There goes Astro

I had a playing binge on Saturday, so I finished up Astro's dungeon and defeated him.  The dungeon was huge and involved going into and out of the water several times.  What's wrong with the water, you ask.  Well, other than the fact that you can't cast spells in it, going into it also strips you of your buffs and you need to reapply them when you leave.  There were a whole lot of times when I'd be in the water for 5 minutes or so and then when I got out, I'd have to reapply them.

I should mention that Astro is, in fact, a male demon.  So, my previous guess of a busty she-demon was wrong.

After two or three lengthy explorations (explorations so long that I filled my inventory and started consuming items so I'd have more room), I faced Astro.  Details on that fight after the break.


I found the Astro fight extremely tedious.  Astro seemed to summon his little seed minions more than the other demons, and he'd heal them.  I believe they had more hit points than previous ones, so this made for a very long fight.  Even summoning Mars and putting her into enrage form didn't help.  I had to use a special technique that I'll explain later; my new battle strategies really deserve their own post.  In any event, I beat Astro and him minions and that fight earned me over 120,000 experience points, which should tell you how long it went.  In comparison, I've never had a random encounter in the dungeon that gave me more than 13,000 exp.

Astro is a magic booster; his passive buff increases the amount of MP that the party has, and he can give a temporary boost in magic damage.  Having this ability earlier might have changed things, but since Mars grants me a 60% increase of physical damage, this seems to be a little too late.

After beating Astro, I ended up back in the inn where the usual jokey diversion was replaced by the Shark Party having problems.  A quick trip there resulted in a fight with Lord Shark.  I had to redo that fight, this time realizing that Lord Shark was weak to the dark element (I guess that makes sense since he's holy).  After that, it was a race up the clock tower where I had a second fight with Luna.  She was tougher this time, but I beat her on my first try.  Now, I have access to the upper levels of the castle.

Using PSN to track trophies, I'm now getting trophies that less than 20% of the players of Demon Gaze have gotten.  It's a little strange, since there's a drop off between Astro and Luna of a few percent.  Given that they happen so close to each other, it seems odd.  Also useful in PSN tracking is that it took 11 days for me to finish Astro's dungeon.  That's less than the 16 that it took to beat Jupiter's dungeon.  We'll see if future dungeons are as big as those two.