This expansion is... weird so far. The game is no longer divided into stages, so I'm gonna group together the missions by difficulty rating. There are two one star missions, which is basically nothing, but I figured I would be talking about general things for a bit. Heck, shorter posts are almost certainly a good thing. We'll see if this structure works out okay. First of all, Lithos' summary *:
Lithos
- Last Word: "Super Void Cavitation" Does 7777 damage to all enemies. Only does 777 to bosses. Incidentally, this is what wiped me on the final boss.
- Specialties:
- Evil Eye: bombs and spellcards
- Golden Wings: magic power and magic defense
- Golden Blade: attack power, hit and evasion
- Family: HP, MP and more bombs
- Weapon: Thrusting Sword (rapier I guess?), pierces defense, resistance and shields.
- Commander:
- Passive: Increases XP gain by 2%
- 1 Bomb: Purification, nulls the land meter
- 3 Bombs: Evil Gaze, petrifies all enemies for one turn
- Overall: Magic Knight. She has both physical abilities and magic abilities. Her magic is non-elemental and has names like "Minus" and "Energy Riot". She also has a number of fixed damage attacks. Her spellcards are very strong, but she has no bombs until you allocate points into it. Somehow she can use the abilities of her sisters.
I decide to take the Cirno quest
◊. A) Because it's one of the easiest and B) because its fucking Cirno. As you can see in the picture, there's a brief description of the quest and then it tells you where to find her. Strictly speaking, I guess this is a wanted poster. Plot-wise, the characters have basically gone berserk, as referred to by Yukari's explanation. Something is making everyone violent, so we have to beat them up one at a time. Sounds like a plot to me!
Anyway, Cirno is at the Youkai Mountain, at the Pond of the Great Toad. Wait, what? I have no idea where that is, but okay. I guess I'll just start at the Youkai Mountain (Stage 11). The enemies... have not updated. They're still the same level as I was back then. However, I only have two people in my party so they're still somewhat troublesome even though they give no experience. Well, they're troublesome until I realize that I forgot to give Reimu equipment and Lithos' starting equipment is terrible. I search through my magic bag of awesomeness and give them generic weapons with the most attack power. Reimu ends up with Excalibur and Lithos has some spear.
I really don't know what I'm looking for at this point, so the first place I check is where we fought Cirno as a boss. No dice. Avoiding all the pointless enemies is kind of difficult, so I decide to use the shortcut thing that this stage has. I mentioned it way back in Stage 11, but I'm assuming that my memories of these things are more vivid than yours. There's a shortcut up and down the mountain, take my word for it.
Luckily for me, the Pond is apparently along this shortcut. Upon entering the correct room, Reimu's Nakama sense starts tingling. Seriously
◊. She is somehow able to tell when future party members are nearby. That's got to be a handy skill to have. Then I get attacked by a generic fluffball which turns out to be Cirno. Yes, the bosses are hidden among the normal enemies for these sidequests, at least the early ones.
So I fight Cirno
◊. With two characters. And she kills me. Or at least she would, but apparently I'm allowed to run away. You really are a random encounter, Cirno. At least she gets boss music. I can't win because the more ice spells she casts she the more the land gauge tilts towards water, which causes Cirno to do more damage and regenerate. I have no fire spells.
I decide to get Nitori first so I can use fire attacks on Cirno, but I can't find her so we'll just skip the part where I run around randomly for a long time. I give up on Nitori and head back to Cirno, because at least I know where she is. Cirno is... still troublesome. Every third turn she casts Perfect Freeze which interrupts me, and she's still regenerating and all that. I got all excited when Lithos procced her Last Word, but it only does 777 on bosses. So I end up running away again.
It's at this point that I remember that I have accessories. A huge bag full of them, rare and mysterious accessories that I've never seen before. The guy who had this file must have farmed a lot. The important ones here are water resistance (duh), and increased Bomb count. Through accessories and Power allocation, I manage to give Lithos 10 extra bombs, for a total of 11. This also gives her no cooldown on them. So I can just spam her spellcards on Cirno and overcome the healing. Perfect Freeze can be dealt with by using one of Reimu's spellcards that prevents status effects on that turn. This happens to have exactly the same cooldown as perfect Freeze, which is surely intentional. You don't exactly have many options with two party members.
After we beat her up, Cirno seems confused. What did you do to me?! Why am I all beat up?! Well, she seems to be back to normal anyway. When asked what happened to her, she has no idea whatsoever. The last thing she remembers is... I dunno. Yeah, she's Cirno. Anyway, she's more than willing to help us get revenge or whatever. She thinks of this as a chance to play some pranks, although I have no idea on who.
Cirno is... level 1. With 3 HP
◊. She does have a ton of lives though. Not what I was hoping for, party member-wise. She's also immune to water and has a skull for fire vulnerability. I've never even seen that before. Even with resistance accessories she can't seem to go above X for fire vulnerability. Which is also a symbol I've never seen before *. She seems to take about 7 times as much damage from fire. That's with the resistance. Anyway, I just give her a dagger so she has some attack power and just let her die a lot. Hey, she has 14 lives. I find this technique to be very fairy-esque.
Cirno
- Last Word: "Minus 500 Degrees" does damage and has a 100% freeze rate on enemies who aren't resistant.
- Specialties:
- Fairy Power: water damage and induction up (the official abbreviation for induction seems to be CAS, dunno what that's supposed to be short for)
- The Strongest: magic power and bombs
- Motivation: HP and water land gauge based regeneration
- ⑨: MP and MP drain from freezing enemies
- Weapon: Ice, lowers water resistance of enemies.
- Commander:
- Passive: Chance of receiving Quick Condition multiplies (?)
- 1 Bomb: Active ⑨, lowers every land gauge except water, which increases
- 3 Bombs: Freeze ⑨, freezes all enemies
- Overall: An Ice Person. Kind of a one trick pony. She's a mage with only one element, but When All You Have Is A Hammer... She only has ice, but she can make it work by lowering resistances or freezing enemies. She also has some instant death spells.
Next on the quest list is Nitori
◊, who is apparently roaming the creek area of the same Youkai Mountain. In the creek area, the enemies are actually updated to be appropriate for my level and party size, which basically means that Cirno gets a ton of XP. It also means I'm in danger, but not too much. Reimu is tanking, and something in her equipment gives her regeneration, so it's not too bad. Unless she gets hit by instant death.
Anyway, I'm starting to see the quest logic here. We're going back to old areas, but they're repopulated with stronger enemies. The 2 star quests also take place on the mountain, so we're basically going through the old dungeons again in a random order with new enemies. And the teleporters and such are already on. There are new item boxes though. While this is disappointing, they did make this expansion in about 4 months, so I'm cutting them some slack on recycling the dungeons.
I find Nitori soon enough. This time around she seems to have 3 attacks. An AOE fire spell that serves no purpose but to make absolutely certain that Cirno cannot survive, a single targeting ice attack (but I still have resistance accessories), and most annoyingly Optical Camouflage. She casts this every other turn and it nullifies the first three hits done to her before falling off. Luckily one of Lithos' spellcards does 1-9 hits ("Pegasus Meteo Attack"), so I just spam that and Nitori falls soon enough. She has a similar story as Cirno, but she remembers meeting a strange person before losing control of herself. Reimu and Lithos' dialog is exactly the same as when they did it for Cirno, which is disheartening. Some of the higher level quests are unlocked by doing these lower level ones though, so maybe it'll get more diversified when they can assume you have certain people in your party.
Whoever played through this clear file didn't seem to like Nitori. She's much lower level than Reimu and Lithos, and her set-up was kind of weird. Although I suppose for all I know it was better than mine, but I changed it anyway. She does have a good gun though, so no generic weapons for her.
Oh, and here's Cirno's Last Word
◊ portrait. We already have Lithos' from the boss fight. Although she doesn't seem to do it for Void Cavitation. I guess they figured it didn't fit into the "all-consuming darkness" imagery of the spell animation.
Comments
A) Because it's one of the easiest and B) because its fucking Cirno.
