Now that the whirlpool is gone, I can go to the dwarf hollow, but first, I'm going to take a little bit of a sidetrip.
In the village of Gysahl, one can purchase magic keys (if you couldn't tell by the decorations in the shop pictured above) and carrots for the fat chocobo, and you can talk to the FF3 development team, and you can even find a shuriken. In this game, shurikens are absurdly expensive and valuable. They do more damage than anything except the onion sword, but they also cost ~65000 gil apiece. That also means that you could sell the one you get here for half that, which is enticing, but I think I'll hold on to this one!
To the west of the Tower of Owen lies the dwarven hollow. Inside, the dwarves all speak as dwarves should, spouting lali-hos and such. Here, the dwarves have had one of their precious horns stolen by a bad dude, so we're gonna get it back. The entrance to the cave where he's holed up requires toad for entry, once again... for some reason.
At the back of the cave lies our perpetrator. He's another boss who is pretty resistant to magic, so I rely on my physical attackers once again. I could change jobs, but why bother? Easy boss is easy.
After the battle, we retrieve the horn, but... there seems to be something following us. Just what
is that, anyway? Weird.
...Oh. Well, phooey. He steals BOTH horns and rushes off to the cave to the north. Time to go get them back.
Woo, fire cave. Something interesting about this place is that the lava does not damage you when you walk on it, unlike in the DS version, where it drains 10 HP every step or so. There is a lavafall further in that does damage you when you walk under it, but it's very brief.
This boss is, by far, the hardest boss in the game so far. The reason is that he does an attack called 'blaze' that will do about 150 damage per character unless they have some resistance equipment on. You could change everybody to warriors and give them all ice armor, but why bother? My strategy is simply to burn it down as quickly as possible with the icebrand, blizzaga and casting cura every round to soak up the damage. Works out fine, and I won.
After this battle, we get the fire crystal jobs, which are knight, thief, hunter and scholar. I change my warrior to a knight, and my white mage to a hunter for now. I like hunter in this game, particularly with medusa arrows. Sadly, she won't be able to remain a hunter for long (more on that below).
Upon returning to the dwarves' place, a dude from Tokkle comes in and begs for our help, dropping a hint about an upcoming boss in the process. Afterward, we go check out the kickin' rad treasure room, which has some good loot.
Yo dawgs, I heard there was a pro--
...where are we? Hyne's castle. The king of Argus and those loyal to him have been locked up, and so have we.
To get out of the cell, we have to mini ourselves again and then make our way to Hyne. In one of the above screenshots, you can see why medusa arrows are so rad. They have a high chance of petrifying any enemy, so I love to use them here.
I also think this dungeon looks really cool in this version. It looks cool in the DS one too, admittedly, but in this one, it was just so surreal when I first got here. The green water is so spooky.
For this battle, you pretty much have to have a scholar in order to stay sane. It is, of course, totally possible to win without one, but you really will have no idea what element to use if you don't use the scholar's peep ability. Once his weakness is revealed, you simply go all out on him, using your best spells and attack items, not bothering with physical attacks since they're useless.
After the battle, the wall begins talking to us. It turns out that Hyne's "castle" is actually the elder tree from the living forest. (This is the weird structure that was hovering over the desert that I showed in an earlier post.)
And so here we are. I think a lot of people who give FF3 a serious shot tend to quit around here, most likely before. It's a shame, since aside from one or two kinda dumb battles (GARUUDAAA), it only gets better from here on out.
