Lennus II, Part 6 - Meridian

Previously on Lennus 2... Farus finished collecting the eight seals. Then, he promptly handed them over to the bad guys, and now the crisis is even more dire. Good work, Farus.

The next step of the game has our heroes taking their incredibly ugly boat out into the ocean to find a great whale. If Zelda has taught me anything, it's that a great whale almost always has a dungeon inside of it.

Sure enough, this is no exception, and it's the home of the Water Spirit. Why do the other four spirits get their own shrines while this one is reduced to inhabiting whale-intestines?

The Gold, Earth, and Sky spirits were all pretty easy optional fights for their particular stages of the game, so I'm not expecting too much out of this-

-JESUS H!

Luckily, that was just a "reduce everyone's HP to critical" attack, not his standard attack power. This made the fight a bit of a chore to win, though. I lost it twice. Both times, he used the critical attack at the end of one turn, then a regular hit-all attack at the beginning of the next turn before anyone could heal. I'm really tired of this kind of battle system. In any case, once I lucked out and didn't get screwed over, I won the battle.

Back on the world map, I need to find the Gravity Rainbow Tower. Where is it? An island somewhere. But where?

Lucky me, it was the second island I checked. For a place called "Gravity Rainbow Tower", I'm expecting a visually impressive locale.

This sounds like the plot of a Kirby's Dream Land game.

I'm disappointed, as the tower looks just like every other building interior in the game so far. While this game has good graphics for 1996, it doesn't have a whole lot of variety. Also, the colors are a lot more muted and dull than its very pastelly predecessor.

Forgot to mention what the Water Spirit brings to the table. Heal isn't that great since it acts as a remedy for status effects and status effects aren't that abundant in this game. MagWall raises magic defense, which is useful in theory, but I've found that nearly all of the more threatening attacks that bosses in this game use are physical-based. That leaves Revive, which actually IS extremely useful. It's a resurrect and full heal, which is overpowered in this game considering it can nearly replace your heals. That said, I already have at least one character with Revive, so I keep Farus' spells as they are for now.

Gold, Earth, and Sky are the spirits I've been using. Bottle is the only group heal in the game and thus crucial, while Grava summons a behemoth to basically stand in front of the party and absorb physical damage (completely crucial for some bosses) and Gubo is probably the best attack spell in the game. Slow and Momrick are status effects that I don't use, but those other three spells are all I need for Farus.

I assume this is a dominatrix outfit of some sort?

The top of the tower...looks like a giant petrified squid. It is here that our heroes are catapulted into the sky via SUPER SKY BEAM.

This is just like when Gohan blasted Cell off of the planet in Dragonball Z, except it's a somehow non-harmful beam and we're riding it on purpose.

Meteorites and UFOs fly by (no, seriously) as Farus rides the beam. Getting hit by any of these things results in random battles.

Needing levels, I just intentionally plowed through all of it.

Finally, Farus arrives at Lennus. This is one way to travel through space. In other news, near the end of a game called "Lennus", I'm FINALLY SEEING LENNUS.

.....annnnnd Lennus looks just like Eltz. Huh? You'd think they would have at least utilized the same color palette as the first game. As it is, it doesn't really feel like I went anywhere. A tad disappointing. In any case... it'd be wild if Lennus and Eltz actually orbit each other, locked in a struggle of equal gravitational pull.

They landed right outside of Chezni's hometown, where his mom still lives. In other news... CHEZNI'S MOM! Has got it goin' on!

She sums up Paladin's Quest for Farus. I'm surprised she's still around, much less young.

Lennus is plagued with problems, mainly that Granada's henchmen have been building twisted citadels all over the landscape.

I think Farus should probably stay away from alcohol after that drunken incident back in Gloucester...

At this point, Myra, despite her improvements, still wasn't measuring up. After finding some promising new mercs, I gave her the walking papers.

Here's my new fourth member. He's a powerful physical fighter, on par with Nikita (who is already my best character). He lacks her healing ability but he does pack Revive.

More summing up of PQ. It's pretty much all people on Lennus talk about, which makes sense.

The first thing to do here is reactivate the flying sphere from PQ. At least, I think it's the same flying sphere. I guess that flying sphere earlier (the "Great Tree" dungeon) was a different derelict vessel.

There it is, the flying sphere. With this, all of Lennus is immediately accessible. That was quick. The objective here is to take out Granada's four commanders (those four caped fellows who took the seals). Each one is located in one of the grotesque fortresses that dot the landscape, and each one requires some questing to get to. I like the open-ness of this part of the game, as you can tackle them in virtually any order.

At least they brought back the weird mega-cabbage plants from PQ, even if they're the wrong color.

The World Map, strangely, still works in this new world. It looks like Naskout and Saskout are mostly underwater now, with the Throne of the Immortals still standing between them. Aside from all the missing land-space, this map is fairly accurate to the original game as far as placement of particular notable locations goes.

Here's the Giant Pink Flower City from the first game... though now it's got a weird void atop it instead.

Granada and his four goons have really sullied the reputation of Raigans, as if Raigan elite Zaygos didn't already do enough.

The town now lay in ruins, and it isn't pretty. On the bright side, the basement of the town contains a small dungeon (which has an item required to breach one of the fortresses) with easy enemies that give what is - as far as I can tell - the best EXP in the game.

The four goons are calling themselves the Four Angels now. On the bright side, since I defeated all four of them at once earlier, they aren't particularly menacing right out of the gate. Having you beat them right before they take center stage in the game is kind of a baffling way to build them up, in my view.

Annnnd it's time for another seal hunt. Seems like this entire game has consisted of hunting for shards or orbs or seals. Luckily, this won't be too complicated because each of the Four Angels have two of the seals.

Meanwhile, Petro is being BRUTALLY TORTURED at the hands of the bad guys.

Here's Daphne. She was Chezni's advisor in the first game and continually annoyed me with how she treated him like a rambunctious little scamp (as opposed to the savior of the world).

She does the same thing to Farus. But wait! ...Petro? It's becoming clearer that he is, indeed, Chezni. But if so, what happened to his hair? Hopefully we'll get some answers.

Next stop: this unassuming little shrine, which is actually the Void Temple (i.e. the last of the magic temples).

This one is interesting. It's a redux of the Doth Maze from PQ that already appeared earlier in this game. The difference is that in this case you're actually chasing something else, as the Void Spirit RUNS FOR ITS LIFE at Farus' arrival.

Catching the Void Spirit is tricky, and you have to contend with Black Cross mages in the process. While these guys were tough earlier with Farus alone, now they're pushovers.

The Void Spirit... looks like all the rest. It's basically a palette swap of the Water Spirit with more HP, because it uses the exact same attacks. I suspect at this point the developers were just trying to get these spirits out of the way.

That includes the reduce-everyone-to-critical-health attack, which leaves the party in bad shape. Winning gets Farus the final element AND level 30 in one fell swoop.

Next stop is the egg-town of Misuto. I remember this place from the first game.

I remember this guy too. It's Joyce's douchey boyfriend. "Who? What?" he says.

He gives our heroes the code to get into one of the Angel lairs without much of a fuss.

The translators at Magic Destiny added some stuff to the ROM of the game, knowing that most people would be using a Logitech controller to play it.

This is pretty funny, actually. They don't even have an answer for that one. The entire time, Zaran stands there going "Huh?"

What...the...shit.

The next dungeon is Boring Cave #14.

It leads to one of the four fortresses. This is the second one that should be attempted in terms of difficulty, but I ended up here first and just ran with it.

Punching in Zaran's code gets our heroes access to Bejould's Nest.

This place is a confusing maze of single rooms with multiple exits. Getting through it is basically a code in and of itself: Up, Up, Up, Left, Up, Up, Right, Right, Down, Left... if I remember right.

The enemies here are armor-clad women. This feels even more like a Phantasy Star game than usual.

Here's Bejould, now sans robes and hopefully powered up due to the seals. It seems the enemies in the cave are her daughters...weird.

New music for this, so you know it's a big, decisive battle. Turns out the Four Angels each have their own battle theme. Most of said themes don't sound like battle themes at all, as they tend to be slow-paced combinations of menacing and creepy.

Bejould is a formidable foe, but I use Grava (the summoned behemoth that absorbs physical hits) to great effect here. Most of her attacks are physical, so doing this makes the fight a lot more manageable. At this point in the game, Grava only absorbs one boss attack. Still, that's an attack that isn't hitting the party. This effectively negates one of her two turns every round.

I expected a rough fight, but I won pretty handily with the same strategy I've been using to squeak past all of the bosses.

It's hard for me to take Bejould seriously when I keep reading the name as "bejeweled".

BAM. There's 5 and 6. Seems I'm going a little out of order.

I'm closing in, and I'll be finishing this in the near future. This concludes the final post of 2012.

Now I'm off to (perhaps) finally see The Hobbit.

 "Dil-do Baggins!"


The Complete Lennus 2 Archive:

Part 1 - The Legend of the Nude Hero

Part 2 - Ric Flair

Part 3 - The Hoodwinking of Farus

Part 4 - Dragon, Dragon, Rock the Dragon

Part 5 - Smoky Hellscape

Part 6 - Meridian

Part 7 - E. Honda's Commie Paradise

Finale - Immortals