Part 54: Bonus The Black Dragon

Alright the, when we left off Blinky had undergone a rather unexpected change. With that said, let's take a quick look at him.



Examining his stats, there's nothing terribly impressive in most of them. He's fairly strong and has a good fire element affinity, but other than a LOAD of HP the really important stats here are Blinky's loyalty and fidelity.



The Black Dragon is the ultimate culmination of the Uni Uni evolution line, which most people stumble upon accidentally. The key factor in the change is achieving a loyalty of 100. For every 10 points in fidelity the dragon will transform again until it becomes a Black Dragon at 100 loyalty and 100 fidelity. In a normal game you'll probably have this happen when you're feeding a lot of weapons to your dragons in order to boost up their strength. Once a dragon transforms, a few important alterations happen...





In the first place, all elemental attacks and abilities are replaced with Uni variations of their basic set. This even applies to summons, although I didn't have a chance to showcase that as of yet. This means no forest fires, no frozen lakes, and no destroyed walls.



Even the dragon's breath attack transforms into a neutral form. Because the damage is neutral you never have to worry about enemy resistances or unintended geographic consequences. This is especially important at this point in the game, as we're about to start encountering groups with mixed resistances.



Another point in favor of the form is sheer power. It's been mentioned that lancers are relatively weak, but as you can see with a single attack one of our weaker lancers is doing almost 900 damage to a group of enemies. Uni breath can do upwards of 1100 or 1200 damage to enemies at this point. You might have noticed that all of the attacks I showcased are at level 10.

The reason is that the Uni attack levels are based off of the fidelity of the dragon. It's a lot easier to get 100 fidelity than to get high levels in any of the elemental affinities. I actually got to 100 fidelity accidentally because of bad information in a FAQ saying that drug potions and super vodka could be used to raise loyalty when they actually raise fidelity.



The third factor in using the black dragon is dealing with mini-devils. What most people don't realize about mini devils is that they have a variety of dances that are dependent on what kind of dragon they're paired with. The Reggae dance, which is associated with the lower Uni Uni forms, has a number of powerful attacks associated with it that can do extremely high damage if you're lucky. The Fright Dance adds two potentially useful unique abilities.



Frog All is a somewhat unpredictable spell that causes 25% damage to every unit, both friendly and enemy, on the screen. If the enemy is spread out and you're close enough to heal afterward, it can do a relatively huge amount of damage to the enemy which you can recover from easily.



The second unique ability with the Fright Dance is Heal All, which restores 100% of HP and MP to every unit on the field. Obviously this is more beneficial to our troops than to the enemy, since with our smaller numbers we're going to be in contact with the enemy in staged combat. You can't heal a unit above its maximum HP, so enemy units that haven't been damaged won't benefit from the dance. In addition, this dance is the only way that you can restore the MP of dragons during a battle.





The biggest downside to these forms is that all of their moves carry a small chance of failure. If you're depending on them in a clutch, this could be a deal breaker. All in all using the uni uni form requires a certain amount of risk taking that, when all is said and done, usually pays off handsomely.



The quickest way to get to this form if you want to is through the infusion of massive quantities of mushrooms. As people have mentioned before, if you find yourself in this form by accident the simplest way to get out of it is to feed your dragon a heal potion.

Naturally there'll be more details as this form shows its stuff, but this should give a pretty good idea of the basics and why I'm using it.