Earthbound – Day 63

–Day 63–

Today we continue our push through the Fire Spring as we attempt to claim the final My Sanctuary location. Using what we’ve learned from the previous areas, we’re actually trying to avoid combat as much as possible at the moment. We can finish exploring after we defeat the boss. That way all the monsters will be avoiding us and we can explore at our leisure.

With that mindset, it isn’t long before we make our way through to the boss. This final My Sanctuary boss is the Carbon Dog, and thankfully we made it here with a good amount of HP and PP. We’re going to need every bit of it as this ends up becoming a rather long battle.

At first, it doesn’t really feel like a difficult boss. The only attack it seemed to do was spitting fireballs at single party members. Sure it did a decent amount of damage, but it was nothing we couldn’t handle. After a couple of rounds though, something unexpected happened. All of a sudden the Carbon Dog gave off a rainbow of colors!

Just like that, the Carbon Dog transformed into the Diamond Dog! With its new form, it also has some new attacks. The main attack it seems to use is a regular biting attack, which does rather significant damage to whoever it bites. Since it’s only a single target attack, this also isn’t anything we can’t handle. It also helps that for some reason it will regularly waste its turn by making a loud piercing howl. The Diamond Dog does have quite a bit of health, so the battle takes a long time, and we end up using most of our healing items. But we eventually defeat the Diamond Dog and get to claim the final My Sanctuary location.

We continue through the opening and make our way to the actual Fire Spring, which looks like a very tiny volcano. Here, Ness has a feeling that he was being watched by himself as a baby. He then uses the Sound Stone to record the melody of the Fire Spring, completing the collection.

As soon as we are done recording the melody, the Sound Stone starts reacting all on its own. It starts playing all the collected melodies one at a time before finally blending them all together into a single song. Ness then finds himself in a dream-like state, walking down a path, alone, towards his house. Upon reaching the house Ness seems to fade from existence.

Now seemingly invisible, we follow Ness as he makes his way through his house and ultimately up to his own room. There we find baby Ness in his crib as his parents, also invisible, talk to and about him. We have apparently traveled back to when Ness was first named, and the happy reaction he had to hearing his own name. We also learn that Ness was given his signature red hat as a newborn and has apparently cherished it his entire life.

We watch the scene unfold a short while longer, after which we wake up in a rather strange environment. Not only that, but for some reason Ness is completely naked. Talking to the wise man near us, we discover we are inside Ness’ mind in a place called Magicant. Apparently this place is the end result of collecting all eight of the Sanctuary melodies.

While this place does contain all the good that is inside Ness, it also contains all his evil thoughts. At the center of it all is The Sea of Eden, which is where we must go next. I’m not sure what we’ll find there, but it doesn’t look like we have much choice in the matter.

If Magicant wasn’t weird enough already, I do want to point out that the whole color pallet seems to fluctuate wildly as we explore. It seems like it changes every time I talk to someone, but that might just be a coincidence. And for no reason, I want to point out these flowers. I’m not sure what it is, but they remind me of evil for some reason…

Anyway, there isn’t a whole lot to do here in Magicant. At the Northeast corner of town, we find Ness’ mother and sister, still performing their normal duties of healing and storage respectively. There is also a small store in town with only two items to buy, Magic Pudding which restores PP, and the Earth Pendant which gives a decent protection against all of the PK Elements.

I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed to be doing here, but we’re going to have to figure that out another time. Join us next time as we explore Magicant and see how twisted Ness’ mind really is!