Part 54: In The Name Of The Moon
Because I blew my “Sailor Moon Joke” load early all the way back at the start of the first game and I want a mulligan.
OVERWORLD MUSIC: “The Continent of Nadias” (Disc 1, Track 15)
We start this chapter all the way back in Faria, because now that we’ve cleared the entire map again, we have our Fast Travel ability back.
The in-game explanation is that we (allegedly) have the Shahgna back under our control, though my pet theory is that it’s because Leonard is finally gone. Because Less Leonard is Best Leonard. EVERYTHING is better without him.
AREA MUSIC: “The Archduchy of Faria” (Game 2 OST, Track 2)
And so we return to Fabulous Elf Vegas to seek the council of Archduchess Miu on how the hell we’re going to get the Moon Maiden out of the giant ball of sap in Father Yggdra’s innards.
Yulie: I wonder where I can rent a big drill at?
Look at it in there, just taunting us. What do I gotta go through to get this thing again?
3 and-a-half hours, the Van Haven Waste, and one of the most grueling boss fights in the game?
Oh Luthia, you miserable demanding bitch.
So anyways, our
Yep.
Well, okay then…
So anyways, our
HEROES (fuck I’ve been waiting SOOO long to type that) approach the dais of Numenshrine where Miu and Scardigne are there waiting for them.
CUTSCENE: The Hunt Begins
Miu: Yulie, welcome back.
Scardigne: Word travels fast. We heard you obtained the second insignia in Greede.
Yulie: Yes, that all went well enough, but… You see…
Miu: Let me guess… The Knight?
Yulie: Yes. We have need of her strength.
Miu: I’m afraid that may prove difficult.
Miu: As Father Yggdra explained, the Moon Maiden has chosen never to do battle again. And besides…
Eldore: We don’t have the Ark.
Miu: Yes.
Miu: That is correct.
Miu: Grandfather was afraid war would break out over the Knight’s power. So he entrusted the Ark to someone else. Eldore: Who exactly?
Miu: I believe… his name was Medius.Dun dun duuuuuun.
CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Scar” (Disc 2, Track 15)
Yulie: Medius?!
Orren: HAHAHAHAHAHOOOOfuckus. Eldore: That’s a fake laugh. Orren: IT’S REAL!
Miu: You know him? Eldore: Yes.
Eldore: He was the headman of Sinca Village. He’s the one who found the ancient ruins in the Dogma Rift.
Miu: Then why don’t you pay him a visit?
Eldore: We would, had he not passed away.And Yulie’s just shaking her head in shock and despair the whole time.
Miu: Oh, that is a shame.Yeah, that’s the most tactful way of saying “you’re kinda fucked, aren’t you?” that I’ve ever heard.
Miu: Without the Ark, there is no way to commune with the Moon Maiden and wake her from her slumber.
Miu: Faria owes you many debts…
Miu: I only wish I could do more for you.
Yulie: Well, you’ve given us something to work with.
Yulie: Let’s go to Sinca Village – see if Medius left any clues. Eldore: Good idea.
Yulie: Thank you, Miu.
Scardigne: Wait. I shall go with you. I have a debt to repay…
Scardigne: …With your permission, my lady. Miu: Of course.
Miu: Travel safely. May Yggdra’s blessings be upon you.
Father Yggdra: Ha hah! Fat chance.
CUTSCENE MUSIC: “New Allies” (Unreleased Track)
So now we get Scardigne in our party full time now. Scardigne essentially becomes our Replacement Leonard now that shit-for-brains is no longer a part of the active party. He’s a native short sword user and has about half the short sword skill line filled in by the time we get him and enough Skill Points to fill in the majority of the rest of it as well as most of one of the two types of magic.
I went with healing magic because that’s the only thing the AI can use effectively.
The thing about Scardigne is he doesn’t really get a lot of play in a lot of people’s games because Level-5 did something REALLY fucking stupid with his equipment setup. I sort of touched on it at the start of the game, but you can’t remove any piece of his armour. Nor can you upgrade it to improve its stats. Ergo, you can’t improve his defense stats at all in a section of the game where having best available armour is essential for your survival against certain enemies and bosses out there.
It’s all done in the name of preserving the mystery of who’s under that mask at the expense of gameplay cohesion. It’s a similar conceit that leaves us without a useable Incorruptus for the next four hours of gameplay and two boss fights.
Because Akihiro Hino woke up one morning, walked into Level-5’s offices, and punched out the lead gameplay designer and by the time the poor bastard woke up, this stretch of the game was hardcoded into the source code and locked in place by Hino’s admin password. …Or so I’d like to imagine, because I don’t know how else anyone in their right mind would think that what we’re about to go through in this chapter was a good idea.
Eldore: Medius was a well-connected man. Scardigne: And a dependable one if the Archduke entrusted him with the Ark. Yulie: I wish I could have met him.
OVERWORLD MUSIC: “The Continent of Nadias” (Disc 1, Track 15)
Oh joy, back to the Van Haven Waste…
CUTSCENE: Return to Sinca
CUTSCENE/AREA MUSIC: “Sinca Village” (Disc 1, Track 14)
Our heroes return to Sinca Village for the first time since the end of the first game, buoyed by the slim hope of finding a clue to the location of the Moon Maiden’s Ark somewhere in the ruins.
Scardigne: Is this it? Sinca Village? Yulie: Yes. Or at least it was. You can see there’s not much left. Scardigne: What happened here? Eldore: Leonard and the others spent their infancy here. The villagers must have found out too much about the Knights. Orren: You literally could have ended that sentence on “Leonard,” and it would have sufficed. Yulie: Let’s split up and see if we can find any clues.
When we get control over Yulie again it becomes a game of “find and talk to the glowy things.”
Hidden around Sinca are several “Memory Fragments.” Inspecting each of them will give you more clues to piece together what should be by now a blindly obvious narrative, given how much they’ve telegraphed it over this and the last game.
Yulie: It’s a bucket… I think I’ve seen this before.
Eldore: There must be something we can find in these ruins…
(They are intently searching the area).
Orren: (Poor Medius. Dumb bastard didn’t realize what he was dragging out of those ruins…)
There’s always a red herring in the bunch. It doesn’t matter what order you check out these Memory Fragments in. It’s one of the advantages of putting no effort into things and representing items by a glowing dot: they can be anything you need them to be.
Yulie: Oh, wow. Is THAT what we’re doing? I had noooo idea. Scardigne: Oh. Sorry. I keep forgetting that Leonard isn’t here so I don’t need to remind you every few minutes. Carry on then.
Yulie: Which house belonged to Medius?
Yulie: It’s a mirror. …Oh my gosh, I remember this.
Yulie: It’s a doll. …I think I used to play with this as a kid.
The game briefly fades to black here.
When it fades back again, all the Memory Fragments have been rearranged around the village for round 2 of the hunt.
Yulie: Ungh! M-my head… Wait. “Underneath the earth it hides…” What the heck? Where did that come from?
Eldore: Just what secrets did Medius know about the Knights?
More running around.
Scardigne: If there are answers to be found here, Yulie, I think you must be the one to discover them.Because you’ve all turned into static NPCs who aren’t gonna do shit for this segment.
Let’s see if Orren will actually say something, ANYTHING now that he’s an NPC. C’mon, Level-5, you wanted to step up the Avatar’s involvement in the game. Let’s see whatcha got for us…
(They seem to be pondering something.)
Oh. Well. Fuck you, then.
Orren: You have a plan, right? Yulie: Get the Ark, make a pact, kick the shit out of Grazel and save the world myself. Orren: Brilliant plan. You wanna maybe get dinner or something later?
Yulie: What was that? I can’t hear you over how competent I am.
It’s a dot! GET DOT!!!
DOT GET!
Yulie: Ngh! My head feels like it’s going to spit open… Wait. “Where a circle moon lights the waterside…” Okay, now what does that even mean?
Yulie: Gya! My head… I can’t take it any more……… W-wait! “There the silver bow doth bide…” Oh man, I think I’m going crazy here.
CUTSCENE: Yulie Remembers
Yulie looks over the ruins one more time as the memories come flooding back to her finally.
Yulie: Hmmm.
Eldore: What’s wrong, Yulie?
Yulie: I… I think I grew up here…
Yulie: With Leonard, and Caesar and the others.
Eldore: What?!
Scardigne: Hmm.
CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Sinca’s Children” (Disc 2, Track 15)
Yulie: I remember now. Scardigne: About Medius? Yulie: Yeah. There were five of us. The babies they found in the Dogma Rift and raised in this village: Leonard, Caesar, Kara, Setti…
Well, that other shoe took its sweet time in dropping.
Yulie: Medius raised us like his own children, and continued investigating the Rift. And that’s when he discovered the connection between us and the Knights. Eldore: You were Pactmakers. Yulie: Right. Medius was afraid of what the Knights were capable of. And so he locked away our memories, and entrusted us each to different parents. Scardigne: And do you know where he might have concealed the Ark of the Moon Maiden? Yulie: Hmm…
Yulie: “Underneath the earth it hides, where a circle moon lights the waterside – there the silver bow doth bide.” Eldore: Charming. Yulie: It’s a poem Medius taught me… I think. He recited it all the time. Scardigne: Well, I have heard that the Moon Maiden’s Ark is in the shape of a bow.
Eldore: That sounds like the Van Haven Waste. The whole area sits atop a series of caverns. Yulie: Right. Then that’s the place to look.
And now we’re officially done with Sinca for the duology.
So let’s head down into the Van Haven Waste down the hill and see what kind of bullshit plot contrivances are going to keep us from just walking in there and claiming the bow in a few minutes like we really should be doing.
AREA MUSIC: “The Van Haven Waste” (Disc 2, Track 12)
Of course this thing just HAS to be in the Van Haven Waste. The worst, most convoluted area of the game outside of Redhorn Isle, of course. Though, in all fairness, at least this area isn’t another hallway area, so there’s that.
Still…
CUTSCENE: Another Downed Windwalker
Team Yulie enters the Waste as unassumingly as a 60 year-old Gen X’er, a purple haired girl, an androgyne in flamboyant armour, and a mute possibly can.
I also caught Yulie in mid-blink in this shot so she momentarily looks like Brock from Pokémon. Ah well, throw another one on the “embarrassing screenshots of Yulie” pile. It’s right at home with Robo-Yulie and the uncounted boiled leather pantyshots.
Yulie: What’s that?
A Windwalker glider goes tearing by overhead.
Well, he’s in a hurry to get somewhere. I wonder why?
Oh. He’s trying to outrun a wyvern, that’s why.
…Two wyverns. Weeeeell…
Good luck, buddy. You’re fucked.
Eldore: One of the Windwalker’s gliders. Yulie: He’s in trouble! Let’s help. Orren: You did see the pair of wyverns chasing him, right? You remember wyverns right? Big, strong, aggressive, LOTS of teeth! And we don’t got a Caesar to stop ‘em this time. Scardigne: Hah. Heroes don’t need Caesars. Orren: …THE FUCK?!
Eldore: He fled east. This way. Let’s move!
And then we’re off to attempt another rescue. Oh god, how are we gonna fuck this one up?
Orren: I just remembered, I left the stove on back in Sinca Village. I’ll catch up with you guys lat— Eldore: Oh come the fuck on, Niles.
Alright then. Let’s go get murdered.
Eldore: What are the Windwalkers doing here? Scardigne: You said Yshrenia still occupies Baccea? Yulie: He’s a long way from home. Come on!
So I make a good old college try at actually playing as Yulie in battle, because this is pretty much her big chapter in the game. However, it doesn’t really last because I don’t really like the way the bow and arrow fighting style plays.
The only times I usually hop into Yulie is when I need to make proactive use of her various support abilities that the AI is too stupid to use on their own.
I don’t like the fact that the bow does such low damage compared to other weapons, and because it’s a ranged weapon type, that means you can enter battle and aggro enemies from afar while your AI party members just sit around doing nothing because they’re too far away to register that there’s enemies nearby. So that usually means you get swarmed by enemies and killed while Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum just stand there gawking at the whole show.
Now scoring twice as many hits per turn as the axe wielder is all well and good, but I’m something of an instant gratification kind of guy, so I’d rather take the massive damage hits of axe over the rapid fire whittling hits of the bow.
Apparently, bows get really good in the post-game, because you couldn’t go two feet without running into someone with a really powerful bow on them, but for right now they kind of suck and they will continue to suck until you grind out X number of hours off of your soul to pay the price the game asks of you to unlock all its good stuff.
So the standard set of enemies are back in play here in the Waste. Fire, Wind, and Earth type enemies above, and Water type enemies below.
The lone new addition to the rogue’s gallery for this chapter is this, the Glacies Wyvern, the first of our Wyvern pallet swaps, not counting the two we just saw in the cutscene. We’ll get to those in a bit.
As you can guess, they’re weak to slashing attacks and fire based skills and hardened against ice attacks.
After I deal with the Wyvern, I hop into the Avatar, essentially assuming control over the character I will be playing as from now until the endgame, barring a few parts here and there.
These damn doors are back in play again.
And just like last time they are strategically locked to ensure you have to take the long way around to your destination.
Will this one open for us?
Small victories.
Once again, the enemy difficulty curve continues its skyrocket trajectory, as giant enemies like these Ice Giants are now able to one-shot you with their regular attacks if you’re not properly buffed against them.
Yulie: He fled east! Eldore: That glider’s no match for wyvern speed.
The game takes a small measure of mercy on you and offers you a save point directly before the boss arena. Trust me, you’re going to need it.
Presenting for your
pleasure: the second hardest boss fight in the game. That’s not artificially handicapped by Leonard coming back.
CUTSCENE: Earth and Wind
Well, he’s dead.
Regardless, the wyverns clamour closer to the crash site, no doubt about to snap the poor Papitaur in half like a Christmas cracker.
Yulie pauses, taken aback by the two wyverns.
However, because Yulie is a hero, like for real, she charges at them undaunted anyway.
Eldore: Oh gods, here we go again…
Scardigne: Unfunny Final Fantasy XIII joke!
Orren: FOR GLORY! 
“Da fuq? Ey, Nigel! Git a lowd ‘a dis shite!”
I have no idea why idea why I made the wyverns Cockey…
If that isn’t a “Let’s do this!” face…
CUTSCENE/BOSS FIGHT MUSIC: “A Worthy Opponent Draws Near” (Disc 1, Track 8)
The wyverns, however, are more than keen to indulge Yulie’s heroic deathwish, it seems.
Shit.
BOSS BATTLE: Solum & Ventus Wyverns (no commentary)
And so it begins, a fight against two heavy-hitting massive enemies at the same time without a usable Knight to help get you through it.
This is the point, right here, and right now, where it becomes inescapably clear that Level-5 a) utterly detests you as a player, and b) had no goddamn idea what they were doing when planning out the flow of this game.
Who does shit like this? Who thinks it’s a good idea to make a game built around a specific mechanic, make that mechanic integral to your continued progress throughout its narrative, and then yank that mechanic away from you without then scaling down its difficulty to compensate for the fact that you don’t have that key mechanical element at your disposal anymore?
Idiots. That’s who. The other answer, of course, is sadists, though I’m a strong believer in the axiom of “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence,” and if there’s one thing White Knight Chronicles just radiates, it’s incompetence.
These two wyverns have charge attacks that they deploy very frequently, and because you don’t have a Knight on you, you don’t have any way to Turn Break them and stop it from happening, so you just need to eat them every time like a chump.
They consists of hitting you with massive damage from their native element and inflicting a status ailment like KO.
And of course, because they’re wyverns, they have nasty tendency to take to the sky and become invulnerable to everything but ranged hits and magic… which the AI can’t cast. Fuck my life.
Again, as you can probably guess just by their colour and each of their names, the Ventus Wyvern is a wind-based monster, while the Solum Wyvern is an earth-based one. After this boss fight, if you come back to the Van Haven Waste, you will find them here and there around the area, along with their fire-based brother the Ignis Wyvern.
Though thankfully, they’re usually alone when you encounter them.
Both wyverns have a roar attack that will inflict status ailments like Poison or Darkness as well.
And both wyverns have the same whirlwind attack that knocks you off balance and does wind elemental damage to you to boot, just like the Wyvern Rex did.
Keeping Fortify and Mana Barrier on as many members of the party as you can is key to staying alive in this fight. As are chaining as many stat-breaking skills as you can on the wyverns.
Because they’re both bastards, and nearly every attack they have will knock you off balance and interrupt your skills and spells because spells take an agonizingly long time to charge in this game.
Case in point. The Avatar somehow chased off after the Solum Wyvern on the other side of the boss arena, and nearly got himself killed while under the AI’s control, so when I hopped back into him to get him back to focus on the Ventus one, he was nearly dead.
Eventually, Eldore will shout out the strategy you need to follow for this fight: pick a wyvern and focus on it exclusively until you kill it. Then go after the second one.
So I flip everyone from “Fight As You See Fit” to “Focus On My Target” in an attempt to get them to come to me so we can all hammer on the Solum Wyvern.
But then Yulie died.
And Orren died.
And I spent a tense few seconds waiting to see if the AI controlling Eldore would be quick or smart enough to pull off a Raise spell on either Orren or Yulie before the wyverns killed him too.
This is about as close to a wipe-out loss I’ve ever come in a boss battle in this LP. And of course, it’s in THIS battle too…
To my relief, however, Eldore revives Yulie, and then Yulie revives me while Eldore begins to heal Yulie back to full health. See what I mean about “Heal First” being the only viable AI tactic setting in this game?
The AI can’t do much right, but it can save your sorry ass if you get lucky enough with it.
With everyone healed and focused on the Solum Wyvern, the momentum of the fight shifts dramatically into my favour.
I’ve got it down to a quarter heath, and I’m now laying on the status effects in preparation for the kill.
It charges up for another haymaker…
Eldore: DENIED!Anchor Blade is a great skill for the long sword skill line. It does decent damage, inflicts slow if it hits, has no charge time and takes only a single AC to pull off instead of an amount of MP. Moreover, because it’s not magic, the AI actually has a decent chance of actually using it on its own too.
Yay, lowered expectations!
Eldore is also a friggin GOD in this battle because the long sword skill line has a lot of slashing attacks in it. This screenshot is in the midst of an attack that scored nearly 1000 damage against this bastard by the time it was done.
See, a distinct lack of Leonard makes everyone better in this game.
And just for the icing on the cake, I kill it with a wind elemental spell, the tier 3 single target spell Lightning Bolt.
Nice job, old fart!
And now that it’s just down to one wyvern, this fight is pretty much in the bag.
Without its friend there to help it, its damage dealing potential has been cut in half and we don’t have a second wyvern skulking about and harassing us with outside shots while we take it out.
If you just repeat what you did to the first one on it, it should go down in no time.
It’s not going to make it easy on us, however, as it takes back to the sky again.
It desperately uses its whirlwind attack on the party, but we’ve got one sure-fire way to bring it back down: earth magic.
I have Eldore spam Rock Skewer on it…
And eventually it proves enough to knock it out of the air.
Then it’s Omnislash time again.
Eldore actually does enough damage to it on this attack that it opens and breaks a Break Chance on its head in a single blow. Usually you need to strike it twice to do that.
Go Eldore.
He looks like he’s just about to bury that blade in its head, doesn’t he?
Finally, Orren lands the killshot on it with Deathdriver, the most powerful slashing attack for the axe skill line.
It’s incredibly satisfying to watch and hear. He spins around using the weight of the axehead to compound his momentum, hitting the target up to two times, doing double damage if both hits land.
POW!
DOWN GOES FRAIZAH!
And that right there is the second-most difficult boss fight in the game. The most difficult one is coming up in the next chapter.
I make this shit look easy, don’t I?
CUTSCENE: Pardon the Interuption
Rekk: Uuuuugh-AH! Yulie: You okay? Rekk: Uhh… Yes, thank you! Eldore: Tell me, what brings you so far from home? Rekk: Oh—Captain Osmund ordered all Windwalkers fit for combat to assemble on the Van Haven Waste. Yulie: Osmund’s here? Rekk: Yes ma’am. Eldore: Hmm. He might know the terrain better than us. We should speak with him.
One fade to black later…
Rekk leads us to the Windwalker encampment down in the caverns.
And oh-ho-hoo. Look who we have here. Why hello Cyrus, fancy meeting you here. Killed any good Farians today?
Cyrus: So technically there’s actually FIVE Uncharted games, but because no one bought Golden Abyss— Rekk: Captain! Pardon the intrusion.
Osmund: Oh thank gods, I thought he’d never shut up.
Yulie: Hey, I know you!
Cyrus: And I know you.
Osmund: And I know all of you. What do I win?My respect.
Osmund: I see… So you have come seeking that Knight’s Ark? Eldore: Aye, that’s correct.
Yulie: Osmund, why are you with Cyrus of all people? Osmund: Ah, my good friend Cyrus saved us when those Yshrenian nincompoops attacked Baccea. Cyrus: Hmph.
Cyrus: Just because I’ve renounced Balandor doesn’t mean I’ll sit idly by while Yshrenia fouls up the countryside. Eldore: That still doesn’t explain why you’re here. Osmund: Oooh, I am so glad you asked. Naturally, we are fighting to take back our village.
Osmund: We intend to destructify them all, one by one!
Yulie: Destructify? Eldore: Well, that sounds rather colourful. Cyrus: Most of the bases in the area, they’re Yshrenian supply posts. If we can destroy them, their whole army will feel the hurt. Osmund: As long as you are here, you should join us. Unify and destructify! Eldore: Mmm. Very well. If it means fewer Yshrenian soldiers to slow us down… Osmund: Good, that settles it. You will team up with Cyrus.
Osmund: You can even do a little shopping.
CUTSCENE MUSIC: “New Allies” (Unreleased Track)
And there it is, we have finally landed the best guest character in the game in our party. Say what you will about the shitty way the game has handled his characterization so far, Cyrus is probably the closest you get to having an actual fourth character in your party outside of Count Drisdall and Miu.
He’s also the last guest character we get in the storyline of the game. So that means the sporadic enforced escort mission the game has hoisted on us for most of its run is nearly at an end.
So now I bet you’re all asking, “crow, what the fuck? What’s Cyrus doing here? Wasn’t he in the Lost Forest the last time we saw him? Does the game explain any of this?” and of course the answer is “FUCK NO, NICE TRY!”
We don’t get a single bloody word of explanation as to how and why Cyrus backtracked from the Farian boarder to Baccea to the Waste, or if he’s still got a bug up his ass about Faria, OR what the hell happened to the four idiots he’d convinced to follow him. Because they don’t show up again in the storyline. They turn up in an online Avatar quest and the Avatar Story very briefly, so they do actually survive the events of the game, but beyond that they’re just kind of forgotten about.
So there you go; that’s the resolution of the cliff-hanger the first game ended on. Cyrus kind of wandered into Farian territory briefly, turned around, and wandered back out and ditched the only four people left on the planet who still gave a shit about him somewhere along the way.
Thanks for that, Akihiro Hino. You’re a MASTERFUL writer.
I feel like an exasperated Creative Writing 101 teacher grading a student’s shitty fantasy story sometimes with this game. I wish I could write on the game in red ink “I WILL NOT SET UP PLOT POINTS I HAVE NO INTENTION OF PAYING OFF”.
Okay, rant over… for now, anyway.
So we get to see Cyrus in battle as a guest character and he fairs rather well. He’s a short sword wielder, although we know that from watching the cutscenes of him fighting all the way back at the start of the first game. He wields a short sword known as the Planadin Blade, and is the same sword he always wields in cutscenes so yay consistency.
He’s also got a higher HP ceiling than the party presently does, by a factor of 100 HP, the widest margin so far. He’s also got higher stats than the party does at this point, so you don’t really need to babysit him the way you had to every other guest character up till this point.
The only down sides to him as a party member are that he doesn’t have any real support abilities or healing spells, nor any offensive magic, so don’t expect him to do much more than rush in and blindly attack the enemies in front of him. Also if he dies, it’s game over.
Much like almost every weapon and piece of clothing/armour worn by other characters in this game, you can actually bind Cyrus’s sword, armour and cape eventually from a Binding Post and wear it yourself if you feel like turning any of the party members into Cyrus cosplayers. It’s called the Admiral’s set, which is a weird thing to call it since Cyrus was the head of the army, not the navy, but whatever.
Scardigne: I never expected to find the captain of Balandor’s royal guard with the Windwalkers. Eldore: It’s a small miracle you got Osmund to trust you. Cyrus: I had the opportunity to rescue him, that’s all. Yulie: Well it must have been some rescue.It no doubt involved explosions and swordfights, and Cyrus and Osmund mowing down like a hundred Ysrhenian soldiers each before flying out of Baccea on a glider like the escape scene in the middle of the original Expendables. You know, something totally that would have awesome, because it involved the two most badass non-Caesar characters in the game… so of course we don’t get to see it.
When we emerge from the underground again, it’s suddenly dusk. This is another “never-ending sunset” deal, but I don’t care because I have a thing for desert landscapes at dusk.
I’d move to Arizona if I could, but that damn GBS Skinwalker thread scared the piss out of me about the Mojave Desert at night. ...And Joe Arpaio has scared the piss out of me about it during the day.
Here’s a Rock Hound, the earth elemental type of the Megalo Tigris, which completes another set of elemental pallet swaps.
Cyrus: Let’s hit those outposts hard. Eldore: This plan is madness… *sigh* Lead the way.
Eventually, we start encountering Yshrenian soldiers above ground and a smattering of Ancient War Machines…
Which tend to ruin your evening.
This was the first of four game overs I scored while recording this footage.
It taught me that I need to have +Fortify and +Mana Barrier on at all times when facing these things from now on.
Again, these things aren’t that bad when you break the hell out of them and gang up on them. It’s only when you let the AI do its own thing that it tends to overwhelm and annihilate you.
Heroes: 1, Tank: 0
Scardigne: So these supply posts were what made their attack on Faria possible.You can see the first of the three outposts off in the distance. They usually consist of a Zore Crystall surrounded by a few army tents and maybe a siege tower.
They also have a heavy hitter guarding the periphery that you need to take out first. In this case, it’s another Black Knave.
…Which takes a dirt nap thanks to TEAMWORK.
The Zore Crystal will power up when aggro’d and start throwing magic attacks at you, while the army tents will spit soldiers out at you. Just keep your barriers up and clear out threats as they come up while focusing on the Crystal and you should be just fine.
The funny thing about these tents is, if you attack a freshly spawned soldier out in front of it, the soldier will disappear and take no damage from the hit and then reappear on the other side of the tent a few seconds later. Just another example of this game’s flawlessly coding at work.
Eldore: A Windwalker and an ex-knight? Talk about strange bedfellows.
And here’s (part of) outpost number 2. You’re not missing shit all, trust me.
The one thing worth showing off here that I haven’t really got the chance to because I usual fight these things with a Knight is the damage textures these things adopt.
If you do enough damage to a leg of a siege tower, it will start to look all frayed and busted up, indicating that it’s near breaking. Kinda fascinating, but not that much.
Yulie: Osmund hasn’t changed. Eldore: You mean “learned his lesson.” Scardigne: His people refuse to bend, I admire that. Cyrus: Such strength has served them well during the war.Before we go off to take out outpost number 3, however, Cyrus interrupts us suddenly.
Eldore: Understood.