Part 31: Xillia

28. Xillia



The run up to the penultimate trial is kind enough to give us a special, small area to begin with.



This is the only thing here. I'm hesitant to call it an upgrade, per se, because it's a piece of armour that boosts magic defense. It has less physical defense than Minerva's Plate though and it does its one big thing (magic defense) worse than the Adamant Armour.

On the flip side, it grants +15 evasion, +10 magic evasion and +10 Intelligence. It's also exclusively usable by Rydia, and is probably the armour of choice for min-maxing sperglords. So, let's use it for a while.



We're not gonna get out of here that easy though. No, we had the misfortune of running into 2 Chaotic Knights. These guys are pretty damned annoying in our circumstances. Not only do they have over 20,000 HP...



They also have some pretty nasty spells, relatively powerful physical attacks and...



Can just cast Death if they feel you've been hanging around too long. Too long being 3 turns.



The benefit to this, though, is that if you do kill 'em you get some damn nice EXP out of it.

And there's easy ways to do it, naturally. Petrification being one of the more obvious ones.



Our next floor is the second possible village area, and is the one I prefer. We can't use any of the armour here but there is a special weapon we can buy.



The Assassin Dagger doesn't have the +15 Intelligence of our Stardust Rod, but we don't really need it to either. We're not even interested in the insta-death chance, because that doesn't work anyway.



No, what we want this for isn't immediately obvious. It more than doubles our physical damage output (can frequently smack stuff for 3k+ from the back row!) for starters, but it has a much better benefit:

+15 Agility.



And while we're in the area, let's pick up a ton of Elixirs. Y'know, just in case.



The last area we get is kind of a dumb one, though. It's a really uninteresting "puzzle" room, which isn't even really a puzzle.



You collect a nebulous item, which you then use to...



Open a door very close by. This in turn lets you collect another nebulous item to open another door, to collect another item to open another door...



The most exciting thing about this room is that it has a Stratoavis in it.

This is only exciting because I constantly misread it as "Stradivarius" somehow.



The thing's biggest move is casting Tornado, which I've never seen it connect with anyway.



At least we can grab a new Megalixir from an easily missed chest, if we really wanted to.



So let's just skip ahead to the next trial, now. Cid's is... well, it's kinda boring to be frank.



See, the entire point of it is that it's meant to be a time trial kind of exercise. You take a dude from one town to another with increasingly reduced time limits, for wacky reasons.



Except, if time runs out nothing happens at all. You can take as much time as you like, and the only difference it makes is you won't get a hammer if it runs out even once.

Other than that, everything else continues as usual. You just get different dialogue.



The entire affair is just flying around for about 4 minutes wherein nothing else happens, so let's just cut out the tedium and get to the Lunar Eidolon.

[Music: Fighting of the Spirit ~ Narikiri Dungeon 3]



Gotta admit, Lunar Ramuh has a pretty sweet entrance. Guy's not even there at first, and just shoots in.



He kinds needs something like that, because he's not very good otherwise! As you might expect, he does basically nothing but Lightning attacks.

The same 2 Lightning attacks, over and over and over again. Forever.



He doesn't have that much HP, so we can easily kill him with a mere 10 attacks if we so wanted.



Of course, he counters being hit with any regular spell with Blitz. And that's including Meteor.



I know that for sure, because this time I actually checked. His pose, of course, means his big attack is coming and...



It's just Blitz but with a different name. He will still do Blitz on regular turns too. I would imagine he can do Thundara and Thundaga too, because why wouldn't he be able to, but he never did this time. I don't even remember him doing so before either.



He doesn't even get the dignity of being killed by any of our usual methods. Ramuh, you are a joke. Go away and think about what you've done.



All in all a thoroughly simple and completely un-noteworthy trial and boss fight.



Since time ran out at least once, we didn't get a dumb hammer for Cid. If we got that, then did the trial again without time running out, we'd get Stardust for our trouble. Not worth it.

Next time: the last trial! Are you excited? I'm excited.





Optional Bosses Fought: 26
Optional Bosses Killed: 26
Success Rate: 100%