Part 67: fuck this place i hate this place

Iʻm on Maui, might migrate to Oahu one of these days. I could suggest some local places to visit, but they might be an acquired taste, haha.






"By the way, Kilika is out running an errand for me in return for your safety.
But I hate keeping promises...
So, I thought I would give you a special death to remember me by.
My palace is home to a magnificent hourglass.
As its sands fall, the floors of your rooms slowly open.
Your lives will be spared if the hourglass is reset. If Kilika comes back in time, that is."








Frog Cid is the best Cid. Bunansa is just an annoying nutter.

See, to me, nutso characters arenʻt actually good. Kefka? Yeah him too, the pixelated pantomime medium just also happens to make him unobtrusive. Itʻs just a bad excuse in lieu of making a good character. That isnʻt to say that clear-headed characters with motives that make them do crazy things are bad (see: Emperor Barbarosa or Luc), just crazy-crazies are really, really shitty.




"Turning off that trap again? I still donʻt understand how you do it."
"You basically have to turn them all on. Youʻre just thinking too hard."


And yes, you do control Cid here. This is the second-most awesome part in the entire game, but it is also unfortunately followed by the most terrible part in the entire game.




So the idea here is basically to follow the instructions. If youʻre really patient, you can get through this pretty quickly.


Unfortunately, that six-minute timer makes you feel rather frantic, and you donʻt even get a save point between Ark and here. Not really sure what happens if you let the timer run down, but knowing Squaresoft at the time, it probably wasnʻt a dick move and they possibly did something silly like making Cid instantly grow a pair in and just run the fuck over there if you have like thirty seconds left.


If the Hedgehog Pie turns around and catches you while youʻre pressing circle, youʻll run back to the entrance and have to start again.


"One more try!"




So yeah to get the key to the hourglass. I never remember that thereʻs a key. Iʻm pretty sure everyone only ever remembers this as the "sneak past the Hedgehog Pie" part without actually paying any heed to the "get the Hourglass Key" part.


"These are huge scales <ribbit>. I could probably put 3 weights on a dish."




There are four weights as well, and the idea is to just put the heaviest combination on the scales. If youʻre down to under a minute at this point, youʻre probably in no position to be thinking critically about such a simple puzzle, though.








If Cid actually joined your party, this would totally be his battle victory pose. And he would never not be in my active team even if he was as gimmicky as Jogurt.


Yay!


"And it wasnʻt easy, mind you... But weʻve no time to celebrate <ribbit>!
I heard from the two black mages <ribbit> that thereʻs some kind of trap up ahead.
They said that you basically just have to turn them all on, whatever that means <ribbit>. Letʻs hurry!"




I donʻt know, that Moogle ate the Hedgehog Pie or someshit.


this game is rated
M
for reference to alcohol


noooooo




So the puzzles here arenʻt necessarily obtuse, just kind of frustrating. They also donʻt stay very fresh in the memory.




A lot of these are just to get you free items and to make the boss of the area easier, but the most ass-backwards puzzles are required to progress.


The encounter rate is actually not that high, but when you consider all the running back and forth youʻre going to be doing, it starts to get pretty tedious.


It doesnʻt help that, I guess maybe because the actual source material is purposefully kind of esoteric-sounding, everything just comes across as poorly translated.




OH WELL HE WASNʻT USING IT MUCH ANYWAY






Great damage when it hits which, unfortunately, isnʻt very often unless you grind stats with casting Meteor in mind.


oooooOOOOoOooooOOOooOooooooooOOOOOoo if creepypasta scares you, you must be shitting your pants over this screenshot right here

You can tell the difference between an amateur and a pro because the pro knows when to stop, but the amateur will keep on going like in that Shel Silverstein poem about the banana.


This is another pretty confusing room that you need to go through in order to actually progress in this dungeon. It involves trial-and-error lighting and un-lighting these torches.


The prize isnʻt even worth it













no because i donʻt want a free item and i want to fight a hard fucking boss


oh oops i guess i took it by accident gee iʻm such a klutz


Makakaoʻs magic library is pretty much rounded out by now. I think heʻs only missing one spell, which we canʻt actually get until the end of the final dungeon.




I suppose the stuff in this room isnʻt too bad, but only because itʻs stuff we havenʻt actually been able to obtain to this point.


CAN YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT THIS ONE MEANS?




To get this path to open, you need to light the candles in such a way that the demon shape is chasing the angel shape. Itʻs not hard to figure out, but itʻs very easy to forget what youʻre doing between random encounters.

For all the shit I gave Star Ocean 2, thereʻs ONE good thing about it: in the one single puzzle area in the entire game, it was hard-coded to have no encounters at all. This should be done for all puzzle zones in RPGs.


"Initializing automatic countermeasures. Transferring from observation to attack mode."






I wish I could say this bossʻs name was something really retarded like OBERISK, but alas.




So all those bloodstones weʻd collected makes this boss unable to give itself enhancements, or to disable your party. Basically itʻs all the core stats like attack and defense and evasion.




Not bad, considering I havenʻt been outright trying to level it up, but since the formula is Lv*#ofFrogs, this is actually pretty dismal seeing as how Iz is in the high 70s.