Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 34

Forest of Spirits (More Spoilers ahoy)

This is a daily series documenting my playthrough of monster girl hentai game Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  If you've just joined, the first part can be found back here (and then there are a lot of parts to read through).

It's time to head off to the Forest of Spirits to find and recruit the first of the elemental spirits – Sylph.  This is close to a direct re-run of the original series.  The monsters are also the same.  There are:

The twin fairies.

Assorted fairies.  There are six of these and they attack in various combinations of three.  When recruited all six are counted as a single character.  This is the same as how it was with the zombies in Chrome's mansion.  I suspect UN_DO's lamias in the Sphinx's pyramid and the slime girls in Undine's fountain will likely be treated the same way.

Elves.  As well as new addition, Brownies.

For the brownies, because there are two of them they get two attacks.  The same is true for the twin fairies.  Because of this it's possible to get some annoying fights where the opponents have more attacks than Luka's party.

Fairies do have a minimise magic spell, but as the negative status wears off at the end of combat it's not something to worry about.  My party at the time was heavy on pyromaniac magicians, and shrinking them didn't seem to affect the boominess of their spells at all.

Elf's temptation scene is… well… tempting.

I wish they'd done it like this for more of the monster girls.  Most of the time the art change, if any, seems to come after selecting 'Please do naughty things to me.'

NPC fairies hint about a scary monster wandering the woods.  That was Chimera Dryad in the first series.  It's hard to see how it could be in Paradox as Promestein, the mystery figure from the first MGQ chapter, is on our side (maybe) this time.

Sylph is at the end of the forest, up in the north.  She's fun and playful, but we still have to fight her to prove our worth in wielding her.

The fight is straightforward enough (I had both Remi and Rami in the party, and imps are resistant to wind magic).

Right, we're about to go into spoilerific territory again.  If you'd rather wait to be surprised when playing the game yourself, I'd skip the following section and rejoin us tomorrow.

..

..

The walkthrough I've been following has some ominous lines for this part of the story.

-Fight and recruit Slyph at the end of the forest
-Watch a cutscene
-Facepalm
-Reminisce about the quality of part 3's writing

The music goes ominous and a mystery sprite shows up.  Given the walkthrough comments I wonder if the game is going to punk us and have it turn out to be stupid and non-threatening.

Not Chimera Dryad.  Kinda looks threatening.

It's some kind of berserker armour.  It screams 'Angel!' a lot.  And then 'Extinction!'  Then it attacks with a cool battle theme.

It's another hopeless boss fight.  The berserker armour wipes the floor with us in next to no time.  It's about to follow-through and finish us off for good when Nero steps in.

He's not alone.  Alice the 17th is there as well.  She asks if Luka and his party are okay and whether she can leave the crazy armour to elder brother.

Wait, what?!  Elder brother.

If Alice the 17th is Luka's daughter from the original MGQ-verse then this is a pretty strong implication Nero is Luka's son.  This is in keeping with the end of MGQ, where Alice was expecting twins – one a human boy, the other a demon girl.

Very interesting.

Alice (17th) spirits the party to safety while Nero hangs around to fight the armour.  Nero looks pretty badass.

Yep, ridiculously badass.  We get to control him for the fight and he's about a level bazillion and something.  So many options.  I get him to throw comets at the berserker armour.  I remember that being good in Final Fantasy 7.

It's a shame the artwork for the armour is a bit iffy.  I can see it's trying to draw on the same melted-angel weirdness as Luka's sword from the original series.  The colours and contrast don't really work.

Berserker armour takes a lot of comets to the face before going down.

Then it's time for more cutscene.

This time I think we're in the parallel world.  Their Micaela is explaining to Luka and Alice the origins of both the world and Luka.  Ilias and the first monster lord were created out of opposing light and dark elements.  Luka's mother was an angel.  She was engaged in the first revolt against Ilias and fled to live as a mortal on the world below.  She fell in love with Marcellus, Luka's father, and the rest – as they say – is history.

In the parallel MGQ-world anyway.  This world's Micaela has already met an untimely end.  Luka's dreams reveal the truth and he wakes up with the realisation of his not-quite-human lineage.  This causes an in-game change as it opens up the Lowly Angel race for him.

Sylph reminds him she's in Luka's head.  And is also outside in the castle grounds.  I still haven't figured out how the elemental spirits work in Paradox.  I'll have to look at Luka's skill menu a little closer.

I'm not sure what the walkthrough guide found facepalm-worthy about the cutscene.  The awkwardness of the dream revelation of Luka's half-angel nature, maybe?

Anyway, Alice comes in and suggests it's time to head for Sabasa.  As it's a long distance away across deserts, wastelands and mountains she suggests we go to Monte Carlo first.

Ah, we might have done things a little out of sequence here, given we've already done the Monte Carlo quests.  Oh well, let's press on further westwards… tomorrow.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 33

Sidequest Roundup (The Return to the Ancient Shrine)

What we up to now, part 33 now?  This is my playthrough of Monmusu Quest: Paradox, the first part of which can be read here.

It's a short post today as I catch up on some side quests and various other things before we head off to the Forest of Spirits to recruit Sylph.

The bulk of the side quests are associated with the loli bandits that run the various stores in the pocket castle.

First up it's time to get caught up with Vanilla.  The next item she's looking for is advanced medicinal herbs.  Because these posts are organised slightly differently to how I play through the game, I tipped off the end point to that a couple of days ago in the Monte Carlo slums.  First up Vanilla needs to go to the item store in San Ilia.  He suggests going to Monte Carlo to find the source.  That person is the Erika dude that runs everything in the slums.  He's the guy you're taken to after giving the letter of introduction from Lazarus to the guard on the door.  If you have Vanilla it will trigger the relevant dialogue and upgrade the item shop to sell advanced medicinal herbs.  I still don't know whether this section was just for Vanilla's sidequest or is needed to trigger the Eva mission.

The other store in the castle is the weapon store managed by Papi, the dragon loli bandit.  She can be taught to manufacture mithril items.  To do this take her to the blacksmith in San Ilia and choose the exit option from his dialogue rather than using the cancel button.  Papi will ask him if he can train her.  To do this he requires a Proof of Faith.  At the time I already had this and I had to look up where I picked it up from.  It's given out as a reward by Christie, the succubus nun, on raising her Affection to 10 (or maybe 100).  Feed her plenty of sausage (oo er, missus) and she'll give it to you.

The next bit was more of an accident as I hadn't really been paying attention to the other side quests apart from the ones needed to upgrade the castle stores.

The problem I usually have with these Pokémon-style games with massive rosters of characters you can play is figuring out which ones I should be concentrating on levelling up.  I normally try to level up everyone and it takes forever.  At some point I figured I should probably be concentrating on the important plot characters and ones with multiple races (Alice is the best example as she starts with five or more base races.  Hild and Page 65537 also have multiple base races).

While backtracking through past areas in an attempt to pick up monster girls I missed first time around, I ended up back in the ancient shrine at the Luddite Village with both Promestein and Hild in the party.  This triggered some new events.

Promestein notices something on the computer by the entrance.  It's mainly incomplete info, so she suggests looking deeper into the abandoned institute to find out more information.

At a second computer she finds out the lab was also studying apoptosis.  She conjectures Hild might have been created to fight against whoever was destroying the world, although there's still no indication of who created her.  She also remarks that Hild has a lot of unnecessary functions for a machine designed to fight and kill stuff.  At this point we also find out Luka is a mathematical genius who didn't think it was anything special.

At the third terminal Promestein has the realisation that her being pulled into Tartarus was not an accidental by-product of her research, but deliberately triggered by the shadowy master of this research institute.

The last thing to investigate is the capsule Hild emerged from.  Promestein identifies it was keyed in to Luka's genetic structure and primed to open when he touched it.  The others point out the paradoxical nature of this given the research institute is considerable more ancient than Luka's tender 18 years (assume coming of age means the same thing as it does here).  Promestein thinks the whole institute is from the future of the parallel world and sent back into their past for some reason.

Could the unknown master be an alternate version of Promestein?  There's a sense to that.  MGQ-verse Promestein was ultimately destroyed by Luka.  The parallel world Promestein (the one where Luka never went on his adventures) would likely have been scoured from the world along with everything else when Ilias decided to start again.  Both would have incentive to meddle around with the past to prevent their future demises from coming about.

That's my thinking aloud, btw.  Nothing in the game suggests it so far.

Oh yeah, should probably include some lewds otherwise people get the impression MQ:Paradox is just another JRPG.

While backtracking I picked up some of the monster girls I'd been missing.  The Insect and Doll races seem to be the hardest to recruit.

UN_DO's spider girl has some new artwork for her 100 Affection scene, I think.

I don't remember this from the original.  In fact, so far it's been UN_DO's girls that have the extra scenes (the original slug girl and someone mentioned the Cursed Doll from Chrome's mansion also has a new scene).  I find UN_DO's artwork to be a little hit or miss, but they should be applauded for creating the extra content (Elizabeth, the slug noble, is a standard wandering monster and has about three times as many scenes as most bosses).

The Bandersnatch from the wastelands around Monte Carlo has one of the weirdest fatal request scenes.  She wanks Luka off with the oversize hand and he just sort of… dies.

Her other scene is a bit of big-boobed Paizuri.

Then there's Hild.  She only has the one request scene, but hints there might be others if we can find her some Dangerous Swimwear.  Not sure where that is.

The request scene is different to her Bad End scene, so we don't get the cutaway shot of the contents of Luka's testes being sucked up.  Instead we get a cutaway shot of her machine insides doing various things to Luka's fleshy member.  There's some bits with warm, high-viscosity gel that look 'Aaah…', and other bits with spinning metal cogs that look a bit 'Eeee!'

Personally I'm not convinced high-speed whirring metal cogs and soft, fleshy sex organs go together so well.  In fact, I'm not sure I want to think about it too much in case…

Damn, too late.

Curse you, evil imagination!

Oh well, tomorrow it’s time to head off into the forests for a frolic with the fairies.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 32

The Hunt for Eva (Just how many skills do you have?!)

Hello and welcome to part 32 of the epic Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough (the first part can be read here).  I seem to have slipped to later in the day for the updates.  I'll try and get on top of that.

Last up we visited the slums of Monte Carlo and a wannabe superhero sent us off on a mission to track down the succubus who's been stalking the back alleys.  We agreed for truth and justice and other hero-y things.  And not because our target is a succubus and can screw our brains out in more ways than we can count.  Honest.  Ahem.

Succubus Eva is hiding out in some hills close to the slums.  I guess that's these hills.

New area means new monster girls.  Tarantula girl and Minotauress come back from the previous series.  Minotauress is very eager to tell us how much she likes eating beef even though she knows it's sort of like cannibalism.  I'm not sure of the logic behind this, but she has a ginormous axe so I'm not going to argue.

There are some new monster girls.  Bandersnatch:

And Sabotless:

That's the name spat out by the machine translator.  I don't have the slightest idea what that's supposed to mean or what she is.  She doesn't appear to be any organism cross I can recognise and I don't recognise her from mythology either.  At first I thought she was an Insect, then I recruited one and saw she was a type of Scylla.  Turns out my first instinct was partially correct as a dig into her Jobs & Races reveals she's a dual-race Insect Scylla.

She wants to be pirate, I think.  Her temptation move has its own artwork.

It's a little… toothy for my tastes.

Her Bad End is also a little scary.  She threatens to bite Luka's dick off if he ejaculates prematurely.  I'm not sure that's the problem here, love.  To be honest I think Luka deserves a medal and a long and successful career in the porn industry for managing to stay hard through all this.

It turns out she's only playing (and the Bad End is even more playing).  That's in keeping with the overall style of the MGQ series.  Despite the vore and other squickness, the artwork never depicts Luka being mutilated or actually shrivelling up like a raisin as a monster girl sucks all his fluids out.

(I'd have written a scene with her biting it off.  You know I would.  That's because I have a black cancerous mass of utter sickness squatting in my intelligence.  Make your readers worry the turn of each page might result in a landmine going off in their face.  That's the fun of writing.  Hyuk hyuk.)

Eva is easy to find.  Just go straight north after entering the hill section and you'll come across her tent.

Eva is living on hard times as the party members note.  Then it's a fight.  Eva has a similar temptation attack to the first series where she turns around and reveals her ass.

Resist, Luka, resist.

After winning the fight Luka tries to get Eva to stop molesting the inhabitants of Monte Carlo.  Eva has a huge strop about how things are so hard for her at the moment and forces her way into the party.

Sure Eva, you can come along with us.

Blimy.  Eva has been around.  There's an obvious joke at her circumstances in that she's a maxed-out, level 10 Unemployed when she joins the party.  A check of her Jobs & Races reveals she has tons of job levels all over the place.  Flirt, maxed out.  Fortune Teller, maxed out.  Levels in Cook, Nurse, Prostitute, Thief and Maid.  Eva has clearly been around the block and back again.  As her trait is Dexterous Poor Succubus, she can also use all of these skills regardless of her current job.  This makes her close to the ultimate support character, like all the loli bandits merged into a single character.  Although all this versatility does come with the drawback she might not always follow orders.

Turns out Eva is a very talented woman.  She has many skills.  Like... um... this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And don't forget this:

Or this:

And even this:

*raises eyebrows*  What is it with the armpit sex?

Oh yes, Eva has a bunch of skills that are an… ahem… asset to the party.

(Now if you'll excuse me I need a good lie down and several bottles of zinc pills.)

Back in Monte Carlo, Kaiser rewards us by unlocking the Hero of Justice job.  She also reveals her other role as a battle-fucker.  Examine her costume thoroughly, refrain from soiling it and she'll reward you with the Burning Soul(?) accessory.

I said there'd be more sex this time.

Tomorrow I'll clean up a bunch of side quests before we head off to find our first elemental spirit.

Hmm, given that this post does have a ton of sex, I reckon this might be a good time to sneak in a plug.  Do you like sexy succubi like you've seen so far?  You'll find plenty more hiding within the pages of my books.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 31

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New Story - "Safe Sex"

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Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 30

Chrome's House of Fun

We're up to 30, that's three-o, in the Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough.  For the start of this madness, see here.

Today we're off to Chrome's haunted house of fun.  How do I know it's Chrome's mansion?  Well because we've already been here before (twice!) in the original Monster Girl Quest series.  This is one of the weaknesses of the Paradox game, in my opinion.  So much of the world is already familiar, although TTR has tried to change it up in places – switching Kraken for Meia, for example.

So how do you feel about zombies?  Putrescence, rotting flesh… sticking your dick up in cold, liquescent pussy.  It's not exactly an easy sell.  Then again, in a game with crab girls and sea cucumber girls, zombies at least have the advantage they were (presumably) once normal girls, with recognisable sex organs.

The main hall in the mansion has stairs going up to the left and right and two doors (hidden) in the left and right.  The left stairs are currently blocked by ghostly activity.  The right by cursed doll activity.  There is a ghost standing next to the left wall and a cursed doll standing next to the right wall.  Both leave when you go up to them to reveal a door hidden behind them.

The left door leads to a kitchen with some ghost girls working away at the sinks.  Interestingly, Paradox hasn't made the same distinction between ghost girls and actual ghosts this time around.  There's a big cake on the table.  Alice wants to eat it (no surprises there).  We eat the cake and then have to fend off the angry ghosts.  After the fight the left staircase is now clear.

The right door leads to a ruined room and a cursed doll standing next to a suspicious chest.  Obviously the chest is a mimic and she tries to eat us.  After winning that fight (mimics are beatable now) the right stairway will unlock.

Instead of Xelvy's scary insect girls, this time we have UN_DO's scary zombie girls.  Some of them are quite ludicrously endowed in the chest department.  Maybe that's something that bloats up after death.

Euwww, imagination can you not just quit it once in a while.

I think the zombie horde (they also recruit as a horde) might be returners.  The new monster girl is a zombie fencer, I think.

Her Bad End is not completely terrifying at all.  No sir.

There's a bit of a difference in flavour to Chrome's mansion this time around.  All the undead girls seem to be mostly peacefully minding their own business.  There's a room full of dancing zombies that you don't have to fight unless you want to.  On the other side there's a friendly zombie that just wants a chat and even a friendly mimic (is that even possible!) that just wants things quietened down from what I can make out.

We do get into a ruckus in a banquet hall, but that's largely our fault for barging in unexpectedly.  It's also rather comedic with Alice getting terrified and trying to pretend she wasn't terrified afterwards.  This is all stuff we've seen already before, though, and it doesn't have the same effect as in the original story where the up-to-then seemingly invincible monster lord gets reduced to a shivering wreck by a few ghosts.  Back then it was a clever way to humanise her character and make her more likable (and was also extremely funny).

Up on the third floor we run into a familiar face – Chrome!

She legs it.  Not quite the epic confrontation I was expecting.

Okay, there are a number of triggers now.  First you have to follow Chrome through a hidden door in the wall.  It's here:

In the next room she tries to sic a pair of zombies on us, but they throw her back out through the door instead.  At this point you need to go back out to the corridor.  She should be standing next to a chest about halfway down the corridor.

You should corner her here.  At which point she tells you it's all part of her master plan to lure you onto her trap.  Her plan doesn't work as she has the trapdoor in the wrong place.  She falls through it instead.

I think this version of Chrome might not be as bright as her MGQ counterpart.

The next step is to go back down into the entrance hall.  The bookcase between the two stairways to the north should be gone.  This opens up a path into the cellars.  Some knights are in a cell, but Chrome hasn't been treating them too badly.  Around the corner and there's a big pentagram and Chrome standing with her ultimate zombie - Frederika

When we confront her she asks us what we're doing invading her research institute.  She might have a point.  Other than random wandering monsters most of the rooms have been full of undead minding their own business.

Oh wait, there are the dudes in the cell.  Plus there are probably laws against hacking up dead bodies and stitching them together in new and bustier forms.

One thing has changed.  This time it's a team boss fight with both Frederika and Chrome.  Like the other zombies, Frederika is vulnerable to fire.

Afterwards Chrome gives her story about how she wanted to make the ultimate zombie to restore her house's standing in the eyes of the monster lord.  Alice points out she is the current monster lord and isn't entirely happy with Chrome's experiments with dead body parts.  Chrome thinks about shifting to necromantic studies instead and requires another prod in the right direction.  Researching Dolls and other artificial monster girls is a healthier way for a creepy young mad scientist goth girl to spend her time.

Frederika's tragic back story barely gets a mention this time around.  In the original series she owned the mansion before succumbing to illness.  The motivation for team Luka to stop Chrome the first time around was so that poor Frederika's desecrated body could be put to rest.  This reality's Frederika is fiercely devoted to Chrome.

The overall effect is to render Chrome's storyline a little bland.  In the original she was a villain, and then a villain with a tragic back story, and finally a bad guy redeeming herself in truly awesome fashion.  In Paradox she's a little weird girl with a super-zombie sidekick.  Playing through this section I got the impression Chrome's mansion was here because it was in the original series and they hadn't really thought of anything beyond that.

Enough griping anyway.  Here's a lewd of Frederika and Luka.

Frederika and Chrome aren't available for recruiting right away.  Now that Chrome is moving into Doll studies there's an item we need to find for her before she'll join the party.

What we do get is the last of the basic jobs unlocked.  Go back upstairs and talk to the friendly mimic and she'll give you the certificate for unlocking the Spiritualist job.  That removes the last ??? from the basic jobs list.  I suspect I'm going to run out of game before I figure out what even a quarter of these jobs actually do.

That's enough of this section of Sentora.  Tomorrow we'll cross the bridge to the west and check out Monte Carlo.

Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox! part 29

Luddite Village and Ancient Shrine (I like the pope, the pope kicks ass)

We're deep in the Monmusu Quest: Paradox playthrough.  This is part 29 (of likely many).  The first part was last month sometime.

Last up we found the mithril ore needed by both the San Ilia blacksmith and the Captain of the Guard as proof of our ability.  First up its shopping time as the mithril items are better than everything I've currently got aside from a few items plucked from blue and green chests.  It's still a pain to compare all the gear.  I hate this part of RPGs and the RPGmaker games don't have a particularly good interface for sorting all the gear out.  (Yes, I can just hit the Equip Best button, but that doesn't always equip the right weapon or prioritise the right stats).

Now that we're all blinged up we can go on this top secret mission for the pope.  It's some kind of guard duty.  He needs to perform a ceremony at the ancient shrine near the Luddite village and needs us around to keep any wandering demons from interfering.

Sounds straightforward enough.  Not sure what it has to do with the overall quest of saving the world, but we might as well go along with it for now.

Ooh, time for another mention of the random encounters.  Alongside the Pac-man watermelon girls there's another new plant-type monster girl in this section – pitcher plant girls.

Now these will definitely eat you if they get a chance.  And also spray digesting juices from their nipples, apparently.  I feel like I've wandered into a Yoshihiro Nishimura movie.

If you like them, I wrote about pitcher plant girls in a story once.  People got laid.  Then eaten.  I didn't have them spray acid from their titties.  I feel MQ:Paradox has one-upped me there.

Luddite Village is a dump.  Even Hips the orc is creeped out by it.  She's hiding in the trees to the north.  I'm guessing TTR is having a swipe at those that trust religion over progress.  All the women are terrified and either won't speak or make it very clear they're desperate to escape.  There's also mention of the war that closed off the tunnel to the north and affected the village's prosperity.

The way to the ancient shrine is through the woods to the west.  I think you have to talk to one of the clerics first (there are two of them in the village) and then one of them meets us on the path to the shrine.  The path snakes west, then north, and finally ends in a cave with a guard standing outside.

The first part of the cave is needlessly large and absent of just about anything.  We head west and eventually meet up with the pope outside another cave.  He joins the party as a non-combatant and teases Sonia about her relationship with Lazarus.  Someone tried to blow the pope up a while back and the rumours are that Lazarus was involved.

We walk into…

…Whoa.  This is not a cave.  Or an ancient shrine.  What the f is a high-tech lab doing here?  Is this more Tartarus?

New location means new monster girls.  First up we get one of Xelvy's bugs.  Which means I'm a little scared to lose to her.

Little bug is actually quite lickle.  She also has good piston action apparently.  Yeah, I was probably right to be scared.

The second monster girl is a repeat, of sorts.

Chapter three of MGQ had a bunch of chimera monster girls that couldn't be fought and seemed to exist purely to jam a few extra sex scenes into the game.  I was critical of it at the time.  Now we finally get to fight them, although the party fights aren't really as sexy as the one-on-one puzzle battles of MGQ.

XX-7's Bad End is very odd.  Three knights appear seemingly from nowhere just so she can suck them up into withered husks.  It seems an awfully contrived way to reuse the art from MGQ.  Then her attentions turn back to Luka and we do get new artwork.

The game spares us the spectacle of Luka withering up into a dried up husk as little miss power-vac sucks out all his juices.

I thought these were the only two monster girls for this area, then I bumped into another one on one of the higher levels – Cancer Roid.  She's some kind of crab chimera-robot.  And very vore-y.

Probably shouldn't have let her get you in that digestion sac, Luka.

I'm not sure I trust this pope.  He seems completely unfazed by what is clearly not an ancient shrine.  Halfway through explorations he talks about the bomb attempt on his life.  It should have killed him, but the technology here kept him alive.  The only drawback is he has to return here every year for maintenance.

At the top we find a capsule with a girl inside.  I remember her from the front cover of the game.  She's a new character like Nuruko and Sonia.

The pope goes to heal himself and Luka balls things up by waking up the sleeping princess.  Whoops.  She goes hostile and as she does Alice is freaked out when she notices both light and dark energy.

Woah.  This world's pope is a little more badass than the one I remembered from MGQ.  Enter Robo-Pope!

Never change, Japan.

Sadly, he's not badass enough as machine girl kicks our asses and then goes succubus machine on Luka.  She even manages the impossible and empties the bottomless testicles of the ambulatory bag of concentrated semen.  There's even X-ray art showing it happen.  Thanks for that, Xelvy.

Note to self.  Make sure you remove Playfulness and all the other nega-abilities/equipment before entering a tough boss fight.

So obviously I don't.  I forget there's pretty much no opportunity to get control of the party between entering the room and the start of the battle.  Worse, if Robo-Pope died in the previous attempt, he starts off incapacitated for subsequent attempts.

On the 3rd attempt I remember to save outside.  It's a blood long walk to get here!  Hild, the machine girl, is bloody tough and hits hard.  On the third attempt I get lucky and Barnny blinds her with one of her arrows.  Her reduced accuracy gives me enough of a breather to whale on her with various lightning attacks until she falls over.

Afterwards Hild reveals she was created – although she doesn't know by who – to save the world in exactly this type of scenario.  Alice points out that we're trying to do the same thing.  And with that little misunderstanding out of the way, she decides to join the party.

She's not the only new recruit.  Back in San Ilia, Robo-Pope decides to join as well.  When Luka and the others point out he'll be missed he shows them a mechanical facsimile created for just this purpose (I suspect Luka just wanted his harem to himself).

That's another quest out of the way.  Tomorrow it's time to pay a visit to Chrome's spooky mansion.