Hello again. Last time, we learned the true value of treasure. This time, we're going into area 2-4: Sentry Tower. This one's going to take a while.
The first screen contains some bones that are doing an absolutely horrible job of blending in, and if you guessed that there's something to them, you're quite right. Examining them reveals that some sort of evil spirit is possessing them. I'm given the option to let either Fia or Lina do something about it, or to do nothing. I choose to let Fia go to work on it, and she explains that she's going to "purify" the bones, which'll supposedly cost Fia some of her own energy. The actual purification involves pressing buttons as a bar moves past the indicators for them. The game calls this a "rhythm" minigame even though it really doesn't have anything rhythm-related in it, showing how far the definition of a "rhythm" game has fallen. Anyway, it's almost painfully easy, and my success causes Fia to launch into nonsense language that somehow calms the restless spirit and grants me 4000 points.
Incidentally, Fia prays to some sort of sacred tree here. It's so unimportant that I forgot its name in the time it took to go through the scene, though.
Anyway, moving on (we can safely ignore the temporary 5% HP loss Fia is experiencing; it'll recover long before she needs it). On the next screen, Fia hears some sort of creature flapping its wings. The creature in question appears, and it is a total bastard. It's in a special variant of the wyrm monster category (which the Naga belonged to) that replaces its normal Break Out with a different one called Gale Wing. Gale Wing doesn't do damage. Instead, it blows you to a different part of the map. Oh, and in this fight, the enemy gets a Break Out after my first attack no matter what. As such, I just throw Einherjar at it until the battle ends.
I'm promptly blown to area 2-5: Connecting Bridge, though not a normal part of it. Ein and Lina land on a rooftop (Fia could've randomly landed here too), and are immediately attacked by a slime and a giant spider. The slime has attacks that remove durability from my items, and the spider is in the back row, where it constantly delays my party's turns. Fortunately, neither of them have anything worth getting, so I don't care about my rank for this fight.
After the fight, I jump off the roof, putting me back in 2-3. On my way back, I find Fia. After Ein expresses his relief that the party is back together (because the other option I have would raise Fia's affection), we return to the wyrm for another stab at it.
This time, I don't have to be blown away, but if I kill him now I'll miss out on something important. As such, I use multi-hit attacks to build up its Rage gauge while doing as much damage as possible without killing it (because its HP carries over between battles, unlike mine).
This time, the party's all together. Anyway, we jump down and land on the tree from earlier. This breaks a branch off the tree. Examining it causes Fia to exposit that it's a Mosamo branch, which apparently has flammable sap and would make a good torch. Since she said that, it's obvious that we'll want a torch later, so I take it.
All right, now it's time to off that wyrm. After fighting it twice it's not looking too good, so the fight is easy. This lets me move on to the next screen, where the Look mode display claims that a bat is flying around, but I can't see it due to lazy spriting. Examining the bat causes it to spontaneously start existing, and Lina quickly turns out to like bats. I like bats too, for reasons I'll explain in a later update, so I proceed to catch it. One ridiculously complex command minigame later, I've scored me one bat and 3000 points. The bat, imaginatively named Mr. Bat, has five uses and replaces the Armor I've been carrying around. I don't have the character who can use him well yet, though, so he's going to have to wait for a while before he can truly shine.
Anyway, it's time to move on, which causes a poorly-animated shadow to move across the moon. Only Fia notices it, though, and Ein claims that it was just a shadow (probably because, with all the stupid things you can do in this game, Ein must've chosen Wisdom as a dump stat).
I'm going to end the update here, then. Next time, we'll explore area 2-5 properly.
