When we last left off, Enduo and company had found an airship and I was going around checking out various optional or you-can't-go-here-yet areas, as well as doing a couple of sidequests. Now...
...the sidequests and other optional stuff continue, this time with a trip back to Nifclont. Yep, that little middle-of-nowhere forest/mountain town where the game started. If you return there with the Red Orb in hand, you'll immediately get a hint that there's somebody living here who can use it.
You can also talk to cats and bunnies now that there's a Psychic in the team. Apparently this big kitty is guarding the green-haired girl from attacking rats, yellowjackets, and morons.
There's also this bunny, who has been constantly staring out across the water since the beginning of the game. As it turns out the random bunny is in fact the owner of the Gold Chains found back in the dragons' caves, guarded by two Yenrab. If you give them back, Bunneh joins the team as a playable character.
And he's not the only one...
If you return to Enduo's house, you can find his sister Julia roaming around upstairs in her room. Talk to her after getting the Red Orb and she immediately grabs out, finding out that it's actually hers and becoming the
sixth playable character in the current team.
Bunneh doesn't have his own orb, so he has no classes to switch between. He makes up for it with ridiculously high stats, probably because most people wouldn't think to go back and talk to a bunny after finding a Mr. T style set of gold chains. Julia-as-playable-character isn't as well-hidden since the Red Orb reacts when you come into town and she's one of the few people around who isn't obviously just some random NPC. XD
Now that you have more than four playable characters, this room in the airship opens up. Talk to the translucent version of a character to swap them out of your party, and talking to them again afterward will swap them back in. They'll walk around and do various random stuff on their own in this room if you have them swapped out (Julia is currently walking around back and forth watching the screens up on that wall, and Bunneh is just roaming around in circles... he's probably bored.)
Randomly swapped Robert out for Julia since she's not quite as horrendously overleveled as he is (she starts out at level 50, rather than being near 60 already like Robert was.) Here she's switched into her "Claw Fighter" class, which takes advantage of the fact that she can equip claw weapons (which always hit twice, just like knuckles) and
always gets critical hits.
This actually traces all the way back to my even-older RPG Maker 2000 game
The Story of Supernum, where Julia had low attack power but always got critical hits so she could still damage most enemies pretty effectively.
Now it's time to head north, into the magical land of Canadia. This first town is actually called "Adanak," which is Kanada backwards. Like the Mortal Kombat version of Canada, I guess.
The number 54248 seems to come up a lot in this game -- first the malfunctioning "the schnitzel is 54248" robot onboard the airship, and now this bunny.
While roaming around Adanak I stumbled across the elusive Chicken Lizard, which tends to run away when encountered rather than fighting. It's also the only enemy in the game that drops a Membership Card, required to get into the Slutzenhoez Club back at Nalles Geso. I may try to track down another one and get the card at some point, but it's not a high priority.
Also, class changes again -- swapped Joguo back to a wizard, Jakarjo to a gunner, Enduo is now a ninja, and Julia is a psychic.
Up north there are
a lot of these "Midget" enemies. They seem to be some sort of dwarf/gnome type species rather than just short humans, as there's an entire town of them up here somewhere and they have weird aging patterns.
Here's the town of Hohhohhoh, where everyone is the worst possible stereotype of the French.
As seen by the inn and bar both being "French people only," with someone who will block the door if you attempt to walk in.
They also have their own set of French-themed weapons... all of which are exactly the same as other weapons you could've found earlier in the game, just with a different name.
For some odd reason a lot of people in this town use "schnitzel" as part of their insults. I'm not sure why.
This guy actually shoves you back off of the ledge, causing you to drop down in front of the entrance to the inn.
Apparently this store sells nothing but beer, so you can't buy anything. Until this random fox, who for unknown reasons is hanging out in the store, takes over anyway. XD
And here's the midget town I mentioned before. They all live in cave-houses rather than regular wood/brick/etc. ones, and there's
tons of trees all over rather than them mostly being cleared like in the human towns.
Yep, these guys were mentioned a long way back in Rebumont -- there was an old midget in the inn talking about this exact event.
Yes, yes you are.
And here's a
HUGE Barfoo symbol made of iced-over ponds here. Most of them hidden across the game are not quite this obvious.
Several of the giant kitties here comment on how much they love to eat human babies. Also, apparently that old midget shopkeeper's name is
Frank.
Yep... like I said before, the midgets have weird aging patterns. Apparently they look like kids all the way up until they get old, then they suddenly get
really old.
Here's another giant kitty talking about how much they like eating human babies. But make sure you wash them off first!
They have an evil-detecting rock. That's a bit more useful than the old boy scout camp's "weather rock." XD
And of course, the reason why the rock was going off was because Nancos was hanging around nearby, just waiting to show up and comment on how you've got your orbs fully-charged.
She wants you to go meet her on an island south of here, in between the Canadian continent and the USA-equivalent one, so she can fight Enduo's team now that both her Black Orb and all of their individual orbs are now at full power.
...but first I'll explore around up north a bit more.
This place isn't especially important, but I figured I'd stop in for a bit anyway. You can't go inside, but there's Secret Service guys roaming around outside.
Apparently they're still not quite used to the Vice-President (...Dick Cheney??) being President now after Nebozu killed the old one back at the start of the game.
There's also some caves here, but you can't really get very far in them just yet as Kuarudos appear to block your path before you can go beyond the first room. So I guess all there is left to do at this point is...
...find that little island and confront Nancos. This fight is the one I remember being
ridiculously hard, so it may take more than one try.
This time, I actually trigger her transformations -- which is kind of unfortunate because that means I
know the fight's going to be hard, now that the cheap-ass method of winning (knocking her normal form to 0 HP before she can class-change) isn't going to happen again like it did the last time back in Larpz.
First she switches to Warrior class, which is kind of a breather moment since she only uses physical attacks. Well, she does use her super move "Exterminate" no matter what class she's switched to, but it seems to come up pretty rarely in this form.
After that she becomes a Wizard, which I forgot to get a screenshot of. Not too tough, at least with Julia's barrier active and protecting everyone from being confused or paralyzed all at once.
Next up is a Psychic, which is one of the more difficult forms since her attacks do a good bit of damage and can cause confusion (and sometimes paralysis, in one case.) And paralysis in this game is way worse than the Pokémon version, as it basically permanently disables one character until the battle's over (or they're cured, which doesn't happen unless you use an item or spell that cures it.) She also heals herself a lot in this form.
After that she becomes a new class that nobody in my current team has, the Warp Mage, which specializes in status effect spells. Half my team ends up paralyzed in the process... which turns out to be a real problem. Jakarjo casts Berserker on Julia and she proceeds to shred this form of Nancos to bits with her claws, but then...
Her final class change makes her into a Karate Fighter. Unfortunately this means that Julia is now incapable of causing damage to her even with berserk-boosted critical hits -- her defense is just too high. With Jakarjo out of MP, Julia rendered harmless, and everyone else paralyzed, I eventually have to just quit the game because it's become an inevitable loss at this point.
Okay... let's switch things up a bit and try again. This time with Julia berserking from the very start, and in a class with higher attack power!
And this is basically what happened. (Ignore the HP inconsistency with Joguo from one screenshot to the next, on my first couple attempts Julia kept getting paralyzed so I needed to restart a couple times. XD)
But yeah... it turned out that berserk Claw Fighter Julia's attacks were doing so much damage (250+ per hit, and she hits twice every turn!) that Nancos' HP dropped to zero before the trigger for her first class-change could activate. Yeah, I won via the cheap-ass method again just like the fight back in Larpz. XD
The game does not acknowledge the possibility of the cheap-ass "knock her out in the first form before she can change even once" win for this fight. XD
There's a brief conversation among the heroes after this where they basically decide that, as scary as Nancos is, she's still not 100% their enemy since she's against Ma-Du Nebozu -- the
real bad guy in this game -- too. It's a pretty similar situation to the 2016 election in a couple of ways. XD
And now that you've beaten Nancos, it's possible to get into the two cave systems up here that were previously blocked off. These caves are the homes of the Aqua and Aero Kuarudos, of course -- as mentioned by the Kuarudo guarding the island that I attempted to visit last time.
The "Path of Water" on the right side takes you through a room where the hallway forms Roman numeral shapes, which are a hint to the next room's puzzle...
Basically, you have to push the buttons in the order of the Roman numerals from the previous hallway to get to the exit. I can't remember what's in that chest to the left, but probably nothing that's really worth bothering with.
After clearing the button-puzzle room, you reach the room where there are
deadly flying fish guarding the room. Some fly by very quickly, others not so much, but all of them will make a loud crashing noise, flash the screen red, and send you back to the start if you let them hit you.
Fortunately they do not actually cause any damage to you in the process, despite being "deadly" flying fish. Deadly to ordinary humans, maybe?
After passing through the Deadly Flying Fish Room, you end up at the end of the cave, where the queen of the Aqua Kuarudos is waiting. My first attempt at fighting her didn't quite work out, as I tried just bouncing her ice attacks back with a barrier -- which works
surprisingly well on regular Aqua Kuarudos, who often kill themselves with a single Blizzard attack when you have a barrier up -- but she's not as vulnerable to ice as the lesser Kuarudos are, so it didn't work out.
On my second attempt, though...
...I switched Jakarjo back to Trainer class and repeatedly summoned Karps to flop all over her, causing anywhere from 730 to
1300 damage per flop. I think it took three hits (plus a few from other attacks here and there) to finish her off.
On the way out of the Path of Water side, I ran into
this odd critter. It ran away immediately, just like the Chicken Lizard from before.
On the other side of the cave is the "Path of Wind," home of the Aero Kuarudos. It's not puzzle-y like the water side. Instead...
...it's
mind-numbingly boring. This giant spiral path room takes forever, partly because it's huge and partly because of the random encounters.
And at the end of that (and past another short, uneventful hallway... yep, boredom seems to be the theme on this side), there's the queen of the Aero Kuarudos.
She's vulnerable to poison, which meant that even with everyone else paralyzed from her Zzzter attacks, Enduo the ninja was able to beat her singlehandedly by spamming Venom Blade (which did around 150 damage per hit) over and over. That 96 damage popping up in the screenshot? That's how much she was taking from poison damage every turn.
And with that, the Kuarudo caves are cleared out, and I now have the two keys that unlock the path to the Ajrien Crystal sealed away in the third cave system between the wind and water caves. I think I'll save that part for next time, though -- the jungle island that I'll be able to get through as a result is pretty big, and I'll want to have a whole section of this just for that.
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