Don’t Let Me Down
Click here for update 17!
YouTube Link: Cursed Town
When we last left our heroes, our efforts to help Rolan deal with his issues resulted in us covering the world in demons.
Rolan himself is looking less-than-stellar as well.
The most important thing for what’s coming up is protecting ourselves from dark damage.
Also, our healer needs protection from light.
Welp, sounds like there’s no problems here!
: Rolan, snap out of it!
: It’s no good. He can’t hear a thing we say!
: DIE, HUMANS. DIE!
: R-run… while you still… can…!
YouTube Link: Strong Enemy
Rolan is… kind of a rude fight, quite frankly.
The majority of his attacks are dark-elemental, hence the darksteel shields, which he also absorbs.
His one attack that isn’t dark-elemental is Thundara here, which does light damage and can paralyze.
He is also resistant to all other elements.
YouTube Link: A Desperate Situation
Fortunately, we have the attack power to get past his defenses.
He’s still pretty good at keeping our healer busy, though.
It takes some doing, but he goes down in time.
YouTube Link: Victory
We also get our hands on our first diamonds, the rarest variety of gem, which is required to upgrade crowns to their highest level.
: I don’t care about saving the world, but I care about you, Rolan!
: You’re my one and only brother. Hang in there!
: Rekoteh…
It was a long, long time coming, but we finally have our happy reunion.
Oh, hey, it’s you. We were kind of in the middle of something, pal.
: Long ago, Rolan was the hero who received our gift of light.
: He drank up the darkness in others’ souls 'til his own heart grew black and dark.
: In his mind he forgot the Light, and his soul was closed to all.
: The darkness has been released, but now it threatens to engulf each and every land in this world.
It’s only natural that we end such a dramatic scene by gaining the ability to be something called “Party Host.”
: Go forth now, Heroes of Light…
Ah well, crisis averted, at least.
…oh.
: Please! My brother can’t do it all on his own. Help him to drive back the world of darkness!
That… sounds like an awful tall order.
Well, the Sky Witch out front seems to know a lot about this sort of thing, I guess information gathering is as good a place to start as any.
Ayy, it’s John and Paul’s boy! Dunno where he went after he dropped them off here but now he’s just hangin’ out here.
: Brave people - brave HEROES - must travel to each nation of the world and quiet this raging storm of darkness…
: And as they do so, they will need to gather the legendary weapons that the hero Rolan once bore.
So, not only did our efforts to help Rolan unleash all the demons he was holding back, we actually unleashed so many demons onto the world that it broke time itself.
Dunno about you but I feel pretty damn accomplished.
Anyway, now that our boy’s back within reach, we can go dragon-ridin’!
YouTube Link: Riding on the Dragon
Setting aside the ominous new direction the sky has apparently chosen to take, the dragon is this game’s airship, FFV style. (Actually better, since this one can actually go over mountains.)
Also note the return of the excellent dragon-riding theme song. (I think this is part of why I like it so much; it stands out drastically compared to airship themes in the rest of the series.)
The dragon can be called anytime while on the world map with the dragon harp. Handy!
With this, we’re given free reign of the entire world; we can go anywhere and do anything. Like the witch said, each town in the world has its own quest to take care of and they can all be done in any order we desire (with the exception of Horne, which must be handled last). In addition, monster strength now scales to the party’s levels, so difficulty is largely the same regardless of the order things are handled in.
Therefore, there is only one logical course of action…
Head right back into Spelvia.
While Spelvia is included in the whole do-things-in-any-order setup, I figured that I’d handle it first regardless since, well, it’s right here.
Our party has more lines in town, but not a lot to say.
Except for George, who points out that Rolan has apparently disappeared.
Curious. Most curious.
(I lied when I said we immediately returned to Spelvia; I took the dragon to the various towns to get equipped with dark-elemental offensive gear and light-elemental defense.)
(Honestly it’s worth just going on a worldwide shopping spree regardless of your chosen course of action; all the shops have new inventory.)
Well, it’s not a very big island; Rolan can’t have gone too far, right?
Plus, this gives us a perfect opportunity to show off our new crowns.
Hero is the first crown we obtain for ourselves that we first saw on a guest character. Since we’ve already seen the basics from when Rolan was in the group, let’s see what we couldn’t do with him.
Bladeblitz is basically the regular physical attack only it hits all enemies at once for an extra AP.
Party Host, sadly, is much less interesting than its name would suggest.
Party Host’s whole deal is the psych up mechanic. Charm here psychs up a random party member until the end of the turn and its upgrade abilities do the same for the whole party. Since the psych up mechanic on the whole is just kinda “meh” the crown is honestly fairly unimpressive.
Anyway, our goal in the Spelvia Dungeons is the very bottom, where Ringo came from the first time.
Oh hey, there’s Rolan! Looks like he lost his little crown, too, and must have gone searching for it. Nothing weird going on here!
: Visitors, here? But why…?
Um, Rolan, it’s-
: Ah, you came at Father’s behest, didn’t you? You have come a long way just to check on my welfare.
Oh, right, the whole “there are so many demons running around that it literally broke time” thing. It appears this is Rolan from the past!
: But you’re wasting your time.
: I won’t open my heart to anyone. Not any more!
Well, it looks like we’re at a point where he’s just kind of a curmudgeon and not millions of demons…
…maybe we can give his soul a jump start on the whole “fixing things” front.
YouTube Link: Another Space
: They scare me… war and fighting scare me to death!
: Rolan the Hero, Rolan the Hero… That’s all I’ve ever heard. But no one asked ME if I wanted to be a hero.
It appears things are still going to hell pretty early on, though.
Our destinations are, unsurprisingly, the three void rooms.
Instead of silhouette chasing, however, it’s just a short walk to a monster, which in this room is to the west of the entrance.
I know I established “dark offense, light defense” earlier, but for now we actually want the opposite. Also, bring echo drops and/or remedies as well as curse-resisting gear.
Just mentioning it here since I forgot to get shots of myself doing it. :V
YouTube Link: Battle With Demons
Unsurprisingly, the Arch Demon here is weak to light…
…and dishes out dark. This attack can also inflict curse, hence the aforementioned preparations.
It has a pretty big bag of HP on top of its status effects but it goes down eventually.
When we go back out of the room, we get a scene:
: I sheltered behind her, hiding from the battles I was supposed to fight. I lived a lie…
: …and that lie let the demons into my heart. They came to steal the power of the hero buried within me!
The only difference between void rooms is the placement of the Arch Demon.
More of the same. After this fight:
: All I ever did was run… Run from people’s hopes, run from my own destiny.
: If only I had a little courage, perhaps I could have driven away the demons myself.
One final Arch Demon.
No scene when we leave the room this time, so now it’s time to check up on Rolan himself.
The tendrils of darkness disappear and Rolan walks through the door. Inside…
We see what can only be the demon head honcho.
This may be a familiar face to those of you who fought a lot of Norende nemeses in Bravely Default.
Now this is the guy we need dark-based attacks and light-based defenses for.
: Besides, we like to see things through to the end.
: I want you to be reunited with your sister and your father, the chief of Invidia…
: Thank you, my brave comrades! With your help, I’ll finally become the hero I was always meant to be!
: Hey, what are friends for? We’d never leave you in the lurch, ever. And don’t you forget it!
I mean, I’m pretty sure this is the version of Rolan we aren’t friends with, yet, but whatever floats your boat.
See what I mean? Head honcho. Duder’s literally named Lucifer.
YouTube Link: The Demon King’s Servants
I will admit that Lucifer kind of gave me some trouble here.
Lucifer, as his name suggests, does light-based damage…
…while being weak to dark.
The worst thing about him is his tendency for causing status effects; his thunder spells cause paralysis while his physical attacks cause silence.
(I can’t really guard against these because I forgot to pick up the accessories that block it and they stop being available in stores post-time-break. :V)
Also obnoxious is Aeroga; we could equip shields that block wind, but that would mean not equipping shields that block light, so the choice is either take extra damage from this or take extra damage from his light attacks. More of his attacks are light-based than wind-based, so Aeroga is his heaviest-hitting move by default.
He’s also another boss that takes flight after awhile.
While he’s in the air, he has access to the second-worst thing about him: Judgment Bolt. Contrary to its usual function and appearance, this time it’s a big ol’ laser that completely destroys your party’s AP.
As a result, the best course of action to take while he’s airborne is to just boost the whole time, since it reduces the damage he does and it’s unlikely your healer will have the AP to do anything effectively.
Lucifer ends up kicking my ass enough times…
…that I choose to bring out the nuclear option.
I make John the Elementalist as he’d been taking the most damage, then upgraded it twice for its most useful ability (arguably the most useful ability), Mysterio.
Truth be told, I honestly prefer to avoid using Elementalist when I can, but sometimes the situation just calls for it.
YouTube Link: Approaching Dread
Lucifer is fairly challenging even with Mysterio active, so it seems the situation did indeed call for it.
(I might have been able to handle the fight without Mysterio if I’d thought to get the aforementioned status-blocking accessories when I could, but that’s just speculation at this point.)
This is much more manageable.
Paul’s accessory made him double resistant to light so with Mysterio the boss is actually more likely to heal him than hurt with it on.
(Not shown here is that the same goes for John due the the Elementalist’s passive resistances.)
No protection from this awful thing, sadly, which is the chief reason this fight is still challenging, as it makes it difficult to heal and renew Mysterio when it wears off.
After taking enough damage, Lucifer starts casting Cura on himself.
It doesn’t do him much good.
You’d think a big-name demon wouldn’t be such a sore loser.
Back so soon?
: You find yourselves in an alternate world, a world that was destined to be saved by the original Rolan of legend.
: The demons you face are mere servants of the Dark Lord himself.
We go almost half the game without a crown that uses swords and along come two in a row!
: O, Heroes of Light.
: Join now with Rolan the champion, and bring Light back to the world.
With that, Spelvia has blue skies again.
: If you can only repair the distortions that are even now appearing in each land, then perhaps this world can be saved.
Travel the world, fix- oh yeah we got a new toy from that, didn’t we?
Paladin is… well, the typical Final Fantasy Paladin class, really. High defense, abilities to keep damage off your buddies, that sort of thing.
We should probably see what Rolan has to say before doing anything else.
It’s worth noting that the golems are now fine with us in human form. Anyway, Rolan:
: I will forever be in your debt. At last, I can stand on my own two feet.
'Bout time, after all that rigamarole.
: I shall travel the world with my dragon. I will learn more of its people and become a hero to everyone.
: Then, at the end of my journey, I shall return to Father and Rekoteh.
I mean, is it really likely, given how time itself is broken?
This just goes in a loop until you say yes. Finally, “but thou must” in its purest form!
: It was once wielded by a great hero, but I have no more need of it now.
And with that we’ve completed Spelvia. This is basically the rest of the game until the end; head to a town, sort out its demon problem, get a crown and a piece of equipment.
You might remember that Bravely Default tried to emulate this and it ended up basically being that game’s biggest flaw. This game actually handles it much better. While there’s some backtracking involved, this half is actually much more involved than just the recycle-the-first-half approach that BD took.
We should probably be on our way as well…
…because while Spelvia is fine again, the rest of the world is not looking so hot.
New Crowns
Click here for new crowns!
Party Host
The Party Host has forgettable stats and is based around a mechanic that’s not especially useful. One of its later abilities, Pot Luck, has a random effect a la main series mainstay Slots, but that’s about it.
Stats:
HP: 1.1
Strength: 1.1
Intellect: 1.1
Spirit: 1.1
Hero
A solid physical attacker. Bladeblitz in particular is useful as it’s a powerful move that hits all enemies on the field. It has balanced enough stats that it can use magic somewhat proficiently but that’s only really good for some backup healing.
HP: 1.1
Strength: 1.1
Intellect: 1.1
Spirit: 1.1
Paladin
Heavy defense, high HP, protects friends, all the standard Paladin stuff. It also hits a bit harder than the average tank.
See next post for important polls!