Part 7: PSX Interlude 2
2Sadly, this chapter doesn't haven't that much unique content. Most of it, is stuff that's available anytime.
Well, there is this guy in Orange Village so he's better than nothing I guess.
Speaking of Orange Village:
There's this guy in the item store. I (probably) could've spoken to him in the Prologue, but there's no real reason to head to the store then; no reason to now, for that matter, but I wanted to buy some accessories for Tell since his damage outputs sucks hard in this version.
Basically, this guy is used for a game mechanic that was omitted entirely from the DS version; recruiting monsters. Whenever Cornet kills a monster with a regular attack there's a chance that it will join you. There are a few exceptions to this, though. Bosses are the obvious ones and the regular monster that stands out in this regard is a Toad, though that makes sense. Cornet despises toads after all, and her horn/cornet/whatever you want to call it is said to make wishes come true, so it stands to reason that she wouldn't wish for something like that to be of help.
You can only take so many characters with you at any given time (by my count, there's just enough for all 15 puppets; Kururu would make 16, but since she is just an NPC in this version...), so you have to store the surplus puppets/monsters with this guy.
In the Wonder Woods you have a slim chance of encountering an Inotium Lizard. These aren't here in the DS version; there, they've been relocated to the cave where Tell was found. There's only one thing of note with these guys aside from being obscenely rare.
They give a shitload of inotium when you kill 'em. A little above average exp for the area too, but more Inotium than even harder fights. If they weren't so goddamn rare, they'd be worth farming for easy money. Oh well.
I mentioned the cave where Tell was earlier; this can be found there. There's 15 of these in all, and they were all removed from the DS version and were mainly replaced by mediocre healing items.
The numbers don't correspond to any specific image from the Gallery (all 15 of these are available to view from there without any save data; there are others, but they're just arbitrarily unlocked at specific points in the game rather than coinciding with anything worthwhile). Nor do you actually get them in numerical order; at this point, there's one other obtainable from the Ancient Forest.
This image should look partially familiar if you noticed the background during the PSX version of Someday. It's the same picture only this time coloured in; as for the rabbit thing? We'll be seeing that guy later.
And, yes, the gallery images are rendered at a perfectly square 448x448 aspect ratio... just because. The rest of the screen is padded out with black bars to fit 640x480. This doesn't actually appear in-game though, so it's not that big a deal.
In addition to normal levels, the PSX version has "skill levels." Any character, whether they be a puppet/monster/Cornet herself, gets 1 Skill Exp for every monster they kill. Annoyingly, there's no real point to worrying about these because they're basically useless. All they do, insofar as I can tell at least, is increase your chance at getting a critical hit.
The Bobos are still easy as hell; I think they even have less HP in this version. I beat them all in one turn because Cornet's Reward skills are still ridiculously overpowered... though they're actually weaker here.
Incidentally, despite being a one-time enemy you can recruit a Bobo if you get lucky. This is purely because it's not counted as a boss.
The only other actual change is that rather than just fight 4 cats after the fish, you get to fight all 7 (disregard the fact that there's only 5 here; two died before I even noticed). It really makes no difference to the difficulty of the fight; it just lasts three button presses longer... or, uh, 6 if you're using the auto commands like a sane person would. I like SRPGs, but it gets way too tedious when every random encounter is one; fortunately, the encounter rate is blissfully low. Well, it is in this version at least.