Toggle Background Color
S01E06: The Upper West Saga 1: This ain't so upper.
I have conferred with people who have access to the code, and gained my own access to it, and as far as we can tell there is no Hard Mode modifier to enemies. Unless he did it in a weird way.
I say gained because these games project files used to be password protected. You had to work out a way to hack into them one or another. Simple but tedious for LP1 since it just required you changing file extensions manually. For 450+ maps. Yes, this game has a lot of maps. I managed to find a folder someone uploaded with that already done, on the old ass Laxius Shrine fan forum.
So we come out onto the Upper West, which is pretty inaccurately named, looking at a map of the Deport, if you ask me.
See? It's way down Downer! This map is from the LPII manual. The LP1 manual instead has a rather large map of the whole Rillia to Sankt Leona region that I might post some time soon. You also may notice there's an unlabeled castle near Fanta. That's Adretana, City of 1000 Fountains, or something like that. It's got a swamp right in front of it. It's not important in the Power trilogy, and is only rarely referenced. It -is- important in the Force trilogy, however. There's also a town in the south-east desert called Oude Giullie or something weird like that, that comes up like once ever and has not been visited yet.
Huh. I didn't remember there being a level requirement to fight Tamara. Well, even if there wasn't one, we'd stand no chance of winning for a long time, as she is one of the most challenging boss fights in the game.
We find a gimmick weapons and armour shop. I do not buy anything.
Apparently dwarves busted the most important bridges in the Tangar Mountains for some reason.
Luci says "Power is not only swords!" Thanks, Luci, I nearly fell for the old golden sword 'losange' ruse.
Our first mook encounter is one that actually has an entry in the manual.
quote:
Wind G-Octopus (common, various places of the Deport)
Able to breath air, the fat Wind G-Octopus and his friends quickly began to settle within the lands. Huge (3 to 5 meters tall), they easily impressed the common folks, but never really caused the adventurers to die.
The Octopus can attack with its tentacles, or spread some blur cloud of their own liquids.
So, they're not even worth mentioning outside of being land octopi.
Random crits it for 600 damage, killing it. 39XP and 60GP. It can cast Poisonous Cloud I guess?
Luci learns a new ALL spell.
Plain Dwarf's are pretty simple physical attackers. Not especially durable. Pretty flat enemies.
24XP, 25Gp. Sometimes drop Dwarven Gauntlets!
Random crits pretty often at this point. Feels like 30% of the time.
To the east of the goldsmiths, here's some linked island we'll ignore for the time being.
Instead, we'll visit that unlabeled house to the north. There's not much interesting here but...
tribus
He's talking about the Tangar Mountains being perfect for ambushes.
what
Poor guy. This house is never relevant to anything ever though.
Sarah's summoning Dryads alone slaughters these guys. They're worth 18XP and 275GP each.
The bush disappears from the map after the encounter.
North-west of there is our next town.
quote:
Merthuns
Inhabitants: 450 (merthians)
Little village, the most famous however of the Upper West.
Wolfen Rogues are nothing. Random often defeats them in a single normal attack, and their own attacks do little damage. 16XP and 130GP. Sometimes drop fethers.
An old man shares his secret knowledge with us and makes us promise not to tell.
Wait, wait. This feels backwards. The gossips say the legendary treasure filled cave doesn't exist?
Upstairs, a maid is getting annoyed at a very energetic child.
This GIF seriously does not capture the full speed of this child. He is at least thrice this fast.
No reason to bother catching him either!
After a short wait...
Indinera plays a joke on us here. The old man advances towards us very slowly. Like one step per two seconds.
And then the last step takes twice as long. And then he has to walk into the counter proper for some reason.
He has all chrome gear which we do not need. He does however, have something we nab for Luci.
Decent defense increase.
Also there's a Chain Armour in a pot here, which Random was already equipped with.
This man makes an incredibly bold claim.
And there's a creep hiding in a bush. That's all for Merthun's proper.
A bit further west, on an otherwise empty stretch of coast...
Excuse me?
The husband has nothing interesting to say besides how good his life and wife are to him.
Really. A book titled "slavery."
Let's move on.
There's like four people in here and none of them will shut the fuck up about how good Dan's succulent bread is. It began to sound like a euphemism.
I buy ten.
I also steal some regular breads. Now we backtrack to Merthuns and start heading north.
We're gonna ignore all the shit we see on our way for the moment.
We could head right into the Tangar mountains right now. Nothing will stop us that wouldn't stop us a couple updates from now. And nothing we do here matters to crossing the mountains or most of the rest of the game.
But we won't. I would like to see if people can guess how many dungeons we shall do here, not counting Balthus Cave, which is a postgame dungeon (or at least one of the hardest in the game, if not THE hardest).
Anyway, we turn west, and cross the river.
We'll be ignoring it for now. West further.
Some good shit here. The Sharks are 2 uses, 50% health and anti-numb. I buy the max of those, and trouts and also 81 whales because we're incredibly evil which puts us at 7k GP. But this will basically be our out-of-battle healing for the rest of the game settled.
The fishing shop has this area out back with nothing but a chest with a Shark in it behind a tree.
Time to go!
The local mage has some crystals floating around.
Also, he won't let us steal his diamonds.
EXCUSE ME SIR
We should get out of here.
There's Big Cows hanging out with Minotaurs in the western quarter of the Upper West. The Minotaurs are the... kind of reddish coloured ones.
They're not much different from Big Cows.
We run into something else on the way back south. 31XP, 33GP. Chance to drop a Fladeon Shield.
One of the infamous lionines! Kind of an ordinary mook. 22XP and an EXTREMELY low chance to drop fethers.
quote:
Upper West (without the towns)
Inhabitants: 2400
The Upper West is the place surrounded by the sea (East, West), the Chanterless Woods (South) and the Tangar Mountains (North).
East of Merthuns we run into... Wine?
This basically a mini-boss. An easy one. It has at least 1500 HP, but it's not terrible effective in terms of damage. So it just takes a while to kill.
It's worth 75XP and 4GP.
What the fuck are you even saying
You know what...? Sure. Sure.
Continuing east...
Also a good place for some foreshadowing!
The woman to the north says she wanted to try armwrestling too, to avenge this guy but he wouldn't let her even though she's strong.
And then Turnus here, says the stuff inside Balthus cave is even more evil and powerful. This is true. We'd be able to slay the golem well before being able to handle the mooks inside.
Finally, we get a good status effect item. Cheap too. Tonic Teas a kinda nice as well. 40% HP+100.
We steal a vegetable farmer/merchants tea.
Guess Indinera's a Phantasy Star fan.
A Plain Dwarf drops this for poor Coryool. He's the only one that can use it.
Excuse me? Are you insane?
Apparently not! The Half-Sharks are worth 25XP and 5GP.
So this is a series of battles. Mostly easy ones too.
Snore!
The Octohuge is pretty tanky for a mook at this point, and can poison and double hit. Worth 45XP and 10GP.
The last fight is this.
That rock still being there though, means we can do these battles a second time, which I do.
Luci learns Mega Flare the second time, and the rock vanishes. This encounter does respawn time to time. I've seen different claims as to what triggers it, and I believe it's stepping on a specific tile near Merthuns.
The infamous Balthus Golem and Balthus Cave are just a shortway north of there. We shall avoid them.
Luci wonders if this could mean ghosts.
We choose to stay so it tells us to die.
If it's noble and a guardian we probably should not be killing it. Let's kill it.
This thing is kind of annoying. It's not super damaging but it has a lot of HP, and occassionally casts G-Wave to heal 999 HP. It does this at least twice to me, making the fight wear on way too long.
Sarah buffs everyone up with Defense Up so it winds up doing even less damage, while Luci debuffs its magic damage with Dark Wave. It's physical attack double hits, but not for any remarkable amount, especially not with Defense Up.
It apparently has a chance to drop a Pineapple, which we did not get. And 95XP and 450GP.
The party search the area and find a chest buried in the sand.
Woo!
Mmhm.
And now, directly north of there is our last stop for this update.
This slime gives us further details. His fiance is a 'rather sexy girl named Wendala.' This is the humble beginning of a legend. Also, probably most of the worst stuff in this game... or even the whole series, has to do with Wendala one way or another.
Anyway, Sarah thinks this is all cute.
Coryool though...
Anyway, with this, we've explored all of south-west to south-east 'Upper West.' There's some places around the teleport mage we didn't look at closely, while there's some stuff still more north of Charlie the slime here. Not to mention the dungeons.
I don't want this to get tooo long, so we'll leave it here for now. I'm not 100% sure what the next update will cover. Probably the rest of the Upper West map and one dungeon at the very least.
the end