Part 18: Part Eighteen: The Tower of Owen (First Part)

Part Eighteen: The Tower of Owen (First Part)





Before I head into the dungeon, I wanted to show off the party's stats. Any green numbers you see are getting a boost from equipment. As you can see, Kuja has none of those; stat boosts for Warrior might be a little more scarce than the other classes, leaving it to stand on its own merits more. Of course, the Warrior won't be around for the entire game - we're getting close to being able to switch it out for something new, actually.


And now, on to the Tower of Owen.


Where Desch can say this. That's it, just that he's been here before. It's good that he's getting his memory back, at least.


Frogs are here. They don't have any dialogue or effect on anything, they're just set dressing. And a hint about how to move on.


Since this is a dungeon there are, of course, enemies to be found. These are Petit Mages. "Petit" means "small" and "mage" means "magic user", so why are they raccoon things? They were raccoons on the NES, too. I figure it probably has something to do with creating a cartoony aesthetic, but who really knows.


What I do know is that they can cast Silence on your party. Here, it hit Kuja. Since Kuja doesn't use magic, it'll be there for the whole dungeon. This is also why you need to grab some Echo Herbs at the Ancient Village or whatever, because if your healer can't cast, it'll throw a spanner in the works.


The Petit Mage's major threat is this, though.


As you can see. If you're at a low level or aren't keeping up on healing, second-tier spells can completely ruin your party. The solution to this is to either be mindful or incredibly lucky. Either way, it's not a long-term threat.


Especially because enemies dump quite a bit of EXP on you here. You're not stuck, either, so it wouldn't be a terrible place to grind if you wanted. As it stands, I don't go out of my way to fight and I still gained 2 or 3 levels on each kid while I was here.


One of these guys is called a Pugman. The plural would be, I suppose, Pugmen.



Thanks, Desch. You're a mensch.


Pugmen have spells. Most enemies do. Multi-target spells are usually a non-issue, but again, if you're reckless you might get caught on a couple of low HP characters. The real problem there, of course, is your limited revival options. Phoenix Downs are rare (and I've already had to use one this dungeon), and even once you do get revival magic you probably won't want to be spending the MP to cast it after every battle. Just pop a Potion or a Cure every so often and you'll survive.


This floor is pretty simple, there aren't any real dead ends or anything, it just channels you towards a central point.


It does make you fight a whole bunch of monsters, though.


Once you get to the middle part of the square, this scene starts in.

: We can't dive too deep in there...unless we were toads or something.

Do toads...dive? I know that frogs are amphibious and all, but I just don't think of them as one of the main species of places that are deep under water.


Kuja doesn't like Toads. She doesn't want to be a toad.


Gulgan Gulch, by the way, isn't as optional as it might seem, because you get the Toad spell there and you need it here.


So I try to teach it to Golbez, but his level 2 slots are filled up with spells that aren't one-time-use shit.


Same deal with Jecht.


Thankfully, it's just because I'd forgotten to take Mini out of there. Not that it would be a problem if it weren't.


Because removing a spell just puts the tome back into your inventory! What does this mean? Well, it means that there's no cost to switching one spell out for another. There's also no real point to only being able to "equip" three spells in each level at a time. I mean, I understand what they're trying to do: they're trying to say "choose your spells wisely", but there's a problem there: there are seven spells in each level, for a total of 56 spells. Of those, about 30 are what I'd call "useful" (and that's being generous to a couple of them). Since no class can handle all of them at once, you can trim it down to 27 and have all the best spells equipped, and Toad/Mini will never, ever be in there, so eventually you'll have to piss around in the menu to change something like this. It's not real gameplay.




So I teach Golbez Toad, and he casts it.


Now the kids are toads and Desch is a toad.


And we can go to the next floor.


Where the first goddamn thing I do is remove the toad status! All you need Toad for in the entire game is to get through, like, two transitions like that! It's the exact same fucking thing as the game saying "hey, you need a key to get in here, go get the key from the man" as an event flag, then making you use the key to move on, except this costs you MP!

It's horseshit, is what it is. On top of that, the game does it to you early on with the Mini thing, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a significant number of people who picked this game up, got to the Mini areas, got trashed because they were new to the game/series/genre and just went and did something else. I also wouldn't be surprised if a bunch more people got to this point and went and played Pong for 60 hours instead. The game does get better, but it's never going to get to a point where it's like Persona 3, where it's dull as shit for something like 10 hours, and then it's still pretty slow, but the ending is so solid that people say "oh, yeah, that's a good game, play it".

This place has its own music, by the way. At least this game has more than one dungeon theme.



That's not for today, though. Today, we have a dungeon to trudge through. The Tower of Owen has a mechanical look to it, which is fitting its nature as a machine.


It also has this exciting top-screen voice that has valuable things to say and makes my batch converting take that much longer.


We don't know where it's coming from yet, though. Oh well, just put it on the back burner.


There are some new enemies around here. They're the same as every other enemy in this game. Physicals that have some sort of status - poison, maybe? - and some spells.


This floor isn't very long, so let's hit the next one.





Second floor's not very long, either. It feels longer because you have to fight a bunch of random encounters, but it's tiny. And it looks pretty boring.

Welcome to the Tower of Owen, folks: it's boring.


Sephy gained a level after I fought something on the steps to the third floor.




The third floor is literally just circling around the staircase.


There's this dead end here that you might go to expecting treasure, but Jesus Christ, we're just going up the damn staircase.


Here we are, up the damn staircase!


Ooh, and a mysterious voice.


We still can't find it.


But! We can talk to Desch for something new.


Oh, top shelf. If there's something I love, it's secret passages.


Another thing I love: stupid-looking monsters with stupid names. They're called Aughisky, which I'm sure is some kind of mythical thing that's important to someone, but look at these losers.


They're pretty solid against physicals, and they can hit for a decent amount, which I guess is something to differentiate them, but they still take the same damage from staffs.


See?

So the strategy is just to have your mages pile onto these guys with staffs while physical classes clobber everything else.




There is indeed a secret passage here, we were not lied to. I would expect him to be over his surprise at that.



Haha, nope. It'll be a long time before I'm even close to powerful enough to get hit with a back attack and seriously consider sticking around long enough to duke it out with trash mobs. By the time I get there, I probably won't need the EXP.


I've got nothing for this. I can't say anything witty about Echo Herbs. This game has bad dungeons, and we're just getting started on them.


We're...about halfway through now? There are ten floors, and I think this is the fifth.



It's the same as the second floor.


Oh, I can one-hit the monsters now. At this point, random encounters had been reduced to just absently confirming the selections I'd left the cursor memory pointing at.



Treasure! Wow!



At this point, the game throws this encounter at me. At first, I think nothing of it. But as I went on, for whatever reason, be it a streak in the RNG or a conscious design choice, this was the only enemy set I saw until the end of the tower. At last, the monotony was complete.


Next time: I finish the Tower of Owen.