Abandoned Castle
Well, our subadventuring continues finally! I haven't really played in a couple weeks because of Things™ but I ended up playing some tonight. And I did the Abandoned Castle subadventure. I feel like this one really deserves its own entry, because it's pretty interesting, one of my favorites, but also one of the most obnoxiously designed, and there's a lot to say about it.
Like many subadventures, we're investigating another rumor this time. Apparently, this castle has been abandoned for a couple years, and there's rumors of treasure hidden inside. But no one seems to return from the castle when they go try to find the treasure. So let's do it!!
But as soon as we go inside, we get trapped in by a cursed door... So we have to find out how to break the curse.
Inside, the castle is pretty big. There's a lot of treasure to be found lying around -- just regular treasure chests, not anything special. But regular treasure chests are still nice because we can get money XD
After walking forward into the grand hallway, we run across this... strange old man. You don't ever actually see him (as the player), so I think he's supposed to be invisible or something? Honestly it's not explained. Somehow you know he's an old man though? And it says that we keep hearing him, but can't see him, after you read this text.
The screen moves around to reveal more parts of the map. I think it's supposed to be like you're paying attention to where the guy run off to (even though we can't see him??? or can we???)
But yeah. I happened to walk straight to where this event occurs, but there are three different paths you can take from the beginning. It's quite likely if you took another path you might not run into this old man event for quite some time, and the turn limit here is only 150 turns. I think the programmers meant to type 1500 or something because this place is huge, and there's a lot to do here. And to progress, you have to do a bunch of stuff in a very specific order, and figuring out that order is going to take you a lot of turns.
Even though I've done this many, many times, I always forget something and end up failing this adventure once or twice each game...
When we start to follow the old man, we run across a diary on the ground. We pick it up and read it. It's kinda long. This guy ate some good shrimp, I guess.
Basically he talks about how a shady wizard came to visit the king and since then the king changed, and people have been disappearing from the castle. The king says he's been firing them, but the author of this diary seems to have suspicions that something else might be going on. Especially since he keeps hearing inhuman beast-like noises in the middle of the night.
He also notes a few times about how there's a picture that is changing or being removed from its frame (it's quite vague).
Near the end, he writes that it's nearing the 3rd anniversary of the queen's death, and the wizard finally left the castle for good, but the king seems to have changed.
At the end of the diary, the author is invited by the king to meet up in the night. He assumes that whatever bad thing has been happening to everyone is about to happen to him... or maybe the king is just horny and wants him. You know, could go either way.
Perhaps the wizard cursed the king, or maybe traded bodies with him, and is now using the king's body to do some evil stuff. And maybe now that he's killed off everyone in the castle, he's just playing around in it and spreading rumors there's treasure so he can have more fun killing the adventurers who come to check it out. Would explain why he's invisible and running around saying weird stuff. Doesn't explain the eating squishy rotten food though.
When we go into the basement where we saw (heard??) the old man run, we find a torture chamber that seems... delightfully colorful. There's a high level treasure chest here. Otherwise, this is not really much of an important area.
In another room in the basement, we find the remains of a man and some obsidian boots! I don't remember if these are always here but we're pretty much not going to find much better boots than this, and if we got lucky enough to find these in the shop, they'd be very expensive. So, Grace has some new shoes ;D
The body is called "possible remains of castle owner," but if you inspect it, you find that it's a soldier named Judas who was mentioned in the diary as one of the people who disappeared. You can choose to search the corpse, which will give you a key that unlocks a door just outside the stairs to return to the ground floor on the opposite end of the basement area. You can always just leave the way you came in, and it just puts you on the opposite side of the grand hallway, so it's not particularly useful. But if you happened to miss this key and went on to the other side, you'd be stuck once you got back upstairs.
You can choose to continue searching the body after you find the key, but it will just engage you in a fight with a skeleton. No real point in doing this, but there's a battle environment you don't get to see much of here (though you'll see it elsewhere in this adventure so it's not that special here lol)
Coming back up from the basement, Mythe says that maybe he went underground. We just came from underground, so I don't know why he says this. Depending on your main character, you'll get different little quotes like this throughout this adventure.
When we step near the large staircase leading up to the second floor, we run into the old man again. This won't happen unless you've seen the previous event and tried to follow him downstairs. And if you took one of the other two paths from the start, you'll probably reach this spot first...
This time the game shows him run into a side hallway and into a room aptly named "room old man entered." It's a kitchen. Inside, you smell rotting food, and hear squishy chewing noises and it's gross.
Mythe seems to already be annoyed. The old man says if you can catch him, he'll share the treasure with you, and runs off. When we try to chase after him, though, we trip over something and lose sight of him (so... we could see him? Also... did we all collectively trip at once? Was it some knid of cartoon thing where one person trips and then each person trips over the last person to trip in turn until it's a big pile of bodies?)
A recipe falls down from a shelf that we knocked into while tripping, though. We inspect it and it's literally a whole recipe for bouillabaisse. The end of the recipe, for some reason, explains how to get to the third floor, since it's usually locked. You know, don't want to keep the king waiting on his stew.
At this point there's no clear direction on where to go, so you can just wander around. Of course, go the wrong way and you'll run out of turns. I wanted to look around at some stuff, so we end up going the wrong way.
But here's a unique battle environment if you happen to go out into certain areas of the castle you don't ever have to go to! The battle camera is also fixed so you can see some unique looks at the battle animations. You're sadly also only limited to three characters in battle at a time.
Travelling around, we come to some towers...
One of the towers has some markings on the wall. Seems one knight was worried about the disappearance of another. These towers are also completely optional. At this point, just from my tiny little detour, I've pretty much ruined my chance of being able to clear the adventure successfully due to the really small turn limit.
But we return to the grand hallway anyway and take the large staircase up to the second floor. Up here, there are two gargoyle/statue things (the other is dragon-shaped!) which upon inspection, seem to have part of the engravings double as switches that we can press. Using the code we found in the kitchen, we press 2475 and the path to the third floor stairs unlocks.
Upstairs, we find the throne room where we encounter the old man, who still seems excited about something. He climbs onto the throne, which Mythe objects is not for him (lol wtf), and then the throne begins moving and descends into the floor!
Mythe seems annoyed at the "lame" trick and we're able to explore around some more. Around this time, I failed the adventure for the first time (which just boots you back to town -- though we were supposed to be locked in from the cursed door!). Returning, you at least get to keep your map of the castle, which is nice.
Here's the regular castle battle environment, btw. Grace x Pharr OTP
Also Grace glimmered a bow art called "Exorcist" which is REALLY powerful! I never use the Power Shot line much so I wasn't really familiar with this, but it's doing more damage than anything anyone can do right now, and sometimes even does 1 or 2 LP damage...! Usually power/HP-damage-focused moves are terrible at LP damage, but this seems pretty good at at least dealing one or two.
Searching around, we find some pictures like this one. There are two pictures lying around the third floor. One is a picture of a queen which reads that it takes you 'between sky and land,' and a jack picture that reads it takes you to the land.
In the throne room, there's a picture of a king. We can take that, too, and it says it takes us closest to the sky. Now the picture frame is empty. Inspecting it, we find we can put a picture in the frame.
After placing the queen picture, we hop onto the throne. What happens when you move to the throne is different depending on the picture, but basically this is just a one-way elevator, and which picture you place in the throne room will dictate which floor you'll move to when you sit on the throne.
When we sit on the throne with the queen picture in the frame, we're taken to the second floor. Here, there's a picture of a joker in a hidden room behind where the throne stops. My intent was to take the joker picture, but a battle occurred after seeing the picture, and when the battle ended, I forgot that I hadn't actually taken the Joker picture, so we just left this room without actually picking it up.
We can't ride the thronelevator from here -- it only activates from the throne room itself. But the door between the hidden room and the balcony where the statues are is now lifted, so it's a pretty quick trip back up to the third floor.
Upon reaching the throne again, I realize I don't have the joker picture and maybe I cried a little. So, instead we put the jack picture into the frame (after taking the queen picture out), and we rode the throne again which took us now to the first flor, in an area separate from what we've seen so far, which seems to be under/behind the large staircase at the end of the grand hallway.
There's a treasure chest here that is labeled "Don't Touch!"
Or apparently "Don't Open." The game doesn't seem to consider this a normal chest, because we can't use our skills like Sharpeye or whatever on it. It's just an object that happens to use the chest artwork.
But I mean... you knew this was coming right? We try to open the chest, which reveals it's a treasure slime.
Running around this area on the first floor you can find plenty of real treasures, though. But coming down here, we've already ruined our chance of being able to clear this adventure within the turn limit. So I just spend time gathering up treasures and stuff. I actually did try to clear the adventure, and actually beat the boss, but didn't have enough turns to make it back out of the castle.
So, third time is the charm, right? Catching back up to where we left off, this time we actually take the joker picture when we ride down to the second floor. Upon removing the joker from its frame, the door between the thronelevator and the statue balcony closes. The only way to open it again is to place either the joker picture or the king picture in the frame. The jack will not work in this case.
You'll always have the king picture since you have to remove it to place the queen picture to get here. So you can't get stuck here or something. Plus even if you could get here without the king picture, you could just put the joker picture back.
But we need the joker picture, so we take it with us after placing the king picture into the frame, and we head back to the third floor.
Placing the joker picture into the throne room frame, we're now able to access the basement with the thronelevator.
My first time here, I had 10 turns left before going down the hallway to the boss... You not only have to beat the boss (which can take several turns) but also escape from the castle before the turn limit ends...
If you explore the central room here, you'll find the resting place of the former queen. The king wrote that he intended to bring her back to life...
When we reach the end, we find an area called "big hole," where we run into the old man again. He reveals who he is -- he is the former king, who had gained necromancy powers from the wizard so he could try to resurrect his wife. But he needs many sacrifices, so after he used up all of his castle staff, he's been luring adventurers in with the promise of treasure, then feeding them to his wyvern as sacrifice magic.
I can't tell if Mythe is upset or just so incredibly bored.
The wyvern boss is so incredibly easy. I defeated it in two turns each time.
After defeating the Wyvern, I got a magic tablet drop. This is actually the third for this adventure -- slimes dropped two on the way here.
On the way back out, we are unable to unlock a door that leads back into the torture chamber we found near the beginning of the adventure. From there, we were able to easily reach the castle's exit. Even though this third time through I pretty much went straight for the goal, I only had about 7 turns left... that's how tight the turn limit is.
And that's pretty much my biggest complaint about this adventure -- the turn limit is so terribly unbalanced. There's no way to explore all of this random stuff, much of which contains little lore elements and flavor text, without failing the adventure several times. There were even places I didn't even go during my three times through here.
In order to clear the adventure in time, you have to pretty much go STRAIGHT to where you're supposed to go with no exploring, no opening chests, etc. Battles should be avoided or completed quickly.
The solution is also fairly arbitrary and takes a lot of wandering around and guess-and-check to really figure out what you're supposed to do. Since you have to do everything in order and have little room for error, it's nearly impossible that you'll clear this your first time. Even though I've done it many times, I almost never get it on the first try because I don't remember perfectly enough to reproduce the successful run on the first try each new playthrough.
Other than that, though, it's a very fun adventure with a unique solution and a nice little self-contained story.
At the end of the adventure, because this is actually considered an 'easy' adventure, I got pretty bad panels. Mostly L3 when I need mostly L5 right now. I did get a L4 tablet, though, which went straight to Marie. It's mostly wood magic, which isn't bad, since Marie's wood level is one of her higher elemental levels.
Silver Girl did complete her triangle bonus of L4 familiars, which was nice, so her magic level is near 60 now.
Other than that, I don't think anyone got anything useful.
I fell asleep at the keyboard trying to finish this entry last night, and I'm not gonna bother proofreading it at this point, so I hope it makes sense!
Like many subadventures, we're investigating another rumor this time. Apparently, this castle has been abandoned for a couple years, and there's rumors of treasure hidden inside. But no one seems to return from the castle when they go try to find the treasure. So let's do it!!
But as soon as we go inside, we get trapped in by a cursed door... So we have to find out how to break the curse.
Inside, the castle is pretty big. There's a lot of treasure to be found lying around -- just regular treasure chests, not anything special. But regular treasure chests are still nice because we can get money XD
After walking forward into the grand hallway, we run across this... strange old man. You don't ever actually see him (as the player), so I think he's supposed to be invisible or something? Honestly it's not explained. Somehow you know he's an old man though? And it says that we keep hearing him, but can't see him, after you read this text.
The screen moves around to reveal more parts of the map. I think it's supposed to be like you're paying attention to where the guy run off to (even though we can't see him??? or can we???)
But yeah. I happened to walk straight to where this event occurs, but there are three different paths you can take from the beginning. It's quite likely if you took another path you might not run into this old man event for quite some time, and the turn limit here is only 150 turns. I think the programmers meant to type 1500 or something because this place is huge, and there's a lot to do here. And to progress, you have to do a bunch of stuff in a very specific order, and figuring out that order is going to take you a lot of turns.
Even though I've done this many, many times, I always forget something and end up failing this adventure once or twice each game...
When we start to follow the old man, we run across a diary on the ground. We pick it up and read it. It's kinda long. This guy ate some good shrimp, I guess.
Basically he talks about how a shady wizard came to visit the king and since then the king changed, and people have been disappearing from the castle. The king says he's been firing them, but the author of this diary seems to have suspicions that something else might be going on. Especially since he keeps hearing inhuman beast-like noises in the middle of the night.
He also notes a few times about how there's a picture that is changing or being removed from its frame (it's quite vague).
Near the end, he writes that it's nearing the 3rd anniversary of the queen's death, and the wizard finally left the castle for good, but the king seems to have changed.
At the end of the diary, the author is invited by the king to meet up in the night. He assumes that whatever bad thing has been happening to everyone is about to happen to him... or maybe the king is just horny and wants him. You know, could go either way.
Perhaps the wizard cursed the king, or maybe traded bodies with him, and is now using the king's body to do some evil stuff. And maybe now that he's killed off everyone in the castle, he's just playing around in it and spreading rumors there's treasure so he can have more fun killing the adventurers who come to check it out. Would explain why he's invisible and running around saying weird stuff. Doesn't explain the eating squishy rotten food though.
When we go into the basement where we saw (heard??) the old man run, we find a torture chamber that seems... delightfully colorful. There's a high level treasure chest here. Otherwise, this is not really much of an important area.
In another room in the basement, we find the remains of a man and some obsidian boots! I don't remember if these are always here but we're pretty much not going to find much better boots than this, and if we got lucky enough to find these in the shop, they'd be very expensive. So, Grace has some new shoes ;D
The body is called "possible remains of castle owner," but if you inspect it, you find that it's a soldier named Judas who was mentioned in the diary as one of the people who disappeared. You can choose to search the corpse, which will give you a key that unlocks a door just outside the stairs to return to the ground floor on the opposite end of the basement area. You can always just leave the way you came in, and it just puts you on the opposite side of the grand hallway, so it's not particularly useful. But if you happened to miss this key and went on to the other side, you'd be stuck once you got back upstairs.
You can choose to continue searching the body after you find the key, but it will just engage you in a fight with a skeleton. No real point in doing this, but there's a battle environment you don't get to see much of here (though you'll see it elsewhere in this adventure so it's not that special here lol)
Coming back up from the basement, Mythe says that maybe he went underground. We just came from underground, so I don't know why he says this. Depending on your main character, you'll get different little quotes like this throughout this adventure.
When we step near the large staircase leading up to the second floor, we run into the old man again. This won't happen unless you've seen the previous event and tried to follow him downstairs. And if you took one of the other two paths from the start, you'll probably reach this spot first...
This time the game shows him run into a side hallway and into a room aptly named "room old man entered." It's a kitchen. Inside, you smell rotting food, and hear squishy chewing noises and it's gross.
Mythe seems to already be annoyed. The old man says if you can catch him, he'll share the treasure with you, and runs off. When we try to chase after him, though, we trip over something and lose sight of him (so... we could see him? Also... did we all collectively trip at once? Was it some knid of cartoon thing where one person trips and then each person trips over the last person to trip in turn until it's a big pile of bodies?)
A recipe falls down from a shelf that we knocked into while tripping, though. We inspect it and it's literally a whole recipe for bouillabaisse. The end of the recipe, for some reason, explains how to get to the third floor, since it's usually locked. You know, don't want to keep the king waiting on his stew.
At this point there's no clear direction on where to go, so you can just wander around. Of course, go the wrong way and you'll run out of turns. I wanted to look around at some stuff, so we end up going the wrong way.
But here's a unique battle environment if you happen to go out into certain areas of the castle you don't ever have to go to! The battle camera is also fixed so you can see some unique looks at the battle animations. You're sadly also only limited to three characters in battle at a time.
Travelling around, we come to some towers...
One of the towers has some markings on the wall. Seems one knight was worried about the disappearance of another. These towers are also completely optional. At this point, just from my tiny little detour, I've pretty much ruined my chance of being able to clear the adventure successfully due to the really small turn limit.
But we return to the grand hallway anyway and take the large staircase up to the second floor. Up here, there are two gargoyle/statue things (the other is dragon-shaped!) which upon inspection, seem to have part of the engravings double as switches that we can press. Using the code we found in the kitchen, we press 2475 and the path to the third floor stairs unlocks.
Upstairs, we find the throne room where we encounter the old man, who still seems excited about something. He climbs onto the throne, which Mythe objects is not for him (lol wtf), and then the throne begins moving and descends into the floor!
Mythe seems annoyed at the "lame" trick and we're able to explore around some more. Around this time, I failed the adventure for the first time (which just boots you back to town -- though we were supposed to be locked in from the cursed door!). Returning, you at least get to keep your map of the castle, which is nice.
Here's the regular castle battle environment, btw. Grace x Pharr OTP
Also Grace glimmered a bow art called "Exorcist" which is REALLY powerful! I never use the Power Shot line much so I wasn't really familiar with this, but it's doing more damage than anything anyone can do right now, and sometimes even does 1 or 2 LP damage...! Usually power/HP-damage-focused moves are terrible at LP damage, but this seems pretty good at at least dealing one or two.
Searching around, we find some pictures like this one. There are two pictures lying around the third floor. One is a picture of a queen which reads that it takes you 'between sky and land,' and a jack picture that reads it takes you to the land.
In the throne room, there's a picture of a king. We can take that, too, and it says it takes us closest to the sky. Now the picture frame is empty. Inspecting it, we find we can put a picture in the frame.
After placing the queen picture, we hop onto the throne. What happens when you move to the throne is different depending on the picture, but basically this is just a one-way elevator, and which picture you place in the throne room will dictate which floor you'll move to when you sit on the throne.
When we sit on the throne with the queen picture in the frame, we're taken to the second floor. Here, there's a picture of a joker in a hidden room behind where the throne stops. My intent was to take the joker picture, but a battle occurred after seeing the picture, and when the battle ended, I forgot that I hadn't actually taken the Joker picture, so we just left this room without actually picking it up.
We can't ride the thronelevator from here -- it only activates from the throne room itself. But the door between the hidden room and the balcony where the statues are is now lifted, so it's a pretty quick trip back up to the third floor.
Upon reaching the throne again, I realize I don't have the joker picture and maybe I cried a little. So, instead we put the jack picture into the frame (after taking the queen picture out), and we rode the throne again which took us now to the first flor, in an area separate from what we've seen so far, which seems to be under/behind the large staircase at the end of the grand hallway.
There's a treasure chest here that is labeled "Don't Touch!"
Or apparently "Don't Open." The game doesn't seem to consider this a normal chest, because we can't use our skills like Sharpeye or whatever on it. It's just an object that happens to use the chest artwork.
But I mean... you knew this was coming right? We try to open the chest, which reveals it's a treasure slime.
Running around this area on the first floor you can find plenty of real treasures, though. But coming down here, we've already ruined our chance of being able to clear this adventure within the turn limit. So I just spend time gathering up treasures and stuff. I actually did try to clear the adventure, and actually beat the boss, but didn't have enough turns to make it back out of the castle.
So, third time is the charm, right? Catching back up to where we left off, this time we actually take the joker picture when we ride down to the second floor. Upon removing the joker from its frame, the door between the thronelevator and the statue balcony closes. The only way to open it again is to place either the joker picture or the king picture in the frame. The jack will not work in this case.
You'll always have the king picture since you have to remove it to place the queen picture to get here. So you can't get stuck here or something. Plus even if you could get here without the king picture, you could just put the joker picture back.
But we need the joker picture, so we take it with us after placing the king picture into the frame, and we head back to the third floor.
Placing the joker picture into the throne room frame, we're now able to access the basement with the thronelevator.
My first time here, I had 10 turns left before going down the hallway to the boss... You not only have to beat the boss (which can take several turns) but also escape from the castle before the turn limit ends...
If you explore the central room here, you'll find the resting place of the former queen. The king wrote that he intended to bring her back to life...
When we reach the end, we find an area called "big hole," where we run into the old man again. He reveals who he is -- he is the former king, who had gained necromancy powers from the wizard so he could try to resurrect his wife. But he needs many sacrifices, so after he used up all of his castle staff, he's been luring adventurers in with the promise of treasure, then feeding them to his wyvern as sacrifice magic.
I can't tell if Mythe is upset or just so incredibly bored.
The wyvern boss is so incredibly easy. I defeated it in two turns each time.
After defeating the Wyvern, I got a magic tablet drop. This is actually the third for this adventure -- slimes dropped two on the way here.
On the way back out, we are unable to unlock a door that leads back into the torture chamber we found near the beginning of the adventure. From there, we were able to easily reach the castle's exit. Even though this third time through I pretty much went straight for the goal, I only had about 7 turns left... that's how tight the turn limit is.
And that's pretty much my biggest complaint about this adventure -- the turn limit is so terribly unbalanced. There's no way to explore all of this random stuff, much of which contains little lore elements and flavor text, without failing the adventure several times. There were even places I didn't even go during my three times through here.
In order to clear the adventure in time, you have to pretty much go STRAIGHT to where you're supposed to go with no exploring, no opening chests, etc. Battles should be avoided or completed quickly.
The solution is also fairly arbitrary and takes a lot of wandering around and guess-and-check to really figure out what you're supposed to do. Since you have to do everything in order and have little room for error, it's nearly impossible that you'll clear this your first time. Even though I've done it many times, I almost never get it on the first try because I don't remember perfectly enough to reproduce the successful run on the first try each new playthrough.
Other than that, though, it's a very fun adventure with a unique solution and a nice little self-contained story.
At the end of the adventure, because this is actually considered an 'easy' adventure, I got pretty bad panels. Mostly L3 when I need mostly L5 right now. I did get a L4 tablet, though, which went straight to Marie. It's mostly wood magic, which isn't bad, since Marie's wood level is one of her higher elemental levels.
Silver Girl did complete her triangle bonus of L4 familiars, which was nice, so her magic level is near 60 now.
Other than that, I don't think anyone got anything useful.
I fell asleep at the keyboard trying to finish this entry last night, and I'm not gonna bother proofreading it at this point, so I hope it makes sense!