Part 19: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time
Now that we've become ninjas and have access to all kinds of excellent weapons and armor, the next step is to go and scoop them up. The best location for lots of loot is hands down the Mirage Tower and Sky Castle, but for that...
We need to head over to Lefein to get the Chime one more time.
Going up the tower has gotten a bit easier with four people, especially once we grab the Thor Hammer and put it on a ninja other than the one who has the Zeus gauntlet. Two shots of lightning can wreck these guards, although they can be very annoying with their paralysis.
One major difference in difficulty was in the Blue Dragon. As you can see here, he pretty thoroughly wrecked my team with Thunder. If he'd managed to hang on and do that one or two more times, this encounter could have been fatal.
Climbing up, this is probably one of the most significant treasures in the tower. As I mentioned earlier, INV2 is the multi-target counter part to RUSE. Every point of evasion will reduce hits, and with a few uses of this White Shirt the party becomes completely invincible to physical attacks. One of my back row folks gets this while Mike gets the Defender. Combine the two and in about 1.5 rounds Mike is nearly unhittable.
Curse you Grey Naga! If only I had AMUT!
This is the other really great treasure in the tower. The Katana is the third most powerful weapon in the game and can only be used by a Ninja. It goes to Leo. While we're here, though...
We might as well take out Tiamat. The party is pretty low level here for this, but it's not going to be a real problem. You might notice that a couple of them are poisoned...well, I ran out of PURE potions near the top and decided to just
it out.
The BANE sword works its magic again, even though it can take a round or two to work. Status effects are kind of funny in this game. Even if an enemy is weak against the element of an effect causing spell, that doesn't mean it will work. Resistance, however, ensures that a spell will never work no matter what.
After dealing with the Sky Castle, it's time to backtrack a bit and get some more armor. I've got to say, the airship makes visiting the Ice Cave must less painful.
We're mostly here for this, as the Ice Armor provides the same protection as an Opal Bracelet or Flame Armor. It goes on Raph, leaving Don as the weakest link in terms of armor.
I haven't actually visited this room in my last couple of playthroughs, mainly because I desperately wanted out of the Ice Cave by the time I would have gotten to it. Inside the chests here is a total of more than 40,000 gold. It's a very welcome treasure trove when you get class change and can suddenly use the more expensive magics. The first four chests are unguarded, but the final set has a set encounter featuring Frost Giants and Frost Wolves.
After looting the rest of the Ice Cave there's still one fiend to deal with. The path to Kraken is actually fairly nice for getting levels, especially since we have two sources of LIT2 to utilize. As a result, the party is a couple levels higher by the time they reach the bottom floor.
The first step to dealing with Kraken is to deal with its ungodly attack. 8 hits can tear apart the weaker armor these guys are rolling with it. Mike is using the Defender since he's going to be the target of most attacks.
While Mike and Don are at work raising defense, Raph and Leo can work on boosting attack.
However, lots of attacks doesn't necessarily mean lots of damage.
Leo deals the finishing blow. That Katana is really showing its worth. That's four fiends down, but I'm a bit concerned that dealing with Warmech and Chaos will require a bit more HP than we've got now. So, it's time for...
solitary training! I'm particularly fond of the image of Mike killing a dinosaur.
When we're done, the group looks like this. My main goal was to get everybody up to around 500 HP, but Leo wasn't cooperating. Now then, it's time for Warmech.
This does not begin well.
Within a couple of rounds Mike and Don have gone down to Warmech's relentless attacks. In the meantime they've bought some time for Leo and Raph and buffed them to a fair-thee-well.
In the end, Warmech goes down to a series of FASTed attacks.
The Eye is the first thing that comes up on our one-way trip to endgame. He's actually a lot less threatening with four people to whale on him.
Lich actually does quite a number on us with his NUKE spell. He takes a bit longer to kill than I'd like for the simple reason that we have 4 uses of the FAST spell and 5 bosses to take down. Lich has the least HP, so he gets beaten down the old fashioned way.
Before we go after Kary, it's time for a little detour. Most people don't pay attention to these doors.
Using the healing items is even more important with four people. 99 potions doesn't go very far with 4 people, especially with all the enemies using group attacks. On the plus side we've got a couple healing items we can use, speeding up the process.
Down the left-hand door at the end of a long corridor is a second Katana. This is pretty pointless unless you have two ninjas in a party, but for this playthrough I find it very handy indeed. Don gets this one, but keeps a few staves for flavor.
Behind door #2 is another ProCape, which also goes to Don and boosts his terrible defense. There's a large amount of gold further down this path, but this is pretty much meaningless to us.
After collecting our treasure Kary gets the FAST treatment, and does relatively little damage to us on the way out.
Kraken puts up a bit more of a fight. It should probably be noted that hitting him for 67 damage for the final blow is probably some kind of an insult.
A quick trip on the second to last floor gets the Masmune for Raphael. I suppose that's KIND of like a Sai, right?
This pays immediate dividends on Tiamat. Probably the least trouble out of all four, although her use of BANE gave me a bit of a scare. There's only 3 ribbons, so one of our characters was at risk for instant death.
At the end of the game everybody's gained one level going through the final dungeon except for Mikey. I blame the sheer number of times he's died throughout the game.
A final snapshot of the stats on our heroes before going in. You can see the degree to which they were specialized.
Chaos shares the insane defense of all the other four fiends. This run REALLY depends on getting a good number of critical hits.
Eventually Raph finishes him off. Go Masmune! While this wasn't exactly quick, it was fast enough that he didn't get to use CUR4. With this party there's not much point in defense in the fight versus Chaos. It's all
all the way until either he goes down or you do. And in this case, it was him.
Next time: More bonus content