Part 12: The Tree With Two Faces

12. The Tree With Two Faces







The Giant Tree is pretty cool. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is undeniably a filler dungeon but it’s exponentially better than the Mine. Kaeli, like Reuben, is also killing a lot of enemies in one hit so life is good but now Shrug is pretty comparable himself. And as you may have noticed, it’s filled to the brim with monsters, so Shrug might gain a lot of levels here and dash my hopes of finishing the game at my lowest level yet.

The only real complaint I have about this place is that it funnels you into a lot of encounters. I fought just shy of the bare minimum and gained three levels.



Gonna get a whole slew of new enemies in here too, so let’s get on with the show.

Live Oaks are jokes—Shrug and Kaeli are going to kill them in one hit so they’re hardly threats. They picked up Electrapulse to lower your magic in case you zoned out while playing and used the grenades or something on them.

Snipions are more annoying but still easily killed in one hit. They do have Doom Powder now which is an instant death for a party member, but other than that they’re nothing special. Apparently their English name is a mistranslation of Sniper?



What is special, however, is the fucking awesome Dragon Claw. We can still climb walls, obviously, but now it’s with a sick grappling hook. There are going to be a lot of those posts scattered around the tree for us to latch onto. This is good. Odds are if there’s something for you to shoot and latch on to, that’s where you should be going.



What’s a dungeon without loot?



Mad Toads can’t be killed in one hit by Kaeli, which sucks, because these guys are pretty obnoxious. They’ve got poison-touch as a counter and Body Odor for paralysis against Kaeli, and Stone Gas is as effective as usual on Shrug.



There are also a few maze-like rooms such as this one where you have to chop the mushrooms down to pass through.



God damn is that a lot of Mad Toads that we’re going to have to fight for treasure



And then a Leech showed up. As the last of the worm enemies, they are still really weak and irrelevant. Still can’t handle axes or earth attacks, but now they’re weak to wind as well. They’ve picked up Fireball which can hurt but eh...



Uuugh just give me the dumb chest



Shrug has almost completed his spell repertoire. Meteor is awesome and does some heavy damage, but it’s sort of hamstrung by its Earth element. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always felt like White has outdamaged it.



These vines take you down a floor but doing it here just takes you backwards. I guess a shortcut if you need to get out of here for healing or something? You’ll actually want to cross the left gap to progress.



Meteor looks cool as hell and makes a great noise, just fyi



For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, you stab these faces with the sword and they’ll open up.



Well, at least everything in here is weak to axes but still. The third path to the left is the one to take to get out of this ‘maze’.



Oozes are actually pretty interesting.





To my knowledge, they’re one of very few enemies that actually have something that resembles the Reflect status of other Final Fantasy games. So don’t cast spells at them because that can ruin your day real quick. They’re weak to bombs like all of the other Jelly enemies.

e:


Oh?



What's happening?



If you recall that the Dragon Claw doled out status effects like candy, you might remember that petrification was amongst those. Because all of the status effect proc when they land, seeing this message means you've killed the Ooze in one hit. It's pretty satisfying! They are also correct, this is the last of the Slime line.



This is the only place where you have to drop down a level.



To an elevated part of the second floor that lets us get back to the third floor. Trees are weird.



Back on the third floor, you have to drop and catch the lower handholds. It sure is a thing, I guess!





Along with Oozes, we’ll start running into these jerks. They’ve also gotten Doom Powder because the Skeleton line needed more tools to be annoying with. They’re weak to wind, which might be worth exploiting.



By the way, if you have to go back through these rooms for any reason, all of the mushrooms come back and you have to chop all of them down again. This maze room has a bunch of Oozes and that’s unfortunate because they take awhile to kill.



Jeez, I never realized how many rooms just had a lot of one enemy. Fortunately, you can pretty much just kill one of these guys and go straight to the boss if you’d like.



e:
"If you can beat Gidrah, the monsters will disappear!" They were right, it isn't worthing going back for, but maybe someone out there was curious!





Gidrah is honestly pretty easy to deal with. I don’t even think he deserves the boss battle music but I won’t not post it because that’s a crime. The Skuldiers are the bigger issue here, in my opinion.

If it starts off with paralyzing Kaeli, though, it can be rough dealing with all of the enemies since you’re not taking them all out in one round that way.



Once you’ve taken care of the Skuldiers, this fight is pretty much won. Kaeli’s Aero hits harder than Shrug’s White, and Meteor hits harder than that. It doesn’t have a lot of health, either, so Gidrah goes down fast.



It’s got a varied pool of moves and all of them can be pretty bad. Tornado and Triple Head can hit for 450 some damage and we all know how irritating Stone Gas can be. But because Gidrah is so hilariously frail and your spells are so powerful, you'll plow through his HP way faster than he can wear you down.

Fun fact: Shrug is now at the level you'd normally finish the game at if you did a low-level run.





Hmm, you know, I’m not sure why we actually did this but it sounds like a fun reward so whatever.



“Go on kid!!” The trees sure are nice



Naw, I’m pretty sure we could have just walked through this.



But first, a quick stop before the next town.





Didn’t you already explain, like, the entire prophecy way back when? What more is there to say?





This doesn't seem as bad as the eternal winter, to be honest


Next time: Rainbow Road? Why not?