Sunday, February 9, 2014

Romancing SaGa III #7 - Abyssal


Harid stands atop the mountain as the wondrous beef curtains of the cosmos cascade upon him. The game with zero romance, Romancing SaGa III, rolls on.




Starring Morgan Freeman.

Rated R.

At this point I go looking for quests that I might be strong enough to finish now. Starting with the Zweig Tournament. A NEW ERA BEGINS NOW! THE ERA OF HARID~!

Annnd I'm dead on the second to last fight. I'll...try again later.

There's the CGI world map. It has a sweet aurora overhead. 1995 in this biyatch!

Unlocked a new area. Aurora Path leads to Snowman Town and Ice Galaxy. I really dig the area names in this game. Awesome stuff.

Harid watches the aurora, and eventually it beams him up to...

...the town of Snowmen. They're all sentient, but they respond about as reliably as a twenty-something girl to a text message. I asked you what you were doing eight hours ago! I'm busy now!

This place has shops and inns too. This is truly bizarre. Huge props to this game for having footprints in the snow, once again.

There's a free inn here, and it would prove to be incredibly useful.

Harid gets accused of being a sexual predator. It's because he's black, isn't it? DAMN YOU, SNOWMEN!

Suddenly all of the snowmen start moving as apocalyptic music plays. GET OUT OF THERE, HARID!

Nevermind, turns out they're friendly. One of them joins the team, and the sheer coolness of having a snowman on the team means I have to kick out the archer.

With that, I continue on to the Ice Galaxy. Not sure why it's called that. It's a frozen lake.

Snowman (that's his actual name) possesses most of the water-element spells, which is great since they were a hole in my spell repertoire.

Wait, Thunder Clap is a water spell? Does not compute! This goes against all logic!

At the end of the Ice Galaxy is the Ice Dragon. In this game, dragons are sub-endgame. They're second-tier, behind the four Abyss Gate Guardians and the final boss. In other words, they're quite nasty.

After a pitched battle, our heroes fall. Doesn't help that this guy regenerates 700 HP a turn (.....) while the total damage the party can dish out is about 2000 a turn.

It's clear that I can't handle this fight yet. Regular Ice Galaxy enemies aren't too bad, and there's a free inn nearby... I think I know what needs to be done. Unfortunately, you can't really speed-level in this game. You increase stats based on your actions in battle, so you need to be meticulous with said actions. In my case, I'll go out of my way to learn new tech attacks and increase weapon skills.

With more damage output, maybe I can move up.

An hour and a half of grinding later... it's rematch time. My power increased a LOT in that grind-fest, with group DPS going from about 2000 to about 5000 per round.

Harid's strongest attack, with BiKill on, does a LOT of damage. Unfortunately, I can only do two such attacks, because the MP cost means only one cast of the spell per battle.

A huge ice breath attack straight out of Final Fantasy VI. Now there's a game I should cover...

WIN. Snowman gains HP, which makes it all worth it. I'll keep him right til the end if it lets me, and he can spam those mediocre heals for the rest of the game. I've got a damn good party here in general, though Ellen has become fairly outclassed.

I was worried that I wouldn't be able to take Snowman from here, but there's no reason for alarm. Equip him with an ice crystal from the Ice Galaxy, and he's perma-frozen. Now he can leave without meltage.

Far more powerful than before, it's time for payback on that tournament. So I head back to Zweig and...

...GET RUN OVER BY THAT DAMN CAR AGAIN.

DAMMIT THEY'VE BEEN RUN DOWN LIKE DOGS! SOMEBODY GET SOME HELP OUT THERE!

At this point I hit the 10,000 G wall yet again, so I go and buy the ultimate Sun magic this time. Muse gets it, since she has skill in that element. Too bad she can't use it, since it costs 20 MP and she has...er... 7 MP. And I can't seem to make her MP go up. That's odd. So basically, this may well be useless to me.

Back to Zweig, finally. This tournament is GOIN' DOWN!

Nora versus a babe! ...well, Nora solos 12 of the 15 tourney enemies with little trouble. She one-shotted about half of them. THE ERA OF HARID BEGINS!

...if I can get past this guy. Ellen is the first to fall.

Get 'em, Snowman!

Nope, Snowman falls too. This is like the last episode of that Mortal Kombat TV show where everyone died.

I manage to scrape past the dragon with only Harid remaining. This....lizard thing is the final fight, and Harid easily defeats it. Turns out the Red Dragon was far and away the big challenge here.

Harid is now the King of Iron Fist, as the Tekken theme plays.

Oh...wow. Good thing I just spent most of my money, or this would have completely gone to waste...

Oh, now the dragon machine is throbbing as well? Awesome. Time for another rematch.

And I finally win. No more getting harassed by this damn car every other time I pass through.

Our heroes hit the breaks, and the demon car flies off a cliff. That was amazing.

Next up... the Earth Abyss Gate. Finally going to try one of the four. Are we nearing the end?

Before, I thought I couldn't do this because you need a ring to get in, and the guy who has the ring wouldn't give it to me. Turns out you have to go through part of the dungeon, get to where you find out you need the ring, and then run back out... and he'll turn it over. Oookay.

"Give me my ring, bitch!" says Harid. He's like Kobe Bryant when Bill Russell doesn't hand over the MVP trophy fast enough.

"Gimme my trophy, bitch! I'm Kobe Bryant!"

I enter the Abyss Gate dungeon, and suddenly a techno-esque version of the regular dungeon theme kicks in. Whoa!

::Harid dances about with glowsticks::

This has to be one of the shortest dungeons in the game, and due to the large walkways I was able to completely avoid the enemies.

Here it is. The first of the big four.

Arakes, the Earth Demon Lord, ROARS out of the gate.

He's the easiest of the four lords, but he still puts up a fight. His massive HP dwarfs everything else up to now.

After an intense fight, the screen flashes a couple times and Arakes disintegrates. It was just like the end of an FFVI boss fight. He had one super-damaging attack, but he only did it once.

Harid seals the gate with his own blood. Don't fuck with Harid!

Next stop...the Holy King Temple, as the rematches continue. Will I be able to get to the Water Abyss Gate now?

We'll find out...very soon.



5 comments:

  1. You really like Harid, lol. This is swagged out like FF3/6. Too bad we didn't get more of these games in 1995. Will you do Front Mission?

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    1. Well, Harid is the man. I would like to do Front Mission... it's on the list. Stay tuned.

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  2. Beef curtains...mmmmm.
    That map aurora is pretty interesting.
    That scene with the angry snowmen all glaring at you was hilarious. And having one on your team is truly exceptional. It's fun even to watch him talk.
    You DID cover FF6! Link the Strago quest.
    It's so bold of the game to just run over you with a car like that. No mercy!
    The tourney bracket is awesome. The Ladies...Revenge...Dragons...
    This game is so erratic while having so much cool stuff at the same time. It's Xtreme. It's idgaf. The Dragon King remix theme says it.
    This demon lord's design is incredible.
    The Holy King Temple has an incredible view, too. You know what? I am just really enjoying this game.

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    1. Oh yeah, the Strago quest... well, that was just a two-parter. I was thinking more of a full-on FFVI series when I said it's missing from the site. It'd be a cool addition but right now I'm high on Super Famicom RPGs just because of the rarity of people covering them.

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  3. I don't think it can be understated just how awesome Snowman is.

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