OK, so maybe I didn't fuck this up as
badly as I had thought.
When I was going to go in and finish
this one, at first I had thought I'd take my chocobo, Dalton, but
then I remembered something I'd read about how it might be smart to
take Bud, the little boy who's “mighty jack-o-lantern army” we
smashed earlier, along instead, because meeting that Pokheil guy is
part of his “Seven Wisdoms” quest. I'll be getting back to that
later. At least there's good news here in that we've already met one
of the wisdoms when we had Bud talk to Pokheil, and I already know
where two of the remaining five or six are. But like I said, I'll
get back to that eventually. Hopefully it won't be another 18 issues
or however long it's been.
So, here we are, back in the Ulkan
Mines, looking for a Gnome or Dwarf named Watts, who runs a mining
business in there. He really wasn't all that hard to find once I
actually got down to the business of doing it. It's just a matter of
continuing to bear left from the save point in this dungeon, pretty
much.
Once I actually got to the man himself,
the game's boss music started playing, and there was clearly a big
monster there I had to kill, but the only way to start the fight was
to talk to Watts three times to get things going. All three times,
the jackass pretty much tells you to go fuck yourself because he's
too busy and it's dangerous in there. Not entirely off base, as I
did have Bud with me, but then again, I did make it through the fight
without either Bud or myself getting killed or really hurt too
terribly badly.
This particular boss is one of those
compound things, where to kill the whole thing, it means killing off
little bits of it one or two at a time. This one's a giant
man-eating orchid sort of thing who's minions can inflict status
ailments. Kind of like Tropicalo and at least one other plant-themed
boss in Secret of Mana.
Surprisingly, this boss wasn't as hard as I was expecting, all things
considered. It was 500 of the easiest XP I'd gotten in awhile.
But
this particular instance was one where I was reminded of why I don't
like having NPCs with me in this game if I can avoid it. The AI they
use seems a little off, which is something that I guess I can't
really fault in a 12-plus-year-old game that came out when such
things were in a state of transition from the minimalistic stuff we
had on cart-based games to the more advanced versions we see
nowadays. Still, it seems like most of the NPCs, required or
otherwise, mostly just wander around battlefields hoping to blindly
stumble into something to hit with whatever weapon the game designers
thought they should have. Oftentimes, I found myself almost quoting
one of Joel's lines from the MST3K
version of MANOS:
The Hands of Fate.
Once the monster is
dead, Watts takes us back to his lab in the mine, where Pokheil
starts telling us about how wonderful Watts is. Turns out the
supposed poet, storyteller, and prophet has a little trouble doing
that because Watts hasn't actually done a damn thing of note thus
far. Not surprising, considering how much he looks like one of the
stormtroopers from Spaceballs.
At the very end of this quest, we get the Moon Mirror, I do believe
it was called. That's one of those things I'll have to get to later,
though.
And really, I've
got some thinking to do before I get around to any of it. The
question here is which way I want to go with this. I could just [go
ahead on] and use another artifact as is and see what happens; I
could go back and do what I should have done before and use a
different one where I put the mine; or I could do both. No matter
what, though, that's a matter for later, and I'm sure we'll all find
out what I decide soon enough.
In the meantime,
though, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA! See you soon,
folks!
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