Earthbound – Day 64

–Day 64–

The environment might be a little weird, but our goal is still the same, make it to the end of the area in one piece. So we stock up on as many Magic Puddings as we can carry, don’t ask where we’re storing them in our current naked state, and head out on our adventure. It would seem the town has quite a few residents. Some aren’t so happy to see us in our current state, while others seem to have had a change of heart.

But we can’t get caught up with our memories of people we’ve met, we need to press on farther into Magicant and eventually leave the safety of the town. There is one last stop however, right on the edge of town is a house full of Flying Men. These Flying Men will join Ness in his adventure and help battle the enemies to come. Unfortunately only one will follow you at a time.

The enemies in this area are rather tricky, disguising themselves as presents and tricking us into walking right into them. The most frequent enemy early on seemed to be the Loaded Dice. On its own, it’s not a difficult enemy to defeat. However, it is capable of calling other enemies to join the battle. In one particularly unlucky encounter, Ness’ attacks kept missing round after round until the Loaded Dice had summoned several enemies to the battle, forcing us to run rather than continue fighting.

There aren’t many branching paths to explore here, so it doesn’t take long before we’re at a dead end. Curiously, there seems to be some kind of large silver hair growing out of the ground at the end of our path. Closer examination of the hair ends up teleporting us to some strange lake area.

If it weren’t bad enough that Ness is now swimming around naked in this weird color changing water, the whole area seems to be full of Kraken. Back when we first encountered the Kraken, it took the full party’s combined effort as well as a good amount of luck for us to defeat it. Now it would seem Ness alone has become strong enough to accomplish this on his own.

Ness keeps swimming until eventually coming upon the Mani Mani Statue, once again here to cause trouble. This time, it would seem it is here to represent the evil within Ness’ own heart. In order to save the world from Giygas, Ness must first defeat his own evil thoughts.

Despite being alone in this battle, the Mani Mani statue, now named “Ness’s Nightmare”, is not all that powerful. It seems to use PK Gaming α nearly every attack, which only does about 75 damage each turn. When not casting PK Gaming α, it will emit a glorious light, which rarely has any effect on Ness thanks to his equipment.

Before long, Ness’s Nightmare is defeated. Upon victory, Ness hears a familiar voice talking to him from the Sea of Eden. It tells him that Giygas threatens to destroy the entire universe. But Giygas and his followers are scared, because the Apple of Enlightenment has already foretold that Giygas will fail, all because of Ness. It is his destiny to stop Giygas.

As Magicant fades away, the voice gives one last piece of advice. Go to Saturn Valley. What we need is waiting for us there. After this, the powers from all eight of the My Sanctuary locations come together to fill Ness with power beyond anything before possible. All of his stats are drastically increase to a point that he is as strong as the other three party members combined.

With that, Magicant is no more, as Ness has taken the whole of its powers into himself. With no further purpose, the Sound Stone disappears, and Ness finally wakes up to his friends. Together, they all teleport off to Saturn Valley to see what new power is waiting for them there.

It would seem the combined power of Mr. Saturn, Apple Kid, and Dr. Andonuts has made short work out of creating the Phase Distorter. In fact, this is actually the second prototype of the device. Apparently the first one has already been stolen, no doubt by Porky. On top of stealing the device, he also took a Mr. Saturn hostage.

Unfortunately, the second prototype isn’t quite ready for use. Apparently we’re missing a key element which is very rare on Earth. This element can however be found in meteorites. Dr. Andonuts apparently discovered it back when he was very young, but he hasn’t been able to find any more since. Lucky for us, we happen to know the exact location of a recently crashed meteorite. In fact, it’s how this whole adventure began.

With just a small piece of the meteorite, Dr. Andonuts will be able to make Zexonyte to power the Phase Distorter. However, it doesn’t seem like it will be an easy task to recover it. Giygas is sure to already be aware of our need of the meteorite and has sent his followers to guard it. We’ll have to prepare accordingly before we head out.

For now, we’re going to rest here in Saturn Village. Join us next time as we head back to where it all began and try to collect a piece of the meteorite. See you there!