Wild Arms 3 Part 12: The Turtle’s Lament

This is being posted on Gogglebob.com on July 11, Bulletin Board Day. Stationmaster what’s-his-name put up a bulletin board for the station. The people posthumously rewarded him by naming a constellation after him. I, too, work hard everyday so that one day I’ll get my own constellation in the sky. Well, what are you aiming for?

Previously on Wild Arms 3: Virginia suffered a crushing loss when she was nearly crushed to death, but Jet took the blow. Her new BFF gave her a pity magical artifact, and now she is supposed to go to Ka Dingel to meet the rest of the big players, but…

Gallows succinctly explains the situation.

You guys have ARMs. You could just shoot her until she’s happy again. … Wait, this is probably why they won’t let me be a therapist.

“I enjoyed that part where we stalked through a dungeon and killed, like, a billion slimes.”

It is good to see that Jet is doing well. If he blames Virginia for what happened, he is not mentioning it.

Drones just hanging out, waiting for their queen bee to make a decision.

Good question!

Soul crushing question!

Look, this is a videogame, and you know you’re going to get back to questing, stomping monsters, and collecting treasure soon enough. But I do appreciate this little intermission that takes the time to relay the always important lesson that sometimes doing your best and taking a task seriously is not enough to succeed. You can’t just expect to score a 100 at “being alive”.

And it is good to have specific goals and not just… drift.

Ugh. Virginia? This isn’t healthy.

I like the implication that Virginia has always had a clear goal in mind (find daddy!), but she is in a vague kind of denial wherein she tells herself she is simply “following in her father’s footsteps”, and not outright pursuing a goal that may have a very unhappy ending.

And the only thing she can admit to is loving the heck out of metaphors.

A breakthrough! Her purpose is finding a purpose! … That is not a good choice, but that’s all the time we have left in this session, so if you will speak to the receptionist about your next appointment…

“I hope everyone downstairs hasn’t already instantly given up.”

Clive is a good dad. He already got some gelato ready for this occasion. With sprinkles.

Virginia is quick to apologize. I would like to see Jet be similarly contrite.

“I became a Drifter, thinking that maybe my ARMs could help people in need… But I didn’t have a purpose or goal as a Drifter… That’s why she said I was pretending. How I put everyone in danger. Please forgive me…”

Come to think of it, for a JRPG party, we haven’t done much objective “good” here on our quest. Clive and Virginia both saved towns in their openings, but since then, we’ve just been following nebulous leads about some Blue Meanie, and we haven’t really helped “people in need” at all. We better get around to saving the world eventually!

But nobody wants to think about that too hard.

Virginia! Dammit! Do you need to go back upstairs again?

This might be the first and last time this happens, but I agree with Jet’s annoyed sentiment.

You sounded confused ten seconds ago!

Gallows, you are simultaneously absolutely correct and saying the completely wrong thing.

Now I’m just picturing a “Game Over” screen that is only prompted when your protagonist gets too depressed. I’m sure that has been in a few modern games…

Clive is a pretty patient guy, but he is helping Virginia along on “let’s leave this depressing inn and get back to work”.

Jet, what are you using this money for, anyway? You got a chateau to support or something?

Remember how Janus said we had to go to Ka Dingel for the final showdown? Let’s do that.

“I even remembered where we were supposed to go! Yay!”

Just going to say this out loud: this is the end of Chapter 1 of the game. There is one optional area available if you know where to look (and I would not recommend looking right now), but the greatest challenge you’ve yet seen is on the horizon. Feel free to run around out there and explore or whatever, and definitely do your best to upgrade your ARMs. You should have at least a few extra bucks after the last dungeon.

Always have to appreciate when NPCs update to talk about the latest quest.

Martina, the adorable moppet that used to hang out in this crapsack, has now gone missing. Don’t worry! She’s fine! She has just started her own sidequest, and you can kick that off if you stop by the local train station (where else would a kid go to start her own adventure?). I will cover that in more detail when I get to the inevitable “et cetera” post in like a million years. You cannot complete her quest for a long while…

We ride!

There is a sign by Ka Dingel that notes that if you save in a dungeon (any dungeon!) after completing the “puzzle” for a room, it will reset the puzzle. So we get a little bit of fourth wall tampering with the game designers telling you that that is not a bug, but a feature. It is like you are getting double videogames!

Ka Dingel is down here.

Looks like a fun tower!

As briefly noted last time, Ka Dingel was basically the final dungeon of Wild Arms (1). Technically, the final area of Wild Arms was a Death Star, but Ka Dingel was the tower that got you to said not-moon. Ka Dingel was an ancient tower there, too, and a structure thought lost during that story’s millennia-old Demon War that popped up again just in time for the finale. Given Ka Dingel more or less exploded when the party returned to Filgaia, it is conceivable that the “ruined” Ka Dingel we now see is what is left. Oh, and the reason Ka Dingel went and went boom? It was thanks to an attack by the half-dead and marginally mutated Zeikfried/Siegfried. This was his final battle against the party, so, “magical space elevator” hijinks aside, Sieggy died at Ka Dingel. Noting that for no particular reason.

And final bit of trivia: the name Ka Dingel is consistent between Wild Arms and Wild Arms 3, but it is theoretically a distortion of the ancient Sumerian word “Kadingir/ Ka Dingir”, which is meant to refer to ancient Babylon.

Enough trivia for the day! Time to get to block pushing!

And fighting! Anna here can take a bunch of hits, and they are likely to poison your party. Bring antidotes!

For all sorts of reasons!

So the first puzzle of Ka Dingel is pretty straightforward. Move two blocks to make a bridge, access the third block, and then use that to cross the next gap.

These dudes are less powerful than Anna, but will inflict the Disease status effect, which disables healing. You do not want to be inflicted with disease before a long dungeon.

Also, you probably shouldn’t suffer any demon to live, either. Just a good idea there.

You can choose to cross one of two gaps with the third block. Aiming for the treasure will score two lucky cards. This is great, as this area has two bosses.

And you can always move that block to progress-assisting locations later.

Practically every room in Ka Dingel then leads to a filler staircase. Ka Dingel is supposed to be an unfathomably tall tower, so I guess this makes a better impression than walking over a “stairs” tile.

Hey, it’s those stupid thieving birds from outside. I guess this is where they roost.

The next room has… well, I would hesitate to call this a puzzle…

For the first time since Virginia’s intro dungeon, there is a mechanism that is controlled by rotating. Remember that that is a thing, and you’ll make quick progress with this manual elevator.

There is a treasure alcove halfway through the rotator room.

Pretty basic rewards here, but a Duplicator is always a great find.

Back to rotating our way up. I guess the “puzzle” here is lining up the two elevators? It isn’t rocket science.

Getting our steps in for the day.

This room looks remarkably unremarkable.

What? A random battle? With no exclamation mark?

So this is a boss battle. It comes completely out of nowhere, and I would not be surprised to hear some players encountered Trask here thinking it was another random mook.

Trask appeared in Wild Arms 2 as a boss fight. It is initially impossible to completely defeat (you can win the fight, but it is still standing after the results screen), then your protagonist gets the powerup to end all powerups, and he tears the turtle a new one completely solo. Later in the game, Trask 2.0 appears, and it makes much less of an impact. In both cases, Trask is revealed to be somehow bio-mechanical, and was invented/created by the great Liz & Ard. This Trask looks to be more on the biological side of things.

I mean… bio-missiles have to be biological, right? That’s right there in the name.

Trask seems to attack twice per turn, and has multiple offensive options. It has that missile from the previous shot, and can plainly stomp your party. It also can poison, which any Pokémon trainer can tell you is bad news when you are dealing with a defensive opponent.

And speaking of being defensive, physical attacks do nada to Trask. It is not completely immune like the blobs of the previous dungeon, but its defensive rating is probably something like 254/255.

So magic is the way to go.

And my magic stats are so insanely impressive that I kinda accidentally killed the sucker while trying to set up the “real” way you are supposed to defeat Trask. Sorry!

At least I got an accessory that can protect against poison in the future.

So let’s pop over to Playstation 5 land for a second…

Here is the “puzzle” way to defeat Trask. First you hit it with a fire arcana (magic)…

And then you freeze it.

Just like the book back in town said.

This causes… something that nobody felt like animating. I guess narration will have to do.

Hooray! Trask is now vulnerable to physical attacks!

If you never figure out Trask’s “secret” weakness, you can defeat Trask entirely with magic attacks, and assume this is just the boss fight equivalent of those blob monsters.

But allowing your whole party to unload physical attacks through shell-breaking is going to take Trask down faster (which is relevant when your party is being repeatedly poisoned). Bye bye, turtle.

Or… not bye bye? Trask is an odd duck narratively. Trask appears with absolutely no introduction or explanation, and then, when it dies, it leaves behind a “sealed monster”. Much later in the game, you can return and fight the optional boss Powered Trask. It is a slog of a fight that relies on the insane defense of a giant, poisonous turtle. And is the implication that killing Trask 1.0 only made it shell up and come back stronger? Is Trask the official guardian of Ka Dingel? A trap laid in wait by Janus? Maya? Janus’s currently unknown employers? Nobody knows. What we know is that Trask lived and died in this room, and it may live and die here again later.

But no time to worry about that, as we’ve got some more stairs to climb. And we are going to call it here. A whole heck of a lot happens in the next update, so right after this obvious midpoint seems like a place to stop. Ka Dingel will be scaled and maybe exploded all over again next update.

Next time on Wild Arms 3: When we say “the finale of Chapter 1”, we mean it!