I was getting fed up with the dungeon crawling to kill Rondo, so I decided enough was enough. I went and explored some lower (or rather, higher – they’re basements, remember) levels and found two better weapons and some more armour, before leveling up my characters some more. With Jazz and Allegretto on level 75, and Falsetto on 70, I thought the time had come to try Rondo again. And she was easy! Well, not easy exactly, but I didn’t …
So I spent three hours building up the stats of my characters, and killed enough baddies to get the almost-100-million gold to buy one of the soul shards. So I went and tried to kill Rondo again. And died. So I bumped the levels of my characters up some more, and swapped Viola out for Falsetto (as Falsetto can built the multiplier up way faster). With Jazz and Allegretto both on level 66, and Falsetto on 58, I tried again. …
This Mysterious Unison dungeon is a bit hard, isn’t it? Well, you perhaps don’t know, if you’ve not played it. But yes, it’s hard. I’m up to (or rather, down to – they’re basements) Floor 11 now, and finding the baddies there give me a whopping 3,000,000 gold each fight. So that 99,999,999 gold soul shard doesn’t seem so difficult to get now! At the end of Floor 11 was another boss – Rondo. Again. Only she’s bloody impossible this …
Um, yeah. So I completed it last night, but one of the end of game bosses dropped an item called the Hero Crest, and I wanted to know what it did. Mr Internet told me that there was another dungeon, near the Double Reed Tower (where you “end” the game), that you could open with the crest. So I did. And bloody hell, is it hard in there. To start with, there was another boss that I’d beaten previously, but …
I was right about how close to the end of the game I was, but still there was another chapter after Chapter 7. It was very short, though. Before that, though, I had some more previous bosses to kill again (adding to the SuckySuck(TM)-ness of the end of game proceedings), and then, with the Xylophone Tower completed, it was time to kill the big dragon baddie thing that Legano (I think that’s his name) turned into. He was actually pretty …
So I completed all of the Xylophone Tower (with two bosses I’d already beaten, again – that didn’t bode well), and opened up Noise Dunes. That led me to another tower, which appears to contain more bosses. Bosses I’ve beaten before. Again. Which means that Eternal Sonata has a SuckySuck(TM) bit. darthvadernooooooooooo.jpg And then, to make things even worse, once I’d killed a boss and was mere millimetres from a save point, the game crashed again. I’d forgotten to clear …
Allegretto and Co leapt into the giant swirly hole thing, and vanished! They awoke to find themselves, um, somewhere. With lots of dead people. Glowing, ball-like dead people. Yes, really. And there’s a desert that I can’t enter, instead having to climb the Xylophone Tower (to hit a switch to open it), which is full of somewhat difficult baddies. Well, they’re difficult as I’m trying to kill them with some of the characters that are on lower levels at the …
No crashes today, although I’ve doing the cache-cleaning thing every time I start the game up now, just in case. Went into Mt. Rock, and got blown around a lot and found some chests (mostly containing stuff worse than stuff I already had), before finally catching up with Prince Crescendo. Then Count Waltz (is he allowed to be a Count? He’s only about 12, isn’t he?) appeared with a million flying dragons-wot-have-donkey-heads and tried to convince Polka to go with …
Had another couple of crashes to start with today – again at the shopkeeper. Cleared the cache again and it sorted it again, though. The Aria Temple was a bit strange. Besides the large areas with no baddies in them, and the big room with nothing but baddies in (that can be totally avoided), there were several treasure chests that kept moving. I’d go for one, get jumped on by a baddie, kill it, and then the chest would move! …
After some hunting around on the internets, I eventually found what appears to be a method of clearing the game cache (documented here), which seemed to work and so I could carry on playing without it crashing every 25 seconds. Played for another hour or so, finding a book in the forest outside Baroque, returning it to a bloke in the castle, then returning through the forest to the Aria Temple. I’ve not entered it yet, though.
Um, yes. So other games don’t exist at the moment, it would seem. And plenty of time has been spent on this again today too – taking me from 13 hours to over 16 hours game time, according to the save files. Killed the pirate captain first of all today, which gained Salsa a new hat (um, great), and then we reached Baroque, where it was snowing. Lots. We decided to leave, after a concert and lots of shopping and …
It’s far too easy to spend lots of time on this without realising. I started early this afternoon, and then suddenly it was dark outside. Chapter 2 was soon over. I had to fight Tuba again on the bridge by the fort, and although I won, he took out the bridge and we all fell to our watery deaths. Well, not quite. The beginning of Chapter 3 showed that my party had been split into two groups. Allegretto, Viola, Jazz, …
This Chapter 2 is a bit long, isn’t it? I’m still on it now! I found the boy at the bottom of the cliff, eventually, and then stayed the night at his parents’ inn. The next day I went Castle Forte (having another, more successful, “jam” session on the way), but couldn’t get in. Instead, some bloke called Tuba who looked like a cross between Ramm-Man from He-Man and Birdie from Street Fighter Alpha decided to fight me. I won, …
Right, the Fort is all done and dusted, and I worked my way along the road to Forte City, killing green flying angel goats on the way, and helping a traveling salesman by fighting some dragon things with rocks on the ends of their tails. As you do. Sold all Beat’s photos (mostly of mice and onions) to him for 500 gold or so each, which I thought was pretty good, but the photos I took after that sold at …
Really enjoying this. Even the (some would say) tedious repetitive battles. But they’re fun! It took me at least another hour to figure out how to get out of the fort (the switches move a room that acts as a bridge – aha!), and had to fight a bit armoured wolf boss thing on the way, who wasn’t exactly easy, but was certainly more manageable than all the other bosses I’ve fought so far! It’s all that leveling up, I …