FFV – Part 17: Low and High

Summary: We chase something that looks like King Tycoon in the town, but it leads us to a trap door. Beneath the town now. A portal there zaps us to Crescent Isle. The ancient Ronkan empire trolls us hard there, and we meet up with Cid and Mid on an airship that we yoink for ourselves.

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Gohn, the Town of Ruin

-The town is as its name indicates: a ruin. It’s not just empty, but also overrun by vines/growth with its buildings broken. What happened here?

-Is that King Tycoon wandering around? Why is he hiding from us?

*Navi mode engaged* “Hey, King! Listen!”

-He keeps running away whenever we catch sight of him. This smells like trouble.

-Cornered him in a building. Faris: “Papa!” I was right about a thing! Huzzah for Coldrun!

-Unfortunately, I was right about two things. As we walk towards “King Tycoon,” a trap door opens and we fall into the subterrane of the ruins.

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Subterrane of Gohn

-Bartz, Faris, and Lenna fall in one room, and Galuf falls into a separate room.

-Lenna’s still kind of reeling from having her suspicions pleasantly confirmed.

Aw.

-Is this gonna be a split scenario, like Palom and Porom’s trial in the Lunar Ruins of FFIV?

-Bartz tells the ladies that they should push on, that they’ll eventually run into Galuf. “He’ll be okay. He’s a tough old cuss!”

Galuf overhears, and in a huff he finds a way around the architecture, under the floor, around the walls, nimble as a monkey, and pops up next to party.

LOLOLOL

-The music down here is really, really eerie, and really, really wonderful.



-what the hell

-what is this place

-This looks like a factory in here, with whirring gears as far as I can see…

-It’s porting us! We get a view of the overworld map, as if we’re traveling underwater or in particle form across the entire frigging world!

-The platform we land on is the same as the one we arrived on, very tech-y. It gets pulsed with currents of electricity, and starts to collapse, but we escape in time.

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Meanwhile

-The chocobo returns to its forest home, ridden by Cid and Mid. Why are we seeing this?

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 Somewhere?

-Back to our heroes. I have no idea where we are now, where we got ported to exactly.

-The warp device overloaded. This is so weird. It feels like Star Trek Meets Final Fantasy.

-We appear to be in some high-tech library/lab/workshop place. No random encoutners, and there are even beds for us to rest in here.

-There are a few treasure chests trapped behind a wall. There’s a panel nearby, but when we try to push it, it won’t budge. We see a carving on the panel that tells us to check the planter in the next room.

We check the planter, and a note says to theck the notepad in the room over. We check the notepad, and the note says, “Made ya look! Neener-neener!” BARTZ GETS SO ANNOYED LOLOL

-Faris replies to Bartz’s rage with a healthy dose of pirate sass.

-Sure enough, there’s another note below this taunt, telling us to “check the urn.” We do. A frog hops out, opens a book, and runs away. The book says: “Down 6, right 4, pull.”

-It leads us to the panel we started out. I’M SO CONFUSED

-Oh. This time, the panel works. Is this all pranks from the past, or is someone alive and currently fucking with me? In either case, the wall now opens, andwe look two shurikens and the spell “Mini” for our trouble.

-Moving on. A different room. We pull a switch, and flash to Cid and Mid in the Chocobo Forest. The ground beneath their feet opens! WE ARE BELOW THE CRESCENT ISLE!!!! Not sure where they landed, but this solves the mystery of why the artifacts on Crescent Isle are the same as artifacts from the Ronkan ruins near Jachol.
These ruins must be Ronkan too.

-The next room over, we see the fire-powered ship, sitting there in dock. Is someone collecting ships?

-Next ship over has propellers! Airship time. Cid and Mid are delighted.

They get the ship working, and we’re up in the air.

-Something tries to drag us back down. Bartz: “Creeping crawdads!” I have to use that exclamation sometime this week. It’s a lobstrosity of some kind, “Cray Claw.” It gets off a few massive hits, but we win.

Awesome Banter #714:

Cid: “Ha! That overgrown lobster just got served!”
Bartz: “With cheese biscuits AND mashed potatoes!”

Anyone else hungry for Red Lobster biscuits now?

-Cid and Mid will stay behind to research the earth crystal. The rest of us will explore in the airship.

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Next time: airship funtimes.

Nerd Fitness Academy - Daily Food and Quest Log: 9/9/14

Nerd Fitness Academy – Fitness for Beginners: Part 2

#3: Customize Your Cooldown

So static stretching, while not so great to start with, is good for cooldown.  Flexibility gets tougher and tougher to maintain, and I know personally that I was never the most flexible of humans.

There’s a specific cooldown set that NFA provides, and it’s LONG.  (22 steps.)

The quest here:

-Review the cooldown steps.  DONE!

-Practice each stretch.  DONE!

-Modify any stretches needed.  A core part of the stretch is the Downward Dog position, and this is really hard for me.  However, my modification of it is to keep trying it, but it ends up less of a sharp “V” and more of a dented line.  DONE!

-Log your modified cooldown someplace accessible.  I’ve saved the PDF “cheat sheet” on my computer, and will probably print out a copy of it tomorrow as an extra.  DONE!

#4: Complete the Recruit Workout

…actually, it’s late, and I’m tired.  I’ll do this tomorrow.  Going to get to sleep shortly.

FFV – Part 16: Eat Darude

Summary: Into the desert! We fight a giant sandworm. We ask it for safe passage into the sands, it’s like, “Over my dead body,” and we’re like “lol k.” The desert is a bit of a maze. We find a locked tower, and eventually make it through, to Gohn, the Town of Ruin on the other side. More important than all that: Bartz gets his Dolittle on.

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Desert of Shifting Sands

-Cid and Mid may be able to devise away around the conveyer belt sands. A bridge! Won’t that take a long time?

It’s hard to dislike Mid. Such enthusiasm and optimism.

-Oh. LOL. I guess not. By “a bridge,” they mean that they’ll summon a giant sandworm for us to kill, and we can walk over its corpse.

50% chance of “Beetlejuice”-related nightmares for me tonight.

-Ranger and bard seem extremely weak rght now, so for this fight I’ll go back to my normal set-up.

-Just before engaging, Mid’s like, “Oh, btw, don’t use magic this fight. Trust me.” THANKS MID, GLAD YOU WAITED UNTIL MY PARTY WAS FULLY SET BEFORE LETTING ME KNOW. Jerk. Now Galuf is just gonna be window dressing, since he’s set with Gaia and Black Magic.

-Here we go. Ugh. Giant monsters so creep me out. Boss time!

-Aaaand I die.

-I died for two reasons. The first is the “do not use magic” reason. It made 25% of my party obsolete. More, considering that I was hoping to have Lenna use “Gravity” as a time mage, but kind of doubt it’d work on a boss.

The second reason is the way the boss works mechanically. There are three holes, and she migrates between them randomly. Attacking an empty hole did nothing. My primary damage dealer was Faris, who was a Ninja with “Berserk” equipped, so every turn she attacked a random hole. 66% of her attacks were on empty holes.

After dying, I adjusted by making faris a Knight with Two-Handed equipped, and Galuf a Monk with Time magic equipped to help get the party hasted. Let’s see how it goes.

-Victory! (Also, I was wrong. It turns out that attacking an empty hole provoked a “Gravity” retaliation. Ow. The berserk ninja was even worse than I thought.

-Can I just say that I LOOOOOOVE the Sandworm boss? Beating it wasn’t about grinding out more hitpoints, or higher stats. It was about strategy! About learning the boss’s mechanics, and utilizing the job system to adapt my party to fit the situation.

This is what I love so hard about MMO raiding – strategy, adaptation, execution. And as a side note, I’ll admit to being really excited to see the Final Fantasy world in that MMO setting with XI and XIV. It’s probably a year away or so even before FFXI, but still.

-Movin on!

-The worm’s corpse serves as a bridge across the initial sand hemming us in. Mid will take care of the Black Chocobo while we pursue. This whole thing makes me miss Boko.

-Into the true maze of the desert, having to navigate the conveyor belt system.

Amidst the shifting sand.

-LOL! Galuf’s “Gaia” here casts “Sandstorm.”

Nerd Fitness Academy - Daily Food and Quest Log, 9/8/14

Nerd Fitness Academy - Fitness for Beginners: Part 1

I’ve spent a lot of initial time getting set in the academy on the basics of the NFA mindset and the NFA nutrition path.  It’s time for me to move to the last of the introductory segments: fitness.

FFV – Part 15: Istory, Crescent, and Chocobo

Summary: Wandered around the world a bit, stopping in Istory, before meandering over to the Crescent Isle. Our ship off the coast there, but we hopped a black chocobo (who literally coughed up the bard and ranger jobs) to fly to the Library of the Ancients to meet Cid and Mid. Off to the Desert of Shifting Sands to look for King Tycoon.

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Overworld

-Sailed north to a town, and mobs are much tougher around here.

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Istory

-There’s a waterfall to the east, which we heard about back in Jachol. The road to get there has been blocked by fallout from a quake. It may hold treasure behind it.

-The armor shop is REALLY expensive. It sells three rings for 50k which enhance certain kinds of power (e.g. fire) while simultaneously making us vulnerable (e.g. to frost). Too rich for my blood at the moment.

-A “monster dressed like an old man” is in the east woods. He’ll zap us with lightning? …is it, um… what’s his name, the lightning Eidolon? That’s what I’m betting. This area is too high level for us right now, but I’ll have to remember to go check that out later.

-A bard in town sang us “Romeo’s Song of Love” to soothe beasts. Maybe I’ll have the Bard job sooner rather than later.

-Even better than the song itself though is getting to the bard. The bard is over a fence, with no normal road or path open. We have to find a pissed-off sheep, smack its butt, and get it to kick us over the fence.

The more baaad puns, the better.

Have I mentioned that I enjoy this game?

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Overworld

-There’s a city I see on the world map in the northeast. I tried sailing to it, but it’s hemmed in by mountains.

-Time to head to the Crescent Isle in the southeast.

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Crescent

-As soon as I step into town, an earthquake hits.

-NO!! The ship is sinking into a whirlpool! Leviathan? In this series, I’ve learned that whirlpools and sinking ships often are due to Leviathan.

-Apparently, quakes are common recently, along with whirlpools.

Not the most sympathetic of townsfolk.

-Interesting. The island grows crops easily without rain or fresh water. The town spring bubbles, even with little rain. Sounds unnatural to say the least, but perhaps the thing underneath the island isn’t all bad.

-UNLESS IT’S DAGON.

Lovecraft teaches us that deals with Dagon can often result in (short-term) gains for a seaside village.

-Lots of talk of chocobos in this town.

The newest AND MOST XTREME addition to the X-Games!

-The Ruins of Ronka are on the western continent. I’m guessing that those ruins are different from Jachol Cave. This island has the same artifacts found there. The Ronkan empire must’ve been pretty widespread.

-Bows and a harp are sold in the shop. Ranger and Bard must be on the horizon. I learned “Mighty March,” a regeneration song, from a town bard, which solidifies this guess.

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Chocobo Forest

-THAT’S RIGHT! There’s practically nothing on the island that I can access, no caves to get down below to whatever lies beneath, but there is a chocobo forest. With chocobo-y music



-A black chocobo. Time to fly.

-LOL maybe not so much. Bartz got him in the air, but the chocobo crashed down shortly after.

-The chocobo is choking on something. Ok.

-IT’S TWO CRYSTAL SHARDS. TWO. BARD AND RANGER HAHAHAHA
 
Power, with a side of phlegm.

-This is stretching belief a bit, even for this game, but I guess the chocobo caught some Karnak-crystal on the wind or something? Anyway, now with that out of his throat, we can fly.

-Trying Bartz as ranger, Lenna as bard for now.

-Oh. My. God. The black chocobo’s dance. I wish I knew how to gif it, because this chocobo knows how to shake its tailfeathers.

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Overworld

-Not sure where exactly to go. Back to the library I suppose.

-There’s an island smack in the middle of the ocean between continents. It is almost wholly covered by mountains. The one part of it that’s not covered is a temple. Something tells me something epic will happen there. Maybe that’s even where Exdeath is locked up.

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Library of the Ancients

-Dialogue between the party and Cid/Mid, who’ve been studying here.

-wait

-really??

-King Tycoon is still alive!!! He was last seen in the Desert of Shifting Sands, that place that stymied me earlier. And HE WAS FLOATING. WHAT.

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Next time: back to the Desert of Shifting Sands.

Uphill both ways.