This is going to cover at least two
sessions just because I didn't want to waste the issue title on what
would have been a short one otherwise.
So, to begin with, we're going after a
water sprite called Undine who lives under a waterfall near the Water
Palace. I'm going with the subtitle here because there's a part in a
more recent game involving a similar character in a similar
situation. In the case of 2015's multiplatform RPG Undertale,
we find ourselves dealing with a character named Undyne in a similar
setting, at least.
In the case of Secret of Mana, the
Undine we're looking for needs rescuing from what amounts to a
miniboss. The waterfall she lives behind is to the east of the Water
Palace. There's three fish monsters called Iffish guarding the main
entrance and three more immediately inside as well. This bit took me
a couple tries to get through. Didn't straight up get the party
killed or anything, but I did get to find out if Luka could bring
back the dead because I got Mickey killed by the first batch of fish.
Fortunately, she can.
The second attempt involved just
dashing past the fist bunch of fish and beating the hell out of the
second before moving on. In the next chamber, there's an egg that
hatches into a tadpole sorta thing that we've gotta fight. Just our
luck it's the first form of the miniboss we have to fight to get
through to Undine. After a little pounding, the tadpole turns into
the Biting Lizard, who can damage party members by eating them. This
second form is a little tougher, but with a strategy of avoidance, it
turned out to not be much of a problem. In this case, I had Mickey
and Rose equipped with long-range weapons, which came in handy
because they could still attack while I charged up the hero's sword
to hit it at full power.
When the Biting Lizard goes down, we
get a Glove Orb and access to a third chamber where Undine is. She
thanks the party, and says she'll help the party by giving us one
more new weapon that I'd forgotten about, the javelin, in the form of
the pole dart. She also says she'll give Rose healing and defensive
magic and Mickey combat magic. The hero doesn't get any direct
magic, but the Mana Sword will be his True Power, I guess.
Once all that's taken care of, we can
go back and save with Luka. She says we should go back to the
Underground Palace now because we can use Undine's magic to get in
and do our thing there. I was going to try to at least make it back
to Gaia's Navel in one sitting, but I got a way-too-late start on it
and decided I'd just do that in a second session and wrap it up then,
in hopes of getting started at a more reasonable time.
That kind of did happen. It wasn't so
much that I was starting at a particularly bad time for the second
session of this as much as it is that I'd somehow let ten days go by
before I got back at it. Not quite as bad as I've been to Final
Fantasy IX of late, but still longer than I'd intended.
Anyway, far as what I got done this
time around was pretty much find my way from the Water Palace to
Gaia's Navel. It's a hell of a walk, sure, and I suppose I could
have found one of the game's “fast travel service” locations if
I'd really wanted to. Thing is, though, we're still early in the
game here, in spite of how long I've been playing, or at least
attempting to play, it, and as I'm sure I've said about many of these
games before, it's generally a good idea to hoof it in order to get
your gold and levels up. That's doubly true for this game, because
it's like I was saying back in Elenee's Castle in that there are a
lot of plot-advancing dungeons where things seem set up to pretty
much screw the player over if they're not careful. There's another
one of those coming up, but we'll be getting to that in a bit.
For now, I should say that to get from
the Water Palace to Gaia's Navel, we gotta head west out of Pandora
Village. It's still a ways from there, but it's worth it on account
of what I was saying before. Gonna need as many levels and as much
gold as I can get to keep myself stocked on supplies and equipment
just so I can hopefully make it through the next section. It's also
why I took the long way back into the Dwarf Village.
Once I actually got there, there were a
couple weapons for Watts to upgrade, which were the glove and the
boomerang. Those will come in handy later. It's also a good idea to
save before going forward. Things do tend to go badly in this game,
as I keep saying.
With all that taken care of, I figured
I'd just go ahead with the Underground Palace, so I could get it out
of the way and make up for a little lost time. Turns out, that was
not exactly the best idea ever. Getting in was easy enough. Just
gotta use Undine's magic on a crystal orb outside the place to take
care of the lava. I'm not entirely sure it matters really what kind,
specifically, but out of habit, I used Mickey's Freeze spell on it.
Considering how this ultimately went, I'll have a chance to test out
other stuff later, but for now, the first attempt.
See, we're going to be running into
more new monsters here, and I think the only one I encounterd this
first time that didn't spawn other monsters was the Chess Knight.
There's another new beast in here called the Ma Goblin that spawns
other Goblins and uses Level 2 Cure Water magic. This is what
ultimately got me here, because a group of these things pretty much
cornered the party after I'd dealt with a handful of switch puzzles
and killed everybody. When that happened, I shut my TV and console
off to come do this. Had I actually started the virus scan on my
computer as I'd intended, I might have gone back and taken another
shot at it before going ahead with this. Since I hadn't, though,
it's time I got this up and posted.
So, next time, we'll be going into the
fire themed Underground Palace, and hopefully getting somewhere with
it.
Until then, stay
safe, keep gaming, have fun, and DFTBA!
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