Third Time's a Charm

Note: Keep in mind I'm not actively looking stuff up about the game, I'm kinda just going in blind with no guides or anything. I don't mind it when my friends give me tips or confirm information for me, but I'm not looking things up on my own unless I really get stuck. So if it feels like I'm doing this blindly and not bothering to look up information... that's kind of actually the point.

So I started over again, and it went a lot better. And we got all the way to LEVEL 4. (I say 'we' because my friends were giving me advice on-stream.) We're champions.

So, yes, it turns out actually equipping your armor and weapons makes a pretty big difference. I got to level 2 much faster, and defeated Garland within probably a half hour or so. Like... this was it for the dungeon.

Also, he was oddly polite for an evil boss.

So anyway, beat Garland pretty easily, brought the Princess back, and then the King built me a bridge, which I promptly ventured over. And then I got murdered.

Crossing the bridge for the first time, I found an iguana and its eyes stared into my soul.

It took out my Red Mage, but I survived. And then for some reason I decided to go back over the bridge again?
I ran into some imps first, which gave me a false sense of security, like "Oh, maybe the iguana is like the BIG random encounter in the area. That wouldn't be so bad."
And then I quickly found a tunnel at the northernmost part of the area across the bridge, and then this happened.

At this point, I decided that perhaps it was best for me to do some grinding.

And grind I did. There's not a ton of note for that whole process, although I did go back to Garland's temple and found a little bit of loot. My friend Ysoko was looking up stuff and let me know that "the guides suggested not proceeding too far over the bridge until level 6" and "yeah you equipped your Fighter with a hammer but it's best to give him a rapier. Everyone should have one except your Black Mage."

In my defense, I just felt like a rapier required more finesse than a Fighter would have, you know? Like "me Fighter and me CRUSH enemies." Okay, maybe that's more like a barbarian. ANYWAY

So, in summary, this is what we all learned during our last stream:

• Equip your weapons
• Wolves are NOT worth it**
• Equip the correct weapons
• You can't have too many tents

I think I'm going to spend some time today just grinding but not advancing the story. It's just not super fun to watch me grind in the overall starting area for hours and me desperately trying to think of things to talk/complain about.

So until next time.

(The archive of the stream can be found here.)

** Just based on experience so far, wolves appear to have a higher than average evasion rate than ANYTHING ELSE in the game so far, and fighting 5 or 6 of them made me want to tear my hair out because I think my fighter hit maybe 2 of them in many turns and I think I aged a few years before the battle was over. It isn't worth it. Don't fight wolves. Choose life.