Part 91: Overtime C: Separate Ways (Part 2) - The Magician
Overtime C: Separate Ways (Part 2) - The Magician
I'm not gonna lie, I was going to straight up veto the vote if Guile won out in the three way choice since he has to be one of the dullest characters in the entire game. If he didn't have the whole "used to be Magus early in develop...maybe still is...who knows?!" thing going for him he'd be about as forgettable as Van. But, meh... For completion's sake here is Guile's path...
Guile is probably the best Black innate magic user in the game. The trouble is his element grid is...kind of fucked, making him rather useless the first time through. Unlike every other character who has an Element grid that has a ton of Level 1-3 slots and progressively less for every other level, until there are only a few for level 7-8, Guile is the exact opposite. He has barely any for low level spells and gets a ton for high level magic. This is all fine and dandy...when you have high level magic...at the end of the game... Early on? That is quite the liability.
But meh, who cares? This is the first and only time we'll be using the Vegas side show loser. This will be heavily abridged since unlike Pierre's little spiel with the Shaker Brothers, nothing at all interesting happens with Guile's path.
First of all, Guile needs a boat to get into Viper Manor. His plan is to sneak in through the back via the climbing the bluffs behind the mansion. So, who do we know at this point that has a boat...?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is fuckface supreme: Korcha.
Korcha is willing to ferry the party to Viper Manor (he briefly questions our motives, but Kid calls him a wanker and tells him to mind his own fucking business) but he doesn't know the way. Not that it's treacherous reefs or jagged rocks surrounding the bluffs making it hard to navigate or anything. Korcha is just kind of a moron. But, Guile knows the way and will guide us there.
We've got to pay Korcha 100G to get the journey underway. Luckily, Glenn and Riddel are right around the corner and we can extort 90G out of him for the Bellflower for the memorial to his murdered by his mentor father and his [sub]murdered by his co-worker[/sb] brother.
Music: Dilemma
Honestly, how do you not know how to get behind Viper Manor? It's the highest point in El Nido next to maybe Fort Dragonia! Korcha is just the worst.
This reminds me...Korcha is totally full of shit. He's hanging out back here fishing or whatever regardless of how we break into Viper Manor.
So, it seems the party is only smart enough to wait until night until beginning the operation to break into the most heavily guarded location in El Nido (that doesn't involve demi-gods) if we take Ziggy's path. Guile's plan is to just climb up toward the manor in broad daylight and hope nobody notices.
Of course, somebody instantly notices. Luckily, the Acacia Dragoons are kind of ridiculously incompetent too. Instead of sounding an alert and gathering a bunch of soldiers with bows and arrows to easily pick off the intruders, they resort to err...
...haphazardly tossing boulders off the side of the cliffs. Sure, why not?
So, Guile's section is basically an annoying game of climbing a shit load of ladders and hoping a boulder doesn't land on your head and knock you off. The boulders only do 10 HP of damage to the whole party. So, it's basically just tedious more than anything. In addition, there are random geysers on some of the ladders and some lead to dead ends with crummy treasure boxes and there are flying enemies about that will mess with your climb and blargh...
When the party finally makes it three screens to the top of the bluffs, the lone private, who completely fails to call for back-up, decides to take the party on solo.
It ends poorly...
Upon his defeat he takes a page from Killer Croc and makes one last ditch effort to smash the party...
...though he aims a wee bit high and overshoots Serge and company by roughly twenty feet.
He does, however, managed to piss off a bird man that was also apparently nesting on the cliff face. Said bird person punts his ass straight off the side of the hundred foot drop and he falls shrieking to his grisly demise. Good! Fuck that guy!
Unfortunately, the
He brings a pair of mono-winged friends with fire and ice themes. The blue one uses ice based attacks, the red...well, you get the picture...
They can combine their powers into their king's staff for a rather punishing triple-tech...48 levels ago...
Needless to say, that shit don't fly against a Level 52 party... Not that it flew much better against a Level 4 party either...
And that is basically Guile's path: long, tedious, and wholly unremarkable. Just like the man himself.
The rest proceeds as normal. Though, Guile does have an item he needs to steal from Viper Manor to settle a bet he has with the Fortune Teller woman back in Termina. It has a crummy reward I cannot recall and do not care enough to look-up. Following that little thread, Guile has literally nothing else to do the entire game. Nobody else is related to him or has anything special to say, he has no sidequests, he earns his Level 7 Tech through leveling. There is simply nothing. He might as well have gotten stabbed in the face with that dagger Lynx threw at Kid during the manor escape.
And that is Guile, ladies and gentlemen.
Guile's Techs