I took Wednesday night off to watch the VP debates, which were way more fun than any dumb game. Thursday, with the drop of Fall Guys Season 2, was already pretty full, but after embarrassing myself for awhile dodging swinging axes and spiky rollers, I thought it was about time to check in on the battling ogres.
Deneb is the Ogre Battle series’ answer to Final Fantasy’s Cid. She’s always going to show up somewhere. Rumor has it that she’s not even human — in reality she is an evil spirit that possesses young women, though she denies this.
Because she is evil, your task in Ogre Battle is to root her out and make her pay for your crimes. Or, if you just no longer care what people think of you, you could always… let her live… and then do her bidding. That would be crazy, though.
Of course, that’s exactly what I did do. After all, my reputation is so bad that people could hardly think worse of me. Plus, I have a secret weapon. I keep my hands clean. I let others do the dirty work.
My “Ali” — alignment — is maxed at 100. I am pure and blameless and above the messy work of killing. I am a melee character but I lead from behind. Bruno, the wizard next to me, is a terror to all he meets. His alignment is 2. The samurai in front of him? His alignment is 38. When it comes to the end game, I will toss these losers under the bus and surround myself with others of the elite and just bask in the roaring of the crowds.
Letting Deneb live did indeed lose me whatever shreds of reputation I once had.
Since I cleared Deneb’s Garden faster than I expected, I moved on to the Slums of Zenobia.
Zenobia was once the capital of the Empire, but it has fallen on hard times. It’s now considered a backwater, but it is still surrounded by impressive walls of wood, thick enough to withstand any army, but not high enough to stop a flying unit… or defeat a few magical termites, such as those given by a sympathetic monk in a hidden temple.
I was not able to expand as quickly as I wanted. I did send my top units to take nearby cities while I held on to our base. The manual suggests deploying all your units at once, rather than at need. There’s a logic to that; the lower level units need battle experience to become useful.
On this map, though, two units wait to join, so once I had recruited them, the field became a little full.
When I asked Lyon, a beast tamer, to join my army, he laughed and said he’d join, no problem — if I wanted to hand him 20,000 goth, the coin of the realm. When I silently dropped the sack of coins at his feet, he was struck speechless, then shrugged, gathered the coin and his whip, and headed out with us.
Ashe was imprisoned in a walled town at the edge of the map. He told us how the emperor exiled him to this backwater until he should happen to be killed or die of natural causes. I told him that the war was not done with him yet, and that the emperor must pay for his crimes. Ashe thought that maybe he could help with that, and warned us about General Debonair, the boss of the Slums. He would be no pushover.
After defeating all his armies, I set the termites I’d gotten from the monk free on the Zenobia city walls so that we could finish the map and move on.
But once those walls were down, Debonair sent all his armies out again. I didn’t know he could do that.
I was suddenly assaulted from all directions, and Debonair’s forces were sneaking around mine and taking cities I considered safe. Sure, after rescuing Deneb, my reputation was in the toilet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to improve eventually.
After Ashe had his talk with Debonair, I sent all my armies after him and he was… formidable. I expected him to defeat my weaker units, but I was hoping they would soften him up somewhat. If I killed his dragon guards with one army, then the next army would find them restored to full health. If I took down his hit points a little but didn’t immediately follow up with another army to keep the pressure going, he would be healing.
He took on my toughest units with a smile. I finally had to defeat him with tarot. It’s a cheap win, but it’s a win.
I hope he’ll forgive me the next time we meet.
With so many units now, and more to come, I’m needing to consolidate some. I can’t afford to bring them all out every map. Now that I have left the areas covered by the manual, I won’t know what’s coming… unless I use GameFaqs, which, of course, I will. Let’s keep up with the fiction that I have no idea what’s coming up and that I send the right person to talk to the right enemy at the right time just by chance, shall we?
The manual says the next area is Island Avalon. And I have no idea what I’ll be facing there.
