Part 22: Episode XXII: Black Sea Strolls
Episode XXII: Black Sea Strolls
BlackSea is our winner, by a small margin! (We will be going to PlainMagma eventually, worry not. BlackSea will just be the level that we cover the most thoroughly as random Magic Key worlds go.)
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MAGIC KEYS TALK
Honestly, pasting the list here would take up pretty much the entire update here so it will be easier to just link to this nice Magic Key FAQ with the lists written out there for the Adjectives and nouns you can see in the magic keys.
All right, the monsters that you find in the Random Worlds are determined by the name of the world in two ways. First is the adjective at the start of the key's name. The later on the list the name is, the rarer the monsters you'll find in the world you go to AND the tougher the Monsters will be to beat. So if you get something starting with Ylw, you probably won't find monsters more powerful than what you'd find in the Oasis. Last would have awesome monsters, though.
The second part of the name determines what sort of monsters you'll find, family-wise. So if you get YlwView, you'll get a lot of weak Zombies and Birds, while MistyLog yields fairly rare Plants and Birds.
BlackSea contains somewhat rare Slimes and Waters while PlainMagma would have given us pretty bland Slimes and Materials. (Why I said I was disappointed at these keys is because both of them contain slimes, which is pretty shit in my opinion.)
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Anyway, let's get to the Black Sea!
This sea is blue! Enix lied to us! Ah well, there's a town there so let's see what's up.
You'll notice that the map is blanked out. Unlike the plot specific Magic Keys, we don't get the map automatically. We have to explore these places in order to get the map full.
This is actually really nice. The other magic key worlds often have their own distinct looks compared with other places, as opposed to just using recycled bits from every other level. It was a nice touch by Enix.
I actually laughed out loud at this one.
Most towns you find in the random key worlds contain an Inn, a Priest and a shop or merchant of some sort.
Random Dude: In any world that you visit using an appraised magic key, you'll come across bosses of certain areas. Until those bosses are defeated, no monster will join your party.
The NPCs in the randomly generated towns in other worlds all have pretty much random text assigned to them, but you'll find a guy who says this is almost every level. He informs us of the main gimmick of these worlds, the boss monsters.
As you can see, pretty nice looking Slimes and
Ignoring the fact that Vekie somehow managed to die there, you can see that the monsters will not join you even if they want to because the Boss monsters are still ruling over them. Just a fun little way the game uses to keep you from running into a world, catching all the monsters and leaving before you have to do anything.
This guy is the used car salesman of Dragon Warrior Monsters' magic key worlds. You can run into a lot of random NPC's in the magic key worlds, most of whom want to battle you. This guy just wants to sell you shit. I figured why not and bought his worlddew.
And he's gone in a flash. Nice.
Hello, what's this? The boss monsters of the Islands in the Magic Key Worlds are always in Castles.
...Apparently all the monsters on this island are being bossed around by a ...Pearlgel. All righty then.
I wanna be the
More often than not, the boss monsters have friends in tow. In this case, two Slabbits and a Pearlgel. When I said that the monsters in tougher named worlds were harder to beat, I meant it. Even with Scorching and Blizzard being cast three times per turn my monsters still took a beating and took several rounds to take this guy out. The fact that we got over 3000 exp from it is even more impressive. BlackSea will probably be a good spot to go level up our baby monsters in the future.
Usually it just says "Island" there but in the case of BlackSea there aren't seperate reigons like other Key worlds will have. In those cases you have to destroy the boss of each Island before the world is open and you can catch the monsters everywhere.
More exploration lead to this, another Castle. Sometimes the Castles contain the boss monsters, but occasionally you'll just find a random castle with the particular world's human King.
King of BlackSea: ...with him, just like you. Those monsters looked fearsome!
Unfortunately, the conversation doesn't get any better.
These guys are awesome. Random wandering priests will either heal your injuries or ask you to battle and THEN heal your injuries if you beat them.
As you can see, this island is pretty small compared to most of the regular Key Worlds. In fact, most of that grey is there just to fill the map, going up a square from the starting location just takes us to the bottom of the world again, that's how small it is. All that remains to explore is water and...
A cave. Every random Key world has caves or Towers to explore for treasure along with the boss monsters and towns.
I like the look of this cave, like a sandy dark cave made of greyish rocks like limestone, perfect for the world that they put it in. It's these little touches that make me like the Key worlds so much.
The caves/towers often have several floors, which contain a good number of chests if you're lucky. This Chest just contained a WorldLeaf, but you find much better stuff than that more often than not.
Here we go.
Aww yeah. This is always the best reward for finishing a Magic Key world, more Magic Keys. You also get a lot of very good accesories through these worlds.
ExitBells are a neccessity here. Make sure you have all the items from the place before you zap out.
These masters and Red Dudes appear to battle you. Usually they have monsters that are the same difficulty as the ones you'll see in th-
WHAT THE FUCK
Lucky for me, they really weren't as good as they looked. Beating these Masters usually results in getting a Warpwing from them.That's pretty much all for the Magic Key world of BlackSea! I'll keep you all updated on the other keys and what is contained within in future updates, probably a couple of them at a time.
Now how about getting a
ANGLERON
Type: Water
Learns: Bolt Surround SleepAir
Ron is truly the name of a frightening monster. There's not very many new Water types in this world that we haven't seen before but they're pretty cool ones.
SCALLOPA
Type: Water
Learns: Upper MagicWall Radiant
Clam is pretty cool as well.
OCTOREACH
Type: Water
Learns: OddDance PaniDance Geyser
Yay Tntcl!
TROPICGEL
Type: Slime
Learns: MPass SleepAir LushLicks
This guy is pretty much perfect for this world, looks like a little Cocnt. TropicGel is probably my favorite Slime, but a close second is...
TREESLIME
Type: Slime
Learns: Sap Paralyze SleepAir
Tree is what I always used to name my Treeslimes back in DWMI, so I'll go with the classics here.
SLABBIT
Type: Slime
Learns: SideStep LegSweep Whistle
It took me WAY too long when I was a kid to figure out that Slabbit was Slime+Rabbit. I'm talking years here.
We'll call it Slabt... and then quickly release it for our next monster.
BABBLE
Type: Slime
Learns: Surround PoisonHit EerieLite
It's pretty sad that we're getting almost every Slime type in this place. Babs is probably just going to be released eventually with all the others because of that.
All right, that was fun. Next time, we'll get some breeding done, finally learn what TinyMedals are for along with doing all the little odds and ends that we can in GreatLog before heading to the Sky World. Perhaps we'll check out PlainMagma as well!