Week of 01 Sep 2024
“Own your decisions and believe in yourself.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Visions of Mana
- Darker Skies
Most of the week was exploring Fa’Diel as I worked my way through Visions of Mana, and I really enjoyed it! The story is pretty entertaining up until the final chapter, when the game does what many other Japanese-developer or old-school RPGs do: time to retread where you’ve been, re-fight some bosses, and generally drag this on far more than necessary. So I had to put a stop to trying to stop the world-ending threat to retread most of the game, fight a boss assigned to each element that has popped up, and tie up all the loose ends of character development. I wrapped up the main story on Wednesday and then the real chore began: the post-game content. Now some games from Square Enix can really stretch on into the hundred(s) of hours, but luckily even though it was a new game I was already getting a sense that it was a far more reasonable 30-40 hour completion, and I could tell as I started working through the last things I had to do. I’d already grabbed all the collectibles finding Li’l Cactus around the map before the end boss so I was fully powered up. But, there were still the Lesser Aeries, themed challenge battles that led into a Greater Aerie and, once all eight were completed, the achievement.
Honestly, I didn’t even pay attention to the theme of them for the first few as I easily mowed through them at a good clip. The Greater Aerie of Moon proved the first difficulty spike, as the enemies would die in one hit but also One Hit KO you and your party. That required just switching to a faster party member and it was cleared. Next few were also pretty easy tasks. But, woof, the first real wall I hit was the Greater Aerie of Darkness and their incredibly strong enemies. One huge factor of these battles is they’re timed, and the Darkness one requires you to clear it in only 20 seconds against enemies that have incredibly high defense. To bypass this, I switched in Palamena for the first time ever, used the Light vessel to chain their life bars together, then started unleashing a maelstrom of magic abilities on them. The next few were easy until I stopped by the Greater Aerie of Fire before facing the Benovodon of Fire. Just…what the heck, developer Ouka Studios?! It’s a bunch of cloud-like enemies that take almost no damage, there’s two waves, and you have 30 seconds. I tried for a good hour or two trying to find something, anything that works. Even worse, I couldn’t find a single post or solution anywhere about this one on the internet! A good class strike will often clear a wave, so what I decided to do was just equip enough ability seeds to increase my magic damage as much as possible, let loose on the first wave, then hit the second with a class strike ASAP. That did the trick and I finally moved to the two achievement fights.
The first is the boss of Chapter 10, Aeve Zalaha, that you have to defeat on Hard. The developers were kind enough to allow you to change the difficulty without negating the achievement, so you can play the entire game on whatever difficulty you want (for me, Easy) and then just switch to Hard for this fight. And, boy, is it hard. The biggest key is Darkness protection, like Dark Shield and ability seeds. He’s also immune to half the elements and resistant to the rest, so it is difficult to do damage to him. Add in the limited amount of resources you can bring into battle, and you just can’t handle much of a war of attrition. It took me a good while to finally get a good run where we did enough damage, fast enough, without exhausting Careena’s (healer) and Morely’s (Crystalline skill) mana reserves and I beat him. This made me worried for the next fight, against Black Rabite, since I’d seen mentioned it was even harder, but really using the same skills and techniques and setup I’d used against Aeve Zalaha made it so I defeated the rabite on my first attempt! Whew, and that was the most recent entry of the Seiken Densetsu series completed! Man, with Xbox hinting they have some notable Japanese-developed games coming to their Tokyo Game Show presentation, I really hope Square Enix brings some ports over. Obviously, namely, Legend of Mana, but I’d also love SaGa Frontier!
Achievements unlocked: 34 (+23) | Completed
Oh no, it's right behind me, isn't it?
I wanted to do something quick next, so I went with Darker Skies, a sequel to a game I did back in 2022. They’re both inspired by the novel The War of the Worlds, and are survival horror games in a more modern setting than the book. First off, man this game is a good bit more entertaining and playable than the first, though still nothing special. In fact, the entire game takes about 2 hours to complete if you play it “properly”, sneaking around and being stealthy. But soon I realized you can usually just sprint through areas and enemies can’t really stop you. One issue is you need to make sure you’re getting enough red fern extract to upgrade. There are two categories to upgrade: available throwables and your character himself. You need to max both for the all achievements, but you can get around any extra grind/effort by holding onto your points until near the end of the game, upgrade one path for the achievement, quit out, then load back up and upgrade the other. It was a nice little detour playing this, and I’m glad I got around to it.
Achievements unlocked: 13 (+13) | Completed
Oh no, a TRIPOD! Quick, cough on it!
