Part 40: You Rappin' Awful

Chapter 38: You Rappin' Awful

So last time, we finished the bonus dungeon up to the fifth floor.

The sixth floor is nothing to write home about either.


It features these gray Funny Thiefs. They're nothing to write home about other than that, like the Weirdbeast boss from the previous floor, every attack only does 1 damage to them. They only have 300 HP, but once they start getting down there, they run away.

There's a Funny Slayer weapon in the game, which is used to kill Funny Thief-type enemies, but with an attack of 1 and a variety of other non-Funny Thief-type enemies on this floor, it's really just a waste. And while you can one-shot these metal Funny Thieves for some merely okay EXP with this weapon, if you're relying on this method to gain levels, you aren't of the correct mindset to address a dungeon that rewards you for picking your battles and essentially min/maxing your equipment.


This room is rather ubiquitous.


The answer to this floor's puzzle is hidden in a random statue here, but that's not what makes it so important.


There's a small chance--I want to say maybe one in four or five--that this fellow will appear in this room. This is Santa. He sells you especially rare items, including the Santa's Boots we pickpocketed from that kid earlier, and the Tri-emblem we ran around wearing the Fortune for a couple of hours trying to get.

Now, there's a clever trick you can pull on this poor man because Star Ocean 2 has some feeble programming. Most people know it: use the Identify All! skill to lower Santa's selling price, fill up on Sage's Stones, then use the same skill to raise your own sales price and sell them back at a profit of a couple hundred Fols every time. Identify All! consumes a Spectacles item whenever it's used, and you can only hold 20 of each item at once, so every time you see Santa, you can only pull this off ten times at most. Then you'll have to leave, buy another 20 Spectacles, and hope you run into Santa again.

However, the Funny Thief enemies on this floor drop Spectacles. This is the second-worst way of addressing your problem of limited inventory space. The smart player will realize that you can buy Spectacles with a high Familiar skill, which costs a Pet Food to use, and can do this trick two hundred times before leaving the dungeon--probably more than enough to rack up the money needed to buy as many Tri-emblems as you could ever want (or at least hold in your inventory).

And then you get the really, really smart players.


You can pickpocket Cinderella Glasses from Celine/ZeeToo in most tows. Furthermore, you can reproduce as many as you like.

The Cinderella Glass reduces the purchase prices of all items in a shop at once by about 30%. Its effect stacks with the Identify All! bonus of 2%*(Identify All!'s level) (so 20% in our case), and if you have a Second Ledger, you can use that to get an additional 5% discount on top of that, buying at an amazing 55% discount.




Santa's Boots should be 10,000,000 Fols. The Tri-emblem should be in the 6,000,000 range.


We stock up on Tri-emblems for everyone, grab a couple of Go-home Frogs (the name of which has to do with some lost-in-translation Japanese pun where the word for "return" and the word for "frog" is the same thing; they let you warp to the entrance of a dungeon, but only work in the Cave of Trials), and max ourselves out on Sage's Stones.

The thing about the Sage's Stone is that it takes advantage of SO2's piss-poor programming. As usual.

See, rather than doing something smart like, oh, I dunno, setting the "sell" formula to (base item price)/2, each item has an individual entry for purchase price and sales price. It just so happens that they programmed the Sage's Stone to sell for as much as you buy it for, probably because when they programmed prices, somebody at Tri-ace thought to themselves, "Well, you can only get Sage's Stones through item creation and this list says that no shop sells them," and just plugged 50,000 into both slots.

Why it happened this way, I will never know, but hey, it ranks right up there with the Suikoden 2 trading quota counting glitch in which a character asks you to make 25,000 gold from selling trade goods before he joins you, but the game doesn't subtract from your sale total so you can just buy 25,000 gold worth of goods and sell them right back in front of his face in his own trading post.

ANYWAY

The boss on this floor is a Funny Thief Lv99, which is a retarded name for a pretty tough enemy.


Why they couldn't call him, like, Funny Master Thief or whatever, I will never know, but if they were trying to be cheeky about JRPG mechanics, it was terribly lost because the rest of the game's translation is so bad, you're inclined to believe that somebody was just really bad at their job.


He drops a Funny Slayer sword once you beat him.

Incidentally, you can kill him in one hit if you have a Funny Slayer equipped, but it's entirely unnecessary and won't matter once you get past the next floor ever again anyway.


Once you beat him, you can go to the right to get to B7, or to the left to warp back to the surface. Warp points such as this are the only way, Go-home Frogs excepted, to leave the Cave of Trials short of walking your ass all the way back to the first floor. Which is stupid, so always try to keep some cheapo Go-home Frogs on hand in case things get rough, which they are prone to do pretty much all the time here.


The seventh floor is utterly retarded.


So, we need to place a jewel on this pedestal to open the door to the next floor.


If you wander around this floor, you'll find the Cracked Gem in a box in one of those hidden pixel-perfect walls.

Put it on the pedestal and...

Oops!


You're supposed to use Metalworking on the Cracked Gem. I don't think anything bad happens if you fail and you can just try again as many times as you need, but this IS Star Ocean 2 we're dealing with.


... Hey, wait a second. We got a fucking Red Lotus Gem at the end of the fifth floor.


Why the fuck couldn't I just use that?


This game is so full of itself


which is to say


that it is full of shit


and somehow, that thing I just said there was a billion times more poetic than this boss here was trying to be, and it was a quip about shit.


It drops a Million Staff, which is a weapon for casters, which means that it is completely useless. I guess you can sell it, but if you're a pack rat, then that's just out of the question.












So, the eighth floor is not only a waste of time, but a waste of items, too.


It's also full of food items which, as stated multiple times in the past, are unfortunately completely useless because honestly, they're such a cool part of this game.

Well, I dunno if I'd eat an Amoeba Soup, though.


So, this floor's gimmick is that you have to give this wall face your precious food items.



Feed it enough,

and you'll get the option of feeding it bad food.


Do this, and...


surprise, surprise.


Seriously, you give Puffy fatal food poisoning and you get to advance to the next floor. Video games that reward violent behavior, much?


Billy, you're such a girl.

Actually, Geese also says the same thing.


The Erysin Beast, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean, is another one of those things that can kill you instantly by eating you.


When it dies, you get a useless Gelatin Steak, which is kind of gross if you consider the possibility that it's a slab of this thing you just killed.






Well this looks familiar.


The trick to this floor is that you have to step on this panel. The tiles you step on correspond to rooms. You can open seven at once, and have to get from the bottom-left corner to the top-right corner. The red tiles and the yellow tiles damage you while you're in their rooms, but the green tiles are safe. There IS one path that leads through only green rooms, but obviously I didn't get it.


Still, the red and yellow rooms are the ones with the good treasures. Valkyrie Boots (Enix still obsessed with Norse mythology even though they clearly don't know shit about it, film at 11) are the best female leg armor in the game.


HUGE defense, and they grant the speed of Bunny Shoes. The male version of these is the Valiant Boots.


The next room contains ZeeToo's most useless spell, Meteor Swarm.

You know you did something terribly, horribly wrong with your game when a spell's usefulness is gauged by the shortness of its animation time.


Valvados also gets his move, tri-Ace in this room. It, too, is useless, but it's actually not bad if you're trying to engage Limiter Off Indalecio in a fair fight.

When you try to leave,



you get to fight a Guardian!


Gee, I bet this will be interesting.


The only reason this fight takes forever is because this thing has so much goddamn HP and such ridiculous Defense that it doesn't matter what level you're on or how many Atlas Rings you think you can equip. Some things just can't be helped.


He drops a Valiant Guard, which is okay I guess.

NEXT TIME:

OH DRAGONS!!!!!!!!!!