At the end of the last post, a dragon had sent me on a mission to find the Storm Bracelet. This kicks off a chain of fetch quests — the owner of the Storm Bracelet wants the Cyclonic Shoes, and you have to trade the Flame Sword for the shoes, but the Flame Tyrant wants an Ice Sword in exchange for the Flame Sword. Finally you can recruit Galahad (or kill him) to get the Ice Sword and then go back through all the dungeons again to chain trade back to the beginning.

Your reward for doing this is small, but along the way each of the dragons and spirits gives you an item that lets you summon it 3 times. I hope these are worth it. It’s also an option to kill the owners of the items; they’re tough fights but if you win you get not only the trade item you need but also several other good chests. I didn’t do this for any of them.

The Sea Dragon sends you to find the Storm Bracelet in the Great Pit

None of the dungeons were particularly difficult. However, near the end of this sequence a problem did start popping up that I referred to in my short post yesterday. The strength of the monsters is dependent on the number of battles you’ve fought. But it’s not like a series of firm checkpoints; some monsters will still be weaker versions. For the most part the enemies are beatable, and the stronger ones can be taken care of by the various weapon skills I have. But every so often I run into a monster that is incredibly powerful; able to do more than my max HP in one hit, sometimes with an area attack that hits everyone. The only real way I’ve found to deal with this is just to save frequently so that if I run into one of these fights I can reload. The nature of the enemies is not determined until the fight actually starts, so on the reload, the strong enemy will probably not be there.

This seems like it should do damage, but it doesn’t.

One other thing that happened during these quests is Jelton being overrun by monsters. There are several events in the game that occur based on your battles, so you can return to a friendly city to find it destroyed, or attacked by monsters. In this case you just have to talk to Flame Tyrant once you give him the Ice Sword and he’ll remove all the monsters.

Once I had done all these quests, I next went for the Assassin’s Guild in South Estamir. Someone tries to kill you when you sleep there. You first head to the Thieves’ Guild but they assure you they’re not responsible and let you loot their chests.

The Assassin’s Guild was supposed to have been destroyed 300 years ago!

When you reach the end of the Guild, there’s a Saruin servant who sends a creepy monster at you, but not too hard.

Gyaaa

After this I had access to several late game quests, but I kept getting killed when I tried to do them. Katarina and Grey have maxed their weapon levels so I gave them new weapons (you can equip multiple weapons at once). Finally I found a quest that looks doable; there’s trouble with the Knights again. You sneak into the castle (overrun by monsters) to find a map, fight a Minotaur, and next it’s off to a dungeon.

Useless Raphael

I’m nearing the point where I can unlock the final dungeon. This quest with the Minotaur requires 800 battles. There are three possible “road to the final dungeon” quests depending on your good/evil nature, which require 880 battles. So I hope to be able to finish this game by next weekend, but I’m still afraid I’m going to be unprepared for the final battle and find it too hard to finish. There are a number of bugs you can use, although I’m playing on the 1.1 rom so some of them may have been fixed.