I ended the last post on here right after finding the Mew Tail after an extremely anti-climactic battle with Barney at the end of that one castle. And now...
...on to the land of the Buttweasels! It turns out I found the entrance that leads to Mahabutt's room
first rather than wandering around exploring the other entrances, so the upgrade to my characters will be happening pretty soon.
Also, it turns out that those skulls are actually the exact same skull used to trigger the Cthulhu fight in Sardine's cave. So... yeah, don't step on those, they make bad things happen. XD
And here's Mahabutt. It's just Bahamut with the consonants swapped around (and an extra T added) but I really like that name for some reason. XD
And here's what everyone looks like now, following the upgrade. Only the regular human "Dude" character class actually gets the "couldn't use magic before but can now" thing in this hack, so the appearance of these guys is the only immediately visible change. They can now use higher-level magic, though, so I'll be stopping by the purple city to stock up before too much longer.
Muyeo's new world map sprite.
And Kurb's (slightly different) new one.
Claws has a black suit with a (scrunched for space) Burijeoo symbol on it. At least outside of battle -- in battle everything's still red since black wouldn't show up against the background.
And Froog is... completely unchanged? Well, his battle sprites are different at least, so that's something.
There's that tower, which must mean this is the Yukkhnurm Desert someone mentioned a while ago.
New battle sprites! And for some reason regular-Wurms show up in the desert, while Sand Wurms were showing up in the volcano. Huh??
(Also, I really don't like the worm graphic used in this hack that much, mainly because the original was so much better. The only reason this one is still in there is because the base hack that I built mine off of changed a bunch of enemy graphics randomly and the worm was unfortunately one of them, and I never got around to changing it back to the original FF1 one.)
New battle sprites' winning/magic-use animations.
More Buttweaseling around.
Knowing humans, I'm guessing the humans got all stupid and jealous of the Buttweasel's superior farting powers and that's what drove them apart.
Ah, apparently the Castle of Ordeals was name-changed to the Castle of Myuu. Which is basically "Mew" written in differently-romanized Japanese. I guess that makes the presence of a Mew Tail in a chest there make
slightly more sense.
Though it does make me wonder what the story of that place was -- was it populated by Mews before Barney came and ate/killed them, stuffing their tails in treasure chests afterward? XD
Appropriately, there are camels in the desert here.
Ribbit. With no period, for some odd reason.
Ummm...
Black crosshairs shown here are Ribbit's location on the world map. So, uh... not even "north," let alone "far north." Guess I just never changed this NPC's text to match the new map layout. Whoops!
For some reason, this awkward Ondu recolor (and the walking broom) have no text in their textboxes. Weird.
Well,
that's a really weird NPC textbox here. I can't remember what this one was originally saying but for some odd reason I replaced it with something completely different and unrelated.
Apparently the "Sky Warriors" are now the "Gas Warriors," and they probably flew Tootamatic Turtle style, by jet-propelling themselves with their farts.
Apparently "Ghost" is a language. Hence all those "Boo..." textboxes whenever you talk to a ghost.
Arrr, mateys. Hardy har har.
The caravan now shows up on the map as a desert-colored town, rather than just a small desert patch that you just kinda had to guess was important.
I can't afford that fairy yet anyway, though. And that would lead in to the
third major dungeon when I haven't even beaten the second yet, so I think I'll hold off on that one for now.
Um... I'm not entirely sure what this is! There's a town and also a blue temple-ruins looking place in a ring of mountains. I'm guessing this is where the water fiend is, but I'm not sure how having a world-map entrance to the underwater ruins place will work -- I'm getting to the point in this hack where I really can't remember how things go.
So instead, I'll head back to the volcano and have that rematch with Android 18.
Hopefully this goes better than last time. I made sure to use Anti-Fire and Anti-Zzzter spells to protect everyone from her Fire Bomb and Super Zzzter, but... ended up having to retry once because Froog was the only one doing heavy damage with his regular attacks and he got killed early on.
Rematch number two, this time with Claws using Invis so she wouldn't get hit so much, Muyeo using Shield to lower the damage he was taking (and then using Warp until he ran out to do some damage himself), Kurb protecting everyone from fire and zzzter attacks and then helping to attack a bit, and Froog doing most of the damage (especially after having Fast cast on him), as you can see here.
Yep, finally managed to beat her this time around!
Quick stop at the church and inn at the weird purple town, and then...
Onward to this place. As it turns out, you
can just walk right on in to this place from the world map -- no need to go through the "get the fairy, free her from the bottle, and get the stuff you need to go underwater" quest at all.
However... you can't actually go beyond the top floor through this way -- the stairs leading down from here have been removed! So it's just the floor with the mermaids hanging out in their rooms full of random treasure that you can get to from the world map. Everything else is below the surface, and inaccessible until after you can go underwater.
A weird blob. Hmm...
And apparently this is a "Cave" of some sort, even though it doesn't exactly look very cave-ish. I don't know what the full name of this area is, since nobody ever seems to call it anything but "the Cave."
Apparently mermaids are obsessed with butts, or something.
"Fooky." Well, that's a pretty awful name for somebody to have. XD
There's some good armor lying around here -- that Kirbium Bracelet is the first body-armor-type item I've found that Kurb can equip since waaay back around the second or third town.
Apparently random encounters only happen in a few parts of this floor -- the narrow path leading to a couple of good items, and a random spot in the corner. Here's the upgraded version of the Golems.
And here's a more watery-themed enemy, Water Bugs...
...which, like Grylloblattids and Yuggs before them, tend to paralyze everyone.
New helmet for Muyeo, which I think is actually the first helmet-type item I've found that he
could equip at all. Must be specifically made for Myuuoo.
And these, which replaced Froog's Frog Gauntlets.
Killer Algae aren't particularly special at all. The Water Bugs seemed like more of a threat, honestly.
Apparently there's a lot of people here who babble randomly about how much they love legs. I guess they were supposed to be the mermaids who left the water and grew legs, or something.
Um... no, I don't think I've found any beer in this game so far, random drunk hanging out behind the church. XD
Apparently the guy who runs the caravan is named "Osamilo."
And here's
this pirate, with a very goofy textbox... XD
And you 'don't' know how to 'use' quotation marks 'correctly.'
More leg obsession here.
Apparently the "Gas Warriors" were ghosts, or spoke ghost-language, or something?
And here's Dope, who apparently saw a robot fall from the sky.
..."You can't go in the cave without Beer."
Uh... whut??
That doesn't even make sense. XD
Some really odd terrain around here, with nothing around except various landscapes. I wonder what kind of random critters are here?
Well, there's these guys showing up as random encounters rather than a miniboss, for one thing...
And also these, which are really oddly weak for the point in the game where they appear. Not sure what's up with that.
Here's the waterfall cave area where the robot fell from the sky.
Populated by Blubbery Blurbys and Evil Ranoids (both of which never had their graphics changed...), apparently.
And also golems. Lots of golems.
Here's the treasure room at the end, as well as that random bat in an unreachable area.
Treasure room is guarded by mummies and birds, for some odd reason.
KABOOM!
And here's Mr. Robot, who conveniently gives me a Num Warp Sphere. Apparently this can take me to Dr. Gero's lab. Assuming I didn't change anything, the entrance to that would be from the top of the tower in Yuhkknurm Desert that I can't actually get into yet.
And here's a staff that nobody in my party can equip, since I don't have any Kaatuoo.
This, on the other hand, is much more useful to me -- a new weapon for Kurb!
Here's the Num Warp Sphere. Apparently Dr. Gero's lab is in another nherbi from this hack's main world map, so you need this to get there.
Another seemingly random and pointless landform here -- a little island with mountains, forests, swamps, and plains on it but nothing else.
Apparently it's some kind of Jurassic Park island or something -- this is the only place on the world map so far that I've encountered the dreaded Barneysaurus Sux, which in this game is stronger than Barney himself. Actually put up a bit of a fight, though it was still dead in two turns.
...apparently fairies have the magical power to draw beer from springs. Well, that's a weird one.
Also, found a level-8 magic shop. "Puku" is Ranoid-exclusive and "BrgtB" (Bridget Blast) is specifically for half-Burijeoo... I can't remember who can and can't use the others, though I assume Muyeo can use 2nd Nherbi (the replacement of X-Zone/Zap from the original game, which sends enemies into the Second Nherbi which is a super-dangerous universe full of Zukkus and all sorts of general weirdness) since he could learn Warp earlier.
Flies away... to the space literally one tile above where I was standing at the time. Whoops!
Beer coming from the bottom of a spring. Where the heck is this, some kind of magical Germany where
everything is beer-themed? XD
Umm... it does have alcohol in it, yeah... but I think everyone already knew that.
Apparently some glitchiness with the Beer item -- it's listed as "PBeer" for some odd reason (I assume that P is supposed to be the little potion icon instead), and in the description it's the glitchy-looking "B`r" rather than "Beer."
Ah, that's the identity of Big Boss #3 -- Squiddilix, the giant squid guy who appeared in several of my older game ideas. His first appearance would have been way back in the late '90s when I was planning on making a series of RPG Maker 95 Supernum games; he would've been one of the two major villains (the other being Cthulhu) in the third game in the series, and the primary villain in the 4th (after he escaped the Second Nherbi while you were busy fighting Cthulhu and then traveled to Earth, which he was going to try to eat.) He later appeared as a much less important boss in
Supernum and the Eight Orbs of Power which I was making using the OHRRPGCE in... 1999, I think. He would've also been the main villain of one of the Supernum games I had planned on making in the 2000s, which involved him apparently becoming the "owner" of the 16th Nherbi after Dark Blubber was finally killed and as a result becoming drastically more powerful, which caused him to start flying through space and attempting to eat entire planets.
And... apparently Squiddilix's place is a mess of purple, with just a blank purple void where water is supposed to be. Not sure what's up with that. Maybe that's just a side-effect of the beer I needed to get down here (which "makes you very drunk") and it's actually just normal water-colored, as seen through purple-lensed beer goggles. XD
Next time: exploring this weird-looking place, and
maybe getting around to the Squiddilix battle... maybe.
