Update 21: Sidequest Grinding 1
Once we get Martha’s scrubber back, all we have to do is teleport over to her cottage and quest complete.
We’ll do just that, and start doing higgledy research. There’s no particular reason for it, we just had the KG lying around and the early higgledy research has a pretty good cost-influence ratio.
I also went and built the kitchen for Floyd - this is again because the kitchen (at least its first level) has a good cost-influence ratio compared to some of our other options right now. The kitchen is one of the big influence-point generators, though not as cost-effective as some other ones we’ll see later.
Before we go to the cutscene, I’d like to just point something out about how broken gear progression is in Ni no Kuni 2. We’re going to kill ourselves a superboss.
Just north of Evermore is this asshole - a giant level 23 whamster. We’re level 19 right now, so it’s a little above us.. but this guy’s a pushover unless you’re dumb enough to fight him on extreme. By the way, the superboss drops are fixed so you don’t get anything better for killing them on extreme.
On normal, this boss is extremely easy - he has a shield, but his attacks only hit a small area in front of him and thus we can just run around behind him and hit him repeatedly.
We can even knock him down with charged special attacks and just lay down the damage. Clangston spent probably 80% of this fight eating dirt.
His only real attack when he’s not busy being prone is charging in a straight line, which has a very visible wind-up and is super easy to avoid. The one hit I took here, believe it or not, was because Windows decided to steal focus due to fucking stickykeys since I just built this PC a few months ago and forgot to turn that off.
He dies, and everyone immediately levels up. This is why you want to do most superbosses as soon as you possibly can.
The other reason is this thing.
The bone mail this thing dropped is an armor we won’t see regular drops of until near the end of the game. You can see that it’s nearly twice as strong at physical defense as the previous best armor we had, and over twice as good at magic defense.
I also tried the slime again, but the slime is practically impossible to do without Evan and I didn’t feel like going back to kill it.
Actually, you know what? Fuck it. No plot this update, it’s sidequest time.
Each one of those speech bubbles on the minimap is a sidequest. There’s one we can do right in front of us.
This is Persha, who we met in the basement of the castle at Ding Dong Dell.
Unfortunately, she wants to make a quilt for the inn before she leaves forever, so she needs four lumps of greenglade cotton. We had eight, and it’s almost always worth it to get a citizen, so this is pretty much a no-brainer.
Next up is this guy, Nu Bi, who is a weaponsmith.. and would be our primary person in the weapon shop if we ever bothered to craft. But we won’t, because the superboss drops are that good.
Magmanimus, however, is an asshole and we absolutely, positively need Evan to kill it.
Goos, you see, have very poorly defined hitboxes and an attack that hits in a 360-degree arc that comes with absolutely no warning. This means it is very hard to hit them to gain MP back.
The reason we can’t do this with Roland is that Magmanimus spends half of its time in a state where it only takes damage from spells. Evan’s water attack is pretty much the only thing we have that can do any kind of damage to it.
When it gets under half HP, it splits. It splits again at 25% HP. Depending on how dickish the RNG feels like being, this can be not too bad, or they can all sit right on top of each other and become virtually impossible to damage due to the constant 360-degree arc attack.
I’m not going to lie, I died twice on this fight. Both Evan and Roland levelled up (Tani and Batu levelled up from trash mobs on the way to the boss) again.
Its drop is.. a really shit accessory.
The REAL superboss drop is the quest reward, which is easily the best sword obtainable at this point in the game.
Would’ve been real useful against that magma asshole… but it’ll be even more useful on our NEXT sidequest that requires us to kill a superboss.
Hoi Den has an EXTREMELY useful skill for this point in the game: she’s how we get the Explorer’s Guild to produce a passive ability that boosts our movement speed on the world map. She wants us to kill Mortimer, who lives in a cave near Evermore. Man, Roland really picked a great location.
Mortimer is a giant asshole of a boss, mostly because he’s very hard to hit without also being hit. Tani dies in the first 30 seconds and I don’t bother reviving her.
His main attack involves chasing after someone, then hitting them with his sword with no real warning to speak of. This does about 350 damage.. on normal.
We have one way to kill this asshole, and that is with Roland’s new sword. His sword has the freeze attribute, which causes enemies to freeze solid upon being hit with one of his special attacks. One flatliner and Mortimer is unable to do anything for a good five to six seconds.
His reward is trash, but we don’t care.
The first thing we do upon getting back is shoving Hoi Den into the Explorer’s Guild and getting that movement increase.
We also pick up this sidequest, which requires an item we won’t see as a regular drop until Kingdom Level 3. There’s another sidequest we have to do first, which happens to reward a grass-green thread. Unfortunately, we won’t see that one until after we advance the plot some more.
There is one more sidequest we can do back at the sky pirate base for a rather useless citizen whose only real talent is vegetable farming.
You talk to him and he runs away.
The map will outright tell you where he is, but you have to do this three more times before he’ll join you.
Munokhoi brings our total citizen count to 11, still less than halfway to Kingdom Level 2.