Part 26

Update 5

Tonight's update has been sponsored by: Jack Daniels. Hold on, because there's a good bit of



While getting ready to fight Apollo, I noticed this guy hanging about. After you reach the final dungeon these guys show up in all the item shops to sell you Doors, Tents, and other end game items. They really tried to put in as many failsafes as they could to keep you from getting stuck.



Anyway, on to the main event. As you can see, I spent some time working up to it.




I kind of wanted to get Rune's mana up higher, but it should be more than sufficient at this point. 96 strength gives Wren some brutal group attacks with XCalibr, and Demi is still an assassin bot. Alys is going to be an absolute monster with that Flare book.



As you can see, Rune and Alys together do about 2,000 damage together. I'm afraid I was wrong about something earlier, by the way...damage you do to Apollo in this form does carry over to his second form, and it's even possible to defeat him before he transforms. However, that would require more damage than even this group can manage.



One thing that gets forgotten by this point is that you can give NPCs items if they have an open slot. Flare is certainly more damage than he's been able to put out with his other weapons.



And our robots wrap it up with XCaliblast and a Laser. The nice thing about XCalibr is that it consistently gets around shields. The battle goes on pretty much like this, with our group doing about 3400-3500 damage per round.



One interesting thing about Apollo is that in the round when he transforms, he becomes vulnerable to melee attacks even before he transforms. It's a result of something weird in the combat system; when you use a shield, its effects work the entire turn, even if you go last.



I hope he treasures that one hit.



I've got to say I'm a bit disappointed in the damage final strikes of Karate did to Apollo. I'd probably have been better off just sticking with Flare.



I'm rather disappointed with Dad for missing his chance here.



It's a relief to actually get to use Demi's best attack.



The next round, Alys finishes the job. If you can kill him quickly enough, there's no explosion.



Dad still falls down and needs to be healed by Isis despite having been untouched throughout the fight. Maybe he had a heart attack from sheer shock? Or a lifetime of climbing out of windows caught up with him?



Speaking of whom, let's scoop her up and go down the stairs. I'm curious as to how we'll do against the enemies that we had to Hyper before.



I noticed right before going down that this is another case where the game rearranges the party to make sure the appropriate character is up front. I leave them like this, since it works well enough.




It doesn't work out well for the Tian Lung, that's for sure.



One of them does get a decent attack in, but it's not enough.



I was impressed with the image of 4 eight legged horses running in a herd.




The Fenrir don't even get that much.

I think I succeeded at my goal with this team.



On the bottom floor you can run into this little guy, the toughest regular enemy in the game, the Haniwa.

In historical terms, Haniwa refers to a particular type of terracotta funerary statue that originated in Japan during the 3rd century. They were intended to guard the deceased in the afterlife. In popular culture today they're usually treated as a ghostlike, malevolent spirit, and that certainly describes this little guy.



They've got resistance to weapons and most elements, but the same strategies that got around Apollo will also get around them.



Their favorite attack is Bash, which can do about 200 damage to a character but is easily dodged by this party. They can also use Quake, but that's preventable with Isis's Aegis, or through the use of Dragon Armor and Parasuits. A big worry is the fact that they also have Flare, and can easily do 800 damage to all of your characters with it... and that's not the worst.



The real worry is the Seven Sword, which as you see can easily one-shot one of our characters.



If you want to wait a bit in the fight, the Samurai shield is probably the best option you have for preventing this attack, which could be important.



After about 4 rounds of our attacks he falls. One of the evil things about this enemy is that he has the recovery ability and thus gets about 1,000 HP back each turn.



The big deal, naturally is that you can get the Seven Sword from him. This is, however, a bit difficult. If you want to, you can run around the floor looking for Haniwa encounters and hoping that sooner or later one of them will drop it, but if you're playing on an Emulator there are options.

It all comes down to using the RNG to your advantage. The number that's used to decide whether you'll get an item in a battle is rolled at the beginning of each round, so through trial, error, and use of save states you can manipulate this. Simply save at each round, kill him as quickly and possible, and if he doesn't drop the sword simply reload, turtle up that round, and then try again the next round. Eventually you'll get it.

Now...what to do with it? At this point the only enemy we can use it on is the final boss.



One popular myth is busted here, as this pretty much proves that you can destroy multiple cannons in a single round. Most parties just don't have the capability to do so.



Wait...what just happened here? The thing about the Seven Sword is that it requires both Strength and Agility to use properly. The number of hits is determined by your agility versus the enemy's, while damage rises exponentially with more strength. Now... who do we have with good stats for that?



With Wren wielding it using his 97 strength, the Seven Sword makes him out-damage Demi as far as single target use is concerned. The Seven Sword only has seven uses, so he can use it just three times, but that's more than 10,000 damage.



Shortly afterward, a Flare spell finishes Arsenal off. His pathetic Smashers missed us every time.



Indeed we did.


[img]

The final stats of our party, after I spent a while looking for Haniwa down on the bottom floor.

And with that...



Or...not. Bonus update planned for tomorrow with the Dragon Glitch.