Part 94: There's no Time to Waste! (Ophanim)
So, in the next couple of updates we are going to go through a bunch of sidequests, before we address the game's final ending. We couldn't really do most of these earlier, since they are typically geared for characters who are level 100+, and there was not really a good way of grinding since high enough level enemies were not available to us. After finishing the true ending, however, levels 101-200 are finally open to us, and we can proceed.
Incidentally, grinding in this game is fairly painless, for two reasons. First of all, there is a particular type of enemy in the game for whom one of the actions they can do in a random battle is summon more of the same enemies in empty slots left by killing some of them. And they are not tough enemies either, they die in one-two hits. Thus, you can simply go to the area where they spawn and basically stay in the same random battle for 10-15 mins and you will have gained 5-6 levels at the end of it when you add in the EXP Increase ability and EXP double items (which these very same enemies give out as one of their possible drops, believe it or not!). Another way of grinding is to farm those Panda-type enemies; they spawn pretty regularly in one particular spot, and you can pretty much gain from 1-3 levels from every fight depending on what particular configuration you encounter, if you use all EXP enhancing skills and items that you can. Personally I prefer the Panda option as it seems to be a bit faster/less boring to do.
But it is actually even better than that. The game is quite merciful, so the other 5 characters which are not participating in the battle will actually follow along with your grinding and basically always be at around 10 levels behind, or so. So in the end, the grinding in this game is not nearly as painful as it could have been.
So let's get going with the quests, today the main focus will be so-called "Ophanim Shrine", that is fights against much more powerful versions of Ophans. But first...
This is actually simply a fight against a stronger version of the "Tentacle" boss. You may remember him from a while ago.
We just need to go to Zenith Bound, exactly where we fought him before.
For the record, the characters will be around level 90 or so for all quests in this update.
With high HP enemies it's not a bad idea to start with a stressor or Necrosis, especially if they don't have elemental weakness.
His attacks are generally not too bad as far as that goes.
Although he does heal for 1000 HP at the end of a turn.
But our damage is fine. Although he does have one problematic move...
This attacks deals decent damage, but more importantly, inflicts random status effects, including poison. Darwin is actually wearing the Auryn, so he won't be affected; but Marie at this point still wears the accessory that gives her extra 1000 HP--even and higher levels, her HP is still very low and this is fairly necessary.
As usual we use this as soon as we can (I am usually too impatient to wait for Godslayer!).
Sometimes, he will do this.
It heals him for a bit more than usual, but also adds an element. This means counter spells of course!
In any case, this is perfectly doable without too much strain.
And here's our reward.
It's a weapon for Darwin, which we have no real use for as it is worse than his current one.
* * *
And now we move on to the Ophanim shrine subquests. As I mentioned, these involve fighting more powerful versions of Ophans, and each subsequent one is at a higher level than previous.
The first one is Orlando, and as you can see, we are a bit overleveled for the first couple of these.
We find him in the All-seeing eye. He is fairly annoying as he is VERY FAST plus he attacks THREE TIMES PER TURN!
His attacks aren't actually super-strong at this point, but some have an annoying ability to cancel your own turn with some probability (which is actually pretty high).
Nevertheless, he makes a mistake of using an elemental spell.
Which means...
And then for good measure...
Yeah.
As a reward we get an accessory that gives us a rather large speed boost, +250. The reason it says +170 down there is because Darwin is already wearing something that gives him +80. Not bad, can be useful.
* * *
Next up is Marie, and this one is a bit strange actually.
She's over here in the first dungeon.
She actually only has 10000 HP (Orlando had around 30000 or something like that), so you might think this is easy.
But check this out, she heals for exactly 10000 HP at the end of a turn. What this obviously means, is that you must kill her in one turn. To reinforce this, if you don't manage in a few turns, she will simply insta-death you and end the battle.
Ok then, I can hear you saying, just use one of your limit breaks--they deal certainly more than 10000 damage in one turn. Well, the game appears to have what I can only describe as a bug. Multi-hit limit breaks appear in some cases to only deal as much damage as their last hit does--and that ended up happening to me here, no matter what I did (we'll see some more on this topic next time). So I had to find another way.
Luckily, then this happened. She used a fire spell.
When I tried a counter, it turned out that it dealt just under 10000 damage thanks to Marie's magic power.
Therefore the solution was clear. If we apply this buff...
...next time we get exactly what we needed.
The reward is an accessory which gives a big boost to our magic. I'm starting to see a pattern here, people.
* * *
Next up is Araki.
Looks impressive, but...
...turns out, with the default Orlando sopia equipped, Darwin is already the opposite element to Araki, so this battle is basically over before it even started.
He does have this one attack which is pretty much an insta-kill (this skill deals more damage the less HP he has, so he will typically use it when low on HP) but it's really just a minor bump in the road.
The reward is pretty expected by now.
* * *
Next up is Conor.
Despite being on a higher level, this one is, if anything, even easier as you can see based on screenshots above.
The bosses are starting to give loads of EXP at this level!
In any case, the reward is again exactly what we expected.
* * *
The final one is Li Hua. As you can see, she's level 90, which means we are finally about on an equal footing. This is one considerably harder for other reasons too, as we'll soon see.
She hits reasonably hard.
Also, high defence, so single person physical attacks do nothing at all.
Magical counters are pretty effective, though. Thanks, Marie!
However, she will often do this to stop you from using them (this is like the Reflect spell in Final Fantasy but only works once and is automatically dispelled after).
You might be tempted to do this...
...but no, it doesn't work since it's still one person attack and does take defence into account. We will soon be able to get around this issue for other bosses.
Due to Mental Wall spell, using magical attacks is not really safe, but you can use elemental attack items, they get through reflect. They do a lot less damage, but still a reasonable number.
To no one's surprise, the award for this quest is Defence Booster.
* * *
We'll do one more unrelated quest for today. Notice, it mentions a book.
Remember how we couldn't read this book before? Well...
...now we can.
And it leads straight into a boss fight against two powerful legion-type enemies.
They hit pretty hard, but...
...otherwise this fight is quite unremarkable.
So that's interesting, but not super-relevant for us anymore really.
The award is one more Auryn. The Auryin is definitely situational, but when you do need it, you need it badly!
So that's it for now, next time we have a few interesting quests that will result in all characters getting their ultimate weapons! So stay tuned for that, because we'll be encountering some unusual enemies as part of that!