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[LP] Dragon Warrior Monsters, "What is a Shota?"
- Thread starter Chibi-Reaper
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nick012000
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Yeah, I know. I just couldn't be fucked to spend hours breeding and levelling an entirely new set of monsters to win one battle.kinglugia said:
Selias
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Going off to fight a bunch of monsters with two herbs and a level one ally? All the great heroes started out like that! Back in my day, we didn't even get two herbs. We got one, started at level zero, and we were happy with it!
Alexander
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You know Chibi, you're a genius. A genius who use his talent to write very, very sick fuck innuendo that still manage to not be obscene but a genius nonetheless.
Please never change ^-^
Please never change ^-^
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Adyen
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Hard times indeed. WE know where the money is all going to... Herbs.
Chibi-Reaper
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The following post will be heavier on mechanics and lighter on fluff!
Of course, we hop right through the gate. It's not like there's anything else we can do, really.
When we come out in the strangely unpopulated wilderness, I go ahead and tap the "Select" button to show off the map.
It fills in automatically as you explore, and you can refer to it at any time, so it's extremely helpful. As you can see, we're on the first floor of four. A nice, simple milk-run for our first dip into the wilderness. Better still, the floors tend to be only between 4-10 screens! You do have the occasional outlier of sixteenish, but it's uncommon to find those on the first dungeon.
Later on, this will turn into tedious slogs of twenty of more floors with a lot of more complicatedly-linked screens to navigate. Map hazards and moving tiles and NPC's, oh my.
Incidentally, you open the menu with the action button, but while there's nothing to interact with, rather than "Start". Start just toggles whether that bit at the bottom shows HP/MP totals or your monsters level. For some reason. That's definitely a required function and does need it's own button, for sure! I'll admit, I'd forgotten this and spent several minutes wondering if my emulator was broken.
Just a few steps forward, and we find the open hole to floor number two. You progress by jumping into the pit. Because that's the intuitive and intelligent thing to do.
There was also an herb on the ground. It's nothing special, like I said before, there are billions of herb leaves just floating around for the taking. You still want to pick them up, because you have no other source of dedicated healing yet, but they aren't worth taking note of. On the other hand, you probably aren't going to see any boned meat icons in the first dungeon, or many other drops, but if you happen to see a very rare coin pop up, you want to snatch it right up.
Well, you want to snatch everything right up, really.
But you want this in particular because at this point the game goes well and away out of its way to not let you have any money at all because Reasons. And normally, the coin is money. Sometimes though... sometimes it's something else.
In any case, there's three different monster types walking around here. A slime, which you already have to have just for coming here. Another is the dracky, pictured above.
It's a bird type. Supposedly, they're strong against thunder magic and skills, but I don't really note a lot of such things in play. Background details that I miss. What I do take note of is that, generally speaking? They grow and level faster than other types. With that said and on the other hand, though, birds will hit a higher level faster, but they'll generally be weaker than another type of monster at the same level. Usually even a monster a few levels behind.
It's the hollow bones, probably. Still, it's not much trouble to get them a few levels ahead, to keep roughly competitive. Give and take.
Obviously, you can see the four combat options. They aren't much to speak of. Fight makes your monsters fight, Item opens up your pockets to throw things that will help, Run makes you run...
And Plan, which opens up this. Most of this won't see much use! It's supposed to be training, getting your monsters used to fighting in a specific way, but it only really sees much use if you have a varied set of skills to take advantage of and choose between. As you can imagine, Charge is full offense, Cautious is as defensive and healbotting as possible, and Mixed tries to strike a balance in theory but generally wastes a lot of turns on buff spells that don't help you in the given situation at all. In most situations, if you have a bunch of skills, it's best to just Command directly and pick who does what in specific, rather than leaving the combat tactics to the things with brains the size of a dried pea.
For the immediate future, we have no skills, so it just gets set to Charge and mashing the Fight button. I called Slib crappy, and he is, but he's got a comparative shit-ton of HP and only one enemy spawns in this introductory dungeon at a time, so he will almost never lose a direct damage race unless the other side happens to crit multiple times in a row.
And you know, that's what herbs are for.
And here's the important bit.
Sometimes, when you finish a fight, the last enemy you down will get back up and decide to tag along with you forever. This is pretty rare, if you're waiting for it to happen on its own, though I think it's got highly skewed odds for your first dungeon. I don't think I've ever failed to pick up a second monster in the first fight, though a third takes a little longer.
In any case, again, this is not something you can expect to just happen every time. In the future, we're going to have to work at it... make it worth the monster's time. How? I'll let Jack field that one.
: "I have to give the monsters my meat. Force all the meat I can on them, every last bit that I can stuff in! All of the meat they can take."
That's right folks, absolutely!
The monsters have to be bribed. And for the most part, money holds no value for them, but a tender, juicy, and delicious cut of steak goes a heck of a long way. I'll go further into detail when we actually get some.
This mostly applies to normal encounters, but there are even some bosses that won't normally join you, but will if you stuff enough high-quality steaks down their throat through the fight. Since the first handful of bosses are scripted to auto-join, it's likely that you will never realize that this was an option until well after you've stopped playing the game!
You're obliged to name the monsters you lured in with honeyed words and the sweet temptation of tender meat, but it's really kind of a drag. The bosses, of course, will have their own default names, but the random encounters will default to just two letters.
For now we're gonna stick with that. I'll let you name things later on, don't worry... not random encounters, though.
Anyway.
The Anteater makes up the third and final crappy monster of the starter dungeon. It's a beast, a family of monster that generally only distinguishes itself with high HP and attack values. However, being as this is the starter dungeon, the Anteater only brings half of that equation to the table. Slib outclasses their HP score by a pretty big amount at an equal level, so basically all they have going for them is that they punch harder than anything else we've seen so far.
We still want to fight as many of these as possible, for Reasons, among which you'll find 'we need a third monster and the join rate plummets once you already have one of a specific type' and 'they give better xp than the other encounters' taking pride and place.
No go, though. We trawl through all four stages and pick up one of these:
... and then walk up and down in a line for what I'm pretty sure would have been over an hour of random encounters, were it not for the emulator's beautiful speed-up button, which adjusts things from about one hundred percent of normal speed to about two thousand percent....
....until this happens.
Feeling a warm, flushed sense of accomplishment, third monster in tow...
I immediately throw that warp wing and return to the castle to do the whole dungeon over again with a new, random set of floors. Because a level one Ant-eater can feasibly be one-shotted by the boss on the first turn and do me no good, so I have to grind a few levels up, and I might as well feel like I'm accomplishing something and getting a second, slim chance for Good Loot along the way.
No such luck, though!
Instead we enter the boss floor at levels five, eight, and five, with the max HP scores noted above. You'll see how Slib absolutely steamrolls the other two in the HP area, with literally more HP than the other two have between them in total? It's still not that he's good, it's just that our random encounter join-ups are just more terrible than he is.
Incidentally, he hasn't learned fireball! Which suggests to me that I misunderstood and misremembered, and the numbers I cited before are what the spells cost, and not what level they're learned at. So, no idea when that will happen, but it's fine because Slib could only weakly cast it twice if he did have it. Between the three of them, the only spell available is Dracky's Antidote, which would be super awesome if, you know, anything in this area was capable of poisoning you at all.
It's basically direct and ordinary attacks all around, which would render this fight an issue with a couple fewer levels, because Hale might blue-ball you by deciding to heal to full in every round. That's always real fun. Super fuckin' fun.
On the plus side, at least Hale is a polite sand-bagging tentacle-slime-jellyfish.
He still has a quick rant about how he's not going back, he hates the farm, he hates the king, you'll never take him alive blah blah blah. Fight ensues.
And like I said before, if you have fewer than a full party of monsters, or your team is even a couple levels lower than this, this fight can be a serious fucking problem. Being a Healslime, Hale has Heal, and he'll use it profligately, and it's going to restore him to full health if he even has one hit point left. It's not unbeatable, it just turns into a huge fucking slog-fest and a question of whether you brought enough herbs to keep up.
When you have a team that can and does just hit him for more damage than his total HP count in a single round, it's not a problem.
Paraphrasing conversation:
HALE: You're.... strong. I think I could grow to like a human like you. Please! Accept me into your party!
: "It's still a thinly-veiled escape attempt from at least the King, but we need a healer!"
Hale, being a boss, has his own canon name. We'll just leave him with that, since it works well enough. He also has healing, which means we now have a team member who's going to do more than just attack directly every round! And Herbs just became all but obsolete since mp recovers as you walk! Yay!
That aside, we're faced with a minor party arrangement issue. It's easily resolved though. Hale is a healer, and has healing spells we want him to learn. Slib needs to learn his rocking fire magic. The ant-eater, even, has a nice skill later on that's hard to find and so we want to pick up early. The dracky, comparatively, is a tagalong that doesn't currently offer anything besides future options of getting something better than a dracky. In theory, it could learn sleep, but that's not really going to go off even half as well as you want most of the time, and a magic-stealing skill that is easier to find, and of course, Antidote. None of it is necessary, and it has the fastest growth, so it gets shipped off to the farm where it'll get reduced xp gain withoutdragging the party down having to fight.
The king, for his part, is obviously disgruntled by Hale choosing us over him.
But he swallows his sadness, frees Pulio as promised, and immediately orders you to go downstairs and compete in crown-sanctioned bloodsport for the amusement of the screaming masses.
So he might not be entirely over the rejection, you know.
TO BE CONTINUED
Of course, we hop right through the gate. It's not like there's anything else we can do, really.
When we come out in the strangely unpopulated wilderness, I go ahead and tap the "Select" button to show off the map.
It fills in automatically as you explore, and you can refer to it at any time, so it's extremely helpful. As you can see, we're on the first floor of four. A nice, simple milk-run for our first dip into the wilderness. Better still, the floors tend to be only between 4-10 screens! You do have the occasional outlier of sixteenish, but it's uncommon to find those on the first dungeon.
Later on, this will turn into tedious slogs of twenty of more floors with a lot of more complicatedly-linked screens to navigate. Map hazards and moving tiles and NPC's, oh my.
Incidentally, you open the menu with the action button, but while there's nothing to interact with, rather than "Start". Start just toggles whether that bit at the bottom shows HP/MP totals or your monsters level. For some reason. That's definitely a required function and does need it's own button, for sure! I'll admit, I'd forgotten this and spent several minutes wondering if my emulator was broken.
Just a few steps forward, and we find the open hole to floor number two. You progress by jumping into the pit. Because that's the intuitive and intelligent thing to do.
There was also an herb on the ground. It's nothing special, like I said before, there are billions of herb leaves just floating around for the taking. You still want to pick them up, because you have no other source of dedicated healing yet, but they aren't worth taking note of. On the other hand, you probably aren't going to see any boned meat icons in the first dungeon, or many other drops, but if you happen to see a very rare coin pop up, you want to snatch it right up.
Well, you want to snatch everything right up, really.
But you want this in particular because at this point the game goes well and away out of its way to not let you have any money at all because Reasons. And normally, the coin is money. Sometimes though... sometimes it's something else.
In any case, there's three different monster types walking around here. A slime, which you already have to have just for coming here. Another is the dracky, pictured above.
It's a bird type. Supposedly, they're strong against thunder magic and skills, but I don't really note a lot of such things in play. Background details that I miss. What I do take note of is that, generally speaking? They grow and level faster than other types. With that said and on the other hand, though, birds will hit a higher level faster, but they'll generally be weaker than another type of monster at the same level. Usually even a monster a few levels behind.
It's the hollow bones, probably. Still, it's not much trouble to get them a few levels ahead, to keep roughly competitive. Give and take.
Obviously, you can see the four combat options. They aren't much to speak of. Fight makes your monsters fight, Item opens up your pockets to throw things that will help, Run makes you run...
And Plan, which opens up this. Most of this won't see much use! It's supposed to be training, getting your monsters used to fighting in a specific way, but it only really sees much use if you have a varied set of skills to take advantage of and choose between. As you can imagine, Charge is full offense, Cautious is as defensive and healbotting as possible, and Mixed tries to strike a balance in theory but generally wastes a lot of turns on buff spells that don't help you in the given situation at all. In most situations, if you have a bunch of skills, it's best to just Command directly and pick who does what in specific, rather than leaving the combat tactics to the things with brains the size of a dried pea.
For the immediate future, we have no skills, so it just gets set to Charge and mashing the Fight button. I called Slib crappy, and he is, but he's got a comparative shit-ton of HP and only one enemy spawns in this introductory dungeon at a time, so he will almost never lose a direct damage race unless the other side happens to crit multiple times in a row.
And you know, that's what herbs are for.
And here's the important bit.
Sometimes, when you finish a fight, the last enemy you down will get back up and decide to tag along with you forever. This is pretty rare, if you're waiting for it to happen on its own, though I think it's got highly skewed odds for your first dungeon. I don't think I've ever failed to pick up a second monster in the first fight, though a third takes a little longer.
In any case, again, this is not something you can expect to just happen every time. In the future, we're going to have to work at it... make it worth the monster's time. How? I'll let Jack field that one.
That's right folks, absolutely!
The monsters have to be bribed. And for the most part, money holds no value for them, but a tender, juicy, and delicious cut of steak goes a heck of a long way. I'll go further into detail when we actually get some.
This mostly applies to normal encounters, but there are even some bosses that won't normally join you, but will if you stuff enough high-quality steaks down their throat through the fight. Since the first handful of bosses are scripted to auto-join, it's likely that you will never realize that this was an option until well after you've stopped playing the game!
You're obliged to name the monsters you lured in with honeyed words and the sweet temptation of tender meat, but it's really kind of a drag. The bosses, of course, will have their own default names, but the random encounters will default to just two letters.
For now we're gonna stick with that. I'll let you name things later on, don't worry... not random encounters, though.
Anyway.
The Anteater makes up the third and final crappy monster of the starter dungeon. It's a beast, a family of monster that generally only distinguishes itself with high HP and attack values. However, being as this is the starter dungeon, the Anteater only brings half of that equation to the table. Slib outclasses their HP score by a pretty big amount at an equal level, so basically all they have going for them is that they punch harder than anything else we've seen so far.
We still want to fight as many of these as possible, for Reasons, among which you'll find 'we need a third monster and the join rate plummets once you already have one of a specific type' and 'they give better xp than the other encounters' taking pride and place.
No go, though. We trawl through all four stages and pick up one of these:
... and then walk up and down in a line for what I'm pretty sure would have been over an hour of random encounters, were it not for the emulator's beautiful speed-up button, which adjusts things from about one hundred percent of normal speed to about two thousand percent....
....until this happens.
Feeling a warm, flushed sense of accomplishment, third monster in tow...
I immediately throw that warp wing and return to the castle to do the whole dungeon over again with a new, random set of floors. Because a level one Ant-eater can feasibly be one-shotted by the boss on the first turn and do me no good, so I have to grind a few levels up, and I might as well feel like I'm accomplishing something and getting a second, slim chance for Good Loot along the way.
No such luck, though!
Instead we enter the boss floor at levels five, eight, and five, with the max HP scores noted above. You'll see how Slib absolutely steamrolls the other two in the HP area, with literally more HP than the other two have between them in total? It's still not that he's good, it's just that our random encounter join-ups are just more terrible than he is.
Incidentally, he hasn't learned fireball! Which suggests to me that I misunderstood and misremembered, and the numbers I cited before are what the spells cost, and not what level they're learned at. So, no idea when that will happen, but it's fine because Slib could only weakly cast it twice if he did have it. Between the three of them, the only spell available is Dracky's Antidote, which would be super awesome if, you know, anything in this area was capable of poisoning you at all.
It's basically direct and ordinary attacks all around, which would render this fight an issue with a couple fewer levels, because Hale might blue-ball you by deciding to heal to full in every round. That's always real fun. Super fuckin' fun.
On the plus side, at least Hale is a polite sand-bagging tentacle-slime-jellyfish.
He still has a quick rant about how he's not going back, he hates the farm, he hates the king, you'll never take him alive blah blah blah. Fight ensues.
And like I said before, if you have fewer than a full party of monsters, or your team is even a couple levels lower than this, this fight can be a serious fucking problem. Being a Healslime, Hale has Heal, and he'll use it profligately, and it's going to restore him to full health if he even has one hit point left. It's not unbeatable, it just turns into a huge fucking slog-fest and a question of whether you brought enough herbs to keep up.
When you have a team that can and does just hit him for more damage than his total HP count in a single round, it's not a problem.
Paraphrasing conversation:
HALE: You're.... strong. I think I could grow to like a human like you. Please! Accept me into your party!
Hale, being a boss, has his own canon name. We'll just leave him with that, since it works well enough. He also has healing, which means we now have a team member who's going to do more than just attack directly every round! And Herbs just became all but obsolete since mp recovers as you walk! Yay!
That aside, we're faced with a minor party arrangement issue. It's easily resolved though. Hale is a healer, and has healing spells we want him to learn. Slib needs to learn his rocking fire magic. The ant-eater, even, has a nice skill later on that's hard to find and so we want to pick up early. The dracky, comparatively, is a tagalong that doesn't currently offer anything besides future options of getting something better than a dracky. In theory, it could learn sleep, but that's not really going to go off even half as well as you want most of the time, and a magic-stealing skill that is easier to find, and of course, Antidote. None of it is necessary, and it has the fastest growth, so it gets shipped off to the farm where it'll get reduced xp gain without
The king, for his part, is obviously disgruntled by Hale choosing us over him.
But he swallows his sadness, frees Pulio as promised, and immediately orders you to go downstairs and compete in crown-sanctioned bloodsport for the amusement of the screaming masses.
So he might not be entirely over the rejection, you know.
TO BE CONTINUED
nick012000
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Don't forget to explore the side areas behind the arena entrance proper, assuming they're even open yet!
Chibi-Reaper
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At this point, both the stairs up and down are open, and they'll remain available through the game. There's little point to going downstairs, though, unless you want to run through the starter dungeon one more time. There's nothing else to see except eight locked doors.
Upstairs leads to the farm, though, and that's actually a little more populated now. I didn't mention before, but the farm allows you to house nineteen monsters, with an option to make them 'sleep' and store another nineteen. You probably won't ever need to do this! There's also the scattered monster npc's... Mostly, the monsters there just talk about their level caps and comment about how fucking delicious meat is, but there's a couple reasons to come up here.
Not this, quite yet. Something good happens later if you walk beneath the chill Shen Long, but for now it just straight up shits all over you. Literally.
On the plus side, the guy fishing up random garbage out of the leaves has something nice in his pot of catches. You could check this earlier, but if you did, it would only have garbage. The tinymedal only spawns after you've cleared Hale's dungeon.
Speaking of, Dragon Quest aficionados will be familiar with Tiny Medals. They're as good to collect here as ever, but infinitely more frustrating. There's a set number that will spawn through the tree through the game... I am not entirely sure but I suspect that it's not quite enough to get the first prize.
The other way to get the medals? Completely random drops in the dungeons. Because yeah, that's how to make the scavenger hunt fun. I like fixed locations better... at least that way, you know you can just check an online guide if you get really stuck.
But that's all for the farm for now. We could talk to Pulio, switch something out for the dracky, but there's no reason we would want to do that.
Instead, we step out of the castle again.
Where this dude falls right to his death.
.... Or not! In fact, the ledge there is just the most pointless of pointless shortcuts, literally less than five steps away from the stairs. It saves a couple seconds climbing down, maybe? They put this shortcut in, but they don't want you to use it yet... so basically the entire purpose of this NPC is to fall down the ledge before you, and then sit in front of the next one for a while. That's the sum total of his existence, his life's work.
Also, that wizard guy is still being a bitch and blocking the way further down.
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Selias
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And now for the arena. Luckily, you can save before choosing rock, paper, or scissors, so you don't have to worry about spending an hour trying to get five wins. Unless there's some pattern that I don't remember, which would make it really easy.
Chibi-Reaper
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Tiny Medal number two! I'll keep checking, but I think that might be it for now.
Most of the NPC's have nothing interesting to say, but there's a bar a little back. Understandably, the waiter refuses to serve a seven year old hard liquor, but one of the patrons have something interesting hidden in their drunken rambling.
... What's this? We haven't seen these monsters yet, but it's a stylized.... Bombcrag, Army Ant, and Bubbleslime.
Hm.
That's right. They literally just give you the solution to this 'puzzle', two screens away. With that said, even if you aren't the most logical kiddie around and decide that maybe that lady is talking about something you can get from the breeding stuff later, for some reason... it's not hard to get this one just by throwing the process of elimination at it. Goopi will throw the same sign in the same order every time, so you'll eventually figure it out.
But hey, who cares, we get to meet royalty.
.... We get to meet the not-king royalty. That the king keeps hidden away behind a secret staircase. Oh boy.
Dun dun dun? Or not?
Well fine. Leaving!
There's also a Master school of some kind, but it just goes into mechanics. There's an NPC who you can talk to about who you'll face in the Arena... but he has nothing important to say this time.
The one other thing to look at here...
You can have a tea party and talk with your monsters!
They seldom have anything to say. It's either going to be a statement of boredom or a self-help-esque 'Seize the Day' sort of phrase.
Better get to that arena for real, then.
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Chibi-Reaper
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One thing I've got to say about the entrance to the actual arena-stage proper? It is pretty darn imposing, for a kid's game.
This right here? This is why you will never find a money drop in the first dungeon. For now, at least, they don't want you to break the sequence of events, and if you had found money, then you could attempt to challenge something more than the most bare-basic of opponents.
After this? They stop caring. As long as you have the money, you can throw down with whoever you want, though you'll probably lose if you try to poke around too far above your own level. And you can't fight in anything above D-class without beating D-class. That aside, it's a go-nuts situation.
I guess in theory, if you were having trouble with an arena match, you could just skip it and go for the next one... but in practice I don't see how you would do well in Rank B if you can't clear Rank C, etc.
G-class is... well, it's underwhelming. It's a slight increase in difficulty, as your fights are now three on three instead of three on one, but....
.... Really, even when the preliminary rounds throw up a monster you haven't seen yet, all you need is to have Hale and any two of your other monsters, and you're basically guaranteed the win. The arena forbids giving direct commands, and using items, but at this point you don't need either. Just set Hale to cautious, and get stomping.
As a note, you probably guessed, but that one in the middle is from the Plant family. They tend to have high Int and MP for some reason... but being plants, they aren't so agile. Slooow.
The third and final fight is with the school Principal, who rolls in with the living dead at his back.
Naturally, all three of these kooks are of the Zombie family. Generally speaking? There's a few solid options, but mostly they have high hp and nothing else really going for them.
This fight is more difficult than the others in that it takes around five rounds to chew through the enemy instead of one or two. But the outcome was never in question.
G-class. Have a healer? You're golden.
The king is either genuinely happy for our achievements or covering for his disappointment at our failure to fail really well. Still, after a cursory round of chat, we're interrupted.
"The royal rumor-mills will have a party with this one, hehehe."
*The king of Greatlog stares at you for a moment. Then he breaks into deep, booming laughter as he turns and sweeps from the room.*
TO BE CONTINUED
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Guile
Clothes That Kill Virgins
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So wait, there's the King of GreatTree, and the King of GreatLog? Could the King of GreatLog possibly live in some kind of giant log, just as the King of GreatTree lives in an effing huge tree?
Truly, we are in a land of the fantastical.
Truly, we are in a land of the fantastical.
Chibi-Reaper
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The big thing that winning in the arena does is open up new doors for new dungeons, each with a new boss at the end.
But there's also usually little things around the area that also change.
For example, that old geezer finally got off his ass and went down the rest of the stairs.
Unfortunately, it's not a clear shot all the way down yet.
"What, you want me to move? Make me."
This kid is kind of a little shit about things! In any case, we can't go further down the stairs. There's a lot of options for what to do on this level and above, though.
For example the well...
Has a crazy voodoo scientist and his ancient, decrepit crone of an assistant living in it! I really can't see why they decided that this was a good piece of real estate for... whatever it is they do down here. Not sure I want to know, honestly. Right now, they have nothing important to say!
A little off from it is the library.
Hahahaha, that's a good, haha, a good, um....
... I'm going to actually have to do that, aren't I? Yeesh.
In any case, the other two NPC's give you an exact number on how many monster's you've had :eyebrowwaggle:, and gives specific details on the monsters, including the three moves they naturally learn and usually the 'easiest' way to breed one.
There's also a ton of books.
I'm running under the assumption that none of them are super important, because hey, I'm not spending fifteen minutes leafing through every one of these to make sure. I think it's just more mechanics and fluff. Probably.
I honestly forgot what was in that room, and forgot to screenshot it! It's a bank of sorts. Nothing exciting. I'll probably never use it. In any case, as the helpful NPC says, the bazaar is to the right, and while it's currently pretty damn sparse in terms of both people and shop options....
It does get us our third TinyMedal.
Like I said, the options are sparse. This is the only open shop at the moment, and their selection is... lacking. "Love Water" is a better Herb, but healing items now that we have a dedicated healer are for emergency use only and otherwise things to sell for money. Haha, it has an option for buying Herbs. Really. That'll happen.
We might want an antidote in desperate situations, but if we're regularly getting poisoned then, again, it's better to have a monster with the antidote skill. And repellent sooounds good, but in most cases it's actually counterproductive. Unless you're confident you can take the boss right the second you go in, you don't want to pull in less xp than you could. And if you've actually beaten the boss, and are going back in, then you're usually going through specifically to grind more xp. I guess there's uses, if you're trying to farm for random items or something, but if you're hunting items you probably don't want to pass up more levels either.
Jerky and Porkchops are Meat items. They're better than nothing, but hardly worth spending money on. The Beast-Tail makes an arrow on your map that points to the exit to the next floor. You might want this later, but only if you get lost on the big maps and can't find where you left the exit at. In either case, you'll want to explore fully, just for a better chance at finding rare items and more xp. The only thing I might want to actually buy right now is a warp-wing, which can teleport you back to the castle if it starts to look like you're not going to be able to clear the dungeon.
With that said, I don't have enough money to buy one, even if I had sold the last two emergency leaves so it's irrelevant.
A few screens off, there's a couple of burly shirtless dudes with sacks over their heads that are trying in vain to start a grill going. You'll notice that there's no meat on it. It's probably irrelevant, but since they can't figure out matches, they want you to give them a monster that makes fire.
Protip: Offer an inch, people will take a mile. They don't want you to use a fire technique or spell for them, they want a monster that makes fire. You will never get this monster back! Choose wisely.
And back towards the entrance, we have the shittiest shopkeeper ever.
Yeah, you just keep on not selling things, buddy. That'll make you money.
I didn't mention before, but the Medal Man is on the castle level, conveniently directly east of the throne room. You have to go down and up stairs to get there, of course. There's definitely no faster way. Why would you think that?
3/13. Zapbird isn't bad. We'll keep an eye out for more medals. We'll have to get lucky with random drops of course, but we'll keep an eye out.
And of course, having proven we aren't a complete schlub, a couple of gates have opened.
Riveting, folks. Absolutely riveting.
Well, these are our options. Such as they are. We'll be clearing both, in whichever order. Alternatively, we do have a little more than 80 gold from selling all those pocket leaves, so we could possibly go and get absolutely humiliated in front of a crowd with our shitty starter monsters.
I mean, challenge a higher rank in the arena.
But there's also usually little things around the area that also change.
For example, that old geezer finally got off his ass and went down the rest of the stairs.
Unfortunately, it's not a clear shot all the way down yet.
"What, you want me to move? Make me."
This kid is kind of a little shit about things! In any case, we can't go further down the stairs. There's a lot of options for what to do on this level and above, though.
For example the well...
Has a crazy voodoo scientist and his ancient, decrepit crone of an assistant living in it! I really can't see why they decided that this was a good piece of real estate for... whatever it is they do down here. Not sure I want to know, honestly. Right now, they have nothing important to say!
A little off from it is the library.
Hahahaha, that's a good, haha, a good, um....
... I'm going to actually have to do that, aren't I? Yeesh.
In any case, the other two NPC's give you an exact number on how many monster's you've had :eyebrowwaggle:, and gives specific details on the monsters, including the three moves they naturally learn and usually the 'easiest' way to breed one.
There's also a ton of books.
I'm running under the assumption that none of them are super important, because hey, I'm not spending fifteen minutes leafing through every one of these to make sure. I think it's just more mechanics and fluff. Probably.
I honestly forgot what was in that room, and forgot to screenshot it! It's a bank of sorts. Nothing exciting. I'll probably never use it. In any case, as the helpful NPC says, the bazaar is to the right, and while it's currently pretty damn sparse in terms of both people and shop options....
It does get us our third TinyMedal.
Like I said, the options are sparse. This is the only open shop at the moment, and their selection is... lacking. "Love Water" is a better Herb, but healing items now that we have a dedicated healer are for emergency use only and otherwise things to sell for money. Haha, it has an option for buying Herbs. Really. That'll happen.
We might want an antidote in desperate situations, but if we're regularly getting poisoned then, again, it's better to have a monster with the antidote skill. And repellent sooounds good, but in most cases it's actually counterproductive. Unless you're confident you can take the boss right the second you go in, you don't want to pull in less xp than you could. And if you've actually beaten the boss, and are going back in, then you're usually going through specifically to grind more xp. I guess there's uses, if you're trying to farm for random items or something, but if you're hunting items you probably don't want to pass up more levels either.
Jerky and Porkchops are Meat items. They're better than nothing, but hardly worth spending money on. The Beast-Tail makes an arrow on your map that points to the exit to the next floor. You might want this later, but only if you get lost on the big maps and can't find where you left the exit at. In either case, you'll want to explore fully, just for a better chance at finding rare items and more xp. The only thing I might want to actually buy right now is a warp-wing, which can teleport you back to the castle if it starts to look like you're not going to be able to clear the dungeon.
With that said, I don't have enough money to buy one, even if I had sold the last two emergency leaves so it's irrelevant.
A few screens off, there's a couple of burly shirtless dudes with sacks over their heads that are trying in vain to start a grill going. You'll notice that there's no meat on it. It's probably irrelevant, but since they can't figure out matches, they want you to give them a monster that makes fire.
Protip: Offer an inch, people will take a mile. They don't want you to use a fire technique or spell for them, they want a monster that makes fire. You will never get this monster back! Choose wisely.
And back towards the entrance, we have the shittiest shopkeeper ever.
Yeah, you just keep on not selling things, buddy. That'll make you money.
I didn't mention before, but the Medal Man is on the castle level, conveniently directly east of the throne room. You have to go down and up stairs to get there, of course. There's definitely no faster way. Why would you think that?
3/13. Zapbird isn't bad. We'll keep an eye out for more medals. We'll have to get lucky with random drops of course, but we'll keep an eye out.
And of course, having proven we aren't a complete schlub, a couple of gates have opened.
Riveting, folks. Absolutely riveting.
Well, these are our options. Such as they are. We'll be clearing both, in whichever order. Alternatively, we do have a little more than 80 gold from selling all those pocket leaves, so we could possibly go and get absolutely humiliated in front of a crowd with our shitty starter monsters.
I mean, challenge a higher rank in the arena.
Selias
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Chibi-Reaper
D-Donations plz?
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Golem is slightly better, built like a brick and built out of bricks.
However, Dragon's techniques are better flat out. Golem can come down on a single enemy like, again, a ton of bricks, but dragon bathes entire enemy groups in flames, and once it picks up the single-target technique it can keep up well in boss fights, though Golem still edges it out there just a little.
They both have areas where they shine at this stage, and are highly indicative of their Family strong points.
However, Dragon's techniques are better flat out. Golem can come down on a single enemy like, again, a ton of bricks, but dragon bathes entire enemy groups in flames, and once it picks up the single-target technique it can keep up well in boss fights, though Golem still edges it out there just a little.
They both have areas where they shine at this stage, and are highly indicative of their Family strong points.
Chibi-Reaper
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And right away we see why it's pointless to buy herbs or the Meat they currently have on offer. You'll seriously find far more than you could ever use just lying around the dungeon maps.
We're also quickly introduced to some new, more XP-rich enemies, among the occasional older kind.
Picky is a bird, and we've already covered that family. Really, it's nothing special. It seems to be the best xp for your buck at the moment, though.
There are also the walking stumps, StubSucks, that we've seen in the Arena... and Grasshoppers.
Bug is an okay-ish Family, though it's obviously not your top tier in general. They're strong against poison, and they can generally buff themselves all right, but their base stats are kind of meh.
Really, any of these are options I can take or leave. There's a real winner in here, but it doesn't seem to reliably show up until right before the boss chamber. Well, it gives more time to pick up meat.
On the third floor, we find this.
Sometimes, instead of a dungeon floor, you can randomly find a 'Breather' sort of room. These rooms can have an item shop, as shown here, full healing, or just a stack of treasure boxes.
They are much more useful on dungeons of twenty or more floors, where you might actually need a breather, than showing up as the third level of four and slashing my possible XP and items find. I don't need to buy anything, and I don't need healing, the only one of these I'd be happy to see is a treasure store-room at this stage.
Better still, his item stock is just not that great! It's entirely comprised of healing and curative items. They can be a life-saver if you need them, but sleep at least I know just goes away after the battle. Spending fifty on an item to specifically cure it, instead of giving something a swift kick in the ribs...
Well. Anyway, less thrilling than it could have been. It does let you save in these rooms, however, if you're playing a cartridge and not on an emulator with state saving at your disposal.
On the fourth floor, we see a few coin drops.
With the power of SAVE STATES, it seems that exactly how much money a coin gets you is randomly determined on picking it up, but it's either pre-determined to be Gold or Medal on entry, or the odds of a coin being a medal instead of money are just pretty darn low, because checking a few dozen times showed results between ten and twenty five gold for this one, but not once a medal.
I'll freely admit, if it looked like it would be easier to cheese up a few medals this way, I would have done so without hesitation. Instead, I'm just going to have to shrug and say you're probably never going to see any of the Medal prizes beyond maybe the ZapBird.
Oh well.
And there we go. Aside from the boss itself, Gremlin is this dungeon's real winner of a monster.
The Devil family, generally speaking, is just all around pretty great, though not out and out fantastic in a single area. Better, they have decent fire and ice resistances, generally. As far as your options go, Devil is just about always going to be a solid choice for a monster.
Gremlin specifically is very nice early on, because it offers both a multiple-hit fire attack and healing.
We're going to get a gremlin before I leave. We might not use it right away, because unfortunately the levels are still low, but we want one.
A bug decides it likes the way we punch along the way. I shrug mightily. Not all the join-ups can be winners.
Gremlin, though, was the one I wanted. And this early on, just a couple sticks of jerky means he's mine.
Unfortunately, he's level two. This means that since the boss is right next door, and I don't want to spend the next hour walking in a circle before I can face him, Gremlin has to go to the farm while I fight with my current team. Buh bye, little guy.
The following bit I will put in totally unaltered. I don't even need to touch this one.
Note.
Princess doesn't give a fuck that you're, like, seven. All of her disappointment stems from the fact that you cannot physically lift her and walk out of there. Baby-faced and don't have any strange hair coming in down there? Not a problem.
If the hero, like, happened to be a bit stronger, or if she was willing to just walk out on her own feet, I don't know where this would have lead.
With that said:
Admittedly, I'm slighly overleveled for this. Game expects your team to average around 4-5ish, and I'm rolling with sevens. Three rounds, dragon drops.
I'll also note, the boss you fight and the boss you get are two different monsters. Dran has a lot more HP to go around when you're whittling through it than when he's on your side. Stats are different too.
In any case.
Dragon's in the team. Dragon and Healer are staying in the team. Third slot is definitely going to be Golem, once I get that guy, and then we can stomp through the next level of the arena and start getting to interesting things.
But for the moment, we've got options for the final slot of our Golem dungeon run. Slime, Anteater, Dracky, Grasshopper, and Gremlin, folks. Who gets off the bench for this one?
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Winged One
Not the Simurgh
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Well, you mentioned that you actually wanted the gremlin, so I guess take him along?
Chibi-Reaper
D-Donations plz?
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kinglugia said:
Not yet!
That little brat doesn't get out of the way until we clear another arena stage. Also, you can't breed anything with a level below the minimum of ten.
Selias
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I'd say take the slime, and give the gremlin to the guys who want a monster that has fire. I got the Sky Dragon Egg after doing the Villager and Talisman gates, and the gate that appears when you give those guys the fire-using monster. Gives you a pretty good boss monster, too.
DuskAtDawn
Of the Thousand Faces
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To be fair, he hasn't hit puberty yet. The princess, to him, is a high-maintenance lady who would force him to spend even more time with an asshole king that he really wants nothing to do with.
The dragon's a freaking dragon. It's like a dinosaur MK II! What sane kid doesn't want a dragon to fry his annoying teachers?
The dragon's a freaking dragon. It's like a dinosaur MK II! What sane kid doesn't want a dragon to fry his annoying teachers?