Live-a-Live #16 - Murasame

Oboro finds Masaru the wrestler in the basement of the castle. They could join forces against Odio, but first... they must do battle. It is the ancient way of the pro wrestler.

After a knock-down, drag out brawl, Oboro manages to subdue Masaru. Wonder how much easier this final chapter would be if I had gotten the Muramasa for Oboro in his chapter. It's BY FAR his best weapon, and I sorta wish I could do his chapter over again just to make sure I get it. If he's going to be the hero in the finale, he should definitely have Muramasa at the outset.

Or you could just go with Sunset, which is the best option.

After the match, Oboro extends a hand to Masaru. The party now has two members.

Masaru is SERIOUSLY lacking in equipment and levels, since his chapter only gave him skills.

The store rooms that I raided as Orsted are all still empty. Wish I'd left them alone, since now I could really use all that stuff...

On the mountain, I find Cube's battery. Fun Fact: This game (or fan-translation?) has such good attention to detail that different characters will identify this item in different ways. Akira will pick up a "Battery" while Kino will pick up "a shiny thing". Everyone in-between will see it as an Iron Box.

I pop the battery into Cube and he springs to life. That's three characters, nice. I think you can hunt down the heroes in any order; I'm just getting them as I happen to run into them.

Cube is another super-underequipped character. His base stats are incredible, though, so he doesn't really need much of anything. Low HP is a bit of an issue, though.

Akira is lurking in some hut, acting all emo. He too demands that I fight him. Yawn, fine.

As the weakest of the heroes, Akira is an easy fight without his mech.

He's just as I left him, with higher-than-everyone-else levels and panties on his head.

Now that I have four characters (and no idea where to find the other three) I start looking for dungeons. There are seven side-dungeons in this chapter (in other words, it's huge) and each one has a unique uber-weapon for one character. Here's the entrance to Cube's dungeon. It's a complex series of puzzles, and I'll get back to it later.

Oboro's dungeon is simpler. It's just a standard dungeon. Doing this one first so that Oboro can finally get a potent weapon. Assumedly his uberweapon is better than the Muramasa that I missed.

At the end of the dungeon is Murasame, Oboro's ultimate weapon.

HUGE, monstrous upgrade. You've probably been wondering about the stats... I'm not entirely sure, but here's what I think they represent, from top to bottom:

-Physical attack power (AT)
-Physical defense (DE)
-Special attack power
-Special attack defense
-Magic attack power
-Magic attack defense

I might be wrong. I haven't investigated further because I like having a bit of mystery, but from what I can tell the above guesses are probably fairly accurate.

After using Akira's teleport ability to escape from a few battles, I get warped to the Mind Dungeon. This is Akira's dungeon; I like that you get transported to it rather than having to find it.

After a fairly nondescript dungeon, I get Akira's ultimate weapon. It isn't such a huge upgrade, but it does go a long way towards making him useful. His special attack power is very high, and this boosts it even further.

The ghost of Princess Alicia appears here, imploring our heroes to stop Orsted. She helped make him the monster that he is by betraying him with his best friend and killing herself in front of him, so she can sod off

Masaru's dungeon is guarded by...

...the world's most intimidating bouncer. It's a tough fight, to say the least.

This next dungeon is really short and to-the-point. I'm guessing the main challenge was being strong enough to get in...

Masaru's best weapon. It's another mammoth upgrade. Probably the biggest single upgrade anyone has gotten yet. Too bad Masaru himself probably won't be one of my final four, even with these newly-impressive stats...

Our heroes battle ARMIES OF PUPPIES as they leave. Seems the second major challenge here is getting out of the place alive.

At this point I have three primary goals. Find the three characters I'm missing, find the four weapons I'm missing, and find the four pieces of Ariel armor (the best armor in the game) for Oboro. Then, track down Odio and destroy him. This is much more like a traditional RPG now.

I head back to Cube's dungeon. It's full of obscure, tedious puzzles, but this time I tough it out.

Cube's uberweapon brings him into good character contention as well. As far as I know, it's his only weapon.

The log cabin on the mountain is now home to Sunset. No word on if he became a grizzled woodcutter after arriving in this weird time-compressed dimension. He won't join yet, and leaves without a word.

At this point I return to Cube's dungeon to fight an optional boss.

This thing is on the shortlist for hardest boss in the game, right up there with the Demon King. I barely won, and about 80% of the damage I did was with Masaru's super-strong counterattacks.

Also had both Cube AND Akira on healing duty. Rare to need two healers for any fight in this game. By the time I won, only Masaru and Cube were still standing.

Winning that fight gets me the first of the four Ariel armors. It better be good...

It has the same stats as the Genji Helm, but it protects against mental-based status effects (like confuse) entirely. Each of the four Ariel armors protects against a certain kind of spell, be it mental status effects, physical status effects, elemental attacks, or whatnot. Putting all of them on the hero will make him impervious to all enemy specials, but it might be more advantageous to spread the four of them among your four party members.

Almost done.

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