Sunday, September 20, 2015

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (Square, SNES, 1992): Issue #004: Dawning of the Age of Aquariua

Or: The Chapter In Which Ben Sits On His Ass And Makes Phoebe Do All The Work

There's a grand total of four battlefields between the Bone Dungeon and Aquaria. I probably could have handled the first couple with just Ben, as I'm sure was the intent, but it's a good deal quicker and easier to get Phoebe in the party first. She's in a place called the Libra Temple. We'll be coming back there before too long, but for now, we're going to backtrack and start with the battlefield west of the Bone Dungeon and work our way towards Aquaria.

First, though, a few things I neglected to mention last time. First up is that while we were watching the crystal relight, Tristam was busy horking one of the final weapons in the game: the Dragon Claw. He'll give us that later on in the game, and it'll be really handy. Secondly, there's a treasure chest for Ben to get as well. It's got something called the Sand Coin in it. We'll need this, and three other coins like it, to get through the Focus Tower.

When we first get into the tower here, there's a secret passage we can go through to get to the stairs that will take us to the door we need to use. It's a little obvious, because there's a narrow part in the wall right where it is. I went the long way this time, just to be sure there was no treasure that I needed to talk about there. Since there's not, it'll be a quicker trip to just take the passage the next couple times through here.

The Old Guy's here, too, and he says something about finding a dude named Spencer, who can help us, and that we need to find Phoebe, too. As will continue to be his way, he just buggers the hell off without explaining any of it

Another thing I think I have yet to go into decent detail about is the treasure chests in this game. There's brown boxes and red boxes. The brown ones are expendable items and will respawn every time we re-enter an area. The red ones are only there until we open them but have special, usually event-related items in them. There's one of each in the part of the tower we've got access to right now. The brown one's got bombs in it. Kind of nice to be all stocked up on those, even though there's no way in hell we'll ever run out of them, even if we use them as weapons. Probably won't very much, because the attack gets split between however any monsters are in the party.

There's also a red one with the game's fire spell in it. This is just like the quake spell we got in the Bone Dungeon. Just in time for it to be useful, since Aquaria's the capital of the ice area.

But we're on our way to get Phoebe from the Libra Temple. She's really valuable right now because she's got a crapload of really strong magic. She's got the life, cure, and heal spells for white magic, the fire spell for black, and a thunder spell in a third category called Wizard Magic, and she's got at least twice as many charges for those spells as Ben does. So we can just use Phoebe to kick some serious ass going through those battlefields. Two have extra XP when we clear them. The one in the earth area has 99 XP, the second one in the ice area has 100, I believe. The one in between has 300 gold. The last one before the actual town of Aquaria has something called the Magic Ring as its reward. This piece of armor protects against the Silence status effect. Since we need to reset the game anyway to get that defense to actually take effect, I'll just use the Inn and call it a night here and continue with the actual plot later.

Some notes before I wrap up, of course. Since I was kind of going nuts with the magic this time, I used two of the three seeds I got in the Bone Dungeon, one on Ben and the other on Phoebe. And speaking of SeeDs, I'm listening to the group LP that County Line Gaming's doing of Final Fantasy 8. I'm a little behind on it. Just listened to part 4 before getting to work on this, and I think I kind of got inspired for the title to the next issue: Puppy Wylls. Not sure if CLG member Reki Wylls is in on this LP, but the play on his user name is what's going through my head right now, so I may as well use it for next time.

And speaking of next time, until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!

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