Part 10: Mythe's Adventure - Part 10

Unlimited Saga, Part 10: The Mausoleum of Iskandar

After the last adventure, I bought up all the wood I could find and set to repairing everything. Michelle's steel sword turned into tempered steel (remember, 1 less damage means this has occurred) so I made her a damascus sword. Mullock is hard to find generally, but it can show up in the frontier towns which generally do not upgrade their contents. I know some people laboriously check every town because they are insane, but that's boring. Usually I just go to Vaftom, which seems to have the highest rank always and buy any rare materials (diamonds are great, for example) and then maybe check a town like Serin or Sadovos to see if they have mullock, if I want to be unfair to the game. High end materials are pretty much just as good as damascus; its appeal is that you can make it early and break the game with it. For example, steel is pretty good, diamond is almost exactly the same (but good luck finding that) and stone weapons are pretty good too, honestly. Any town can have stuff that's good for repairing things, like serpentine or wood or iron.

Usually you get a bonus when repairing something if the material is similar or the same. Also one of the smithies is better at repairing, theoretically? It has a sign that says so but I've never noticed a difference. I also want lots of life protection, and there's lots of things which give that. I've noticed that bone charms offer it and bone shows up all the time so I just bought a lot of that. If you combine an elemental stone with an equipment there's a chance it'll put the Arts skill on it. For weapons or accessories it's slot 2; for shields, slot 4. It's a somewhat low chance but if you just keep trying you'll get it eventually. You can do this to get an accessory which has life protection AND Water Arts, for example, or you can do what I did with Laura's axe and shove Carnelian into it until it gets Fire Arts. She can't do much damage with them, but she knows one buff spell and I never use Tomahawk, the ability it replaced, so why not?.

Now, before we go to the mausoleum and see what's up with Silver Girl, we're going to do one more sidequest. Do we need to? No, but I think it's funny.





Spooky! This path leads to the cemetery itself, which is largely empty of monsters barring a few undead walking around. There's a shed, where the groundskeeper is hanging out to yell at us.



What is that guy's problem? What a jerk!

This area is full of graves, which you can search. Though you can only screw up three times, it's a very easy reel.



Succeed and you get an item. Fail and you fight some zombies. Search the right grave (it's in the furthest area, of course) and you get a key!



Maybe now the groundskeeper will talk to us.




I literally only did this sidequest so I could show you that message, because I think it's funny. Well worth the effort.



Sapphire kills all the zombies with Shock and then Marie burns him to death with her Fire Arrows. Nice.

The room behind the shack has some high-level chests. They'll have traps, of course, but if you manage to defuse them the reward can be good.



Remember, failing to defuse an explosion trap destroys what's in it. One of the chests blew up and we'll never know the contents... So that sucks.

I found a shop selling a single piece of obsidian and I bought it. It cost over sixty thousand gold. This is good because, while I said earlier that there's a guaranteed piece of obsidian, I forgot you can't actually forge stuff out of boots and therefore they'll be useless for this purpose. Even a single piece is good though, since you definitely don't want your healer getting petrified. Everybody else can hopefully rely on their endurance to help prevent status effects, which is its main purpose. Spirit blocks mental effects but a lot of those can just be powered through or ignored, especially if the character isn't a spellcaster.




We've been here before, of course, but, as you may remember, the party fled a strange noise and did not reach the end.



Once we get back to the purple floor, everything begins to shake.



After a few turns, the guardian finally appears:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z10BiGp-ibo

This is a tough fight. Thanks to GameFAQs I can tell you that he has around 12k HP, and 12 LP. He can also attack the entire party, and quite effectively too. He won't do that early in the fight, though, so I started off by using as many people as possible to spread out his single attacks.



Unfortunately, Grace and Sapphire aren't too useful in this fight. They're set up to deal crowd damage, which is great for exploring but bad for bosses. This means Sapphire is mostly stuck on healing duty, and Grace is useful only as a way of absorbing hits (which she does quite well).

For context on his HP, if Laura pulls off a Reverse Delta it does about 600 HP damage. A full combo with several party members can do maybe a thousand. However, neither of those are reliable options because this guy is very slow, meaning it's hard to use up his turns and set up a combo, and he often stuns with his attacks, meaning if we shove Laura out by herself she'll just end up not taking any turns! Plus, he exclusively uses spears, which deal piercing damage, meaning even if he attacks someone with full HP he can deal an LP or two -- especially if he gets off a combo.

However, since all his spear-based attacks are physical, you can reduce his damage through equipping good armor, or by giving people stuff to parry attacks with.



Sometimes people aren't so lucky:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/JauntyPer...crab-mobile.mp4

The giant acts several times per turn, and everything turns into a big damage race. I actually had fun with this fight; it's dangerous, and I had to constantly cycle your party to protect them. However, you're free to ignore that and just gamble on doing your strongest attacks all the time, or maybe rely on buffs and debuffs, which are very powerful in this game.

Michelle sparks a cool skill, Bopeep. It can cause Blackout, which for enemies means instant death. It even works on mini-bosses sometimes! Plus, even if that fails, it still does a ton of damage and looks pretty cool.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/YawningTi...tail-mobile.mp4

This means Michelle and Laura both have powerful level 4 techniques to pull out. Plus, Michelle has a Lv4 sword panel, meaning it's very easy to do this every single time she attacks. Like so:

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/WelltodoO...cete-mobile.mp4

Even if I missed the timing, I'd still probably use Roundabout, which is the level 3 attack. Less powerful, sure, but it can stun enemies and is thus still perfectly acceptable.

Notice that I switched to her reel from another one. That's because it resets the position when you do that, and so if I want to do Bopeep it's a simple matter of switching to Michelle, waiting a second, and hitting the button on the line of level 4 panels. It's not as damaging as Reverse Delta, but it's more reliable. Finally, we kill the boss and are sent back to the map.



The party proceeds towards the newly opened room, searching for treasure along the way. Nobody has been down here in a long time, so there should be plenty to find.




The room has a switch, which opens another room. Good. Eventually, though, we find this weirdly-shaped chamber: our goal at last!




Don't ask me to open it! It's risky enough to be found by the Knighthood in here...



Iskandar's alive and well, and yet he's hanging out in his own tomb? I guess you eventually run out of stuff to do when you live that long.

Is...kan...dar...

Hey, where'd you come from? How'd you pop up like that?

Don't worry about it, young man.

Mother told me, "Meet Iskandar."

You must be the daughter of Rivelvalla. Your name?

Faedaljen.

Even though we finally know her name, the game still calls her Silver Girl. I think that's kind of strange. She has a name now, so why not use it?

"Loyalty to God." It's so Arcanian.

Mother would be grateful.

No, I'm the one who should be grateful. You opened me up to the truth.

Hey, what's this all about?

Young man, let us finish, okay?



As an Arcanian, you have the ability to thwart their energy and return the darkness to its former state.

Your wish is Mother's wish, and her wish is my command.

Thank you. The only ones who can save the world are the ones living in it. Hey, young one. Be her guide.

So, we have our final mission: head to the Undercity Pharos and defeat the Knights who reside there. This is the famous Most Difficult Boss, and we'll get there eventually! But since this is the big, final plot dump, Mythe is unsatisfied with everybody's explanations and demands to know more.

You owe me an explanation. What's going on?

I'll explain, but it's a long story. Want to hear it?

You can choose to skip all the exposition after this point, if you want. But that wouldn't make for a very good Let's Play, would it?



She is an Arcanian, created by the gods. The Seven Wonders are the relics of her ancestors. But their power almost destroyed the world. The gods prevented this by vanishing. We were born in the ruins of the gods. In that sense, we are no different from monsters.

What on earth is he talking about? Is he mad? Is this some wildly exaggerated story? Or could it be... the truth?

Leith Torles first introduced me to an Arcanian about a thousand years ago. That was her mother. I couldn't believe it myself -- that I wasn't a real human. I created several photographs of her. She looked exactly like her daughter. The Arcanians are all so alike. They have the perfect human form.

Either way is fine. No matter who she is, no matter what she does, I'm going to help her. That's all there is to it.

I... wish to go to Tal'fa Palacaleo.


But we won't go there yet, because we'll die. So in the meantime we'll do another Wonder or two, and maybe check out some ruins, before finally heading to Pharos to finish the story. Stay tuned!