Part 18: It'll take a lot more than words and guns; A whole lot more than riches and muscle
~Update 9: It'll take a lot more than words and guns; A whole lot more than riches and muscle~All of the housekeeping is done, so let's close the book on Chapter 3. There were a few developments, like the Disciple-Monster thing, or Alec becoming a bro, but overall this was a relatively quiet chapter. A little shorter than usual as well.
So it's time to get marching towards actual story progress.
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Greed is our third Labyrinth, and it's... hold on a second... what?
quote:
Let me tell you about this new Labyrinth. The new Dusk Circle is relatively far from both the mainland and this island.
It's right there you dumbass! You could probably spot it on the horizon with binoculars, or a telescope! We don't know the exact size of Aterra as a planet, but under no scale would that be considered "relatively far". What, does the Savage only travel in one direction? Does it need to circumnavigate the planet in order to reach that Labyrinth?
I hate you so much Ruby...so very very much...
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Ignoring that for a second, I want to point out that I haven't completed either of the Sub-Labyrinths here, yet. Technically I did do the first one, since it's where we find Sagitta, but Wind Tunnel here is completely untouched.
If memory serves me, no new Sub-Labyrinths open up in Chapter 4, so I'm going to save Wind Tunnel for then.
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-Greed Labyrinth-
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I want you all to keep this part in mind for when Chapter 4 kicks off.
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Just before we start the operation, Chlotz has something for us, on the down low.
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Keep this part in mind for waaay later in the game.
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New objective. Mark is stupid and we need to save him and his stupid team, or at least report their deaths so AngelMarker will know what to put on their tombstones.
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First off, I should mention that Chloe is rocking her default outfit. Opinion was divided on her costume color scheme, so I'll just switch between the black and white whenever she is brought along for a dungeon (assuming I remember).
Second, there are a few quest enemies roaming around here. If you picked up the corresponding quest, that is.
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I believe this quest is in relation to killing a certain number of those Recksaless in the back there.
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More importantly, we've got new enemies. Monoceros is a lot like the bear guys we saw in the previous Labyrinths. They've got a lot of health and no magic of any kind. Monoceros have excessive defense though.
This will be a reoccurring theme in this Labyrinth, one that I am not actually prepared for. That is partially because of you guys and partially because I'm lazy.
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Here's something I forgot to point out that I said I would ages ago. Remember how I said map enemies can pull real dick moves later on?
It's a little hard to see since I had to capture it mid-motion, but look at that enemy in the upper left, just above the treasure chest. See how he's facing?
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Sometimes when you enter the room, enemies will automatically move into certain positions. In this case, this little bastard has blocked a door in the room, meaning we have to beat him to go through it.
Enemies do this with a bunch of things. Sometimes they go for doors, other times they go straight for treasure chests and will circle it if you try and move around them, and sometimes multiple enemies will move into a combination of those positions.
I've entered rooms before where enemies blocked every unopened door. It's really irritating. Jerks.
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We also get a message from Torri while we're in here. Let's have a gander.
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Someone please get that girl a responsible guardian.
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We start running into the guys from the first Sub-Labyrinth as well. The ones that acted as a boss stand-in.
They actually hit pretty hard with their elemental spells, although that might be due to a lack of MDF on our part (I know Team A(wful) is definitely lacking in MDF). They also have Stare of Death, which means you can't run from them.
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I skip most of the enemies in this place. They are still dropping pitiful EXP and I'm still killing them in one or two hits. The first few floors mostly have a lot of the Monoceros guys.
The Floor 5 portal tells us that a powerful presence is hanging out there. I guess that must be Mark and his team. Let's see what they've gotten themselves into.
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Way to be helpful, Chlotz. Glad to have you take over from Ruby. I mean, I'm not going to be putting any of that info to use, but the thought is appreciated.
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Laboratos is a new enemy that will start appearing now, although in this case he's acting as a mini-boss. He's a quick little bugger and he's got some hefty HP behind him.
That being said, he suffers from the same thing every enemy in this game suffers from, limited skill pool. He can Poison you, and he comes with two of those Magic Attack focused Fornax enemies, so if you want an honest to god strategy from me then just dump on him and deal with the Fornaxs' after.
Alternatively, since you automatically start by surrounding him, have some of your teams break off to take out the Fornaxs' while one of the teams keeps Laboratos busy. Turtle up by using Defend, and when the Fornax are dealt with then you can have everyone surround and wail on him.
Not sure what to tell you guys. The difficulty kind of picks up in this Labyrinth, but if you've done the bare minimum of exploring/grinding/Star Child raising, then your go-to strategy will almost never go beyond 'everyone gang up and hit it as hard as you can'. Plan B is always 'have the BP before a boss to MECUNITE'. It's hard to give an involved strategy when most everything dies within 5 turns.
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Case in point, let's go ahead and hit this thing with Chloe's Seventh Burst.
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Chloe has her Bits/Funnels/DRAGOONs attack the enemy while Wake rushes in and gets some blade beams in.
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This proceeds to wreck Laboratos' shit.
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With him down, it's just a matter of picking off the Fornax, who are at opposite ends of the field. Team B and Team A(wful) take out one.
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While OG Team A(wful) shows that they are still a force to be reckoned with.
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Awesome, so now Mark and his band of merry morons are wandering around active Dusk Circles taking pictures for their science fair project. I notice Ruby is sitting nice and cozy back at the lab. No problem gambling other people's lives, but fuck risking her own neck.
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Back to what we were doing. We've got another quest enemy here, Lacerta. Similar to the Laboratos we just fought, except it doesn't have the same speed or HP. Nothing to it.
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We also get upgraded versions of the weird cannon spiders from the first dungeon. They have a recovery spell and basic magic attack. Their basic attack is a spread shot that can hit two zones, to their left and front (possibly the right side as well, I didn't have a team there at the time), so be aware of that.
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On the way to Floor 8, where the boss is, we run into a special treat with this Trap Chest.
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This crazy looking guy is Regred. He has a chance to spawn from Trap Chests, you can't run from him, and he's a step above the other enemies around here. He has good ATK, DEF, and MAT. He also has some magic and decent SPD. His HP total is also way above anything else around here.
If you go all out, you might be able to take him down before he can do much. Waiting out his relatively low MP pool is not the best option, since he'll likely mix it up with physical attacks that could hit just as hard. Just go with the tried and true method, using your strongest skills to kill as fast as possible.
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Finding these guys are a stroke of luck to be honest. You get great EXP from them, which is nice if you aren't (or can't) using the DLC quests.
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Team A(wful) gets a level up as a reward, which now puts them on par with their predecessors. Current Team A(wful) have higher level caps though, so they still have room for growth.
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Fuuko sends us a message as well. As you can see, this can happen outside of battles as well. Might as well read it. We read Torri's after all. It's only fair.
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So glad to know that Fuuko is out having fun and eating good food with friends while her other friends are roaming through hell, trying to save the world.
And I'm hungry now...
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Wake is slowly amassing his own group of fangirls. It's about time.
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I imagine Fuuko saying that last part while her mouth is full of delicious food. "I sho worred abou you. I 'ith I was 'ere."
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Anyway, moving on. We get a palette swapped Monoceros that looks like a real mean dude. DEF is still crazy high, HP is higher, exact same strategy, and exact same problem I noticed at the start of the dungeon.
I run into a second Regred after this battle. Either they aren't as rare as I thought, or I just got real lucky.
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Finally, at Floor 9, we get to the boss. These dungeons are getting longer and longer. Up to now you probably wouldn't have any trouble going straight through a dungeon in one run. From this point on though, you're probably going to start getting bored and stopping halfway through, then finishing the dungeon some other time. Running a 10+ Floor dungeon in a single go is pretty dull. I should remind you, the last dungeon in this game has around 25 Floors. Ugh.
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Some users in the thread have already figured out the entire boss line up, so Mammon here isn't a surprise. The Labyrinths being named after the Seven Deadly Sins is probably obvious to everyone reading this. However, possibly lesser known among readers, Mammon is the 'Prince' of Greed as classified by Bishop Peter Binsfeld in the 16th century. He tried to classify demons using the Seven Deadly Sins and basing it off of an even older classification called The Lanterne of Light.
Ah, Fanfiction. Timeless.
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And now we get to my major problem for this fight/dungeon. Mammon's DEF is nuts, and his HP is equally tough. He's a brick wall. Magic seems to be the way to go with him.
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Unfortunately, none of my current teams possess anything in the way of offensive Magic. I have somehow ended up with 3 Physical oriented teams.
Part of this is that I have no control over what classes you guys put in to Team A(wful).
Team's B and C are entirely my fault though. I chose to run the Team C experiment knowing that they don't have attack magic, then I sleep-walked through Team B's creation and didn't put any thought into their abilities.
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None of that will matter. Original Team A(wful), despite being created back in Chapter 1 and having been level capped since Chapter 2, are still hitting for +2000 damage with attack skills. Current Team A(wful) are not exactly slouches in that respect either.
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For his part, Mammon can hit for about 800 damage using physical attacks and Magic attacks. Both of these can get a little more dicey if the team he hits has crappy MDF or DEF. Team B has the highest MDF for example, and they still took this fire element attack for close to 900. That would have fucking hurt Team's A and C.
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You may actually have to use healing stuff in battle, is what I'm trying to say. First time for everything.
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Also, I have no idea what Chlotz is smoking. Possibly the same thing that Ruby and Mark are, I guess.
Despite Chlotz' line about this guy not letting us Chain him, he is completely open to being chained.
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Hell, I even score my highest Chain count so far on this guy. Enemies like Mammon, with lots of health or high defenses, are the only ones you even have much of a shot at chaining. Most regular enemies will die just in the process of setting up the chain.
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Regardless, here is what Mammon rewards us with. Honestly, the Speed Fruit is the most valuable reward on that screen right now. That's a permanent +10 Speed for Wake. Good stuff.
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And that's all she wrote for Greed. Overall, the difficulty did spike a little bit and that boss does pose a decent threat. Although you have to keep in mind that I went up against him in the entirely incorrect way. If you're playing through on your own, then you might want to make sure you have some kind of Magic Offense.
-Laboratory-
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Seriously, what the hell was the second half of that conversation? We already discussed these possibilities back in Update 4. Ruby was present for it. We were told that the Circle Seeds are gathering Dusk from the surrounding area, the worse the Circle the longer it will take to activate, and Fuuko questioned what would happen if all the Seeds activated at once.
None of what Ruby just said should come as much of a shock. Hell, Wake should know better than anyone that monsters are getting stronger with each new Circle, he's fighting the damn things!
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The end of the chapter introduces a mechanic that will be available later, but it also ends a little abruptly. Chapter 3 itself kind of feels like a filler chapter if I'm being honest.
So, since I still have quite a bit of room left in this update, we're going to get caught up on some sub-events that have been skipped over. We start with Luce. It only feels fair that we check in on the poor girl after that monster Disciple event. See if she's feeling better now that she's had some time to process.
-Hallway-
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Luce seems to be coping okay. Between Chlotz and Wake, I'm sure she'll be just fine. Emotional support doesn't seem to be Alec's 'thing', but maybe he's also helping her, in his own way.
Next up is Mark. We need to dig a little more on this whole Dusk Crystal thing, considering Ruby and Mark keep messing around with them and that seems like a poor idea at best.
-Laboratory-
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Kinda seems like there would still be government oversight of that though. I don't think they'd allow unfettered access to Dusk Circles and for a corporation to just extract whatever banned materials they wanted.
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Finally, as much as I might not want to, we have to check in with Ruby. This event will be mildly important to me when I do Ruby's character analysis, since it gives us some history on her.
-Laboratory-
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Ruby Coiler, ladies and gentleman. If a guy isn't drooling over her, then he must be gay. Or Wake. Those are the only two possible explanations.
Anyway, we now move on to something... different. Okay, maybe not that different. There's a tiny bit of a common thread I suppose.
-Laboratory-
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I have no idea what Ruby is referring to. I don't remember there being any mention of special ceremonial Classmating clothes or uniform or dress. None of the characters ever wear something different for Classmating, it's always their uniforms.
Maybe Ruby was just hoping that the guys would be confused and just walk out in the boxers or something.
-Ritual Hall-
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As you can probably tell by the fact that this gets a cutscene, Classmanting will indeed be a gameplay mechanic.
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There's even some floating neon character model things, but the guys don't get any suggestive posing or even a full body shot, just the hands.
I don't mind fan-service, to a certain extent anyway (certainly not Senran Kagura levels). I want equal opportunity, though. Shame on you Conception II. Shame on you for not having the balls to give the dudes the same weird cringey treatment.
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Oh, right, Classmanting itself. Classmanting is something we will eventually be able to do, but not quite yet. It's still a ways off, but to quickly summarize:
Classmanting is a Network Feature that lets your MC Classmate with other players MC's. Star Children made this way have better stats, but lower Level Caps. So they'll be stronger right away, but their usefulness will eventually drop off because they'll hit a level cap earlier.
I think I'm remembering that correctly. We'll get a tutorial card when it comes time to open the feature. If we open it, anyway. I have no idea if I will be able to show it off, to be honest. The Steam version of this game may have disabled this feature due to it involving online functionality.
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So that was something. As I pointed out, it's going to take some more experimenting before this bears fruit (assuming you are playing the handheld version anyway). We'll stick a pin in this for now.
-Heroes' Grave-
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And that brings an end to Chapter 3. How heartwarming, and also kinda weird. Mostly heartwarming though.
Next time, we get started on Chapter 4 and finally get to say hello to the final party member. Our team will be complete, story stuff happens, new Fort City features become available, it's going to be a fun time all around.
At least until I force you guys to vote on the heroines again. Then it's going to be fun times for some people and sad times for others.