Round two with the Ragin' Contagion saw me put it to rest. With the sickness sealed, Dragon Quest IX continued onwards. Now I'm back up in the Observatory - the game's sub-heaven. That is, the game's cosmology is laid out in a way similar to Norse mythology where there's the earth below (Midgard), the realm of the gods (Asgard) and then a realm between them (Alfheim). There are six other worlds in Norse mythology, but just between the three in Dragon Quest IX (the world below, the Observatory, and realm of the Almighty) the game gives me a feeling of enormity all the same.
Backtracking a bit, though, the second fight with the Ragin' Contagion got me thinking. I can't tell if my level grinding helped since the battle seemed as long as it did before. However, that time spent away from the boss fight got me to change my strategy. Rather than going all out offensively, I distracted the two-turn-in-one having monster by upping my own stats, forcing him to use one of his turns to bring them back down.
Disappointingly, the whole tension and "Coup de Grace" things remain mysteries to me. I guess it's a number that goes up as characters are attacked, but my main character definitely took enough damage to merit such an attack, yet it never opened up.
Nonetheless, I count a game successful if it forces me to shift my battle strategy - especially since Dragon Quest IX has been a mostly classic J-RPG experience thus far. Plus, given that the game pretty much spells out the need to distract the Ragin' Contagion from his set strategy when it teaches you to provoke enemies with a book written in a Cajun accent, it's great that an alternative strategy works just as well.
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