Armed with my Java transformation program I set off last night in search of power and tasty things to eat. The going was very rough at the start. I had a sequence of meat I wanted to eat in order to turn my starting goblins into higher level monsters but the problem is the monsters I wanted to eat were only found in the hardest dungeon I have access to, and themselves are substantially stronger than goblins are. My red bull was good enough to take them out but he could only attack 10 times before having to run back to the inn. Also, his progression path involved moving to a substantially worse level 1 monster before I could jump to level 2. And the first thing the goblins turned into at level 2 was actually worse than a goblin!
I made substantial use of save states and knowledge that the random number generator isn't random at all to learn how many rounds it would take to run from each fight. I also would go to a different level of the castle if I wasn't getting any good fights since there are different fights on each level. After several runs back to town (I remade the Bung character 3 times as he kept dying while other monsters were powering up) I eventually got to the point where all my characters were leveled up above 20 maximum health. Above and beyond remaking the Bung character I suffered two other deaths to leveled up monsters. (If any character dies three time they're gone for good.) One was even on my main character which is unfortunate.
On the plus side once I got my team up to level 3 I became essentially invincible. Most monsters attack me for 0 damage and my team tends to have 50+ actions they can take between trips to an inn instead of 10 like my red bull started with. They also kill enemies in 1 attack total instead of needing 5 or 6 attacks from my team. So while it started off rather painfully it's actually become a lot easier to level up as I've gotten better.
I was thinking earlier that I wanted to level a little bit and then would probably get bored of grinding and work on the plot. Having worked at it a little bit now I'm pretty sure I now want to just twink up as high as I can possibly get and then move on. Unlike leveling in most games it's actually getting easier and faster to level up on low level monsters than it would be on appropriate level monsters. Until I reach a point where I can't level on the trash in this castle I'm probably going to stay there... When I stopped playing last night my levels were 10, 6, 6, 4!
One interesting thing was that at level 6 I turned into a mosquito and it was an unbelievable beating compared to anything I'd been previously. Clearly whoever was in charge of monster design at Square has visited Riverview!
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