It was back to Suikoden V tonight, and I discovered to my dismay that I’d done the Big Hole run for grinding the wrong way, as I hadn’t yet had the trigger that opens up a new area occur yet. Oh well. I figured I’d go ahead and do the western ruins first anyway, so I can ditch Zweig and Lorelai since they’re forced into my party right now and I don’t really want them in my core party.

Twilight Forest was along the way, and it’s really annoying since it’s easy to get lost in it and it’s full of irritating Creeper enemies who’ll poison you fairly often, requiring me to burn through a lot of antitoxins. I eventually caved in and used an online map to get through it, but at least I earned a lot of cash and skill points in the process. The ruins themselves and the Ancient Creeper boss were actually fairly easy, and Leknaat popped up to show off how cryptic she can be again. Thanks for nothing. But I did get a new spell attached to my Dawn Rune, and with that I was able to go back and heal Lyon. I also befriended Killey along the way, though he’s a rather big jerk.

Unfortunately, now the Armes army has allied with the Godwins and is invading, and now I have to go fetch the Dragon Cavalry and hold them to their promise to defend us from foreign invaders. And although I could remove Zweig and Lorelai, now I’m forced to take Lun and Logg, the petty gold thieves from earlier… At least they’re pretty decent party members, have a good co-op attack, and I’ve used them a lot before.