Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons
Welcome back! I really underestimated the size of this chapter!
Like the Ninja chapter, there’s no real story beats. As a result, I remembered this chapter being a lot shorter than it actually was. I intended to do everything aside from the final boss fight, but that didn’t really pan out.
Instead, there will be two more updates after this one. This update goes through everyone’s personal dungeon. The next update will focus on the secret bosses of this chapter. And the third update will close everything out.
Silent Labyrinth
Since this update is all about dungeons, this track will be playing throughout.
LIVE-A-LIVE
And this is our battle theme. Unless I post a different song, this plays over every fight.
Dungeon of the Mind
The Dungeon of the Mind is where we left off last time. There are four starting places. This starting place lets us get right into the gimmick. While every dungeon has a gimmick, this one is is plot-related.
All the souls of Brando’s victims have ended up here. You have to read their minds; they remain silent if you try to talk to them. Most of them are these knights, who all think the same thing.
Accompanying him is the Royal Adviser. He’s still the worst.
Just past them and to the south, we find this IQ boosting accessory item.
We also start bumping into some of the random encounters. This is a setup we’ve seen lots of times; kill the Mustard Dragon, and the rest will break down. The Dragon has a lot of Defense, but Ninety can kill it in two shots.
The Barbarians have a lot of Bonk’s moves. I think this chapter is the chapter that mixes up your starting positions in fights the most. I like how this one isolates your leader.
These guys share their name with an Earl of Hell. The Demon is a winged dog, and these guys aren’t dog-like and lack wings, so that’s probably just a coincidence.
This guy is never easy to fight. Ishtar has 1600 HP, which is more than any other enemy we’ve seen aside from the Inko Statue. He has four attacks. One hits everyone for a lot of damage, lowers stats, and inflicts drunkenness. One of them hits a single target for a lot of damage, paralyzes them, and puts them to sleep. The other two attacks barely do any damage. On the plus side, defeating him is a guaranteed level up until you hit level 40.
This fight really had me on the ropes, so I started looking through my attack items. This is what the Parasite Sword, which boosts attack and power at the expense of everything else, can do as an item. Unfortunately, it’s one use only.
We’ve also picked up some new techs. Ninety learned Triple Shot. It shoots three bullets at a single target.
He also learned Quad Shot. It shoots four bullets at a single target. Ninety is a very practical gunman.
Li’s new technique is pretty good. It has a charge time, but it hits the entire screen for some pretty decent damage.
This tech is also pretty useful. Instant healing plus a stat boost.
And then there’s Shinji. This is his ultimate technique. It has a lengthy charge time and hits the entire screen. It’s supposed to paralyze and debuff enemies, but Li makes this move obsolete.
Anyways, back to dungeon crawling.
We want to check out those stairs. They lead to our next NPC.
…
On the other side of his door, we find a nightmare helmet.
If we go past the kid’s stairway, we find the path forward.
That little flame is another knight, nothing new.
This flame on the other hand…
Weird. He doesn’t mention Brando, even implicitly. I think every other NPC mentions him in some capacity.
Let’s go back to that intersection, but head left this time.
After a fairly lengthy trek, we find another unique NPC.
It’s everyone’s favorite treasonous wizard! What do you have to talk about, Straybow?
…Really? You’re not even going to ask for forgiveness? You’re just going to pretend this has nothing to do with you?
Let’s just move on.
Down the stairs, we come to the last room of this dungeon.
Hash seems confused, but he’s also not particularly judgmental.
Uranus, on the other hand, is not so patient.
Here’s what we’ve been looking for.
Fittingly enough, Shinji’s ultimate weapon is the worst one. It’s stat boost are unimpressive, and it’s almost better as an offhand item. It’s boosts are smaller, but it protects against foot/arm locks, poison, stun, sleep and being drunk.
Once we take the glove, Alicia shows up to greet us.
And with that, the dungeon of the mind draws to a close. It’s the only dungeon we can’t re-enter; Shinji’s teleport will never take us there again.
Dungeon of Technique
In our search for the Puncha dungeon, we come across this somewhat familiar rock…
Welcome to the Dungeon of Technique.
This dungeon has two gimmicks, and I’m not a fan of either of them. The first is these rocks. Whenever you approach one of them, the Puncha Master’s movelist pops up. You select one, and the rock breaks.
If you select the right one. The rocks can only be broken by the standard Puncha techniques, but that’s still too many techniques to choose from since there’s no indication which technique is the right one.
The other gimmick is this guy.
WARM-A-LIVE
This is Voice Heart, and I don’t know why he exists.
Both of his techniques are damaging and debilitating. He is just frustrating to fight.
And to make things worse, he’s a recurring boss. This dungeon has a few large rooms that he doesn’t spawn in. In every other room, he’ll show up. On top of that, he will respawn if you backtrack to a room you’ve already been to. This dungeon is just obnoxious.
Anyways, let’s try and navigate this dungeon.
We’ll head through that lower left door first.
This room is a dead end, but it doesn’t have to be. If I had smashed this rock from the outside, I would have been able to pass through it.
Instead, let’s head through this blocked door.
We find one of the equipment items we left didn’t make in the Prehistoric chapter. But more importantly…
We’re further along in this dungeon.
There’s a lot of this dungeon that I could show, but I’ll just stick with the critical path from here. Heading south, we find a stairway that leads to higher ground. If we then head right, we’ll find a boulder we can break.
This guy gives us his spiel one more time, but then…
YES. YES, WE’RE ANGRY.
MEGALOMANIA
Despite the end boss theme kicking in, this fight is just like all of his others.
Li learned her last unique move. TianMaHouiSuiJiao makes Li face away from her target, but it also moves her backwards one square after she uses it. She has one more technique to learn, but it’s Puncha’s Ultimate Technique. We’ve already seen it; the only difference is that it can now be used without restriction.
Ninety learned Shot Storm. It can target an area, but it’s also useful against single targets.
And finally, there was silence…
Now that’s an ultimate weapon! +20 across the board! And this is still one of the weaker ones!
Dungeon of Strength
Some of these dungeons are a little hard to find. The one marked by an evil birdman riding a giant red fish, however, is a little easier to spot.
MEGALOMANIA
…Have I mentioned this chapter is weird yet?
This guy doesn’t even have any interesting techs to show.
I hope that using a gun for a test of strength isn’t cheating.
And he unceremoniously vanishes.
Here’s the Dungeon of Strength proper.
It’s full of chests, but none of them open.
This dungeon is essentially a straight shot to Dwayne’s ultimate weapon.
It has a massive boost to Dwayne’s Atk, Pw, and Vt. Dwayne’s stats are good enough as it is, so this is insane.
But now, we have consequences to deal with. Taking that bandage has opened all of the chests, but it’s also turned on the random encounters. And the random encounter rate in this dungeon is absurdly high!
This fight is simple, but it can wreck you if your not careful. Again, you want to target the mustard dragon. If The Pistachios have more HP and absurdly high defense, but they also have an absurd counter attack. It hits the entire screen and inflicts almost every status effect in the game. Do not attack the Pistachios!
Aside from the bizarre name, this guy isn’t really notable.
This encounter is just really silly to me. Why are we fighting a dogwalker?
These mammoths have a health draining tech that can prolong their fights, but they aren’t too difficult.
Out of all of the chests, this is the most important one. We’ll need a Golden Topknot for later in this chapter.
Despite the dungeon just being a line, it takes a long time to get out of. It’s definitely not the worst gimmick, but it can really get on you nerves after a while.
As soon as we step outside, Ninety learns Neo Shot Storm. It’s exactly the same as Shot Storm, but stronger.
And this, by the way, is why most people consider Ninety to be top-tier in this chapter. Hurricane Shot has a lengthy charge time, but it obliterates enemies in a large area.
Dungeon of Intelligence
Next up, it’s time to check out Egg’s dungeon.
The Village of Familia has been replaced with the Dungeon of Intelligence.
If we head right, we’ll be taken out through the other house in the village. Going up takes us further in.
…Egg is probably having the worst flashbacks right now.
That reminds me, is anyone else looking forward to Intelligence of Egg’s new album? It should be coming out soon.
: Strength is unnecessary here. Lateral thinking and a calm composure will guide your mind to a new level. This chair will connect us from here on out. Speak to teh chair, and I will come…
Now that he’s gone, it’s time to dive in.
: Rearrange the red floor… First width, then height… Both at last.
That advice was a little misleading. We aren’t re-arranging the tiles, the tiles are re-arranging us.
The first set will swap your left and right controls while the second will swap up and down.
The last one rotates all of your control 90 degrees clockwise.
: Follow your image in the mirrors, and a white sphere will show you the way… Speak to me if you wish to restart the test…
This puzzle is simple. Just do what the Egg in the mirror does.
Listen to the mirror on the left.
We have three deceitful mirrors and four directions on our d-pad. We want to go whichever direction is not present in the mirrors.
This is the easiest puzzle in concept, but I can see why people might get hung up on it. You want to go through whichever door this arrow is pointing at, even if it’s the door you just came through. Eventually, you’ll get out.
: At its terminus you shall ascend. This is the final test. Here too shall the spheres guide. In Time, you shall find understanding.
Egg’s Intelligence doesn’t mean we’ll eventually understand it. He means we should use time as a guide. We want to touch the spheres in a clockwise manner. This will take us to the end of the puzzle.
Behold, Egg’s first and ultimate weapon.
That +50 IQ is a godsend to Egg. His healing and his attacks just got a huge boost.
And with that, we’re dumped outside of Hash’s cabin.
Dungeon of Instinct
Bonk’s dungeon is hard to find. It’s marked by a scent, but it can be hard to even find the scent.
And with Bonk acting as our battering ram, we make our way inside.
Welcome to the Dungeon of Instinct.
Navigation is simple enough: Just follow Bonk’s nose!
…Until we get to this point. The scent led us to this room, but we can’t actually access the next doorways from here. We’ll want to go south from the last room instead.
That takes us to the right part of the room. All three of these door smell of meat, but they all lead to the same room.
The left and right doors lead us to these parts of the room, but they’re dead ends.
These guys look familiar and creepy, but since I brought Shinji with me…
This is a reference to one of this chapters many, many bonus bosses. We won’t see it in this update, but keep this in mind.
This room forks. While the right path has a scent, we’ll want to take the left path.
Behold!
The exact moment the sprite artists ran out of time!
The Bone Axe has a pretty good stat boost. It doesn’t lower Spd, by the way. Our Wild Armor is still lowering Bonk’s Spd, and he no longer has the Smoulder Spear to boost his speed.
Well, that was relatively painless. One more weapon down!
Dungeon of Keys
Bort’s dungeon is hidden in plain sight. All of these doors will lead to it, but we want the Northwestern door, which is just offscreen.
This door, to be exact.
Welcome to the Dungeon of Keys.
Well, so much for that. Door’s locked, everybody go home.
Naah, this dungeon is just a little odd. Shadow is a random encounter in this dungeon, and it drops keys. It uses a lot of Bort’s techniques. I think it usually spawns more often in rooms with locked doors, but that might be observational bias.
We only get one use out of the rusted keys before they crumble.
We don’t want to head down the stairs yet.
From here, we head right.
Here’s the first of four non-rusted keys. We’ll need all four of them to find Bort’s ultimate weapon.
We want the door, not the stairs. It’s locked, so we have to find Shadow again first.
Go north here.
And get the second key.
Now it’s time to go up these stairs.
Sometimes, the best way to go through a dungeon is to not go through the dungeon. We want to go back in through the rightmost door on the leftmost house.
…I’m really glad this game doesn’t have too many dungeons. I feel like I have nothing to say.
But at least we’re 3/4 of the way through it.
We want to go north here.
And here.
We want the top right passageway.
The middle door leads to another Parasite Sword to replace the one I burned on an Ishtar, and then we want the door on the right.
And now we want south.
There’s the last key, and we’re right outside the weapons resting place.
First up, this door wants the Genbu Key.
Next is the Byakko Key.
Followed by the Seiryu Key.
And finally, the Suzaku Key.
Check out that Hanzo Steel, everyone.
Sorry Ryoma, but you’ve just been replaced! The Murasame, as befitting a ninja, boosts power and speed.
I really hope Bort keeps a hold on the Yoshiyuki. If he ditched it, I don’t think Ryoma would understand.
Dungeon of Time
Ninety’s dungeon is marked by a vision of his horse.
We need to chase it around these woods for a while.
Eventually, it takes us to the dungeon’s entrance.
Welcome to the Dungeon of Time.
There are a few things to grab, but nothing is a “must-get.”
This area is down-right of the chest. We’ll want to head up and right from here.
And at this moment, I may have panicked a bit.
This dungeon is a mirror of Ninety’s chapter. After eight bells, Bad Things start happening.
This chest was the left path, and the right path has nothing.
Instead, we need to head straight left, then down.
We head down from here.
Good, I got here while there was still enough light to see it.
The most powerful handgun in the world!
Any Speed boost is welcome for Ninety. The sooner we get Hurricane Shot out, the better.
Now, you may have noticed that this room had six ways out of it. You might think that going back the way I came would be the safest way out.
You would be right, but my eyes were bigger than my stomach.
I ran out of time. I bet Bort would have gotten us out of there safely…
There’s a second laugh before…
This screenshot makes me laugh because there’s no animation for this thing. It’s just suddenly there.
Meet the Jaggy Egg, one of this chapter’s plethora of bonus bosses. Unfortunately, we won’t be fighting them in this update. The bonus bosses will be the focus of the next update, so see you then!
Having gone back through these dungeons, I can see why I forgot how long this chapter was. There’s no story present, and while I like the game’s combat, I need context to remember a given fight. And while I like how bizarre and surreal everything is, I wish that the characters were more involved with their dungeons. I wish Shinji reacted to learning about Lucretia’s past, or that Dwayne commented on the gauntlet he had to run through. I don’t need a whole lot, just a few lines of dialogue would be nice. Things don’t need to be explained, but I would like for the characters to acknowledge that things are weird.
Anyways, we’ll be clearing out the bonus bosses next time. In the meantime, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be preparing for the final fight with Odio.
While it won’t be the next update, the final battle against Odio is rapidly approaching. That means we need to be thinking about what team we want to send in.
Thread, it’s time to select who will be accompanying Li. Vote for your three favorite characters. When the poll closes, I’ll take the three most popular characters with me. Don’t worry about tactical decisions if you don’t want to. Every party configuration is viable, so just pick the characters you want to see!
: Riddle me this, pal…
: … … Can you tell me where this place is? I’m Ninety… the Ninety Kid. So, you’re lost too…
: The name’s Shinji. You don’t look like such a bad sort, you know.
: It’ll cost you a lot… Let’s see…
: … All anyone’s ever done is ask for your help. They distance themselves from harm, and rely on others to save them… Are such people even deserving of help in the first place? That is my first question.
: He’s… like I was, long ago… Gramps… Was this the right…
: You’ve come… Now! The Great Inko Buddha statue shall bring unto us salvation!
: I am not impressed, though. The competition was not exactly stellar.
: Doesn’t matter how many rats you rustle up…!
