Part 15: The Search for Joch..

Our next destination is a little village tucked away in the mountains southwest of Matango. It's one of a number of places that we couldn't possibly reach without Flammie.



It's a picturesque place, with an exit to the north and to the south. We'll be seeing this place a few times... okay, more than a few times.



Naturally Joch is tucked away in some remote peak with a bunch of monsters surrounding him. I shall be very familiar with this route before long. There's also a cave on the way which is in fact the Palace of Darkness.



As we're getting closer to the end of the game the Mana Tree is coming more and more into focus. You can put money that any place named in capital letters will be visited.



... I just give up on explaining Watts. Maybe.. maybe there's not just one Watts? Maybe it's the Watts Clan sending a member out to every place in the world?



Part of me wants to call them Jock and Jerk. This desire will only increase as time goes on.



This old lady is all about us being tourists until she finds out that we flew here like a bunch of pansies. When she was our age they climbed the mountain uphill both ways and were grateful for it, dammit.



We've also got a few new armor upgrades here, and for once we're actually getting some proper armor as opposed to a set of overalls and a helmet instead of a hollowed out raccoon head.




Taking the north exit first there's an ancient temple at the top of the peak. It's not much more than a decorative area, but it's supposed to give a bit more atmosphere to the game and I'm grateful for it. The mention of videos is a bit weird.. Woosleyism, or not?



No, we're here to clean the place out if it has anything of value. Got any orbs?




Evidently they had "The Empire" back in the old days too, and it was fond of the same kind of shenanigans. There seems to have been a much higher level of technology before the world was ruined as well.



Some of the remaining videos (by sheer luck) date from the end of the Mana Fortress period. If you think about that the chances are pretty slim. It's likely that if our civilization were destroyed tomorrow the video evidence left behind would be someone's home movies, a Disney movie, and a stack of porn. The video ends with the Mana Beast coming right for the Fortress.




I'll bet if they built a giant cannon that shot mana at things they could use up the Mana. They're just not trying hard enough.



Some of the videos are inconsequential, almost as a nod to verisimilitude..



Although this one seems to have been recorded off of Jeopardy and serves to suggest that this is a weird future version of our world. If anybody starts building a Mana Fortress, please direct them to this game so that they can see the consequences.



Unless this person is pretending to not be Sage Joch just to mess with us, it looks like we're going to have to look to the South. With that said, there's no real reason to ever come back here.



Leaving the south gate we've got Trap Flowers and Bomb Bees covering the hillsides. The bees shoot exploding stingers and the trap flowers put you to sleep. Luckily the bracelets sold in the item shop here actually prevent sleep... as I found out when I upgraded and Boy started suffering from plant induced narcolepsy. The bees are practically immune to any magic except freeze, and have a small chance of dropping Royal Jam.



The enemies have at least one new trap, which contrary to expectations doesn't kill you outright. Instead, it drops the character who opened it down to 1 HP, allowing any nearby monsters to do the rest of the work.



The aforementioned Cave Palace of Darkness. The number of targets in this little stretch makes for a good place to grind weapons and spells, although there will be better places later.




Further up the pathway we can find the Eggatrice, which is about what you'd expect from their name. They can cause petrification if they hit you, although the weirdest thing about that is the fact that the statues always look the same.



After you pass this little cut out, Neko is hanging out when you circle back around. It's a bit weird, as you're likely to say to yourself "I could have sworn that cat wasn't there a second ago."



Puns aside, he's got nothing to sell us beyond basic supplies and the armor we just bought in town, with the price conveniently doubled.



Finally, at the very top of the peak we come to the abode of Sage Joch. Notice hte size of this place...



As it's considerably larger on the inside. Also, what the HELL is that thing and is there any way we can not go near it?




It's Sage Joch's hideous henchman, suggesting (although not ordering) that we should bugger off to the Palace of Darkness if we want to find Joch. He's got to have been in there for a while, since we didn't pass him on the way up.



Or particular note is that instead of the green forest that we saw climbing up, the background is now blue sky. This is actually what we're supposed to be seeing, but a bug causes the background not to scroll while we're actually climbing the mountain. Exiting Joch's cave resets everything to where it should be.



Proceeding back into the cave at the foot of the trail we enter an area that could be called the Antechamber of Darkness. It's inhabited by a hideous face enemy that should look fairly familiar, but it's not a real problem.



The Palace proper is one room further, and in addition to the face enemies is full of morning star wielding knights similar to the ones that the Emperor's Palace had as guards.



Some parts of the dungeon are palace like, while others are a fairly standard cave setup. We've got to pull out the axe again to make some progress here, making it very tempting to just keep it as your main weapon throughout.



There's something vaguely suspicious about this wall... more to come on that.



The game likes to play a little trick on us, as that door in the lower left hand corner was actually locked a second ago. You'd think after all the work we've done to get here that this door is important... and you'd be pretty much wrong.



A bit more tracking around shows Imp type enemies and Dark Ninjas wandering around here. They seem to be favorites for anything darkness or Empire related.



The real trick here is to get to this room and hit this switch to raise up a whip post on this other island..



Backtrack around and get that chest which I swear wasn't there the first time (and which contains 1000 gold)...



And then use the whip to get over here and open that suspicious looking wall we noticed earlier. This is the real route to the center of the temple, but before that we can go check on that inconsequential door.




This isn't an accidental double-post, you're seeing what I'm seeing. After opening the chest with the glove orb, another chest was right behind it. Both orbs are real, as this is a failsafe the game has in place in case you missed an orb somewhere. I evidently missed one in the Ice Palace, and the game was kind enough to fix it for me.




The final regular room of the dungeon has triggers that outline bridges over nothingness, requiring you to take a walk of faith in order to proceed. If this game had any way of allowing you to fall off edges (like a Zelda game) this would be a bit more suspenseful.



After three bridges we end up in front of a not particularly ominous looking archway. Appearances can be deceptive.

Boss Fight: Lime Slime

Lime Slime Boss Battle Video



This big bruiser is the Lime Slime, and also apparently Shade conducting a test of us. It seems that Shade is the only elemental spirit who has tried to anything like this.




As you'd expect, this boss uses Darkness elemental magic and for once actually has the magic power to back it up. Letting it get off too many spells is going to hurt you badly.



It also uses Dispel Magic to take off your buffs and prevent you from casting magic for a little while. It's a bit annoying, especially if you don't realize why you can't cast spells.




While the slime is normally black, when it changes colors physical contact has the appropriate elemental status applied. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the fight this boss is so big that you're going to have trouble avoiding it.



Exploder is a good way of handling the boss when you can't get close, and as you do more damage the boss will shrink and allow you to use weapons more easily. Once it gets to a small enough size it'll explode, which does some veryw eird things to the text boxes if any are up. Prize: Javelin's Orb




Because of our awesomeness, Shade gives us his powers.. although I'm using the term "us" loosely.



This is also about the only point where the game doesn't have the color for sealing the mana seed appropriate to the elemental. Somebody probably realized that this would result in a boring black screen.



The only person who actually gets Shade's powers is Boss, including Dispel Magic. We now have our most expensive spell yet at 8 MP, although we aren't going to run into anything weak to it for a while.




Making the trek all the way up to the peak reveals that somehow we've missed Sage Joch and he's now moved on. We'll have to revisit the Empire in order to find him now.



Before that, it's time for a weapon's upgrade roundup. The Imp's Fork balloons enemies, making it very useful for crowd control. With our two glove orbs we skip right over the Heavy Glove, which does damage to insects, to the Hyper Fist that works against slimes and lizards.

People in Mandala Say the Darndest Things