Summary
: On the way out, we get another cutscene with Abrecan.
: I can only imagine how prohibitively expensive that would be in a medieval setting.
: What he’s saying is that Alaron will never be a knight.
: The game makes it incredibly easy to find Rheda and Abrecan. Rheda is one room to the right of the throne room.
: Abrecan is one room to the left. We’ll take him since we’re here anyway.
: Abrecan is a strong early-game physical character whose only real weaknesses are his lack of access to skills and that he falls off later in terms of scaling.
: Godric is significantly harder to find. We need to head back outside and follow the carpet.
: This door leads to the wizard’s keep, which is where Godric is.
: The wizard’s keep is a small, circular room with a staircase in the corner. The note on the stairs is from Godric.
: Most game designers would make the stairs lead directly to the lab, but we have to go through a pointless room to get there.
: Godric is supposed to be the comic relief character. The joke is that he’s senile. He’s a more annoying, less likeable version of Ford Cruller.
: To recruit Godric, you need to talk to him once and then leave and come back.
: The basement has a bunch of rooms full of locked chests that we can’t pick. If I remember right, these chests are end-game stuff you’re intended to come back for much later.
: One side room has a bag with 9 spice and 200 gold in it. This will get us a jump start on breaking the economy.
: We recruit Godric, and now we can BEAR WITNESS to his skills.
: Godric starts kind of sucky, but eventually can level up throwing. He specializes in damage magic as opposed to the buffing/debuffing that Rheda has.
: Mechanic is a useless skill, and let me show you how useless.
: It lets you make armor out of common item drops. In this case, we can turn beast hides (which drop off giant rats) into armor of the same name. Is it good?
: Of course it isn’t! It’s got the same stats as the leather armor Alaron starts with (and which you can buy in Gwernia) but with an extra point of dexterity penalty.
: His real talent is in Alchemist. Godric can create a ton of potions, including the curing potion I mentioned earlier. They’re super cheap and very efficient for healing.
: If we try to leave the castle, we run into Brenna again. She demands we take her with us.
: She also gives us an axe we have no use for and a set of scale armor no one will ever use.
: Brenna is our only source of the Thief skill this early on. Thief increases damage if you attack an enemy from behind and allows you to pick locks.
: By the way, you might notice that little orange circle under Brenna’s portrait. That means she’s a diurnal character, and gets bonuses to hit during the day.
: Godric is a little different. He’s nocturnal, which means he might get hit bonuses at night - the whole thing is kind of half-baked. As far as anyone knows, he doesn’t take penalties during the day.
: Even though we’ve “left” the castle, there’s a sidequest we can only do after we have a full party but before leaving Gwernia.
: To do that, we head to the bottom-left corner of the castle. This is the training room, and it’s where Trahern (the head of the Gwernian knights) hangs out.
: It seriously seems like all anyone wants to talk about around here is goblins. I’m going to cut parts out of this conversation.
: The game mentioned it earlier when Alaron was talking to the Mirari in the forest, but he’s the sole survivor of his village and adopted by the king.
: Anyway, the point of this is that Trahern wants us to find his sword. Doing so requires us to go to a pointless area near where Godric was.
: If we go up the stairs instead of down, we wind up on the roof.
: The roof is a big, pointless, empty loop with a door on the other side from where the stairs are.
: This brings us to Bowden’s room. Bowden is Rheda’s mentor.
: Bowden hates Trahern, and so he stole Trahern’s sword and locked it in a chest in the basement not far from Godric’s lab.
: The locked chest is down here, just to the right of the lab.
: There’s a portal down here. I don’t know what this one connects to.
: Trahern gives us his sword. It’s useful throughout the game, because you can give it to Abrecan and then give it to Brenna later if you decide to keep her.
: It has the same stats as Abrecan’s starting sword except for the fact that it has 55 base hit compared to his broadsword’s 40. We throw his broadsword on Alaron.
: Finally, we make a stop at the castle’s barracks, which has six chests in it. We can open five of them, and there’s a chance they drop equipment.
: Picking locks drains Brenna’s HP because this is a well-designed game.
: After making a bunch of curing potions and loading back up on ingredients, we still have more gold than we can ever conceivably use.
: Down the hill from the shop is the inn. There’s a sidequest here that is in no way a ripoff of an early sidequest from Baldur’s Gate 1.
: The innkeeper has a bat problem in his cellar. This is an easy fight, so let’s do it.
: As soon as we take the stairs behind the innkeeper, we wind up in combat with two giant bats. These wouldn’t be a challenge for Alaron alone, and definitely aren’t for a full party with Abrecan in it.
: This is where we really start seeing Alaron’s shortcomings. Abrecan and Brenna get two or three turns before he gets one.
: Once the bats are dead, we can go through this crack in the wall.
: Going through the crack starts a fight with a single goblin.
: Brenna stabs the goblin in the back and Abrecan follows up to kill it before it hits anyone.
: The goblin drops Iden Scale, which is the same armor Abrecan starts with. It has a higher dexterity penalty than Alaron’s armor, so this will probably get sold.
: There’s a pile of stealth potions here we can take and sell for a considerable amount of money.
: The cave has an exit that comes out behind the shop area.
: Our reward is 100 gold, 1500 EXP for Alaron, and a free night at the inn.
: We leave Gwernia over the bridge, but there’s a hidden scene if you take a left instead of heading right back to the forest.
: There’s a beach over here with nothing important on it. See that ramp in the background?
: Before we go to the camp, I want to show this off. If you take a right from the ramp, you run into what looks like another giant rat fight.
: This is how Aidyn Chronicles handles having more than four enemies on screen. Any extra enemies are pictured in the smaller portraits underneath the four active ones.
: This is why you want to play this game at 2x or 3x speed. The enemy reinforcements will usually spawn in on the other side of the map.
: It takes Abrecan something like six turns to get in position, and then another few to kill the remaining rats that don’t run away.
: I get Brenna’s strength up to 9 and save the remaining EXP for some training. Brenna has a very limited weapon selection by default due to her low strength score.
: I get Alaron a point of dexterity, which will be the primary focus for him until he hits around 25-30 and can both take turns and hit consistently.
: Up here is the camp we just saw. There’s a chest here we want to open, but..
: If Brenna screws this up, we lose the chest. You want to save before attempting this.
: The Chaos Sword is a weird bit of game design. I’m pretty sure we can only get it now, but it’s not useful in any way until much later in the game.
: It takes 25 strength (Abrecan has 20) and has less than half the base hit of Abrecan’s starting sword. Even if you rush Abrecan to 25 strength, he’s never going to hit with it.
: I spent 200 gold out of our infinite stockpile to get Warrior for Brenna. I was wrong about one thing earlier - you only need a trainer to learn new skills, not to level them.
: The reason the gold isn’t infinite in that shot is because I did this part before doing the alchemy farm.
: Now that we’ve cleared out Gwernia, it’s time to head to Erromon. To do this, we need to go back through the woods where we started the game.
: As soon as we get past Kendall’s house, a cutscene starts.
: Metal Gear?!
: That’s the best part. We don’t have to kill Godric because he’ll happily leave the party any time we ask him. Rheda won’t do that if you take her.
: I saw that episode of The Simpsons when it first aired. That was right around the time the show turned to shit.
: The ghost turns around and peaces out.
: The elevator vibrated with motion.
: We reach the bridge from Gwernia’s outskirts to the woods. The logical thing to do would be to cross it, but we’re not doing that just yet.
: If you look to the right, there’s a vaguely rock-shaped polygon that appears to be partially unrendered on one side. We can walk down that.
: Doing so brings us to the River of Clipping Issues.
: We get in a fight with a single wolf, which Abrecan and Brenna kill before it does anything.
: The reason Godric and Brenna are at less than max HP is because I fought some minor side battles and got them both a level up.
: I get Brenna to 10 strength, and now you’re going to see how badly the models in this game are scaled.
: At the top of the River of Clipping Issues is a burnt-out village. There are two items in here, and we need one of them to keep Brenna viable.
: We get into a fight, and you can see that Brenna is now effortlessly wielding a sword roughly half the size of her body in a single hand.
: I gave her a saber from the weapon shop in Gwernia. It’s identical to Alaron’s starting sword, but has 5 more base hit.
: One of the houses has a chest in it.
: This gets us a ring which has Spell Battery, one of the most pointless stats in the game. Spell Battery is effectively an extra HP bar for casting spells. Yes, spells cost HP to cast.
: There are just two problems with that. The first is that you can camp almost anywhere to restore HP (on top of our massive potion stacks), and the second is that Spell Battery recovers REALLY slowly. You get 5 points per night camping and only get it fully restored if you sleep at an inn.
: Behind that house is what we really came here for.
: This is the only rope in the game. Rope is an accessory that increases the thief skill by 2, which saves us tens of thousands of EXP.
: For reference, upgrading Brenna’s thief skill from 3 to 4 is over 20,000 EXP. The rope sets it to 5, which is good enough for most of the game.
: Once you’ve left Gwernia, wolves spawn along the road to the forest, so I go back and farm them for EXP.
: There’s one last thing I want to do in this area, which is heading west from where we got the chaos sword.
: This takes us to a different part of the forest with minotaurs in it. Minotaurs can and will kick our ass right now.
: To the side is a waterfall with a ramp running above it.
: No.
: At the top of the waterfall, there’s an ogre. Ogres would normally demolish the party at this level - they can potentially twoshot Brenna or Godric.
: That is, they would demolish the party if this game had working pathfinding. Instead, they line up and get cut down one by one.
: We get 3600 EXP, which is enough to pump Brenna’s warrior to 3 and Alaron’s dexterity to 18. Brenna is now a better melee fighter than Alaron is.
: Behind the ogres is a chest with 1,000 gold and boots of adamant, which add 2 protection and do not have a dexterity penalty.
: At this point, I turn around and go back to Oriana’s house. There is a very long (50+ textboxes) conversation about nothing.
: At some point, she got home invaded by a sorcerer carrying a legendary necromancy staff.
: She then gives us a lore justification for why Alaron is the only person who can learn every spell in the game.
: Oriana gives us a letter to take to the two Mirari we met earlier, and a scroll that teaches the Strength spell for free.
: Trust me, be glad I’m not transcribing the whole thing. Half of it is her screaming at Alaron to find her tea.
: To get to Erromon, all we have to do is go southwest from Oriana’s house.
: The road there is long and empty, apart from the occasional enemy encounter.
: We run into a group of goblin scouts, which are the first ranged enemy you’re likely to encounter.
: They don’t hit particularly hard, but are pretty accurate and can take two or three turns in a row.
: A bit further down the road, we run into another new enemy type: bears.
: Bears are giant blobs of HP that do a lot of damage.. assuming they can land a hit.
: Fortunately, they suffer the same pathfinding issues the ogres did.
: We’re a little low on HP for Brenna and Abrecan, so let’s camp. Camping is the primary means of restoring HP, and it sucks.
: There’s a 50% chance you get this screen, which restores around 30% HP to the party. The other half of the time, you get into a fight instead. The fight is always level-scaled, and so you can use this to grind EXP.
: Another 5 minutes down the road, we run into this guy standing at an intersection.
: I hope you’re ready for more witty and endearing dialog.
: This is that one scene from Borat a full five years before Borat was a thing.
: This is the kind of thing they’d put into a 90s point-and-click with some dipshit doing an annoying voice.
: This is what happens when you do Frank wrong. There is a fine line between Frank and terrible writing, and these people have long since crossed it.
: Right past the signs is the point where the game takes a nosedive. There are a bunch of enemies here we don’t want to fight because they will demolish the party.
: This first group isn’t too bad. There are two flavors of bandit: regular bandits and bandit woodsmen, who have bows.
: About two steps down from that first group is a bandit boss, which might as well be an insurmountable obstacle for this party. Bandit bosses have access to Tap Stamina, which is a lifesteal spell.
: They also hit EXTREMELY hard for this point in the game and if you’re really unlucky can stack a shield spell on themselves to make it impossible to hit them.
: The last obstacle before Erromon is this hobgoblin. These things are effectively the same as bandit bosses.
: I’m going to have to spend several hours grinding on fast forward soon, because the next boss fight has six of these in it.
: Finally, we reach Erromon. The first building up ahead is the inn.
: Before we go anywhere, we’re going to use our stockpile of cash to buy new armor from that building on the left.
: The merchant here has dragon leather armor, which has more protection than leather and more importantly has zero dexterity penalty. These sell for 11,000 gold each, which you wouldn’t have unless you did the Godric glitch.
: You can also buy spices here, which I do because I’m going to need a few more rounds of Godric cash to buy some more stuff.
: This shop has a ramp in the back that leads to the underground tunnels.
: The tunnels are a maze, but in the middle are these two shops. The one on the right sells spices and gemstones for the same price as Gwernia’s shop does.
: She also sells Sapphire Gems, and I should talk about those for a second. Sapphire Gems are believed to be a dummied-out item that existed in an earlier version of the game.
: According to one guide on GameFAQs, the developers originally intended for there to be an item called a Life Gem that could revive dead party members. The guide author claims to have emailed H2O about it, and was told that they dummied it out because they coded it so poorly that using a Life Gem actually killed a party member off the next time you went to the world map and crashed the game.
: This guy next to her is also very useful.
: He sells a bunch of accessories that increase armor value - mirari cloaks, plate gauntlets, and mercenary belts.
: He also sells belts of life, which you’re not intended to buy this early in the game. They cost nearly 24,000 gold each, and can only be equipped by diurnal characters.
: Necromancy resist is huge for the upcoming boss fight, since it helps mitigate the damage done by the lifedrain spell.
: If we go past the inn, there are even more shops. We want the one on the far left for now.
: This shop sells the same boots we found behind the ogres. They’re prohibitively expensive without Godric, but we can easily afford three more.
: Brenna and Godric have gone from having around 4 protection to 13. How much of a difference does that make? Let’s take a look.
: If you backtrack from the inn, there’s a ladder that leads up to a fight that would normally be incredibly difficult.
: We have a bandit boss, two wolves, and two normal bandits. One bandit boss was enough to bring the entire party to its knees before, but this time we wipe the encounter without much of a problem.
: I get Brenna up to 16 strength and a few more levels in sword to help her hit more consistently. Abrecan hits warrior 5, and Alaron hits warrior 4.
: We’ll do one last thing before I end the update, and that is going into one of the other shops in that row of three.
: If we go into the middle door, we get a cutscene.
: This guy is Becan. He’s a potential party member who can replace Abrecan or Godric, but starts weaker than Abrecan does. He uses hafted weapons instead of swords, and is one of the few people (other than Alaron) who can do so.
: He also looks kind of like the guy from the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas. I just watched five episodes of that with Ryan recently while we were on a voice call.
: Becan has a weapon shop we can only access this one time. We don’t really need anything from it since most of it is either stuff we already have or stuff we can’t use.
: What I’m going to do is grind a bunch of money with Godric to buy some more stuff from the shops in the tunnel before replacing him with Becan. Next update, we’ll meet King Txomin and get bodied by the king of the hobgoblins.