Into the labyrinth once more

Over the last while I've been less inclined to work on personal projects than usual, but as a result, I've been playing loads of games in my spare time instead. That's led to further progress past the end of Etrian Odyssey 3, enough to give another update on my continuing quest to find out what the word 'Etrian' means.

Yes, I've had this for over a year now, but completing the game is nowhere near the end - when you've defeated the final boss, you're invited to continue by going back to the beginning and getting the ending that you avoided this time - or taking a hidden third option to reach a hidden alternative final boss, as I heard around the Internet. From my first impressions, I had thought that this was a convoluted Cave Story-like procedure that involved going to places that you wouldn't possibly want to go, but this route is pretty logical by comparison, relying on only a couple of decisions in the main game and realizing that in the decision to side with Armoroad or the Deep City, there's a third non-pointed-out "neither" option.

This third option results in you avoiding the final boss that you were going to have to fight and instead entering the unexplained door in the Abyssal Shrine level, leading you into a hidden part of the dungeon and ending with a fight against the only creature in the world more pretentious than Brian Sewell, an evolved version of the sort of Segæchinda that you encountered in the middle of the game. In his new form, he's disappeared so far up himself that every time he uses a past-tense verb, it's got a T on the end instead of an ED. But after I walkt through the hostile reaches of the stratum and strugglt against the formidable new random encounter monsters, I finally unlockt the route to him and left him thoroughly pastt.

And once you've done that, you can also go into the sixth stratum which serves as a Turbo Nutter Bastard Impossible difficulty and looks like it's somewhere in the middle of H. P. Lovecraft's head. I've actually reached the bottom of this and the final floor of the game, after mostly running away past the absolutely malicious enemies and level design, but the final final boss is going to take a bit of practice before I'm capable of surviving against it for more than a turn or so.

Having praised the number of things there were to do in the game early on, I have to admit that it does sort of run out during this post-game phase, and becoming capable of survival as I made adjustments to my adventuring party meant going back multiple times through the dungeon on a cheaper grind than a night at Peter Stringfellow's the Tesco Value meat section. For the purposes of getting both a vast amount of money and a decent distribution of experience, I found one fairly effective tactic was to knock three unsuspecting farmers out cold and then drag them around unconscious with two characters who needed experience but could fend for themselves, as in an unusual burst of generosity you still get the farmers' gathering abilities even if they're not awake.

With a new character class at my disposal, I added a Shogun called Brian (for the huge beard) and quickly trained him up to see how his abilities worked with the rest of the party, getting rid of Prince Siegfried and instead passing his princely magic duties to subclasses of my attacking characters. For a long time I felt that the new balance worked slightly less well than my original team as far as defence was concerned, because the newly appointed Prince and Princess didn't have the speed of the primary-classed one and so vital defence abilities might not be cast at the start of the turn. But it really made up for it in the attack department - I was expecting to use Brian as another physical attacker, because of his unique ability to use more than one weapon at the same time and to presumably cause nearly double the damage of everybody else, but I discovered something far better in the abilities list instead. Blitz Command, though it takes a few prerequisites to get to, is extraordinary - it causes everybody except him to attack with their equipped weapon as a free extra move on the current turn. Effectively that meant an attack in the region of 800-900 points per turn - but then it was pointed out to me that you could do this the other way around, use a Shogun ability on somebody else that made them follow up every single attack with an attack of their own, equip the main Shogun with two weapons and a Buccaneer ability that allowed them to attack up to eight times per turn, and... just let slip the dogs of war, basically.

Even this doesn't make things easy, because part of what you have to do once you're past the end is defeat three dragons which appear around the game. I merrily went into the first of these expecting to be able to get used to its tactics a bit and plan out a strategy, then on the first turn it hit everybody with a lightning attack for 1700 damage (in a game where the average total health of your party members is likely to be in the 400 range) and slaughtered me instantly.

This led me to a couple of changes:

Jet - Gladiator/Shogun (for the follow-up attack trick, mentioned above)
Brian - Shogun/Buccaneer (for the other half of this trick - also a fairly competent attacker as long as Swashbuckling works out well)

Siegfried - Prince/Zodiac (Brought out of retirement largely because he had a subclass slot free, to which a Zodiac was added so that he could use Volt Prophecy at the right moments to nullify lightning attacks. This granted the party the ability to survive past turn 1.)
Bernard - Monk/Prince (Healing - you'll need this. Also backup for casting all-important Prevent Orders to stop bad status effects from happening)
Tanya - Arbalist/Princess (Usually an attacker, but mostly in the role of casting more Prevent Order in this particular battle)

And... it worked, eventually. Saying that gives absolutely no impression of the weeks-long struggle this has been, examining and re-arranging things in the hope that something might eventually come together - in the end, abandoning most defensive items in favour of accessories that reduce the specific damage that the dragon caused seemed to work well. That and an immense amount of luck in it just not using the really bad attacks on turns when I was unprepared. Unbelievably I find myself regretting that I opted to finish it off as quickly as possible instead of using a Formaldehyde on it to get its rare drop, but in all seriousness, that can just go and boil its head.

There are just two more of those to go, for which I'll have to reconfigure the entire party each time. Then a harder sort of boss-boss dragon, which was put in just to infuriate everybody. I'm sure there was a final boss I was supposed to be fighting at some point, as well.