We start off by going to Luxus Palace, a castle we haven't been to as of yet. In the castle were rooms labelled Fighting Room and Temple, which had enemies themed on the word. There were priests in the temple and the fighting room had something like men-at-arms in it.
We find the princess playing with an A1-Todilor, and promptly steal it from her. Cause we're jerks.
Eventually we find our way to the Black Bishop, but we don't have the key to save him.
In the main hall of the castle we find Corak's study. Odd, I'm pretty sure he's dead. In fact, the Cleric's quest was to reunite his body and soul.
I have a feeling that his assistant has something to do with his death. Why else would she know the whereabouts?
They'll never notice if I steal a bit of gold!
Oh well, the guards apparently did notice. Castle Guards are really easy at this point though. They used to murder my party with ease. Now the tides have turned!
The Queen apparently is sad since her people are boring and can't win a triple crown. Our party already has the Plus, but we're missing the Black Triple Crown, which we go ahead and do now.
In Atlantium the blacksmith sells Black Tickets. To win the Triple Crown, you have to take a Black Ticket to the arean in Middlegate, Sandsobar, and Atlantium. Unlike the other colored tickets, the Black Ticket battles are actually kind of difficult. In one of the battles someone died so I had to go back to Atlantium and buy another ticket and do it over again.
To free the Black Bishop we have to have the Black Key. 50,000 gold is chump change for the party.
So we head back to Luxus Palace and free the Black Bishop and collect quite a bit of experience.
And we return to the Queen, who gives us a quest that sounds very end-game. We'll do that in a bit.
First we have to finish exploring the castle.
We save some hirelings, but they don't even tell me their names so I can't even make fun of them! Jerks!
There was a room filled with enemies. There was a battle on every step. Some of the enemies were pretty strong, but we made it through eventually.
Yay! Boobies! I actually expected this to turn all my party members into females, but it didn't. I think its basically making fun of me for exploring the enemy infested room for no reason whatsoever.
Anyways, time to go back in time! To the year 800!
First thing we see is some guy getting eaten by a Mega Dragon.
Yes, if only we did... I have no idea what the Orb or the Talons are. Needless to say, we meet the same fate as King Kalohn
Well, we avoid that location in the past and find our way to Castle Xabran. In present time, all that's left of castle Xabran is some ruins. Present time is 905, so sometime in the past 100 years, the castle was destroyed.
The purpose of going to Castle Xabran is to get some hints for various puzzles and locations, and collect the colored discs.
Basically the Hall of Hirelings and Hall of Spells are long hallways with each step telling the location of a spell or hireling. It sounds more useful than it is.
There are four discs. One for each of the elements, a red one for fire, the aqua one for water, etc.
This is a hint involving all those signs with gibberish on them. I don't exactly understand the hint though.
Now that we have the discs, we can go into the Elemental Planes. We'll start with the water plane. In the planes, the only enemies are the elementals and a elemental hydra. They aren't too scary, and give AWESOME experience.
The water plane wasn't too hard. Now we have the Water Talon. Soon we'll be able to kill the Mega Dragon!
The other Talons were a lot harder to get. Not because of the enemies, but because the maps are FUCKING stupid. Every few steps you get teleported to the bottom left corner of the map. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to when it teleports you. I walked onto one spot and it didn't teleport me, but later when I walked on that same spot IT DID TELEPORT ME. I was really starting to get pissed off. I wanted to punch my monitor so bad.
At some point I made Ian cast Eagle Eye and it may or may not have helped, but after I casted it, I was able to get to the Talons pretty quickly, like I was getting teleported less often than without it. It might have hust been a coincidence though. On the plus side, I got MASSIVE amounts of experience by fighting the elementals over and over again.
I don't have the ending stats from last update, so I can't really do a side by side comparison.
For this update, everyone got 4-5 levels. We got a few weapon and armor upgrades. Found some +12 padded armor, which really helps Ian's armor class out. Found some better armor for Thund R. as well. So now everyone's body armor gives at least 10 armor class. All my melee characters now have a weapon with a base damage of at least 1-20 now, which is really nice, although Elayne will always be the most badass character in the party. I found a few Tri-Sickles which are insanely powerful two handed weapons, but they're enhancement level was always lower than my current weapons so they weren't as good, unfortunately.
I'm pretty sure we're in the end-game now. We have all the Talons, whatever the hell those are for, and all the time machine parts as well. Apparently we need to find an orb so we can kill the Mega Dragon or something. I really want to finish this game so I can get into Might & Magic 3 which is my favorite game of the series, or at least my favorite game of the series that I have actually played.
End of Part 17.
