I've chipped away a little bit at Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. But most of my free time has been spent with Dragon Quest III, both the Super Famicom and Game Boy versions.
I finally beat Shin-Ryu several days ago. Once my sage was levelled up to normal endgame levels I was able to do it with her and my hero, fighter, and soldier. My soldier spammed the sage's stone while my sage buffed and my other two attacked, with an occasional supplemental sage stone from my fighter. It went surprisingly well. However, when I finished the fight, somewhere over 40 turns, I was chided by the boss on how long it took me. I realized soon after that the boss sets a target turn time of 35 turns to beat.
I thought I could beat that with a refinement of my strategy and my existing characters, but I did a little more levelling anyway before coming back. Last night, it took me longer than I intended. I had a few bad luck runs against the boss and even more mishaps on the way to it. But I finally won again, this time in 25 turns.
Well, when you beat it, you can choose between 3 wishes. On of them, to my surprise, adds a brief new story element to the game, which is the one I picked. I have learned, however, that if you want to choose a second wish, you have to beat the fight even faster. Fortunately, the threshold for the second wish is 25 turns, which I already know I can hit (but even if you meet that threshold before making a wish, you only get one wish per fight). Apparently the third wish takes a higher threshold of 15 turns, which I really wasn't sure I could hit with my current party and strategy.
But I've been both analyzing and researching the fight this morning, and I think it's doable with my current party and a little luck, bolstered by some targeted seeding. I was originally just going to focus my efforts on grinding my party to level 99, but now I'm detoured from that while I try to beat Shin-Ryu in the target time, which I think I can do much sooner.
Meanwhile, while I'm out and about, I've been replaying the GBC version. When I was doing all three together some time back, my GBC cart basically died. Someone looked at it and said something was wrong with one of the chips and the repair would be more expensive than a replacement. So I wasn't able to finish that file. I decided to start over. Actually, it was starting the GBC one that inspired me to finish my SFC file, rather than the other way around.
After working to fill out the enemy list on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I was thinking about the in-game bestiaries for the Dragon Quest games, which all remain unfinished on my game files. Dragon Quest III for the GBC, as near as I can tell, is the first Dragon Quest game that features any kind of bestiary. It doesn't technically have one by design, but the monster medal list still basically functions as one. So I thought I'd fill it out by collecting the monster medals.
My thought is to try and collect one of each non-boss before finishing the game normally. I've now made it up to Dharma and have all the medals up to there, excluding the ones in Kandar's cave. I managed to get a medal by chance for the first Kandar fight (I don't know if he has two medals or not) but not his henchmen.
I decided to get myself the whistle ability before getting the monsters in the cave, since the encounter rate there is quite low. As it turns out, I had my thief and jester characters learn Whistle and MapMagic at about the same time, so I've taken a brief break to make sure I have all the treasures up to this point as well. I've been playing with a thief to that end, but now that she has the ability I'll take her out of the party for normal fights. I learned online that any successful steal from a thief negates the chance of getting a medal, so from here on out I'll keep her in Aliahan during medal hunting sessions.
Every day I'm thinking of the replays of Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI that are in my queue, but not quite there yet. I've also booted up Dragon Quest IX, where I finally got a Silver Orb from Baramos, and, consequently, a Sage's Stone. Progressing on the postgame on DQIII also makes me want to revisit VIII's postgame and try again to unlock VII's. It's too much. I'm on the verge of overwhelming myself with thoughts of these games, but I'm relishing my actual play time when it finally comes time every day.
I guess it means I have stuff to look forward to in the coming months.
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