Part 56: A Poisonous Bounty

Update 56: A Poisonous Bounty

In This Update:
- Poisonous Dishes!
- Poisonous Eyeballs!
- Misplaced Metallurgists!

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Welcome back! Today we're helping some cooks gather ingredients.


Or helping poison tasters fulfill their latest death wish. Whatever.


There's 5 of these quests in total, and we've already done two of them back in updates 4 and 34.


They're most tests of how well you can count, though they do add a bit of flavor to the world.


Pun fully intended.


Same as before, we need to collect enough of one type of enemy to fulfill the request. In this case, we want 3 of the yellow jellies.


We're joined once more by this apprentice... poison taster? I guess?

: You let me know when you think you've bagged enough monsters to fill the order. As you know, I'll be in charge of transporting what you've gathered.


Let's get to it then.


Remember, you can kill any number of the other monsters, but only three of the yellow ones.


The plan is to send Vaan and Tsing up the mountain for some in-person ingredient culling, while the rest of the team just hammers on them from below.


The enemies aren't very effective at stopping us, sadly for them.


The enemies spend a few turns moving around and trying to debuff us, and Vaan grabs some treasure.


This guy is in our way. I'm also hoping that killing him will spawn another yellow jelly. (It doesn't, it spawns one of the blue one.)


We've thrown a few ranged attacks at this guy, as you can see. Also I love that face in the second picture.


The law forbids Ice, Fire and Lightning, but the yellow jellies are weak to Water. That's one (1) jelly collected.


Fortunately, the second spawns right on top of Tsing.


I should probably be concerned about these guys moving in on my backline, but they're mostly busy healing themselves.


Tsing and Vaan keep it up on the second jelly.


Basically all Hurdy and Montblanc are doing is casting Haste, since they can't use their Black Magick.


Haste helps Talf actually get a chance to do something, and he finishes off the second jelly.


Al-Cid kills one of the red jellies, and a third yellow jelly appears. Looks like we're almost done then!


Tsing and Vaan are entirely out of position for this one, so it's up to Talf to wrap it up.


Montblanc kindly gives him a second turn to finish it off.


And Al-Cid goes to talk to the apprentice.

: Oh? Got all you need? All right. I'll be taking it then. Not that I'll eat any when it's done. Don't care much for sweets.

: I hope the finished meal will be worth of our efforts!



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The next course for the most poisonous banquet in Ivalice is the protein dish, I think.


Now, you might look at that monster description and think you need to kill four of these Ahrimans.


But go back and read it again.


"Long of tail."


That means you need four of these Floating Eyes. Might as well ignore the Ahrimans completely.


Same thing as before, collect enough ingredients and talk to the Bishop.


So yeah, let's go beat up some eyeballs.


This is a weird battlefield. Why is it split in half?


I don't think we've been to this location before, actually.


The nice thing about eyeballs is they're really weak.


One down, one respawns. At least the game is consistent about respawning the same type.


The Ahrimans move up but honestly, just ignore them. They won't do anything.


Vaan kills the second eyeball. Two down, two to go.


The fourth eyeball spawns in, and Tsing and Al-Cid almost kill it.


The rest of the team is stuck in this choke point. I bet a flying character would be really good here.


This eyeball finally showed some initiative and attacked Hurdy, but we don't give it a second chance.


Thanks to Haste, Al-Cid is able to immediately dispatch the fourth eyeball. I'm glad none of them tried to fly away to the other side of the cavern.


With four eyeballs down, Montblanc goes to talk to the apprentice.

: Eyeballs got a lot of nutrition in 'em, you know. Guess they're more than just looks, eh?

: Well, the ingredients are in order at least, kupo! Hope it's tasty!


Alright, that was a pretty great pun, good job.

---


I assume they're making ladyfingers for desert.


Someone should probably tell them they don't need actual fingers.


I managed to not say anything on the bad laws earlier in this update, but this is just the worst. Laws you can't do anything about are bad design.


Joining us is Terry Terev, who you should summarily ignore because he's a big baby too weak to hurt us.


Hurdy, we get potions and herbs out of treasure chests. We eat them. Chestfood saves our lives.


Our good friend is here again. Is he enjoying the lava, do you think?

: You let me know when you think you've bagged enough monsters to fill the order. As you know I'll be in charge of transporting what you've gathered.


Time to hunt down two Mimics. Yes, thumbs count as fingers for the purpose of this exercise.


Some of the chests have actual loot, so it's worth opening as many as you can.


Flee boosts Vaan's movement enough that he can jump up to this treasure chest. Will it be worth the effort?


Tsing finds our first Mimic and punches it in the face. Or the palm. Whatever they have.


Penelo and Al-Cid kill it.


Well, that's not really a bad reward, I guess.


The next two chests have Mimics. Remember, we have to kill only one more.


Hurdy takes care of it.


And immediately breaks the law! Thanks, game.


I'm not going to bother getting the last chest. I'll end up accidentally killing the spare Mimic or something, I'm sure of it.

: All right. I'll be taking it, then. My last act as apprentice, actually. That's right, they're making me an official member! The test for official status was this -- watching you gathering materials for us. The trick is finding a clan that can get enough for five courses without needing our help. I wasn't all that hopeful at first, but you Clan Sawyer folks really came up trumps. Cheers!

That... that makes no sense. It's not just me, right? It's a guild, a poison taster's guild, SURELY it involves more than just supervisory work? Like, I don't know, proper emetics use to avoid fatal poisonings? Taking small, regular doses of iocane powder? Learning how to extract poisons from the various monsters we've collected? Ugh. Whatever.

: Is that so? I suppose congratulations are in order, then! Perhaps once you're in, you could recommend they try some more conventional recipes?


I love the idea of this one and really wish they had leaned into the idea of a poison taster's guild. But all we get is thin excuses for battles and some really wooden writing. Sorry, readers, but I'm disappointed by where this one went.

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- Riger, The Boy Who Cried Eyeball

Let's slay a bunch more eyeballs instead then.


This is actually one of the more difficult quests.


The premise is simple: Survive for three rounds. Don't get too injured.



: Kupo-po... They don't look too happy, do they? Better keep them on that side of the barrel there, away from the door, kupo. Kupo-po! I don't want to think what would happen if one of them got out into town.


Right, that's the hard part. See the line we're standing on? We can't let any enemies land on or behind that line.


Now, you might be thinking that's easy -- just stay there, maybe use them healing magicks to keep your health up.


And hey, look how fast round 1 ended! This will be easy.


Except no, these enemies can fly and the eyeballs have quite the movement range. There's a three-tile wide area in front of the door, and the enemies will easily fly over you and land there, failing the mission.


So actually, aggressively slaying the monsters is the better strategy.


To that end, I'm hasting my magick users immediately. Talf is key to killing these beasts.


Also, watch out for the purple Flying Eyes! They have Critical: Quicken, so make sure you overkill all of them. If that activates, they'll happily hop over your heads and hit the door.


Like so. See how Lian rolled almost 20 damage below what we expected? If I didn't go for the overkill, the eyeball would have had a free turn to ruin the battle. I actually lost my first attempt due to this.


Immediately after one enemy falls, another will spawn in to take its place. This really is an endless horde.


Now, you may have noticed Talf is wearing a Scholar's robes instead of his usual bestarred Alchemist's hat. Everyone is wearing Earth-absorbing gear, letting Talf cast his battlefield-wide Lore spells with wild abandon.


And hey, the damage isn't too bad. Plus everyone is healed for around 50 HP.


And that creates an opening for Hurdy to get a double kill, though of course they're immediately replaced.


Hey, you know which spells cost the same as the Scholar's for the same damage, don't require your teammates to have proper gear, and come in enough elements that you can hit every enemy's weakness? That's right, Illusions!


He gets a triple off that one. Hasted Illusionists with a handy Bard to replenish their MP are so much fun.


Anyway, the battle rages on for a while.


Talf has by far the highest body count, though there's always a replacement for every one he knocks down.


Which is why the actual best solution to this quest is using status effects like Stop and Sleep to let your Bishops and Assassin turn all the enemies to Stone. For some reason, petrified enemies aren't replaced, utterly trivializing this quest.


Also now the little guy completely blends in.


The enemies' turns come in lumps, which makes it difficult to react to them moving forward. Not much you can do when six enemies move in a row, really.


Lian needs a bit of healing, since Al-Cid had to shoot him out of Confusion.


Seriously, this battle was boring to play and is very hard to make interesting now. There's a lot of actions, but it's all just us trying to control the population of eyeballs.


Finally, Round 2 is over. Now we have a few dozen more turns until we're through Round 3.


I played around with shutting down the enemies with Petrify, but it's hard to pull off without full team support.


And Sleep and Stop aren't any more accurate, too.


Talf has never had this many turns before, he is living his best life. All these illusions would run counter to the Stone strategy, anyway.


In general, this isn't a difficult quest as long as you respect Critical: Quicken and the eyeballs' movement range. Be prepared for debuffs, and seriously try to disable them instead of outright killing them.


I brought Scions for more area-wide damage, too. There's a still a couple of these I need to show off, and one or two left to collect!


They don't do as much damage as Talf though. A little sad.


Alright, now things are interesting. We're reaching the end of the third round. Al-Cid and Hurdy are Confused, and there's a Flying Eyeball a couple tiles away from the barrel. (The symbol over our team's heads is Spellbound, which extends the duration of buffs and debuffs. It means I can waste fewer turns on refreshing Haste.)


One of the Ahrimans immediately attacks Hurdy, breaking his Confusion.


Jalia crushes one of them to death with a giant boulder.


See this? Don't risk this. There's a really good chance the damage would roll low and give the eyeball a free turn.


Stop helps, guaranteeing the eyeball won't move even if we fail to kill it later.


And, well, there's nothing left for us to do but wait. Seriously. Not doing anything is more effective right now than attacking the enemy. Talk about action economy!

: Hopefully the watch has been alerted by now, kupo. We'll leave the rest to them!


What, we don't get to see the Watch rush in to save us, like the heroes they are? Oh well.

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Let's finish off this update with a quick delivery. Just need to bring some Ether up to Tramdine Fens.


Except our customer isn't there!

: Hm? Is that a note? Let's see... "To the clan who accepted my quest. Urgent business has called me away. Please meet me instead near the town to the south. I still require the delivery to be made on time. Ezel Berbier."

: So Ezel is the "master" metallurgist. But what's this town he wants us to go to?


Not sure what's with the quotes around master there -- we know Ezel is supremely talented. Anyway, the town is obviously Goug.



: Sorry about changing the meeting place on you at the lat minute. Ran into some trouble back there. Incidentally, have you been down to the tunnels beneath the city? You wouldn't believe some of the things they dig up down there. Relics from different eras all mixed in with each other.

: I heard there was some weird stuff down there. Never realized just how weird, though. Oh, before I forget, here's the ether you asked for.



: Ah, yes. Thank you. I think I may just take a look around those mines m'self. Farewell, Samuel.


Of course we're been down to the mines, we helped Hurdy find his hurdygurdy down there.

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We'll have to keep an eye out for Ezel, see if he has any more requests for us.

Thank you as always for reading! This one was a bit more of a slog to get through, but hey: we're 5 quests closer to the end now!

Well, one more update out of the way! Let's vote for the next one!

Again, these are smaller quest lines, but this time I'm going to just fill out the update with filler. So you only need to vote for 1 of the following.

1. The Nazan Mines are awful busy this time of year. We should check it out.
2. Some monster-hunting lady is asking for help.
3. We could continue our education with some timbrology!
4. Or perhaps we should finally teach a man to fish.