LogFAQs > #946336508

oh ok

At the Castle Gates we have a fun gimmicky battle. I don't know how this could be done if you don't have some form of Cure set on Ramza, maybe healing him from below with a White Mage? Fortunately he's a Monk for me and has Chakra, which heals 60 damage of the 63 Gafgarion inflicts with Night Sword. This allows me to take my time, letting the team below sort everyone out on the outside before having Ramza open the gates (I saw the gate tile but wasn't certain it would actually work, we haven't had anything like that in the game before now). I almost paid the price for my hubris when Gafgarion crit his Night Sword attack, but Ramza got to the gate literally just in time.

I don't want to change the world! I just can't allow people to suffer and die because of some elitist's ideas.

Gafgarion actually dies this time (rip), and a shiver runs down my spine as we fade to a save slot not on the world map... We're soon into another unusual battle against just a single enemy, Cardinal Draclau/Queklain the Tainted King. This dude is straight up a Resident Evil boss, great atmosphere here. The battle is unlike anything we've had so far. Queklain has a nasty habit of casting Nightmare, which seems to cause Sleep or Death Sentence on anyone in its radius. He gets to cast it before we move too. Ramza gets Death Sentence'd, but thankfully he learned Stigma Magic just after beating Gafgarion. He wakes up our healer, which gives us a fighting chance.

The battle is quite a grind, getting hits in when we can (usually once per turn) and waking/healing when possible. I try to keep the party spaced out so we aren't all caught up in an attack, and he switches to Bio3 once down a chunk of health. I don't know how much HP he actually had but it can't have been too much, because the chipping away takes him down before my White Mage runs out of MP. I feel like I got lucky here. (I get that he's a boss and it would've been too easy but I wonder what the canon explanation is for him not taking damage from Seal Evil etc)

We get the Scorpio Stone (2/12... guess we're in for the long haul!) and a very cool scene of Delita manipulating Goltana, taking out one of his advisors, increasing his own station and... kicking off the Lion War. Delita has been busy indeed, though apparently he's not alone in whatever he's ultimately attempting to do. We're plenty of hours in but the war officially begins right now.

Our nation exists because of the people! We exist because of them.

Onto Chapter 3, and we kick off with a small council of assholes and one reasonable man known as Orlandu, aka 'T.G. Cid'. Tensions run high, three months have passed, and Ramza is off to see his brother. This seems a good place to leave things for now. The bar rumours state that 400,000 have died already (!), and there's some more detail about the King's death that mentions an unidentified monster and people being crushed to death. We're heading to underworld territory for sure.

Ramza has gotten most of the Monk abilities so I switch him to Geomancer and look forward to trying that out. Likewise Mustadio is now a Chemist as they can still use guns. Fur shops are available though I don't have the requisite skill necessary to use them (which class is that in? I can't find it by looking through). I am also keenly aware that whichever guest character shows up next will probably betray us and die at the end of this chapter.

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