Part 27: Cecil Suffers a Crushing Blow
Chapter 27 - Cecil Suffers a Crushing Blow
If it makes you feel any better, I'm pretty sure this is the last dungeon where "Into the Darkness" is played.
Welcome to the Sealed Cave, our next plot destination. Our mission is to
This dungeon, like the Sylph Dungeon, is incredibly annoying. Fortunately, there's no damage floors here, so you don't have to cast Float to get around.
You'll navigate around using ropes, which is a minor yet neat detail. Hey, it lets you automatically move a few spaces without encounters.
This is the main reason most people hate this dungeon. Essentially every door in this dungeon is a Trap Door.
A TrapDoor spends its turn searching a random character, then casting Disrupt, which instantly kills that character.
The good thing about Disrupt is that it's Reflectable, and since the Trap Door literally tells you which character it will kill, you can cast Wall on that character and have the spell bounce off and instantly kill the Trap Door instead.
The problem is that the ATB is a fucking piece of shit and I never get a chance to even tell Rosa to cast Wall before the Trap Door gets its attack off, so I end up having to revive and cast Cure 3 on the affected character during/after every battle. Fun.
Of course, my characters are capable enough to take the door down before it can cause any more trouble, so in the end it's only a minor nuisance. And it does give decent EXP, so there's that.
After you defeat the door, you can enter as normal. At least you don't have to fight a door again if you want to re-enter a room.
There's also regular encounters, including my favorite enemies the fucking Were Bats. HugeNagas are great at dying easily.
There's two Long swords here, though Edge only needs one. You may want to keep the FullMoon for flying monsters and the Mute Dagger for enemy mages, but otherwise a Ninja/Long combo will take Edge a long way.
Edge manages to stay competitive with Cecil in damage, eventually overtaking him by the end of the dungeon. Kain's still outpacing them both, but that's because he's constantly Berserk. I don't know what the hell Screamers are or do other than die easily.
Sometimes, if you don't kill a Trap Door quickly enough, it'll summon a Mantcore. I don't know if these are the much-loathed Chimera Brains from The After Years, but I doubt it because I utterly destroy them before they can get off a single blaze. If they were really Chimera Brains, I'd be cursing their presence right now.
In a callback to FF2, there's some empty rooms scattered in this dungeon purely to spite you.
Rosa picks up Cure4, which is a bit overkill right now but is still much-appreciated. Edge also learns Image, which is the same as Blink except it only targets Edge. Most importantly, Rydia learns Ice 3, her first L3 spell, which means she's got her first powerful Black Mage spell.
One of these rooms has the Light sword, which is a holy-elemental weapon similar to the Legend sword Paladin Cecil started with that only Cecil can use. It pales compared to Cecil's current weaponry, and there's not really anything weak to holy right now, so it's shelved.
It's around this point where Edge just starts taking off in the damage department. Granted, he's got some nice strength-boosting gear like the Strength Ring, but he's still outdamaging Cecil and probably unberserked Kain at this point, meaning fucking Edge is my strongest character. That's kind of weird.
So yeah, one of these rooms has a whole row of doors. Some lead to treasure like the Light Sword, some are empty, one even has a save point.
This nice little helmet gives some small boosts to physical stats, which Edge happily accepts. The other chest had another Long sword.
The dungeon's pretty long. There's quite a few screens, and a couple of them are very lengthy. This dungeon's a slog to do.
Hell yes, the final Trap Door. Trust me, you'll be fighting 15-20 of these things before the dungeon's over unless you just blitz through the thing.
Finally, we gain the last crystal. Luckily, there are no disembodied hands to paralyze us in fear.
As we leave, the screen starts shaking. Of course things can't be that simple.
Let's destroy the trap, then!
Meet the boss, EvilWall. He's yet another gimmick, though this one can be quite terrifying.
Evil Wall starts far away, but slowly gets closer and closer over time. When he gets too close, he'll use a crushing attack to instantly kill characters every turn until the party is wiped out. You probably won't be able to keep pace with his crushing attacks by then, so this battle is all about dealing large amounts of damage as quickly as possible.
He likes to inflict gradual petrification sometimes, though I wouldn't focus on healing unless it gets bad, or Rosa has nothing else to do.
I manage to take out the wall before you get to notice it's a disembodied wall, unattached to anything in particular. It's just a random wall strolling around the dungeon, I guess.
Well, we just beat up a wall, so I feel accomplished.
Unfortunately, you can't cast Exit to leave, which means you have to backtrack through the long, annoying dungeon.
Ugh.
Ah, the entrance. Now let's get out of here and relax before Golbez steals the crystal from us.
Video: Kain Falls Back to Old Habits
Or he can just steal it from us here. You know, whatever.
Golbez!
Kain!
Get a hold of yourself!
I'm...all right. I am no longer under his control!
Welp, Kain has betrayed us again. This is why people always joke about Kain constantly betraying everybody.
You wretch! Kain! What are you doing!?
I've been waiting for this moment! Now the Tower of Bab-il can be reactivated! The way to the moon will open! Come Kain! Come on, Kain! Wake up!
Wait!
Kain... Oh my...!We didn't even get out of the damn cave before losing the last crystal. Plus Kain has quit due to a better job offer. So we trekked through this long, annoying dungeon and murdered a bunch of innocent doors for nothing. Bleh.
Next time, we'll tell Giott we failed for yet a third time. He won't really give a shit, though, because he's totally chill like that.