We last left off just outside the ruins of a gigantic castle somewhere in the deserts of the southwestern United States, probably somewhere around where Arizona would be if the map was laid out like the real-world version.
And almost immediately after entering said ruins...
...you're attacked by two demons who, for some odd reason, are named after two ruined towns from my old awful OHRRPGCE game
The Kirby Lands (which is no longer available for download anywhere on the internet, by the way. It was just too crappy to leave up. XD)
Anyway, these guys are kind of an obnoxious boss battle because even though they're not all that tough, they are demons and in this game demons are outright immune to physical attacks. Enduo ran out of MP for ki blasts fairly quick (though not before wiping out Ghugribu, with some help from Jakarjo's elemental-type-based gun add-ons and Mejuai's Zzzter spells), which made the fight become a very slow and boring drawn-out thing for a while.
Basically, Mejuai ended up repeatedly using Zzzter until Moglozhu
finally ran out of HP while the others just kinda sat there doing not much of anything.
I'm pretty sure I went out and bought MP-restoring items after this, and also switched Joguo from Swordmaster class back to Trainer so he'd actually have some non-physical means of attacking things.
Here's some random encounters in the ruins. The elusive Hudawuda tribe finally makes an appearance. I guess these were Hudawuda ruins, then? It's never really said one way or the other.
Anyway, I kept getting cursed and poisoned by the other enemies in the ruins (lots of mummies and scorpions... the random enemies here are weirdly Egyptian-themed for the Arizona/Nevada/New Mexico desert area... XD), so getting tired of that, I left the ruins and decided to head off to someplace a little different.
That town up there in the mountains is Clodaro, which is an anagram of Colorado. There's actually an interesting little sidequest set up in this town, though it has
absolutely no plot relevance whatsoever and you don't even get any items or anything as a reward for completing it. It's still probably one of my favorite bits of the game, though.
Not one of my favorite bits of the game: opening a treasure chest containing a useless stat-booster item and then being attacked by enemies that I have basically no way of beating thanks to not having enough attacks that can harm them (Enduo's ki blasts seem to be the only thing that work from my current team.)
I think the only attacks they're vulnerable to are ki and light-based ones, and I don't have any light-based attacks right now since Mejuai's spells are all electricity, healing, and poison-based. If I'm remembering right, Joguo gets light spells if you switch his class to Wizard, so maybe I'll come back at some point and fight them that way.
Anyway... after a trip up through the mountains via that cave system, I make it up to Clodaro... where this random baby hanging out in the shade of a big pine tree makes a creepy noise if you talk to it. XD
And apparently a girl previously living in this town has disappeared sometime in the not-too-distant past. Almost everyone in town talks about this disappearance. This game might be the first appearance of Kekyu Arghenplaffer, though I know I came up with her around a year before I made this game (and her design in-game is drastically different from how I actually draw her, then or now.)
It's definitely the first time she had a last name, as she was just "Kekyu" when I first made her up. The spelling of her last name has changed a bit over time, as "Argh'n'plaffer" is just too silly. XD
Oh, and apparently she might be related to the guy who owned that "Argh'n'plaffer Golf Course" back in Alfrido, considering that her last name is also the name on the golf course.
Her house is full of adorable little rats that squeak when you talk to them. Being abandoned, the lights are off.
This girl is hanging out right in front of Kekyu's gravestone, though of course Kekyu is not buried there. As we'll find out later, she's not buried anywhere at all, though I'm sure you could've guessed that already.
Yep, she's definitely not dead.
The standard "French chef who sells you crappy healing items" in this inn is replaced by a black chef. As in, the little chef sprite is exactly the same except for skin color (though, as I only just now realized, the textboxes are covering him up in these screenshots... it should be pretty easy to imagine what he'd look like, though.) Apparently the French chef plans to
leave down and join a gang because of this. Um... y'know, it
is possible to have two chefs around in one town... XD
And they're not rumors about a humanoid wolfy-thing, those are normal visitors just passing through from Rebumont.
And... apparently the inn is full, so we have to use the cabin in the woods east of town if we need a place to sleep. It's locked, but the innkeeper lady gives us the key to open it up.
"Nice little cabin," the innkeeper says. "Old cabin," the sign says. Yeah, it's gonna have roaches.
After the standard fade-out and inn music, rather than waking up the next morning, you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of roars and footsteps on the roof of the cabin.
Which means it's time to go outside and see what the heck is going on, of course. In a horror movie, this would lead to someone getting killed. Enduo and company have just wiped out an invasion force of alien robots
and a Lovecraftian tentacle-monster, however, so horror-movie villains would be wise to steer clear unless they'd like having their ass handed to them in a matter of seconds (and that'd be one short movie.)
"It," in this case, being a
gigantic freaking cat. Which seems to be peeking in through the windows of houses around town.
And... going into the door of Kekyu Arghenplaffer's abandoned house.
And now a brief moment of silliness. In order to prevent you from coming around to the other side of where the giant cat is rather than chasing it from the intended directions, there's a random camel blocking this ladder.
Anyway, once you follow the kitty inside the house, you find that it's hopped up onto Kekyu's bed and is now looking
out the window rather than in.
Because what else do you say when you're trying to track down a cat? XD
Turns out this is a very large kitty. And a ridiculously strong kitty. Uses a lot of ice and wind magic, as it turns out, so I ended up having some of my characters get frozen a lot. This turned out to be a pretty hard battle (and not one you could win cheaply with the Karp summon like the fight with Tuham Yigro), and I think I only had two characters left standing at the end.
And after the fight... there's a bunch of flashing lights and the kitty turns into a human.
The very same Kekyu Arghenplaffer who had gone missing a year previously, to be specific.
There's never any explanation as to why she turned into a giant cat, oddly enough. Though there
is an old guy around town who mentions that there were rumors and sightings of a giant cat around town back when he was younger, so apparently it's happened before.
Hmm... you don't think those two things might be related, do you? XD
Randomly decided to change up my characters again -- Joguo is now a Wizard and Mejuai is now a Dancer. And apparently she's learned some new moves with some... odd... names. XD
Now, back to the ruins of the random castle in Arizona or wherever. This room is a teleporter maze; pretty much every door on the map isn't a regular door, it just teleports you somewhere else...
...like this.
After a few wanderings through I find what appears to be an endless loop through the rooms. Turns out if you go back the way you came at one point in the endless loop, it takes you directly to the end.
Finally, stairs! No more teleporty-doors!
And in the next room down from there, there's more orb-energy hanging out. No Bunprego this time, though...
...instead,
Nebozu comes floating down from the ceiling (there is apparently a hole up there leading to the surface) and "Mwuh huh huh!"-ing as usual.
And for some strange reason he randomly has a different portrait sprite here (one of the generic black-haired guy sprites from one of the graphics sets I used) than in the intro sequence, where he had one that was edited from a picture of the guy Nebozu was based on in one of my high school yearbooks. Not sure if I just never got around to adding the new Nebozu face to this scene or what... I guess I'll find out when I get to the later parts of the game and see which face he has there.
And yep, that means finally there's a fight against the "moron from the moon" (as many people in the game call him) who started this whole thing.
He's basically a generic vampire sprite edited to look a little more like Nebozu (it's the hair.) XD
Directly attacking Nebozu in this fight is a bad plan, as he'll blurt out "how dare you strike Nebozu!" and send a bunch of weird energy-arrows flying at you (...is Nebozu randomly a Quincy all of a sudden? Weird.) Special moves, however, cause no reaction.
Well, almost all special moves cause no reaction. It turns out that, funnily enough, having Mejuai as a Dancer is actually the "cheat" that makes winning this fight possible! Use any of her Dance techniques and on top of causing damage to him like usual, he'll be distracted by her dancing and become confused.
He's actually surprisingly vulnerable to confusion-inducing attacks from other sources, too. The automatic confusion every time Mejuai uses a Dance attack in this battle is the most reliable way to keep him confused (and hitting himself) rather than attacking you, but Enduo's Bash attack (which sometimes stuns and/or confuses) works pretty well too.
It took a long time, but I
finally managed to beat him. This is completely optional, by the way -- this is actually one of those "you're supposed to lose" fights. And if you can't consistently confuse him over and over (or do massive amounts of damage really, really fast) you most likely
will lose.
Randomly, he drops
this item. It heals all status effects except the weirder ones (curse and insanity) that can only be healed by their own specific items (Holy Rice and Sanity Bananas.)
Nebozu even reacts to your winning of the intended-to-be-lost fight against him. Turns out he wasn't fighting at 100%, however, and still has plenty of strength left even after you've smacked him around a bit. And the next thing you know...
...he's added kidnapping (and threats of mind-control to make sure the victim
stays kidnapped) to his list of moronic acts. After some babbling about his plans, he floats up through the roof (like I said, there's probably a hole up there leading to the outside) with Mejuai in tow, leaving the party one member short.
After that's over, everyone realizes that hey, that orb-energy is still here so we might as well use it. Enduo and Jakarjo pitch in by holding two orbs each (one with Mejuai's and one with Robert's Purple Orb that they retrieved from Aaj-an-Xonu), and the orbs get another power-up.
It's not a big power-up for Joguo -- he only gets the Warrior class, user of heavy armor and weapons (and a lack of special attacks that means they're useless against some enemies) -- but Jakarjo can now become a Wizard and Enduo can now become a Psychic.
Next time: what's beyond this cave, and then on to the west coast!
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