Part 17: Mysidia

15. Mysidia

The break between Acts 1 and 2 is pretty clear and telegraphed reasonably well. It's the culmination of everything we've seen and learned up to that point; the break between Acts 2 and 3 is a lot less clear. I'd say it's around here, though you could make an argument that it might be just after Rubicante though I'm not entirely sure on that one. The Demon Wall isn't as fitting or memorable in itself as the end of act boss, but...



The plot itself is most relevant in this distinction. We just lost the last crystal, and that is where the break lies. Now we're back where we started yet again and the villain's almost won.



We've had loss after loss, and can finally start to gain significant ground in fighting back. Our first course of action is meant to be going to Mysidia but we need to find a way back up to the overworld. We can't rely on Cid to explode for us again, so we seem to be at an impasse.

Tower of Babel let us come down, but there was no way up through it. Even if there was, it's become all weird and glowy since it's doing things involving the moon now.



So, Cid's going to do one last thing and attach a giant drill to the Falcon. We are going to dig our way out. Sadly, we don't get to transform into a giant robot using the power of awesome to perform it.



There's nothing else we can do down here without first returning to the overworld, so let's head on up to the top-right corner and leave. I always thought the Falcon sprite looks kinda goofy with the drill on it, but that might just be me.



We get out without any fanfare or cutscenes this time, but that's probably for the best. It'd just be a generic reminder to go to Mysidia or something anyway.

But we're not doing that. Now that we can freely go between the over and underworlds, we have one last bit of business to take care of in the Underworld.



First, we're going back to Fabul. This is the one sidequest that gives us a summon without that sidequest requiring we beat it up, or beat it up after beating up other summons.



We're just gonna go talk to Sheila to get a Frying Pan. This is the last time we're ever going to see her; we have no use for the other reward for doing this, after all.



Next, we're off all the way back through the Sylph Cave (which is hilariously easy now). This is solely to hit Yang in the face with a Frying Pan.



Since Yang's still to injured from being inside an exploding control room, and we technically have Edge, he doesn't rejoin the party even for a little while. Instead, we just get Sylph.

Sylph is really, really good and we'll be using it a lot. It only costs 25 MP to use too!



But we're not content with just the one summon, are we? No, we got one that's useful so let's go get another. One that is basically useless.



Inside Baron's right tower, we can find a staircase that leads to where we want to go. We didn't bother with it earlier, since we need to beat Cagnazzo to get down the stairs but also have beaten Leviathan to get anything from down there.



Since we've done that, we can now get our boss fight against another summon.

[Music: Fighting of the Spirit ~ Radiant Mythology 2]



Odin is... very difficult, to put it simply.



On paper, he doesn't seem menacing but if he's not dead by his 5th turn he wins. Because of his speed, this means we have to kill him in three turns maximum.



This sounds like it should be easy, since 3 Thundagas will do the trick. The problem is we only have enough time to get two of them off. Switching to Thundaras means we need 6 of them and still can only get 2 in.



Almost immediately after the second, this will always happen. Rydia on her own is not fast enough to kill Odin this way. Adding Hermes' Shoes and/or Spider's Silk does give us that third turn, but that's still only 2 attacking. There's not enough time to stack both effects, either, so that options out.

No, we can win this fight but to do it we need to take advantage of something unusual in the way Odin fights.



We'll start by hitting him with Flare. It costs more MP than Thundaga, deals less damage but in return it feels like it charges faster and doesn't do something that Lightning elemental attacks do:

It doesn't piss Odin off. If you hit him with a Lightning spell, he gets faster and hits harder.

So, this way we can get in 2 Flares before he even raises his sword. Immediately afterwards, we can charge the Thundaga and it should be enough to wipe him out.



Needless to say, it does. 2 Flares drop him below 9999 HP and I've never seen Thundaga deal anything else in this fight.

There's a way to beat Odin in a single hit, but paradoxically it's a lot more time consuming and convoluted. We'll get to that when we get to that though.



Either way, to say he's a lot of trouble to get, Odin is decidedly not worth it. He costs 45 MP, doesn't do anything against a lot of enemies but costs you that MP regardless and even when you use him against stuff that isn't immune he has a 50% chance of not working anyway. Even if his coin flip decides that he doesn't feel like it today, you still pay the MP.

Odin sucks, is the point.



There's nothing else to do other than get some useless stuff, so let's just head on over to Mysidia for the plot stuff. We get to see the prophecy from before again at least.



In order for us to go to the moon, the Mysidians all pray to make the legend a reality.



This summons a giant whale ship out of a whirlpool.

Only for this game can you say half the things that happen with a straight face. Completely devoid of context, telling someone that you summoned a whale ship with the power to transport you to the moon from a whirlpool via prayer would make you sound completely crazy.



And yet, for this it just... works. Considering what the premise was made out to be until we reached, like, maybe Zot (or Babel at the latest) this might seem a tad out of place to anyone with no idea what's going on.



A giant weird airship called the Lunar Whale that is taking us to the moon is not even slightly out of place.



[Music: Lunar Whale ~ Flight Theme #2 Magical Ship]



The moon is technically the third, and final, overworld section we get to. Functionally, I think that it's closer to one great big dungeon with three distinct segments. We're only interested in one of those three for the time being though.



On that note, before we do anything we're off to this cave here. It's one of a very small few we can access, and it's the only one that's not going to try and murder us.



Instead, it's a cave of moon-rabbits that do nothing but hum. Three of them give exposition, and exactly one is a shop.



A damned nice shop, though. It's the only place to buy some things, and even though the Elixirs are expensive we now have access to what is essentially an infinite number of them. The only hard part is being able to afford 'em.



But, seriously, we want to head to those three spire things. We can't really get much closer than this, because this is the first segment of the moon. It involves travelling through caves and across the moon's overworld itself.

[Music: Another Moon]



The Lunar Path is relatively short, but it doesn't feel like it.



It has only three chests, and they're all immediately obvious and very worth it. This one, though, is the most worth it so it also has monsters hiding within.

[Music: Battle 1 ~ Battle Theme]



The Prokaryote and Eukaryote are... bizarre. They don't do anything weird, but they're kind of weak defensively and yet have all the status resistances of a boss, no elemental weakness to exploit and hit quite hard too.



Since there's a significant number of them, and they all hit quite hard this seems like a good time to try out Sylph. Sylph is basically Drain, if Drain didn't suck and was cost-effective.

Reminder: Drain costs 18 MP to take maybe 400 HP. Sylph costs 25 MP to take upwards of 13-2200 a pop, and that's just at our current level.



Though in this instance the best way to deal with the problem is to just drop Levi.



This wipes all of 'em out at once, and gives us the Apple from the chest. One of the -ryotes is kind enough to also drop a Lunar Curtain which is nice, but basically everything in this place can drop it so we'd get one eventually.



Black Flans are the newest addition to that little family, with the unique twist of not sucking. It can hit relatively hard (upwards of 800 if we were in the front row!), and has no elemental weakness.



This is the only time we're ever going to use Odin, and it was just to see if it'd work. Amazingly, it did.



Next up is the Abyss Worm who's just a big ol' bucket of health (relatively). He has 7,000 HP and that sounds menacing until you realise he's dumb enough to bring a weakness to Fire with him.

This ends exactly as well as you'd expect.



The last two treasures on the Lunar Path are a Lunar Curtain (told you I'd definitely get one!) and a Stardust.



Appropriately, the Lunar Path is a very straight forward and linear, well, path towards our goal. It's not very difficult or complex to navigate and that's to its benefit.



The Dark Grenades are the newest Bomb and are, well, more of the same. If you didn't have the Bomb summon yet this is the best place to get it, functionally, since this formation is relatively common and both Balloons and Dark Grenades can drop it.



There's just a second, even more linear, cave to navigate before we can finish up but it puts us basically right where we wanna be.



Once there, we get to meet FuSoYa who has a weirdly written name but it's okay because he's Cecil's moonman uncle.



He also explains the plot to us. A different moonman named Zemus (conspicuously not something like ZeMusYa) is actually the real villain, and he wants a big ol' mecha to destroy the earth because that's what bad guys do.



Also, the strange revelation that Cecil's moonman dad was basially moonman Charlemagne and nothing comes of this. Oh, sure, this hints at the possibility that Golbez is Cecil's brother before that revelation but 2 children is not "many." They could do so much with this that they just don't. I'm not necessarily complaining, I just think it's weird.

Oh well, now that we know Zemus basically wants a gundam to do generic bad guy things we gotta go back to Earth.

Next time: The penultimate mandatory boss! Revenge of the Fourlen! _{also maybe a dragon god or something}









The Lunar Whale ~ Amano artwork