We wave goodbye to our werewolf friends in Kelb and head north to search for the pass to the dragon fields. Our mission is to find some special grass that we can give to Kirile’s dragon so that he can fly us over the great barrier and gain us entry in Exdeath’s castle.

I turns out that finding the mountain pass is easier said than done. We make a couple of wandering runs through the valley, but can’t seem to find the way up. The random encounters eventually wear us down to the point that we have to return to the werewolves for some rest and relaxation. Revived, we once again try to find the way up the mountain. This time we succeed, and begin a long winding expedition to the top of the mountain.

And then it happens. We run into a fight with a Golem, a dragon, and a dinosaur. The dragon and the dinosaur are attacking the Golem. Cool, I think. I’ll help them finish off the Golem, then turn my attacks on them. Within a couple of rounds, we’ve killed the Golem. We then face off against the dragon and the dinosaur. I figured this would be a straightforward battle—we’ve fought this combination already a few times on this run, and they didn’t give us much of a problem.

This dragon and dinosaur are completely different, however. We hammer them repeatedly, but can do little damage. It’s as if they are suddenly some sort of turbo enemy. The fight goes on forever, but eventually they start throwing bones at us that do significant damage. We put up a valiant fight, but in the end they simply wore us down. Crap. Wipeout. And my previos save is way back in the werewolf town. Damn.

I must be missing something here. This fight shouldn’t have been so hard.

Status: Going Backward.

We set out early the next morning on our Weed Quest. We leave Galuf’s castle and head north. The passage quickly narrows to small village. We enter, only to find the place completely deserted. Humm. Strange. Most of the buildings are locked up tight, and there doesn’t seem to be a soul aroud. Finally, we find an unlocked door and then—Surprise! A pack of werewolves! Argh!

Fortunately, the head werewolf is a friend of Galuf. (I wonder why Galuf didn’t tell us about this beforehand?) Unfortunately, the leader doesn’t believe Galuf when he tells the leader that Bartz and the rest of the party are working for good guys. Things spiral down to the point where Bartz and the werewolf leader start to fight. Bartz cranks up his stud level, however, and blasts the werewolf through a door. This ends the fight and injures the werewolf badly enough that his mates have to put him in bed to recover.

From his bed, however, the werewolf leader is more open to discusson. He, Bartz, and Galuf talk for a bit, and in the course of the conversation figure out that Bartz’s father was one of the four people who traveled from Galuf’s world to Bartz’s world many years ago to imprison Exdeath there! Bartz is an alien!

Anyway, after that interesting diversion, our party gets ready to leave our new furry friends and continue their search for Dragon Weed. We’ll continue there tomorrow.

Status: Still Hunting for Weed

I’ve noticed a minor problem with the database that is causing some goofiness with apostrophes. I thought I knew how to fix this, but I haven’t nailed it quite yet.

Most likely, I’ll need to roll back the database to mid-afternoon a couple of times, so any comments you’ve made after 2PM today have vanished. For the time being, I’ve disabled commenting until I can get it fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience!

I’ll post again once I’ve solved everything, but I’ve got to leave for a bit and won’t be able to try again until after 10PM EST.

EDIT: Problem solved at 5:18PM. I’ve turned on commenting again, but we did lose any comments between about 2PM and 5PM. Sorry about that.

Well, it’s been a long time. Time to scrub the rust off the swords and get this story going again…

When I last left our digital heroes, they were riding the back of a huge dragon on their way to the castle where Galuf lives. Little did I realize, however, that Galuf actually owns the castle: He is the King of his land. Impressive!

But our heroes waste little time on small talk and instead begin plotting how to get past the massive barrier that Exdeath has built around his evil castle. It seems that the only way to get inside is to fly over the barrier. Simple, right? Nope. This is Final Fantasy! Our dragon is too pooped to fly anymore. Seems it got all worn out from hauling our butts back from the Moogle forest. The only way to make the dragon better is to head north, to a dragon field, where some sort of healing grass can be found. Apparently, no one who has ever gone to get the grass has ever returned, though. What I wonder is if no one has ever returned with the grass, how do we know it’s there? But anyway, let’s not mind the details too much.

And I won’t belabor the obvious point that we basically started this whole adventure on this planet inside Exdeath’s castle in the first place. If that’s where we were trying to get, why did Galuf rescue us and get us out? We could have saved a heck of a lot of time!

Galuf: “I’ve saved you! Let’s flee this castle!”
Party: “Okay!”

Once outside castle:
Party: “What do we do now?”
Galuf: “Try to get inside the castle!”

Joking aside, we’ll go grass picking tomorrow.

Status: Hunting for Weed.

Sorry for the delay again. I’ve finally cleared everything out of the way. Life got crazy for a while there.

I’m ready to resume posting, but I’m currently running an old version of WordPress, and the site badly needs to be upgraded. There won’t be much, if anything, in terms of visual change, but the engine under the hood will be better, and I’ll fix some of the current problems with the way the site is presented to Google’s search engines.

I hope to finish the upgrade on Saturday during the day, and hope (crosses fingers) to make a new post about Final Fantasy V on Sunday. Saturday, the site may go down while I do the upgrading.

Thanks again for your patience!

Mike