RPG: Chunk 6

The point at which the game disintegrates into subplots is fast approaching; one more post and I won’t have a concrete order in which to write these anymore. This is pretty wild. Chunk 6!

There are two things you can do at this point: stay in Phyrenia, which is less obvious, or chase the extraspatial demongrain across the sea to the city of Akredia, which is much more obvious. Basically the only thing that staying in Phyrenia accomplishes is giving you an easier jumping-off point to the quest that will get you Avira, and there’s no dungeon associated with it, so I’m going into Akredia now because that will actually be interesting.

Story

You get on a boat from Phyrenia and head across the sea to the third of the trifecta of rival trade capitals, Akredia. Upon arriving, you tell the Akredians upon unshakable warrant-driven authority that their grain is actually evil. They aren’t happy, obviously. So their authorities say, alright, we won’t distribute our illegally-acquired grain to the peasants around our city, but we expect Phyrenia to reimburse us for it later because the harvest this year is going to be really bad. They also say that they’re going to have to dip into the city stores of grain to give stuff to the peasants, which they’re none too happy about. The stores are actually kept out of the city, a little ways off to the west in a location that makes it easier to distribute their grain and makes the stores harder to attack from the ocean.

So they send a messenger, and you wander around Akredia for a while talking to people and stuff. Then, once you get back to the palace, the messenger comes back and says, hey, the stores are pretty weird, somebody should go check that out. The Akredians pretty much give you a meaningful look, and you have to be the fall guy and check out the silos for them.

Guess what? Demons!

But there’s something weird about the stores – the demons that have infiltrated and taken them over haven’t really materialized in their true forms. In the Eastern continent, where all the other dungeons have been so far, the demons have been in very solid, physical beings for the most part. They’ve been able to materialize as their true selves in a way they can’t seem to manage in this new area, and they have to manifest themselves indirectly – in this case, as plants. So once you’ve cleared the city stores, whose grain is thankfully unharmed, you realize that the inter-planar portals in the grain shipments from Phyrenia were the main jumping-off point the demons had in their invasion, and in preventing their shipment you’ve won your first real victory. However, it’s certainly not the only plan the demons had to invade the Western continent: they actually have two contingency invasion plans in effect right now, and within your time frame you’ll only be able to prevent one…

Akredia

Akredia has the same basic setup as the other big cities you’ve been to so far – four outskirt screens, four interior screens, and one square screen. It also has the Phyrenian structure of the docks at one end of town, so there’s one outskirt screen from which you can’t reach the world map. It also has a different kind of art direction – the Akredians were, until fairly recently in terms of world history, nomads, and their city has a kind of ramshackle feel to it, like a bunch of people just kind of decided to stay there and started building on top of their yurts. In terms of the magic-technology axis, Akredia is kind of the third wheel, but if its culture is based on anything, it’s religion. Akredia’s culture centers around a kind of animistic spirituality, a belief that all objects and organisms have an inherent spirit that can influence the outside world. This is the basis of Khavir’s Curse ability (I don’t know if I’m calling that Curse or Hex yet) and Sufiri’s mounts.

Anyway.

You head over to the grain stores, which are covered entirely in horrible twisting green vines. Good luck.

Akredian Grain Silos

There are three silos, so I guess this is formatted sort of like Lucan Temple. The catch is that all you actually have to do is the middle silo – the other two are effectively sidequests. If you don’t do them, all that will happen is that certain things in Akredia, like better weapons and stuff, won’t be as readily available later on, but if you want you can go back and do them whenever you want.

The puzzle mechanic in this dungeon is burning the vines. You can use one of Enata’s spells outside of battle in this dungeon, so you’ll use it to burn paths through otherwise-impenetrable vines. However, if you screw up, you can end up crippling your progress in the room and having to leave and reset it, or worse, you could even burn a whole in the floor and have to do the whole floor again. So the dungeon is really all about foresight and seeing the consequences of your movements.

Monsters

The Akredian Grain Silos contain Tanglers, Reapvines and Tendrils.

Tanglers are basic enemies with not too much health, but they attack in large groups, and their real bitch skill is the fact that their attacks have a chance to cause Slow. So you have to kill them fast, or else they can get in a million attacks before you can do anything. They can Attack, Constrict (causes slow 100% of the time but deals no damage), and Tighten (deals extra damage for every turn Constrict has been in effect).

Reapvines are hard enemies to deal with because they can spawn Tendrils. They can Attack, Constrict (no chance to cause Slow, but does damage every turn passively), and Spawn.

Tendrils are extremely weak, but they can link together to get stronger. They can enter battle independently of Reapvines. They can Attack, Link (combines all Tendrils in battle into one mass with more health and toughness, and one attack for each Tendril in the mass) and Regenerate (heals slightly, chance to create another Tendril).

Boss – Boreal Horror

Once you enter the final room in the dungeon, it attacks you. The vines, omnipresent and creeping all over the walls, split off and merge into one giant tentacled piece of evil. It’s the Multi-Limbed Boss of Escalating Difficulty per Limb Severed by Player, guys!

This boss has six tentacles and a head. You can’t hurt the head until you’ve killed all the tentacles. It moves slowly, but it gets one attack for each tentacle and each tentacle is on a separate attack gauge, so you have to cope with a steady stream of attacks all the time, which is very hard to deal with in an Active Time Battle System. This gives you an incentive to kill all the tentacles. However, once you do, they retract into the floor and then wrap around the head, making it more powerful. So the head starts off very very weak, but as you damage its limbs, it consolidates its power. By the end of the battle, it only gets one attack, but it is a fucking strong attack. It can Attack, cast Vine, Thorn, Nettle, Poison, Venom, Sinkhole and Pit, use Spores (chance to Stun or Slow), and, when all of its tentacles have been killed, use Chamber Contraction, which does heavy earth damage to the entire party.

Killing it gets you a Twisted Staff, which can heal and has a chance to slow an enemy every time it is used for anything.

~ by pieboy on August 24, 2008.