LogFAQs > #961545282

No students left to recruit now, and only one quest left which is a monster quest on the Kreuzen highway. The fight goes down easily, compared to the Cryptids we've been killing it wasn't even a challenge. Speaking of which, there are apparently two new Cryptid fights that have opened up as well. The Eisengard Range, where we just were, has one to tackle at the top of the mountain. It's always fun coming back to the starting area in RPGs late game. There's even some new standard enemies here so you don't get bored killing rabbits or whatever. Though they start you off this game at level 60 or something so they'd still be some pretty strong rabbits at this point. Anyway, there's a random trial chest here that wasn't here originally, between Laura and Fie. "Laura may usually win against Fie in a swimming race, but it's no contest when they're racing on land. After all, Fie's always been fast on her Fiet." I swear they're getting worse lol. Anyway, the actual fight is pretty easy. And by that I mean, Laura's 110cp s craft one shot it. I know this wasn't here originally because you only had Rean, but was I supposed to come back here at some other point to do this? I can't imagine this was balanced for this point of the game, even with how generally unchallenging the game is.

At the top of the mountain is the next cryptid fight, a cool looking white dragon thing. He doesn't have any crazy gimmicks in this fight, just does a bunch of damage randomly and can poison you, but it turns out to not be too tough of a fight. He did get one retry out of me so I'll give him some credit. You get some dragon gem for winning which when used gives your entire team +100 CP, as well as 30cp/turn for 3 turns. A utility one like this I doubt I'll get much use out of, but I'll give it to Laura so she can have something to do if she rolls a free arte turn. Maybe I can use it before a boss fight to get everyone to 200cp quickly? That sounds fun. I don't think it'll get used too much in battle proper though, but we'll see.

The other cryptid for us to fight is at the top of that mountain that Beryl was chilling at before. This one was actually disgustingly easy unfortunately, not only did he have no real gimmicks he also has some stupidly low accuracy for some reason. He missed probably half of his attacks on me. No other boss has had this happen so I feel like they did this intentionally for some reason. Were you supposed to fight this thing a long time ago or something? I feel like the difficulty curve of these has been backwards, the hardest one was by far the first one and they've gotten easier since then. I didn't even have a single character die, let alone a retry. Anyway, the reward for this is the Grail Burst spell, which casts instantly and lets you attack twice in a row while moving the rest of your party up in the turn order. So you're spending all of your EP for one additional attack and potentially your teammates moving up? That seems...pretty bad. Rean never uses his EP at all so I'll give it to him, but really it's just a way worse version of Machias' skill. To be fair, that skill is OP as hell and is really the only reason I bring him around with me most places, but still. Maybe a worse version of that will still be worthwhile.

I take some time to explore the ship to examine the fruits of my labor for the day and see what all my new kids will do for me. Klein (Laura's swimming coach) is our new navigation officer. Alfin randomly gives me a Medal of Strength for beating up so many cryptids, which gives 100 Str and 10 spd. My Sara, with that equipped, now has more strength than Laura (1890 vs 1868) while also having almost double her speed (125 vs. 71). So I think she's officially broken.

We find our third trainer in Hibelle, he's in charge of artes training. I take care of all 3 levels pretty quick, they're not too hard. I decided to finish up ranged and melee 3 since I'm here, and man those were annoying. Not because the fights actually tough, but because they make you dodge and counterattack 3 times to count as a win. I guess they realized how easy their game was and needed to add some arbitrary "challenge" to these but really it just made me waste a bunch of time waiting for my guys to dodge. I could've probably set up Fie as an actual evasion tank and had her do it for me...whatever. Live and learn. The melee one was especially a pain because getting those guys to counterattack also requires them to be right next to the robots, I ended up just getting down to 1, cornering him and then skipping my turn over and over and over. But you can't use artes, so I had to use balms to heal when people got low, and my supply started getting kind of low actually lol. I guess it's good to finally get some use out of them, I almost never use items in this game.

Exploring the rest of the ship, Hugo does indeed have a nice shop for us, a high quality item shop with lots of expensive shit, but nothing I really need too much. There is a +20 spd accessory for 75k, but I have a bunch of money in the form of loose sepith so I can afford it if I want it. I decide to give it to Sara, she has a weaker +10 spd accessory on now and I think I want to make her Sara the hedgehog. Actually fuck it, lets just make her as fast as physically possible to see how hard we can push this. After some optimization with R orbments that give speed and changing around her equipment, I finally get her up to 155, now well over double Laura's measly 71. I did have to lose some strength in the process so now Laura is beating her by a massive gap of Laura's 1898 to Sara's 1890. Would you ever trade 8 strength for 80 speed? Laura says hell no.

Margarita is in the kitchen (of course) and wants peculiar dishes, which I have none of since I never cook. Without that jinzo shrine to give things too I've lost interest in cooking in cold steel, I know I made every dish at the very end of the game last time and I'll probably do the same thing here. I've got 4 recipes left to find so whenever I find those I'll go through and make everything. There's also Stefan in the computer room, who said he would give us battle stats but really just does a Noel and gives you U materials for however many unique monsters you've killed. Lame, I wanted to see cool data on how much overall damage I've done and things like that. It's weird they'd introduce Noel's role so late into the second game, but what can you do.

With all that done I believe I'm officially out of stuff to do so I head out to tackle one of these shrines. I'll just go from top down, so first one is the Nord shrine. They say that I need Emma if I'm going to explore, so I'm just like ??? Yeah? Like I said at the beginning? So I'm just required to use Fie and Emma I guess, which is a little lame but I doubt it will matter. But now my team is currently Alisa, Laura, Sara, Fie and Emma - girl power! Rean probably gets a +20% boost for harem buff.

My first battle in, my Sara attacked 4 times I believe before Laura attacked once, so I'm glad this speed optimization is working out lol. That trend didn't repeat itself in the other battles though, it's usually just 1 or 2 so not sure why the first one was so weird. She still attacks a shitton though but I think they must've rebalanced their speed algorithm between Sky and here. I remember Joshua or Richard getting like 8 turns in a row in those games when you'd cap their speed out lol.

There's a monster chest in here which gives the Zeus gem, which is 90% impede chance, as well as 15 strength. It also happens to be a wind orbment, and wouldn't you know it, the only somewhat useless orbment in Sara's arsenal was on a wind required slot, so that fits in perfectly. So not only am I now permanently impeding on a character who attacks all the time, I've also got her above Laura in the strength totals again! It's a good day to be Sara.