So let's talk Dog Map.

You may remember the Repede Marking Map -- or, pissing contest -- sidequest we started a while ago. If not, we're supposed to have a territory marking battle with Little Wolf.

In practice, this works out like this:



On the world map, you can check which areas are currently under control by whom. Blue is us, red is Little Wolf.



The way to handle this is to tab over to the Field section, and go down the list, one by one. So we start with Mayoccia Plains.



Locate this area on the actual world map.



Make sure the top right corner of the menu has the correct name listed.



Land and use any of the four camping items.



And now this area is under our control, nice!



Repeat that for every field area on the world map, except the few where you can't land. You will have to fight a battle between each two camping item uses.


After a certain amount of areas, a scene will trigger.

Now continue with the territory marking.





Once nearly done with the whole world map, head over to Aurnion.

Repede just loving killed him. What a badass. On a more mechanical note, that means that he now no longer has the ability to take our territory. We're nearly done here.



Finish off the rest of the world map, then go to Zaphias.

Repede learns the Shining Fang arte here. In battle it looks like this:







It's kinda like Tempest, I suppose.


There's another scene we can trigger by resting again.

The Pterobronc seems to be an exception to the rule here, as you get the Pterobronc Claw from the Guild Quest sidequest line instead of from Rich.


If you talk to him without having beaten any new Gigantos, he tells you where to find them, more or less.



He only tells you those you haven't beaten yet, but here's the full list:

Wait, Bulsis?



Someone was clearly sleeping on the job while translating this Giganto's name.

This is the key item we get for beating the Green Menace, which we did a long long time ago:



And here's the other new Giganto monster, the Bloody Beak:

Achievement/Trophy:

Big Game Hunter

Skit: Enjoying Victory

Random fun thing that happened to me in the desert while searching for the Medusa Butterfly





You can shoot those skeletons! And sometimes, you get random herbs if you do that!


Anyway, once we've beaten them all, we can return to Rich and rest for another scene. You might be able to trigger this before beating all of them but I'm not sure.

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Nov 1, 2016

Today, it's time for the bonus dungeon.




To unlock this dungeon, you need to have gone to Phaeroh's Crag right before Zaude and do the scenes in fake Yormgen. If you don't, well, no bonus dungeon for you on that playthrough. The developers probably realized that this was a huge dick move after release (or maybe just got some negative feedback), so in the PS3 version, this dungeon is no longer missable. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe you head to present-day Yormgen after beating Duke if you haven't done the "normal" way to unlock it, or maybe the scene we'll see in Dahngrest in a bit just triggers without the prerequisites. I should probably check this more thoroughly.

Anyway, we're going back to fake Yormgen.



Somehow, it is now filled with all the NPCs that we saw way back during the Yormgen illusion after we passed out in the desert.



Our objective is talking to the Sage.

We can talk to him again for this line that I'd love to actually hear the story of, but otherwise we're done here.




Next stop is Dahngrest for a short scene.

Roughly west of Dahngrest are the Truffdae Mountains. If we went here before the scene in Dahngrest, we would have seen this:





However, now, they have changed to this:





Approaching the changed area triggers a scene.

And down here, we can find this... dimensional rift or whatever it's supposed to be.





We can enter it like any other town or dungeon, so let's do just that, after I restock items and rest up.

You may notice this brown filter over the area. You will see this filter the entire dungeon, so get used to it. This also goes for this music, as well as



this great motion blur whenever anything on-screen is moving.





Every area of this place has one or more of these dimensional rifts that leads further into the dungeon. This area has two. Both of these will lead to a different area, as well as trigger the same scene:

Big Reason #1 why this place sucks: Fake Gald. To actually finish this place, we need to collect a total of fifteen Fake Gald. Apart from the first one here, getting Fake Gald is completely random. You may get one after beating a boss, and you may get one from treasure chests. I believe the drop rate increases in later areas of the dungeon, but that could be complete coincidence.

So hey, there we a chest right next to us in that cutscene, wasn't there? Let's open that!



Welp.

Big Reason #2 why this place sucks: All treasure chests are locked until you have defeated all enemies in the area. The contents of these chests is random, and may contain anything from Gald (pretty common) to usable items to accessories to Fake Gald (super rare). It feels like later areas in the dungeon give you better stuff than earlier areas.

So you'd think, okay, sure, if the treasure only gives you random pointless stuff but requires you to fight all enemies, and later areas of the dungeons with bosses give you better chance of Fake Gald, might as well just ignore the early random enemy fights and rush through to the end, right?

Nope. Reason #3: The dimensional rifts to the next area don't spawn until you have defeated all enemies in the area! Which means that the lock on treasure chests is entirely pointless and just means you have to backtrack through the area once all enemies are dead. Game design!







The enemies around here aren't very exciting. They're always one of three groups: Enemies that would normally be in the area, enemies that would be in the final dungeon, and like three enemies that are actually exclusive to this place.








Enemies are dead, which means we can advance and open the chest(s). I'll skip over most of this after the first room.



Entering the only warp in this area goes to:




You may have noticed that all of these areas are areas we've been in before. This leads into reason #4: the layout. Since they're just using stitched together areas from before, you will have no clue how any of these are actually connected unless you have a map or diagram.

GameFAQs is to the rescue:



(http://www.gamefaqs.com/xbox360/945075-tales-of-vesperia/faqs/54060)

This looks a bit confusing, but is actually not too bad. We start at the bottom and all paths are one-way.

Thanks to how the middle section of this place is laid out, it will take you a total of at least five visits of this dungeon to see every area once, but only four visits are required to meet and scan every enemy for the monster book. Unfortunately, this is not an issue.





And they didn't even bother to properly section the areas off for the revisit here, I am running up against an invisible wall in that screenshot above.




Here's some or maybe all of the memory dungeon exclusive enemies.






Some of the chests are jokes, thanks RNG.

Imagine more rooms like these here, there really isn't even a point to show them off, they're all places we've already seen but with a brown filter.

Eventually, we will get to a boss:






The bosses count as different scans and actually have different stats than originally, and also remove all the in-battle events and dialogue and whatever, but are otherwise identical as far as I can tell. Same movesets, same AI.





After defeating either Yeager or Schwann for the first time, a scene triggers:

I actually do take a short trip outside to trigger the skit (since all audio in the memory dungeon gets an echo effect which is pretty annoying), which forces me to start over from the beginning. Getting out here isn't too terrible, only makes you redo four or five rooms, so let's ignore that and jump straight back to where we were:



Skipping past most of these rooms...




This one is interesting because in the actual game it's only used for a cutscene, way back when we first met Barbos and Ioder. Here we can actually run around on it. Strange priorities, although I suppose they might have already created the non-cutscene map before they realized they only needed it for a scene.




Two.




You sometimes get to fight battles like Estelle or Schwann with them being in your party as well, which is kinda neat and silly.




These black warps have some requirement to go through them, in this case you need to have finished the Giganto sidequest.




Like I said before, assuming I didn't get extreme RNG, later areas have better items than earlier ones, so it would be much more efficient to just run back here instead of fighting a million random enemies.




Three.




Four. This is also a cutscene-exclusive room, I believe.




And back here is the end-of-dungeon locked warp, which needs the 15 Fake Gald:





End of run 1: Four Fake Gald. This is actually pretty good, on average you only seem to get around two per run.


Fake Gald (thank loving god) carries over between trips to this dungeon, but everything else resets, including chests. A single run through this dungeon usually takes somewhere around an hour, I guess.


Let's just speed through this until we get to interesting stuff again. Second run:



Here's another of these cutscene-only areas, this time the scene in Baction with the Schwann reveal.




Five.




And end of run two, only one Fake Gald.


Third run:



Sometimes you actually get nice stuff from the random chests!



This area is weird because, for some reason, you can't open the menu here. No idea why. I believe it's fixed in the PS3 version.







Fourth run:








Fifth run:






Yay, we're finally done here! Of course, the game proceeds to troll me hard:





Running total: 18 Fake Gald in 5 runs, which is insanely good actually.


So what actually is behind this locked warp?

It's Kratos! In case you don't know, he's one of the main characters in Tales of Symphonia.







He fights a lot like he did back in Symphonia, and overall this is a pretty fun fight.






























He's also got his Mystic Arte, which as far as I remember was exclusive to the PS2 port of Symphonia.



























But yeah, fun fight, not too hard but not a cakewalk either. It's too bad this is part of such a terrible dungeon, really!

And with this, we have everything we need to do everything in the Coliseum!



Oh, and in case you wonder, the chests here are randomized crap, just like the rest of the dungeon. Thanks game.









Let's get out of here.

Achievement/Trophy:

Ahhh, Memories

Skit: Around the World, Thanks to Karol

Skit: The Strongest Guild

Skit: Check It Out!

Achievement/Trophy:

Map Nerd

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Nov 1, 2016

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Jan 28, 2014

Flavor text or subtle commentary on game development? You decide. This is where the PS3 version has the Team Melee, after all.


Anyway.





Before we can do the 100 Man Melee, we need to do the 30, 50 and 80 versions.



The way all of these work is that you register a single character, then head up into the arena.





In here, you get to fight one battle, with lots of enemies.





New enemies keep spawning in when you kill old ones.



You also have a time limit, but it usually isn't a problem.



The enemy list is completely pre-determined, no randomness or anything.



At specific points, special enemies will spawn, such as:









These guys! In shiny golden armor, too.



So far this sounds pretty neat, but there's one unfortunate caveat to this entire thing.



Namely: Later challenges are just extensions of the previous ones. In other words, even in the 100 Man Melee, you start with these exact 30 enemies. Considering the requirements here to actually get everything, this gets very tiring.



Alright, so enough of the mechanics, let's skip to the 100 Man Melee and actually show this off.

All of the "special" enemies in here have a in-battle conversation with some party member. To save us some time and sanity, let's assume we can switch characters on the fly to show these off efficiently. Most of these enemies require their corresponding Letter of Challenge in your inventory to actually show up.

And if you're anyone else, you just get... this guy.



He's just a random dude, but he's unique to this place, for some reason.

And that's the basic idea and progression of the 100 Man Melee.

But wait, there's more! By having the Letter of Challenge (Legend) and beating the 100 Man Melee with any three characters, so let's say, Yuri,







Estelle,



and Rita, we unlock:



The Mysterious Two Hundred Man Melee!











So as cool as this sounds, it just adds another 100 on top of the existing 100 Man Melee.





For the most part, the enemies here aren't very exciting.





But at around 140 enemies, suddenly:





Hello there, Dhaos! What are you doing here?



So for people not familiar, he's the big bad of Tales of Phantasia.



He's got a couple magic spells, as well as the badass Dhaos Blast.







And a loving Laser, too! This guy's awesome!





Unfortunately, as you might have noticed, he doesn't actually do a lot of damage. You almost inevitably level up a lot during the multiple runthroughs of the Labyrinth of Memories, and beating it is required to access the 200 Man Melee. So that dungeon haunts us even after we've beaten it!



But hey, enjoy his attacks anyway.







He even has a Mystic Arte! Here's a video of it and the Mystic Artes of our remaining guests. (Baldurdash)










Roughly 20 enemies later, we run into another familiar face:





This is Shizel, the final boss of Tales of Eternia.


















Guest number three is another major boss:



Barbatos, from Tales of Destiny 2. He comes complete with his signature item-hating trait in form of a Mystic Arte:


















And while I'm usually all for English dubs, come on, you can't say no to Norio Wakamoto. We'll eventually hear him in some PS3 footage.














And to close off our cameo party,



oh, it's just Kratos again. I guess that's fine, but kinda boring after the previous three bosses. He has the same stuff as before.









And that's the Coliseum!

So what do we get from beating all of this? Well, the first time we beat the 200 Man Melee, we get a really nice set of items:








No Skills


The best of these is clearly the Dhaos Cape, because:













Hell loving yes, so awesome! Look at that gigantic range!


Apart from that, every character gets something unique for winning the 100 Man Melee and the 200 Man Melee. Getting all of these takes a while, although you can make this sorta-automatic, if perhaps longer, by setting the difficulty to Easy and the character to Auto, assuming your character are high-level enough to let the AI that is not at all made for solo fights handle it.

The wins from the 100 Man Melee are:

Skit: Congratulations

Skit: A Youth's Victory

Skit: A Princess' Crucible

Skit: A Boy's Befuddlement

Skit: A Genius Mage's Change of Heart

Skit: An Old Man's Dream

Skit: A Maiden's Concern

Skit: A Dog's Thoughts on Battle

In addition to the entire Team Melee section of the Coliseum, which we'll check out another time, the PS3 version hands you some costume titles for beating the 200 Man Melee with everyone. Guess the developers felt guilty for not really giving you anything substantial in the 360 version. All of them are references to characters from other Tales games.



Judas, from Tales of Destiny 2.




Chloe, from Tales of Legendia.




Lloyd, from Tales of Symphonia.




Mao, from Tales of Rebirth.




Ricardo, from Tales of Innocence.




Rutee, from Tales of Destiny.




Caius, from Tales of the Tempest.




Cress, from Tales of Phantasia.




Anise, from Tales of the Abyss.


They're pretty cool, and come with a special Altered Arte from the referenced character, which you can use while having that costume on or learn after using them a bunch, just like normal Altered Artes.

There's also a neat skit you get from having everyone equip their costume, but I don't have a good recording of it around, so we'll get to that during the inevitable "missed skits" update(s).


Apart from that, there isn't much change from the 360 version of the Hundred Man Melee and its variations. If you play as Flynn you get to fight against Yuri as the 100th opponent, and everyone gets to fight Clint shortly after the other two Hunting Blades members. Otherwise it's exactly the same, I believe.

Except for one thing, thanks wdarkk for reminding me. If you fight against Dhaos as Rita, get him to below half health...



Enter Over Limit 4 and cast Thunder Blade, and you get: (Baldurdash)



























It's Indignation! Somehow this spell was absent from the 360 version of the game, but in the PS3 version, you can get it as a Mystic Arte for Rita by doing these steps. After doing this, you can activate it during normal battles by doing the typical "2nd Mystic Arte" combination of OVL 4 -> Arcane Arte -> Hold Attack+Arte. As appropriate, Dhaos gets instakilled and even does his "What?! It can't be!!" "what the HECK is THAT?!" thing when you use it against him.

Interestingly enough, they actually recorded English voices for Indignation.





Before we end this, I just wanted to point out that I'm pretty impressed at the pretty big body of text they wrote for the Coliseum registration counter. Some of it is kinda funny, too. I mean look at this:

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Nov 1, 2016

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Feb 3, 2014

Admiral H. Curtiss fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Feb 4, 2014