Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei: Anderson and Rachel mess with the bull, do not get the horns
Last time, Anderson had just fused a cool crab and was preparing to head down to conquer the lower floors of the Daedalus. Here's the thing though: There are two sets of stairs leading down on the fifth floor, one in the northeastern corner, and one in the southcentral region. Anderson and Rachel take the southern set.
In a room directly below the stairs that requires a little bit of walking to enter, there's this lady. Let's pretend she's
Big Mama Nyx from that one bar in SMT3 instead of just some random human lady hanging around down here.
"The Labyrinth is separated into six areas, each ruled by a Tyrant. However, it's Lucifer that stands above them all. Even though there's a number of demons seeking to overthrow him and claim his position for themselves, there's no way you'd be able to befriend them."
So they're still laying out the rules of the game. DDS has six levels and each level boss is a Tyrant-class demon, and Lucifer is the very last boss. (Spoilers: Lucifer is the final boss)
Also down here are
Foul Will o' Wisps. They reflect fire and tend to come in large groups. They aren't very strong, but I imagine if you came down here at a really low level, six of them could give you trouble. As long as someone in your party can cast
Di though, there's nothing to worry about.
There's another Fey folk hanging out on the west side: "The
Lord of the Daedalus holds the
Orb of Tranquility." Like we couldn't have figured that out.
hey look who it is
Southeast of the Fey is a room containing
Femme Harpy. This room acts as sort of a
Miniboss Closet, since it blocks the stairs to the next floor. Harpy is at level 11 and is weak to lightning, not that it matters to us. She's the toughest thing we've come across, knocking 8 HP off Cancer per hit and 6 HP off Rachel.
Luckily only one Harpy spawns here, more than one would be a death sentence at this part of the game.
Since Rachel was running low on MP, they hoof it back up to
Healer instead of continuing, and naturally they both level up on the way.
8F
7F
6F
5F
At this point I decided to fill in the maps completely so y'all can see 'em, and while doing so they both hit level 11.
Level is 11 is a special level because it means we can fuse a new ally!
Yoma Heqet and
Jirae Gnome come together to create...
Jirae Yomotsu Shikome!
YoShi is a good addition to the team at this point: She comes with
Agi (2 MP, low fire damage, can hit twice),
Dorminar (5 MP, attempts to put all enemies to sleep), and
Patra. Sure,
Patra and
Dorminar kinda suck, but
Agi is welcome (ahem) fire power, and she can hit pretty hard with her physical attacks.
YoShi is weak to Expel, but I'm not sure she'll have to worry about it on our team.
She gets summoned into the active party on the walk back down to the 3F. With both
Cancer and
YoShi active, Anderson is losing MAG with each step.
Harpy ain't no big thang, not with four targets that can take a few hits. The stairs dump Anderson out on north section of the 3F.
Fairy Bogle is running around down here. He's a level 9 neutral demon and definitely worth recruiting. His physical attacks don't do much, but he has access to
Agi,
Zanma (4 MP, medium Force damage, can hit two times) and
Hanma (3 MP, low Expel damage, hits once).
Hanma is the most powerful base-elemental spell and
Zanma is the first second tier spell we've seen. We (A) want these for ourselves, and (B) do not want to be on the receiving end of such spells because
OUCH.
Anderson tries to persuade Bogle to team
Cable News Hosts, but Bogle just ends up taking about 300 DBucks and running off. Bummer. Spoiler: Anderson never manages to con a Bogle onto the team.
There's... not much up in the northern section of 3F, just these two folks in the northeast corner. The first talks about how
Bien, the next labyrinth level we'll be tackling, has changed.
The bald fella warns Anderson about a
prank-playing Goblin hanging out on the southern part of the floor.
...and that's all we can do on this branch of Daedalus. To actually continue, we'll have to walk back up to the 5F and take the stairs in the northeast.
The eastern side of the 4F is just a small, linear path to the next set of stairs that'll put Anderson down on the southern part of the 3F. Oh yeah,
Dryads start spawning as regular encounters around here here, in case you ever need one.
The southern half of this floor is mostly a linear path too, but there's a few points of interest that'll we'll get to.
But first, new enemy:
Jaki Orc. There's... not much to say about them. They're level 5 Evil demons, only have 20 HP, and always come in parties of at least 2. Their attacks don't hurt very much, and they're easily dispatched. I think they're weak to fire.
Actual point of interest: The room in the bottom left. It contains
Wilder Tiamat:
"I am the mighty
Tiamat. If you wish to live, give me 100 Macca!"
Two options are presented to Anderson: Give the money to Tiamat, or fight it.
...
First of all, we're given an option outside of combat and if that wasn't a big enough tipoff, that bald dude a couple of paragraphs ago was like "Ayo a Goblin plays pranks on the south side of this floor."
Anderson smacks the scales off "Tiamat" to reveal the
Goblin underneath.
"What the heck is your problem?! Why would you do something like that?! Wait, did
Garu send you? Well you can tell him it's too late, I already ditched his shield someplace you'll never get to as long as the
Minotaur is around! Smell ya later!"
The
Goblin runs off. If you look up at the map of the 3F, you'll notice a four tile square down towards the southeast. If you were to look at the rest of the Daedalus maps, you'd see that that section is where the elevator stops on 3F, and to work the
elevator we need the
Orb of Tranquility, which is held by the
Minotaur. That was pretty easy to put together, but it just leaves one question: Who the heck is
Garu?
Anderson and Rachel hit level 12.
The other point of interest on the 3F is the
Junk Shop. the DDS name for "item shop." You know, it's great that they put this four floors down in the dungeon instead of town ain't it? The
Junk Shop has these items for sale:
Poison-Non (400 DBucks, heals Poison)
Parala-Non (450 DBucks, heals Palyze)
Petra-Non (1000 DBucks, heals Stone)
Muscle Milk (1500 DBucks, restores HP and temporarily raises max HP)
Magic Source (2000 DBucks, restores MP and temporarily raises max MP)
The status recovery items are... less useful since they're expensive and there are so many demons with status recovery spells. The
Muscle Milk and
Magic Sources are expensive, but you can see how they'd have their uses. This early in the game, however, they cost way too much to even think about getting.
From the
Junk Shop, the stairs down to the 2F are just a short, linear walk away.
Whole lotta doors going on here, but nothing too confusing if you've got
Maparala active.
The most important thing: There's a
Monster Closer in the northeast containing
Beast Nekomata, and we definitely want to pick one up for the team. She's fast, has decent
Intelligence and the
Di spell, and her regular attacks are nothing to laugh at either. Her other spells,
Makajam (3 MP, attempts to mute enemy party) and
Marin Karin (6 MP, inflicts
Panic on 2-3 enemies) are pretty lackluster though. That's ok, she's got enough MP to cast
Di eleven times, and that's good enough.
It takes nearly
1400 DBucks to recruit her, but it is worth it.
Plus there's a
treasure chest on the west side that contains some DBucks, so that helps take the edge off. From the chest room, Anderson has to walk all the way around the perimeter of the floor to get to the stairs down to 1F.
On the way, he passes through a room with this fella.
Man with an oddly incongruous sprite compared to everything else in this game: "It's here! We're right under it!"
If you check the map of the 3F, you'll see that this fella is standing right under that inaccessible area we need the elevator to get to. I wonder what the game is trying to tell us.
Despite all the one tile rooms on this floor, Nekomata was the only Monster Closet.
Back in
Micon, Anderson buys that suit of
Chain Mail. He's gonna need the extra defense.
Down to the 1F!
As you might have guessed from the word map, the 1F is considerably larger than the previous floors. It's about three times as large 4F, 3F and 2F plus it introduces some MegaTen Classixs:
Dark Zones and
One-way doors!
Let's get started. In the top left corner of the map is this fella, who relates the story of a snake-eating being known as
Tabatha. Tabatha's epicurean habits earned the wrath of
Medusa.
...
Medusa? We haven't even taken on the
Minotaur yet, y'all are getting ahead of yourselves! For whatever reason, pretty much all the NPCs on this floor are setting the stage for the next level.
Anderson and Rachel hit level 13 while walking around. Rachel picks up her first offensive spell,
Agirama. Agirama is a fire-elemental spell that costs 4 MP and can hit up to three times. With Rachel's Intelligence stat, it's quite powerful. Too bad literally every
Tyrant in the game is immune to fire magic!
More importantly, this guy is running around down here. This is
Beast Cerberus, a fixture of the series, and that affords him a certain level of prestige compared to other demons. Look at those stats. The next demon we'll see that has over a hundred HP is at
level 22. His other stats, while not as great as his constitution, are nothing to sneeze at, and he comes with the
Recarm spell, which costs 8 MP and allows him to revive a fallen comrade. (Sometimes it fails, you know, like
Zing in
Dragon Quest ((There is no
Samrecarm/
Kazing in this game)) Dude's got a lot going for him.
On top of that, Cerberus is our first ally with
Extra skills. Extra skills are randomly used when you choose the attack command, but don't cost any resources when used. Cerberus has
Burninate and
Howl.
Burninate deals fire damage to the enemy party and is generally a pretty useful skill for hitting all enemies.
Howl is quite a bit weaker, but has a chance to inflict
Bind.
Cerberus drains fire and is weak to ice.
His extra skills will severely crimp his damage output in the upcoming boss fight, but his HP and
Recarm spell are gonna be super useful, so it's really important to recruit him. (The other, probably more important reason to recruit him is because you do not want to have to whittle down his 104 HP while taking
Burninates to the face).
With Cerberus in the party, we're ready to take on the
Minotaur. The Fey up on the 7F told us that the Minotaur's room is straight down from the room she was in, so if you compare the maps you'll know he has to be near the northern part of the floor, one tile from the top of the map. The Fey's room was five tiles from the western edge of the map, but the larger floors of Daedalus has two tiles to the western edge, meaning he's gonna be seven tiles from the west. There are actually two ways to approach it: Through the dark zone in the north, or from the southeast. It doesn't really matter either way which you pick.
Anderson Cooper summons
Cerberus,
Cancer,
Nekomata and
YoShi. Cancer won't be doing much, but he will be an additional target and that's about the best thing we can get out of non-Nekomata/Cerberus demons at this point.
Also, because he's dumb, he doesn't let Cerberus take point.
Let's do this.
Tyrant Minotaur: "I've been waiting for you, whelps!"
So.
Tyrant Minotaur is pretty fearsome. He can cast
Zanma and has
Howl and
Paralysis extra abilities.
Howl is probably the least bad trick he has up his sleeves, although I was lucky in that he never managed to proc
Bind from it.
Paralysis can hurt, but it'd be even worse if managed to proc
Palyze from it (Uh,
Paralysis deals damage and attempts to inflict
Palyze status).
Zanma is the worst, and his regular attacks sting something terrible too.
Cerberus and Nekomata take about 17 HP from Zanma, Roar was hitting on the low end (~2 HP to the whole party), and YoShi was taking 20+ HP from physical attacks. Nekomata and Rachel are on constant healing duty, and the party is only hitting Minotaur for about 3 HP per hit.
It's a rough, slow battle.
Anderson even died at one point (good thing we brought Cerberus along). Cancer also went down, but who cares.
Eventually Minotaur is defeated. He drops a ton of EXP.
Enough to bump Anderson and Rachel up three levels.
And more importantly, they obtain the
Orb of Tranquility!
So now the elevator works, and we can travel back up to Micon easily. (There's also a warp in the room directly southwest of the Minotaur's room that'll instantly warp you back to Micon. You can't access it until you beat the Minotaur, so I think it's supposed to be a blessing from the developers rather than a nasty trick)
We still need to finish up exploring the 1F of Daedalus so we can move on to the next area.
A little ways east of the Minotaur's room is a Skeleton: "Up ahead is the
floating city Bien. You can probably guess from the name, but the city used to fly up in the sky, but now..."
There's a
Monster Closet directly south of the Skeleton's room, but it takes some winding to get to it. Inside is a
Foul Sand Looper. It might have been scary before Anderson and Rachel slew the Minotaur, but not it's absolutely trivial. They actually do have a ton of
Strength, and the
Stone Touch extra ability (guess what it does), so theoretically they could do some real damage. On the other hand, they're weak to fire and ice and Rachel has access to
Agirama and even if she didn't Cerberus has
Burninate so.
This lady is hanging out in a room a little ways to the west of the
Monster Closet, in an area only accessibly via a
Dark Zone. She just says that the floating city can't fly anymore because Medusa turned it to stone.
East of the
Monster Closet:
"The people living in the floating city don't want Medusa running things, so they hid the
Statue of Tabatha to keep it safe. But..."
Rachel and Anderson hit level 17, Rachel learns
Mediama (6 MP, heals the whole active party moderately). Mediama is great. It's not as important as Di, but it's certainly gonna come in handy.
This dude is located a little ways northwest of the previous person we chatted with, kind of in a little nook in the middle of the floor. He pretty much spells out that the
Statue of Tabatha is not so much a statue that Tabatha created or owned, but Tabatha, who had been turned to stone by Medusa.
Rachel's Agirama deals ~70 HP to Orcs. I think they're weak to fire.
"There's a man west of here. If you find the
Statue of Tabatha, you should go see him." This woman is located on the edge of the map, directly east of the guy who just told us Tabatha was turned to stone by Medusa.
That concludes all the points of interest on the 1F of Daedalus. Next time we'll move on to a new location, complete with new wall textures and carpet, but first let's do a little fusin'
First up:
Yoma Lemurian x
Yoma Solas =
Holy Tapir. Tapir is the second Good aligned demon we have access to (we'll fuse the first in a second), and he is a fearsome one at that. His Strength stat is higher than any demon we've seen thus far, he can cast
Zan and
Mediama, and a decent pool of HP. I'm surprised they didn't give him Patra or something to cure Sleep (in Japan, Tapirs have a connection with dreams, hence them being a Holy-class creature here).
Next:
Beast Cancer x
Fairy Dryad =
Elemental Trent. Trent is less impressive in comparison, but I'm not saying no to
Zanma and
Hanma.
Next Time: Gee I wonder if the next area will involve getting the
Statue of Tabatha and battling
Medusa?
