Today on Dragon Quest VI: After a hiatus where I level-grinded in Spiegelspire during my spare time, we return to DQVI with a super powered-up party. Turns out it isn't hard at all to max out in a phone game that you can play whenever you want during random lulls in activity.
Also I just remembered that Dragon Quest VII has a Pirate class (tier 2) and it's very good. Well I'm definitely playing that now. Just need Sailor + Thief maxed to get it. Wait, the Alltrades Abbey in that game is like 30 hours in? FUUU-
WHAT, YOU THOUGHT I WAS JOKING?
The last two are Dragon and Liquid Metal Slime, and unfortunately I can't get those until I get the optional characters that have them as classes. It's especially unfortunate because you get a ring that stops enemy encounters once you have all classes at 5 stars or more (across the party, doesn't have to be on one character). I can't get that ring until I recruit those lategame optional characters and get their classes up, though. A no-encounter ring would be GREAT now instead of like, at the end of the game, but whatever.
Wonder if it'll make Dragon and LMS usable by other characters. Judging from the ??? pair on the hero's screen here, I think that'll indeed be the case. Since LMS is said to be the best class in the game, here's hoping. In that situation I won't even want to equip the no-encounter ring, at least not until everyone gets Dragon and LMS done.
I thought Hero was a main character exclusive, but nope. Thing is, the main character needs to max ONE tier 2 class (Gladiator or Sage or Paladin or Ranger or Armamentalist or Luminary) to get access to Hero. However, the other characters need to max out ALL of the tier 2 classes (and possibly tier 1 as well) to get Hero unlocked.
A full party of Heroes is basically invincible. That said, I'm not entirely overpowered. Spiegelspire might be the best place to grind class levels, but it isn't much for normal exp, so I'm still well short of endgame level (though way higher than I was).
Watch out, now Healie can bite.
Spiegelspire is a pretty generic tower dungeon. Once my epic grind was done, nothing in here had a remote chance against me. Average party level went from 27 to 47 during the grind. I would have thought it'd take more levels to max out all those classes. I'll need even more levels for the final boss and postgame.
Spiegelspire's top level is an actual spire, which is pretty cool. Our heroes slogged their way up, only to find Tifa already at the top and calling them slow.
Speaking of the top, there's a house up here. That's bizarre. DQVI is full of things one might classify as bizarre, and it's part of the charm of this game. It may be my least-favorite of the 4-6 trilogy by a lot, but it does have a certain distinctive mood to it that I like.
Here's noted German Man, Spiegel.
"Eat ze bugs!" he says while stirring a large suspicious pot.
Since it's been a while, time for a quick refresher: A lady is trapped in a mirror prison and the local king is trying to set her free, so we went to Spiegelspire to defeat the guy who put her in the mirror to begin with.
Spiegel here wanted Miralda to be his wife, and she didn't want to, so he cursed her.
Worth noting is that King Ludwig, who sent us on this mission to save Miralda...wants to free her so he can marry her, which I'm pretty sure nobody consulted her on. So she's being treated the same way in the present that Spiegel did in the past, only in a slightly less-abrasive, less-cursed fashion.
Spiegel can be a challenging boss if you're underlev-
-ANNNND IT'S GONE
King Ludwig can't wait to free Miralda from the mirror, because...
...I hope she does object, because it's worth noting here that the entire time she was in the mirror, he couldn't hear what she was saying.
OBJECT! OBJECT DAMMIT!
This gets us the next key item, and Miralda...does not object. Why? Here's why:
So basically Miralda believes that the king here must be the reincarnation of that guy from long ago. Welp. I mean, whatever floats your boat.
Speaking of boats, our next stop is this pirate cove. Supposedly a mermaid lives here, but when our heroes arrive all they see are a bunch of grizzled pirates with peg-legs.
Yeah, we were hoping to see a hot, shapely, glistening mermaid with a hair-bra.
That's funny because Pescado is Espanol for "Fish"
It's like when Alberto Del Rio would call people "perro dog", which means... Dog Dog.
Here, the store is sold out of fish because all of their stock is being bought up by this one guy, Rod.
"I AM THE FISH KING NOW!" says Rod.
What follows is a super drawn-out and tedious minigame where you have to follow Rod around in the cave without making any noise or alerting him to your presence.
Get spotted, and you have to exit the town and sleep at the inn before you can try again. Also, the screen being vertical does not take this minigame into account, and often you can't see him off the sides of the screen when you need to. It's the one time in the entire game where the screen's verticality becomes an issue.
DAMMIT
Eventually we find out Rod's secret: He's been hiding a mermaid who washed up here. I'm guessing he's feeding her all those fish. So wait, the fish genocide was to feed this one mermaid? I didn't even realize mermaids were carnivores. This puts everything I once knew into question.
Unda is the mermaid, and she got separated from the other mermaids. However she really likes Rod, the peg-legged pirate. Rod kinda wants her to be able to go back to the other mermaids, so at least he isn't selfish like King Ludwig. I don't know man, I don't think you're ever gonna do any better than this.
GET A ROOM
He tasks our heroes with getting her back to mermaid-ville, even though she doesn't want to go. This is actually like the opposite of the Miralda storyline we just did.
After going allllll the way back out of the cave and wheeling in the boat, off we go. Pay no attention to the screen-in-screen of Aliens: Fireteam Elite. Post on that here.
Unda returns to the mermaid-land, which is full, absolutely BRIMMING, with hot mermaids with hair-bras.
They give our heroes the power to not need to breathe. Now they can go down and stay down for hours and hours!
Under the ocean is like a whole new overworld map. Reminds me of when Breath of Fire did it. That was one of my favorite parts of the game.
First thing I do is head to the sunken ship and grab the Ultimate Key. It takes all of two minutes, unlike the previous game with the mighty optional boss that guarded it.
We also get some new shoes for Ashlynn.
Time for Ultimate Key harvesting. However, there are only a couple things you can get with it at first. This isn't like other DQ games where you have a whole list of things to get with the Ultimate Key immediately. Here, most of the doors are found further in the story than the key is.
South of Alltrades Abbey is a hidden well with extremely good shops. They sell better equipment than any town I know of.
The prices are pretty high, and even with my absolutely ludicrous amount of gold from class-farming, buying upgrades for everyone eats up a large portion of the gold total.
Fishnet stockings...for the ladies
The weapons are good too, and it's safe to say that being able to get everything I needed from these shops is going to give me a significant advantage for a while.
Back at the Abbey, there are fire-pots in the basement that light up as you master classes. At this point I'm only missing those two monster classes. Once I get those mastered and return here, I'll get the no-encounter accessory.
Our next stop is a snow area, which is awesome because I love snow areas in DQ games. They aren't too common but always look nice when they show up.
This town is in the midst of a full-on blizzard...and everyone is frozen. Wait a minute, this happens in DQXI too.
Even the indoor people are frozen. Let's melt 'em!
Here's Gerda, the flirtatious ice witch. She froze the villagers, and she'll only thaw them if we do something for her. Luckily, our heroes just got the underwater breathing ability from the mermaids!
A few hours later...
...well, that was easy. Now that the town is thawed out, it's on to the next place that has problems. This game is the genesis of DQVII's long-winded chapter-based story, where the game transpires in the form of lots of episodic and self-contained areas/chapters rather than one big story narrative. You go from place to place just kind of solving micro-problems.
More micro-problems later.
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