Wednesday, January 10, 2018

TEXT PLAY: Secret of Mana (Squaresoft; SNES, 1993): Issue #007: Through The Woods, At Least

I haven't exactly wasted the last month. I just haven't done anything worth an update to these Text Play series.

What I did with the time, as far as gaming goes, is to get as much of the next level armor as I could manage for everybody conveniently and a few levels for everybody. Once I got everything to where I thought it was sufficeint to press on with the actual story, I just got on with at least part of it.

Part of the reason I've sorta been taking my time with this the last month or so is that this is one of the parts of the game where things tend to get real cheap with the damage the monsters tend to do. It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if I'm not actually doing things in the wrong order or something. One contributing factor to that is this one eyeball monster that spits out Chobin Hoods that shows up about halfway through the forest and is kind of a major player in the castle as well. This would be bad enough if it didn't also have this glare attack that turns whichever player character happens to be close and in its line of sight into a moogle temporarily. This is a negative status effect in several ways because it renders the character unable to attack or move, and I think it reduces defense as well.

Once we get into the castle proper, we get a second new enemy in the form of werewolves. For as much as a pain in the ass as the Chobin Hoods and the eyeball things can be, the werewolves are worse. For where they are in the game, they actually have reasonably high HP and defense, and what's worse is that they also know the Cure Water spell, which is one we get from the sprite Undine, at the Water Palace. This really makes them a pain in the ass because they use it on themselves and whatever monsters are in the area.

Far as I know, though, we don't get to do the bit with Undine at the Water Palace until after we're done with Elene the Witch in the castle we're in now. What really makes this suck is because we're going to have to fight a fire-based boss monster to take care of all of this, and without water or ice magic to use on it, it's a fight that's harder than it needs to be.


But before we get to that, we have to let Dyluck's troops out of the dungeon cells that Elene's got them locked up in. Most of them are zoned out like the folks in Pandora, but there is one guy who can still kinda talk. He explains that Dyluck is with the witch and that we can get through by having everybody stand on a switch outside the dungeon. Because I wound up getting both Rose and Mickey killed by werewolves on the way in, I used half my supply of Cups of Wishes to bring them back. The good news is that Neko is there to sell me more, even if his prices are a little high. We can also save there, which I took advantage of before going after the witch herself and the tiger she sics on the party. I'll get to that next time, and hopefully, it won't take me a month to make that happen. Until then, though, have fun, stay safe, keep gaming, and DFTBA.

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