Part 38: Statues are Dicks: Part 2
Statues are Dicks: Part 2

I'm about to show you why taking on these FOEs right away is a bad idea, even if you do have a Dark Hunter on the team. If you have an Alchemist with a specific skillset though, go right ahead.






Trigourds are very tanky and resist nearly everything.



They can also curse your entire party, which makes it so that a party member takes half of the damage they deal in an attack. This is more deadly to party members than enemies, since Etrian Odyssey follows the JRPG rules of party members dealing more damage than what enemies can do to them.




Trigourd
Type: Invisible
Behavior: Patrol
Aggressive: No
HP: 780
AT: 27
DF: 27
Skills: Pain, Whisper
Weakness: N/A
Resistance: Physical (0%), Fire (0%)
This game was their debut, and they've appeared in every game since. Aside from Untold, which was a remake of EO1. They are the first of the gourd-type FOEs you'll encounter in the game. They lost their FOE status in 3 for being a deadly postgame random encounter, but regained it in 4 as a deadly postgame FOE. They resist everything aside from Ice and Volt, so if you don't have the right elementals or non elementals you'll have a tough time whittling them down. They take 0% damage from what they resist, so all using those attacks will do is deal single digit damage. They can curse your entire party with Whisper, and have a very strong AOE fire attack with Pain. They're a very painful reminder that Climax can't help you if you can't get them into killing range. However, they do have a weakness. An Alchemist with their Force Skill ready to go, or has a level 5 Megido can nuke them in one shot. Aside from that, there's not much you can do to these things until your party gets stronger. Unlike the later games which paired it with the rest of its family, the Trigourd is alone here. The rest of the gourd FOEs only appear in every other stratum. And yes, they are also invisible.




Hidden treasures tend to be a lot more useful than ones out in the open.

Past the door are two Trigourds.

The one on the top goes clockwise, and the one on the bottom goes counterclockwise. Don't get yourself trapped. One thing you have to be careful about invisible FOEs is getting into a random battle around them. You can't see them on the map, so you can't keep track of how much longer you have until they join in on the fight. So try to finish up fights quickly, or better yet, don't get into random battles in the area at all.

The deliberate way that they've been placed makes you suspect that a human did this. As you mull over the path of berries, one tactic occurs to you... You can always follow the trail if you want to learn why they may have been placed here.

Thinking it may be a sign of some sort, your curiosity leads you to follow them. The trail ends at the wall. You walk towards it to investigate it more closely...


Suddenly, Fedot screams out! You spin to see what happened.




Two saplings hidden in the grass spring up to catch Fedot's leg, locking it in place. The row of berries was a trap all along to catch wild game! It was most likely set by other explorers, and now it has snared one of their colleagues. You carefully break the trap, setting poor Fedot free. But the saplings sprung up with such force, Fedot's foot was injured in the process.







After another battle, both Aegis and Ling get a level up.

I level up Provoke up on Aegis just so he can get the Mystues to stop attacking the back row.

As for Ling, I'm just making him as tanky as possible.






A minor upgrade in defense for Aegis.














When Loyalty does kick in on the times you want it to, it's a pretty good passive. It's just that leveling it up too much will make it kick in when you don't want it to all the time. Even though it may seem like a good idea to take Back Guard on a Protector, this is only one of the few times it would come in handy. Compared to Front Guard which is relevant more often. Just bear through it and use Nectars if you have to.

Maverick leveled up here, and Fedot's getting close to a level up.

Maverick masters Patrol. Now our party's feet are completely safe from damage tiles.





Incidentally, Ling's Force has been building up fast because of all the hits it kept tanking with Loyalty.



Devour's also handy for keeping a Beast alive. Decent physical damage and the heal rate isn't bad.
















Got the Holed Rock off it. Something to take into account is that the Gunner's elemental shots are purely elemental attacks. They don't have the Stab attribute, so they don't work if you're trying to get conditional drops that way, or are trying to damage an enemy that resists elemental attacks but not physical attacks.

Got Fedot to level up.


Fedot has now mastered how to use Guns. Which unlocked 2-hit, a passive that gives his normal attacks a low chance to hit twice. But more importantly, it unlocked this move.

Ricochet is a Gunner's best damage skill, and one that doesn't put them in any danger, like the Risk shots. It's like the EO1 Survivalist's Multishot, but better. At max level anyway. It's also pretty expensive, but worth it.





We're not gonna be able to open this one up for a long time.








Ling's Force Skill works exactly the same way as the Medic's Force Skill. Salivall revives all dead party members and heals them to full health, as well as getting rid of status effects. Can be pretty handy and it charges up really fast thanks to Loyalty.



Is it another explorer's? It looks like a hemp sack and doesn't appear to be empty. You can try climbing a nearby tree to reach it or give up and leave it be.



Maverick finds a strong branch and uses it to shimmy up the tree. The sack is farther from the tree than it looks. Maverick nearly slips trying to reach it. No one in your party had any way of knowing, but this is no normal tree...


Still, at least you caught the sack that Maverick dropped, so its contents are yours to keep.




The Red Pine is a rare item from a Chop point, so I'd say losing 50 HP to get one is a good trade. That said, they don't unlock any pieces of equipment, and you only need one for a quest. So you might want to keep this instead of selling it.

Now we have a shortcut to the 7th floor. The stairs are nearby.

The stairs are over here, but there's still more to explore.

You can't see it right now, but there's another Trigourd in this area.















Unfortunately, enemies can target anyone who just got revived, so be careful about that. Also dead characters do not get exp after battle.

And here's me being an idiot and sidestepping where I shouldn't.


Fortunately it likes to curse your party most of the time instead of using Pain and killing your party.




Just don't walk clockwise and you'll be fine.












Something you can do to deal with the Mystues, is switch your front row and back row with the Switch command so the Mystues target them instead of your original back row, but that leaves the problem of your front line being in the back, and your squishy back line in the front. Who are guaranteed to die if a Mystue or some other enemy decides to target them.

The other Take point of the floor.

The Fire Wall is an accessory that reduces fire damage slightly. We won't need that just yet.



If you're wondering why I didn't heal up, I ran out of Medica IIs and Maverick's out of TP. I'm out of Nectars as well.






Our back row is probably gonna rack up the highest body count for the next few floors and it's because of those things.

There's still more to explore on the floor, but that's for much later.










Going to the Duke's Palace when we've reached the 7th floor advances the plot, so let's do that.

















We won't actually see it until we actually get to the 8th floor. Anyways, this is pretty much a reprise of the Wyvern mission in the first game. You had to sneak into a Wyvern's nest on the 8th floor, and steal its egg. This is pretty much the same thing, only difference is we have a map this time. The first game didn't have that courtesy and it made running around the Wyvern's nest, or trying to get into it dangerous. More on that later. As much as I like this game (Even if some of my comments implied otherwise), I hear some people say that this is just an expansion pack sequel to the first game. And with moments like these, it's hard to disagree. Some of the plot points from the first game got reused in this game, just remixed a bit. The later Etrian Odyssey games were much better about differentiating themselves. Anyways, let's talk to Dubois.



















Some new quests opened up. This one needs a Medic, but a level 20 Medic will give the maximum reward, so I put off that one for now.




Atlus, if you're gonna tell the player that the reward is bad (It is), then you should make the reward good, not poke fun at it. Really glad that EO3 made it so that quests gave out exp.

This quest kind of throws a lot of people off.









The Mugwort is an uncommon Take item, so we can get those right away. But the Moving Eye is a drop from an enemy we haven't seen yet. Anyways, we didn't actually get her regular dialogue, so let's do that.















Okay, so the reason this quest throws people off is how the game checks for map completion. The first game had an actual mission (not quest) that involved mapping the 11th and 12th floors. How it checked for map completion was checking to see if you stepped on a few select tiles, the corners of the floors, which was done to make sure you can't just complete it by looking up the map. And checking to see if your map was accurate enough. (12th floor also had you kill a boss but that's not related to this) The way this game checks for map completion is by checking if your map is accurate enough, and if you've stepped on most of the tiles of the floors. You can't just paint in the tiles even if you see them. No, you have to step on them. Oh, and the 7th and 8th floors are riddled with damage tiles. You know, the places people will deliberately try to avoid? Yeah, it's dumb.


