Part 10: Spelunking
Now that we've taken that little detour, let's actually go where we're supposed to go, shall we? Before we go to Dist Cave, item management time!!!
First elixir bought! Also two ethers and a cottage.
That out of the way, to the cave. It's directly north of the castle; can't miss it. Dist's enemies are mostly the enemies you saw around the Warship, but there's a new face.
Stalactite
Rank 4, HP 240, Attack Power 35, Attacks 2, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-30%, Magic Resistance 3-40%
Stalactite are one of the few enemies in this game weak to poison. With level 1 Aero that means nothing to me, and they're pretty uninteresting otherwise, but hey, poison weakness.
Cave time! Right from the get-go we've got three different staircase we can go down, so we're heading to the upper right first.
Seriously, someone on the dev team must have thought this was the funniest thing.
And we're done already! Well, not quite, but we do have walk back to Dist to talk to the wvyern, and come back. There's not really a point is Exiting out, so I just walk.
Oh, there is something I wanted to mention and I forgot to. We've seen Revenants before, another one of the nigh-indistinguishable undead, but they have a special property that I forgot to mention before. Now, Revenants have an attack power of 40, and Viv has a defense of 15. Even with a high roll, they should do 65 per hit, tops. What's going on? Drain touch, that's what's going on.
You see, physical attacks that drain HP work... interestingly in this game. For every hit that a draining attack lands, it does an additional 1/16 of your max HP in damage. That's added onto the base attack power. And that's max HP, not current HP. And the draining property ignores defense completely. One sixteenth of Vivian's HP is 69, so this would quite handily explain the numbers seen. With low numbers of attacks, this is hardly that big of a deal, but later on there are enemies with lots of attacks and drain touch. They make your life hell. This, this right here is why you can't just tank it in heavy armor and abuse yourself to astronomical HP.
Holy shit they really don't want me to leave do they? Once again, what was once a boss is now just a random encounter like it ain't no thing. Thankfully, we now have the curse spell, which, if it hits, makes these guys cake. Unfortunately, it's still only level two and Gigas's have 4-40% magic defense. Not quite foolproof yet. At least Viv can scratch them now.
Oh and this is what the wvyern wanted us to do. Anyway, let's get our cottage on and then back to the cave! This time, we head directly south of the entrance.
In case you were curious, this is how much damage Vivian can do when curse manages to stick. Normally she does around a hundred or so. Curse is quite nice.
Soul
Rank 4, HP 20, MP 80, Attack Power 35, Attacks/Accuracy 1-70%, Defense 25, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40%
These guys are pretty much just like their older brothers, the red soul (yes we're gonna fight red souls as a random encounter later, don't play coy.) They absorb all elements, so you have to kill them with attacks. Unlike the red soul these guys are far easier to kill. Also unlike red souls they have a half-decent amount of MP.
And that's all they do. They do nothing else, unless they're out of MP. One problem you could have is that all of them are going to cast the same spell, every turn, and if there's a lot of them in a formation they can wear you down. In this case, the only way I could lose to them is if I was not paying any attention whatsoever. I still lose more HP than I'd like, though.
Great Ogre
Rank 4, HP 300, Attack Power 40, Attacks 3, Accuracy 70%, Defense 35, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40%
These guys are, uh... the upgrade to the regular ogre, I guess. Yeah. They drop the winged sword sometimes. That's something.
This path basically just leads to a dead end treasure room. What goodies await us.
Heavy, worthless armor. Yay.
Guarded by a giant turtle army.
This isn't hard by any stretch, not anymore, but it's gonna be a long, tedious battle.
Curse alleviates that quite nicely. (In all fairness though, she can actually now do damage to this guys, although nowhere near a one-hit kill.)
The other chests have heart, elder IQ, and-
If you're crazy enough to fight the Captains in Phin early on, they can drop Flame Bows. They're really good if you can snag one that soon. Well, good for a bow, anyway.
Since this is a dead end, and I don't see the point in walking back, time to exit, cottage, and go back in. You know, I do feel it's wasteful to use so many cottages, especially when Bofsk is fairly close by. On the other hand... why should I care about being wasteful with purchasable items at this point?
On the third trip in the cave, we take the lower right stairs.
Wow this is outdated as hell. I can't imagine you'd ever have any characters still using mythril armor at this point, and even if you did, you'd probably have the helmet by now. (There's also some armor just a bit north to complete your shitty, outdated mythril set.)
Anyway, we have two stairs to choose from here. The one you see in the screenshot leads to treasure, so treasure we go for.
Oh, that little black smidgen on the bridge is a gap and you will fall if you step on it. I believe you land in the area with the Knight armor and the other shit treasure. No point in doing that now.
There's a chest with some mythril shit, and also-
Do you remember how I said Wall would be a good spell if you could ever be bother to grind it up to absurd levels? Yeah, this casts level 16 Wall. It only casts it on the user, but that's ideal for this run. The question won't be if I use this, but when.
You may be starting to wonder if I'm really going to show every single agility gain I get in this entire game. The answer is yes, yes I will.
Going back to the previous floor, we get a magic staff. It casts multi-target bolt 5. Yeaaah not that good, although magic procured from weapons doesn't break the weapon, so that's something.
Green Soul
Rank 4, HP 6, MP 60, Attack Power 25, Attacks 1, Accuracy 70%, Defense 17, Evasion 1-40%, Magic Resistance 3-40%
Also it's trapped with a monster that-
Heals you. Yeah. At least the dev's stupid sense of humor finally benefits the players. They will actually attack if they run out of MP, but they get one 25 power attack. Nooot scary.
Anyway, the exit we need is left of this chest.
This time, we're on the other side of the bridge.
On the next floor we get this... thing. It casts multi-target Aero 16, so I have no idea why the fan translator chose that name. Probably just gonna sell it.
And finally, we have the return of the beloved "guess the right door" game. I missed you.
It's this one. (Surprisingly I only made one wrong guess.)
But of course we need a boss.
Chimera
Rank 5, HP 640, MP 80, Attack Power 60, Attacks 4, Accuracy 75%, Defense 50, Evasion 1-50%, Magic Resistance 3-50%
How many of chimera spawn is a little random, between two to four I believe. Obviously, we hit the middle result.
EDIT: It's one to four.
This is all they do. Nothing too bad, but with their high attack power an unlucky roll could put me up shit creak. With their HP the battle miiight last long enough to let that happen.
Love you, curse.
Yeah, this gets won pretty easily.
And we're done!
And the wyvern is dead. I'm certain you cared greatly.
Not much to do at this point but sell off all that excess shit.
I don't know if I can stress how money has become such a non-issue. (Yeah, I buy another elixir, along with two cottages.)
Power +2, Agility +1, Vitality +6, Intelligence -1 (Damn it!), Soul +4, Magic Power +1, Unarmed +1, Cure +1, Aero +1, Curse +1, Holy +1, Barrier +1, Blind +1, HP +232, MP +43