[Click here to start from the first progress log]

This is where we bid adieu to Powerful Anime Jeff. In case you don’t remember, he’s the random Royal Brat Baddie underling who attacked Polka and Fauxpin in the forest “for the lulz.” Sadly, he hasn’t been forced to go through a bunch of mandatory fights like the party has, so the beatdown that results in his death is truly profound. I did stumble across an optional fight that gave me my first game over, though. Even that fight wasn’t very hard once I prepared a better array of items to bring along and bunched enemies together to damage them all at once, but it was still enough of a difficulty spike that everyone gained three levels afterward. Putting this fight out in the open where players are bound to randomly stumble on it wasn’t great design.

Taking a long time to do very little

The captain who picked Polka’s party up (I think his name is Crescendo, because of course it would be) turns out to be the prince of Baroque, Royal Brat Baddie’s rival nation. Since the king has a serious illness that he’s seeking treatment for and the queen went along with him, the prince is currently in charge of the nation’s affairs. The only other thing learned in the nearly hour-long video above is that the prince’s fiancee is named Serenade, and she opposes Baroque helping the Andantino rebels. She has enough sway over the prince that he asks the party to find rebel leader Jazz and explain that the nation of Baroque can’t offer them its support any longer for fear of sparking a larger conflict. Other than that, the video consists of running around the castle and city talking to people while looking for hidden score pieces. They’re always placed obnoxiously enough that you have to run around hugging walls while mashing A to find them, and I’m confident that I’ve missed several of them already if the constant F-rank performances are any indication.

One thing of note, however, is how I sold Beat’s pictures of the pirate captain for 210,301 gold. That means that he doesn’t have to sit out of combat taking pictures again for awhile. We don’t need the money because there’s nothing left to buy.

Faffing about on a mountain

Everyone decides to head back to Forte, figuring that Jazz probably survived and that they’ll maybe-probably-possibly find him somewhere. It’s not a great plan, and it requires climbing a snowy mountain and then descending into a volcano. There’s nothing wrong with the mountain area and it’s decent enough, but the volcano offers no sense of which direction is forward, meaning you never know if you’re making progress or engaged in a long diversion bound to culminate in an underwhelming treasure box. Anyway, I tried using Salsa here, but for some reason she couldn’t move. There was a “locked foot” icon under her portrait in combat, but I have no idea what the issue is. This is the first time I’ve ever used her. That means she’s never had a status effect inflicted on her or anything. Also, you can’t use status-fixing items outside of combat, so it seems unlikely that getting into combat and using one would fix the problem. Eventually I gave up and swapped Fauxpin back in. He’s useless, but at least he can run around and raise the combo counter by landing blows.

Oh, and Serenade is a spy (21:18). It was kind of obvious because she had distinctly Claves-esque expressions, but still, not quite as obvious as last time. In fact, I wouldn’t have mentioned it here if the game hadn’t addressed it so quickly. It’s pretty cynical how 100% of the relationships in this game thus far are the result of spycraft.

At 51:30, I find a save point and run forward a bit. At least, I thought it was forward; after some annoying jumps where enemies on a cycle kept popping up and initiating combat, I fought an enemy and found something on the ground. After looking at it, the pirates from the last progress log showed up and wanted revenge. The fight wasn’t too bad, but they kept healing, and the generic pirates have an attack that can nuke 90% of a character’s life bar (when full). Not focusing on taking them out early came back to bite me, as did bringing a bunch of not-very-useful items. You can only bring a certain number of items, with the strong ones using more space, and to this point I’ve been content to ignore items in combat almost entirely.

I equipped some better items and focused on building the combo up before using Beat’s rapid shooter attack to inflict something like 40,000 points of damage, and the fight went much more favorably. Then it dawned on me that this wasn’t the way forward at all, and that I had to go in the other direction from the save point. It turns out that the other direction leads out into Agogo Forest, where the party reunites with Salsa’s sister March before Powerful Anime Jeff shows up and is quickly murdered by the characters he wronged. It’s also revealed that the agogos only glow around Polka because Eternal Sonata has apparently decided to push this weird “magical chosen one” thing onto her. I think this is hinted at in a flashback in the last video shortly before Royal Brat Baddie’s scene where he talks about Serenade being a spy, but who the hell knows if that’s related or a totally different bit of random magic.

The spy who killed Claves is hiding nearby and realizes that Polka is the key to the glowing agogos Royal Brat Baddie needs, so she runs off to tell him about her discovery. Then everyone decides to go off in different directions back to their respective homes for a bit and meet up later, at which point the scene switches to the prince of Baroque. Remember how Claves sent a message right before she croaked? Well, that message was that Serenade is a spy, so the prince now knows that. The video closes out with a bunch of different characters wandering around. Falsetto is upset because Claves dying somehow makes it harder for her to get with Jazz (this isn’t built up to; Falsetto just wants him suddenly because the plot demands it), Beat and Fauxpin meet back up with Allegretto at their hideout, and Jazz shows up in Baroque to find a new girlfriend. Or maybe something else.

[Click here to go to Eternal Sonata log #7]

The post Eternal Sonata: Progress Log #8 appeared first on Killa Penguin.