate and throw a different item, you will still get the same "random" item. However, if you take but one step in any direction, you will get a different item from the Barong.
I used this theory here. I savestated on Floor 38 next to the elevator, and checked for Guy's ghost. Upon seeing that it was not there, I reloaded and moved around a bit. I repeated this process at least twenty times, each taking different number of steps and seeing a different floor 39 each and every time.
I hate to say it guys, but Guy's ghost does not exist.

However...there is still some very unusual information on this myth anyway. When I was looking up gameshark codes, there was a code to give you an egg of any monster you wanted, including evolved monsters. On the list of possible monsters, there was "Frog", which is what Mamoru or the monsters turn into under that status effect, "Beldo", which crashes the game when hatched, and "Guy", which also crashes the game when hatched. I believe there was also a "Ghosh" and "Koh" (Mamoru) spots as well, but I don't remember off the top of my head and they would crash the game anyway.
So, I'm calling Guy's ghost to be false...but the fact that there is data reserved to run into Guy in the tower means that this may have been planned. Who knows.


Also, there is nothing interesting about Floor 40 anymore. It's empty. Hope you remembered a Wind Crystal, because there is no way down. You can even wait hundreds of turns, and you won't get booted by earthquakes. I think this is because it's an event room, like running into Ghosh.


The Khaki egg was another Volcano.


Here is the Kid.
BULL. SHIT.
Kids, and Dragons, are one of the easiest monsters to raise because they are so powerful already, evolve into more powerful monsters, have a very good spell natrually learned, and that part about eating metals. You can throw any metal item at a Kid/Dragon to restore MP. Yes, ANY metal item, including worthless swords and shields and even the coins you find on the floor.
Kids and Dragons are easily one of the most broken monsters you can raise. Their only saving grace is that by the time you find one, you probably beat the game already.


Charly is the Unicorn I hatched, and Heavy is the Block. The puns involved will become obvious, if they are not already. I bring all the monsters I need to evolve with me. Soth the Flame and Peter the Griffon each have evolved forms I need to awaken as well.




Is it bad that I still feel bad for getting all these eggs?


All evolving monsters evolve at level 20. Flames will evolve into an Ifrit. This time the monster book is rather off, because the Ifrit isn't on fire like the Monster Book describes. Still, Flames are pretty decent monsters before, now it just got better.


Unicorns were always kind of a mediocre monster in my opinion, and I never really dealt with Univerns much before. So I'm going to spend a moment here and talk about some of the unique properties of flying monsters. You may remember back when we had Wendy the Cyclone how sometimes she would fly over the patches of water that appeared on only the first floor. I don't know how many monsters can do that, but I imagine any monster that doesn't stay on the ground could. This includes the Univern.
Although it looks like Clowns hover, but Deaths do not. Hmm...I wonder what would happen. Probably just a game crash.


I always thought Griffons would be an awesome monster because of Rise, but looking at their raw stats, they seem on par with Unicorns, making them rather average. I guess the reason I always thought Griffons would be badass was because they were usually that first monster you remember being really powerful for a while.
Krakens though, which appear with Griffons, have never stopped being annoying to me.


Yeah...lame pun. Heavy Metal. Their stats are pretty mediocre again, maybe their HP is a bit low, but none of that matters with their godly DEF. I imagine without it's double DEF gains, it would still be a good tank. Same with the Arachne.
And yes, an Arachne/Block is a deadly deadly monster. I never got the chance to make one, but I probably wouldn't do it anyway. That's the kind of monster that just breaks the game on it's own, but will destroy you when it gets confused or brainwashed. Fortunately, only Blumes brainwash familiars, and they only appear for about four floors.

I think a while back I mentioned that I wish Azure Dreams mixed up the enemies you found. I don't mean like finding a new set of monsters every floor, but somehow rigging it up so that the "Order" of monsters changed a bit, scaling the levels by their position on the list. So this way you would still encounter the same monster for three or four floors, but the next time you might find that monster on a different set of floors, either stronger or weaker as needed. It'd be good to rotate the mediocre monsters around. Barongs are fine the way they are, and strong monsters like Maximums probably could stay limited to the top.

Oh, and I went back to the 39th and 40th floors on this trip. Nothing unusual. Just used a Wind Crystal and got out.



The two eggs were a Pulunpa and a Weadog. I felt the Pulunpa name was appropriate, but the Weadog requires a bit of an explanation. Loki was my first dog, and my first memories include him. He rarely barked and never really jumped up on me, which is the main reason I don't like dogs too much because they constantly did this to me as a child. Because Loki never did those things, I saw him as a very good dog and I loved him dearly.
Sadly, dogs have a shorter lifespan than humans, although Loki lived a very long time for a dog. Whenever there is a game that gives me a dog of any kind, I have to name it Loki. Fable II and III? Dragon Age: Origins? Yup. My dog is Loki, always and forever.


Anecdotes aside, it is time for my final trip into the tower. This time, I bring Mic, Haiku and the Seraphim sword with me. I also gamesharked a Roche fruit in. I realized you could just use the gameshark to put items in your empty slots, and it works pretty well. Whenever I tried to replace the Pita Fruits, it glitched and replaced Mic or Haiku instead.

First things first, the Seraphim Sword. It's description is "Guy's keepsake sword. ATK 8." And that's it. Some people claim that sometimes when you kill a monster with it, it will turn into an egg. As weird as it sounds, I could believe that. The Money wand sometimes turns defeated enemies into coins, so why couldn't the Seraphim Sword just replicate the Roche Fruit effect and turn monsters into eggs? We shall see. The Seraphim Sword is my weapon of choice this entire tower run.


But first...let's go into the curiosity that is Haiku. This monster, simply put, is a game breaker on it's own. It has very high stats already, and it's spell breaks the game in half. It's Direct makes you invincible for a couple rounds for 20 MP. I imagine it could last longer at higher levels, but I'm not sure. You can tell you are invincible because there is a thing barely noticeable black aura around Mamoru. Now, I want you to know something.
This is the weaker of Dark Wave's abilities.



Dark Shoot is what you get when you mix Dark Wave. It hits all enemies in a 3x3 square infront of Mamoru. (Close Blast 3 for you D&D 4e people.) First it summons a dark cloud over the enemy, then the cloud turns into the Black Tortoise Genbu Genbu howls, and then the disappears, causing the monster to shrink with some kind of colorful misty effect. When that fades away, the monster stands still for a while, and then fades away like they always do when killed by Mixture/Direct magic.
Yes, they just die. Dark Shoot instantly kills all enemies. This Mixture costs 8 MP, and is the more powerful of the two uses for Dark Wave, in my opinion. It is just deadly. Also, I linked above to TvTropes on the Four Gods. You already saw Seiryu for Snow Shoot, I showed off Fire Shoot once, but we never got to Gaia Shoot. Dark Wave finishes the quartet.


I savestated before this, so I did some testing and reloaded back to Haiku being normal. I'd like to point out a very unusual trait in Haiku that I didn't realize until this run. If you feed an elemental seed to Haiku, his element will change, but Dark Wave will still continue to level up and still produce Dark Shoot and make you invincible. However, I highly reconmend against changing Haiku's element because this is the only monster you will ever get that has this unique element.
Speaking of which, there really isn't a good name for Haiku's genus. I've heard it called the Neutral genus, Dark genus and Fusion genus. I'm going to go with Dark from now on, because the spell is named Dark Wave.


Several more things here. First, I found an egg on this floor (that did not come from the Seraphim Sword) and inside was a Pulunpa. If you fuse a monster you hatched in the tower with a monster you hatched back in town, if the tower-monster survives, you can take it home with you. You can tell because their name is no longer red.
Second, Dark Wave will not carry over through fusion. You just can't.
Third, Haiku will always be eaten in fusion. Even if Haiku is of a significantly higher level, has recently eaten a Leva fruit and is wearing the red collar.
Fourth, you can't transfer over the Dark genus.
Fifth: I went through with the fusion anyway, but loaded the savestate I had before. Haiku has no special Traits. Or if Haiku does, they don't carry over.


Sixth, you don't get anything special here either.


And on to the next floor, it's time to embarrass Ghosh. Badly.


And I got curious to see how the game handled instant-kills against things that you really can't instantly kill.


It ended hilariously.


The rest of the trip is of surprisingly little note. Along the way I tried feeding my Roche Fruit to Mic and Haiku. Both didn't take it, even if I threw it at them. It just dropped on the floor beneath them.
The only reason I'm showing this screenshot is because I wanted to show that the Seraphim sword can rust.


Floor 39 again, and still no Guy's ghost, although I do find an egg in the same room I started in, and found two more I never mentioned on the trip, to save on screenshots. However, the entire trip here, I've only been killing enemies with the Seraphim sword, and I have not gotten a single egg from the sword. Like the myth about the Holy Sword, this too is completely false.


However, I did do one thing that was unique, and I never picked up a Wind Crystal on the way, to see how the Tower would react. It responded by spawning two Wind Crystals on the top floor. But I won't be using them.
: Of course. It's in my contract to only screw you over to a certain degree...although that contract should be null and void now that you've cheated.


I toss Mic and Haiku back to town...they don't need to be a part of this.
: You hardly used them this entire trip.


I realized I had two Medicinal Herbs and tried eating them resulting in...well, you can see it for yourself. This is what happens when you break the game in half.
: Hmph. You should have broken it the standard way.


I empty my entire inventory here, except for the Seraphim Sword, pulun and the Roche Fruit I've been holding on to.
: Glad you're keeping the sword, but why all of this?


You see, for I realize my mistake. I realize what I have done wrong. I have dishonored this game by completing it with the assistance of an outside program.
: Damn. This kid's gone nuts.


So I Roche-ed pulun, and then rehatched it to upgrade it to a Lv. 99 Pulunpa.
And gave it a name that was worthy.
: You..you...what on earth have you done?


The 40th floor is scripted. Beldo cannot be defeated the normal way. The only way you can win is by ignoring all random numbers and using the scripted ending. Whenever you return to the 40th floor, there is nothing to find, except maybe a Wind Crystal or two if you don't have one already. Because of these scripted situations, the Random Number God has practically no domain over this floor.
: Yup. He's lost it.
: ...You think this meager sacrifice will earn you forgiveness?
No.
: Then why throw away your inventory?
I offer more than a few eggs, fruits, seeds, shields and a bell. I offer my soul. Kill me.
: What.
My death will give the Random Number God domain over the 40th floor, where otherwise no player could ever die.
: Very well then. Prepare yourself.


Blessed be the name of the Random Number God.


I offer to you this realm, where you were once powerless.


Forgive me for I have gone against your will, and strayed on the path of darkness.


Cleanse me of my sins..........
:





























...until nothing remains.