Plodding along

Let's see, so I get a canoe, and head over to the giant volcano where everyone is telling me to go, unlike Matty, who goes and upgrades his guys because he knows what the fuck he's doing. This obligatory lava dungeon is designed to inflict as much pain upon you as possible, and it's streamlined so that rather than having the chance of a random encounter every certain number of steps, each step on lava (and there's lava everywhere, as you can see in my pic) saps you of one hit point! You know, I actually prefer forced HP loss at every step to the tedium of random encounters. And yet I play RPGs all the time. What is the matter with me?

Then it's time for the battle with the monster babe in a bikini, which is every bit as obligatory as a lava dungeon, an ice dungeon, or an ancient civilization with extremely advanced technology that perfected airship technology before it was lost to the ravages of time.

At this point, I'm obscenely wealthy, but I can't buy new spells until I upgrade my guys. I'm a big fan of the upgraded party, not only because they have fancier sprites:

But also because the new classes lead to this hilarious status screen:

Then I hit the bonus dungeon and fought the wrong boss several times before deciding to be lame and use save states to figure out which door led to the one Matty fought. I was mildly amused here:

It's Rand! And Mat! Wandering around aimlessly in the desert with no end in sight! Come on, that would NEVER happen.