Went back to Altena and upgraded my teams equipment. Got completely lost in the castle, but eventually made my way to the Crimson Wizard and Darkshine Knight. They were holding Angela's mother hostage as well as the Fairy. We, being the good guys, hand over the sword and the Crimson Wizard kills Angela's mom for out trouble. I imagine that if Angela had been my lead character, we would have had more of a scene concerning her death, but this is a 90s JRPG, we don't have time to be sad, we've got God-Beasts to slay dammit! Now its time to hunt down some God-Beasts, why am I using the fan translation term for them instead of the official one? Because Benevodons sounds silly.
Anyway, since I still vaguely remember where the Mana Stones are, and the map is kind enough to leave markers for me, I head back to the Cave of Winds and have a pretty epic battle with the Wind God-Beast Dangaard, which is a pretty snazzy fight where the party chases down the winged beast on Flammie and fight him on top of her. Pretty snazzy, especially when the fight would actually shift the visual focus so sometimes you play the fight in a profile visual setting, and the other time from a top down view. It's going to be really interesting to see how this fight is done in the Remake since they'll have full camera control to make this dynamic style more apparent. I did run into a minor problem where the game kind of froze on me, not exactly sure if its because of the emulator of the actual game itself since it was notoriously buggy. I did take the time to do a little leveling up the second time around.
With one down, I head to Sultan to tackle the Fire Beast since he's not far from Rolant. The leveling really helped me out because I had more than enough GP to outfit my whole team thanks to the Neko Merchants parked outside the dungeon entrance. I forgot how much of a maze the Pillars of Fire were though, and I will now say that Knights and their variants are my new Kill-On-Sight enemy. This is because certain enemy classes can use the same skill sets as the player characters, and Knights can use Duran's special attacks, including his powerful group hitting one. Since I don't have a dedicated healer and have to rely on items, it has become too easy for me to ignore my party health and then run into one of these assholes and get a total party wipe. Not helped that these guys can use the move whenever they feel like it whereas its Duran's Lv. 2 Limit break. I've noticed they have started showing up everywhere now as well...
Anyway, after wandering around for ages in the fire cavern, I finally stumble onto the God-Beast Xan Bie who is really weird and very reminiscent of the Son of the Sun boss from Chrono Trigger in terms of visuals. He's a fire bird head, but his body is just disembodies fireballs that circle around him. He likes to dissipate into these balls and wander about the stage. What's weird, and I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but you can still hurt him when his heads not around unless he forms a column shape. Not sure if that was the plan cause the guy spent most of his time just changing his form and hitting my team with single target spells I could easily remedy through. I honestly think it took less time to kill him than the first one. The one thing I did find clever, and I remember a few bosses in SoM did this as well, is that he'll occasionally Flame Blade onto your weapons in order to lover our damage against him. Pretty clever.
I feel the one real nice treat about these bosses has been how useful support magic is starting to be. It made or break you in SoM but for awhile it didn't seem that important since it took forever for it to appear, and now its proving to be invaluable, though my overall plan is going to screw me over by the end. Since I'm doing a Dark-Dark Class run with this team, I will not obtain a few of the elemental weapon buffs. I do really like the fact you can tackle the bosses in any order, and I especially appreciate the fact that the enemies and the God-Beasts themselves get more powerful after each one is felled. So the challenge is staying consistent.
Next up will be the Water God-Beast Fiegmund, so its back to Altena which is probably where I should have started...