Wild Arms 3, Part 10 - Disaster Girl

 What do you mean by that, "Galahad"?

 We return to Wild Arms 3 in-progress as Gallows' grandma gives our heroes a verbal thrashing.

 "Come back when you have all of the Guardians" screeches she before throwing everyone out of Baskar Colony.

 Time to hop on our GIANT TRANSFORMING DRAGONROBOT* and fly to the next dungeon.

* - Whoa, I just realized how weird that is after all this time.

 Shane-O-Mac is our tour guide for this next dungeon, and he won't let the good people of Baskar down.

 This next shrine is full of murals and harkens us back to a time when the "Neosapiens" descended upon Filgaia from another world and basically seized it from the indigenous sapiens, the Elws. Ah, this is a take on the somewhat popular theory that Neanderthal were the indigenous species of Earth and Cro-Magnon were "introduced" to the environment by an external force, given the lack of apparent link.

 Speaking of annihilation, here's a species that one could drop on any world and the indigenous life would be doomed: Scissor-wielding dolls. The Devil's hands have been busy.

 Here's Dark Matter in action, Luceid's shadow-element attack spell.

 Back to the story: After arriving on this world from their own doomed world, the Neosapiens proceeded to battle it out with the indigenous Elws, despite that they weren't that genetically different.

 A terrible war followed that went on for many hundreds of years and made life hell for pretty much everyone on the planet.

 Clive...is giving them too much credit. I'm pretty sure they just didn't have any weapons big enough to blow up the planet yet.

 And the final Elw:

 Cary Elw.

 That dungeon was full of Filgaia backstory, and culminates with The Advocacy appearing in their new, Siegfried-Approved forms. They're all hideous demons now...except Melody, who refuses to take a hotness downgrade.

 They're not going to fight us with their new forms yet, though. The next boss fight consists of a bunch of weird monsters. It's another of those "powered-up regular enemies" types of boss fights that this game has a few of.

 The Advocacy report back to Siegfried, and it took me this long to notice his monster head-dildo.

 After that dungeon, Clive starts having some weird brooding sessions. I think the game is suggesting that he's going to turn on the party, but it's highly doubtful that it'll happen in a game with four permanent party members. Then again, Final Fantasy V might have something to say about that.

 Meanwhile...remember the Goddess Idol that I got from Senorita Emilia when she was having a yard sale on her late boyfriend's possessions? It turns out that it's for the second of the four tier-3 espers.

 Raftina is a bit more pleasant than Luceid. She's the Love Elemental, and a fairly easy fight at this point.

 Love Charm gets equipped on Jet. This Esper comes with some "weird spells" like Weaken (makes the enemy vulnerable to whatever damage spells that character has, so fire in this case), Copy Ability (copies the abilities of an enemy to that character for the rest of the battle, but at the cost of their own abilities being locked), Requiem (kills an undead foe instantly), and Status Lock (protects a character from non-Death status effects for the rest of the battle). Used correctly, there's some powerful stuff here.

Chances are I'll give Virginia the final, strongest tier-3 medium. The game is letting me choose who gets what, and Virginia getting the last one feels like what the game would do if it weren't giving me the choice.

 Clive is acting all weird again as we begin the (sigh) next dungeon. So...many dungeons. Luckily most of them only take around ten minutes at this point since I can dispel the random fights.

 Clive now drops the knowledge bomb to end all knowledge bombs: The Yggdrasil System that the bad guys set into motion isn't just transforming the environment. It's transforming the entire planet to make it more suitable for their ilk. Things just got pretty dark. In essence, it's what happened to Mars:

…annnd that's what was on Clive's mind, so no worries, he won't be leaving the party or signing with WWE to debut at the Rumble. Though it would be kind of cool if he did.

 Next boss is Humbaba, who has the name of a Final Fantasy VI boss and the hard head of the Helmasaur King.

 This is the first fight in ages to hand me a loss. It turns out that every few turns he can use an insta-death attack on the entire party. The gimmick to winning this fight is to equip the entire party with Status Guard, an ability that makes them immune to status changes when they defend. This also blocks Death attacks, unlike Status Lock. From there, just defend on every third turn and the fight will be over soon enough.

 Oh, and he's super physical-resistant, so it's the first fight in a while that makes you rely on spell damage.

 "I never meant to hurt you-ou-ou!" says Werner.

 With another dungeon in the books, and Virginia's father chased off again, we're off to Fila Del Fia.

 This next dungeon is played up as a "flying city" and sounds awesome...until we get there and find out that it's yet another bland mine zone. Our heroes explain it away by saying it must have fallen long ago.

 Yeah, I guess it isn't, game. Look, I like this game a lot, but I can only deal with so many dungeons that are basically just cave zones.

 On the bright side, in this dungeon Clive gets his third and final tool: The Grappling Hook. This fires a hookshot straight up, which can pull you up to some platforms and activate switches.

 And luckily for us, vertically-placed ring pop switches start appearing in this very dungeon.

 Jet takes a moment to remind us that, much like a Final Fantasy hero, he just doesn't give a care! Thanks for your contribution, Jet. Don't go thinking you so bad jes' 'cuz you in SOLDIER.

 The next boss is another oddball foe that is easily confused with a regular enemy. Like so many other bosses, it has an annoying gimmick: It turns invisible when hit by a physical attack, causing all other physical attacks to miss it that turn. This means it's another fight I have to rely on magic to win, and my magic attacks are much weaker than my physical attacks... ah well. The gap will get even bigger once I farm up enough money to go back and max out all of my ARM stats.

 Next up is a tricky puzzle where you have to turn this wheel and then run to a switch with frame-perfect movement to get to it before it resets. ...or you can just freeze the wheel. This game is so much easier when you have an idea of what to do and know all the nuances.

 You know what, Jet? You know what?

 Elsewhere: Maya and her posse roam through the desert. Unlike us, they don't have a rampaging flying hellbeast to soar around on.

 Alfred gives his sister grief. Well, if what he means by "the gem" is "Virginia", he might be getting closer to the real crux of the issue.

 "She UNDERSTANDS me, OKAY?"

 The next dungeon is the Caging Tower, which sounds like something out of Dark Souls. It's...another relatively bland locale. However, THIS bland locale has...

 ...Maya and company, whose feet must be KILLING them.

 What follows is yet another fight with these guys, and it's identical to the other fights where Maya wasn't in a Dressphere. Final Fantasy X-2: Coming to this site in 2022!

 …"Fifty Shades of Virginia"?

 What follows is a scene where they try to punch each other, both block it at the same time (Gokou/Vegeta style) and then just kinda chill there for a minute. It was at that moment that they realized they didn't want to fight, and that was that. I joke, but it's pretty cool to have two female leads who are adversaries at first, go through character development from their fights, and later get along. Hell, it's cool to have two female leads at all.

 Maya can't deny the fact that Virginia is just a really nice person and not deserving of her grief, so we team up yet again. Will it last?

 ...nope, as Maya air-palms over Virginia's chest and immediately gets ousted from her Senate seat despite like 70% of her home state of Minnesota wanting her to stay.

 Well, not quite, but something almost as bad happens: The Advocacy warps in and traps Maya inside of a light-pyramid, Reno-style.

 And they're threatening to make her die horribly. This RIGHT AFTER her and Virginia decided to be friends.

 They warp away, Maya in tow, and that's it for this dungeon. The worst part? This place didn't even have the item we're after*, something Maya KNEW ABOUT. ...which makes no sense because she came here too.

* - Oh yeah, we're after an item called the Teardrop. More on this later. Apologies for not being too thorough with the story at this point, trying to keep things moving. Suffice to say this game is rife with macguffins for our heroes to chase.

 The next dungeon...eww. This is where Maya was taken, too.

 This is a fairly quick and interesting dungeon. In it, Maya's gang each have an important role to play as they break through various barriers with their talents. For example, Shady can spit hot fire. Todd can slash through doors with his sword.

 All this talk of magazine issues and trains reminds me of Final Fantasy VIII. Well, safe to say that Maya is the Disaster Girl in question.

 Clive's block-pushing ability can be used in this dungeon to reach a hidden postgame boss. Typically you'd use these blocks as a bridge to cross the room, so this is easy to miss.

 Play Gallows' Kramer Dolls at this portal to summon the postgame boss. Why am I doing this now, you ask?

 Because this boss, Heimdal Gazzo, uses ONLY dark-element attacks. I've got two characters with the Dark Ward skill maxed out, which means all they have to worry about are his relatively weak physical attacks. Unfortunately the two characters without Dark Ward (Jet and Clive) are annihilated within two turns.

 From there, it's just a matter of whittling down his 120000 (!!!) HP with the two remaining characters. Their attacks are so blunted by his defense that they do around 50-80 damage...unless I use the Valiant spell to boost their attack power by whatever HP they're missing. And use it again. And again. Since he dispels the group frequently as well. And make sure he doesn't kill anybody with his 600 damage attacks, since he always goes first.

 A legitimate HOUR LATER...I finally win. I started regretting my choice to fight this guy around 20 minutes in...

 Here's the reason for the fight, though: MEGA EXP. That 70000 is magnified by almost 10x for the two surviving characters. And it gets better: The Gold License halves the cost of all items in shops.

 The only bad news is that Jet and Clive were left completely out of the EXP train due to being very dead. Now Virginia and Gallows are significantly higher level than they are. If I could do it over again, I'd wait a little longer to do this fight and get Dark Ward on the other two characters. That was a big boost to miss out on. There's no way I'm resetting and doing that fight again though, especially considering that I was already overleveled for this part of the game without a mega-assist from a postgame boss. Once I can farm money and get my ARMs maxed out, the game might effectively be over.

 The actual boss of this place is a weird one. The gimmick here is that they revive each other constantly, more or less. Well, the big one self-destructs to murder your party, then the little one revives him. They have miniscule HP pools, however, and your characters can obliterate them after a cast of Valiant. The big guy is also super-weak to spell damage.

 After that we find this giant monitor, which Siegfried uses to show up and taunt our heroes like CATS in Zero Wing.

 We see things from his perspective, as he lurks in his evil lair.

That's right, Maya and Siegfried aren't actually here. Looks like we'll be looking for that Teardrop after all just to exchange it for the Disaster Girl. Things have gotten serious as the endgame draws near.

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