Part 35: Final Preparations.
Alright, time to take care of our last two party members. Sonic doesn’t need much beyond better accessories and some more levels (he’s still at 10)…
…and Cube gets sky-high IQ, of course. We’ll be going to his dungeon first, so that I can swap him out for someone who actually gains experience.
Sidenote: If you run into the Giant Face encounter during this chapter, definitely take the time to destroy them before finishing off the Mustard Dragon. That seems to just about guarantee two Power Parts.
Cube’s dungeon is inside either of the houses in Familia village; we’ll just let Coop keep sleeping for now and head on in.
Yep, this definitely isn’t Uranus’ home any more.
If we head downstairs and behind the curtain, we’ll reach the dungeon proper. The eastern path comes from the other house, of course.
…Hmm. This seems irregular.
Strength is unnecessary here. Lateral thinking and a calm composure will guide your mind to a new level.Alternatively, you could look up all the solutions on GameFAQs.
Yes, this is another mostly combat-less dungeon. Instead, we have puzzles!
Rearrange the red floor… First width, then height… Both at last.
No, we aren’t swapping tiles. This first set of red tiles reverse left and right movement while you’re on them. There are two more that swap up and down, then rotate your controls ninety degrees.
The latter has two doorways; right is a deadend, so go left.
Follow your image in the mirrors, and a white sphere will show you the way… Speak to me if you wish to restart the test…
This one is simple. Just act like the Cube in the mirror is your reflection, and go the direction he’s facing. (It’s two steps right, three up, two left, one up.)
Like with the doorways, you want to trust the left mirror here. (One right, two up, one left, two up.)
And because videogames love the rule of three, our third mirror challenge is to look at three mirrors and go in whichever direction none of them are telling us to go. (Two right, one up, one left, two up, three right, two up.)
Follow the arrows, even if they point at the door you just came out of. The Dungeon of Intelligence isn’t very difficult.
At its terminus you shall ascend. This is the final test. Here too shall the spheres guide. In Time, you shall find understanding.No, I didn’t mis-capitalise that. Cube’s Intelligence is telling us to touch the spheres in a clockwise direction; northeast in the first room, southeast in the second, etcetera.
Which will end up dumping us in front of Cube’s ultimate (and only) weapon.
…And as soon as we grab it, we’re dumped out of Hash’s cabin and have to climb down this mountain yet again.
Can’t really argue with another +50 IQ though.
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If we return to Cube’s dungeon after taking the 17 Diode (the significance of which is lost on me), there’s a robot plodding around in the red tiled room.
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The ‘ancient god’ takes the high defence that Amlucretia and the Jaggy Eggs had, then dials it up another few notches. For example, Li’s ultimate technique does about 35-80 damage to this asshole.
He also likes to fire Missiles that hit a 3x3 area for what usually turns out to be okay-ish damage (unless you’re underleveled like Sonic).
I say ‘usually’, because it can decide to just heap all of its hits onto one target.
For this party, it’s basically just a case of healing until the Waco Kid gets a good roll on Hurricane Shot. The big guy has 656 HP, and manages to survive two bullet barrages… before triggering Li’s FushaNoSha and dying to a 22 damage counter.
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…So what was that guy’s deal? Was he mad that we took the IQ-boosting part and made Cube smarter than him?
Oh well, more petrification protection for us.
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Eh… Coop’s right here, might as well give him a little more time to shine.
He’s not quite as smart as Cube, but he’ll do. (Pity the guy with all the charged moves has such bad base speed. I’d correct that, but most of the speed boosters are busy helping with Hurricane Shot.)
Okay, now then… With the Dungeons of Instinct, Power, Intelligence, Technique, Mind and Time taken care of, that leaves only the Dungeon of Keys. And it’s located right here in Lucretia; enter any of the four doors of these houses, and…
Say hello to a locked door! (I went in through the northwestern door to get here.) So, how do we get a key for it?
We just have to wander around until a ninja attacks us, of course. Shadow is not the only enemy in the dungeon, but he is the only one who will drop a Rusty Key for us when he dies. (He has 240 HP, so he’s not hard to kill.)
Said key is good for one door only, so it’s a good thing they aren’t hard to find.
Fair warning: The Dungeon of Keys is a maze. It has five treasure chests, and four of those are special keys that you need to get Sonic’s weapon. There are a lot of routes that you could take through this place, but here’s the one that I ended up using.
From here, go through the southeast door.
Sonic shows off his level 12 tech while we grab another key. Like a lot of his moves, it’s more useful against multiple smaller things than one big thing.
On the other side of the door, ignore the southern path and head east.
This leads to one of the four keys we need, and from the name alone, most of the audience has guessed the theme for the rest of them.
Oh yeah, there’s going to be some backtracking involved in this.
Door time again.
There’s… not a whole lot I can say about this dungeon. (Go north.)
It’s mainly fight Shadow, open door. (We get the Suzaku Key from the chest.)
And then backtrack to take another path.
From this intersection, we’re going to head south. That’ll take us out of the dungeon, through the southwest door.
We want the middle one of the three north doors. So the one closest to that plant.
So, I suppose I could take this chance to say that I’m glad people have been enjoying Live-A-Live. It’s certainly one of the most unique RPGs I’ve encountered.
I think that Xander77’s LP was what made me aware of the game (I’m not entirely certain), and it’s been… man, very nearly five years since I completed my original playthrough of it. Got a week and a half until then.
This game clearly had a lot of love put into it, and the patch’s additions have only added to the charm. I had honestly forgotten how much I enjoyed the Knight chapter, and seeing everyone’s reactions to all the different little twists and references the game makes has been incredible. (Going north here.)
Basically, I’m saying that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed making this LP, and reading everyone’s contributions to the thread. (North door.)
We have just a little bit more to do before closing up shop though. (The middle door has a Parasite Sword, the only non-key treasure here.)
Once we get out of this maze, there are two more bonus bosses to take care of. (Backtracking a bit here.)
And after that, there will be one final update.
I’m also trying to work out the logistics of that Waco Kid Finale stream. As I’m sure most VLPers would agree, scheduling sucks.
Oh, here we go. Genbu, Byakko, Seiryu and Suzaku key doors, in that order.
And now Sonic has a rain-summoning katana, the strongest weapon in terms of raw Attack.
Now, let’s blow this popsicle stand.
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Along the way to the next bonus boss, it turns out that I was mistaken last update. The enemies in Devil’s Peak change to include some of the Strength Dungeon’s encounters once you’re strong enough, and said dungeon gets a new set of even worse encounters.
One of Sonic’s new techs helps to even the odds though. 200 damage, or 120 damage and stone, which is an instant kill on enemies (and thus makes the damage irrelevant). It’s pretty good!
We also see our first Tumble Bug, who has only 31 HP but stupidly high evasion.
Anyway, back into the void. We’ll just wander around until…
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So, uh… Say hi to Head Plucker. He has 544 HP and only one tech.
And holy shit, does he have a lot of defence. HP’s stats are absolutely insane.
His one move is Wezan Blade.
Wezan Blade hurts.
Okay, so Wezan Blade is kind of like Dodegesden. It’s supposed to try and debuff all of Head Plucker’s stats with every use. After a few goes, it’s possible that his defence will be reasonable and his damage will be much more manageable. The best idea would be to have Andre stand in front of him and tank for a while.
Of course, I did not do this.
But I did barely scrape out a win on the first try.
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With four out of five pieces of the Ariel equipment, we have only one more goal… Flee from battle one hundred times!
For that, I opted to use the Strength Dungeon’s high encounter rate to my advantage. It still took a good twenty minutes or so.
I did get to see Gynophobia Mk. II though.
Running away… 5 more times…
Ah, here we go. Almost done.
While running down the final five, there turns out to be one more encounter added to the forest. There’s also a W-1 recolour that can attack you (with an EXP value of 32), but I think you need to be a really high level to see that. Our highest level at the moment is 23.
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Death Prophet is somewhat dangerous if encountered too early; it has 960 HP, a reasonably strong attack called Dimension Rift (about 120 damage to Li), and…
The ability to turn people to stone.
Guess what I’ve given the whole party protection against?
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Oh very yes.
And that’s it! We just need to go give Odio/Oersted what for!
Question is… Who gets to go teach him a lesson? This is your chance to vote for three people to accompany Li to the final ass-kicking. You have 24 hours.