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'!