Verse 2-5: Clash on the Big Bridge
Hello and welcome back to Eternal Sonata! Last time the party rescued a kid from having fallen off a cliff and then immediately got thrown in a dungeon afterwards. We now return to your regularly scheduled breakout already in progress.
♪♪~ No music
Allegretto: “Hey! What have we here?! This almost makes up for getting thrown in the dungeon!”
These things are just lying around everywhere, huh? Not that I’m complaining, mind.
Point taken. Seems like our only option is to go right and hope for the best; there’s an audible breeze coming from that direction anyway.
Huh, kind of an elaborate mirror to just be sitting here in the castle dungeon.
Click to watch the cutscene
*The rest of the party walks past, but Salsa stops and looks at the mirror.*
♪♪~
DANTOTSU!
Salsa: “Wait, hold on a minute.”
Allegretto: “What is it, Salsa? We need to keep moving.”
Salsa: “Hey, just come here a second.”
Beat: “Huh? Well, what is it?”
*He walks over.*
*He does.*
Salsa: “Ah-hah! See? I knew it!”
Beat: “What’re you talking about?! You’re only taller because you have a hat on! That’s not fair!”
Salsa: “Come on, we gotta hurry!”
*She follows after the group.*
Poor Beat. He’s had kind of a rough day.
Anyway, past that is this person who I swear isn’t this game suddenly being wildly offensive;
a musical slur is an actual thing!
Thief Slur: “Or so I thought. Apparently my luck ran out sneaking into this place. I was caught before I knew it. Punishment in Forte is known to be nasty, and now I’ll never get out of here. You wouldn’t happen to have a score piece, would you? If it comes out nice, I’ll give you something real good.”
Alas, neither of our score pieces match his. This is going to be something of a recurring trend until we find more of them.
Thief Slur: “You’ve still got a ways to go. It’ll take more than something like that to touch my heart.”
One last item before we investigate the large obvious hole in the wall.
Frederic: “Mmm. Whoever made this hole must have been in quite a hurry.”
Viola: “It looks suspicious to me.”
Polka: “But this seems to be our only way out. There are bound to be lots of soldiers upstairs.”
Salsa: “It’ll be fine! I’ll bet this hole was dug by a great burglar! I’m sure it will get us outside!”
Beat: “I don’t know.”
Viola: “Well, fearless leader, what should we do?”
Allegretto: “Hmm. All right, let’s give it a try!”
*Audible gust of wind*
...Let’s just go through the hole and pretend Allegretto didn’t say that.
♪♪~
From Strength to Kindness
I tend to prefer the more bombastic and energetic area themes, so I don’t seek out the more laid-back tracks like this as often. It still has some good things going for it, though; the percussion is really nice, and I like that the flute is largely the instrument playing the melody here.
A-ha, so now we know who’s responsible for the hole in the wall. This extensive cave system right under Forte Castle is pretty convenient for them! Or it will be until Forte discovers it and seals it, which I’m sure will be pretty soon after we escape.
Anyway, the path through these caves is pretty twisty, with several sizable branching paths leading to treasure that let you see other parts of the dungeon. Let’s get to it!
This is one of the few times I can honestly say I enjoy a cave dungeon in an RPG, and that’s partially due to the aesthetics; a lot of it is just standard cave stuff, but all throughout you also have these weird tendril-things of light curving upwards. Couldn’t tell you what they do, but they look nice!
The main path is off to the right, but for now we want to keep going south, which means dealing with this scorpion.
♪♪~
Leap the Precipice
The battlefield here is pretty cramped; it’s a little larger than the arena at Glissando Cliffs, but the stalagmites on the floor can block your specials if your positioning is off. The arena is also mostly in darkness, with a few patches of light here and there.
As for the enemies, they’re the same Sweet Whispers/Caravan Crabs that we fought at the cliffs, so you should be pretty used to fighting them by now. There’s also one new enemy further into the dungeon that we’ll cover later.
And by “later” I mean “right now”!
Bolbos are these weird squid things that are pretty unpredictable; sometimes if they spawn far enough away from you they’ll wave at other enemies before heading your way. They also have far more HP than most other standard enemies up to this point, so it’s best to take them out with a fully-charged Echo Meter.
Spore Scatter will poison any characters caught in the cloud. It’ll actually telegraph using this attack by puffing up at the end of its turn; it will then use Spore Scatter at the start of the next turn. It’s up to you if you want to move your party out of the way or try to blitz through its HP before it goes off, since Bolbos are pretty slow. Wreathe, on the other hand, is just a mildly-damaging attack that I always screw up the guard timing on anyway.
♪♪~
Well-Done
Allegretto: “What did you expect?”
Bolbos will sometimes drop these items, including the next tier of cookie; Star Cookies heal 3,600 HP and cost the same amount of points to put in the Item Set (1), which is very nice indeed!
♪♪~
From Strength to Kindness
Moving past that, we come to another intersection; again, we want to keep heading south for now, but we will head east later on.
Beat: “Look over here!”
This isn’t strictly important, I just wanted to let y’all know that I took some
choice photos while going through this dungeon.
Ten Lashes is just what it sounds like: a ten-hit attack that can hurt if you don’t block it. It also carries a chance of knockback if unguarded, so try not to let that happen.
Down at the end of the path is this new umbrella for Polka; you can see the other path leading from the intersection we were just at, which is cool.
Yeah, this’ll do.
Back to the intersection, this time to head east (after dealing with this Bolbo).
Speaking of, their basic attack is two lashes followed by a four-hit spin attack. It comes out really fast so it’s hard to block, but it’s not the end of the world if you do end up eating the hits.
Hmm, that ledge over there looks suspicious; I bet there’s a chest hidden in the foliage up there.
We’ll worry about that later; for now we’ll snag the Star Cookie from this chest.
On the way back to the intersection we pass by this ledge; keep it in the back of your mind for later. In the meantime, I think it’s time we take a look at our new character.
That’s right, Salsa officially joined our party back in the Forte dungeon; I just haven’t used her yet because I’m trying to keep everyone except Beat evenly-leveled (more on that later). As you can see here, she’s very fast, and because of that she’ll almost always get the first turn if she’s in your active party. She isn’t exactly a tank, but Salsa’s DEF is decent for this area, and her starting weapon lets her deal good damage to the Caravan Crabs even though her ATK isn’t that high. Her MAG is easily Salsa’s lowest stat, but her other stats and utility in battle easily make up for it.
Salsa: “I’ll send you flyin’ to the other side of the sun!”
Salsa fights with two large chakrams that the game calls Sun Rings, and her standard attacks with them hit five times per combo; this combined with her high SPD and fast combo speed mean she’s really good at building Echoes very quickly.
On top of this, she starts out with a dark special called Shadow Silhouette, which is flat-out one of the best specials in the game. It’s a three-hit combo, and it doesn’t deal much damage on its own…
But it does put a red aura around Salsa and any other party member in the immediate area. What does this aura do?
I’m not sure of the exact math here, but Shadow Silhouette increases the damage of the affected character’s next special
pretty significantly; note that Frederic was only working with 16 Echoes and he still annihilated that Bolbo. Combine Shadow Silhouette with a full Echo Meter and you can deal some preposterous amounts of damage.
Oh, while I’m here, turns out that Caravan Crabs have a long-range attack they can spam if they’re too far away to melee you, but it’s not a big deal.
♪♪~
Well-Done
Frederic: “It’s a frame of mind, you see.”
Ooh, nice! In the Xbox 360 release Frederic learned this attack at level 38 instead of 18, and it wasn’t as useful there. This is actually only one of two of Frederic’s specials whose level requirements were altered for the PS3 port; more on the other one once we get it much later.
Way back at the first intersection in the Secret Passage, we finally take the east path.
We also see Salsa’s light special in action. Solar Flare only hits once, but it’s a
big hit despite her low MAG, and the knockback is ridiculous.
Ah, that’s right, Caravan Crabs can heal each other. Nothin’ a Shadow Silhouette-powered barrage can’t fix.
Anyway, past this handy save point…
We come to another intersection. We’ll go down the southwest path first.
Nice. I do enjoy when games let you see all the different paths you’ll traverse in a given level before you do it; it’s neat!
That obtained, it’s time to go southeast.
The winding path soon leads to the next area.
This is the first area where the Secret Passage really opens up; you get a good feel of the sheer depths of this place.
Before we press on, we’ll hop down to the ledge I mentioned earlier to grab this new sword for Allegretto. We’ll have to do some backtracking to get back to where we were, but I’d say the free weapon upgrade is well worth it.
There, now we’re back where we were, and we can show off Frederic’s new special while we’re at it.
♪♪~
Leap the Precipice
Mirage Blow hits once and deals decent damage, but its real use lies in the fact that it’s our first debuff! There are only a few specials in the game that debuff an enemy’s stats or inflict status ailments; this one decreases an enemy’s ATK by 10 points. It’s also very spammable, taking only a flat 1 second to use. The only problem is that I’m not sure how much the debuff stacks, and there isn’t any documentation online that goes into detail about it, at least not that I can find. Still, it’s good to have, and much more useful here than in the original game.
♪♪~
From Strength to Kindness
Onward to the next area.
Past another save point, should you need it…
Wrapping around back to the north…
And into the next area.
Before we move on, we should take a closer look at our surroundings – we’re directly above where we just were a minute ago, and that plus the two plant-things are a hint…
At another new piece of equipment. Man, Allegretto is doing very well in this dungeon, huh?