What do you do with a hero with three balls?

Walk him and pitch to the fairy.

When I looked at the screen shot for the Vault of Tears, I noticed that there was a strong frog theme in all the sculpture but the big naga in the centre. Kind of weird for a snake themed dungeon. But then i figured out why they are there shortly after entering the room with tsaid statue... 

Frogged! (also still colour coordinated!)

The stone naga casts Toad on the party and turns them all into frogs. This isn't as big a set back as you might figure, since all it does it stops Oliver from using magic and blocks off a couple areas with fast moving water. They can still summon familiars in a fight, use items, and even can swim across pools of standing water. Also, after following a rainbow frog, they quickly find a magic circle that changes them back. There's even one of the magic circles at the entrance, so you can't leave as a frog, but the party doesn't even remark on having the curse suddenly lifted that way (the stature just curses you again on returning).

If Oliver was a frog from the start, his mom would still be alive. Oh well, back to human.

The rainbow frog then leads them to a frog man locked in a jail cell. On freeing him, Esther recognises him from an old fairy tale about a price who turned himself into a frog so that the evil naga that was attacking the land would eat him and he could kill the naga from the inside (that old tale). But then it turns out the potion he used to turn into a frog was permanent, and also made him immortal (not bad deal). He was so upset that he was now forggish, he left his princess and just hung out in the Vault of Tears for a millennium. Then recently some one brought the naga back to life (the evil wizard finally did something), and he was locked in the cell.

  

Looks like they're mixing up their Disney princes.

So now it's off to explore the temple. It's not as large as the ice caves, and it's much more centred around puzzles than combat. There's only a few monsters around, mostly snake or lizard based, but there was one that stood out for two particular reasons...

Snake tits! (alternative title of this post)

Well, what ever floats the naga's boat I guess. Although, I would have more figured he would be an asp man. 

After solving a couple of simple puzzles, it was time to take on the naga guarding the magic stone! It was a pretty strait forward fight, since the naga mostly used physical attacks and not much ranged or stat affecting stuff. Half way through the fight Drippy suggested using speed down spells on it so it wouldn't attack as quick, which only worked about a third of the time. 

Worst Indiana Jones impression ever!

After a constant beat down, the snake man finally had too much and poofed out of existence, dropping the magic stone we were after!  

That's two down!

As a bonus the fog prince returned to human form (there goes immortality), and the rainbow frog that helped us turned out to be his princess (who took the same frog potion). Apparently they never spoke to each other after a thousand years hanging out in that temple. Also she didn't seem to mind at all that he left her and his kingdom due to his own vanity. In the end nothing was learned and nobody chnaged. Yay? 

Better not come back in Ni No Kuni 2!

So just that ghost ship remaining! Since the first dungeon was combat oriented, and the second was puzzles, I figured that this one would rely a lot on magic (still have about a dozen spells I never used). So I got on my own ship and headed out to where it was, figuring that i would get to the first save point in the ship and call it quits for the night. But the game had other plans...

As soon as my ship made contact with the ghost ship, which was clarified as a ghost galleon (due to the wall of canons on the side), there was a cut scene and some freaky zombie steam-punk cyborg pirate attacked!

Umm, cool?

It was more or less just a mid boss and the party stomped him without much effort. After that the captain of the ghost ship shows up in another cut scene. I was figuring that now the party will be captured and we would have to fight through the ghost ship to escape. Nope again! The captain just straight up attacked!

This world doesn't even have 7 seas! It's all open oceans

The captain wasn't much more of a challenge than the last fight and the party stomped him in no time. As he was poofing way I was still hoping to get to raid the ghost ship to find the stone, but nope!

Two weak bosses to get this thing?! The bad guys are not even trying any more!

I get the feeling that I wound up doing this in the wrong order. I was meant to start off with the short ghost fights, then the medium puzzle temple, and work my way up to the big ice cave. The way i did it was all down hill. 

After all the ghost pirates fade away, having been bested in glorious combat, the game cuts to another session with the characters barely in the plot. The counsel member that helped Oliver with the time stuff questions the evil wizard's loyalty. I guess he's feeling out if the wizard could be used for good, but covers it as checking if he's loyal to the cause of doing big evil stuff for reasons. The wizard also dosen't seem to trust the council member much either.

Can't bee all that forbidden if people keep casting it! 

So back with the party, they finally notice that each one of the stones are bigger than the wand they are meant to go in. Not the most observant lot here. So they figured they should check in with the sage emperor prince (aka Swaine's brother) to see if he knows how to get big balls into little holes. 

The way this story works, the place has likely gone to shit the moment you left...

The gambling of Oliver

Ok, off again! Now to find the next magic stone to recharge the wand's battery. Following the map marker, I came across this really freaky and evil looking town/castle. there didn't seem to be any way to  reach it, so it's likely something much later.

Betting this place is run by cute puppy people.

But the marker was actually past the cost of that weird location, and it was moving. Turns out that the next power stone is located in some kind of ghost ship. But there was no way for my wyvern to land on it, so i'll have to come back later and try hitting it with my boat.

Now where did i park that ship?

With that a bust, i statted flying to the third marker, and along the way I came across this neat looking Mayan/Aztec tempel/town at the top of a mountain. but once again there was no way to get in, since the bouncer of the place won't even let you get up the first set of stairs.

Yeah, well, I didn't want to come in any ways!

Since I was in the neighbourhood, I decided to check out that undead casino that finally opened up on Tombstone Trail.

It's pretty lively for a crypt

It was the typical video game casino, with prizes that could be won with enough casino points. The two top prizes were familiars, which were really high priced at 99,999 and 25,000 chips. The chips in the casino were not cheap either, with 10 gold per chip and you needed 5 chips for the lowest bet. So the top prize was the equivalent of 1 million gold! it better be good! So i cashed in all the gold i had and started playing!

First off was black jack, which I made the vast majority of my chips on. Standard rules, with a payout of 3 times your bet (4 times in the case of blackjack), with the bonus that you could bet your winnings on the next hand and triple that too. After a while I got into the pattern of making 100 chip bets (the highest you can go) and going until i won at least 3 in a row before cashing out. With this strategy each 3 win streak gave me 27 tries to get another 3 wins, even with the low odds of winning (about 40% chance). Also, the witch that runs the table cheats! Nearly every hand, her covered cared was a 10 or 11 value, so if she showed a 7 it was very safe to assume she had at least 17. At one point she beat my 21 with her own 21 twice in a row!

Doesn't happen often my ass!

After grinding away for about 600 hands, I finally had all the chips i needed for the prizes. Since i was swimming in them, I tried the slot machines for a while too. They were pretty simple and had a starting rate of 10 chips, but that at least gave access to all 3 rows and diagonals. One neat plus was that randomly there would be a chance to win powers ups/downs that could raise or lower the slot speed, the bonus round rate, or even give/take chips. After 306 spins of the max bet of 90 chips, I got the jackpot, which was visually under whelming and mostly just won back what I bet.

  

woo~

The last game I tried was some weird thing that was more a strategy card game called Platoon, with a fixed entry fee of 100 chips. You take 10 cards and put them into 5 groups (can be a group of 1 if you want) and try to have a higher total than the dealer's group, win the majority of the groups and you win the match. The twist is that a king wins the hand automatically (unless facing an ace), an ace lose the hand automatically (unless faced with a king), and a joker swaps the dealer and players hands.

It's a really slow game to play through, so I didn't spend much time on it.

At least she plays fair!

Cashing out my large fortune of chips (wish i could get god back for them), I got the two familiar tokens, now to find what to do with them. The game has so far given no indication where they could be redeemed, and I've been dragging around one of these things since the start of the game because it was a day one bonus. Looking it up on line, it turns out that I have to talk to the sage at the temple of trails. When i got to the temple, it was a lot more crowded than the last time i was there. Apparently they are having a pokemon championship of sorts, but I'm not here for that!

All the NPCs!

First off I cashed in my day one bonus familiar, which was a silly looking red dragon. It has scrawny arms that look like a plucked chicken wing, so I named it Chick Wing (due to limited characters).

Some dragon has been skipping arm day

Then it was time to check out what I won from the casino. The grand prize, Tin Man, was actually a gold robot that reminded me of the Gold Golem from the Dragon Quest games, so I named it Golem. The second prize, Idler, turned out to be this weird dino person with a -_- emoji head and a stick. I named it Wat, because wat?

You two better be worth the 1.25 million gold!

Of course they start at level 1, so I added all three of them to the back of my party so they can slowly gain XP. With that silly distraction out of the way, it's time to find that last stone location! Turns out that it's the very same temple that i spotted at the start of the  January 23 post, So i finally get to go in. The temple has the epic name of "The Vault of Tears: Cursed Crypt of the Cobra King", which i'll be delving into next time!

Looks really cool!

Snow dog

Ok, enough grinding, time to make some progress! By progress i mean running like crazy from every other monster since I still can't survive more than 2 battles in a row. 

After a few tries  managed to get to the second area of the ice caves, which were thankfully lighter on monsters. There the group cam across a weird hologram image of the sage that's the soul link of Oliver's mom talking to Swaine's father, so it had to have been from at least 15 years ago. There's no explanation give how this vision is there or why, i'll just go with because magic, and it pretty much only shows that they knew each other (which makes sense since they were both sages).

It's just a show, you should really just relax

While running around and fleeing from more monsters, I cam across yet another broken robot. these things are everywhere! 

Warranty is likely expired by now.

Finlly I get to another save point, and this one is a short jog from a big round open area. Looks like I found the boss battle, time to see if all the grinding was enough!

Gee, I wonder what could possibly be in this big open- oh hi dogie.

Since it's an ice wolf with ice attacks in the ice cave, I figured it was safe to stick with the fire attacks. Half way through the battle Drippy pots up to give the oh so helpful advice to try fire...

That's what I've been doing!

After burning through all my HP and MP restoring items, I some how manage to beat down the pooch with only a small bit of health remaining. After the fight, the boss coughs up a black flaming ball that turns out to be one of the stones we need. Kinda odd that the stone for ice powers is yellow though.

Ewww.. good thing they're wearing gloves already.

The boss then explains that it was driven mad from holding on to the power of the stone for too long, which rendered the whole thing of the evil wizard controlling the beasts pointless. Where was he during all of this?

Cool, a talking ice dog!

He then explains that due to how well we fought him, he can tell that the group are good guys and worth of having the stone. The same stone that drove him mad, nice move there dogie. Drippy even calls out how silly the trope of "you beat me, you must be worthy" is, but the boss just says that he's a magic talking ice wolf, so shut up.

He's got a point.

So next time it's off to another stone location. I hope that since all the spots open at once they can be taken in any order, so the grinding i did here should help carry me in the next dungeon.

Grinding ice...

Well, the ice cave is a lot stronger than I anticipated. I guess the game figured i would back track and go exploring before getting here, so I would be more levelled than I am. Currently I can barely beat the first monster of the dungeon before i'm almost out of HP/MP. So this is basically how I spent this session:

1. Start at the save point

2. Fight first monster

3. Beat first monster for XP (if killed go back to 1)

4. Restore HP/MP and save

And repeat that for an hour and a half...

Stone Cold

After another frustrating gap in posting i'm back again at it. My goal is to get Ni No Kuni done before my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild arrives (and hopefully my Switch at the same time). Since one of the previous stumbling blocks was that it took me more time to write up these blogs than it did to play the game, I decided to make these posts much more concise and limit myself to about 10 pictures. So off we go on the next step of the adventure!

Following the map, the party finds that the "Sky Pirates" are currently landlocked inside a mountain, and for pirates they are a pretty reasonable group.

At least the mountain is in the shape of a skull...

After bumping into the pirates, the group explains their story and the captain tests them by having them fight a giant dragon. Drippy offers that we should use poison on it, but none of out crew has poison abilities, so we have to brute force it.

By bye dragon!

Impressing the Captain of the pirates, he offers to show Oliver and crew the map to the magic stones, but the catch is that there's no way to get there by boat and the pirate's airship is too large. Only way to reach it is by Wyvern (which the only correctly refer to once, the rest of the time mislabelling it as a dragon), but the pirate's Wyvern is not feeling well. It's once again a case of some one in the fantasy world being tired to a troubled person in the real world, but before that it's time to check back with the White witch.

The council is all annoyed that Oliver got the wand despite it being impossible to get to in their time, but then it's brought up that the wand is useless with out the magic stones. To add to it, the stones are guarded by three monsters, and the council put the monsters in the control of the evil wizard dude (since he's performed so well so far...). It seems kind of pointless though, since the monsters are there to guard the stones already, what would having the wizard in charge of them change? It's almost like a badly dubbed TV show where they need to make up a reason why the big bad is involved in the plot where they were never originally.

Well he says a lot of things...

So popping over the the real world, Oliver soon finds that the soul link of the pirate captain is a bulldog, and the dog's owner is the soul link of the Wyvern. the game doesn't waste much more time with introductions, since as soon as he opens the door the nightmare fight starts. This fight was a pain in the ass since non of the part members would block before it's big attack, so they quickly wound up dying. so after wasting a bunch of money to revive, i finally managed to beat it down.

My nightmare too...

After that there's still a matter of the guy missing some of his heart, and the part he's missing was confidence. A quick hop back to the pirate captain and we have all the confidence we need to get him right as rain again. 

An odd thing when going to leave town was that Pea showed up again, and it turns out that people in the real world can see her, yet the ones from the fantasy ream can't. She warns Oliver that the three guardians of the stones have been awaken, in the most vague and confusing way she can, and that he needs to watch out. 

Watch out for being boned by the slithery doggy style, got it!

Back at the fantasy world the Wyvern is all better now and ready to fly Olive anywhere he wants in the world, fully opening up the map finally. 

Now only we could bring this into battle...

So first stop is where the big X on the map was, and weirdly enough it's that island with the tomb stone that I ponied out at the top of my post on the 4th. Down side is that the tombstone just says that the stones are not there and the secret is in the map.

Not even a "Here Lies Erdrick"

So it's the long flight back to the pirates to take a better look at the map (I likely could have teleported, but the flying is neat). After trying a few spells on the map, Oliver unlocks the real locations of the stones, scatted across three points on the map. I decide to go for the one in the artic first since it's closer, but when i get to the spot, a big yeti-like creature says I need the ok of the local town chief. So it's now off to this small town!

A.K.A. Upper Canada

The group meet an archaeologist cat lady, who has apparently been following Oliver's exploits in the news, and she gives them a bit of an info dump on the wand's history and says that the chief will be back the next day. So the group goes to the local inn and spends the night there. and of course Oliver has another odd dream. This one is off the sage that's the soul link of his mother doing battle (badly) with the nasty wizard dude. An interesting point is that he doesn't seal her body away in an orb (as illustrated at the start), but just her heart. This adds to my theory that the White witch is the corrupted sage (hence the mask).

You really should have planed this attack better...

Back in the waking world, the group talks to the chief and not only does he give the ok to enter the cave where the stone is held, but also new winter outfits (previously they were shivering everywhere).

And still colour coded!

So with the ok of the chief and the right clothes to ware, it's off to the frozen cave, complete the dungeon there, and kill whatever boss is at the end. But that's all for next time.

They better play some version of  'In the Hall of the Mountain King'!

Long time coming

As expected, there was a boss fight right around the corner, but i was not expecting the boss to the a jacked up version of Chandelure. 

Must be the mega form

The fight is pretty standard, with the only twists is that it would often attack with a bline or curse all spells. Part way through Drippy pops out to suggest using the light arrow spell, which is what I was doing already.  Even with the light spell, which only did about 5% damage, it still took ages to wear it down. 

I wouldn't normally considered a haunted light fixture as 'dark'

After the battle, there's a cut scene where the boss gets back up again, but Marcassin goes full super saiyan and one shots it. Apparently he's just totally over the whole thing of holding back his powers not to be a sage and separated from Gascon. No real lead up to it or anything either, maybe he finally noticed that Gascon is kind of an ass.

"Yeah, I've been totally OP the whole time, lol"

as a bonus, during the fight, all by his AI self, Swaine managed to steal a sweet robe item for one of his familiars.

Score!

Now finally Oliver can get the Monstar wand and get this adventure back on track. The want itself looks like a mini version of the staffs that the White Witch's counsel have, particularly the yellow, blue, and red balls at the top.

  

The Monstar wand of legend! Gives +5 more magic attach then current wand...

Doesn't take long to see the comparison, since a hologram of one of the counsel members (the one eavesdropping) emerges from the wand. He confirms my theory that he was the one that sent them back in time to get the wand since it's unavailable in the present, and tells them to hurry back.

"Help me Oliver, you're my only hope!"

We also get the Breach Time spell to go back, which is one time use by design. 

When this spell hits 88mph...

But the most important part of getting the uber powerful Monstar wand, is finally being able to unlock all those purple chests that were too strong for my old wands. There just so happens to be one along Tombstone trail, so lets check it out...

Crap!

I guess the batteries in this thing needs replacing, it has been left unused for a long time.

Back on the storyline, Gascon must have figured that since his brother had a out of nowhere change of character, he needs to also. On the way back to the castle he decides that he sucks too much to be around his super cool sage emperor brother, so he is going to set out into the world and make himself into his own man. Before leaving, he promises that he'll always come back to Marcassin when he needs him. Since we know that he winds up being the broken hearted deadbeat thief Swaine in 15 years, it's not the best of carrier moves.

Yeah... good luck with that.

With both his sons quickly having personality shifts to line up with the future (since nothing can happen off screen), the emperor figured it's his time to die and picks a fight with the evil wizard dude. the party shows up just in time to miss the fight but catch the emperor's dying moments. He says that he knew Swaine was Gascon the whole time and that he has faith that the prices will save the future. Which they do eventually, after fucking around for 15 years and going to lives of crime and pig masks. 

"It was rather obvious really, like, from your first line to me."

A couple days later, i guess for the off screen funeral, Marcassin in now emperor and full of belief in the future and his brother. So Oliver takes some of that to give to the Marcassin in the future lacking belief. Then they cast the spell to send them back to the future!

No creepy mist this time

Back in the present, Oliver gives current Marcassin his own belief and Swaine reveals to him that he's his brother.  

I have a half formed theory that the piece of belief that Marcassin was lacking in the present is the one that Olive took from the past, so he's responsible for all the hardships that happened in between. Although i doubt this game would go that far

Meanwhile, the White witch is suspecting that Oliver is getting help and plays the pronoun game as to who it is (though earlier said straight out that it's the king that made the Monstar wand). She then starts to tell the council why she's not worried... and it cuts off right as she's about to. 

This thing is playing out like a TV series...

Back with the main characters, Marcassin informs the group that the wand actually does need new batteries, or more accurately it need 3 stones that power it. And so flags the next step in this wild chase, hunting down the sky pirate king that has a map that says where the stones are.

Vyse is the only true king of the sky pirates!

Oliver also gets a wack more spells, the only really useful one is Travel, which lets him travel to any major point he's been before. no more tedious backtracking across the desert!

That's a lot of spells, and I sill haven't even used most of the ones i got from Drippy's mom!

After that I tooled around a bit doing side quests like:

Fighting a couple of bounties.

Forging a new gun for Swaine

Catching a new familiar for a quest

And finally got to see Drippy's 'Tidy tears' power, which heals the party randomly.

 Now with the Travel spell making things much quicker, it's off to explore the world for the sky pirate king! 

World just got even smaller.