28 - Back At It at the Fertile Crescent
(Originally Written Sep-Oct 2024)
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Last time, Fanfic OC Cascada joined the Stardust Crusaders and shaved a good 30% off their canon travel time from Japan to Egypt by blasting their enemies with an arm-mounted laser cannon. How are things going to go now that we're finally on Dio's home turf?
It's been a while, folks... I swear I haven't just been laying around. The game gets a bit harder and more complex around here and I needed more prep time... yeah, let's go with that.
(Editor's Note: Plus, I mean, Cohost died and I had to reupload and fix the embeds for every single image up to now. There's that too.)
The fishing village is a small map with only a couple buildings, but we're going to spend quite a while here. Well, you won't...
new arc, same shit
Here we have the newest tier of Element of Freedom. As always, they aren't very difficult to kill and give solid EXP yield, but we're in the back half now. Shit's a bit harder.
They deal hefty damage and freeze your party members, so it's possible to get stunlocked. We're also hitting the point where the 18 SP Thunder Beam isn't reliably sweeping encounters anymore, leaving Cascada's multi-target options the 30 SP Freeze Ray (which obviously is not great against Freeze enemies) or the 40 SP Venom Cannon. Our SP cap as of this point is 277, so we're stopping to juice up a bit more often.
The new Mounted Soldiers can show up in groups of one or three, and have a slate of gun/explosive attacks like the Joey Dolls. They also like to run away, which is always just lovely to see after you've burned 80 SP with Venom Cannon missing twice. They yield a bit less XP but more money than the Freeze, and they also have a chance to drop Surgical Tools, an elixir equivalent (100% HP & SP).
Also visible in the above screenshot are the Fireflies that've been hounding us since Varanasi. Still jerks.
Jotaro still sucks at fighting Long-range enemies. I think I said waaaay back that Star Finger was his only ranged attack, but I forgot about this one where he throws rocks.
The restaurant doesn't have anything we haven't seen already, though the Seafood Curry makes a reappearance after a while. Alas, the Joseph Food Tour commentary only happens with bespoke food vendors.
I'm taking a deep sigh in real life as I assemble this update a few weeks after recording the footage. A few hours indeed.
I've lived in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area my whole life, so I can't help but be slightly curious about more rural life. What does it feel like to run the only restaurant or the only bar in town? (I mean, it probably sucks)
Brain tangent: old Pokemon anime lore is that Ash Ketchum's hot mom runs the only restaurant in Pallet Town. That's why there's that gag during the first Pokemon League arc where she shows up at the tournament and muscles her way into the local restaurant kitchens to cook for her son.
What was on the airwaves in rural Egypt in 1989? I learned recently that Go Nagai's Grendizer is incredibly popular in the region, becoming a seminal work in the local genre scene after it aired in Lebanon in 1979, so maybe re-runs of that.
(Jumping back in here with some trivia: cursory research tells me that an espionage thriller series titled Ra'fat El-Haggan about the eponymous [real] spy was huge at the time.)
me about once a fortnight
I believe this has a chance to give you the Dizzy status. Cascada can hold her drink, though.
I'm pretty sure there's been at least one creep in every city we've been to on this trip. It probably isn't even Polnareff most of the time.
Picking the "Tell your fortune" option just tells you whose ending you're in the running for based on your FP levels... which is information we can access for free at any time by calling up Steel. Otherwise, the fortune is based on whoever's in your party at the time. First up is Jotaro.
In Jotaro's scant handful of appearances in later JoJo arcs, it's established he became a marine biologist and wrote his thesis on starfish.
I'd chalk it up mostly to how the party dynamic fits together, but it does kinda feel like Abdul gets a bit more manic and expressive in the second half of the story. This kind of personality change isn't unheard of in people who have the frontal lobe of their brains damaged. Supposedly Hol Horse's bullet only grazed the flesh of Abdul's forehead and didn't reach his brain, but it's something I always thought about.
Getting a party member's fortune told gives them +1 FP, but Abdul gets +3 to make up for his long absence. Joseph's right here, so we'll get his done right now.
Joseph's "I do not have a secret love child" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions answered by his shirt.
Polnareff's turn. His FP should still be low enough that I can get his fortune without worrying about it.
Polnareff does in fact get up to some business with a turtle later. It might even be a Stand-using turtle! Alas, the details of this are spoiler-y enough that I'm not quite comfortable repeating them directly.
Next up, Kakyoin. What strange darkness looms in his future?
The joke with all of these is, of course, that everybody hates or refuses to pay for their 100% correct fortunes.
Current FP standings are about as expected. Kakyoin's actually got 16 because I did a couple things slightly out of order.
The next task on Cascada's itinerary is to hang out with Joseph. Steel said that one of the Stand users around here would be easier to find with the old timer in tow.
Besides the nickname thing, everyone's recruitment line changes once they're past 10 FP. Joseph's not talking about how girls get targeted more often anymore.
Back at the inn. Can you spot the difference compared to when we started?
Every time you talk to a villager outside who mentions that people left the inn, one of the sleeping folks in the other room disappears. This last one stays no matter what.
Upon hitting "Yes" you are immediately thrown into battle.
On one hand, a group of two Fireflies is annoying enough and now we gotta deal with four. On the other, our multi-hit attacks work just as well.
Jotaro shows up after a turn or two. Honestly him showing up makes this overkill; only Cascada and Joseph would have been just fine.
This might as well be a wasted turn on his part.
I believe Faith only has a random chance of dropping a Badge of Honor, so it's a nice get.
Just like with Kate and the Green Hornets, beating Faith here removes all Fireflies from this and all subsequent maps.
COMMENCE THE GRINDING!
Once a party member is over level 30 and has over 10 FP, there's a chance for this to happen in battle.
For 100 SP apiece, you get a super strong combo attack. Every playable Stand has a unique combo attack for every main party member, though they do often re-use animations from elsewhere.
If anyone's got anything particularly good in mind, please leave a suggestion, but, I mean...
Really, what else?
Perfect.
The grinding commences here. A lot of grinding. We're probably fine after the Joey Mansion, but Mr. Tutorial wasn't kidding either when he said we should level up a bit. I have my own reasons besides. Montage time!
Abdul and his fire attacks are naturally pretty good at blasting down the Freeze encounters.
Jotaro's even learned this, which despite being labelled as such, is not his ultimate attack.
Freezes pop into Short-range more often than some of the other Elements of Freedom enemies, so Jotaro's pretty good at taking them down.
Back in Update 9, I said Joseph has "a late-game buff that breaks the difficulty curve if you're a very particular kind of sicko". This is what I was talking about.
Fun fact, the "Deep Pass Overdrive" text here is in the exact same position on screen as in the previous screenshot. This isn't important, it just made me chuckle.
This is a reference to Parts 1 and 2. In both, a member of the hero's group creates a sacrificial Ripple out of the final remnants of their life force, bestowing it upon Jojo for a mid-season power up.
It's a hefty stat boost for the entire party. The game says you can't use it again, but that's just for this cycle. It's available again in NG+, buffing your stats as many times as you're willing to play through the game with the same Stand (player Stands are all considered separate party members on the backend).
Minus 30 levels means Joseph is about as strong as Cascada was when we first gained control in Japan. He does keep all of his skills though, if you were so inclined to level him back up to fighting shape. I am not doing that. I am instead simply going to load a save and never use Deep Pass Overdrive.
You can see Cascada's level here. In the process of this grind to get the rest of the party up to level 34 or 35, we went from 164712 experience points (level 40) to 306612 experience points (level 45), nearly over again how much we've gotten from the entire game up until now. An encounter with three Freezes yields 900 EXP, three Mounted Soldiers yields 750. You do the math.
can you blame me for taking a hiatus lol
We really should have seen this coming once he made a Sentai team of himself back in Varanasi.
Okay, I know I say it every time we go up against an optional boss, but King Joey is no joke. He has a solid 150% of the HP of the last strongest boss we fought and will spam missiles and other big party-hitting attacks. If a bazooka happens to stun both party members, losing just that one turn means he might keep the momentum and outright wipe you.
Joseph's Deep Breathing heals himself for 200, but healing Cascada for any reasonable amount takes items, and it's hard to outpace King Joey without dipping into The Good Stuff.
I make some rare use of a couple buff moves here. Unfortunately these early ones don't really increase your stats enough to matter at this point.
Thankfully, he's not immune to status effects; that's our in for kicking his ass.
I mean, other than the level grinding.
...and the combo attacks.
Very next turn, the exact thing I mentioned above happens. Both party members get stunned by a bazooka then smashed with a big physical attack, leaving Cascada below half HP and Joseph below 20%. Our combo attack cost a full 100 SP from each too, so we're getting pretty tapped out.
But do you remember? Level 45 is a special level.
The Wave-Motion Gun is arguably the strongest skill in the game. For a hefty 100 SP, it does huge defense-piercing damage on both HP and SP, and it has a chance to inflict status effects.
Which status effects? All of them.
It still isn't enough to put Joey down and Cascada's almost completely out of SP, but he's no threat anymore. There are so many fetters on him now that he can't hit for shit.
The Nuclear Warhead is a one-time use item with the same effects as Wave-Motion Gun. You can get at most two per playthrough (not counting NG+ shenanigans), and we're already past the other one. King Joey actually has a low chance to use one against us, which would have been a no-questions-asked party wipe.
Rest in piss, Joey. The Murderdolls will never bother us again.
I think Cascada deserves a treat after finally putting Joey in the dirt, don't you?
See you again!
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