Shining Force 2 Part #31

Part 31: Laser Eye 2.0

Part 20: Laser Eye 2.0

Last we left off, I got my shit pushed in by Muddle 2. Time to heal up!

And thus resolves all the plot for this update.

Okay, I lied. Petro or Paseran or whoever the fuck it was that stole the Ground Orb to hike it to Grans Island dies. I have no idea who he actually is or why he's important, but you can't honestly expect me to keep track of dangling side plots from two months ago, can you?

Apparently somebody dying makes Zynk so angry he'll join. Seeing as how the little scene with Petro is actually optional, I'm not sure what happens if you just advance to the next fight without triggering the scene.

Anyway, that's all there is to see in that town. There's no weapon upgrades, and the only item to pick up is a Blizzard.

If we head north of the town, the next fight awaits. If you head south, there's some winding path that leads to this cave. Inside the cave?

Whoa.

And now we actually have characters that properly benefit from Attack. Kiwi being my only unarmed fighter was really starting to get to me.

Hey, I actually have decent characters now! Zynk and Claude both hit like freight trains. Zynk's defense is decent while Claude's is the second best after Kiwi's. The problem is that they both have awful movement, at a pitiful 4. This is easily remedied with a pair of Running Pimentos, except well. I forgot to pick up the one in Moun. Guess what it's time to do!

Remember this fight from the last update? It's the first fight in North Parmecia, with the impassable not-Higgins square. See, the tunnel from Grans to Parmecia drops you off in the cave where we found the Wooden Panel all those updates ago. That means we have to trek through a good chunk of South Parmecia and the entirety of North Parmecia to get back to Moun. Luckily, this is the only random encounter we have to deal with again.

Strangely enough, however, the enemies have actually scaled up. Apparently random fights do scale up, though they are still always a few levels behind your army. If you remember, the devil soldiers and dark knights are from a fair while ago.

Just like Kiwi, Zynk can now use his special attack on command. It's got range and an area effect. As far as I can tell, it's strictly better than Kiwi's fire breath. AND it's a frickin' laser beam. What more do you want?

Yeah, there's a reason why I'm backtracking all the way to Moun for a movement increase.

Strange phenomenon: The dark gunner is an enemy I'm actually not supposed to see yet. In fact, it's stronger than the bow knight, the current archer enemy. Yet it gives me experience as if it were an under-level enemy. Not really sure what's going on here.

But they still drop full EXP on defeat.

The prize.

And then another long journey later, we're at this cleared field north of that town we started at.

Man, I just walked across the globe, and you only just finished? I wonder what would have happened if I didn't waste all that time walking across the continent.

This fight is about as gimmicky as the kraken fight. Thankfully it's far less lethal, though possibly more annoying.

The fight opens up naturally enough. The dragonewt wastes its time using the heat axe to cast Blaze 2. The bow rider shoots Skreech which really hurts, but thankfully he's not getting one-shotted anymore.

Also, the laser beam owns, even if Zynk can only cast it once per fight.

Losing my flying artillery and also power ring user in the first set of enemies is not cool, however.

Frayja hits harder than you'd expect.

See, here's the gimmick about the prism flowers. They can't move and effectively have no attack stat. However, they can fire down a straight line down the entire map, damaging everything in its path for 13 – 16 damage. The damage itself is pretty weak, but the fact that it stretches across the entire map is what makes it dangerous. Line up too many people in a row, and the damage will pile on. Combined with the fact that other enemies are strong enough that ~15 damage is enough to tip the scales towards a one-hit kill, this fight requires a lot of careful maneuvering. And frankly, I'm really running out of patience.

Claude's attack animation. Effective, but uninteresting.

The first prism flower that actually does anything is just off to the left. It fires across the row where Jaha and Claude are. The funny thing about the prism flowers is that they're not programmed to fire in all four directions. Skreech is currently sitting in that flower's “blind spot”, and gets to attack it for free without risking anything.

Well, up until the part where a bow knight walks up and shoots him. I am now down both my fliers, which is going to be very annoying in the near future.

This is what prism flowers do to you. In case you can't guess, the columns where my characters are lined up are the columns where there aren't any prism flowers. This turns out to be unnecessary because while they do have global range, they don't actually fire until you enter a certain radius. However, I'm too lazy to figure that out, so I just do this anyway.

Another annoying thing about prism flowers: They can hit their fellow monsters, which is cool, They can also kill their fellow monsters, depriving you of the EXP and gold.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is a reimagining of the Laser Eye fight from Shining Force 1.

After the first chunk of monsters is cleared, the most sensible thing to do is barrel down the right side. The center has a huge block of prism flowers that I just don't want to deal with if I'm going to be tangling with regular enemies at the same time. At this point, all that's left is two groups, each with a mist demon and a bow knight. Since they're both high mobility/range enemies, it's best to just funnel down the safe area and let them come to me, and then wipe out the flowers when it's safe.

Muddle 2 thankfully hits a fairly unimportant character, and it ends up with a mist demon out of its territory.

Didn't know that confused characters could even do this. Better than trying to attack me, at least.

And there's the bow knight down. Time to repeat that trick on the other pair.

Once I manage to cross this god damn minefield, of course.

That would have been too easy, of course. The flowers are actually fairly tanky and take a fair amount of fire to take down. It doesn't help that they're usually cornered by cliffs or water. Especially when both my fliers are dead and I only have one archer.

Having two characters and an item with Aura 2 really makes this fight bearable, though. All that area damage from the flowers would be a lot of trouble if I only had Sarah and Sheela (or if I were stupid enough to make Karna a monk

Boost makes Claude a total shit brickhouse. And he has a reasonable amount of HP too! He really is the better version of Kiwi, even if fire breath tips the scales back into the giant turtle's favor a bit.

Why can flowers dodge?

It's always nice when the game is nice enough to leave me with hope

Only to crush that hope with an immediate follow up. Jaha, the most reliable character at the moment, is now dead too!

The bow knight falls quickly after that, though. Down at the bottom, we have:

And everything else on the map is a prism flower. Due to my current position on the map and the number of blind spots the flowers have, I could just walk past them all and finish the fight. But flowers do give a decent chunk of EXP along with 800 gold (!!!) a pop. Time to do some weeding!

Weird thing. The flower next to Claude will fire to the left, but the flower next to Sarah won't. The blind spots for each flower are programmed weirdly. I kind of wish I had held onto Elric for one more fight, since having the angle to take down flowers safely would have sped up the process. On the other hand, it does mean Janet gets a lot of EXP for chipping them down. Hell, she gains three levels in this fight.

This flower doesn't have any blind spots, and will fire in both directions that it can. I don't know how it reacts to fliers from the bottom or the right, but I couldn't test it out!

At this point I remember that the goddess staff casts Aura 2, and it's a life saver. Both Karna and Sarah are running out of MP at this point.

That is surprisingly unintimidating.

Though it sets up the opportunity for a shameful Blast 3 kill.

Executioners are immune to Slow. Good to remember.

Meanwhile Claude makes a nest next to the last flower's blind spot. Free experience, woo!

I kind of forgot I had this item lying around. Would have been useful to know earlier.

Because Attack apparently increases the effectiveness of chest lasers.

The executioner also drops its weapon, which I believe is the last non-mithril sword. Nothing special other than another +3 to attack for a sword user.

Battle Report!