Kingdom for a Frost Gem
Apr. 23rd, 2007 11:14 amAfter its disc never leaving the PS2 since we got it last month, we're nearly at the end of Kingdom Hearts now. It's really quite impressive how they got a Square/Disney crossover to work without it being unintentionally hilarious.
The only obstacle in our way is that Whitney insisted that we go for Ultima Weapon on the first play-through, which essentially means trekking around the game and beating up monsters to get several rather rare items. And unlike in Final Fantasy 8, there's no handy way to refine or upgrade your items into other ones if you have enough of a lower level (Potions to Hi-Potions to Mega-Potions to X-Potions, for example) - everything's completely separate from each other and you have to keep finding exactly the right enemy and hoping that they'll drop the right thing.
A solution comes in the form of the White Mushrooms. These red-hatted things appear at random around the game, and promise you rewards of specific items if you help them by throwing the right spells at them. You have to watch their moods to decide what they want you to do - for example, if they're shivering they need Fire cast on them, a need for Thunder is represented by a light over their heads for some reason, and Gravity is used to bring them down if they're floating in the air waving their arms about comically. The last spell you cast on them determines the item you get.
Except these mushrooms don't want to co-operate, and their item drops are random too. They keep giving me common-as-muck Shards instead of the all-important Gems, and on the occasions that they give something more substantial as a reward, it alway seems to be something called "Mystery Goo". This is supposed to be the rarest item in the game, but thanks to those mushrooms I've got about thirty of them in my inventory and have no idea what to do with them. Sadly there is no in-game option to threaten the Mushrooms with a large frying pan and some garlic, which would probably convince them to make the process a bit quicker.
But once that side quest's out of the way, it'll hopefully be very easy to sail to the end. We've got the choice of playing Alien Hominid or Dark Cloud next - I've no idea what either of them are like, but I've played through almost all of Dark Cloud's sequel (including chapter 8, which the pesky Japanese developers included past the end of the game). That was possibly the biggest game in the entire world in terms of what you could actually do in it - on top of the standard dungeon RPG was a city builder, trading, fishing game, golf sim, fish racing, Japanese photography-type thing, and various other bits and pieces. And the plot was something to do with restoring the origin points of the world so you could go back into the past to change something to affect the future, so that you could go back into the past to correct the origin points, so that you could change the present, so you could go back into the past, to change the present, so you could go into the future and - [gunshot]
The only obstacle in our way is that Whitney insisted that we go for Ultima Weapon on the first play-through, which essentially means trekking around the game and beating up monsters to get several rather rare items. And unlike in Final Fantasy 8, there's no handy way to refine or upgrade your items into other ones if you have enough of a lower level (Potions to Hi-Potions to Mega-Potions to X-Potions, for example) - everything's completely separate from each other and you have to keep finding exactly the right enemy and hoping that they'll drop the right thing.
A solution comes in the form of the White Mushrooms. These red-hatted things appear at random around the game, and promise you rewards of specific items if you help them by throwing the right spells at them. You have to watch their moods to decide what they want you to do - for example, if they're shivering they need Fire cast on them, a need for Thunder is represented by a light over their heads for some reason, and Gravity is used to bring them down if they're floating in the air waving their arms about comically. The last spell you cast on them determines the item you get.
Except these mushrooms don't want to co-operate, and their item drops are random too. They keep giving me common-as-muck Shards instead of the all-important Gems, and on the occasions that they give something more substantial as a reward, it alway seems to be something called "Mystery Goo". This is supposed to be the rarest item in the game, but thanks to those mushrooms I've got about thirty of them in my inventory and have no idea what to do with them. Sadly there is no in-game option to threaten the Mushrooms with a large frying pan and some garlic, which would probably convince them to make the process a bit quicker.
But once that side quest's out of the way, it'll hopefully be very easy to sail to the end. We've got the choice of playing Alien Hominid or Dark Cloud next - I've no idea what either of them are like, but I've played through almost all of Dark Cloud's sequel (including chapter 8, which the pesky Japanese developers included past the end of the game). That was possibly the biggest game in the entire world in terms of what you could actually do in it - on top of the standard dungeon RPG was a city builder, trading, fishing game, golf sim, fish racing, Japanese photography-type thing, and various other bits and pieces. And the plot was something to do with restoring the origin points of the world so you could go back into the past to change something to affect the future, so that you could go back into the past to correct the origin points, so that you could change the present, so you could go back into the past, to change the present, so you could go into the future and - [gunshot]