Still Adventuring

So almost a month has gone by, and I'm still playing Etrian Odyssey III. I'd say that was a well purchased game. My adventures will soon be coming to a close however, since I've finally made it to the final boss. Or at least, I've made it to the first portion of the final boss?

Not to give away any spoilers (like there are any people in the maybe three who read this that this will spoil anything), but I unlocked the Yggdroid class soon after my last post, and so obviously, decided to use it. Unfortunately to use a different character, I had to make a few sacrifices. The first and probably the worst, is that I had to remove a character from my already pretty well set-up party to make room for a new one. Who was the one with the least value? My Hoplite/Gladiator was a brick wall for defending my team, and was doing great damage with a spear. He wasn't done yet. My Buccaneer/Ninja was extremely fast, did good damage with a rapier, and could hit 2-4 times on most turns. No way was I about to get rid of her. My Monk was my healer. Enough said. My Wildling was starting to produce viable animals, with a lion which had a ton of health, did good damage, could paralyze enemies on occasion, and would take hits in place of other characters. That on top of good damage as well. I wasn't about to let go of a character I put plenty of effort and thinking into. That left my Arbalist/Zodiac. Sure it did more damage than others on occasion, but it had very low TP which left him with little abilities. Someone had to go. It just happened that he was the odd one out.

Little did I know that the Yggdroid is, well, difficult to use. It has two "main" ability paths it can take. The first involves summoning elemental robots into empty party spaces, and countering elemental attacks. They can also team up with the Yggdroid for attacks. The problem is that to cause stronger attacks, more robots must be "summoned" into empty spaces, and who wants to take out even more party members? That's also combined with very low TP, so the attack could only performed about one time. I strongly decided against that route, to save party members. But to save those party members, I had to sacrifice my Yggdroid's health. Not a normal way of attacking in an RPG, but it was something I was willing to try out.

This turned out to be a huge pain, literally. By the time I had the abilities maxed out to do as much damage as possible, I had to completely bind my Yggdroid, and basically reduce its health to 1. It's ok, that wasn't very difficulty, seeing as how it damages itself 127 HP each turn (thankfully only down to 1 HP, it would never damage itself to death, with curse, plague, poison and confusion not included) and I could self-inflict the three binds with one ability in one turn. But I only did around 280 damage, which sounds great, but being left at 1 HP left the Yggdroid extremely vulnerable.

A few days ago I finally made the decision to rest the character, losing 5 levels, and then putting the ability points into the former ability path. With only one robot being produced, the damage was minimal at best. I haven't made the switch yet, but I think it's about time to drop Samus (yes, that's my Yggdroid's name, and it even looks a little like Samus) and reinstate Nate. Eh, it was worth a shot...just maybe not worth my time.

Maybe with Nate back on my team and leveled up to around the same levels as the rest of my party, I can take on the final boss. I tried fighting him earlier today and reduced his health to 1/3 of what he started with, but unfortunately with all bosses in EO3, new abilities are used by the bosses when they get to low enough health. No surprise that my party was quickly demolished. Doesn't help that I have a character *cough*Samus*cough* laying dead in the corner during the battle. Dead weight indeed.

But yes, I think I've enjoyed this game, and should probably thank the person who made me buy it. I mean I've mapped out what, 95% of the ocean? Found every town in the ocean? Beat every quest but one in the normal game? Yeah, it's kinda fun.

Enough about EO3, I've come into possession, or at least I will come into possession of a SNES soon, thanks to a few back and forth transactions. This has me very excited since I've wanted a SNES since I was a kid. Not only that, but I've found a couple stores that still sell SNES games! Back home it was becoming hard to find older generation games, especially of cartridge format. But here where I live now, there are a few cool stores who sell all types of games. I've already spent a few bucks on two games, even though I don't have the SNES yet. I got F-Zero and StarFox. Yeah, I have to go for the classics first.

Finally, yes, I am still playing a few other games. Spirit Tracks has been put on hold for now. Yes, I'll come back and beat it some day, seeing as how it's Zelda. But I also got Borderlands for cheap at the same store that had the SNES games that I bought. It's basically a FPS game with leveling up...and x500 the amount of weapons...and it's not set during WWII or a modern war. It's an RPG gamer's FPS. To me it's a ton of fun, because it's basically taking a ton of guns out into a huge landscape, and killing everything in sight. No major plot to be found (yet), no linear path through levels or a story, and no online deathmatches. For example, right now in the game I'm a basic soldier who's proficient with automatic weapons and shotguns. I'm a big fan of going back and forth between a SMG and a high powered pistol with long range sighting. Best of all, I like to melee as much as possible to conserve ammo. There's nothing like sneaking up to the top of a ridge, spotting a few non-human enemies about ten yards below, and jumping down quickly meleeing them before they knew I was about them. When they finally realize what's going on, they're all getting a mouthfull of lead. I imagine playing online with a friend would be sort of like crackdown, except instead of a do-anything roaming action game, it would be a do-anything roaming FPS game. Hopefully I'll get to try it sometime.

Ah, I forgot to mention that I have 2080 Microsoft Points sitting in my account on my Xbox 360, and I need to figure out something to spend them on. Microsoft has a deal where if you spend 2400 by the end of October, you get 800 free soon after. I figured there would easily be things I was going to buy anyways, so why not buy them now and just play them later? So now I've got about five days to figure out where to spend these points, so any tips would be welcomed. And I still can't believe Microsoft basically gave away Fable II for free last week. Awesome.