Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 notes #10

Postscript:

Whenever I put a game away, I soon find myself asking "What if I tried this? Or, is there a way to get that to work?" And I end up pulling the game back out and experimenting again. That's what happened with DQM:J3. Initially, my question was whether there was a way to boost Tension at the beginning of a battle more reliably. Normally, all of your monsters start the battle at 0 Tension. There are some abilities that allow for rarely bumping tension up, but they work maybe only once per 20-30 battles. With the Anesu Battle Arena event (battle master 4), I needed it to happen every round. I did have Tension Vampire for everyone in my party, which sucks 25 units from the enemy on a successful combat attack, and puts it on the attacker, but that kept missing against the cyborgs Anesu used. Tension can go negative, which makes the subsequent attacks or magic weaker. The increments are -100, -50, -25, -5, 0, 5, 25, 50, 100. Making my monsters stronger for one attack by boosting their tension while simultaneously weakening the enemy's first attack by stealing from their tension bar could be the difference between winning and losing a tough battle.

In rooting around in my monsters' abilities (for the ones I had in inventory), I noticed the skill "ouen" - "cheerleader." This skill occasionally bumps up the Tension bar one increment for the entire party. I also found something that is all in kanji that I called "rampage." This causes the monster to injure itself (maybe by 10%) at the beginning of the round, as long as its HP stays above 50% of its max value, in order to bump the Tension bar one increment. If I put cheerleader on everyone, and the one rampage ability I'd found was on my strongest monster, they'd naturally be at 5% at the beginning of the round for one attack (my main monster was equipped with AI2 (for two actions per round)), and the chances of at least one monster cheerleading in the same round would be maybe 10%. If I got lucky, I could get two monsters cheerleading together, to get the Tension bar for everyone at 25%, and 50% for the main monster. If that happened, the main one at least would be hitting for 999 HP on each attack. And, because I had x5 attacks on everyone, that would be 999 five times from my rampager in one round, best case. Since Anesu had 4 cyborgs in his party, with HP around 4000 each, AND I had super-fast start on everyone, I would the first one to attack in the first round of the battle, and - again, best case - I might be able to take out one of his monsters per round before one of them paralyzed one of my monsters some how.

So, I do this thing. I have 4 monsters, each with super fast start (from the motorcycle monster I got from one of the Master Roads), and each with cheerleader (from the BigHat monsters in the chapter 1 field). I have rampage from the Alchemist (which I got through random breeding) on my main guy. Two of the monsters have AllRecovery, a skill that includes Healing Rain (restores 300-700 HP to everyone in the party, depending on the Mnd stat of the caster), and everyone has AtkUp-SP (boosts Atk by about 200 points), and AtkUp-3 (boosts Atk by about another 100 points). The ones that don't have the healing skill have some other offensive skill that also boosts Atk another 50+ points. Finally, I have two accessories that boost Atk another 100+, which I put on my main fighters, and another that boosts Mnd 100 points, for one of the healers.

Then, I go into the battle arena and challenge Anesu. The first couple rounds go really slowly, so I activate Auto battle mode. This causes the screen to go black for a few seconds. Suddenly, the message "You won the battle" pops up on the screen. Cool. Anesu gives me something as a reward, but I couldn't find it when I went through my inventory. I think it was just 4 slices of top quality monster meat used for scouting monsters. Since I already had 50 of those, the prize wasn't that great. Additionally, I got 3 bronze, 2 silver, and 1 gold stars for use as Code Words for the Disk System.

I haven't mentioned this before, but the Battle Event rounds can only be fought once every 24 hours, with the next opportunity becoming available at midnight (based on the clock in the 3DS). Naturally, I could change the 3DS's clock and have the battles as often as I like, but I was using this timer as an excuse to stop playing the game for a while. The next night, I pull the game out, and select the 5th battle round. This turns out to be against Aroma-2, who has a 1-slot robot monster named Sancho, and a 3-slot behemoth robot called Giant Nocho-ra. They are heavily reliant on status attacks that result in some form of paralysis. While my party does deal some damage to them right away, I still ended up getting wiped out in a few rounds.

Pondering my next move, I do a little more exploration, specifically on the Dimension Eyes. There's one eye that usually shows up near the enemy hideout in the chapter one field, and another near the monolith point in the chapter three field. I use Ruler to teleport between the two points, and if the eyes are there, I go in them. Usually, they just have low-level monsters or some minor items (stuff for making the weaker accessories). Sometimes, they have Scout Masters that want to do battle, and more rarely, really high-level boss monsters. One of the scout masters has a party of three flying dragons - red, yellow and green. I'd managed to scout the yellow and green ones from him, but the red one was proving harder to get. By sheer accident, I'd also been messing with creating disks for the disk system and gotten one that had the black flying dragon as a reward. Thinking there might be something useful in having a full 4-dragon rainbow party, I focused on hitting the dimension eyes to see if I could ultimately scout the red dragon. After 2-3 hours of play, I succeeded. Along the way, I found a black chest along the left side of the chapter 1 hideout that contained the final rare item Queeny wanted for the last of her Accessory quests. I give this to her, and she gives me some other rare items. The accessories I can make with them turn out to be boring, though.

I then switch to the disk system, slowly working myself up from level 1. This takes a couple hours, and is really frustrating. Around level 29, the flying monsters hanging around the check points in the relay race challenge stop running away and start attacking you on sight. This trashes my ranking at the finish of the quest, giving me a C-rank, and a 1% chance of winning the award. It also means that the disk system only levels up the disk at the end by 1 level.  Finally, I get to about level 70, and get lucky a few times, with the checkpoints in places where there are no monsters. I get S-rank now, and a 25% chance of success. I eventually do get the black flying dragon, but it's a 3-slot monster. I breed it down to 1-slot, put it in the party with the other three (red, yellow and green), and run them all up to exp. level 100 and rank SS-100. I put them in a couple test battles, and they're actually pretty weak.

However, in with all this, I notice that one of the monsters has something called Tsuneni Maho Counter. Going through my inventory, I find another with Tsuneni Ata Counter. These are "always on" mirrors that have a better than 50% of reflecting magic and physical attacks back at the enemy. I also ended up getting a rare monster from the dimension eye that is 3-slot and pretty strong (stronger than my other monsters individually). I take this new monster, level it up, put the two counter abilities on it, add cheerleader and super fast start, and equip it with skills to boost its attack and mind stats. I pair this with my strongest 1-slot healer, and return to the arena to challenge Aroma-2 again. Again, I get in some decent shots in the first round, but I still get paralyzed, and the counter mirrors don't always work. I get whittled down and killed. Sigh.

I put the game away and get ready to type up this postscript. Since I don't know what the reward was that I got from Anesu, I decided to check out the Japanese walkthrough site I've been using. As I'm scrolling through the page on the event battles, I realize that I'm looking at a "preparation guide" for making the monsters for beating Anesu. Going through it more closely, it occurs to me that I already have a lot of the skills and abilities I need to make this work. The biggest issue is in finding a 4-slot monster. The site shows a super-rare cyborg, which I might be able to get from the disk system, if I tried long enough.

Instead, I start wondering what the odds are in being able to breed something with what I already have in inventory. I did get a few rare monsters from the dimension eye, and I don't know what combinations they'd form. I go to Ace at the breeding console in the Center building in the chapter 2 field, and slowly walk through every single one of the 100+ monsters in my inventory, and try to pair them up with every other single one. I find three offspring that I've never gotten before, and I take notes on them. Two are 3-slotters, and one is a 1-slotter. I save my game, then try breeding for the first new monster. When I have it, I try a test breeding with everything remaining in inventory. That gives me nothing new. I reset the game and try again with the second monster. Then I reset again and try with the third one. Amazingly, the second new monster could be bred with another rare monster I'd found to create the only 4-slotter I've every gotten in the game.

The walkthrough suggests taking a slime and breeding it with some 4-slotter to get a slime with a chou-giga (super large) body. On this, add the magic and attack mirror counters, All Guard+, rampage, AI2, Tamekite Body (from the clockwork bird in the chapter 2 field) and Magic Usage 1/2. For skills, add Nijikujaku (for one of the boosts it gives, obtained from the monster of the same name), MndUp-3, Tension Vampire Guard SP, Defense Guard SP, Priest (obtained by buying two lower level priest skills from the skill book shop, and breeding them on two different monsters), and DefUp-SP. I do this, which requires multiple breedings of my slime, and the other monsters that have the other abilities I need. Along the way, I accidentally create stronger skill books that include Giga Power SP, and MndUp-SP. I leave them on SuperSlime, as I call him.

The one thing that really bothers me during all this is that I don't know what to do about the main offensive skill. The walkthrough uses a specific skillbook that can only be found on the 4-slot cyborg used for the basis of the customized slime. I don't have that book, and I don't know what to use in its place. The screen caps of the battle against Aroma-2 show the slime hitting for 4,000+ HP in one attack, and I'm stuck with the 999 cap. Just as a placeholder, I keep Giga Power SP on my slime (it consists of various magic attacks that may or may not do anything against robot metal bodies). Additionally, every time I try putting Magic Usage 1/2 on the slime, it disappears from the abilities list. I try breeding one of the monsters that already has it with one of the Color Fondues, and again, it disappears from the list of available skills.

Giving up, I level up my 4-slot Super Slime in the Golden Slime disk field, and I suddenly discover that I'm getting way more experience from the gold slime than I should be. At one point, I even maxed the exp. received from one encounter at 99,999,999 (I didn't unlock any special achievements with that, though). With SuperSlime as ready as I could get it, I teleported to the battle arena. I save my game, with the expectation that I'd have to shut it off before I died, and then start rummaging through my item inventory for spell books I'd collected from the various special monsters I'd bred, and defeated in the dimension eyes. I start the battle against Aroma-2, and SuperSlime starts taking damage in spite of the counter mirrors. But, he's not getting paralyzed. That, and with the slime body, and the really high defense boosts, the amount of damage received is only about 125 points per attack, and SS has 2,200 HP max. In the next couple of rounds, the mirrors start kicking in, and SS shows that not only does he have the ability to heal himself (from the Priest skills), he also has automatic MP recovery. Suddenly, he throws out one of the Giga Power SP attacks for 5,000 points against the 1-slot enemy (Sancho has 4,000 HP, and the other monster has 8,000), killing it. This is the one that had been doing the healing, and most of the status attacks. Now, things are turning more in my favor, and after 5 rounds, I've won.

Aroma-2 acts surprised at losing, gives me Sancho (the 1-slot monster), and 3 bronze, 2 silver, and 1 gold stars for the disk system. She then invites me back to fight another event battle (you start over with round one again, but the monsters are a little tougher now) the following day. There's nothing else special that happens, so now, yeah, I'm over this. I'm deeply tempted to mail the game to a friend to hold on to for me so I can't try digging it out and wasting more time on it again. I still keep hoping that there's one more monolith for unlocking Scout Class SS, and to try pulling the Anesu clone from the cloning tanks, or to maybe take a space capsule out to space somewhere. These really seem to be unresolved loose ends. But, I'm betting that there's nothing more to do here now. Stick a fork in it, it's done.

Last comments:
I tried playing the Slime Challenge game again, and there doesn't seem to be any kind of logic behind the race stats your monsters are assigned, or any way to make the race monsters faster through stat boosts or winning at the stage races.

Also, when buying items in the shops, or assigning skill points to skills on the monsters, I'd always used the cross controller up and down buttons. These change the increment/decrement counts one unit at a time, and take forever when buying 800 low-level healing potions. By accident, I discovered that the cross controller left and right buttons change the numbers in increments of 10. That's a huge time-saver.