Part 10: Rope Bridge & Alive Forest

Rope Bridge & Alive Forest



Focus Tower is still pretty boring, but what's this? A bottomless pit or something. It's apparently a lake, but the lack of a bottom is still kind of ominous. I sure hope we all watch our step on this rope bridge, Reuben.



Oh good, it's not even in proper working repair, Reuben.



Reuben tries to save Steve from an ambush and proceeds to fall off a fucking cliff. Praise God, something good finally happened.



Steve dispatches the mummy solo with a single blast of Aero, because he's just that kind of guy.



"I wasn't checking if you were alright, I just wanted to verify that you wouldn't be able to get back up."



As if on cue, Tristam shows up and joins. Steve slips his payoff and enough to cover the mummy's hospital bill discreetly to our ninja star tossing friend. Mission Accomplished.



Onward we go, to Alive Forest. I know I feel alive just knowing Reuben will be stuck down there. He might have to eat his morning star just to stay alive. Merely thinking on that makes me giddy. Oh, sure, Tristam also sucks, especially now (he's no better than he was before, just higher-level), but after what he does later in this update you can't ever really stay mad at Tristam.



The arrow says leave. I don't think this forest likes me. It's understandable though, considering I'll have to cut down about half of it to progress.



The Alive Forest is (ironically!) full of undead, which are pretty resistant to Tristam. The ghosts are weak to him but just about everything else laughs off his ninja stars.



A mysterious tree with an even more mysterious marker, hidden under a random smaller tree. This one is clearly a crest teleporter, but I don't have the appropriate crest yet.



I do, however, have this crest, which allows me to presumably warp inside the large tree and snag the treasure inside. Which isn't even very exciting.

But what's this I spy?



A red chest, and a new weapon! The Giant's Axe is the brutal top dog of the axe family, and will serve me quite well for the remainder of the game. For some reason it also feels like it swings slightly faster than the Battle Axe, allowing me to chop through trees and mushrooms and shit with the frameskip on like some kind of demented JRPG Pac-Man.



Another crest, another chest. Ninja stars, be still my heart.



Steve is good at a lot of things, but negotiating with trees is not one of them. Fortunately, his nascent Jedi powers allow him to sense that Kaeli is in Aquaria, sparing me the hassle of going back to Foresta to look for her first. How does he know this? He's psychic.



"I hate to interrupt your lesbian makeout session but at least one of you girls has got to join my party."



They're not quite finished yet, so Phoebe dumps me on her grandpa, like there's anything even remotely interesting about Spencer. After confessing that he isn't actually digging anywhere (he probably just wants to hide from Phoebe), he and Tristam decide to go treasure hunting, which I assume is a euphemism for drinking. Tristam you coward!



Oh. Nevermind then. Tristam is pretty hardcore. Steve shrugs, but he's happy to have the claw, and so am I. In addition to the small Magic boost of claws, the Dragon Claw has several other features. I'll get to those in a minute, but first Phoebe has to blow up her grandfather's hideout.



Women, I tell you what fellas. They just can't use high-yield explosives in amateur industrial tunneling to save their lives, am I right?



Phoebe sounds so worried. I don't have the heart to tell her Spencer gave up on the whole digging to Captain Mac thing. Sadly, this means she runs off and won't be joining us yet. But who cares about Phoebe, let's talk about the Dragon Claw.



Badass. In addition to climbing walls, the Dragon Claw makes an awesome sproingy sound and extends to grab on to levers and latches and stuff and can pull Steve across gaps, which will come up in very short order. On top of that, the Dragon Claw inflicts almost every status effect under the sun on anything it hits. One of these is Petrify, which works like instant death on monsters (and just semi-instant death on the party). There is an upside and a downside to all this. The upside is that if the monster gets hit by one status effect, it gets hit by all of them, which means it dies if it's susceptible. The downside is that if it has a strength against one, it seems to have a strength against them all, so it's impossible to petrify things that are immune to the other claw effects, it seems. The claw's instant death properties are not immediately apparent because most things in Alive Forest and the Giant Tree are immune to at least one of its effects, but past that it actually can instagib quite a few things.



Kaeli finally gets off her ass and joins up again. She's a good deal better than she used to be, and while she lacks the magical oomph of Phoebe, her axe is brutal and she's got Aero, which is good enough for this portion of the game. She's also got a hell of a lot of Black Magic casts.



Back at the forest, Kaeli somehow talks the bigass tree into letting us go inside him (ewwwwww), on the condition we kill all the monsters inside. Then he'll... I don't know what he'll do. Anyway one more dungeon and then we'll actually reach Windia!