Thursday, November 02, 2006

Phantasy Star: getting tooled up

Going by a comment from a villager back on Palma, I'm going to have to get a Laconian sword, shield, axe and armour before I face Lassic. So far (at the end of the adventures I describe below) I've got the sword, armour and axe.

The game's a little frustrating now, with no signposts as to where to head next. After defeating Medusa, I knew that the sword was on the island in the middle of the sea, so went over there and got that. I then went exploring a bit and didn't find anything new, so I flew to Uzo and went exploring around there instead. East of Uzo there's a maze of mountain ranges, and I found a new dungeon. At the end of that dungeon was Noah's mentor, who was a bit rubbish and died in a one-on-one fight with Noah without causing any damage at all. I've no idea what a "frad mantle" is meant to be, but it increases Noah's defence.

I went a bit further East, over a lake and found myself back at Paseo, the spaceport that I originally arrived at. I'd forgotten, but in the armory there they had diamond armour for sale at 15,000 mesata. I had 17,000. I bought it. Well, it's got to be good, yes? And it did seem to bump up Alis's defense quite a lot.

I couldn't find anything else, so went to Skure and starter wandering around there. The planet's quite restrictive, with massive mountain ranges all over the place. I did find a cave, however, which I went through, only to find another cave, and another ... I ended up in Twintown, which is populated by some ugly aliens with a French accent. These use the same sprites as the evilheads, but with a different colour palette, and they haven't attacked me yet. I presume they're friendly.

Half the town are pathological liars, it seems ... but you can tell the ones that are, because they say "indeed", "really" and "oh yes" all the time.

I went into the shop in Twintown and found an ice digger for sale. For 12,000 mesata. Great - by this time I had built up my money store to just under 4,000 ... I decided to come back after exploring more.

I found myself in a morgue, full of zombies. It was a real pain, because there were countless dead ends which were full of enemies, and traps, and I even got caught in an area I couldn't get out of - I had to use the flute to go out of the morgue and back in. In the end I found a chest (I had to use Myau to disarm a trap to get past it) which had the Laconian armour in it. Huzzah!

By this time I had 8,000 mesata, so headed back to Twintown. Around Twintown is evildead city, and evildeads give you 136 mesata each when they die. Being attacked by 3 of them is very profitable. I quickly raised the money I needed for the ice digger.

This thing is great. It can plow straight through some mountains. Not others, though. And there's no way of knowing which is which. I'll have to explore more to find where to go next.

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