putting the pieces
together. found my
way out of the maze.
Kiria’s status has updated now that we’ve finished her first sidequest, and…
[quote] hrrgh… I made friends with a girl from the photo shoot, but I haven’t been able to reach her… ‘^’;
and I saw some of her pictures on the wall in the Idolasphere. guess that means she’s in there, huh…?[/quote]
Well, that just means we have to get her out, doesn’t it? Back to Illusory Shibuya.
The second room starts off pretty straightforward. Up the stairs, we immediately run into a one-way wall, so down the ledge it is.
There was an encounter here, it’s gone now.
On the lower floor, we hang a right and hit another one-way wall. The locked chest has a Chakra Pot if you’ve got a key handy.
New enemies! The Abyss is an upgraded Man O’ War from Illusory 106, complete with its focus on causing status ailments. However, as you can see, they’re weak to literally everything, so dealing with them is far more trivial than their jellyfish cousins.
Heading the other direction, we pass an incredibly obvious camera and work our way back up to 3F, grabbing a pair of Dis-Charms along the way.
And there’s our first shortcut for the area.
Moving on, we head down the stairs and hit another ledge.
That drops us down to here. The far chest has a pair of Beads, to the right is progress.
The girl on the left is our first Cleric enemy. As the name implies, they can heal up enemies if you give them a chance, but they’re mostly content to cast low-level magic like Flux or try and whack you with their mace. Weak to Swords, Fire, and Light, resist Ice, Electric, and Dark.
For a second, I thought I was actually stuck here because of how that camera is positioned, but their view is actually very narrow and we can easily slip behind it. Hell, there’s one later on that you basically walk right up to in order to grab an item; you essentially have to walk directly in front of it to get caught.
Itsuki finally picks up Mazio, and we drop Rakukaja for it. Admittedly it’s not as clear cut as a traditional SMT game because you get skills from weapons, but L20 feels really late to be picking up the Tier 1 multi-targets. I think Ryuji is the only person to have a similar time on that, and his excuse is that he’s literally Kanji and should be punching people instead.
Another camera that’ll get you if you’re not paying attention. This one is guarding Nightlife Flicker, a Performa that we need to get one of Tsubasa’s Radiant Skills.
And there’s Wall #2. Up the stairs we go!
But not too quickly! There’s a locked chest tucked away immediately to the left, and it’s incredibly easy to miss. The Roaring Ear Plugs are a real interesting accessory, trading 3 points of Def/Res for 12 Speed, plus being marginally better than our current stuff in armor value. I still don’t use it because I’m boring, but at least this one is actually worth the tradeoff. 12 speed is plenty to more or less guarantee that whoever you give it to will go first in the turn queue.
At the top of the stairs, the path splits into three options. There’s really no way to tell which one is correct, so we might as well just pick one and see where it leads. The left one seems like as good of a place to start as any.
This one drops us all the way down to 1F, with a camera blocking us off to the right and a large open area to our left.
I’ve always been a firm believer that the Suku (de-)buffs are the most important of the lot. Taru and Raku are nice (and certainly have their place, to be sure) but they’re reliant on hitting in the first place, whereas the Sukus help you avoid that situation altogether. Although that said, Kiria is pretty slow and needs all the help she can get for dodging.
And speaking of dodging, Hamstring is Touma’s equivalent of Fang Breaker, but for Hit/Evade. Like Fang Breaker, it is never leaving his skill slots for as long as I can feasibly hold on to it.
Anyway, if we bear right in that large open area, we’ll eventually work our way over to a Res Incense.
And if we go up the stairs from there, we’ll reach the end of this area past another camera hallway.
…Huh, well that wasn’t supposed to happen. Guess we should go back and check out those other ledges.
The center ledge drops us on the other side of that pesky camera. Up the stairs?
Nothing! Pick again, fucker.
Stage Rank 4 nets us Unyielding Lord, raising his evade against Lances. Again, it’s kinda filler-y, but getting a free Evade skill against one of your weaknesses (that doesn’t take up a skill slot!) is pretty solid.
As you can probably guess, the right ledge drops us behind that camera and lets us grab a cool ten grand in cold, hard cash. And hey, we’re about to fight a miniboss, so why not put that money to use and stock up on supplies?
The Obelisk is one of those “weird weapons” I mentioned when we were discussing skills and weapon inheritance, and a quick look at its resistance set should be enough to show why. It’s one of Tsubasa’s only weapons to resist fire, tosses in a Null Light because it can, and if I was so inclined, I could use it to teach Tsubasa Agilao (among other things). This is important because this literally allows her to make Touma obsolete, assuming you’re happy with her session skills.
Of course, Touma can do the same thing. The Yomotsu Hirasaka would allow Touma to pick up Wind Strike, letting him pull double duty on Tsubasa’s elemental coverage. This isn’t as viable long-term because Agilao is a Tier 2 spell (whereas Wind Strike is a Tier 1 physical attack), and Touma will still be lacking Tsubasa’s healing prowess, but you could absolutely do it if you’re feeling saucy.
Kiria, meanwhile, just has a couple standard upgrades. The Silver Rod blocks Sleep, but otherwise neither of her new weapons are particularly notable.
Anyway, let’s go rescue some models.
.
Ah… I remember those people! They were at the photo shoot!
We have to save them!
And standing in our way is…a sentient camera. Well at least it’s on-brand.
We’ll have to take this thing down first if we want to save them.
Yeah. Let’s do this, Chrom!
Like most of the minibosses, Tarnished Myrmidon mostly coasts on his support crew to really do damage. That said, he’s got a couple fun surprises in store for us.
First of all, we should deal with these guys. This is our first taste of archers, and we really don’t want Tsubasa on the receiving end of that.
Kiria isn’t particularly useful either, but she’s better for clearing out these mooks. The shaman is kind of a joke, and I’m not sure why he got to tag along here.
TM gets two moves a turn, and starts his cycle by casting Tarukaja and Sukukaja. This is your freebie turn before shit hits the fan.
Fortunately the archers are weak to Electric and Lances, so cleaning them out is pretty trivial. If you get Itsuki and Touma lined up right in the turn queue, you might even wipe them out before they get a shot off.
Here’s where things start getting ugly. On his second turn, TM will cast Order Snipers, which gives all the enemies an elemental flavor, and causes them to attack the same target. He’ll also throw out a Media to top off any of the archers that are still alive.
Now, because you’re a smart cookie who knows what all your weaknesses are, this is the point where you switch out whoever the game decided to target. This has the benefit of breaking the lock-on, but you’re still going to get everyone hit by the new elemental arrows. It’s a minor damage boost, but nothing you shouldn’t be able to shrug off.
Alternatively, you can be like me and kill them all before they get to do anything at all. I recommend that one.
TM himself is weak to Ice and Lances. The ice weakness is incredibly tempting, especially considering Kiria’s sky-high magic stat, but he gets two turns and you really don’t want him repeatedly smacking her with Cleave. Touma and Tsubasa are more than enough to tear him apart safely.
That said, he’s perfectly capable of fucking up Tsubasa’s day too. Granted, this is with a Tarukaja active, but Wind Strike does respectable enough damage that two of them will easily kill her in one turn.
That’s all he has in his bag of tricks, though. Once he’s alone, he goes down real quick.
And a round of new skills for everyone. Tsubasa, Touma, and Kiria get Sukukaja, Speed Boost, and Mabufu respectively.
Looks like they’re all back to normal. What a relief…
Itsuki and the others rescued the kidnapped models…
Before we check out for today, let’s see what everyone has to say at the halfway point.
It seems like he was taking the girls’ Peforma through their pictures.
Let’s keep this up and rescue Ms. Maiko!
If things had been even a little different, Tsubasa might have gotten taken too, right? Maybe it’s good the photo shoot got stopped!