This entry is based on little bits of gameplay from between November 25th and December 2nd. I had previously gotten to Laurent.

I did a bit of wandering back and forth, as I said I might, before fighting the big wall/door thing, whose name is Zehnoa.

I remembered this fight being annoying in prior (partial) playthroughs but it was actually quite manageable.
 

Bil&Ben were harder, actually, because when they did two Shadow Menace attacks in quick combination they could sometimes knock someone out without me having any time to react. Overall though, it was fine. I don't really see how any of these battles could be truly tough as long as Charlotte's healing a lot.


In my last write-up, I wrote a lot of complaints about this game. One I didn't touch on before was how amazingly bad the menus are. They are slow, unresponsive, ugly, and barely functional. And on many menus there's no cue for how to even interact with that menu. You press A and then random directions until something happens. It's literally one of the worst game menus I've ever used.

And it's strange because this had been done so well within the ring menus in the prior Mana game!

We shopped in Palo, and I'm glad I did because it was a long time until we could shop again. We got on the Ghost Ship. I had no real issues here, although I chose to skip battles after losing Duran for a while, which I guess was smart.

This meant that, for the boss, a large proportion of my damage was going to be from spells. It was slow, but it was fine.
 
At one point he did beat Angela, but that provided an opportunity for her to be revived with full MP to accelerate the fight a little.
 

We then went to the exploding island. We were able to shop again in Tomato Town.
 
Maybe because I've been pumping Duran's strength so much, his defense has pretty consistently been worse than that of Charlotte and Angela. I don't know the mechanics of this game too well, and I don't really notice whether 8 points of defense is a lot or not... but it sure feels nice to get new gear, despite the terrible menuing and blandness of the equipment.

Eventually I found the cave at the end of the island. The rapidly growing birds here were pretty annoying to fight.
 
The enemies in the cave were much more manageable. I actually spent a bit of extra time here, since I knew I'd be finding a Mana Stone soon.
 

We met Malocchio and then got our directive from the King of Valsena.
 
Translations like "Beuca" and "Vuscav" were new to me and unexpected, but I don't care that much.
We got the Ferry Flute and now we were able to summon Vuscav. Very fun.


We went to the Altena area and I didn't even realize I was doing a "dungeon". I saved at the gold statue and didn't know I was already basically at the boss! Here were our stats before running into the Darkshine Knight.
 
I was glad to have gotten level 17 when and where I did! The fight against three Machine Golems was a simple one.
 
And look! It took us right to level 18!

We met Undine and also got our first class changes. It feels like this variant playthrough - such as it is - is actually getting underway.
Duran became a gladiator.
 
Charlotte became an enchantress.
 
Angela became a mysticist.
 

Cool!
This felt good. The stat boosts are pretty huge and it's also nice for Duran to have Spin Slash.

I made an awful lot of use of that!
We went on the the desert. We had a minor equipment upgrade in the oasis town of Diin and saved up there.
  

...or so I thought!

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