SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Dec 28, 2014

The biggest change: no more world map. Just a menu for wherever you want to go. I like this feature a lot since world maps without fast travel are literally the worst, but I guess that's just personal opinion .

Talk has you chat with your party about your current objective, in case you've forgotten and isn't very exciting. This time, it just repeats Lexis' dialogue higher up.







Character Menu lets you check stats, your inventory, equipment, and options menus.

Save and Load are as usual. You can save anywhere between dungeons, but inside a dungeon, there are designated save points and checkpoints.

So let's head over to the that shiny new location, shall we?

I hate to cut off Lexis here, but the next several lines of dialogue are just glorified tutorials. The big thing he mentions is the Level Boost feature, which is...really something else. Level Boost is literally what it implies. If you ever are defeated in a fight, you can "Retry+Level Boost" to start from the last checkpoint, but everyone in your party will be 5 levels higher. Yes. There is no penalty for doing this as much as you want. You can also retry normally, but this is just a sign of things to come as to just how forgiving this game is about combat.

Also Ruben isn't actually dead despite Maxim's "No!". You can even chat with him, but he doesn't say much of value.


Oh hey, the little jellies. They take more than just one hit to destroy now, but it's extremely trivial.

So, combat is pretty simple. Press Y to attack, press A to dodge, B to jump, and X to perform a special move called a Wave Art. R lets you charge your moves up. Every character has their own special, and these can interact in various ways with the environment, which is how a big part of the puzzle-solving in the game comes in. As you get more and more people in your party, the puzzles become more dynamic, and you rely on switching between dudes to solve them.


Maxim's is Cross Dash which lets him dash a short distance (read: literally fly), and lets you cross small gaps with it. Wave Arts cost IP, but this recharges by itself very quickly so feel free to spam them.

Also, see how our damage numbers are yellow, and there are coins everywhere? This is Overkill. You can keep whacking enemies after they're dead for a short period of time for bonus gold and experience.



There isn't much to show here. There's a new enemy that looks like a bee, and hits pretty hard, but is otherwise a weenie. I also get an antidote (cures poison) for my troubles. The item you get here is actually random, and I got a mystery pin (cures paralysis) on my first go-through. The only other thing of note is that all the encounters are mandatory. You need to beat them to progress.

Since this is more or less a tutorial dungeon, it's very nondescript. When we finally reach the top...

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Dec 30, 2014

Happy New Years, everyone!

So last time, we ran up the local volcano temple, got our asses kicked by ENERGYWAVES, and met a lady in a pretty dress. This time we'll be heading to the town of Elcid to hang out with Tia and get our exposition on.


As you probably remember from Blastinus' first update, Elcid is our starter town, and it's not very interesting in either game.

Lexis is an engineer, not an architect.


Tia is hanging out next to this fence, doing something with the plants. I actually really like her new design in the sense that it is goofy as gently caress.

None of the other NPCs say anything interesting, so let's move on.


Hey, is that a scarecrow in a labcoat?

Actually talking to Lexis is pretty dull. He just tells you to go keep Tia company. I guess we should do that eventually. The rest of Elcid is basically one large screen with a few NPCs scattered around, and Tia's shop, so, let's go explore some more.


This well is actually pretty important. You can jump in, like so:




And that takes you to this little hidden area. I didn't even know this place existed until I accidentally jumped into it while hopping around town during this LP run.

And he just ports off. Let me amend my previous statement, Lexis along with all his other goodies, also has a pet legendary dragon. Dude owns. Leaving that aside though, this well is dead centre of town. People probably draw water from it. How has no one ever found this lab?? .




We can also go say hi to the dragon, who isn't super chuffed that we woke it up.

So, this dragon is a recurring Lufia NPC and part of a massive sidequest, where you have to defeat various bosses under a time limit that is never specified ingame. I won't spoil which bosses just yet, but the bonuses for showing it the dragon eggs are:

One egg: 10,000 gold.

Four eggs: Egg Sword (+5*Level to Attack and Magic).

Eight eggs: You can fight the Egg Dragon for the Egg Ring (+70 to Defense and Magic Resist, +50 to all Elemental Defenses, Egg Armor, which makes it so that your moves don't cost IP).

You can challenge the Egg Dragon as much as you want, but you can only get one Egg Ring. I'll try to get the eggs, but there's usually a very tight time limit in place for these fights, so maybe NG+.

Anyway, we port back to the outside too, since there isn't anything else to do in here.


Just north of the well, there's this large structure.

Hey, let's also go talk to this guy, just standing in the middle of those sprinklers. He never moves. Ever. Hardcore.


Whoa, you have a portrait.

Albert's gimmick is that periodically, when you come back to Elcid for whatever reason, you can talk to him, and he'll give you new titles provided you've fulfilled the requirements for having them. Much like in Tales games, titles give you little bonuses for having them, but one nice feature is that every title you collect is active at the same time. There's no reason not to try to unlock them all.

We're done with everything semi-important in Elcid now, so let's go say hi to Tia and get some of that lunch.


I just--aww man.

We run back to Albert


Wow, rude.

We can totally check out Tia's shop before we leave. Potions are a full HP heal (no kidding), Charred Newts recover all IP, which is kind of useless in most circumstances, and Antidotes heal poison status, which is relatively debilitating this early in the game. It's not a bad idea to buy a couple of antidotes or potions at this point, because there are a few enemies in the next dungeon that can do a surprising amount of damage. Combat isn't hard, but statuses are definitely annoying.

Now, off to meet up with Lexis.


Aww yeah, a landship.

I think I'm with Maxim on this one, Doc. My poor boat

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jan 1, 2015

Aww they didn't let him science.




Before we do anything productive, let's go grab some treasure. We can push the lower block towards the stack, and scope out that treasure chest.


kaching!




Just off to the side, we can jump on these boxes and get another Potion, which is pretty sweet. Now, we head to the left, for actual plot.

Oh, Lexis, you god. Reset is the best drat thing, because it completely nukes whatever terrible things you did, and sends you back to the previous checkpoint. The game is fairly generous with checkpoints as well, so feel free to use this whenever you think you've messed up. You Reset by tapping the pictured button on the bottom screen. There are a few places you can't use it though, and I'll point this out when we encounter them.


So, let's pretend Maxim wasn't an idiot, and move on. Our box is back now, so we'll push it towards the brown pressure plate.


This activates a ladder that will take us down to the meat of the dungeon. Before we go down though, let's head further left, and go grab some more treasure.




These blocks are light blocks, and you can throw them at things. We can use that, and another of the blue push/pull blocks, to make our way up to that treasure chest, which contains a Miracle. Miracle is pretty great, but completely useless to us for this dungeon. It provides a full IP/HP heal and revive, so unless you have another person around to revive you...

Now we can head down that ladder for real.

Just like Reset, you tap the icon to leave any dungeon at any time, barring when plot decides we're stuck. One downside is that if you do use it, puzzles get reset as well, and you're sent back to the start, so it's more of a oh gently caress button.




So, let's take Lexis' advice and go for the right lever first. This one is just a matter of going right and jumping up a few levels.


There's a ladder just to the left of this lever, which is where we want to go next. If we work our way downwards, eventually we'll run into a gap.

Now that we technically know how to Cross Dash, let's make a quick detour. Right of this gap is this rather indistinct ladder that you have to jump to get to. If we climb up this, and dash across the catwalk...


We can get ourselves a nice little armour upgrade to Maxim's current gear.


Poison resistance is really nice for this dungeon, as we'll see in a bit.




These two blocks on the left side of the area are our next objective. We need to push them so that we can use them to get onto the catwalk again.


Uh, oops. So I hosed up, and managed to knock the Blue jelly onto the block, where it's happy to kill me.




Our next objective is a ladder at the top of the catwalk. First though, left of the catwalk is a potion that'll replace the one I had to burn to take out Bluey up there.


At the top of this ladder is the second lever.


A chest to the side gives us a Charred Newt, which restores all IP, and isn't a very good item in this game, because of passive IP regen being pretty quick. I guess it's ok if you really need IP in a bossfight.

The blue block is going to get pushed to the top-left, and used as a stepping stone so that we can grab a throwing block, and use that to get to our lever.




Now, let's head back to our device.

One last detour before we go the other side. This particular ledge is pretty important, and kind of on our way to the next pedal device. There is a fairly tricky jump forwards into Cross Dash you can perform here for treasure. Don't worry about falling, while the game has fall damage it'll never kill you, and you land back on the edge you fell off of.


Several attempts later...

Also you can see the pedal device we want to get to just above the message.

Getting this block on the X switch lifts the wooden platform just behind the block, and lets us progress.




We can also get to the third lever, and once that's activated, climb on the brakes, and grab some dosh.




There's a chest with an Antidote in the area just above the block. These purple enemies are why they give us this freebie. These assholes are Poison Butterflies and they can paralyse or poison you. Poison works as normal and saps your health, which is pretty nasty, but won't kill you. I am...not quite sure what paralysis does, since I was fighting normally. I think it makes you slower?


These are the savepoints in dungeons, and they give you a full heal. I spent some time grinding up to level 8 here, so that I'd be ready for the boss, since things respawn when you come out of a save point, and all the healing's free.




Left of the save point, there's a large two-stack tower that you want to get to the lower ledge, and then climb up so that you can push another tower down.




Rapier gives +5 to Attack and +10 to Magic. It's a decent upgrade for Maxim.

We're actually a high enough level that these guys aren't very dangerous to us, but they still take a while to kill.


When enemies are red, they're in Berserk status, which makes them very hard to knock down, and also amplifies their damage.


Their most dangerous move is to spin at you really fast, which knocks you out for a bit. The best strategy for this fight is to dodge away when you see them spinning, use Cross Dash to knock them down, and then attack until they berserk, which is when you dodge away again. You can even punt them into the void, but that doesn't really do very much.

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jan 4, 2015

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jan 4, 2015

It's time to go straight to Parcelyte, completely ignoring all the different places Blastinus had to deal with, because haha, we have a landboat. Just to give you a sense of the scale here, he had to go past a lot of different places, meanwhile, this lovely paintjob is our journey so far:


Apologies for the insanely high quality bordered text. I learned how to do that just for you guys.

So yeah. In true JRPG tradition, the world seems to have about four cities in total. That map has all of them already marked.

There's a lot more to do in Parcelyte than in Elcid, though for a big city, it's seriously missing out on dens of iniquity, and all those other things I can see out of my window.


If we head down the bridge to the right, there's a tavern here. You can talk to that dude, but he just remarks that your journey must have been hard. Well, kinda, I had to mash A a lot.

A depressing commentary on capitalism by Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals.


This guy sells your basic consumables. We've already seen Potions, Charred Newts, Antidotes and Miracles. Awake is a new one that does exactly what it says on the tin, it wakes you up. I like the description because it's literally a party popper. These are fairly handy to stock up on before the next dungeon for a variety of reasons.

Ayy, it's Jessy. Her boyfriend is still Guy too, but we'll meet him in the next update or so. She sells weapons, which is how the tavern also functions as an armory.







Check out all those things we can't equip yet, I wonder who they're for.

Lines like these lend credence to the idea that he's not nearly as dense as he pretends to me, I think, because it's not like he's completely uninterested in women. Just Tia.

Selan's house is actually right here, so let's drop in and say hi.


oh okay

Lame.


Going up stairs, while disregarding all the work they put into the landscaping is my idea of a good time.




what the gently caress that is so mean

We can go yell at Curtis for being a dick too, so that's nice. We'll overthrow the patriarchy for you Lamitty .

I think the interesting thing here is that Maxim in this game is just a normal guy who happens to kill monsters for a living. He's never referred to as "Sir", and most people have no idea who he is or what he's doing behind the scenes, which is quite a contrast from SNES Maxim who gets recognised right away.

The next thing on our agenda is to meet Selan and try to get her to join up with us, so we'll just have to come back when she's not working.


Or not.

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Jan 18, 2015

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jan 18, 2015

Last time, we had a ruby apple stolen by the goofiest thieves, and we headed off to the Tanbel mines. Tanbel was a bustling little town in the original SNES version. Now it's a lovely mine with crystals that grow out of nowhere.




The actual mine is fairly pretty, and doesn't really give off the whole industrial revolution dead miners dying from lung cancer vibe, so that's nice.

Tia's IP skill is a giant hook (her beartrap?) that flies out and grabs things. It's pretty great.




I've been skipping these tutorials so far, but Tia's artwork for them is kind of adorable so here you go.


boop

I just really like this picture too.




After crossing over, we hit our first puzzle. There are a couple of ways to solve it, so let's do the smart version first. Technically, you're supposed to push the boxes in the upper edge onto the X. Let's not bother.


We can just pick up a bomb and leave it on the X to activate the elevator.






The intended solution is to use the bombs to clear these crystals, and then push the boxes on the X.


A useful application of these bombs is to take one to the next level and then clear out those crystals too. That gets us a Featherweight, a weapons upgrade for Tia.


+7 to attack, +15 to magic.


We just work our way across the map.


Hey Jaffy.

Moving along, a pole behind Jaffy leads to this chest.


Then we can jump down and toss this box over to the other side preemptively.

This is the intended solution on that note. I think it's neat they had dialogue in place if you broke the sequence.


Again, we can work our way past these guys, who are the bosses from the last dungeon as it happens. Exactly the same in every way.


Tia is important for this elevator because Maxim can't hit the lever for it with his sword, but her boxing glove briefcase can.


Note the box. He is our friend.

So, the key is on the other side of the chasm we just crossed over. Tia can grab it easy.


Using her hooks, we drag it over way off to the right.


Now we need this box to help get us over onto the level with the gate while carrying the key.




These scarecrows are massive assholes because that giant bubble? It causes sleep. You just sit there and take a bunch of damage if you don't have any Awakes (like I didn't ). Notice my healthbar.


Anyway, I managed to fight them off eventually with liberal use of potions.

See where Tia is standing? You can hook southwards from that ledge.


Don't need that raincoat because our current gear is better, but at least I can sell it.






And that's that for the first segment of this dungeon.

Oh you thought we were done? No way. There's still plenty of exciting minecart action to come. Next time.

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Feb 8, 2015

I wasn't kidding about minecarts last update. We can board one of the pedal minecarts (luckily you don't have to mash A this time), and these take you around this second segment of the dungeon.


wheeeeee


The second segment is itself divided into two parts, a chase on the cartrails, and a later semi-puzzle section. The chase is all about timing your jumps over gaps in the rails like the one in this screen.




After you do this for a while, Berty activates a switch that changes the layouts of the rails slightly by extending the rails. I don't know why the mine is like this, I assume that the guy in charge was bored.






He flips a switch for the second time. Our goal is to get to the extended rail just south of us in this screen.

I have no physical idea how to not make this sound incredibly dry, but the entire sequence is just figuring out which gaps you need to get to to jump over, and then not accidentally falling. Falling itself isn't a big deal. The game sends you back to a checkpoint, and you proceed as before.

After you get to that rail, the game takes you to the next part of the dungeon automatically.

Oh boy. The second half of this second segment is all about collecting all the crystal mine carts. You may have noticed that there are seven panels on the board, which means of course that there are seven carts hidden around the mine.

First off, we pick up a bomb...


...and toss it over there, at a breakable wall. There's a crystal hidden behind the wall.


Tossing the crystal at your mine cart somehow attaches the two together.


Next up, we take the cart to the next station.


Tia can stand on this switch and pull the next crystal to her. She's still MVP right now.





Just south of the switch are some poles, that you can hook yourself up to some more armour we already have. Maybe I shouldn't have wasted my cash.







Heading right and then north from the third station leads you to a crystal just chilling there. It might not be immediately evident that you can just run into the cave.

To the left of the third station is a slightly harder to reach crystal. You need to time yourself correctly over the poles, which move.



And that's four crystals. We're more than halfway there!


We're not actually done with this third station yet. Just slightly to the left and then southwards, you can work your way down to a good old box puzzle.





There are two boxes here that can only be pushed, so the trick is to turn the lower box into a bridge for the upper box, and then push that one down onto the right switch, and then push the lower box onto the bottom switch. Easy.


We can grab our fifth crystal. At this point, if you're bored of the puzzles, you can just move on and chase after the thieves, but that's not what I'm going to do.


Back at the starting area, activating the lever changes the route you take on the tracks.


At the fourth station, that suspicious wooden cover is hiding yet another crystal.


We're at the sixth and final station now.


All the way south is a chest.


So, here's a problem. There aren't any bombs here to clear the crystals, but we need to move that box to get at our next destination.


Tia is still our MVP yo.


Self-explanatory really. Just repeat this for each crystal and you'll be done.

You can actually gently caress yourself over by killing all the bomb monsters until they stop respawning, so don't do that.


Crystal #7 is a go.


Heading north of the station, we can hook ourselves across this chasm.




And grab this bomb off from the left to break that wall. That'll get us to our eighth crystal.


Now that that's done, it's time to find out if we're winners too.




We're rewarded with a game mechanic that isn't relevant just yet, but don't worry we'll get to this very, very soon.

Now we can motor off after the two thieves.

What.


Oh, lovely.


So this is literally the lowest point in the game for me. It's incredibly tedious even with save states. As the tutorial says, you have to watch Berty and Betty's cart and copy the things it does. Now, if you fall, which is perfectly possible if you gently caress up the timing even a little, it'll just punt you back to the beginning of the loving level. It's awful.

Pressing B will let you jump over gaps, or onto lower level tracks. Pressing Y lets you duck away from stalactites.

This goes on for a while like the gif shows until Berty decides to kick it up a notch.

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Feb 8, 2015

And so here we are again, fortunately free of the minecart menace.


These nerds are the same armadillos we've been fighting in this dungeon, as well as the bosses from Gordovan bridge, so Maxim makes short work of them. It's not a notable fight, but again, you need to watch out for their berserk mode and spinning attack.

We have a new option unlocked in the menu now and it is pretty great. The Mystic Stone Board is the game's nod to character customization, and is basically a...board that you put mystic stones into. What is a mystic stone, you ask? Remember when we picked up that reward from stacking crystals and I was being coy about the mechanic involved--that is a mystic stone.




Placing mystic stones into these slots boosts stats as listed on the stone. Board squares with symbols on them confer extra bonuses if you can get a stone on them.
The arrow, and the line flowing from it is the start point, and you have to be connected to the start point in order for the stones to work, so it turns out to be a nice little board puzzle when you want to get as many stones in as possible while also getting the bonuses.

Each character has their own area on the board with their own starting points.

Personally I like to fill up the board for the character I'm using completely since I don't really switch much in combat, but it's up to you how you want to go about it.

So now that we're done with this tedious as hell segment of the game, let's go back to Parcelyte and deal with Rochy.

Considering that we are likely the only customers, calling it a business seems somewhat premature.

---


Mr Rochy's house is to the left here, on the way to the President's quarters.


Hey, it's our buddy from the tutorial!

I actually rather like this line.






Oh good lord, why.

Let's get out of here now that we have our money. gently caress you Rochy I hope you drop the apple and it breaks

SC Bracer fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Mar 23, 2015