Looking back at Uggy Barfoo (part 10 of many)

Last time, Enduo and company reached the Great Tree of Arkusazzo in the heart of the jungle on... that unnamed island in the southeast.  Which, looking at the game file, isn't even given a real name there -- it's literally just labeled as "South Island" which is about as generic of a name as you can get.  But yeah... after climbing to the top of the tree, the team found out that a backup crystal is needed (since the Ajrien Crystal broke) and ended up finding that backup crystal elsewhere in the tree.

Now we're going to the moon.

 But first I changed my team around a bit, found out that Bunneh kind of sucks due to his ridiculously low MP making it near-impossible for him to actually use that great lineup of special attacks (ki blasts, zzzter magic, and berserk!), encountered a Yogurt Snail or two randomly (it turns out that they drop massive amounts of konju and also Magical Sheep Yogurt, but give no experience points), and then changed my team around again.

 But after all that, I made my way up to the top of the tree again...

 ...and after putting the Su-Nearu Crystal into the teleporter machine, I walked outside and suddenly was sent up into the air for a bit before teleporting away.

 The point of arrival on the moon is that temple down there, with a big ol' runway of down arrows leading up to it for some bizarre reason.  The music here is the "sea floor" music from Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga.  And it's basically a second "world map" area, though much smaller than the first and with no water or... well, much of anything else besides flat land, mountains, and craters.  I mean, it's the moon.

Except in this game the moon seems to have an atmosphere -- either that or the Orbs randomly give you the power to survive without air and that's just never mentioned up to this point.

 Lots of new enemies up here -- some of them recolors (as seen here), but some completely new.  These are the two strongest varieties of Zos in the game, and of course they appear together so you can't just use Joguo's light/dark magic carelessly -- it'll end up healing one and hurting the other.

And yeah, I swapped Bunneh out for Joguo and made him a wizard again.  Mainly because wizard-Jakarjo wouldn't be too useful, what with his fire-based magic and not a lot elese.

 After wandering a bit, I stumble across a cave that seems to have had a close call from a pretty good-sized asteroid in the past.

 And inside the cave, there's... elves.  Though for some bizarre reason nobody ever comes out and says the E-word, not even the Yenrab when describing the moon's original blue-haired inhabitants.  The pointy ears are even mentioned, and yet nobody ever calls them elves.  It's kind of odd, since my later ideas specifically did call them elves!

 There's one random Yenrab who's turned against Nebozu here, hiding out in the cave with the elves.

 Most of them have blue hair, but a few randomly are blonde or even green-haired.  Also, there's the origin story for the airship we randomly found a while back.

 And yes, the moon really is made of cheese.  Well, the moon's core is, anyway.

 Over here on the other side of the map there's a town surrounding a ruined castle...

 ...and it turns out it's the Yenrab capital city or something along those lines.  See here: Yenrab referring to the other inhabitants of the moon but for some odd reason not calling them elves, just "moon-people."

 Yenrab armor shop here.  I don't think the pun in this armor description was intentional, as the next one up is "medium armor strengthened by dark magic," but it's kinda funny anyway.  All of this stuff is cursed, as you probably could've guessed.

 These guys are really annoying, despite having very low HP.  They're fast and tend to confuse you a lot, and they can heal each other too.

 And here's the acknowledgement of the "moon-people" having the defining feature of elves... but still not being called elves.

 Some new enemies.  Madasi Yenrab are a physically tougher variation of the Yenrab we met before (which also show up here, of course.)

Their name also is an anagram of "ADAM IS BARNEY," which I'm pretty sure was completely intentional.  Uh... yeah, I guess I probably should've put a "spoiler alert" on that little detail, you may see why later in this post. XD

 Being "blessed" by the Lord of Moronism means becoming completely enslaved by Moronic power and losing your sanity, pretty much.  Even the Yenrab seem to be disturbed by this.

 

Yenrab are asexual and don't have distinct genders, so they're a bit puzzled by the difference in appearance from one human to the next, apparently.  They also don't realize that Mejuai isn't even a human, as mentioned by Nancos waaaay back when we fought her in Larpz.

 There's one more variety of Kuarudo up on the moon, the purple Void Kuarudos that use light and darkness magic (plus ki blasts.)  There's no matching Kuarudo queen for these guys though, at least as far as the game shows.

...okay, technically they're not the last Kuarudo variety to appear in the game, but they're the last one that matters since the one random addition in the second half is pretty lame. XD

 After a bit more wandering I stumble across the last major landmark on the moon... Nebozu's castle, up at the top of a randomly not-to-scale cliff surrounded by regular world-map mountain tiles.

 After traveling through a lava (actually molten cheese) cave, I end up in this hallway filled with skeletons...

 ...and I'm ambushed by a mysterious enemy who states the obvious.

 And doesn't fill up their textboxes.

 Really doesn't fill up their textboxes.

 Aw, come on! That's only two words!

 ...ah, that's why.  It's Cheez Ball.

 Or Cheez Balls, actually, as there are several of them (five the first time, and then three after I restarted and tried again after being blasted by so many Cheese Breath attacks before I had a chance to counterattack that I ended up losing.)  They don't have much HP but they are pretty fast and they've ambushed you so they start the fight surrounding you and with a head-start in the turn order.  A major head-start, as they attack several times before you even get a single turn.

Once I managed to actually get a chance to hit them, the three Cheez Balls got wiped out pretty fast.

 And this actually traces aaaaaallllll the way back to my ancient The Kirby Lands website (last active: sometime around 2004-2005 when I was making this game), where an anonymous commenter randomly showed up out of the void of the Internet one day to say that The Kirby Lands (the OHRRPGCE game, not the website) sucked in a terrible-grammar, angry-internet-person way.

The Kirby Lands did suck, but there was no need for this guy to be such an asshole about it, so from that day forward he was christened "Cheez Ball."

Yep.  Statues of Mejuai.  There's more of them in front of Nebozu's castle, too.

 

 There's a lot of dramatic talking before the jump, even though the jump itself is very not-impressive since it's a single-tile-wide gap.  Whoops. XD

 When you first get here, it's impossible to go into the castle since the door is locked.  However, if you pull this switch...

 ...an earthquake happens and bridges pop out of the surrounding mountainside, making it possible to come in through the hidden back door here.

 

 

 Meanwhile, somewhere inside the castle... Nebozu is trying, apparently for the 201st time, to hypnotize Mejuai into being his queen.  It hasn't gone well so far.

 After "doing the hypnosis thingie" (which involves some attack animations playing over Mejuai's sprite, ending with spinning chickens), he commands her to run back and forth and act like a chicken.

 And... this time she actually does it.

 Commence Moronic gloating from the Master of Morons himself.  Because of course he's going to go into a fit of Moronic gloating.

 Now that you're inside the castle, you may be surprised by the absolute lack of random-encounter monsters.  Yep, there is not a single randomly-encountered enemy in this castle.  Instead, there's the roaming robots, known as Warp Guards, which will trigger a fight if you run into them (or the more active ones chase you down)...

...and they will immediately teleport you out of the castle, not even giving you a chance to fight back against them to prevent that from happening.

So yeah... you have to avoid them.

 Fortunately, once you exit the castle from inside, the front door is unlocked and stays that way... so you can go in and out as you please from that point forward.

 There's no random encounters in here, but there are several boss battles.  They're all optional, but they all guard Kirbium equipment -- basically the best you can get of each weapon type at this point, though these chests only have the Kirbium versions of fairly weak weapon types (staff, whip, and boomerang -- though the boomerang is decently strong.)

 First treasure room I stumbled across...

 ...and it holds a Kirbium Staff, along with this guy, who talks like a complete moron.  Not surprising considering he's a minion of the Lord of Moronism, but still.

 Ah... his name is "Reeeetaaaahd."  Basically "retard" stretched out in a weirdly-pronounced way.

He's not too tough of an optional boss and before long he's dead.

 Also not that tough of an optional boss: this guy.  Who is not just plain ol' Barney despite the face graphic used here.

 It's a Konimed Yenrab, which if you reverse the words spells "Demonik Barney"... which is pretty much exactly what it is.

 The third and final Kirbium weapon (the boomerang) is guarded by... a little girl? What??

 Or... maybe not a little girl.  I'm actually not sure what that is going by the sprite, but its name sounds kinda like "salad pita zone"... so I'm guessing that whatever it is, it must be on a diet. XD

(Actually, now that I think back a bit, I'm pretty sure Salaapitaazon was supposed to be a corrupted Zwooban who had joined Nebozu for one reason or another.  That origin story probably dates back to this game, since I had Zwoobans being a bit more "special" than they have been recently back then -- now they're just humans who left Earth 10,000 years ago and developed the ability to use Kihlah due to living on a Kihlah-saturated planet for that long, but back in 2004-2005 they were one of the most powerful species in the 40 Nherbis.)

 This one was tougher than the other two, but eventually it (she?) succumbed to its (her?) own reflected fire attacks -- Salaapitaazon was vulnerable to fire but not ice, oddly enough, despite using both types of attacks in the battle -- and a couple of Megaboogers from Robert.

 And shortly after that fight, I go up some stairs and immediately stumble across Nebozu's room, where Mejuai is now acting all brainwashed and sitting on a throne next to the Lord of Moronism.

 And then, of course, a fight is triggered... and Mejuai really does not look like herself here.  I don't think she's taller than Nebozu, let alone twice his height as she seems to be here. XD

 

 Luckily, it turns out that she was pretending to be hypnotized just to get Nebozu to finally stop trying to hypnotize her, and she's actually still on your side.

Also, she kicks him in the groin before running away.

 Yep.  Here's Nebozu moments after being groin-kicked.

 After recovering from the pain of having his nuts busted, however, Nebozu is angry and decides to reveals his full power and true form for the first time in the game.

Cue his "final boss" music, conveniently found on Youtube:

...yes, the boss battle music that plays when Nebozu goes into his true form is the Black Eyed Peas' "Get Retarded."  He is the Lord of All That is Stupid, after all!

 And... it's Barney.  Yep.  The anagram of "Madasi Yenrab" earlier on that I mentioned was a bit of foreshadowing, which I'm pretty sure I had planned at this point in the game: it spelled out ADAM IS BARNEY.  Which basically revealed the bad guy's true identity ahead of time.  Madasi Yenrab... Adam is Barney.  Ma-Du Nebozu, also known as Adam Nebozu, is actually Barney.

He actually describes himself as the "Father of All Yenrab" in his pre-fight speech here, which is odd considering that the Yenrab seem to have been on the moon longer than he has and specifically mentioned that they didn't need any help from him to conquer the moon-elves.  It's a weird situation.

The fight is ridiculously hard, too.  I'm pretty sure he has 10,000 HP or something equally ridiculous, and my attacks do around 200-300 max (some pushing 400 when I'm really lucky.)  And, unfortunately, it seems that making Joguo a wizard wasn't all that great of a plan, since none of his magic even does triple-digit damage to the purple monstrosity.  Enduo being a Ninja isn't especially helpful either, it seems, as none of his techniques do 100+ damage.  Robert's Freezerburn (he's a Foodfighter at the moment) is surprisingly effective, causing 100-140 damage per hit, but the real damage comes from his booger-based super moves which do 300-400 damage -- it's too bad they eat up such a huge chunk of MP in the process.  Julia's psychic attacks do pretty good damage too, and reflected Mega Tornadoes end up doing 90-some on top of the 150-240 she's doing on her own, but it's still not quite enough.

Yeah, I think I'm going to have to change things around some (no Ninja Enduo, no Wizard Joguo... maybe no Joguo period if none of his other classes are more useful) before I can take this guy on and actually win the fight.

I remember Bunneh actually being pretty effective in this battle based on past experience (mainly by going berserk and getting a ton of critical hits... for that matter, Julia might work pretty well if I can turn her into a Claw Fighter again and figure out a way to get her berserked without having Jakarjo in the team), but I'm not sure if I have a way to go back and swap my party around at this point -- I may be locked into this team since I went ahead and saved after landing on the moon.  Hopefully not, because that seems like it'll make beating Yenrab Nebozu a real pain.

Next time: I will (hopefully) defeat this big purple doofus and finish the first half of the game!