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| You blew it up! You maniacs! |
Right... so I had quite an explosive beginning to my adventures in Saronia, what with my busted up airship. Reluctantly I pressed on, despite my dismay at constantly having my airships violently combust on me. It's just rude, you know?
Once I got over my initial grumpiness, I followed my trusty walkthrough to the letter. Rather than head to the castle, I explored the giant gated community I now found myself trapped in. My first recommended stop was southern Saronia where I paid a visit to a chocobo scholar and dropped some crap off with the Fat Chocobo he summons when you speak with him. With my inventory cleared a bit, I set out for the pub to meet up with my next temporary party member, the exiled Prince Alus. He was having a bit of trouble with some local riff raff.
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| These rude little punks all look the same to me. |
Lucky for him, Hemnes of all people, decided he wasn't having it and stepped in. A short battle sent the rabble screaming for mercy and Alus offered his thanks and explained the situation. He then
tagged along with the group, and having him around earned me some bonus loot around town.
At this point, I made my way to visit each of the other four districts. In the Southeastern one, I climbed to the top of the tower in the center and fetched a pile of Dragoon equipment. Clearly, the game was trying to tell me something. Sure enough, upon consulting my walkthrough, I discovered that the upcoming boss was a pushover if you attacked him with dragoons. That made it time to change everyone's job and grind them up to a decent level. It took the better part of my playtime yesterday, but it turned out to be well worth it.
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| This circumstance is not at all suspicious. |
With hours of grinding finished, and the party all at level 30 as suggested, away we went to Castle Saronia to find out exactly why the King was not only instigating civil war but generally being a pretty mean guy. The guards tried to turn us away until a message arrived that the King wanted to let us through. The group was shown to sleeping quarters, and a heartfelt conversation between Hemnes Bookcase and Prince Alus ensued. It was a brief discussion to foreshadow that something was really wrong with the King if he was willing to exile his son, and it touched on the nature of parental love. Then both of them went to sleep only to be awoken by a half-hearted attempt on Alus's life by none other than the king himself.
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| Cue Psycho music. |
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| Aluminum Foiled! |
Lucky for Alus, the king refrained from killing him. This was much to the displeasure of Gigameth, who had been mentioned in my travels through the four corners of Saronia as a creepy guy with a bird shaped shadow. Instead, the King drove his knife into his own chest to break the control the real villain had over him. Of course, Gigameth didn't see this coming because the bad guys never do take any stock in the power of love. They just don't know that there's no greater force in the universe than the vocal stylings of Huey Lewis and The News. You know... the song... Power of Love? Sorry, not sorry. that joke was gold.
What were we talking about? Oh yeah, Gigameth's disbelief.
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Don't worry about it.
Voldemort made the same mistake. |
He didn't spend too long being incredulous, and switched gears to 'kill everyone' pretty quickly. As I mentioned earlier, the walkthrough suggested dragoons, and I'm totally down with following this thing's advice if it will get me back on track. (I'm pretty dissatisfied that I'm still only on FFIII.)
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| I can respect his time management. |
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Allow me to introduce you to
eight spears.
|
Allow me to say, I was pretty impressed with the dragoon trick. It worked like a charm and made what is considered one of the most difficult boss battles easy as pie. It seems that by using jump, you can avoid nearly all of his extremely hard hitting attacks. Not to mention the fact that it's an established fact that dragoons are effective against flying creatures. This dude is a giant bird in his real form so that worked out perfectly. Now, given the fact that I had equipped each of my party members with not one but two spears, I managed to take this blowhard down. He was dead in just two and a half rounds because I was doing MASSIVE damage (1500+) with each and every jump.
With the boss dead, I watched Prince Alus have a touching moment with his father before he finally died and left his kid the kingdom. "Here are the keys, son. Clean up my mess, ok?"
With that unpleasantness complete, it was time to more freely explore the kingdom, with the blessing of the prince to take whatever treasure we wanted to help us on our journey. SHOPPING TIME!
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| I've never wanted to kill an NPC this badly. |
I'd like to note that on my way out of the castle, I ran into an odd little fellow who was seemingly proud of his penchant for property damage. I honestly did a double take. IT WAS THIS GUY! He's the guy who BLEW UP my AIRSHIP and there is NOTHING I can do to him. GRR!
Once my rage had subsided again, I subsequently visited all of the shops that had been closed due to war until now.
Several thousand Gil later, I had myself some shiny new equipment and spells, and a nagging curiosity about what I was going to do about transportation now that Cannon McShootyPants had destroyed my vehicle. This problem was corrected by visiting one of the towers in the castle. It just so happened that some airship scholars had just unearthed a very fast and fancy airship from who-knows-when, and got it ship-shape. And they just gave it to us. For free.
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| La la la la, lah lah, Lah La Lahhhh! |
Free airships are the best airships. Tune in next time for my triumphant return to the skies.
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