(The funny thing is, the same girl says, 'Hey, haven't we met before?' to Wil. )

Tyler doesn't ask the informant any questions, so as mentioned, his words last time were the last.

And then you return to the City of Night with full control.

If you just want to complete the scenario, then you can head right up the ramp; the trigger you need is in the little guardhouse with the lights. If you're interested in exploring, though, it's been about twenty years and there's some dialogue relevant to that. (Plus, you can't trade the Ores away after that trigger.)




Kyle was the grandson of Kisk, the man with the Talisman Alexei wanted... And Kyle had nothing to do with it, because Kiske gave the talisman to the town's Tool craftsman before he died. That scenario was kind of a shaggy dog story.



There's a number of NPCs here who reference other, older NPCs (or younger versions of themselves) who stood in those same places.



All three of the random ground treasures are here. All three were questionably useful at the time and they're worse now. You can chip them, at least?

There's also the Rock Axe in the old lady's house cabinet, which can at least serve as a back-up weapon for Tyler (or an upgrade, if you did Anima Faith Fiasco but no other Wil scenarios).



These dancer sprites never show up anywhere else. They're animated!



Best sprite dog.



You can't buy anything in this scenario. Each character has their own independent collection of Crowns, and even if they didn't, this is Wil's last scenario. If you exchange here, you're increasing your Circulation counter, but you're also basically throwing the Chips into a black hole.

The developers are dicks sometimes.



Speaking of which, if you brought Tyler here last time, he still has the Crowns he had nearly twenty years ago. (That's definitely not Wil's--he has about 3500 still.) Consistency!





This guy still says he wanted to apprentice to the Tool craftsman but got turned down... Just like he did twenty years ago. And when you give him the Ores, he says he'll use them to make special Tools so that the craftsman will agree to take him on.

What have you been doing with your life, random NPC?



This guy is responsible for Infiltrate! taking so drat long to do. I will never forgive you, craftsman.




That's a quick tour of the city. Let's move on.

Yep! This is happening.

Compared to the rest of the party, Gustave's base stats are kind of weak and his Sword skill is not very impressive--he's faced a lot less in-game combat, and he doesn't really have anything innate to make up for not having magic. In terms of items, though...



...a 53-attack weapon makes up for a lot at this point in the game. Gustave has finally got his three-times-longer sword.

But why stop there?



yessssssss

He also gets Patrick's old Steel Armor, since he's the best user of it. I just go and throw away the Iron Breastplate; it's not a Tool, so you can't break it down for Chips. (You can't break down Quells either.)



Now the city is filled with monsters. They don't respawn, and your job is to hunt them down and kill them all. They're not very difficult, but now that Gustave has the big fancy sword, the developers feel comfortable upping the ante a bit. There's nothing here as dangerous as the two Polar Drakes fight in Tycoon Wil, though, unless you get very lucky/unlucky with one special fight.

(The music is just Feldschlacht I here, since we're in no real danger.)

Patrick using Gale Strike (7 SP, 74 power) with the Silver Staff (23 attack). 23 Staff, 15 Tree, does about 1180.



Gustave using Double Stroke (4 WP, 44 power) with Gustave's Sword (53 attack). 18 Sword.

As you can see, he holds his own pretty well, even before you switch to the Cinderforge or start using bigger Arts.



The bird on the first screen can have a Polar Drake in the fight, but that's as rough as most fights get.

(Interestingly enough, they actually bothered to differentiate Gustave's Sword and the Cinderforge--the Cinderforge's blade is a triangle of about the same length. The Trial Dagger, Steel Dagger, the Gustave's Sword of Buckethill and Steel Sword are all shorter, while IIRC the Paladin Sword uses the Cinderforge sprite... The result being that Gustave's Sword actually has a unique sprite.)

There's two exceptions to the low difficulty. The first is this Scene. (And possibly the other enemy with the same icon on the same screen, but I'm not sure; I haven't encountered this fight there, but I haven't tried much.) It'll jump off as you approach, engaging you. If you get very lucky/unlucky here...



...then you get this fight.

The Queen Peg and her three Knight Pegs are a special encounter, available only here and in one specific third generation dungeon--one past the halfway point of that generation, even. They're correspondingly more powerful than anything else here, having about 2500 HP and doing much more damage. Plus, they look exactly like the incredibly weak Peg enemy; the only giveaway is that a maximum of three Pegs can appear at once, and the Queen and Knights will not appear with any other enemy type.



If you've fought through Wil's scenarios to this point, then they're not very tough (damage isn't amazing, defense isn't all that high, no status immunities but high resistance), but they can surprise you. The Missile Head attack from the Knights can stun, and the Queen Peg will usually use Queen's Kiss, which does low damage but can Charm. Charm + three enemies that Stun is not good times.

There's two other places to get the Feather Cap, and one of them is here. The one specific scene with the Knight Pegs has one in its Scene Drops, and you don't need to encounter the special Pegs to get it.

The real notable entry in the rare drop contest, though, is the Valleria Heart, the special drop of the Knight Pegs. It's a 53-power Flame Sword with +10/+1 SP/SPR and thirty uses--essentially a breakable Quell, considering the power and the SP gains. The problem is that it's a Sword, and Swords have previously-discussed user availability issues, and if you're crazy enough to grind for the Valleria Heart, then just go get the drat Cinderforge.

The Peg Queen can also drop the Peg Heart accessory, which grants +10 SP, +4 physical defense, +23 heat defense, +3 to the other magical defenses, and makes you immune to Water attacks the same way that the Birch Ring does. It is amazingly pointless for such a rare item.

(Some of these weird random encounter things seem designed just to mess with people in the pre-internet age. "Yeah, I fought this one zombie in the tower, and I was attacked by Alexei's dragon things! But I couldn't make them show up again!" "You are so full of poo poo." Or, "Hey, I ran into these super-strong bird things in Wil vs. Egg, they dropped a sword just as strong as Gustave's!" "Yeah, sure you did")




No special drops this time around, sadly.





The other slightly-dangerous thing is the two fights with bug map enemies, each of which has at least one 4400-HP Beetle Cruiser in it. It can kill a weaker character like Raymond in one hit with Step In and it's very tough. But hey, if you learned the Sword attack Head Cracker, it's effective against Beetles! This is like the one time it'll ever matter!

(Weirdly enough, despite its really high status defense, Raymond gets his first-ever Death Shot insta-kill on the first one, so the HP utterly fails to matter. Good job?)

The second one had two Beetle Cruisers, but it wasn't much more dangerous. (Aside from poor Patrick's bad luck, anyway.)



The Quell craftsman has locked himself inside his house (and won't let you in), but the rest of the townspeople are hiding in the bar. You can get hot chocolate up in the topmost corner, which'll restore your HP (but not your LP/WP/SP, so it's kind of useless).



Also Kyle's not in the bar. Well, I'm sure he'll be fine.

(I checked, you can't hop in the sewer to see if he's hiding there again. That would have been kind of clever! He's probably just hiding in the house with the Rock Axe, though, since that's where the elderly friend of Kisk was living last time we were here and it's also locked.)



Once you've cleared out all the enemies, my second-favorite sprite in the game appears! It's Skeptical Pirate Captain!



Before we talk to him and finish up this half of the scenario, let's bid farewell to Tyler. Look at that Axe level! It is very possible I will never get another weapon skill that high--in terms of availability, Tyler is second-best in the game, and he's drat good at Axes.

I also make sure to take the Anima Crystal off of Patrick, and I hand Gustave the Kris Knife to replace the Cinderforge--there's someone else who wants to use the Steel Triangle of Death in the near future, and Gustave can get by well enough with his own sword.

Now we're up against the Wyvern, who is essentially a baby Hell Winger--same attacks, half the HP and damage, also has a Feather Cap to drop. It's also by itself, the end result being that 13000 HP or not, it's not actually very threatening.



Plus, if you grabbed the Elven Lyre, then Raymond is immune to its Sonic-based Oscillation attack, which will probably kill him otherwise. This makes the fight basically a joke, because no one else is going to die in one hit and you've got Recover HP to heal without spending any turns. If you're using the Silver Chain, then that carries the fight all the way to "joke" territory.

...he starts using the fairly powerful Light-elemental Egg attack, which drains a good amount of HP. It only uses one action, but he can only use it twice a round and won't use anything else at the same time. (I'm guarding, so this damage is more than halved... And I'm starting to suspect SP Enhance decreases damage taken by your amount of SP, because Wil is generally weirdly tough for his armor. If you're doing four actions a turn, it's more around 160 each time.)



Shortly after that, he says this, then begins to lower your defense with Stone and raise his own damage with Beast. Combined with the Brawl Hit two-step Art he starts using at this point, he can actually do double-digit damage!

Still, this is SF2: if you can't kill a player character in one turn, you can't kill. Wil prevails after a fourth Call Thunder.

(Though not before using Custom Arts Level 3 Water three times, because Duels are sometimes very dumb and this pirate is weak)

You're given one last set of town interludes to convert Wil's Crowns over and move items off of him (or onto him, for long-term storage; you don't need Dead Stones yet, for example) before he's gone for good and takes his Crowns with him (to the bottom of the sea, presumably).



Pictured: Wil, equipped with a lot of crap I don't really need (but that I can retrieve if I want it). Those are some drat fine magic levels, aren't they?

Current Chip count: 4841, coming out to about 14800 Crowns + 2000 chips. That's already enough for two Paladin weapons and two Custom Tools! All money past this point is officially surplus.

That's all for Wil's chapters. It'll be a while before the Knights story resumes, so we're on Gustave chapters for a while... Including two locked Secret History chapters.

Einander fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Mar 28, 2015

Chuu fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Mar 13, 2015