It would almost be cool if this dungeon
were a Beetlejuice
reference, but alas, it's not.
But at least there's a song by the band
America called Horse With No
Name that I can reference here, because at least there are plants
and birds and rocks and things, and plenty of sand and hills and
rings to be won in fights.
Gotta say, this is one of my favorite
mini-adventures in the game, at least of the ones I've played. There
are some longer arcs that I've at least marginally started that I
like just as much, but haven't managed to make it all the way
through.
So, anyway, the dungeon. The place the
Sand Rose creates is called the Duma Desert. On arrival there, we
find that a chimera named Kathinja and her students from the Magic
Acadamy, “no seriously that's its name”, are looking for a rival
instructor named Mephinase and his students because he apparently
horked an ancient spellbook from the school and plans to use it for
no good. With a name like his, I can only picture him using it to
make everybody put mayonnaise
on their sandwiches.
Anyway, being the upstanding guy that I
am, I join up with Kathinja and her kids so that we can stop
Mayonnaise, er, Mephinase, from doing whatever it is he's going to
do. This is a good place to build up levels, anyway, because the
monsters will generally drop XP like stink. And they drop a few good
items, too. At least ones that'll come in handy when I finally get
around to opening up the workshop. I should probably do that before
too long. Too bad I've never been particularly great at getting
through the quest that's part of.
The thing about the students is that
most of them are actually pretty much working for the villain of this
little side quest, and what's worse is that they're all pretty much
inept pansies, even for kids. They offer little to no resistance,
and pretty much tell you exactly where to go each and every time you
see them. So, with little effort aside from the time it took me to
comb the desert Spaceballs
Style, I eventually did catch up with the sandwich spread wizard,
just in time for Kathinja to catch up to me. She tells me to make
sure I've got a good equipment loadout and skill set ready to go, and
then we head out to confront Mephinase. He casts a spell that blows
the player character to the previous screen, which was quite
obviously the boss room, and Kathinja clean out of the desert.
The boss for this quest is a pair of
axe-beaked birds, and for once, I wish I'd have been doing a video LP
of this, because this is the first time I've made it through that
fight without dieing at least once. This is a hard fight, usually,
because the birds can really gang up on a guy and beat the tar out of
him. For my efforts, all I got was 80 XP and 40 Lucre. Kathinja
comes back once I win the fight and we charge Mephinase one more
time, just as he fires off his fireworks show. Not bad, all things
considered. Just needed a little John
Phillips Sousa music and maybe a
national monument in the background, and it would be really
great.
My final reward in this quest comes
from Kathinja, and is a piece of gold. From what I understand,
that'll come in handy some time later, but I'm not sure when,
exactly. But there's time to figure that out. There's other quests
I need and want to do first anyway. And I'll probably do a little
running around before then, too.
Plus, there's the Final Fantasy side
Text Play I'm doing right now, too. There's something else I want to
try there, too, but we'll still be following the main party I talk
about there. At any rate, I'll get to that when I get to it. Until
then, more random stuff. See you then, folks!
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