When it comes to video games, I have to admit I’m somewhat of a perfectionist. I want that 100% clear file, I want the super powered weapon and I want the character that’s so good they literally break the game. Unfortunately, when re-playing these games I haven’t played in ten plus years I forget things. Small things. Small things that make it impossible/hard to get what I want later in time. There are many famous examples of games that can put one over on you in this fashion, but there is no genre guiltier than the RPG.
My most recent experience in trying to obtain some forbidden fruit brings us to Wild Arms on the original PlayStation. One of the game’s better kept secrets is the existence of the Necronomicon, Cecilia’s best magic book. A drop from the Necronomics that inhabit De Le Metallica, this accessory raises a character’s sorcery by two hundred and seventy points - a significant leap over the Elder Scroll, the next best book. But why is Cecilia’s sorcery rating so crucial? The higher this score is when a spell is cast the more powerful it becomes. While making ones offensive spells stronger would seem like an obvious win-win, this isn’t the real allure of a high sorcery score. No, the real allure is putting that number behind restorative a spell like Remedy.
So, to ask another question, what’s so special about Remedy? Remedy (12MP) is the only healing spell that heals all three characters of your team simultaneously. This becomes insanely important in the game’s optional battles if you intend to take the high road and not cheese your way through these fights with Goat Dolls, an easily purchasable auto-revive accessory. A majority of these bosses smite your party with attacks that easily do two thousand points of damage. Others attacks like Lucifer’s “Beam Fencer,” Angol Moa’s “The 7th Moon,” and “Boomerang Flash’s “Shadow Boomerang Maximum” do upwards of three thousand. Faced with such attacks, you can see how you might want a more than reliable recovery option to back up Cecilia’s force-fueled Mystic ability.
Unfortunately, getting the Necronomicon was a lot more involved than I remembered, or rather getting the Necronomicon the “sane way” was a lot more involved than I remembered. Yes, you can wait for a defeated Necronomic to drop the book, but you may end up being there for hours waiting for the drop – it’s that rare. The quicker way of getting the book is to get the killing blow on a Necronomic with the Lucky Shot spell. As simple as that might sound, it’s not. Lucky Shot requires a significant amount of sorcery to inflict any damage at all! You can’t really score a killing blow when your blow does zero damage, can you? Adding to this misery was the fact I didn’t have usually worthless Banish spell on hand, a spell that can lower an enemy’s magical resistance and could have *possibly* allowed Lucky Shot to do some damage. Hell, by employing Jack’s Divide Shot (a Fast Draw that halves an enemy’s HP) even one measly point of damage would have been enough to kill the Necronomic and gotten me the book.
At this point you may ask why I just didn’t wait until later to do all this when my characters were more powerful. That’s a legitimate question, but one has to realize that like a few other dungeons in Wild Arms, De Le Metallica is a one-shot dungeon, and I lacked the foresight not to save in it. I was stuck if I wanted that blasted Necronomicon. Anyways, long story short, after about three to four hours worth of fighting, five level-ups and twelve Mystic Apples (Item: +1 to sorcery) later I got my sorcery score up to three hundred fifteen which was enough to make Lucky Shot do seventeen points of damage, more than enough to kill a Necronomic that had been battered with constant Divide Shots.
Still, even worse than forgetting all the in-and-outs of getting this accessory is when I got screwed over when it came to getting Opera Vectra in Star Ocean: Second Evolution on the PSP. To anyone’s that’s played either version of Star Ocean: The Second Story, you know how awesome Opera and her Alpha on One attack really are. Seriously, passing on Ashton in exchange for Opera is almost a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, as expected, there’s a rather long list of theatrics one must do to even meet Opera, and there are more than a few ways to screw this up. So how did I screw this up? Well, I wanted every possible treasure I could possibly find and this included the chests in the usually inaccessible Dragon’s Den portion of Salva Drift.
So I played the game until I got to Herlie where you first hear the rumor about the dragon in Salva. Back in Salva, I went to the aforementioned section of the drift and started to follow Ashton grabbing that “all important treasure” along the way. Having grabbed the last chest, I backed out of the mine and continued the game as normal up until the conclusion of the Lacour Tournament of Arms. Finally able to leave Lacour and all the other prerequisite work earlier in the game, I went back to the pub in Herlie expecting to see Opera. Bad news was I didn’t. Turns out because I didn’t finish following Ashton through the mine and refuse to take responsibility for his “condition,” the sidequest to get Ashton was still technically open and threw everything out of whack. It was way too late to go back and complete it in the correct manner and trigger her appearance. Just like that ten hours of game play - which included several hours of power leveling in the Lasguss Mountains to work on getting the skills and money to fuel the pick pocketing specially before the destruction of Clik – went up in smoke because of a silly little mistake. Don’t even get me started on how many hours I spent opening the “Treasure Box” just to get the Marvel Sword.
Anyway, I guess the whole point of this is that there is a seemingly endless amount of ways to screw up a video game, but there seems to be an infinite amount of ways to screw up in an RPG. This especially holds true considering the commitment that’s required to complete them and how hard it is for me to dump twenty plus hours into any gaming experience. In the case of Star Ocean it could have been worse; I could have screwed up something twenty or even thirty hours in. On second thought, I don’t even want to think about that….
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