Part 12: Bird People Are Dicks
Nuku Island is a bit of an odd place. The entire navigable area is made up of a giant banyan type tree. This will make more sense in the by and by.
Directly to the west thorns poke out of the ground and.. trip Theo and his group so that they fall into them? It's a case that for some reason the developers didn't think you'd enter the room from this direction and failed to account for it.
A new area naturally means new enemies. Fly Eels usually die off from lightning magic before they can be a problem, and Stalkers are weak enough that they go down in a single hit from Theo. Rhinoktes (Rhino Kites?) take a bit of killing and can do some damage on the way out.
On the way up the tree we'll find various stones scattered around. They're color coded for our convenience, and red is obviously bad. We'll just leave this one here.
Strange atmospheric conditions result in clouds forming around the tree at ground level and sticking there. We'll go with that. Also, somebody apparently hauled a bunch of building materials up here and constructed these ruins.
We'll find out a bit more about the Hishojin later, but the important point is that they're responsible for this place and we aren't going to run into any of them. I feel sometimes as though this game is missing a great deal of expository information. Either that, or I'm missing it but it seems as though the Hishojin haven't been introduced at all.
Treasure in the tree resides in piles of stone like this, but there's actually two possible results from hitting a pile of rubble:
Plot item to continue the game or a fight and some experience. There's no way to lose here! We'll need three of those blue stones, by the way.
Theo's imagination.
Theo is NOT a furry!
So, yes. The Hishojin were beautiful, graceful bird people that somehow died off in an unexplained catastrophe.
Big Crows (I assume that is one's foot.) have monstrous defense but relatively low HP. They're also fairly weak against magic so Mute can tear them up.
By this point, I'm pretty sure the people in charge of room descriptions had decided to just phone it in. This game is actually substantially larger than the first.
A clue! I imagine the fact that Hishojin and Hisho share a kanji or two is probably deeply significant, but it still works here.
Oh, woe this dark day. The day the great Hishojin fell to the fangs and claws of foul demons. They seek the power of the Hishoseki, but they'll find we guard that secret beyond death. Alas, they come for me now... my time is done.
That's obviously the last entry. Creepy... but at least they didn't cut the written account off mid-scream.
In other news, Layl is slowly becoming useful. Now if Theo should bite it we can get back to a shaman fairly easily.
Bone birds are somewhat like big crows in having high defense and moderate to low HP.
Heading west from the ruins results in us walking right off the tree and falling onto the thorns for 5 damage. There's about 2 or 3 places you can do this throughout the tree area.
More levels and more useful spells. Cure is a single target spell that brings the target back to max health. Exit's a bit less handy, but it'll still see some use.
Along the way we go ahead and find the nest of a severely endangered species and proceed to raid it.
There's more than 3 blue stones around here so this probably wasn't technically necessary but.. eh, screw bone birds. By the way, when I said endangered species I meant "endangered now."
The construction on this tree is outrageous. A large building is weird enough, but an entire working fountain? That's just crazy.
This isn't usually a good sign, but thankfully there isn't anything swimming around in the pool that wants to eat us.
Excuse me. Two large buildings is weird enough. How tall is this damn tree?
The little atmospheric messages only get creepier.
There's also a second pond, except this one's experiencing a bit of a water shortage. Pulling the plug releases the water into the pond..
Like so. It's a bit strange that the water here is muddy while the previous pond was clear. Must be a bunch of dirt and rust in the spigot.
Direct the flow from plenty to empty and the passage will simply appear.
Huh. I guess we already did that by accident? Before we try to figure out this riddle, the important question is what's at the top of this tree.
At what point does a tree like this become a tower? Also, I'm fairly sure this is a structurally unsound construction in multiple ways.
ceiling forces Theo to stoop.
Having reached a dead end, we've got no choice to go back down a bit.
The lower of the two ponds was somehow so deep we couldn't see the bottom but had a small hole that the water wasn't draining through.
I suppose you could argue that the water was filling the tree, but considering that this is a one way passage it can't really be all that large.. so where did all the water go? How much water did they put into this thing?
Strange multi-eyed dinosaurs roam the inside. I've never seen one actually accomplish anything, so I have no idea how dangerous they are.
Dammit Layl, you were doing so well at becoming useful!
No, Mute. We're in the other giant brick structure you saw on top of the tree.
The gimmick for this dungeon is that we have an elevator that needs one blue stone for each of the three floors it can go to. If you were just ignoring those blue stones, this is the time when you get to start swearing and go hunting through the tree for some.
Yep, nothing at all unusual in the mystery tower.
There are actually treasure chests here, but our old friend the Mimic finally makes a triumphant return. Mimics are fairly tough and can do a lot of damage, so the point where the use of Fortify is usually required to take them down in any kind of timely manner. It's not a case where you get a treasure after beating the mimic, either.
Pulling the bar off this trap door and opening it lets us freely enter and exit the tower from the front door. This'll be useful in the future.
There's actual loot within the tower, but this sword isn't quite as good as the one Theo has. Layl gets it because she attacks as often or more often than Theo does.
Having looted the first floor thoroughly we can proceed up the elevator. You might notice that there's four floors and only three stones. The meaning of this is that we're going to have to find another way up to the fourth floor.
Being methodical we head up to the second floor first, and are greeted with a new set of enemies. Specters haven't changed much from the first time we saw them in the Kraken's grotto, but Liches... liches are bastards. They've got great armor, hit hard physically, and like to use the multi-target version of Blast when they're not stealing your HP.
Our party barely survived the first fight on the second floor. The best trick to dealing with liches is to use antimagk or de-spell on them to seal their magic then use fortify and pound the crap out of them. They tend to ignore most other magic, and even the spell blockers aren't 100% effective.
The second floor is home to various statues of Hishojin, finally giving us a glimpse of what they look like. Violence is required to change the position of the statues. I don't know why I'm doing this yet, but it seems like the thing to do.
Stupid Mimics. I did say they were pretty strong, didn't I? Along the way Layl also bites it from fighting with a lich.. this place is pretty brutal.
unison, one may safely join the family of Hishojin!
On the third floor we finally get an explanation as to why we were hitting statues, although I should mention that at this point there were only three statues on the 2nd floor. The fourth must be hidden somewhere.
Our ticket up to the fourth floor is this balcony with all the convenient hanging vines. RPG and adventure game logic dictates that only one of these will work.
Well, one down. Heading east from this spot brings you back to the base of the tower while heading west.. is something I didn't do for some odd reason. It doesn't help that the only way to get here is to fall down the vine. The path back to the tower is one way.
Two down. This one only dumps you back at the balcony, giving the hilarious mental image of Theo scrambling down a vine to get away from angry bees.
Our third attempt brings us to the top. Now that we're here the elevator will actually work, making return trips much easier.
I believe this is a multi-target StealHP, but those spells are so universally awful that I haven't bothered to check yet.
Right next to the elevator we stumble across this tableau and get jumped by a demon. Not one of Zakdos' demons (necessarily) just a random asshole.
He's kind of a pain in the ass. At this point I've had more characters die in this tower than the entire rest of the game combined, and that's saying something. A few uses of the fortify spell settle him down pretty quickly, though.
Considering how bad tempered Mute's been, I'm surprised it took him this long to learn. Actually, it's the group target version of Blast.
Even with the demon destroyed, our entry is still blocked. The clue lies in the hole on the wall, but no immediate solution presents itself.
... Layl, one more shitty spell and you're going into the corner.
You might remember me saying that the game loves to pull "Go back to a random location after defeating something and have the room change" games on you at this point. Shining example number two is here, where you have to go back to the second floor and enter an apparently dead end treasure room to find a secret passage.
I was only here because it seemed likely that I could find a 4th statue here and stumbled across it by accident. The crest looks like it could fit that hole on the 4th floor..
But the bird people are dicks and we still haven't gotten clearance to touch it. This is an oddly elaborate storage method that doesn't make much sense. Hitting the final statue and then tacking the crest results in no damage..
And with that we can return to the fourth floor and shut off the force field.
Shiny. Next time: Beginning the final dungeon that we located through