Or: Just Getting On With It
Like I said in my last FF2 issue, I'm going to finish the Mysidia Tower this issue, and it's gonna take multiple sessions. The primary reason for that is that while the minibosses themselves aren't so much trouble, as I remember, and as the first couple demonstrated as of the night I started this; it's the pairs of floors in between them that are hell.
Much as the second fire floor had patches of lava that damaged the party as they walked on them, the second ice floor had patches of what I'm assuming are ice spikes that do similar damage. There are a few ice elemental weapons and armor to be had along the way, but I passed on quite a few of them in part for the sake of time and inventory space and in part because what I suspeced would happen kind of did. See, the game made me fight for what seemed like every step the last quarter or so of the second ice floor, and I wound up getting the entire party killed several times along the way. Fortunately, though, this version of this game has a memo file or save state function that lets me save wherever I need to. Had this been like the Chronicles version of FF4, this would have been one of several moments where I would have rage quit. But I did make it through in the end, and like the Fire Gigas before him, the Ice Gigas really wasn't much of a problem thanks to having Maria's fire spell at level six and Gus's fire spell at level five.
Something I'm going to mention briefly here because I'll probably have talked about it more in a post that I'm hoping has gone up awhile ago by the time this one did is that I seem to still have the save data from all the other games I had on this particular memory card. Kind of a relief after panicing at the end of the last FF4 issue. So, from here, it's off to the next set of floors.
After the ice floors is a pair of thunder themed floors, based on the element of the miniboss at the end. By this point, the regular enemies are fairly standard things, weak against fire, mostly, and being wailed upon by regular weapons. The two most obnoxious of those are the Basilisks, which can turn characters to stone with their gaze and the Imps, which tend to use Muddle 16 on the party. In a session I didn't write about, I had to go back to Altair to get some Gold Needles because a basilisk turned Garreth to stone and Firion's Esuna spell didn't work on it. Not sure if that's just how it is or if it's just not high enough level yet. There have been Imps for awhile now, and I'm not sure if I've mentioned them. It's just that we're getting bigger and bigger parties of them now, and they like to spam the Muddle spell. Kinda hard to get past parties of six or eight of them because the player characters affected by the spell always attack one another.
The Gigas this time around doesn't seem to have any weakensses that I can exploit that I noticed. Fortunately, the way I've been playing means that pounding it to death with physical attacks wasn't as hard as it could have been. Past that, the next several floors don't have a theme, per se, as far as I know. There's some good stuff to be had, but it can be tough to get.
Part of what took so long to get this up is that I had to keep leaving the tower on resupply runs to make it through. It's made this take some time, but it's been good for the party's stats.
I hadn't intended to let this sit for the better part of two months after the thunder floors, but between a rough February and getting a Nintendo Switch in March, that's kind of how it worked out. I think I may have said something about the Switch in previous posts, and I'm sure I'll talk about it again in others to come, so for now, I'll get on with finishing this.
Even before that rather lenghty delay, I'd forgotten that there were no more Gigases in the tower that needed to be defeated in order to proceed. I guess it's been that long since I've made it this far in the game. Rather, when we get to the very top of the tower, we find that instead of a big boss fight, Mindu is there, and he tells us that he's going to do whatever it takes to unseal the final door in the tower. Whatever it takes is his life force, and once the seal is gone, he falls. Before he passes into the void, he tells us that he's fulfilled his destiny and it's up to us now.
Beyond the door are five crystals, four silver that give us stat bonuses and one gold that has the Ultima spell. I know there's some special way the silver crystals are supposed to work, but I don't really understand how. That HCBailly guy on YouTube I reference from time to time in these things does a better job of explaining how all this stuff is supposed to work than I could ever pretend to, so if you're interested, here's a link to a playlist of his recent replay of the game. I'd link to the specific episode, but most or all of the individual titles he used were Star Wars references, and I can't remember which one is the relevant one here, so I'm not leaving a link to that. It's not like I'm terribly much better with my own titles, to be honest
When we get the Ultima spell, it acts a bit like there's going to be a boss fight there, but fortunately, no. All we get is a warp tile behind the altar, which is fine. I had to deal with enough bull getting there that it was nice to not have to deal with it in reverse. Plus, there was some of that on the way back to Mysidia, too.
Back in Mysidia, the mages note Mindu's passing and tell us that we can actually pull off a win here, even though things are going to get really hard here. They say it's all thanks to Mindu's sacrifice and having Mysidia's power with us now. They also say we need to get back to Fynn because the Emporer has really messed things up with his new weapon, the Cyclone. I'm hoping I'll get to that in less time than it took me to finish this, but I'm not going to commit to anything on this just yet. I will say now that I'm going to want to work on powering up Ultima to some extent before I go into the Cyclone, and then maybe a little more after I do that, just because it's a decent spell once we get it up to even where I've got the elemental and Cure spells, which is somewhere between levels 6 and 8.
I've got some thoughts on that and a few other things to give, but I'll be doing a digest of those once I get this finished and posted. Beyond that, I'm hoping to get back to these things on a more regular basis again.
Until next time, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.
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