Mystic Quest Part #19 - A Farewell to Shrugs

Part 19: A Farewell to Shrugs

18. A Farewell to Shrugs

Yeah, that’s our hero...? Shrug, what happened to your armor? And your pants, for that matter?

Obviously, since I stopped leveling up, the stats haven’t changed at all since we recruited Phoebe. I figure this is a good reference for what we have to work with in this fight. Good enough, I guess. Since his offense is going to revolve around magic, Dragon Claw is a good option and I found that Excalibur let him move second every now and then, which was handy for emergency healing in my case.

I don’t think the Focus Tower was this tall?

Oh, uh, you got a little something on your face. Should probably have wiped that off before your evil speech.

Serve you to do what? Rule the world? Destroy the world? Having some trouble understanding your motivation here, Dark King!

The entire game is about the world getting punk’d by a stupid rumor, you go on with your bad self, Dark King.

The Dark King obviously gets a special background being the final boss and all. I’m not gonna lie, fighting this guy legitimately can be hard. His attacks are varied and deal a lot of damage. He resists every single element and status effect other than fire, so fortunately Flare is still worthwhile here.

Or you can do that.

This is probably the most infamous glitch in Mystic Quest. It’s just an overflow error but damned if it isn’t cool. Curiously enough, this only works with Shrug. If Phoebe were to use Cure, the boss would just have health restored. That might be because she has too much magic so it overflows back into positive healing but don’t quote me on that. It’s a good way to heal Dark King enough to hit him with another ridiculously strong Cure though. That was over half of his health.

edit:

Nitrodon, of tasvideos.org posted:

Cure heals the target for (magic*1.5+50)% of its maximum HP (divided by the number of targets). For instance, if you use Cure with 32 magic, then Cure restores 98% of the target's maximum HP. In the case of the Dark King with full HP, the game adds 39200 to his current HP of 40000, but HP is only a 16-bit integer, so the result overflows to 13664. This is less than the Dark King's maximum HP, so the game accepts it as the Dark King's new HP and displays that he took 26336 damage. In short, the Dark King will take that amount of damage if and only if it won't bring his HP down to less than zero. Curing with Phoebe overflows all the way back to positive healing, but it can be used to set up a second damaging cure by the hero.

Artix posted:

Yeah, to expand on the Cure Glitch and that Nitrodon post a bit, the reason that Phoebe can't do it is because of the way the numbers work out. Basically, HP is stored as a 16-bit integer, which maxes out at 65535. Dark King's max HP is 40000, and Phoebe's cure spell, because of her 99 magic, gives a total of 199% healing. So more or less, Phoebe heals him for 80,000 HP. 80k is enough to go through a complete overflow and leave you with about 15k HP left to be healed, and there is no point at which adding 15k to the Dark King's HP will force an overflow, so no matter how much HP he has left, Phoebe will always actually heal him if she tries the glitch. In fact, if Shrug was capable of getting up to 76 magic (and he can't, for the record), he wouldn't be able to do it either for the same reason.

So let’s rewind and do this legitimately. The strategy is throw Flares and White out, cross your fingers, then heal. As low a level as Shrug is, though, it’s substantially easier to just cheese this fight.

What would a final boss be without having several forms? This one makes use of those many weapons: Fire Sword, Ice Sword, Dark Sword and so on. None of these deal elemental damage, unfortunately, so expect at least 600 damage from all of these. He can also heal himself for 1000 damage with Cure Arrow while hurting you for 500 or so.

Your true from is a huge spider? That’s terrible.

This is where the fight gets dangerous. Everything before now was more or less tolerable and manageable but the attacks he picks up now make everything beforehand child’s play.

Golden Web is guaranteed petrification if you have no immunity but you’ll still take damage. Silver Web is confusion and poison plus similar damage. Spider Kids deals around 800 damage to a single party member so it’s probably the least noteworthy of the bunch. Lastly, Lazer also only hits a single target but a critical hit is just immediate death and normally hits for almost 900 damage—that’s nearly all of Shrug’s health. You can basically forget about surviving if it’s a critical hit because it deals just about more damage than health you can possible have.

He also gets Mega Flare and Mega White, the first deals a comparatively little amount of damage to Shrug and almost 1000 to Phoebe while the latter hits both for 600.

His last form, which is just a really wiggly spider, throws Golden Web around more frequently but that’s really it. Kind of a disappointing last form but hey. Because of how damaging his attacks are, you might want to have someone dedicated to healing. In my case, Shrug would just die to all of his attacks in two hits save for one. Now if you were at a higher level, then you’d probably be able to get away with less frequent healing here.

O...kay…

So the events of this game were basically the Crystal of Light punking the Dark King by manipulating Shrug into inadvertently fulfilling the prophecy.

Alright, good work, you weird old man.

Is gratitude really the right response here?

The game takes the wheel, as it were, and sends us off to visit everyone that got wrapped up in this. Otto’s closest so I guess he goes first.

But of course! Say, what’s become of Reuben and Captain Mac?

They’re fine! They’ve already headed home.

Great. I’ll stop by sometime and say “Hi!”

What are you going to do now?

That’s awfully forward, Shrug.

I need a little more adventure in my life...

I guess it’s not like you have a home to go back to but I have a feeling you’ve completely forgotten that.

Kaeli sort of freaks out about this. As an aside, I think she’s the most excited out of everyone to see Shrug since she leaps in the air and spins around when he arrives, so... there you go?

Don’t worry, Kaeli!