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Reading all this about Earthbound being hard, all I remember is having a really easy time with it every time I played. Like, my last playthrough I remember actively avoiding enemies so the game wouldn't be too easy. Am I crazy?
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Aug 20, 2013 19:04
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:If Ness is John, why would he ever do that? Exactly, he should beat the dog. Not try to kill it.
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Aug 20, 2013 20:19
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How Rude posted:Reading all this about Earthbound being hard, all I remember is having a really easy time with it every time I played. Yeah, I don't get it either. I've beaten Earthbound no less than 8 times in my life, the first time being when I was 12 or 13 years old having never played an RPG before. Only 1 or 2 fights per playthough give me troubles. Typically one of the Sanctuary bosses (seemingly at random) and the Robot at the top of the Monotolli building. Otherwise the game has never been hard for me at all.
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Aug 20, 2013 20:30
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greatn posted:Nah Yoko Ono is awesome, the only people who hate her for "breaking up the Beatles" are generally idiots who basically know nothing about the Beatles or Ono. I don't hate Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles, I hate her because she makes bad music.
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Aug 20, 2013 21:18
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Smoking Crow posted:I don't hate Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles, I hate her because she makes bad music. She makes amazing art.
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Aug 20, 2013 21:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68 "What an art. 10/10" - IGN
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Aug 20, 2013 21:49
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Smoking Crow posted:I don't hate Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles, I hate her because she makes bad music. The Beatles broke up The Beatles
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Aug 20, 2013 21:51
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The Beatles were really nothing more than a boy band of their day and anyone who buys into their mystique is as foolish as a teenage girl screaming her head off and having a heart attack because Ringo winked at her.
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Aug 20, 2013 21:54
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Smoking Crow posted:I don't hate Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles, I hate her because she makes bad music. Ahaha. There are tons of gold videos on youtube of this pretentious attention vacuum making an oblivious embarrassment of herself, but this is the Earthbound thread so Bill Burr saying it all in 3 minutes is like the perfect condiment on reality's rock candy. TheRationalRedditor fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Aug 20, 2013 |
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Aug 20, 2013 21:56
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lmbo that Games, the forum where Games Are Art but discussing them beyond superficial gameplay and graphics observations is verboten, thinks that Yoko Ono sucks. Bill Burr is great, I really love his one stand-up routine about hating women.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:08
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How Rude posted:Reading all this about Earthbound being hard, all I remember is having a really easy time with it every time I played. Nah. The duality is just how easy it is to forget or overvalue a lot of things in game. Inventory management is a colossal pain in the rear end in Earthbound, so it's dead simple to try to ignore it, which leads to you ignoring food items at the very least. Well, Titanic Ant becomes quite a bit harder if you're relying on Lifeup for your healing (and so does Peaceful Rest and the trek to Saturn Valley). If you just bring along 3-5 healing foods into these places, you'll breeze through. In more advanced cases, you can start ignoring the broken gadgets that Jeff can fix, ignoring Bottle Rockets, etc. That adds on another handful of areas where the game will be substantially harder (half of Fourside, some of Summers, a few bosses after the Tenda village). And even if you aren't scared of the inventory, you can over-value PP, since it's so difficult to restore those points. So that leads to things like preferring to Bash with Paula instead of using Freeze, which is busted as all gently caress. It also leads to not trying unreliable things like Flash, Paralysis, Hypnosis, etc even though these things can win an entire fight for you if they connect. The game also does a really good job of psyching you out if you're a first-time player. It's not that big of a deal to get nailed for half your health against a boss, because that boss doesn't actually have an entire truckload of HP like you're fearing. Trillionage Sprout is a good example - the dude has an instant kill attack, two ways to partially disable party members, and a buff that patches his one big weakness (fire). He can also hit like a loving train. If he had 10,000 HP and could survive 20 rounds of combat, this would be a real problem. He doesn't, though, he's got 1k, and your team at the time can very feasibly two-round him, particularly if you save Jeff's initial Big Bottle Rocket for the occasion. If you're in the right place mentally, I'd say the only truly difficult place is the Fourside Department Store and Magicant. Moonside might also qualify simply because it can be confusing to find your way to the safehouse to heal. Beyond that I would say Earthbound's a 3/10 in difficulty.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:10
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TheRationalRedditor posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaCKKHcpf0w The "Redditor" part of your name is well-earned.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:18
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For me, the 'hard' part of EB is that unlike a lot of other RPGs, you don't have early, easy ways to revive your party members. Depending on the part of the game, you may get lucky and have a Cup of Lifenoodles on you but otherwise you're trucking it to the nearest hospital (which can be a pain in certain dungeons) or praying that your Secret Herb/PSI Healing gamma works this time.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:26
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Debonhare posted:For me, the 'hard' part of EB is that unlike a lot of other RPGs, you don't have early, easy ways to revive your party members. Depending on the part of the game, you may get lucky and have a Cup of Lifenoodles on you but otherwise you're trucking it to the nearest hospital (which can be a pain in certain dungeons) or praying that your Secret Herb/PSI Healing gamma works this time. Of course, "abusing" PSI butterflies is the antidote to this, but there's no way a new player is even going to be acquainted with their locations and how to reliably make them reappear.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:34
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The hardest part about Earthbound is just how weird and different it is. If you're an RPG pro and you expect to plow through it and get by on conventions, then you're probably gonna die a lot. You gotta slow down and learn it as its own thing. Everything's just slightly different enough that you could totally miss something important or misunderstand how something works.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:39
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I say getting past Peaceful Rest Valley and the worst is behind you. If you're under-prepared and made the mistake buying the slingshot, that place was hell. It's worse if you forget to pick up the hard hat. Clumsy Robot was another roadblock because it's one of two bosses that resists bottle rockets. My PSI attacks were failing a lot too. It just came down to using normal attacks and pray it doesn't spam its OHKO missile attack.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:41
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TheRationalRedditor posted:Your point is on the nose. I can still recall playing for the first time on SNES, and without the luxury of emulator tools those early game areas where enemy ferocity really ramped up (Twoson through Threed) felt really threatening because of all the enemies there were with oft-used heavy hitting attacks, dying was a big deal, and poor newbie Ness and Paula don't even have much more than 150 HP to show for themselves yet. I found the Peaceful Rest valley to have an air of menace because the player goes from having encounters with shrubs to suddenly facing exploding trees and alien robots. Even knowing the butterflies are around, there's the leaf dudes there that loving cast magnet, which at that point of the game is knocking off ~1/4 of your PP every time, and if there's more than one it's entirely possible you can run out of PP in one battle.
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Aug 20, 2013 22:43
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Y-Hat posted:Even worse news for you: you can't go back to the Peaceful Rest Valley until after you beat Master Belch and Trillionage Sprout. It's a common but also fatal mistake that first-time players make. Yeah, honestly the second article really annoyed me, esp since most Japanese authors... Okay. So like, Japan's been writing literary fiction for a long rear end time, and like, it's pretty common to write things about : sex and sexuality(all kinds) why capitalism is bad why WWII was a really bad idea why destroying the enviroment is bad Now that's a lot of countries, and I'm oversimplifying it quite a bit, but a lot of that shows up in Mother 3. Mother 1/2 were quirk-heavy, and the games were really silly and got more serious as time went on, but they were mostly just interesting riffs on Dragon Quest. There was more thought put into them than your usual RPG, but they weren't nearly as deep. Mother 3 definitely was a more intelligent look at the story, there's huge anti-capitalist, anti-enviroment destruction themes, but this really isn't like...a good analysis. I mean Itoi confirmed he knows people in the gay community, he's friends with many of them in Japan and so on so he wouldn't throw the Magypsies in because XDDD MAN IN A DRESS! RAPE OF YOUNG BOYS IS FUNNY! That's not really like, how he works as a person. He's like a wee bit smarter than that. I don't see it as an apology though, and I don't really see...at all....the work of someone apologizing or attacking the story he made like, a decade prior. Itoi is somewhat more intelligent than that. I think he already confirmed that Mother 3 was about moving on, accepting things are over, everything dies, so on and so on. He was like, letting go of his game design career(he didn't want to make M3 for example) and he even said that "mother 4" would be the lives of people who finished the game and were affected by it. Go out and have your own adventures. Final note: Tomato is a really awesome person, who I actually met. Intelligent, cultured, educated. Calling a middle eastern looking dude fassad is generic as hell, sure, but it's like a Japanese person calling an American character John, or a british person Nigel, or a german person Klaus. Honestly that article is just really frustrating to me, I don't understand, being gay myself, how anyone could look at the weirdness in M3 and think Itoi is saying anything about queerness, and his attempts at creating different characters isn't much of a statement, it's one of the game's quirks. Kumatora is a godlike psychic witch, she's a riff on the trope of a princess. I mean Duster is handicapped and he attacks using his bum leg. It's quirky. Girls can kick rear end. handicapped people can be awesome. Kids can be brave and useful. Guardians of ancient relics can be completely loving weird. I dunno. I'm rambling. Back to video games. 
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Aug 20, 2013 23:32
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HarveyVdarski posted:Final note: Tomato is a really awesome person, who I actually met. Intelligent, cultured, educated. Calling a middle eastern looking dude fassad is generic as hell, sure, but it's like a Japanese person calling an American character John, or a british person Nigel, or a german person Klaus. Honestly that article is just really frustrating to me, I don't understand, being gay myself, how anyone could look at the weirdness in M3 and think Itoi is saying anything about queerness, and his attempts at creating different characters isn't much of a statement, it's one of the game's quirks. Kumatora is a godlike psychic witch, she's a riff on the trope of a princess. I mean Duster is handicapped and he attacks using his bum leg. It's quirky. Girls can kick rear end. handicapped people can be awesome. Kids can be brave and useful. Guardians of ancient relics can be completely loving weird. I dunno. I'm rambling. Back to video games. I really didn't get it at all. Whenever someone links me something like this (which is generally on tumblr) it's like reading... I don't know how to explain it. Suppose you're reading St. Francis of Assisi and you've never even heard of Christianity. Or you are reading a Newtonian physics textbook, but your Universe doesn't have gravity. It's a lot of jargon, built upon presumption, built upon presumed shared worldview which is entirely subjective and far from consensus. This person and I are not from the same planet.
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Aug 20, 2013 23:39
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I'm pretty sure Yokuba -> Fassad is a pun on the word Façade. The fact that it looks like a generic middle-eastern name is just a bonus.
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Aug 20, 2013 23:49
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avlein posted:I'm pretty sure Yokuba -> Fassad is a pun on the word Façade. The fact that it looks like a generic middle-eastern name is just a bonus. That's literally what it was. His japanese name (Yokuba) is some sort of pun for like "deceptive" or something, so Tomato went with Fassad to keep the pun and also because it's sorta middle eastern soundin'. But hey it's Tumblr gotta get mad about something
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Aug 20, 2013 23:53
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Lord Ephraim posted:I say getting past Peaceful Rest Valley and the worst is behind you. If you're under-prepared and made the mistake buying the slingshot, that place was hell. It's worse if you forget to pick up the hard hat. The mole cave can be another difficulty spike if you're not prepared for it. If you don't know the map it's easy to get stuck going in circles, and those snakes will keep poisoning you and draining Ness' PP with casts of Healing β, then the moles all have power shields so you have to choose between burning Ness' PP on attacking or giving up on that damage, and Jeff is useless during those fights since all his attacks are physical. (Unless you've got the Shield Killer, which is kind of a coin flip since you have to rely on Jeff fixing it) When my friend was playing through a year or two ago, that was the hardest single part of the game for him.
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Aug 21, 2013 02:58
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I had a long flight so I started an earthbound play through on my tablet. The hardest part for me so far has been the third sanctuary just after fighting belch. I was over levelled and had no way that I could tell to rid myself of the mushroom effect. It was a crap shoot of getting to the boss without that status effect. If Paula was one of the people mushroomed it was game over. The only way I could tell to rid myself of it was to kill the member and use life noodles. That said Ness was mushroomed for so long there I got crazy in battle messages about his desire for LSD.
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Aug 21, 2013 04:05
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I don't remember the last time I played through the third Sanctuary dungeon without having one character get mushroomized.
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Aug 21, 2013 04:58
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Yeah that tumblr article is really awful and basically sums up absolutely everything that is terrible about Tumblr and social justice warriors.
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Aug 21, 2013 04:58
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Goodpancakes posted:I had a long flight so I started an earthbound play through on my tablet. The hardest part for me so far has been the third sanctuary just after fighting belch. I was over levelled and had no way that I could tell to rid myself of the mushroom effect. It was a crap shoot of getting to the boss without that status effect. If Paula was one of the people mushroomed it was game over. The only way I could tell to rid myself of it was to kill the member and use life noodles. The right way to handle this is to power through and fight the Trillionage Sprout with all three characters mushroomized.  I did this on my latest playthrough. Finished the boss off while everyone's HP was ticking down from mortal damage caused by an unfortunate Rockin' β from a confused Ness. It was awesome.
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Aug 21, 2013 05:02
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DarkHamsterlord posted:The right way to handle this is to power through and fight the Trillionage Sprout with all three characters mushroomized. The hp counter system is honestly the best turn-based rpg mechanic ever thought of and I wished there were more games that did something like that. Rewarding quick thinking/problem solving is a good thing! EDIT: Like, imagine if you played a final fantasy where that one loving mob that ambushes and murders you off instantly had to deal with an HP counter. You could potentially save someone from death and maybe find a second wind into victory/escape.
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Aug 21, 2013 05:42
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That tumblr article is almost embarrassingly heartfelt and kind of sweet but I think she's confusing what the game is bringing to the table with the chord it strikes in her. It's a super evocative game and it's cool that it connects with people on that emotional level. I think she's onto something with the magic queerness of the magypsies though. She's freely intermixing academic jargon with colloquial speech, using academic terms derived from but not necessarily meaning the same thing as colloquial speech, so it can be confusing if you read it as "she's saying they're literally gay," when queer here just means contrary to gender norms. Mr. Belding posted:It's a lot of jargon, built upon presumption, built upon presumed shared worldview which is entirely subjective and far from consensus. Come the gently caress on dude. You're gonna have to share the world with all kinds of people you think are weird.
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Aug 21, 2013 05:58
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robodex posted:Yeah that tumblr article is really awful and basically sums up absolutely everything that is terrible about Tumblr and social justice warriors. Yeah I honestly regret revealing my sexuality because on tumblr it's basically the law that you have to be the same "dis-privileged" level as them. It gets annoying trying to discuss...politics, law, video games..anything. I disagreed with someone recently that Brittany from Pikmin 3 was sexist and was just screamed at because as a man I am not allowed to discuss gender at all. I still don't get why people go looking for poo poo to get pissed at.... swamp waste posted:
But the door swings both ways. Plus I'm pretty sure we need to stop discussing this article before we all get banned to poo poo for breaking a forum rule.
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Aug 21, 2013 06:03
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absolutely anything posted:That's literally what it was. His japanese name (Yokuba) is some sort of pun for like "deceptive" or something, so Tomato went with Fassad to keep the pun and also because it's sorta middle eastern soundin'. Yokuba is a pun because Yokubari is greed in Japanese. Fassad is a pun on Facade, but also because fassad is Arabic for corruption. Basically the person jerked their knee so hard it probably knocked out a few teeth.
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Aug 21, 2013 06:10
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Anatharon posted:Yokuba is a pun because Yokubari is greed in Japanese. It is? drat, Tomato did better than I thought.
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Aug 21, 2013 06:24
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Zaphod42 posted:The hardest part about Earthbound is just how weird and different it is. If you're an RPG pro and you expect to plow through it and get by on conventions, then you're probably gonna die a lot. You gotta slow down and learn it as its own thing. Everything's just slightly different enough that you could totally miss something important or misunderstand how something works. Really? Earthbound is pretty much a pastiche of Dragon Quest. The turn based system, the menus, the first person perspective on the combat, even things like revival being rare and hard to get. Ness himself is basically the archetypal Dragon Quest hero. A silent protagonist with a strong all rounder set, having strong physicals and a good mix of support and attack magic. Granted, Earthbound isn't an exact copy of any one Dragon Quest game, but was clear to any Japanese player that this game was intentionally taking little nods at Dragon Quest. What makes Earthbound stand out, beyond executing it's game-play as a "Dragon Quest Clone" very well, is how it takes the conventions of what a player would "expect" in a archetypal JRPG, (which is, to Japan, what Dragon Quest is) and twisting them around. The setting is both modern thus more familiar and yet paradoxically foreign to the Japanese player, being based off 90s American suburbia. The plot gets increasingly strange and surreal as the game goes on, culminating not with the final and grand confrontation leading to the victorious defeat of the Evil Giygas, but a desperate hopeless fight that is literally only won through prayer.
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Aug 21, 2013 06:56
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Anatharon posted:Yokuba is a pun because Yokubari is greed in Japanese. Yeah that was it, it got explained in one of the translation blog entries but it's been a few years since I've read it (oh god years) so I didn't remember all the details.
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Aug 21, 2013 06:57
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Goodpancakes posted:I had a long flight so I started an earthbound play through on my tablet. The hardest part for me so far has been the third sanctuary just after fighting belch. I was over levelled and had no way that I could tell to rid myself of the mushroom effect. It was a crap shoot of getting to the boss without that status effect. If Paula was one of the people mushroomed it was game over. The only way I could tell to rid myself of it was to kill the member and use life noodles. The pink watered hotspring in Saturn Village cures mushroom. Just wade about in it for like 30 seconds.
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Aug 21, 2013 08:34
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absolutely anything posted:That's literally what it was. His japanese name (Yokuba) is some sort of pun for like "deceptive" or something, so Tomato went with Fassad to keep the pun and also because it's sorta middle eastern soundin'.
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Aug 21, 2013 09:29
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jymbojones posted:The pink watered hotspring in Saturn Village cures mushroom. Just wade about in it for like 30 seconds. The Mr. Saturn doctor will also cure it, and he's free. Just let him operate on you! Ding!
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Aug 21, 2013 15:03
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jymbojones posted:The pink watered hotspring in Saturn Village cures mushroom. Just wade about in it for like 30 seconds. This has the added bonus of causing the mushroom to levitate a foot over your head while you're in the water, which always amuses me for some reason.
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Aug 21, 2013 18:44
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DarkHamsterlord posted:This has the added bonus of causing the mushroom to levitate a foot over your head while you're in the water, which always amuses me for some reason. It's not that you can't cure the effect in general in Saturn valley but you have no portable way. Which means some if not all of your party will be mushroomed in the later part of the dungeon. I guess it can add a casino like thrill with every cast of PSI fire.
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Aug 21, 2013 19:11
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Goodpancakes posted:It's not that you can't cure the effect in general in Saturn valley but you have no portable way. Which means some if not all of your party will be mushroomed in the later part of the dungeon. I guess it can add a casino like thrill with every cast of PSI fire. Fortunately, the dungeon is only three short rooms long. If you can despawn/avoid fights with the mushrooms, you're golden. And of course once the boss goes down everybody runs away from you. But yeah, it's still a pain in the butt. Plus I don't think they ever incorporate mushroom enemies again, do they? I don't remember ever getting mushroomized past Threed.
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Aug 21, 2013 19:17
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I'm pretty sure the fourth sanctuary boss can mushroomize you. He is Shrooom! after all
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Aug 21, 2013 19:21
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