Octopath Traveler: Session 7

I began this session realizing that I had a silly gap of 126 JP between Olberic and Therion, that I could easily close by having Olberic use Challenge on a few people.  I ended up with them perfectly synchronized, and a good bit of grinding later, they got their Divine skills.

After that, I ran around having Therion steal everything that wasn't nailed down.  Levelling up improves his chances of stealing by a lot, so a good many things that had lower chances now had 100% chances.  I've got quest items for side quests that I don't even have yet.  Anyway, my filching quest took me to Stonegard, where I could also have Alfyn finally use Inquire on the townspeople now that he's levelled up.  Satisfied with having exhausted path actions, I went to the tavern to continue H'aanit's story.

By the way, I love this game's use of taverns for stuff like this.  You can only swap party members around at a tavern, and if you choose not to continue a story when you enter the town it's taking you to, you can go to the tavern to continue it.  It's totally like the other four travellers are hanging out in the tavern, and then you visit it to exchange stories and put together a group to head out and get stuff done.

H'aanit's search for her master, Z'aanta, leads her to a townsperson in Stonegard by the name of Natalia.  Before continuing on his hunt, Z'aanta stayed at her place.  After a quick talk, H'aanit learns that he was headed into The Spectrewood, and sets off on his trail.  Dealing with a rock slide and a weird tree enemy that was blocking the path, she eventually encounters a clearing where there was clearly a battle.  Shortly thereafter, she's beset upon by the Lord of the Forest.

Breaking that narrative style for a moment, this was an interesting boss fight.  It kept summoning additional plants, and part of its attack pattern involved nomming someone down to 1 HP, gaining two extra hits on its guard, and changing its weaknesses around.  It was a difficult fight for me to get into a rhythm, though I did end up with a reliable setup to avoid its powerful lightning attack that hits the entire party: simply weaken its guard to the point where it has one hit left, concentrate on the summoned plants for a bit until it starts charging for the attack, then deal the last hit to break its defense and make it lose the turn on which it would otherwise unleash the attack.  It has a ton of HP, it took a few hits of Draefendi's Rage to the face, and they were hitting for over 6000.  It was also quite annoying with the status effects, so the battle was a careful balance of figuring out which status effects to let run their course and which ones needed to be removed straight away, followed by weakening its guard, figuring out weaknesses, and also remembering to heal people occasionally.

Anyway, the beast Z'aanta was after, Redeye, apparently has the ability to petrify things, and it's done so to Z'aanta.  Fortunately it wasn't the quick form of petrification seen in some works of fiction, but rather the slow version that gave him enough time to write a note asking whoever finds it to consult a specific seer in the town of Stillsnow.

Stillsnow so happens to be where Primrose's Chapter 2 takes place.  I won't be seeing it for a bit, as I currently intend to do everyone's Chapter 2 before partaking anybody's Chapter 3, and I also intend to do the chapters in the order I recruited the characters, for no real reason other than "because I can".  Anyway, next session will at the very least be Ophilia's Chapter 2.  So far, the chapters seem to be designed to be reasonably digestible lengths, so given my play style that mostly involves dicking around and exploring everywhere except where the game is telling me to go, I can probably crank out a chapter in a couple of hours.  We'll see how well this works as I get further into the game.