Part 16: Shrug’s Creed 4

16. Shrug’s Creed 4





Mac’s Ship is hardly a dungeon, to be honest. You can probably be done with this place in a couple of minutes. If you’re playing the game normally then it’s worth it to take out all of the enemies here for some EXP because there’s a lot to be had around here and you won’t be returning to this place once you’ve finished it.

But EXP is so far down on my list of priorities that I’m not going to bother. I’m not really sure why it has the Bone Dungeon music but hey.



Heading down this way will take you where you need to go. This is seriously a short interlude compared to Pazuzu’s Tower.



It does have a neat background for battles though.



Shrug doesn’t need the claw to climb this but it seems like he would. I dunno.



Climbing the rope makes sense though. That’s a pretty enormous rope!



Here’s the background for fighting inside. Not as pretty, if you ask me, but still.



This is actually a pretty devious little trick. Does the floor underneath the Gargoyle look a little odd?



That’s because there’s a hole you can fall down. Not only that, but this route is a dead end.



I was a little curious to see what would happen with the overflow glitch, so since this was a convenient place to check I grabbed some Refreshers at the end of that path and it basically got rid of all my items.

So, uh, “just buy seeds if you want them” is the moral of the story. It’s not like there’s anything left in the game worth spending money on. I’m still not keeping the seeds, so don’t worry about that if you were.



And that was it for Mac’s Ship. There’s nothing of value in the other parts of the ship. Of course, the treasure comes first.





I sort of have the feeling this is the armor Spencer and Tristam were going on about. With Shrug resisting sleep and wind, that’s pretty much everything except for petrification. That’ll change soon.

Like Heal, you could miss this but you’d have to do that on purpose otherwise you might want to get your vision checked.

e: I was wrong and you can actually still get this chest after clearing the ship. The monsters won't be there anymore. I'm good at this.



And finally, the man of the hour himself.





I guess your daughter appearing out of nowhere would be pretty surprising.


I’m okay... but I have some bad news. The Dark King... the Prophecy...




Kaeli’s got her head on straight though. The Prophecy is stupid anyway.


But...




Kaeli slings her father over shoulder and leaves.



What’s the matter now?




Reuben! Let’s go to Windia and put you to bed!


The game teleports you out so that’s nice.





What are you two doing here?


Spencer! Phoebe’s looking for you!


I met her at the inn in Windia, and now she wants to see you.





Okay, now we’ll never see them again.



Why should she care? She doesn’t even know him?



Oh man, talk about melodramatic. I just saw you beat up a headless horseman.

I’m surprised you made it here with such a bad wound! Off to bed with you!


And that’s it for Reuben. What a swan song.





I’m okay with this







Since a lot of the offense in the endgame is based around magic, Phoebe is as great as before despite that garish shade of yellow. The Bow of Grace has definitely lost its luster but there’s a pretty cool glitch that is exclusive to Phoebe. When she’s on automatic control, she’ll start casting Aero once she runs out of Wizard charges. Since that’s the strongest Black spell, Phoebe will make some great use of it with her high magic. Other than that, she’s a little bit of a glass cannon but she’s a fitting last party member.

She’s picked up a lot of new resistances, most notably paralysis and sleep. She’s also resistant to Drain attacks but that’s sort of pointless because those are terrible and hardly ever effective.

The deal with Drain attacks, to my knowledge, is that they have to exceed a certain threshold before they’ll drain health from you. So if an enemy uses a drain attack and they happen to get a critical hit, then you might see them drain less health than the damage they first did. Like, for example, if an enemy deals 400 damage then they’ll only drain 150 HP. Phoebe’s drain resistance means these attacks fail and she’ll absorb health from the enemy instead.



I haven’t done this because the differences tend to be pretty negligible, but look at how awful Phoebe is with Reuben’s resistances. Considerably worse defense, noticeably slower, less evasive... Reuben is so bad he inadvertently infects other party members.



I’ve discovered a lost part of the Prophecy.



“Okay, but I asked what was important?”


“The one behind the 4 is darker than the night, an rises midst the land.” You’ve saved the Crystals, but our real enemy is the Dark King. He’s in the Focus Tower. Reach the Tower with my ship. Stand by the steering wheel and press the A button.



There has to be other lines to this prophecy because that’s pretty terrible, to be honest.




I don't think it's totally 100% the Dark King's fault that you beached your ship.



Gonna beat this nerd up for a bit



and then onwards to destiny or something.


Next time: So this place has just been here for how long?


We'll probably be wrapping things up this coming week. That being the case, is there anything I've missed (which is probably pretty likely given my track record thus far ) that should be shown/you want to see/etc.? Figure it would be best to knock that stuff out before moving on to the endgame.