The Bigger Picture
We head to the south and a teleporter to 3F. Once again, it seems like there's a clear route to the next level quite close, but plenty of other rooms to check. Which we will. Particularly because upon investigating the first room we see there are a load of them in some of the storerooms.
- a Potion
- Protect Ring
- Protect Cloak
- Clothes
- a Gold Needle (discarded)
- another Gold Needle (discarded)
- Sasuke's Blade
The blade is the first thing we've had in a while that somewhat unsurprisingly given the name is for ninjas. It's another 3 Attack for Kaili, so we don't complain and equip it over the Defender.
In this area as we walk around I notice we are seeing a slight difficulty ramping of the enemies, with rewards in line with it. For example a formation of 3 Vampire Lords - yes, we're now re-skinning the Vampires - started raining down Thundagas that were hitting Glitz for about 150 damage a go, and he was suddenly on critical health.
Fortunately we downed them before Glitz dropped, but death feels like it's always just a moment away for him.
Hopefully reaching Level 44 for him and the rest will help with that.
The rooms in the south just contain groups of blinking tablets, all of which upon investigation report:
...analyzing TIAmat... no known WEAKNESS...
which is good to know... I guess we just need to beat him round the head then? That's worked well so far for the majority of things in here.
Before heading upstairs, we see a friendly mechanical golem who tells us:
...from this observation WINdow...you can look out on...the ENTIRE world...
I guess that window is the big blue ball in the middle of the room - we wander over and take a look. Looking out we observe "The four forces of fire, earth, water, and wind appear as mist converging on a single point... ...a point at the centre of the four Altars. This must be the location of the Chaos Shrine!
A cutscene shows how the Chaos Shine is effectively at the centre of the world, and energy is flowing towards that point in a cross.
Well, I guess we'd better do something about that.
We head up in the next teleporter to 4F. This appears to be just a big expanse, and is probably a lot more tricky without the use of a map to tell us to head north west, otherwise it's a bit of a crap-shoot which way is the right way without any indicators. Without anything to really do other than head up, we're soon onto 5F, which by the reckoning of the other Shrines may well be the last...