Part 20: Armic's Adventure - Part 7

Unlimited Saga, Part 20: We Just Need Silk

Armic's quest cannot continue until we find some Glossed Silk. That's the only thing left to get. As far as I know, the market rank is high enough at this point for the silk to appear, but maybe not? In any case, until it shows up, there's not much to do but finish quests and try to get people better equipment. I use my vast wealth to buy lots of wood, and make some damascus stuff. Armic has a Black Sword, and Edel has a Black Bow. Nuage still has his diamond spear, because it's mostly the same strength (a little worse, but that's ok) and we might as well use it for something. Eventually I'll turn it into a shield for Edel, since he has a shield panel and will make good use of it. The main thing people need is armor and accessories, which I've been neglecting since I wanted to get everything done as soon as possible. Until shops get what I want, we just need to go do some quests and hope that it'll happen someday.

Here's a short quest:



Short quests are sometimes a bit of a trap, since you'll get lower level panels due to lack of combat. They can get you weird ones you normally wouldn't, though. For example, if you just started a game and want lockpicking as soon as possible, you can go do Fulgar's Mansion and probably get it on someone.

The master of the mansion told his butler to find his wife's jewelry, so it could be worn to a party. However, the butler forgot where he put the jewelry. Being a butler for thirty years, his pride wouldn't allow him to admit the lapse. There is not much time until the master returns, so he urgently requests your assistance.

"The jewelry has to be somewhere on the first floor. Please, find it quickly! You can break the custom-made doors and dressers. Here, you can use this tool designed for them.



You may remember this manor, and the keyaxe, from Mythe's quest. Unlike his visit to the manor, however, we've got no real urgency here, and we also can't visit the second floor where the painting lies. There's no fire, and no danger -- indeed, no enemies at all.



Sometimes, you will find a door and, by spinning a reel, you can break it with the keyaxe. In the southernmost-room you can find a magic tablet.



In the northernmost room you will find a bunch of dressers.



These also must be broken, and one of them has the jewelry in it.



And that's it. That is the entire quest.



As you can see, we got a magic tablet, but all the panels and tablet are at the current minimum level, 2. This is because there are no encounters in the manor, no combats or traps or even chests to unlock. Doing this quest may result in having to throw away a high level panel if you don't have one set aside for dumping them in. For example, here's Edel losing some Skill because I can't afford to drop any other panel.



Of course, it'll get replaced again soon, so it's not a big deal. However, there is a way around this, and to abuse quests like this for leveling purposes. Remember, you only get panels when you finish a quest. and those panels are determined by every action a character has taken since the last panel assignment. This means you can fight monsters and find tablets in another quest (say, the public area of Pharos) and then come here, and get the result. It's unnecessary, but I know some of the people who do challenge games use this quest that way.

And hey, guess what?



This seems like an insurmountable price, but it's really not. If we needed to, we could go do some other quests and then leave via time-out, to grind cash, but instead I decided to just sell Edel's damascus bow. It was worth about 50k, making the price easily attainable. And now, with the world's most expensive socks in hand, we have every item needed to finish Armic's quest. Everybody removes their equipment, and at last...



I deciphered the item for Wood! It's Jupiter's Anvil, and it's at Flying Island.

Oh, Flying Island...

Armic, it's the Seven Wonders! Be careful and go for it!



The Flying Island is, indeed, one of the Wonders, and is where the final boss resides. So Armic's fourth item is located in his final dungeon; the water item, which cannot be deciphered during gameplay, is not explained at this time but will come into play later. That's fine, except that this also means you will always miss out on one of Armic's party members! In our case, we're missing out on Pharr, who you get during the wood quest. Pharr is lame, though, so it's not a big loss, but Rebecca and Edel are both awesome and would be unfortunate to miss out on. Since Rebecca is in the Fire dungeon, the last one on the list, she's probably the most likely to miss out on.

Anyway, this means that Armic's story is now basically over. He does have some story stuff in his final dungeon, unlike Mythe, but until then it's all sidequests, all the time. We could go to Flying Island right now, and definitely could defeat the story boss, but Chaos would still win. So to alleviate that problem, let's do some more quests, yeah?



This place may be a temple in name, but in actuality, no one knows its original purpose.



Two Moons Temple should be familiar if you played Minstrel Song, because it also appears in that game. It's the location of one of the Fatestones, though I don't remember which one at this time. Probably the Moonstone, that'd make sense. It's also Ventus's final dungeon, but because he also has to do the entire Undercity Pharos thing and fight Phantom, they made it pretty short. You can wander off and find treasure all over the place, but it's also easy to finish up quickly if you know where to go. This is because the dungeon's gimmick this time is teleporters.



Some chambers contain a teleporter pad, which will dump you at a specific spot in the dungeon. Choosing the right ones will get to the end very quickly. Now, I believe you can also make your way to the end by foot, ignoring the teleporters, and of course the fact that you can see where you've been makes solving it through teleporting easier too. All in all, a pretty easy dungeon, with a pretty easy boss at the end.

If you decide to do the temple properly and explore for loot, remember to bring someone with the appropriate Guide or Familiar skill skill. Most places do have hidden stuff, but in a dungeon like this it's pretty easy to figure out where they'll be and to search accordingly. Like this:




Dead ends will probably have a chest hidden away. There are also, I believe, several magic tablets in the temple. It's also, like Starship Anchor, one of the quests you can walk away from, so you're free to grind here for item drops and gold if you really want to. This is one example of a way to abuse Fulgar's Manor for panels -- you can fight things endlessly here, with a safe exit at any time, and then maybe get lv4 or lv5 panels early on by completing the manor. But, like I said, mindless grinding isn't really needed for the most part. Sure, we're sort of grinding right now, but at least it's by doing quests.

Anyway, the path to the boss is so simple that you may stumble into it by accident. The first teleporter leads to an area from which you can immediately see another. That drops you two rooms away from the boss chamber, so there you go. In any case, the target area is this red floor, which has different environment art and more dangerous monsters.



Proceeding all the way northeast, we find a big demon guy hanging out.



Perhaps as an acknowledgement of how easy it is to get here, you can actually choose to leave and not fight the demon at all. It doesn't count as finishing the quest, but would allow you to leave safely if it turned out that your characters were massively outclassed. Most of the other Wonders are tough enough that getting to the boss at least guarantees a certain level of power, so I guess they wanted to be nice in that way.



You may recognize these demons. The green ones are the boss from one of Armic's quest, and the big guy is a stronger variant of the Satanachia that patrols Undercity Pharos. I like the animation on him, though:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/Unconscio...asse-mobile.mp4
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/BlandGlis...toad-mobile.mp4

While these guys can take a lot of punishment, they're not necessarily that dangerous.

The main thing that happened is that Nuage started sparking a bunch of skills. Some are rather useless, like Twin Dragons:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/VacantVag...thon-mobile.mp4

Sure, it looks OK, but it sparks off of Double Stab, which attacks twice instead of once. The chance of doing LP damage seems to be much greater with the regular attack than this special attack, which is annoying. I've never seen that with any other techniques, but in this case it's a pain.

On the other hand, this one's pretty good:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/MadeupEnl...phin-mobile.mp4

Eventually, the big demon falls, and the party is victorious. Nuage is probably the best character I've got right now, and he's dragging the rest of the team through every challenge. The demon leaves a magic tablet behind, but winning doesn't count until we actually leave the temple out the front. The time limit is short, but it's not a problem.



So that's that. Next time, revelations. What will happen in Flying Island? Who can say? Can you guess? Well, we'll find out next time. So stay tuned!