There's not much to do in town, and people do say that the army is gearing up to retake the bridge to the south. However, they need their provisions. Looks like it's up to us to go get some!
Head to the castle and head down to the kitchen. Don't worry, the soldiers are cool with us now.
The brief stop in the kitchen reveals that he chef is actually the Commander's brother, and when we leave, he gives us the key item above. I hope it's at least a travel pack and not just one piece. We also get a Strength Capsule.
Once we give the food to the commander, Magus's troops launch their big attack. Talking to the Commander again has him ask if we'll help. Certainly will, we need to go that way! He gives us a Golden Helm (HIS Golden Helm) if we agree to help.
We meet Ozzie once we see those skeletons bump off a couple of soldiers. If you spoke to the Elder of Medina, it turns out the town elder of Medina is a descendant of this guy.
He's a dirty coward and we'll see why when we hit Magus's castle.
Fight your way through the enemies until you reach the end. You can attack Ozzie, and in fact, doing so after killing the other enemies is what ends the encounter. The skeletons require you to use magic (or, for some reason, Goku's wind slash) to do any significant damage. Explains how they're cutting through the human troops.
At the end, Ozzie throws together a bunch of skeletons who combine into Zombor, a non-indicative name if I ever heard one. Then again, Skeletor is a registered trademark.
Zombor is divided into two parts, Upper and Lower. The Upper body is weak to Ice and Shadow, while the lower is weak to Light and Fire. Kill the lower body first-it hits harder with a Quake style attack, and if the Upper Body is killed first, it MP Drains whoever did it and the Lower Body can then insta kill your team. So burn the legs first, then finish off the upper part. That's not to say the upper is without pain, it to has a full party hitting attack with "Death, death, death", so for the love of god, keep yourself healed!
Ozzie leaves before the fight begins, and the Commander doesn't have any extra rewards for you, so let's head to the new town we can now get to that we couldn't before (even on our first visit, the way way was blocked). There are, in fact, two towns we can go to. Domino isn't much, but in Porre, we get to hear about a little kid named Tata that supposedly bears the Hero's Badge, marking him as a hero of legend. Now, bear in mind that Goku and company are 16 at the most, but we've already put down monsters the size of tanks, so hey, maybe Tata can help us out.
Also, the market has Porran Berets for your ladies and Golden Suits for all. I prefer Taban's Vest for Bulma, but buy upgrades as you see fit.
We can also head to the Cursed Woods in the west, and here we have a game mechanic that barely gets mentioned-sometimes, monsters will fight monsters. If you hit the snakes, they'll eat the frogs (their in game name is "edible frogs", by the way) in order to heal. They're lined up so Goku's Slash or Cyclone can hit 'em both.
Heading all the way to the end and slipping into the secret passage under the bush (which is not super obvious at first) allows us to meet up with Ginyu again! However, when we tell him the King is wounded, he gets quiet and asks us to leave.
Well, with nothing else to do, we are hearing talk of a legendary blade in the Mountains, so I guess we'll have to go there. Word is Tata's heading out to get it to, so we need to do some climbing.
Monsters with bells, and monsters that are asleep. This'll go well.
The sleeping monsters are called Ogans, and when they have hammers, they're a nightmare, but the hammers can be burned with fire magic and they lose all their high defense stats. That boy is Tata, who ran away from a single Ogan without a hammer, and without the hammer, Goku can one shot them without a crit.
So, when danger reared its ugly head, Tata bravely turned his tail and fled, brave brave brave brave brave bold Sir Tata. We fight both the one chasing him and one with a hammer, to give us a showcase of this new enemy.
Most of the mountains is a pretty simple dungeon walk, against either Ogans (with hammers or without) or Freelancers, which are ninja birds that counter EVERYTHING but die pretty quick. The mountain isn't the test however...it's the fight at the end that is.
The Peak, however, is an annoying series of four battles with no breaks inbetween. Hope you weren't hurting for HP before!
In the cave at the end, we find the Masamune...and the creatures Masa, and Mune. They turn into monsters and attack us.
Masa has the green scarf, Mune has the purple scarf. Attacking Masa prompts a retaliatory "X-Strike", similar to what Goku and Ginyu combine to perform. Attacking Mune results in no counter attack. I recommend beating the shit out of Mune! They will occasionally combine to do some weird tornado attack that'll confuse the target, if you have extra Ambrosia you can use it to cure them, but you can also just wait and let one of the brothers attack the confused character and let them snap out normally.
After the first part of the fight, they combine into Masamune, and fight us again with no healing break inbetween. He has 3,600 HP, decent defense, and hits like a train. There's only one trick to this, and in the original SNES translation, the hint the game feels forced to give you is next to useless-when he begins to store Wind energy, Goku's Wind Slash somehow negates the nasty "hit everyone for triple digit damage" attack. How? Why? I DON'T KNOW! But you'll need to brutalize the ever loving shit out of him for this fight. No tricks aside from the Slash, nothing but a brutal battle against a high powered boss.
After the battle, the brothers wonder if we'll fix them. Well...we kinda have to now. What use is a broken sword?
Jaimas you are invited to shut the fuck up about the Lepers in Darkest Dungeon, I can already hear you typing.
So what you're telling me is...that Ginyu is the legendary hero? Shock, gasp, someone who's already competent actually carried this thing? Who'd have thought?
Speaking of Ginyu, he continues to angst even though we now have the Hero's Badge and half the Masamune. The other half? In the chest we couldn't get to earlier. I have a feeling Ginyu wanted us to find it, why else would he have moved out of the way? Bulma even reads a name on the hilt, M-E-L-C-oh fuck it, it's Melchior. Didn't we meet him? Ginyu says none alive can mend the Masamune, but that's where he's wrong and we're gonna prove it.
Will Goku and friends mend the Masamune? Is the Melchior we know the same as the one who engraved those letters? And will Ginyu ever snap out of his angst funk? Find out next time, on Chrono Trigger Kai!
