I finally finished the gruelling trek through the item world today, and it actually started getting decently tougher near the bottom. The main monsters weren’t too much of a danger, but some of the pirates that started showing up had so many hit points that it would take two or three rounds to defeat them, and they came close to killing my main guys when ganging up.

Unfortunately, even though I found a lot more pirates and a mystery room that sells the illegal tickets, I still ended the trip one frigging ticket short of the 24 needed to unlock Land of Carnage. I’ll have to start the item world of a new item, but hopefully I won’t have to go too deep into it before finding the one I need.