Part 90: There's no Time to Waste! (2)

Before we continue with fighting gods, I figured there is some time to do more sidequests. Unfortunately, most of them are intended for higher levelled characters, and right now our levelling has slowed down due to ever-increasing EXP needed; however there are still a few things we can do, so let's get started.



First off, there's this. Incidentally, when there is no "suggested level" listed on a sidequest, that generally means that there's no boss fight as part of it.









For some reason, this will be done by Marie and Connor (but like I said, there's no boss fight to do, so it hardly matters). As the description said, we need to go to a library in All-seeing Eye and find the rest of the recipe.



The game does not specify which of the several libraries, so you may have to look around a bit until you find it, but eventually...



































Well, that was not weird. Good going, Conor!



In any case, as a result of this quest we got the Gold Recipe. As the screen says, it gives us a new skill, Qilin Gate when we equip three gold Sopias on a single character. This skill gives us +10% on HP and MP, so not that special really, but I guess it can be useful for something. Incidentally, Qilin means "unicorn" in Chinese, although the same word (Kirin) simply means "giraffe" in Japanese (麒麟/キリン). So take your pick!


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And now, the moment we've all been waiting for! It's time to finish this whole Panda Gang story once and for all. Note that the suggested level is listed as 75; this is actually way too high--our characters are only around 60-61 and will actually manage this without significant problems.





Unsurprisingly, Piu-Piu seems to have something to do with this whole thing. Incidentally, we don't have predetermined characters for this one, so I'll just take Darwin and Marie as usual.



Again, we're going to the All-seeing Eye.













So actually, we have not one but three opponents. The main goal is Panda King (the dark one in the middle), and the other two are just incidental. We'll leave the King for last anyway.





While the other two are still alive he will tend to skip most turns, but may act occasionally. Such as this spell, which does no damage, but may cause insta-death. Hence, it's a very bad idea to use pair attacks in this fight! I actually forgot to equip the accessory that prevents insta-death on at least one of the characters, but normally you would do that.





Another thing that I forgot to do was to equip elemental spells on Marie, so she's stuck mostly using Banish which is just a simple non-elemental spell. Oh well, it's just going to take a bit longer.



Panda King hits pretty damn hard.



A well placed Collbrande finishes the Panda Prince.



And soon after the Queen is gone too.



Now we can focus on Panda King.



Look how much damage he's doing to us!





Nevertheless, Marie is able to finish him off eventually.



This whole Panda quest is very much worth doing, for a couple of reasons. First of all, look how much EXP and SP you get!





Yep.



Coincidentally, during this fight I got enough SP for Dragon Sopia to learn this skill: I normally don't regularly show all learned skills, but this one is too good not to mention: it makes you start all battles with your limit break charge already at level 1! This is absolutely fantastic and makes you even more overpowered than normal. This is one thing I do like about these games: as your characters level up and learn skills, you get a real sense of power with your new abilities and so on!









And this is the second reward for finishing this, a replica Auryn accessory.



It gives us a new passive skill, Übermensch.



It's a very good skill, because it reduces a chance of status effects working on the character that is wearing it.


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And finally, here is the last of the three "Flavour research" requests from Lessica. This time, we need to give her ten of Last Suppers. Last Supper is a consumable item which if I remember correctly heals full HP and MP and removes all status effects. If you haven't been using them, you probably have a few from various chests already. As for the rest, Piu-Piu does not sell them, so the only option is to farm them from enemies. There are some monsters that have it as a rare steal, but if you equip all the steal success rate boosting skills, they won't be so rare and it will only take a few minutes to farm the necessary quantity...







...which we can then give to Lessica and observe her reaction!































Completely by coincidence, the reward for this quest is actually a real Auryn (not replica)--figures that for the previous Piu-Piu related quest we would get a fake one, doesn't it?



This one gives us a skill called "Untouchable".



It's actually just a stronger version of "Übermensch", in that it completely blocks any status effects, rather than just reducing the probability. In short, these two quests are very much worth doing in order to get these two useful accessories; even if chasing down all eight Panda gang members can be a little tedious sometimes.


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Well, that's it for now; most of the rest of the sidequests need our characters to be more levelled up, so we'll come back to them after we see a bit more of the story and game opens up higher level enemies that we can level up faster against.