White Knight Chronicles I & II Part #55 - In The Name Of The Moon (Part 2)

Part 55: In The Name Of The Moon (Part 2)

CUTSCENE: The Therapy Session

Wherein Eldore actually does something productive and Cyrus gets over his bullshit. See? Everything is better without Leonard.

CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Reflecting” (Disc 1, Track 18)

Cyrus sits in the cave sharpening his sword as he’s approached by Eldore.

Cyrus: What?

Eldore: Do you know what’s happening in Balandor? It lies besiege by Yshrenia’s forces as we speak.

Cyrus: Heh.

Eldore: You must remember Leonard, the White Knight’s Pactmaker?

Cyrus: Yes.

Eldore: He rescued Queen Cisna, and now he’s fighting to save the world.

Cyrus: Hmff. Good for him.

Cyrus has the appropriate response to whenever someone brings up the subject Leonard in this game.

Eldore: At least… he was.

Cyrus: What?

Eldore: Leonard fell in battle and has yet to wake.

Eldore: The White Knight’s power has sapped away his strength.

And not a fuck was given by Sir Cyrus of Balandor on that day.

Eldore: See that young lady? She has seen as much hardship as you. And still she fights.

Eldore: Cyrus. Have you no intention of helping your kingdom?

He ponders it for a moment…

Then turns away in disgust.

Cyrus: No, I… I have renounced my kingdom! Those bridges have been burned.

Because you’re an impulsive idiot. I’d say you got hoodwinked by Ledom, but you DIDN’T! You burned them of your own unprompted volition you dumb fuckstick.

I should probably ease up on ol’ Pubebeard, all told. After all, the train is about to pull into the Cyrus Redemption Station.

Eldore: Swallow you childish pride.

Cyrus: Hold your tongue!

Oh shit, son!

Yulie: Uh!

Yulie rushes to help Eldore, but Scardigne throws and arm between her and the two fuck up ex-royal knights.

Eldore: King Valtos spent this life—gave his life protecting the kingdom of Balandor. Perhaps as a knight you can ignore that… but not as a son.

His blade wavers in his grip.

Cyrus: Gha!

Eldore: But perhaps I have you wrong…

He turns and walks away.

Mic drop not pictured.

Eldore: Shall we be on our way?

And Cyrus is left to his lonesome to mull the merits of becoming a decent human being again. Because “depressed, drunken, racist manchild” hasn’t exactly been working out for him so far.

Winning Osmund’s eternal friendship notwithstanding, of course.

Eldore: The fools don’t realize they’re sitting on top of the Ark.

Okay, let’s clean up this shit.

Skadoosh. crow

+Aftermath.

Orren: Yeah, I broke your stupid crap, moron!

CUTSCENE: Can We Just Get This Ark Already?

Team Yulie returns to Osmund’s field HQ to report the good news.

Osmund: Ooh! Well done! Thank you.

Cyrus: The region is safe now. Yshrenia will be forced to abandon it.

Yulie: And we can look for the Ark!

Scardigne looks up at the night sky.

Scardigne: Yulie!

Scardigne: The “circle moon.”

Yulie: A full moon…

Yulie: We have to find that underground lake.

Osmund: Underground lake?

Osmund: Why that sounds like Van Haven’s Navel. I will mark it on your map of the Waste.

Here we go again…

Thankfully though, Osmund’s camp is close to the Navel, which turns out is that patch of greenery with the waterfalls flowing through it in the middle of the Waste where we found the Fiendslayer lance for the Dragon Knight the last time we were here.

Fun fact: if you start a fresh game from WKCII, like this part of the LP is running on, you don’t have the two optional Incorruptus weapons found in the first game in your inventory (Fiendslayer and the White Knight’s Sword of Malice). That said, the chests where you find them are still there in the Van Haven Waste and Greede’s Underbelly in the sequel, so you can claim them at your leisure.

In the midst of the river, the full moon’s light reflects a strange purple sheen in the ripples.

CUTSCENE: There The Silver Bow Doth Bide

Yulie: What’s this…?

Yulie: “Underneath the earth it hides, where the circle moon lights the waterside. There the silver bow doth bide.”

WOM!

Reacting to its Pactmaker’s presence, the Ark emerges from the water in a flash of purple light.

Yep. That’s a silver bow alright.

I’m just assuming it’s reacting to Yulie being here at the right time and all. For all I know, this has actually happened once a month for the last 18 years since Medius hid it here we’ve just been lucky enough that nobody’s happened upon it the other 215 times it’s done this.

Because full moons aren’t exactly rare occurrences in this world by the sound of it.

Yulie: That’s it. The Moon Maiden’s Ark.

CUTSCENE MUSIC: “The Ark of the Moon Maiden” (Game 2 OST, Track 12)

Yulie reaches for it, ready to claim, or rather, reclaim its power.

LOL, NOPE!

The Ark spits out a flash of white light and the booming roar that fills the cave does not portend anything good.

Huh. Maybe Yulie misremembered that whole “raised in Sinca with Leonard, et al.” and she just deluded herself into thinking she was Luthia’s Pactmaker out of a desperate lust for power?

Wouldn’t be that something?

Well, let’s find out, eh?

As the light fades, the party finds itself in the same ethereal plain where Leonard encountered the Phantom when he first touched Wizel’s Ark.

Orren: Well, this is… Not entirely unexpected.

Yulie: Ah!

Eldore: What?!

Behold the Efreet, one of the last new giant enemies introduced in the game. These are the giant versions of those little fish things, interestingly enough. There’s four elemental pallet swaps in total, each one named after a different mythological beast. The Efreet is the fire elemental one, this one right here. It’s named after the Ifrit of Islamic folklore, popularized by the Final Fantasy series as its go-to fire-elemental summon.

The water-based ones are blue and are called Krakens, named after the giant sea monster of European folklore.

The wind-based ones are green and are called Rudas, curiously clipped from “Garuda,” the bird-man warriors of Sanskrit mythology.

And lastly the earth-based ones are Behemoths, they’re brown and named after the massive mysterious beast from the Book of Job in the Christian Bible, and the apocryphal Hebrew Book of Enoch alongside Leviathan and Ziz, the great monsters of the sea and sky, respectively.

Scardigne: Gha! A trap.

Efreet: Warning: Ark defenses breached. You will now be destroyed.

BOSS BATTLE MUSIC: “A Worthy Opponent Draws Near” (Disc 1, Track 8)

So this thing is essentially the Moon Maiden’s version of the Phantom, a defense mechanism meant to keep the unworthy from claiming the Ark. However, unlike the Phantom, the Efreet is not intrinsically connected to the Incorruptus is guards like the Phantom is…

Ding!

I dunno, maybe this is something Medius put in place, but then you’d think it would recognize a grown up Yulie and we wouldn’t even have to fight this fight. But then Medius being a far-minded, short-sighted idiot is kind of par for the course of what we’ve learned about him so far.

So too are things that are just plopped down without any more thought or explanation behind them than “Well, it’s a thing that’s happening, isn’t it?”. So that’s the explanation I’m going with for what this thing and its purpose here is: It’s happening.

White Knight Chronicles! It’s pretty much just personally fucking with me now.

BOSS BATTLE: Efreet (no commentary)

Okay, so here we go, the last major fight of this chapter. Compared to the wyverns earlier, this fella’s a pushover.

These giant tubby fucks are all weak against impact attacks, so they’re easy pickings for an axe wielder like Orren.

I also went into this battle fully buffed, because you can actually game the battle system a little if you want to. If you cast all your buff spells before you trigger the cutscene that leads to the boss fight, your stat boots will carry over through the cutscene and still be applied once the boss battle starts.

It’s a lot quicker and easier than taking up to two minutes to cast all these buffs on your party in-battle where you run the risk of being knocked off balance and having your spells cancelled.

The Efreet calls for reinforcements early on in the battle by summoning a quartet of Salamanders to its side. Those two bulbous tentacles dangling from its sides are called Summoners, and each one summons a pair of fishes of its elemental type.

These are destroyable, by the way. Taking them out seals its ability to summon underlings, however, it will eventually regenerate both of them if you take too long beating it. This is just to give you some breathing room when facing it.

Again, +Aftermath works wonders here. It does weakness-matching damage to the Efreet and one-shots the Salamanders.

Then I hop into Eldore and get magic’d across the field by the Efreet, because “fuck you, love White Knight Chronicles II.”

Throughout the battle, Yulie and co. are freaking out like they’re getting beaten badly, yet I’m handling this thing kind of admirably, all told.

I even break the Summoner pods on it. And that’s enough to win this stage of the battle and trigger the cutscene.

CUTSCENE: Yulie’s Big Moment

The Efreet sends out a burst of fire towards our heroes.

Yulie: AAAAH!!!

Yulie: Uuuh…

Yulie’s able to stagger to her feet, but she’s not looking too good now, is she?

The Efreet starts to blur and her vision begins to blacken.

Yulie: Uhh…

Yulie: No…

She falls forward, completely beaten.

Oh, I guess she died then.

CUTSCENE MUSIC: “The Ark of the Moon Maiden” (Game 2 OST, Track 12)

Okay then. I guess we’re about to do a Kingdom Hearts opening sequence then.

Yulie: So this is it…

Yulie: This is where I die.

Yulie: Leonard… I’m sorry.

Don’t be, girl. He doesn’t deserve it.

Yulie: NO!

See. Good job!

Yulie: I didn’t come here just to give up.

Yulie: My friends need me.

Yulie: Give me the strength to save them!

And Yulie developed super powers and flew away to go star in a better video game.

WOOSH!

Mysterious Voice: Yulie…

Yulie: Huh?

Mysterious Voice: Yulie…

Yulie: Ah!

Yulie: You’re the Moon Maiden.

Luthia: Yulie, thy heart has been weighed. To wield my power, thou must serve thy friends first and foremost.

Luthia: As thou must know, the strength we Knights possess is formidable, and dangerous. It can twist a man’s heart, change a person beyond recognition.

Well, now we at least get a semi-explanation for why the Black Knight’s influence fucked with Kara and Shapur so much.

Luthia: Yulie… Art thou prepared to risk thy very self?

Yulie: Yes.

Luthia: Then Yulie, let thy prayers be answered.

Luthia: Master…

Luthia: To thee, all my power I bequeath.

The Moon Maiden turns back into blue glowy energy and flows into Yulie.

Aaaand we’re back.

Yulie: My turn, bitches.

CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Argent Goddess” (Game 2 OST, Track 13)

Good god, the Moon Maiden has a kick ass theme, it’s probably the best and most uplifting of all the Knight themes. It also has a nice little bit to it near the end of the song which features a heroic reprise of “The Ark of the Moon Maiden,” heard earlier in this chapter.

Yulie: O Luthia…

Yulie: Argent goddess, and beacon in the ancient night…

Yulie: Grant me your power…

Yulie: VERTO!

Well, it took goddamn long enough, but here we go: Knight #5.

I’m so giddy right now I don’t have anything snide or derisive to say. Look at that face. She’s so happy right now. And boy does she ever have the right to be.

Unlike Leonard and his transformation, Yulie 100% earned every moment of this one.

I have never been more happier to be playing as a sparkly purple metallic princess robot with a set of torpedo boobs.

Until someone walks in the room and I hard shutdown the PS3 in shame and embarrassment.

But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s all just take a moment and be happy for Yulie, the One Girl Akihiro Hino Got Right.

Scardigne: The fifth Knight…

Scardigne: The Moon Maiden!

Eldore: Yulie. Well done.

Cyrus: Ah—!

I think Cyrus just shit himself there.

Yulie: Come on!

Yulie: Let’s finish this!

So now it’s round two with the Efreet. This is our tutorial battle for how the Moon Maiden plays.

The Moon Maiden wields a bow, much like Yulie herself does. This bow, called El’Liet, is one of only two bows for the Moon Maiden in the game. …Yeah, Yulie gets the shaft when it comes to Incorruptus weaponry.

El’Liet is a decent enough weapon for now, however. It’s got a few attacks to it: a stabbing attack (Energy Shot), an impact attack (Concussive Arrow—perfect for fighting the Efreet), an area-off-effect healing spell (+Glittering Moonlight), an area-of-effect resurrection spell (+Pale Moonlight), and an enemy magic attack power breaking spell (Spirit Dance).

Yulie: So this is the Moon Maiden, my very own Knight!

The Moon Maiden isn’t as fast on the draw as Yulie is on foot. She has this very slow and deliberate drawing animation that takes a few seconds before she shoots again.

I use Spirit Dance to nerf the Efreet’s magic attack potential. The Moon Maiden literally spins around when she does this skill.

Yulie: You won’t hurt my friends!

When you Turn Break an enemy with the Moon Maiden, however, she looses an arrow at it instantly.

Yulie: There isn’t a place you can run where my arrows won’t find you.

I also felt I should show off +Glittering Moonlight, even though at that point in the fight I could have taken the Efreet without even bothering to heal.

The Moon Maiden hews very closely to Yulie’s stated mission of protecting others. It’s the only Incorruptus that has healing abilities that affect others and not just herself. The White and Dragon Knights’ Healer’s Soul skill only heal themselves.

I don’t show off +Pale Moonlight because there was no one there to revive with it. And if Yulie dies in this battle, it’s game over. What’s more you can’t revive yourself with it, so it’s kind of moot at this point, though I imagine I will find a use for it soon enough.

*cough*Brimflamme*cough*

And POW!

CUTSCENE: And That’s How It’s Done

With the Efreet defeated, we’re returned to the real world triumphant and with one more non-Leonard Knight under our control.

So, we saved someone and actually had them survive the post rescue, solved one of the dangling mysteries of the first game, put the hurt on Grazel’s troops, unlocked a new Knight, found Yulie’s purpose in the plot, and kicked Cyrus out of his petulant shitlord funk.

And all we needed to do was kick Leonard the fuck out of the game. We’re on a bloody roll right now.