Aunas's Abyss Gate
Apr. 7th, 2017 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marchionessofmustacheLast time, we journeyed into the Devil Emperor's Palace to look for one of the Abyss Gates, only to find a sealed door that we can't enter for now. But with a teleportation seal that will lead us right back, our journey was not in vain, and now we're going to head out to find another Abyss Gate.
If you remember what we learned from Johannes and Anna, Aunas's Abyss Gate is located somewhere in the southern jungles.
The only way to get to the jungle is from the tropical town of Ake, by leaving the town on the south. The jungle is not a place you want to wander into by accident. I remember my first time running into the jungle, it took me almost two hours to get out.
The jungle functions as a classic "confusing forest" type of area. Each section of the jungle has many exits, but the exits don't seem to make any kind of logical sense, essentially "transporting" you to random other jungle sections, to give you a sense of being lost.
And you will certainly feel lost! What's scary about the jungle is there's no clear way to get back once you're lost. If you come in and go straight back out the way you came in, you'll be back in Ake, but if you venture to any of the other exits from the initial jungle area, you could be in here for a while.
And the jungle is home to some nasty baddies. Here, a Dobby is being guarded by an armored bug. A Dobby on its own is not too terrible, but given space, it can really dish out a lot of damage. Not all enemies can attack well from the back row, but Dobby being an archer goblin, not only can, but can very well. He can hit the entire party with arrows at once, or focus a bunch of arrows at one character, even able to sometimes one-shot a member of the party. Herman can try to paralyze Dobby with Shadow Sew, but the best solution is to try to take out the armored bug as fast as possible, which means using a lot of costly weapon arts.
Too bad we don't have UNLIMITED:Saga's Missile Guard magic art!
And Dobby isn't the only threat to the party in the jungle. There are tons of strong enemies in here, and since we have no way to get out and rest easily, we have to conserve our LP (especially Herman's). But in the same vein, we also have to conserve our WP and JP! So it's a bit scary. We do have some potions and ethers to recover a bit, but it's not something we can rely heavily on.
But by a stroke of pure luck, after only a couple of screens, I happened to run into this building.
There are actually two "solutions" to the jungle -- one is to just wander until you find this place on accident, or the other is to just wander until you find a different place where you can learn a way to successfully navigate the jungle without trouble.
So I guess the "proper" solution will have to wait for another play diary. We'll actually be required to go there in Sara's scenario (not because the game requires it, but because of something I want to do in her scenario) so we'll definitely get to it eventually.
Once you arrive at this place, though, you can exit and you'll be taken to the world map, rather than back into the jungle. And after discovering it, you can travel there from the world map without having to go back into the jungle again.
Apparently we've found some kind of fire magic palace. Seems like a place there might be an Abyss Gate to seal...
Entering the palace, we're quickly greeted with a fire theme -- there's lava pillars and fire and stuff everywhere. As we walk through this opening corridor, undead enemies will actually try to ambush us from behind the pillars. If you run straight up, you'll almost always avoid them, but I hardly ever run in this game because of the 'punishment' for bumping enemies while running, so we get ambushed right away.
I forget the name of these enemies, but they look like the "mages" that attacked us at Undine's place. (Remember that?) Well, not the big dragon skeleton thing. Anyway, if you also remember from the Devil Emperor's Palace, we got a Sledgehammer drop, which I thought was a big deal, because enemies dropping those kind of rare items is something that almost never happens. And I wasn't farming for it or anything (not that you really can, since you'll eventually just raise your monster rank anyway).
But the little pixie thing dropped a Stardust Robe! This is that same powerful robe that we found in Maximus's hideout under the church when we were chasing him. So now Herman has a new robe to wear, increasing both his physical and magical defenses, as well as giving him protection to shocking damage and +1 to Endurance and Magic. A great powerup.
The layout of the palace isn't too confusing -- there's basically always a "main path" and you'll find some doors along the way that lead to dead-end rooms where you can pick up various loot. We score a Flame Beast Hide, but it's weaker than any other armor we already have, which is a shame.
While running into a Goblin-class enemy in here initiates a special battle, other types of goblin enemies still show up paired with some of the other types. For example, here is yet another Dobby wreaking havoc on the party, even killing Trucks, while it accompanies a skeleton enemy.
Bumping into a Goblin, though, starts one of a few special encounters that are unique to this area. Most of them involve these green-robed little twerps, which are disciples of Aunas. They seem to have a pretty good deal of HP, and in large groups, they can be pretty dangerous. They are susceptible to status effects, but you run the risk of planning for the whole lot of them to fall asleep, and... only one being affected by Nap. (It usually did put them all to sleep though).
Continuing our trek through the palace, we encounter various different kinds of décor, like these various sized pits of fire. There are goblins everywhere in here, so I guess either Aunas or the power of this Abyss Gate seems to attract them like crazy.
We also start to run across some pits of fire which have these big fireballs jumping between them in arcs. It's pretty cool to walk under them. You can't get hurt by them or anything. But I like as we progress through the palace, we encounter more and more dangerous-looking fire-themed things like this.
A lot of the treasures in here are things like magic scrolls, so they're not particularly useful. Though in one chest after the jumping fireballs, we did find 3,000 Aurums, which was pretty nice.
Eventually, we get to a room where the fire is blue instead of red, and we see a Dog enemy, which we haven't encountered at all in here, so that's a bit strange. It also isn't walking around, but rather standing guard in front of a chest at the end of this long corridor with the blue fire.
Seems pretty foreboding, I think.
And indeed, instead of a regular enemy, we run into Cerberus! While he looks intimidating, he was actually pretty easy to take down. Spamming our strongest arts ended the battle more quickly than I was expecting.
Behind Cerberus, in the chest, was the Nightingale, which is a foil with an attack power... of 12. Way lower than the other stuff we have at this point. I thought maybe it would have some kind of special weapon art or something, but after using it for a while, I gave up on it and put it back in the bag.
Looking at a guide online now, though, it seems that it does have a special art called "Nurse Heal," which sounds cool, so I might try to glimmer it later. (Some weapons with special arts require you to glimmer them before you can use them).
We continue on through another blue fire room, where goblins are swarming.
The other kind of special goblin we find in here are these little guys, the Majan Trio. They constantly summon various fire-themed enemies, even including those Blazer things we had to fight underneath Vanguard! They will always summon something at the end of a turn, so they'll always be guarded by at least one enemy when the turn begins. And they start with two of Big Naked Fire Guy in front of them...
Fortunately, the enemies they summon are vulnerable to sleep and paralysis, so we can immobilize them while focusing on taking out the trio in the back. And fortunately, once the trio is taken out, the battle is won, even if their summoned monsters are still on the field.
For just a regular encounter that you'll see a lot if you bump a lot of goblins in here, it's pretty interesting and can be quite tough if you don't have a variety of arts at your disposal to hit enemies in the back row and to debilitate the enemies guarding the front.
In a chest, we also find a Suzaku Armor, which has somewhat low physical defense compared to most armor we have right now, but it has great magical defense. I let Trucks take a bit of a hit to his physical defense to wear it, especially since the Lode Armor he had on gave him vulnerability to shocking damage, so this will remove that weakness as well.
After some more exploration, we come across the most dangerous-looking room we've seen yet -- some narrow grated pathways over a pit of lava! And there are stairs, here, too, making this a bit of a two-tier maze. Though it's not particularly difficult to navigate.
You can actually enter from two different places in the hallway outside, and the two 'paths' don't connect. The left entrance will let you find various treasures, and the right entrance will let you move on to the next area.
Among the treasures in here, though, is something really cool -- rather than a tangible object, we find instructions on how to use the blended magic art Crimson Flare! We have to use the Power Rise formation and position members with access to Lunar, Solar, and Suzaku arts in the right places...
There's also another part of using combination arts, and I don't know if I'll go into it in this playthrough or not. In fact, you can go through the entire game without realizing it even exists, despite it being an actually very fun and interesting unique game system.
Similar to bumping into Goblins here, bumping into Elementals initiates a fight with Magma, which ... looks like it's supposed to be coming out of a pit of fire or something, but in all the battle environments here, it looks awkward. (Is it coming out of the grate??)
What's special about this fight, though, is that it seems to be a very high rank, which means LOTS of levels up at the end of every battle. And these things are kinda everywhere. Since we're pretty far into the palace, and I have various weapon arts that need to be mastered, I decided to purposely run into all of these I could find to try to get a lot of levels up while mastering all the weapon arts. I even exited and re-entered some areas to respawn them a few times.
I did manage to get all the arts mastered pretty quickly, and even got everyone's skill levels to 20 or more. Herman grows the slowest of the party (as he has a growth rate of 0 in everything...) but even he was getting quite a bit of boosts at the end of every battle.
Mikhail also surpassed 100 Waza Power!
The next room seems kind of foreboding, so we run out of the palace, avoiding battles, since all of our WP and JP is getting pretty low. When we get out, we're able to stay at the inn in Ake for free. And since we're out here and have a bit more money now, and some items to sell, we head back to Xuan Cheng and buy the most expensive Solar Art, Parhelion, for Tiberius.
Similar to how the ultimate Lunar Art Shadow Servant creates a puppet from your shadow, Parhelion uses the reflection of light to create a mirror image of yourself that draws enemy attacks -- meaning it will take damage in place of you.
We head back to the palace and avoid battles to conserve the WP and JP we recovered, and find ourselves in yet another blue fire hallway, this time with jumping blue fireballs.
When we get to the end, there's a pit of blue fire, and it seems we've reached a dead end...
But approaching the pit, we're suddenly attacked by Pyro-Hydra! It seems to be guarding a door that we can just barely make out behind the fire pit.
While it is called Pyro-Hydra, each of its heads seems to have a different elemental affinity, one using heat arts, one using cold arts, and one using shocking arts.
I took the time to try out Shadow Servant. If you remember, it creates a servant from your shadow that mimics every action you take, meaning you basically get two actions per turn instead of one. But it also dissipates when you're hit by any enemy attack...
And sadly Pyro-Hydra gets many actions per turn and has some multi-target abilities, so I never got to actually make use of it, because it would get taken out before Herman got to use an action every time.
I also tried out Parhelion, though I didn't pay enough attention to understand how it actually works, so I'm still just going off the in-game description that it seems to 'deter' the enemy's attacks toward the reflection. I don't know if it's just overall reduced damage, or a one-time 100% miss or something, or something similar to UNLIMITED:Saga's Aegis Shield or what. The battle ended pretty quickly after I used it...
Heading into the back door that Pyro-Hydra seemed to be guarding, we find the Abyss Gate! This is what we came here for. All we have to do is seal it up, right?
We're given the option to seal it now or wait a bit. Waiting will just return you to the previous room in case you wanted to prepare a bit before going on or something, or maybe just wanted to get here but not seal the gate yet.
But we choose to seal it!
The party separates and Mikhail walks into the center of the gate.
But a huge enemy appears and knocks him back!
And now we're fighting Aunas, one of the four Devil Lords!
This battle starts out with, as you probably expected, a fire elemental field. Suzaku Arts include many fire-elemental abilities, but we're pretty much an all-Seiryu team (and Tibby on Genbu lol) so we can't realy benefit from this.
But Aunas of course has many fire-based attacks, and the fire elemental field only strengthens him. Thankfully, he doesn't get healed from the field, but it's still better to keep it out of fire if you can.
Pretty much everyone had pretty explicit roles throughout this fight. I finally got to make great use of Herman's Suction, which is a Seiryu art that steals HP from the enemy. Not only does this help keep Herman alive, but it strongly pushes the elemental field toward wind.
After a War Song, Ward's main job was to constantly dish out damage. Bull Crash all night.
Trucks had the special privilege of being the fastest character in the battle, and the only member of the party that was actually faster than Aunas himself. So his priority in the turns made him an important healer, using Moonshine to keep the party in top shape.
Mikhail mostly just spammed Wind Dart to help keep the field in wind or out of fire at least. It didn't really go into wind much, but was not in fire for most of the battle. He also would renew Dancing Leaf on party members who fell in battle and were revived, as falling gets rid of all your boons and buffs.
Because Trucks was acting as the primary healer, Tiberius got to go on the offensive with Thunderclap. Because he was using Genbu arts, which are water-based, he kept driving the elemental field away from wind. He'd also do extra healing as backup for Trucks if needed.
Aunas had a variety of attacks. The most expected being a heat wave attack that would damage the entire party at once. Thankfully, the party's magic defense has gotten pretty decent, especially with stuff like the Suzaku Armor and Stardust Robe that we found on the way here.
Another attack he used often to hit the entire party was this ... slashing thing... I'm not really sure what it was doing, but basically a sort of wind tunnel thing blew across the party, and they got hit by these red... things.
What's nice about this is that it is a physical attack, so it can not only be blocked by a shield to reduce or evade damage completely, but Dancing Leaf can also completely negate its effects. It was pretty cool when the entire party would evade with Dancing Leaf and you'd see everyone disappear behind the leaves one by one...
He also did this... moon... thing? I'm not really sure what it did, but a moon appeared by a character and then nothing. LOL
He could also put up Fire Wall, which defends him against heat and cold attacks. Thankfully Thunderclap, despite being "water-"based, is shocking damage, and could still hurt him. So he basically would waste an action doing this one.
The battle was long, but not terribly difficult. Even when a party member would get knocked out, we could revive them quickly, especially since even Herman could heal if we needed it.
At the end, everyone managed to be alive to get their levels up, too!
After Aunas falls, we're free to seal the Abyss Gate. Mikhail kneels down in the center of the gate, and the floor starts changing colors and stuff...
And the Abyss energy seems to disappear, so we have successfully sealed out first Abyss Gate! Mikhail does a little victory dance after the party joins back up with him, and we somehow end up at the front of the palace, so we don't have to actually walk all the way back out.
There are some things in the game that are not accessible until after you've sealed your first Abyss Gate, and some things that won't happen until your party has grown enough (it goes by your HP growth), so we'll have more stuff open to us now, too!
If you remember what we learned from Johannes and Anna, Aunas's Abyss Gate is located somewhere in the southern jungles.
The only way to get to the jungle is from the tropical town of Ake, by leaving the town on the south. The jungle is not a place you want to wander into by accident. I remember my first time running into the jungle, it took me almost two hours to get out.
The jungle functions as a classic "confusing forest" type of area. Each section of the jungle has many exits, but the exits don't seem to make any kind of logical sense, essentially "transporting" you to random other jungle sections, to give you a sense of being lost.
And you will certainly feel lost! What's scary about the jungle is there's no clear way to get back once you're lost. If you come in and go straight back out the way you came in, you'll be back in Ake, but if you venture to any of the other exits from the initial jungle area, you could be in here for a while.
And the jungle is home to some nasty baddies. Here, a Dobby is being guarded by an armored bug. A Dobby on its own is not too terrible, but given space, it can really dish out a lot of damage. Not all enemies can attack well from the back row, but Dobby being an archer goblin, not only can, but can very well. He can hit the entire party with arrows at once, or focus a bunch of arrows at one character, even able to sometimes one-shot a member of the party. Herman can try to paralyze Dobby with Shadow Sew, but the best solution is to try to take out the armored bug as fast as possible, which means using a lot of costly weapon arts.
Too bad we don't have UNLIMITED:Saga's Missile Guard magic art!
And Dobby isn't the only threat to the party in the jungle. There are tons of strong enemies in here, and since we have no way to get out and rest easily, we have to conserve our LP (especially Herman's). But in the same vein, we also have to conserve our WP and JP! So it's a bit scary. We do have some potions and ethers to recover a bit, but it's not something we can rely heavily on.
But by a stroke of pure luck, after only a couple of screens, I happened to run into this building.
There are actually two "solutions" to the jungle -- one is to just wander until you find this place on accident, or the other is to just wander until you find a different place where you can learn a way to successfully navigate the jungle without trouble.
So I guess the "proper" solution will have to wait for another play diary. We'll actually be required to go there in Sara's scenario (not because the game requires it, but because of something I want to do in her scenario) so we'll definitely get to it eventually.
Once you arrive at this place, though, you can exit and you'll be taken to the world map, rather than back into the jungle. And after discovering it, you can travel there from the world map without having to go back into the jungle again.
Apparently we've found some kind of fire magic palace. Seems like a place there might be an Abyss Gate to seal...
Entering the palace, we're quickly greeted with a fire theme -- there's lava pillars and fire and stuff everywhere. As we walk through this opening corridor, undead enemies will actually try to ambush us from behind the pillars. If you run straight up, you'll almost always avoid them, but I hardly ever run in this game because of the 'punishment' for bumping enemies while running, so we get ambushed right away.
I forget the name of these enemies, but they look like the "mages" that attacked us at Undine's place. (Remember that?) Well, not the big dragon skeleton thing. Anyway, if you also remember from the Devil Emperor's Palace, we got a Sledgehammer drop, which I thought was a big deal, because enemies dropping those kind of rare items is something that almost never happens. And I wasn't farming for it or anything (not that you really can, since you'll eventually just raise your monster rank anyway).
But the little pixie thing dropped a Stardust Robe! This is that same powerful robe that we found in Maximus's hideout under the church when we were chasing him. So now Herman has a new robe to wear, increasing both his physical and magical defenses, as well as giving him protection to shocking damage and +1 to Endurance and Magic. A great powerup.
The layout of the palace isn't too confusing -- there's basically always a "main path" and you'll find some doors along the way that lead to dead-end rooms where you can pick up various loot. We score a Flame Beast Hide, but it's weaker than any other armor we already have, which is a shame.
While running into a Goblin-class enemy in here initiates a special battle, other types of goblin enemies still show up paired with some of the other types. For example, here is yet another Dobby wreaking havoc on the party, even killing Trucks, while it accompanies a skeleton enemy.
Bumping into a Goblin, though, starts one of a few special encounters that are unique to this area. Most of them involve these green-robed little twerps, which are disciples of Aunas. They seem to have a pretty good deal of HP, and in large groups, they can be pretty dangerous. They are susceptible to status effects, but you run the risk of planning for the whole lot of them to fall asleep, and... only one being affected by Nap. (It usually did put them all to sleep though).
Continuing our trek through the palace, we encounter various different kinds of décor, like these various sized pits of fire. There are goblins everywhere in here, so I guess either Aunas or the power of this Abyss Gate seems to attract them like crazy.
We also start to run across some pits of fire which have these big fireballs jumping between them in arcs. It's pretty cool to walk under them. You can't get hurt by them or anything. But I like as we progress through the palace, we encounter more and more dangerous-looking fire-themed things like this.
A lot of the treasures in here are things like magic scrolls, so they're not particularly useful. Though in one chest after the jumping fireballs, we did find 3,000 Aurums, which was pretty nice.
Eventually, we get to a room where the fire is blue instead of red, and we see a Dog enemy, which we haven't encountered at all in here, so that's a bit strange. It also isn't walking around, but rather standing guard in front of a chest at the end of this long corridor with the blue fire.
Seems pretty foreboding, I think.
And indeed, instead of a regular enemy, we run into Cerberus! While he looks intimidating, he was actually pretty easy to take down. Spamming our strongest arts ended the battle more quickly than I was expecting.
Behind Cerberus, in the chest, was the Nightingale, which is a foil with an attack power... of 12. Way lower than the other stuff we have at this point. I thought maybe it would have some kind of special weapon art or something, but after using it for a while, I gave up on it and put it back in the bag.
Looking at a guide online now, though, it seems that it does have a special art called "Nurse Heal," which sounds cool, so I might try to glimmer it later. (Some weapons with special arts require you to glimmer them before you can use them).
We continue on through another blue fire room, where goblins are swarming.
The other kind of special goblin we find in here are these little guys, the Majan Trio. They constantly summon various fire-themed enemies, even including those Blazer things we had to fight underneath Vanguard! They will always summon something at the end of a turn, so they'll always be guarded by at least one enemy when the turn begins. And they start with two of Big Naked Fire Guy in front of them...
Fortunately, the enemies they summon are vulnerable to sleep and paralysis, so we can immobilize them while focusing on taking out the trio in the back. And fortunately, once the trio is taken out, the battle is won, even if their summoned monsters are still on the field.
For just a regular encounter that you'll see a lot if you bump a lot of goblins in here, it's pretty interesting and can be quite tough if you don't have a variety of arts at your disposal to hit enemies in the back row and to debilitate the enemies guarding the front.
In a chest, we also find a Suzaku Armor, which has somewhat low physical defense compared to most armor we have right now, but it has great magical defense. I let Trucks take a bit of a hit to his physical defense to wear it, especially since the Lode Armor he had on gave him vulnerability to shocking damage, so this will remove that weakness as well.
After some more exploration, we come across the most dangerous-looking room we've seen yet -- some narrow grated pathways over a pit of lava! And there are stairs, here, too, making this a bit of a two-tier maze. Though it's not particularly difficult to navigate.
You can actually enter from two different places in the hallway outside, and the two 'paths' don't connect. The left entrance will let you find various treasures, and the right entrance will let you move on to the next area.
Among the treasures in here, though, is something really cool -- rather than a tangible object, we find instructions on how to use the blended magic art Crimson Flare! We have to use the Power Rise formation and position members with access to Lunar, Solar, and Suzaku arts in the right places...
There's also another part of using combination arts, and I don't know if I'll go into it in this playthrough or not. In fact, you can go through the entire game without realizing it even exists, despite it being an actually very fun and interesting unique game system.
Similar to bumping into Goblins here, bumping into Elementals initiates a fight with Magma, which ... looks like it's supposed to be coming out of a pit of fire or something, but in all the battle environments here, it looks awkward. (Is it coming out of the grate??)
What's special about this fight, though, is that it seems to be a very high rank, which means LOTS of levels up at the end of every battle. And these things are kinda everywhere. Since we're pretty far into the palace, and I have various weapon arts that need to be mastered, I decided to purposely run into all of these I could find to try to get a lot of levels up while mastering all the weapon arts. I even exited and re-entered some areas to respawn them a few times.
I did manage to get all the arts mastered pretty quickly, and even got everyone's skill levels to 20 or more. Herman grows the slowest of the party (as he has a growth rate of 0 in everything...) but even he was getting quite a bit of boosts at the end of every battle.
Mikhail also surpassed 100 Waza Power!
The next room seems kind of foreboding, so we run out of the palace, avoiding battles, since all of our WP and JP is getting pretty low. When we get out, we're able to stay at the inn in Ake for free. And since we're out here and have a bit more money now, and some items to sell, we head back to Xuan Cheng and buy the most expensive Solar Art, Parhelion, for Tiberius.
Similar to how the ultimate Lunar Art Shadow Servant creates a puppet from your shadow, Parhelion uses the reflection of light to create a mirror image of yourself that draws enemy attacks -- meaning it will take damage in place of you.
We head back to the palace and avoid battles to conserve the WP and JP we recovered, and find ourselves in yet another blue fire hallway, this time with jumping blue fireballs.
When we get to the end, there's a pit of blue fire, and it seems we've reached a dead end...
But approaching the pit, we're suddenly attacked by Pyro-Hydra! It seems to be guarding a door that we can just barely make out behind the fire pit.
While it is called Pyro-Hydra, each of its heads seems to have a different elemental affinity, one using heat arts, one using cold arts, and one using shocking arts.
I took the time to try out Shadow Servant. If you remember, it creates a servant from your shadow that mimics every action you take, meaning you basically get two actions per turn instead of one. But it also dissipates when you're hit by any enemy attack...
And sadly Pyro-Hydra gets many actions per turn and has some multi-target abilities, so I never got to actually make use of it, because it would get taken out before Herman got to use an action every time.
I also tried out Parhelion, though I didn't pay enough attention to understand how it actually works, so I'm still just going off the in-game description that it seems to 'deter' the enemy's attacks toward the reflection. I don't know if it's just overall reduced damage, or a one-time 100% miss or something, or something similar to UNLIMITED:Saga's Aegis Shield or what. The battle ended pretty quickly after I used it...
Heading into the back door that Pyro-Hydra seemed to be guarding, we find the Abyss Gate! This is what we came here for. All we have to do is seal it up, right?
We're given the option to seal it now or wait a bit. Waiting will just return you to the previous room in case you wanted to prepare a bit before going on or something, or maybe just wanted to get here but not seal the gate yet.
But we choose to seal it!
The party separates and Mikhail walks into the center of the gate.
But a huge enemy appears and knocks him back!
And now we're fighting Aunas, one of the four Devil Lords!
This battle starts out with, as you probably expected, a fire elemental field. Suzaku Arts include many fire-elemental abilities, but we're pretty much an all-Seiryu team (and Tibby on Genbu lol) so we can't realy benefit from this.
But Aunas of course has many fire-based attacks, and the fire elemental field only strengthens him. Thankfully, he doesn't get healed from the field, but it's still better to keep it out of fire if you can.
Pretty much everyone had pretty explicit roles throughout this fight. I finally got to make great use of Herman's Suction, which is a Seiryu art that steals HP from the enemy. Not only does this help keep Herman alive, but it strongly pushes the elemental field toward wind.
After a War Song, Ward's main job was to constantly dish out damage. Bull Crash all night.
Trucks had the special privilege of being the fastest character in the battle, and the only member of the party that was actually faster than Aunas himself. So his priority in the turns made him an important healer, using Moonshine to keep the party in top shape.
Mikhail mostly just spammed Wind Dart to help keep the field in wind or out of fire at least. It didn't really go into wind much, but was not in fire for most of the battle. He also would renew Dancing Leaf on party members who fell in battle and were revived, as falling gets rid of all your boons and buffs.
Because Trucks was acting as the primary healer, Tiberius got to go on the offensive with Thunderclap. Because he was using Genbu arts, which are water-based, he kept driving the elemental field away from wind. He'd also do extra healing as backup for Trucks if needed.
Aunas had a variety of attacks. The most expected being a heat wave attack that would damage the entire party at once. Thankfully, the party's magic defense has gotten pretty decent, especially with stuff like the Suzaku Armor and Stardust Robe that we found on the way here.
Another attack he used often to hit the entire party was this ... slashing thing... I'm not really sure what it was doing, but basically a sort of wind tunnel thing blew across the party, and they got hit by these red... things.
What's nice about this is that it is a physical attack, so it can not only be blocked by a shield to reduce or evade damage completely, but Dancing Leaf can also completely negate its effects. It was pretty cool when the entire party would evade with Dancing Leaf and you'd see everyone disappear behind the leaves one by one...
He also did this... moon... thing? I'm not really sure what it did, but a moon appeared by a character and then nothing. LOL
He could also put up Fire Wall, which defends him against heat and cold attacks. Thankfully Thunderclap, despite being "water-"based, is shocking damage, and could still hurt him. So he basically would waste an action doing this one.
The battle was long, but not terribly difficult. Even when a party member would get knocked out, we could revive them quickly, especially since even Herman could heal if we needed it.
At the end, everyone managed to be alive to get their levels up, too!
After Aunas falls, we're free to seal the Abyss Gate. Mikhail kneels down in the center of the gate, and the floor starts changing colors and stuff...
And the Abyss energy seems to disappear, so we have successfully sealed out first Abyss Gate! Mikhail does a little victory dance after the party joins back up with him, and we somehow end up at the front of the palace, so we don't have to actually walk all the way back out.
There are some things in the game that are not accessible until after you've sealed your first Abyss Gate, and some things that won't happen until your party has grown enough (it goes by your HP growth), so we'll have more stuff open to us now, too!
