Part 14: Requiem

Starting out in the ruins the gravy train of items has pretty much rolled to a stop. The scarf is sadly obsolete, but we can still use the light crystal.



If you think about it, this is the first time we've seen Borgin since the intro. We've been a few steps behind this guy pretty much the entire game. That said...



Chrono's question at this point is actually quite sensible.

I'm Borgin, the one who took you to the past.

You?!

I have to go and investigate Mt. Goht. Go destroy the Barrier Machine in here! I'll be back. Good luck!

Hey! Wait!

And with that he runs past us. That was certainly quick.



I think these things are coming far too late. They should have been sprinkled around as rare and useful items early in the game when it was too easy to run out of MP.



Two more dark crystals. Now that I think about it, they're kind of treated like the fire crystals. You know they're out there, but for some reason they're mostly found near the end of the game.



One of the funny things about any of the RPGs in this series is that when they have to come up with a name for the most powerful evil soldiers they generally pick the SS. Residue from World War II?



The boss and his machine. You know, I never really noticed this before, but his heads look kind of dorflike on the screen.




As you can see, we've become rather more powerful since the last time we had a boss fight. Chrono and Marle are boasting some rather impressive stats and have enough HP to be very difficult to take down. The other two are coming along, but they're going to be more about supporting Marle and Chrono for this fight and only using offensive magic when they're not too busy with that.



He's...actually got a bit of a point. I mean, we did just completely come into his house and rob the shit out of him, and now we're coming to finish the job by killing him. It's a good thing he's evil, or we'd never get away with this.




Nothing beats being direct.

Fools........

The party tries to move forward, but there's a flash of light.


me from Mystic Sword.

Well, they certainly thought this through, didn't they?



Dion! Wait!


occasion. Chrono, take care of Faye!

Stop!! No, seriously, stop. You've had an explosive device big enough to destroy a giant barrier machine in your body this entire time?

Well, yeah. I couldn't take the chance that someone would search me and find it.

Who the hell was going to search you? And even if they did, you can buy pocket nukes two towns back from here.

For science!

Dion...

Puny humans, what



Too soon?

Just a bit.



Boss Fight: Agron

Now that I think about it, this is the first boss fight we've had in a while. The image is nightmarish if you're not going in expecting it. Agron isn't a push-over, but we've got plenty of healing capacity to go around. He can hit the group with several different attacks for about 400 or do a single attack for a good bit more. Our main offense is Marle and Chrono for about 2500 damage per round, while Frog and Lucca keep up everybody's HP with CureB. Lucca's not going to get a chance to do much else, but occasionally Agron will waste a turn using a petrification attack that everybody's immune to. Magma is actually the most damaging spell (even more so than Nuke) and does about 875 damage with each use. He's got 28,000 HP so this is going to take a while.



...that had to be the quickest trip to Mt. Goht ever.

Dion.....



Not sympathetic at all, but to be fair they do have a couple of bigger things to worry about. Kudos to Borgin for pointing that out.


hole in the Talon.

Right......


castle at Mt. Goht leads to Xagor. Let's go!

So you're basically planning for us to jump through multiple holes in the floor until we find the right hole and somehow land in a place where we can make our way to the rest of the palace

Pretty much! But you all jump first.



Borgin is a big improvement over Dion in terms of HP and with the added bonus to his spells from being a mutant. He's also got the evasive ability of an intoxicated duck. What gives with that?



Examining Borgin's equipment he's evidently wearing all of 2 pieces of armor, neither of which is any good. We can't replace his items directly, but we can add to his inventory to make him a bit tougher.



He looks like a spiky haired and somewhat bulky old man, which is pretty much what you'd expect based on what we've seen so far.



This is the final unit, allowing us to go pretty much everywhere. Worth all the trouble.



Now that we've got the barrier down we can get some of the items from our inventory. The first one is the Masmune, which is the second strongest of the Mystic Swords.


with your three treasures.

Naturally this is a reference to the three imperial treasures of Japan. What's really weird is that when you combine them...



They somehow make a weapon that in the Japanese version was known as the Kusanagi no Tsurugi, which is itself one of the three treasures.



We can also put some magic stones together to get the Shake spell, which is a strong quake type. It'd be a tough call between this one and Magma, but in my mind Magma pretty much wins.



I hadn't noticed this before, but Faye and Quacer are hanging out in the engine room where we have no reason to ever go. Apparently nobody has the heart to tell Faye about Dion.



The E-Ray in action, with the white orb that makes a figure 8 over the enemies.



Now that we have the Talon inside the former area of the barrier we can explore a couple of small treasure caves.



This should be one of the last 3 fire stones in the game, along with the final ingredient for the last special construction.



Heh. Okay, definitely need to do something about these dark stones. Armlets for everybody!



The Aegis is about the second best shield for pure defense, but combines the stone protection properties of the Samurai shield with the agility bonus of the Speed Shield. It's going to Chrono since he's out front.



Thought you were getting away, did you?



The next cave is just a bit southwest of Porle, where the other one was directly south.



A couple of stones are nice, giving me enough materials to put together a Speed shield for Marle. I ended up missing something earlier, so this is the second to last fire stone. The last one we picked up was used to create LitX, so we're short one for the final magic.



The Ribbon is another standard item from Square RPGs, which seems to provide status protection and gives great magic defense. Priority for these goes to Cyborgs, since they don't have natural resist all like the Anubis do.



The final cave we'll be visiting is actually just north of where we found Buzi. I missed this one somehow while jetting around.



As a result, the Poison Claw and Elixir in here are rather outdated.



With this firestone, however, we can finish the set of lost magic.



Fire squared means flare, but I'm inclined to think it's a non-elemental attack.



The animation for it is very similar to that of FireX, but the damage is in a whole different class. It's not unusual for Flare to do 900 damage to an entire field of enemies, meaning that Frog has more firepower than the Talon. He's quite easily able to destroy an entire screen full of late game enemies on his own with this spell.



After this it's time to go to the Dwelg town, where we can armor up, get Borgin some much needed protective equipment, and spend the rest of our cash on as many nukes as possible. On the way we run into our old friend Jorgandr, who mp5 was good enough to mention could be found in the Chasm.




This goes about as well for Jorgandr as one might expect considering that we're a number of levels higher and have four mystic swords. Interestingly enough Jorgandr stlll gives the same XP as it did as a boss, meaning this single encounter is worth between 5 and 7 regular encounters. It's enough to make grinding in the Chasm rather tempting in and of itself.

Now that we're fully prepared, it's time to investigate Mt. Goht.

Next time: We finish this.