MAGFest 17

Continuing my resistance to using the year number instead of simple sequential numbering, this post is all about the MAGFest that just ended.

This year, I wanted to get all my clothing into one bag, and success was had.  Last year, I took workout clothing, but I was an idiot and took so much other shit I didn't use that I couldn't fit it in my regular duffel bag, so I had to take an extra bag to hold the workout stuff.  After omitting the shit that I didn't use, it all fit quite nicely into one bag.

I kinda screwed up signing up for shifts, I didn't get to it fast enough and a lot of my preferred stuff was already taken.  This MAGFest was a mishmash of both Floor Staff and Inventory as a result.

Wednesday

I drove up on Wednesday evening, just like usual.  Fortunately, this year there was zero snow in the forecast, so I didn't have a repeat of last year's anxiety-inducing 25MPH drive north.  I parked in the Gaylord's garage this year, because after careful consideration, the reserve-a-spot lots that MAGFest was promoting were both uncovered, one was a gravel lot, and my usual garage a block away would charge me in real time as opposed to in Gaylord room-nights, meaning I'd theoretically have to pay more to park there.  For once, the Gaylord's garage looked like the cheaper option.

I arrived at 11:30 PM or so, grabbed my badge, and walked up to the LAN room to hang out with some friends for a while, and eat the meal I'd made for myself to eat when I arrived, which consisted of a ham and cheddar wrap with ground pepper, shishito peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, and brown mustard, a banana, and some Coke Zero.  After that it was just me aimlessly wandering around the hotel.

Almost immediately in the wandering, I noticed this new vending machine with ice cream inside.  It looked kinda neat, so I took a picture of it.  Sadly, I don't have any video of it in action.  I bought some on Saturday after dinner, just for the novelty.  It's sorta like Dippin' Dots, and while it was neat, it wasn't really worth the price.

The rest of the wandering was just, you know, wandering.

Thursday

Wandering continued well into Thursday, where around 2:30 AM I decided to try and find coffee.  Spoiler alert: you can't get coffee in National Harbor, MD at 2:30 in the morning.  I walked all the way out to where the gas station and McDonald's were, to no avail.  The Starbucks was closed.  Even the coffee shop in the Gaylord's atrium was closed.

At 5 AM, the atrium coffee shop opened, and I finally got my damn coffee.  It was almost four dollars, but I didn't really care, I needed the caffeine.

Later I picked up my "swadge", which is basically just a custom PCB with a microcontroller and some other shit on it that does token novelty stuff.  Honestly, my badge collection is filling up with this stuff, and I don't touch it after the event.  Can it be optional for staff in the future?  That'd be nice.  Anyway, I appear to have been the only one to whom they didn't give batteries, so I had to borrow two rechargeable AA batteries from Consoles while I was on shift just to have the thing light up like it was supposed to.

Thursday was home to the sole panel I went to: DwangoAC's TASBot panel.  He highlighted some technical difficulties (and a baggage handling problem that broke some of his stuff...) while giving a nice presentation and showing a few TASes of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World.  If you've seen all the various TASes of those that have been shown at GDQs, then you've seen the TASes he showed here.

After that came the sole dealers' room raid of the event.  My bounty was Super Nintendo-filled:

Getting cartridges to boot in old systems is sometimes a hassle, so Future XT™ will chime in with details about that.

Future XT™: Hey, Past XT™!  Super Metroid, The Lost Vikings, and F-Zero all boot just fine with zero or very little hassle.  I've already spent a while playing Super Metroid and died like an idiot trying to sequence break and get the Wave Beam early.  Anyway.  Unfortunately, Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 are very temperamental, but I have gotten both of them to boot.  I'll give their contacts a good cleaning with some isopropyl alcohol and see if that doesn't help.  *mutters something incomprehensible about still needing to do this with Blaster Master*

Back to you, Past XT™.

Past XT™: Thanks for the input there, Future XT™!  Now, where was I?  Oh yeah, that's right...

I bought a Super Famicom cartridge of Super Metroid because Japanese cartridges are cheaper than their US counterparts for some silly reason.  The Japanese and US ROMs of Super Metroid happen to be identical, with English text and an option for Japanese subtitles.  It's just the cartridge shell and label art that are different.  All the more reason to break off those tabs in your SNES' cartridge slot.

4 PM rolled around and I checked into my hotel room.  I was the first one of the people assigned to my room to get there, so I had to dodge putting my debit card on the room for incidentals.  As it turned out, neither of the other people assigned to my room materialized, so I ended up with a hotel room to myself for the weekend.  Not complaining.

Later I remembered that I hadn't yet paid for parking, so I went back to the hotel reception desk to take care of that.  Or at least, I tried to take care of that.  There's a separate exit lane for pre-paid parking, and it would have taken the whole thing off of my mind for the weekend.  Unfortunately for me, the guy at the reception desk misunderstood my request as "activate the parking lot in/out privileges on my room card" and my attempts to dumbfoundedly rephrase "I'd like to pre-pay for parking" so that I could get my point across failed spectacularly.

I didn't have a staff shift on Thursday night this year, so I just played games for a while and went to bed.  I beat World 2 of Yoshi's Island, including successfully doing a 1-1 warp on one of the levels.  I also figured out how to be reasonably decent at Asteroids on the Atari 2600.

Friday

Going to bed marked the end of my usual really long first day of MAGFest.  I got up at 11 AM on Wednesday and didn't go to sleep until 2 AM on Friday.

During my wandering around on Thursday morning looking for coffee, I'd noticed a shop in the National Harbor area that I'd never had the opportunity to notice before because I always just stay in the hamster habitrail: Pepper Palace.  They sell hot sauces, spicy seasonings, and lots of it.  I went back there on Friday, spent a while looking around the store, and using their sampling station to try various sauces before settling on a couple to buy.  I ended up with a bottle of Wok Dis Wey, which has a panda on the label and came with a panda keychain (they all had different ones, so I spent a while looking at them to figure out which one I wanted), and a bottle of The Great American Hot Sauce.  Wok Dis Wey is sweet and spicy, and The Great American Hot Sauce has a nice smoky flavor to it.

After that, I walked over to Subway and bought lunch: my usual footlong sub.  I ate half of it and saved the other half for the trip home.  Hotel rooms have refrigerators these days, did you know that?  They keep food from going bad in the short term.  They're nice.

Once I was back in the hotel and fed, I went down to consoles and did some of the challenges.  I accrued enough points to get a couple rewards, and declared myself done there.  I didn't actually pick up my challenge rewards until Sunday morning, though.

I did another walk around the dealers' room before my shift began and flagged a couple things as "if they're sti2ll there later, possibly buy them", but then I never went back later to see if they were still there.  They were all lower-priority things, but still, it would've been neat to get a SNES mouse, the mouse pad that goes with it, and Mario Paint.  Maybe next year.

Friday was the beginning of possibly the worst thing I've ever had to do: a 12-hour shift.  I made the mistake of standing for the entire first four hours, which was an Inventory shift.  Given that the second four hours was Floor Staff, which involves a lot of walking, that didn't turn out so well.  I ended up trading off some Floor Staff work with others who were on Inventory just so I could rest my feet.

I say the 12-hour shift wasn't that great, but it could've been far worse.  I originally had an entire extra mathematically unnecessary shift in my schedule that would have made it a 16-hour shift.  Once I did the math and noticed the extra shift, I dropped it.  In the meantime, though, I was very close to emailing STOPS and asking if I could work something out to swap shifts with another staffer.

There was cake during the shift, that helped somewhat.  As seems to be the usual when a group has cake and wants to offer me some, I was invited over to get a slice by one of the higher-ups asking me if I liked cake.  It was a "Do you like cake?  Because we've got cake!" kind of thing.

On one of my bathroom breaks I experienced something I can only really explain in video game terms: I call it an NPC interaction moment.  Basically, staff can do certain things that regular attendees can't, in this case it was the ability to enter the expo hall through doors marked as exits.  Ostensibly for the convenience of staffers transporting large items or something that need to use the door that's most convenient to them, but certainly usable by me for a quick bathroom break without having to run all the way back around to the entrance in order to return to my shift.

The security staffer on duty at that exit door saw me walking over to the door and said "you can't enter here, this is an exit".  I showed my staff badge, and he said "oh wait, you're staff, go on in".  It's like in video games when there's a guard standing in front of the door you need to go through that refuses to let you pass no matter what, but when you have that one key item that grants you permission to pass (and, typically, progress the story), he immediately changes his tune.

The 12-hour shift took me into Saturday as well.

Saturday

During my shift, I saw a Wii running a game that had been left on this screen.  I don't know what game it was, but since Waluigi is a character everyone likes to talk about (previously WALUIGI AMIIBO PLZ, now mostly how he's not in Smash), I found this kinda funny and took a picture of it.  It stayed that way for several hours.

I haven't been mentioning it here, but of course, I went to the Gaylord's fitness room once every day.  I absolutely didn't feel like doing anything other than sleeping after the 12-hour shift, so I had to do Saturday's workout after I woke up.

My next (and final) shift didn't begin until Sunday, so I had a bit of time to kill.  I decided to spend it playing Super Mario World.  A couple of other people showed up and we started passing the controller around after each level completion, stomping our way through the game.  Before they had to leave, we got to the end of World 6, I pushed it a bit farther to partway through World 7 (with all of Star World complete and Special World unlocked) before my shift.

It didn't help that we were playing it on an LCD TV, which meant there was input lag messing with us and making us miss easy jumps and stuff.  Using the cape is a lot harder when there's a significant delay between pressing a button and seeing the result on screen.  Anyway.

Sunday

Consoles must have been through some shit in the hours prior to me and the others that comprise the usual evening crew arriving on the scene, because when I got there, the operations officer on duty said "hey, a competent staffer!".  What the hell was someone screwing up?  Staffing consoles isn't even that difficult of a thing to do correctly!

Anyway, this was more my usual style of shift: only eight hours long.  After it ended, I went down to the fitness room for one final workout before packing up and heading home.  Parking ended up being cheaper as expected, $72 instead of $80.

The one remaining issue I have yet to solve reared its ugly head once again: driving fatigue on the way home.  I kept two 500ml bottles of Coke Zero and the other half of that footlong sub I got on Friday for this purpose, but it didn't work.  I had to stop a few times to regather myself.  One time I stopped and walked into a McDonald's just to use its bathroom.  Apparently you can order something that vaguely resembles food there?  I dunno.

I prevailed over the driving fatigue one way or another and made it home, and hey, now I'm here typing this, taking photos of things I bought, and grumbling about how uploading pictures to Blogger doesn't work in Pale Moon.  Well, it kinda works.  You can upload them, but you can't add them to your post.  I don't have the patience to pretty print and reverse engineer obfuscated JavaScript just to look for a solution, so I get to launch a Chrome incognito window instead.

Octopath Traveler: Session 19

I did a little work on the spreadsheet since I got access to a whopping one extra weapon in Wellspring now that Alfyn can use Inquire on everyone there, and then while pondering how best to add a sheet for his concoctions, I had to resist my inner DBA instinct to relate the hell out of the data (in a spreadsheet, running through a heavy and sluggish layer of JavaScript, mind you).  I think I'm going to bite the bullet and manually enter all the effects, even though I could do stuff like "Oh, Noxroot deals with poison!  Make the sheet automatically recognize that it cures poison on allies and inflicts it on enemies!  And by the way, it also deals fire damage to enemies!  And if you use it on a single enemy, the fire hits twice!".  Just reading that and thinking about how you would lay that out to all neatly and automatically figure itself out is a nightmare that anyone can realize regardless of technical level.  Remembering that the best way to complete a game is to actually play it, I put down the Google Sheet and picked up my Switch.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, Alfyn and Therion.  They're both in the party so they can both get experience, so let's jump straight into Alfyn's Chapter 3, shall we?

Alfyn arrives in Saintsbridge and witnesses another apothecary examine a wounded man and then refuse to treat him.  Alfyn doesn't understand why he refused treatment, and the response of "some people aren't worth saving" doesn't really help, because in Alfyn's mind, everyone is worth saving.  Alfyn tends to the man, whose name is Miguel, and finds out he's a thief during the process.  He promises Miguel that they'll raise a glass together at the local tavern once he recovers, but only if he agrees to stop the whole thievery thing.  Oh Alfyn, so naïve.

Checking out the local tavern himself, Alfyn notices a child passed out on the floor and a mother crying for help.  Alfyn tries to figure out why the kid's passed out, but the other apothecary shows up and does it better, and reveals his name to be Ogen.  Apparently it was the snow peas his mom no doubt had him eat.  Anyway, Alfyn goes back to check up on Miguel and ends up staying there the night.  Once he wakes up, Miguel's gone, and of course, immediately back to being up to no good.  Specifically, Miguel is now holding the kid from the tavern at knifepoint in an attempt to get money from his mother.  Upon seeing Alfyn, he grabs the kid and runs off into the nearby woods.

Alfyn follows, fight ensues.  Every time Miguel recovers from being broken, his weaknesses change, but the standard rhythm of breaking his guard and then unloading Divine skills and other high damage attacks did the job.  Alfyn tends to the kid, who got stabbed by Miguel, and takes him back to town.

As Alfyn is leaving town, he runs across Ogen, and they get to talking.  The stage of apothecary-ness that Alfyn is in is apparently a pretty common early apothecary thing, you know, the whole "I wanna help everyone regardless of anything" phase.  Ogen tells his back story, which explains how he progressed on from the naïve stage that Alfyn is in, to the more realistic "I choose who I treat" stage.  After some compliments about Alfyn's tonics, the two part ways.  Alfyn randomly decides to head to Orewell next.

Therion's Chapter 3 is in Wellspring.  Since I ended last session with Olberic's Chapter 3, which also took place there, I could've done Therion's first, but decided to get a change of scenery instead.

Therion speaks to the shadiest looking NPC he can find in hopes of finding the black market in Wellspring, and soon enough he's got his lead: go to the tavern and order something that isn't on the menu.  The real black market is in a nearby cave, and it's run by the tavern keeper.  There's a guarded building with some merchants in it in town, which I mistook for the black market since the merchants inside talk about it.  Anyway, now that he's found the black market, Therion needs a way in.  Given the choice between walking all the way back to town to hit up the tavern keeper again, or simply stealing a mask from an NPC five feet away from me, I chose the latter.

Therion is close to getting the emerald dragonstone when it gets stolen by some other thieves.  Therion chases after them and has a reunion with his old buddy, Darius.  They aren't on such good terms anymore, so guards had to be fought, and Darius had to be pursued.  Darius just out of his grasp, Therion ends up fighting his main guard, a guy by the name of Gareth.  Gareth has a couple minions who heal him a lot, and he keeps changing stances, which changes which of his weaknesses are available to be hit, but once his guard is broken it's all the same anyway, so a healthy beating from Draefendi's Rage and Aeber's Reckoning saw him defeated.

Darius is headed to Northreach, so Therion is naturally following him there.  Darius' group basically controls the town, and they now have both the emerald dragonstone and the gold dragonstone.  I really want to refer to them as the dragonballs, but there's only four of them.  Anyway, shit's gonna go down when Therion gets there, you know, whenever I actually do his Chapter 4.

For now, I'm in that "between chapters" state, and I have a plan.  Run around doing inquiry and thievery, level up Alfyn some more so I can do more inquiry (I'll impose a reasonable limit on it, probably the level 50 milestone since I just passed the level 45 one, although I have yet to encounter someone who requires higher than level 60 and it's tempting to go for that).  I also want to give those four extra shrines a try now that I have better equipment and so forth.  There are also various NPCs guarding various buildings that I haven't defeated yet due to their high star ratings, I'm probably more than strong enough now for either H'aanit or Olberic to beat them senseless in relatively short order.  There's a fair amount to be done, so hopefully I can get a decent portion of it done before delving into Chapter 4.

Octopath Traveler: Session 18

After a few days of making sure I wasn't falling too far behind on YouTube, I decided it was time to do Chapter 3 for Cyrus and Olberic.  But first, a little equipment shuffling and party maintenance.  I decided to put Alfyn in the party this session, to let him level up a bit.  Both Cyrus and Alfyn needed a bit of attention, because Alfyn had no accessories, and neither had a secondary job as I tend to remove secondaries from people when I take them out of the party.  Not wanting to go all in on equipment knowing full well that I don't even have access to all the equipment from the third town in each region, I just shuffled the good stuff around.

Cyrus arrives in Stonegard looking for the tome From the Far Reaches of Hell.  He starts his search at the local book bindery, and ends up talking to the person who did the translation.  His name is Dominic, he's not too proud of having translated it, but he was in a bind and really needed the money.  Cyrus had been noticing someone following him for a while, and finally confronts them.  The person turns out to be Lucia, the assistant to the Royal Academy of Atlasdam's Headmaster, Yvon.  She says Yvon is up to no good and that she can't stand by while he does it, and tells Cyrus that Yvon grew up in Stonegard.  Being the naturally curious scholar he is, Cyrus wanted to visit the house.  However, as soon as he enters, Lucia attacks him.

Cyrus wakes up in a dark room whose only exit is straight up, being taunted by Headmaster Yvon.  Lucia is right there with him.  Yvon leaves Cyrus down there to starve after Cyrus refuses to join him, and after a little bit of looking around trying to find an exit, someone else opens the hatch and lowers a rope.  Surprise, it's the student who wanted the "personal lessons", Therese!  However, Yvon shows up and takes her hostage, so Cyrus naturally decides to go save her and stop Yvon in the process.  Also, Lucia is completely gone.

The enemies in this area spam status effects and were rather annoying to fight.  I didn't really have the best weapon spread in the world, and it didn't help that both Cyrus and Alfyn were a bit over 20 levels behind H'aanit and Ophilia.  Alfyn was basically on Donate BP duty with the Merchant secondary I gave him, since his damage is kinda crap.  A lot of things were weak to Bow, this led to me spamming Arrowstorm, and using Draefendi's Rage with reckless abandon.  Whatever, it worked.

Cyrus finally reaches Yvon's chamber, suitably placed in his basement at the furthest point from the stairs down from the ground floor.  He pulls out a blood crystal not unlike the ones Cyrus found in Quarrycrest, uses it to transform into a demon version of himself, and thus the battle is on.

Unlike previous battles of this nature, there was no "can't use these weaknesses until you kill the minions first" mechanic.  He gained more hits on his guard every time he recovered from being broken, but also gained another weakness.  At one point, he "lost control of himself" and got a permanent critical hit buff.  I just kept hitting him with Draefendi's Rage and Amputate, and he died before too long.  In typical "I get to get my last words in before I actually die" fashion, he spouted something about immortality and a promise having been broken.

Therese passes out shortly after being rescued, so Cyrus takes her back to the inn.  Once she comes to, they have a bit of a conversation, wherein Cyrus finds out that Yvon was plotting to kill Cyrus, and then head to Duskbarrow.  Given that From the Far Reaches of Hell is still yet to be located, Cyrus decides that answers will be had in Duskbarrow.

Fast travelled over to Wellspring, did a bit of inquiry now that Alfyn is above level 40, and unlocked more stuff at the general store.  Yay.  Wellspring also happens to be where Olberic's Chapter 3 takes place, so I swapped him in, set his secondary as Merchant, and changed Alfyn over to Scholar so he could use some JP to learn Analyze.

Olberic asks around about Erhardt and finds that he's highly respected here, for defending the town from lizardmen.  Just as he's getting to business with the captain of the guard, the lizardmen attack, and Olberic joins in on the defense.  After fending off the attack, Olberic decides to push deeper into their cave, where Erhardt has already been, fighting lizardmen alone.  Erhardt is surprised to see Olberic, to say the least.  They fight off some more lizardmen, and then the lizardmen chiefs attack, so they split up and each take one of them.

It was an interesting fight, the chief didn't attack as long as its minions were alive, so I identified weaknesses and wore down the leader's guard for a bit before taking them out.  The chief itself died shortly thereafter.  What, does the combination of Draefendi's Rage and Brand's Thunder hurt or something?  Oopsie!

Anyway, Erhardt and Olberic have themselves a good discussion about everything that's happened, and it doesn't really seem like Olberic actually wants to kill Erhardt.  He does challenge him, though, which was fun.  Erhardt had a bunch of weaknesses, but the only one I could exploit was Polearm, so I basically just poked his guard down, beat him around a bit with Brand's Thunder, cleaned up HP/SP/status as necessary, and repeated ad nauseam.  If you're reading this and haven't yet done this fight, equip the accessory that prevents Blind.  It'll help.

Olberic gets the name and location of the guy who plotted the downfall of Hornburg, a man by the name of Werner, who went to Riverford.  As per usual, that's Olberic's next destination.

After I finished that, I went around, wrapped up some side quests, beat the guard in front of the Wellspring black market, did some inquiry with Alfyn, and had Therion steal some things.  There's still quite the number of side quests that I have no idea how to continue them, so every time I get a few more key items, I go around and try a few that I think they'll work for, usually to find out that I was wrong.  Whatever, lol.

Up next, Alfyn and Therion.  I'm still waiting to see if all the stories meet up in one "gotta save the world" sort of thing.  I've seen a mysterious hooded figure following people around, notably Tressa at the end of her Chapter 3, and this hooded figure looked a lot like the one that ended up being Lucia.  There's also one among the Saviors mentioned in Ophilia's story, and if I remember correctly, the Saviors have also been brought up in Primrose's story.  They're definitely up to no good regardless, so they'll inevitably get the smackdown.

Octopath Traveler: Session 17

Between last session and this one, a quick Twitter interaction led me to test what stat the healing spells are linked to.  As it turns out, it's Elem. Def., so Ophilia now has armor that boosts that.  My heals are back up to being useful again.  With that done, I fast travelled to Victors Hollow and started Tressa's Chapter 3.

Upon arrival, she starts looking for something that she can sell at the Merchants' Fair in Grandport.  A map at a local merchant catches her eye, that the merchant seems willing to let go of for cheap, but she makes the mistake of letting the merchant know it actually has some value, so just like that, price jacked up to unreasonable levels.  She also comes across Leon, the pirate-turned-merchant she encountered earlier in her journey.  As it turns out, the map belonged to a pirate friend of his, named Baltazar.  Tressa decides to get the one and only thing that the merchant was willing to trade for the map, a stupidly huge shield.  Having successfully traded an incredibly valuable shield for a treasure map, she takes it to Leon.  Back story ensues, but basically he ends up telling her to keep the map and to find the treasure herself.

So she goes and does precisely that.  Guarding the treasure is a beast with venomous claws, so to battle we go.  Because of my equipment, I'm going to stop rating battle difficulty until it catches up to me again.  However, this beast didn't seem to have a big attack to be wary of, it was just the standard "increases its guard when it recovers from being broken" mechanic.  With the beast dealt with, Tressa claims the treasure, a stone called Eldrite that is apparently the only one of its kind in the entire world.  Also in the chest is a letter from Baltazar to Leon, so Tressa takes that back to Leon.

More back story ensues, and in the end, Leon leaves Tressa with the Eldrite.  She now has something to sell at the Merchants' Fair, so her next destination is none other than Grandport itself.

Shifting gears a bit to a much darker story, I fast travelled over to Noblecourt to start Primrose's Chapter 3.  As you may recall, she'd just killed one of the three men responsible for the death of her father, and has returned home to Noblecourt seeking the truth.  Will she be able to handle the truth?

Upon arrival, there's a commotion in the main square as someone's apparently dying in public.  Primrose notes that nothing about that event or the way the city handled it would have happened if her father was still around.  Shortly thereafter she starts getting recognized by people who last saw her when she was a child, including a gardener from her house way back when who also used to write poetry and comfort her periodically.  She also meets the former Captain of the city watch, who tells her that a group called "The Obsidians" basically runs everything in town, and takes her to the entrance to their lair.  Another of the men she needs to kill in order to avenge her father happens to be in charge of things there, so it seems fairly straightforward.  Run in, exchange pleasantries, casual fight to the death.  You know.  The usual.

Instead of having his two minions who prevent his weaknesses from being exploited straight away, the Right-Hand Man summons them a few turns into the fight.  I had to deal with him being two lousy hits away from being broken while I figured out the minions' weaknesses and took them out.  He was annoyingly applying Blind a bit too often for my liking, but with Ophilia spreading the Rehabilitate around, I offed the minions and went back to work.  A few turns later, and he too was down for the count.  Fittingly, Primrose dealt the killing blow.

After the fight, the gardener she met earlier suddenly appears in an oh shit moment, because surprise he's the last person she needs to kill.  Except that he stabs her.  You know, for good measure.  Unfortunately for him, he didn't stab her good enough, and she recovers after a few days.  The ex-city watch guy tells her that he went to Everhold, so that's where Primrose is headed next.

Up next, Cyrus and Olberic.  Side note: I really wish that out-of-party characters would get a percentage of XP, just like in Chrono Trigger.  I wouldn't have all my out-of-party people being 20-30 levels behind like they are right now if that were the case.  I think the intent was for the player to be shuffling their party around a lot more often...

Octopath Traveler: Session 16

After gathering all the equipment and consumables data into a Google Sheet where I can filter it and sort it and encounter annoying issues with Google Sheets and make workarounds for their stupidity, I put together a shopping list.  Naturally, purchasing everything on said shopping list almost completely drained my money, but selling the old stuff recouped a fair portion of it.  Side note, I really wish there was a series of shields that was a straight upgrade to the Kite Shield.  It's the best shield I've found so far that doesn't have some crappy penalty to evasion.  Also, in buying all the good armor, I had to forgo elemental defense, so we'll see how that comes back to bite me.  Anyway, now that I'm kitted out, it's officially time to start Chapter 3.

H'aanit arrives in Stillsnow, seeking the sage Susanna.  Susanna reveals that she's no oracle and that everything she does is power of deduction and getting others to reveal things, which is how those fake "psychics" work in real life.  Anywho, the good news is that the petrification is one of those spell effects that disappears when its caster dies, so all H'aanit has to do to save her master is kill Redeye.  In order to do that, though, she needs a specific herb called "Herb-of-grace" that has the power to prevent the petrification.  It happens to grow in the nearby woods, by sheer coincidence, so off H'aanit goes.

At the end of the forest, near the patch of Herb-of-grace, there's a dragon.  H'aanit has a flashback about her master's stories and how they get longer with each retelling, and decides this will make for a most excellent story before jumping into battle with it.  This fight uses the whole "can't use some weaknesses yet" thing, but instead of the dragon having two minions like in the other cases, the battle simply plays out like you're slowly weakening its defenses over time, meaning as it recovers from you having broken it, more of its weaknesses become available to use for the next time you break it.  It also strengthens its guard, this time by three instead of two.  Interestingly, it has an ability that sweeps a party member out of battle for a few turns, and it used it on Ophilia, so I had to have Tressa do a bit of healing with Healing Grape Bunches until she came back.  Owing to the equipment I just purchased, no doubt, the battle wasn't so bad.

H'aanit returns to Susanna's place with the Herb-of-grace and tells her the story of the fight while it brews into a potion.  Once that's done, I received ten "Herb-of-grace Potion" consumable items, so it looks like I'll actually have to use them in battle myself.  As H'aanit is leaving Stillsnow, one of the Knights Ardante shows up and informs H'aanit that Eliza has located Redeye, near Marsalim.  That'll be the setting for H'aanit's Chapter 4.

Hopped over to Goldshore to do Ophilia's Chapter 3.  Right off the bat, she has another encounter with the merchant that showed up in her Chapter 1.  I thought there was something suspicious about him then, and nothing about this meeting has changed that feeling.  Anyway, she heads up to the cathedral to do the Kindling, but the bishop there is very clearly hiding something and acting rather suspiciously himself.  Ophilia follows a small child who she sees running out of the cathedral and begins to find out what's going on: some random guy asked the kid to give a letter to the bishop, and upon reading that letter, he was clearly shaken.  Getting straight to the point, Ophilia gets him to dump the goods: it was a ransom note.  His daughter has been kidnapped, and he'll get her back in exchange for the Flame that Ophilia carries.  Standard "tell anyone and she dies" threat as well.  Never being the one to avoid helping people, Ophilia runs off to the cave where the bad guys are hiding.

The fight was kind of interesting.  Some weaknesses couldn't be hit, as per usual.  The two guys were both mages, however one was a healer that kept popping off 800 heals for the both of them every couple of turns.  Naturally, after revealing weaknesses, I focused the healer and took him down, at which point all weaknesses became available to hit.  Shortly thereafter, the other one bit the dust.  I make it sound easy, but my lack of elemental defense at the moment left me in fairly constant need of healing, and Ophilia's lack of elemental attack meant that her heals weren't as potent as usual.  I definitely need to rethink the equipment I bought, but regardless, through the use of BP, I was able to keep everyone alive and take them down.

Bishop's daughter safe and sound, Ophilia performs the Kindling, and speaks of returning to Flamesgrace.  Just then, who should enter the cathedral but Lianna.  Back at the inn, Lianna reveals that her father (Ophilia's adoptive father), the archbishop, has died.  She also drugs Ophilia's drink, and then she and some mysterious hooded figure steal the Flame and head off to Wispermill.  The mysterious hooded guy is promising to be able to bring Lianna's father back to life, and Lianna is clearly in the bargaining stage of grief.  Ophilia somehow heard them openly discussing their plans after having passed out from the drugged drink, so after she comes to, she vows to go to Wispermill and reclaim the Flame, and Lianna as well.

Up next: Chapter 3 for Tressa and Primrose.  I'll re-evaluate equipment after that, since I'll also be shuffling party members around for the rest of Chapter 3.

Edit: Actually, effective immediately, Ophilia's now wearing a Platinum Vest instead of Platinum Armor.  I did a quick test, and found that healing amounts are linked to Elem. Def., which the Platinum Armor doesn't boost.  My healing should be a lot better now.

Octopath Traveler: Data Gathering Session 2

...aaaaaand done.  That felt like it took forever, but I really just needed to establish an optimized workflow.  Once I got things rolling it wasn't really so bad.

However, in the process of trying to set up the spreadsheet to be shared, I learned a lot about the shortcomings of Google Sheets.

1. Rather than selecting "Publish to the web...", you have to select "Share...".  Why aren't these two options under the same menu selection?
2. Filters are awesome, but don't get shared along with the spreadsheet.
3. The green color used in many places to indicate that filters are present still propagates through to the shared spreadsheet, though.
4. If I have the spreadsheet open, and filter it, it becomes filtered for anyone who's viewing it.  lolwut?
5. The sorting options in each column's filter menu have to be undone by the standard editing Undo action.  There's no "revert to unsorted state" option.

If you want to use this spreadsheet, you'll have to go to Data → Filter views... and make a new temporary filter view.  Only then will you be able to filter and sort it to find what you're looking for.  This kinda sucks, but there's no other option.

Also, I've enabled comments on the spreadsheet.  Hopefully, if I've missed anything, have a typo somewhere, or some equipment stat anomaly has gotten past the sanity checks I did as I entered information, people can comment and let me know.  Keep in mind that it's not complete yet, as I still need to Inquire/Scrutinize in a few towns to get access to the full inventories of their shops.  I'm also filling in recovery amounts for various consumable items since the game doesn't see fit to tell you what they are, and that process isn't complete yet.

Here's the link to the spreadsheet.  This is a separate, static view of the one I'm working on, without any of the formulas or the sheets that just serve as lookup tables and sets of data for data verification rules.  Lacking all that stuff, it should load a lot faster.  Enjoy!

Octopath Traveler: Data Gathering Session 1

So, I have a slight issue with the way Octopath Traveler handles the player's acquisition of new equipment.  It's basically spread out among a bunch of towns, and they just say "figure out what's best yourself lol".  Unless you're like me, you'll probably have to fast travel around comparing stats and whatnot to find what you need.

I've never been one to pass up an opportunity to make myself a solution.  I've also always had issues with the ways that games present information, usually it's not in a manner that I can easily digest.  If you recall, I made a PHP/MySQL application a while back for the StreetPass game Flower Town, just so I could track my progress and see what I had left in a way that much more completely and concisely told me what I had and hadn't done.

It should come as no surprise that I started work on a spreadsheet of all the equipment available for purchase from shops.  It may come as no surprise that I'm also including consumable items in this spreadsheet.  I've been asking myself "where did I get this thing?  If I knew, I'd go back and get more!", and that's precisely what this spreadsheet will tell me.  Well, not completely.  If I got it from a chest, or boughtstole it from an NPC, it won't be in the spreadsheet.  At least, I'll have a pretty good indicator as to which items I can readily get more of.

This is a fairly time-consuming process, hence my actual game progress has come to a halt.  I even restart the game periodically so the time I spend standing there with one or another shop's menu open won't count towards the gameplay time on my save.  Up until the time of this writing, I've got half of the game's shops documented.  I need to get the other half, and then I need to get Alfyn levelled up more so he can Inquire about things, since one of the things you can get from that is additional stock at shops.

Making this spreadsheet has been an interesting journey of writing formulas, using the hell out of named ranges, and adding in data verification and conditional formatting.  These sheets are designed more like database tables, to be honest.  I'm using VLOOKUPs all over the place.  I have a duplicate equipment protection conditional formatting rule in my equipment sheet that takes so pointlessly long to actually apply its formatting that I might as well not have it.  The performance issue is either due to the fact that it has to compare what I've entered to everything else in the column, or that every row on the sheet is subject to a VLOOKUP from my main equipment sheet with all the pretty formatting, to pull in item stats and whatnot so I didn't have to keep typing them out over and over again, and every time I change a cell the VLOOKUPs are getting re-evaluated even though the sheet they're on isn't even visible.  There's probably a way to optimize it further than I already have.  Do I know what that way is?  No!

In my typical fashion, I'll post a link to this spreadsheet once I'm done making it, so everyone can bask in its glorymake use of it.