The Cloud Log Database : [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]

Heya, Cloud here. It's been awhile since my last post, but with Christmas around the corner, I've gotten a bit busy, but no worries, I will see this play thru to the end! xD  So yeah, let's get started... o:

Forced Story Segments, the Secluded Tree, and Ghost of Regal's Past

 
On our last adventure, we had quite the challenge on our hands with the underwater ranch, with puzzles and sad endings. Luckily, our party escaped, thanks to the aid of Mithos's flute (which is now broken somehow...) Our party escapes to Palmacosta, where we say sorry about Mithos running away while being baby sat...

Anyways, we leave, and this is where the game goes on story auto mode for a little bit. I report to Yuan, one of the renegades who told me to go to the ranch. I tell him his friend is swimmin' with the fishes, and he only gives an 'I see' response. Ice cold... milk... dood. Anyways, now we have access to both worlds. So now we can jump between worlds without needing 88 miles per hour ; ) But before I enjoy my freedom, I have to drop off Mithos off somewhere, so someone can watch him. Quite a pain, but it has to be done. Too bad he can't fight so this jumping around could be avoided. Well, at least now it is done.
Now I am given freedom to roam the worlds once again, though story-wise, I need to go to Altamira. Someone mentioned something about avenging Presea's sister's killer to Regal. He then comments they should go to Altamira so he can hear more about this. Wow, before, he wanted nothing to do with the place, and not he wants to do? Very quick and easy to change his mind.

Buut, before that, I heard from a coney dog that we can get to the mysterious tree that the phoenix bird likes, which caught my interest. I went to a caravan where I first learned about this bird and a tree, and I talk to the man who introduced me to it. At first, I only know it would go to a tree which was now dead, but now I know more info, like it is somewhere that can only be reached by air, needs 2 summon spirits, healing arts, and a melody to revive it or something. Since I can fly, I thought maybe I will try to find it.

...And that I tried doing. I flew across Sylvarant, searching high and low for places I couldn't reach on land. Eventually I found a tiny tree on the overwould, surrounded by mountains. Wow, I really couldn't reach it before, and it was so close. So I get to the tree, we do all the necessary steps, and revive the tree! And then, the legendary bird arrives... It asks for Luna, the other light summon. We tell it it's hanging out at the tower of mana, and should totally meet up with her. So the bird leaves, saying it will meet us there, like a true bro. We could take the light summon, but the party stronger suggests we get darkness first. So the light summons will have to wait. Oh, and I should be going to Altamira, haha...

So off I go to Altamira, with Regal finally. I head to the Lezoreno company to learn about the killer of Presea's sister... When we get there, we find people are knocked out and Varley, some big guy with a nice hair-do is responsible for it. So we head to the top to see Varley is threatening the butler president guy, asking for a password into the Toize Mine, those mines we went to before... Regal reveals how to open the door to it, and that he is the president of the company. Varley also reveals he is working on a plan to kill the king, so that the pope will become the next ruler, and Varley can crush the Lezareno to the ground. And then a ninja shows up and poofs them away... Okay, bye bye Varley O:

So we learn Regal killed Presea's killer, and is a fancy president O: We learn about the details of the sister's death. It turns out the sister, Alicia, was part of an experiment to make a cruxis crystal or something. It didn't work though, and she became a monster. Oh, also, they were in love. I guess Regal loves young girls huh, haha... So he asks for Alicia back, and Varley gives her to him, but she is an ugly monster, like Marble and Clara from before. She asks Regal to kill her, so she doesn't kill people, and he eventually does. So really, it wasn't his fault. Plus, Lloyd did the same thing. No one considered him a killer o: I think this whole thing was way over blown. Well, anyways, Alicia asks Regal to not be so hard on himself and move on with life, but Regal is adamant to remain guilty and fight with his feet, saying he will never use his hands to kill again... So he'll use his feet instead! Those are still guilt free!!! I can't wait to see what he fights with next when he kills with his feet. Maybe a mouth warrior? xD Alicia asks they destroy the exsphere she is trapped in, so she can move on too, and Lloyd breaks it. So uh, yeah... I guess that wraps up this small story. Next!

To Megatokyo Meltokio and the Shadow Realm Temple

 
So next on the list is going to Meltokio to get a blue candle to get access to the shadow temple. This is a long winded way to get the necessary thing needed to do so. So, the jist of it is, I need to go to the research academy to get an item to let me enter the shadow temple. So I go there to do just that, but there's an issue. Kate, one of the people that helped me escape from Sybak, was sent to jail and will be executed. Being the hero, I won't let that slide, so I decide we should rescue her. She is being held in jail at the coliseum, so we decide to compete in the coliseum, despite being wanted criminals... I think Raine bribed the receptionist with money as well.

So I enter the ring as Lloyd, have one fight, and then for some reason, the guard blocking the way to the jail cell is gone, and I can waltz in, free Kate, and just... leave the area. Wow, they have really lax security... So I take Kate back, and I get a blue candle, which allows me to see in the shadow temple.
So now begins the shadow temple, which some may say is quite a troublesome dungeon. Personally, I found it to be quite easy, although a bit tedious. The mechanic for this dungeon is, the ring gains the power to shoot... black slow beams. In the dungeon, there are glowy crystal lights that ward shadows away. Why is this here? Well, the other puzzle in this place is the shadow spirit is split into 5 small cute black blob pieces. Your goal: to find all 5 pieces, unite them together at the summon spirit area, and fight the completed boss. And this is where the frustration begins. You are supposed to get these little blobs to follow you, but they don't like light, so you have to turn off the lights with the ring power. Also, the blobs can't go into other rooms. You have to get them to a specific place where they will stay, like good dogs...

Another part of the puzzle are blocks you can push in or out of walls, which will affect another block in the room, moving the opposite direction. You have to shift blocks around to make paths and push blocks around to get the black blobs.  A really breaking issue are the blobs themselves. They kind of follow you, but also get stuck or lag behind. You'll have to walk slow, so they don't fall behind. So it really slows down the pace of the game. I didn't have too much issue. Once things clicked, I figured out how to get all the blobs to the waiting location, and then I was able to move them down to the center of the dungeon.
The next issue was getting them down. I don't know why, but the dev team decided to make a very long stairway down to the summoning area. I felt I was moving down an endless number of stairs. There are branching paths, which made it even more tiresome. I did find all the treasures though, and got to the end. (Phew..!)

So I assemple the shadow spirit, and out comes Venom from Spider Man, who speaks like a cave man... Anyways, I fight him, and he puts up a good fight, but like all fights, I beat them in the end. I take him as a summon, and we finish the shadow temple. With that left, we head to the last summon spirit, the light summon spirits. I say with an 's' because there are 2, but you will see that soon... So we head back to the tower of mana, where the light spirits resides. It turns out we have to climb back up the tower manuelly. I wish there was a quick jump, which is hilarious because there is a conversation where Lloyd also asks for that. The other members looked confused when he mentions 'quick jump'. Haha, that was a great 4th wall breaking moment...

Anyways, at the top Kratos awaits trying to stop us. However, Yuan, an ally, shows up to stall him and tells us to run ahead to make a pact with the summon spirits of light. So I head to the top of the tower, where I find a lady sitting on a moon, and the bird from before comes to meet us. We fight the 2 of them and form the pact.

Now this is where things get messy. Upon making a pact with light, suddenly, a giant tree comes up from the ground, takes over a tower somewhere, and destroys Palmacosta. Well, that wasn't nice at all... It turns out the giant tree is going out of control, and will destroy both words. I feel like we did something terribly wrong. Now we have to stop the giant tree. The plan: use the mana cannon the villains have been working on all this time to fire at the tree. Wow, kinda funny we are using a weapon made by the bad guys. Thanks for that villains, even though the mana cannon was probably going to be used to destroy the world or something... So that is the plan: to infiltrate the Iselia base, get the mana cannon running, and fire it at the tree! ...And save Chocolat ice cream cake. Yeah, remember that dumb ho? Well, save her too, but that's next time, cuz...

It's the eeeeeeeeeeeeeend of this play through. See you next time!

Edit: Double Post

Sylvarant Chapter  | [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]    

Tethe'alla Chapter | [7] [8] [9] [Chapter 10: Slowly, but surely]

"..." "......." "....." *boom* !!!
Here we are at the Lightning Temple. This dungeon isn’t that bad, though it’s super easy get lost our back track over and over to get everything. This temple consists of Blue, Yellow and Red blocks that obstruct your path so you will need that specific colour lightning to destroy them.. meaning that you will run back and forth to open up new paths that were previously blocked off since you didn’t have that colour yet. There are also sections in this dungeon where the room is reallly dark, so you will need to wait for lightning to strike in order to see where to go, our else you will fall down and have to restart from the beginning. Not really difficult since I’ve done it enough times to not have to walk slowly through them, despite not memorizing the paths :p The boss is rather simple as he has only has electric attacks so equipping people with electric resistant equipment makes it easier.

 
“So you’ve come, like moths to the flame!”
Next off, we head to Tethe’alla base to get our rheiards! We need to get 3 passcodes by killing some special grunts and push a lot of blocks around to avoid beams of death and to make new pathways. The boss is pretty tricky, as you have to fight 2 people at once and they are both magical swordsman so my spell casters can get killed easily. I like to split having 1 fighter against each boss to keep the preoccupied, giving time for my spell casters to chant, but it doesn’t always work out nicely. Once one is down, the fight is a lot easier so sometimes it’s better to focus everything on one person. They go down and now we can fly to wherever we want!


Welcome back Colette (again)!
We then fly to a floating island where Colette is trapped and surprise! We have to fight a boss. This battle consists of fighting a giant dragon head and the baby dragons, which is pretty difficult, as each baby dragon can use a mini cyclone that does a lot of damage. Taking out the baby dragons is a must and after we focus on the dragon head. Hurray, Colette is back! Also, I figured out how to chain attack with Colette, so I’m using her now :p

 
Gnomes..
We are now off to the Earth temple, which would be a rather short and simple dungeon, if the gnomes weren’t always blocking your path.. First, you had to give the gnome in the Toize Mine the potion or else you can’t progress. Then, you have to have learned how to make curry and have the ingredients to progress. After, you have to protect a gnome from enemies and finally, you have to time your sorcerer’s ring (which is now a mini earthquake) to match with a jumping gnome to destroy a bridge. However, as I’ve done this, all these things are fairly simple and easy to do so I don’t really have any complaints about this dungeon. The boss is super easy, as he’s reallly big, with a giant hit box so chain comboing him is a breeze and he falls quickly.

Recap:
We get Colette and the rehairds back as well as getting two more summon spirits (Lighting and Earth)


Nice Song: Search a Seal – Tethe’alla

Next: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8077570

Sylvarant Chapter  | [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]    

Tethe'alla Chapter | [7] [8] [9] [10] [Chapter 11: Reboot!]

Note: Having put this off for some time, I was able to play quite a lot and decided it's best to finish up my logs.. It seems that I'm further back on logs than I thought I was, meaning that chapters will be less detailed :p

 

Freezing Water Drops!
Next stop is the Ice Temple where we have to get the Summon of Ice, Celcius, but first we must get some penguinist quills in order to make penguinist gloves. This dungeon is really simple where you basically follow the path and do a sliding maze at the end. You also need to freeze dripping water from icicles to form a giant ice block because, you know, makes sense! Summon Spirit Celcius also has a wolf buddy, so it makes the boss battle a bit more tricky, though same rules apply, take out Fenrir and take out Celcius. I must say that I really like the animation for Atlas :p

 
Return to Sylvarant
We eventually meet up with Mithos, a half-elf with the same name as the legendary hero, but that can’t be same person!
After getting backstabbed by Kuchinawa, we flee back to Sylvarant via the Otherwordly Gate, which looks like the stone henge. Dropping Mithos off in Palmacosta, we learn about the renegades and how they are planning to give a ton of mana at the Great Seed to make it germinate. In order to do so, they need our help in opening all of the summon seals. After deciding to team up with the renegades, we head off to the Remote Island Human Ranch, which is a massive underwater cannon that Rodyle has been developing behind Cruxis’ back.

This dungeon has a few switch based kart puzzles, but is relatively simple. Rodyle turns himself into a monster thing and he is pretty tough, with a non-elemental Explosion type move. Upon dying, he sets a timer to self-destruct the whole base, but luckily the renegades are able to deactivate it, though with the cost of their lives. Being sent to a Dragon’s nest, we are eventually saved by Mithos with a mysterious bird.. Upon completion of this dungeon, we are able to freely move between Sylvarant and Tethe’alla

 
Sylvarant Summon Spirits
Now that we need the summon spirits of Sylvarant, it’s time to use Sheena to make a pact with them. The game actually allows us to get the summons before leaving to Tethe’alla near the beginning of the game, but I skipped it to keep progress similar. Since the dungeons have already been completed, all we go to do is to fight the boss. Efreet, the fire summon, is not difficult, because he is really big so using Genis’ Cyclone + Lloyd and another combo glitch character locks him preventing him to cast or to deal damage. Only really need to worry about him going into overlimit but unison attack can help take care of that.

The wind summons are more difficult as you have to fight 3 of them at once. Each person basically needs to keep one summon busy or else the will be able to get a magic cast to deal a lot of damge.  Selphie has a massive sword but can also cast spells, Yutis has a bow that picks on the spellcasters by dealing a lot of ranged damage, and Fairess casts a lot of spells. Once one is down, the battle is much easier with another character free to team up on another one.


Recap: We get three summon spirits (Ice, Fire, Wind) and are able to travel freely between Sylvarant and Tethe’Alla. We also meet a mysterious half-elf named Mithos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycj5EWypJ1I

Next: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8099272

Sylvarant Chapter   | [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]    

Tethe'alla Chapter  | [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

The Linked Chapter | [Chapter 12: Light and Dark, Prison and Freedom]

Dark Temple
We may only have 3 of the 4 summon spirits in Sylvarant, but the Light summon spirit must be the last to get. The Dark Temple is well, dark so we need to do a nice errand in order to get the blue candle to even attempt this temple. I would say this is the 3rd worst dungeon in Symphonia because of how annoying things can be if you don’t know what you are doing. Firstly, there are large blocks that obstruct your path and you need to use the sorcerers ring to push them. Easy right? Not really, as if you push that block, another of the same colour somewhere else will also move. Then, when you switch to move a block of a different colour, all other colours will reset. But this isn’t the tedious part of the dungeon… You have to grab the 5 fragments of the summon spirit and bring them all alllll the way down to the bottom of the dungeon. Getting all 5 takes time and multiple attempts if you mess up the order, but they don’t follow you Dragon Quest style, so it’s hard to guide them along when they randomly float off to a different pathway. The boss is easy though, really big and squishy, no new strats with him


Luna and Aska
In order to get to Luna, we need to get Aska, which we have seen before when Mithos came to save us in the Remote Ranch. This is where the Caravan from wayyy in the beginning of the game comes in, you need to get an exsphere shard, which you get from Dirk, and the flute, which we already have. These, along with Gnome, are used to revive the Linkite tree and to summon Aska, which then flies off to the Tower of Mana with Luna. We already have beaten the Tower of Mana, so climb to the top and get stopped by Kratos. He says bad things will happen but Yuan comes in to keep him occupied.

Luna and Aska duo is pretty tricky since Luna has a ton of spells and disable/photon, which you cannot escape from, and Aska has some annoying moves while being resistant to all elemental types. I still kept Genis in the party, but made him focus on casting Cyclone on Luna, while I was Lloyd and dealt physical damage to keep him busy. After we make the final pact, things go haywire and we are treated with the 2nd anime cutscene where Palmacosta gets completely destroyed. Since we broke all of the mana links, the Great Seed germinated but became twisted and evil D:


Iselia Human Ranch
Lloyd comes up with a great idea to shoot the Tree with Tethe’alla mana so Sheena leaves for the mana cannon while we go to the Iselia Human Ranch to shut off the reactor. Luckily, we rejoin with our old buddy Kratos, and this is the only time in the game where we get to use both Zelos and Kratos, except that Kratos is just better ;) This is another dungeon where we have to split up our party into 2 groups so I go with Lloyd, Kratos, Collet and Raine to take on the boss. The 2nd team just does errands by running around and unlocking switches so good for them.

The boss battle is against Forcystus and his mini robot minions that cast mini sparkwaves as a normal attack. Despite outnumbering him, this battle is actually pretty tough since he can snipe Raine while she is trying to heal. Trying to combo the floating robots is also difficult as they are floating so the infinite combo chain is difficult to preform, and I have to be weary of Forcystus back attacking me. Once one of the robots go down, it’s a lot easier with 2 people focusing on Forcystus. Without Genis, I am unable to lock him with Cyclone (he is resistant to wind anyways) and can’t use Prism Stars during Compound Unison attack, so I use Stardust Rain [Stardust Cross (Colette) + Sword Rain Alpha (Lloyd)] though it misses often :/ Taking him down, we push him into the reactor only for him to come out later to shoot Colette, who takes the bullet in place of Lloyd. We learn that Colette has an angelic disease that is taking over her body and she collapses. Another cutscene with Sheena taking down the Tree with the Mana Canon and we are now on to disk 2!


Recap: We get the final 2 summon spirits (light and dark) and we liberate the final human ranch and kill the last of the 4 cardinals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMalY-VSn0g