Sunday, January 13, 2013

Lennus II, Part 7 - E. Honda's Commie Paradise

In the penultimate installment of Lennus 2, I prepare for the final battles by slathering our heroes in delicious sweat. Just like in real life, this boosts their HP.

Previously on Lennus 2... Farus battled the nefarious, whip-wielding Bejould.

Daphne gives our heroes some intel on the upcoming bosses. This game is all about using the right elemental weaknesses to take town foes. I wonder what Bejould was weak against? I just walloped her with Nikita and Dark's rapid-fire punches. The Fist of Rage type weapons all do multiple attacks (usually around five, but as many as ten) which makes them the best physical attacks in the game. I'm glad I brough both Nikita and Dark for this reason, because I'm not sure if anyone else can use those.

Boozoo... is covered in flesh? What does that even mean? Is this a T-800 type deal? DAMN YOU, SKYNET! LEAVE OUR SUPER FAMICOM GAMES ALONE! And why does that mean he's vulnerable to air? Let's just move on quickly.

Now that I have all eight spirits, Farus can make use of basically any spells. Since he can only equip four spirits at a time, I have to choose carefully. I went with Gold, Earth, Sky, and Void, which got me the crucial spells of Bottle, Grava, SkillsUp, and Gubo. I've already talked about what most of those do in previous post, but SkillsUp is basically a combination of three different buffs and it can affect more than one character. It's a huge boon. I believe that the red circles indicate your "level" with an element, while the meter below represents your ascent to the next "level". Lightning never got much use from me, and Water arrived too late in the game to be of any help.

The elder of Jurayn is pretty upset because his city lay in ruins. That's what they get for being all "flower power, man" while villains run rampant. He helps our heroes out by letting them into Jurayn's dungeon, which has the item needed to get into Balmod's Castle.

The Flame Sphere is the item in question. I mentioned it in the last post, but Jurayn's dungeon here has the best exp in the game. Fights are the easiest they'll be for the rest of the game, and the exp is the best I saw anywhere. Average of 10-12000 per fight, where most other endgame locations give you about 5-7000 after much more difficult battles. Why is exp so high here? I'm not sure, but since the game steers you toward this being the first real dungeon on Lennus, it's a fair assumption that it wants to bump up your exp before you start tackling the Angels.

Balmod's Castle. He's another of the Four Angels, and the one I was supposed to fight before Bejould. He's a plant monster, apparently.

"I am not a tree, I am an Ent!" says Balmod when reached for comment.

He makes a few statements phrased as questions, and the battle begins.

Uh...whoa. This guy has officially replaced Booth from Tecmo Secret of the Stars as the most profane boss I've ever seen. However, no amount of waving his invisible penis is enough for Balmod to win this battle.

After that fairly easy fight, our heroes return to Saskout. Notice how some of the eggs have hatched. Either the world's largest face-huggers are on the loose, or this is just more structural damage wrought by the Four Angels. Though I guess now they're the Two Angels.

Good nod to the first game here. The first game had a couple of genuinely good little storylines in it, namely Joyce the baker's story and Smash the miner's story.

In the next town, Farus gets accosted by this random woman who seems intent on giving him a full repertoire of STDs.

Lennus 2 goes out of its way to make women out to be trollop-y strumpets. Look at my two female characters: Iris is a bar-hopping girl who wants men to buy her sexy outfits, while Nikita is a stripper.

After freeing himself from the groping hands of Keena, Farus continues on to hear rumblings of the next Angel.

Keena's husband is a real tool. No one is getting fresh here, 'son. It isn't Farus' fault that your wife can't resist his overpowering pheromones.

The people in this town are in dire straits, as they find themselves at the mercy of the gluttonous Boozoo, known by most as the most difficult boss in the game. I'm picturing a Dynasty Warriors version of Xu Zhu here.

This is needed to get into Boozoo's Ice Castle. Which sounds like an awesome place. Everything about Boozoo seems to revolve around food, and he's played off as the comedy character of the Four Angels.

Farus should listen to Zane. He's a pretty cool guy.

And they were doing so well for a little while there! Is this why the color palette on Lennus has devolved into a drab Terminator Salvation style gunmetal?

And here we are. Boozoo's Ice Castle. There's no avoiding this now. Since Boozoo is more powerful than the final boss (weirdly enough), this is the point where you'll need your levels to be as high as they'll get. Guides recommend level 38 for this battle and the remainder of the game, but I got by with level 34 characters.

Bringing Boozoo's Feast causes the guards to step aside. I'd like to know what Boozoo's Feast consists of.

Boozoo's Ice Castle is full of sliding floor puzzles where you need to line up just right to make it through the rooms. It really isn't too difficult, but it doesn't help that Boozoo is on the intercom (I guess) harassing you the entire time.

This is an interesting bottle. Unlike the other bottles, it doesn't heal you. It increases a character's max HP for the duration of a battle, and as far as I can tell this increase is close to 50%. This is crucial for the few remaining bosses, but since equipping this replaces a standard bottle, it comes with the downside of depriving one of your characters of the ability to heal. I put it on Dark and had him use it on everyone (one at a time, no group-effect with this) at the start of boss fights.

Another ice floor puzzle, and we arrive at the lair of the hardest boss in the game. What's up with these boner-sporting gargoyles?

...What the hell? It's like Xu Zhu made sweet love to the Easter Bunny and Boozoo was born.

The battle music here is another unique track... and it's a slow, quirky tune that sounds nothing like a battle theme. Instead, I shall play Jay-Z's Big Pimpin' for the fight.

Uhh! Uhh! It's Big Pimpin' baby!

Boozoo dishes out a Senton Back-splash, doing heavy damage to everyone. ...or would, if I weren't summoning Grava every turn to take attacks for me. Summoning Grava is absolutely the key to winning this fight, and it still isn't easy.

Boozoo's hundred hand slap is his most devastating attack, and it's the most potent attack in either Lennus game. Even Zaygos' energy ring barrage isn't this bad. It's noteworthy that the worst attacks in the Lennus series tend to be multi-hit non-elemental attacks. Luckily, Grava can block it. Even if the shield only has 500 or so HP before disappearing, it can still take a full 9999-damage hit from this.

Boozoo is WHOOPING OUR ASSES, but Nikita is doing mega-damage with her physical attacks.

Farus and Nikita barely manage to subdue Boozoo, and that's that. Onward, to...

...Boozoo's dinner party? Indeed, he now wants to be friends.



Of course, since Farus is the most gullible character on the Super Famicom, he obliges. After a hearty meal (that healed both the party and their foe), it's time for ANOTHER battle with Boozoo. That's right, the hardest boss in the game...makes you fight him twice.

This is something you don't want to see, a hundred-hand slap without Grava up.

The damage distribution from his hundred hand slap is somewhat random. Each punch does around 900 damage and he does around twelve of them to varying targets. If he evenly distributes the hits, everyone in the party will take close to 3000 damage. At this point in the game that's probably their max HP (before buffs from the Combat Bottle), so this fight is quite nasty.

Boozoo didn't get any more powerful for the second battle as far as I could tell, and I had a slightly easier time winning after knowing what to expect. Still, I give the game props for making you do the hardest battle twice. It was getting too easy for a while there. What is the third-hardest fight behind the two Boozoos? That dragon-riding Gege fellow from earlier, probably. That fight is brutal, and it's right before the arrival-on-Lennus-level-spurt. Other than these fights... the game is disappointingly easy, given its pedigree.

Fun fact: In the original PQ, Enix mistranslated "Raiga Sanctuary" as "Taiga Sanctuary". The guys who translated this game decided to keep that mistranslation around just because it was comical.

To get into the fourth and final Angel lair, we need a way to get past a barrier. Luckily, the good Taigans of the Taiga Sanctuary happen to have just finished constructing a barrier smasher.

Unfortunately, the Great Union that the bad guys initiated is already in motion, and the landscape is darkened by what appears to be the shadow of The Big Valbowski.

Val Venis: "Heh heh. Unlike the sun... The Big Valbowski... rises in both morning AND evening!"

Here's the fourth and final angel lair, Belts' sky fortress. Why do these guys have such bizarre names?

This place is a bit of a departure from the norm, and consists of lots and lots of stairs with a sky backdrop. It's good to have a dungeon that looks different, at least.

There's an enemy in here that summons other enemies. Usually this kind of thing is highly-exploitable in an RPG. I take a few minutes to farm this for major exp (though, oddly, not much gold), but it's quickly evident that just fighting battles in the normal way would be faster exp than this.

Here's Belts. Like the other Raigans, he's weird-looking. He points out the elephant in the room, that Farus is indeed a member of their race. Why is Farus the only Raigan who doesn't look like a beastly alien?

The Raigans are basically causing all of this carnage on Lennus in order to save their homeworld in a roundabout way. Sadly, "Lennus 3: Chezni and Farus Go Solve Raiga's Problems" was never made.

Unfortunately I didn't get a good shot of Belts during the battle. It's unfortunate because this battle was even more visually impressive than the final battle of Return of the King.

After a fairly easy fight, Belts gives up the last two Seals and whines a lot before expiring. And with that, all of the Four Angels have been cast out from Lennus.

Petro, still crucified, is finally saved. Moments after this picture was taken, Petro suggested that "maybe...you guys could get me down from here?" as Farus stared on creepily.

The Great Union is now complete? Or nearing completion? The story hasn't been very followable for a while. Either way, this means that Eltz and Lennus are now part of the same overworld. Considering how they looked the same anyway, this isn't much of a shock. It's more convenient than anything else. Matter of fact, they neatly interlock to form what looks like a full-fledged overworld.

At this point it's time to continue on to the final areas. But first, I take on an optional dungeon with eight or so optional "minibosses" that guard potent uberweapons. This dungeon is one of the longest in the game, if not the longest. It consists of eight wings. I only went through two of those wings, and it was as long as a standard non-major dungeon. I get the feeling that when the designers reached the end of the story, they had a bunch of leftover unused dungeon maps and threw them all together to create this optional place.

The minibosses here are actually difficult to beat. Not on the level of some of the bosses I've fought thusfar, but surprisingly nasty. I believe that they're all palette swaps of this guy, who is wildly incongruous with the rest of the foes in the game and looks more like he'd belong in a Pokemon game. These minibosses have a lot of HP, which makes these fights tedious as well. After defeating one of them, I headed on out of the optional dungeon.

Too bad for me that the one that I fought was guarding the ultimate boomerang...and I don't have any characters who even use boomerangs. Oh well. Wonder what the other seven had. Might revisit this,because my curiosity is piqued.

There's only one thing left to do now in the main story: go to the Throne of Immortals (the same site where the original game ended) and take on the big bad.


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

6 comments:

  1. It doesn't matter how strong he is, his name is still "Boozoo."

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    1. It's so weird and non-intuitive that experience doesn't necessarily correlate with battle difficulty, as you said with the first dungeon being an EXP farm. Boozoo didn't even give you much for your trouble.
      Boozoo's my favorite character so far for the reasons you mentioned.
      Farus must have traded his brain for the ability to look like a human. Actually his look probably comes from player "racism" - I'm not sure we'd be into having the main character avatar look like Belts, though Belts has the cool animations you say.
      Reading through these is fun.
      It's pretty wack of the game not to tell you which weapons are in which chests first in the optional uber-weapon dungeon. FF5 did that right.
      I gotta say, I still like your team, even if you missed the other mercs and whatnot.

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  2. You missed Flash, Joynus and two other mercenaries I think... One of which is useless but is of the same specie as the Rasav in the first game if I remember well.

    Joynus is really weird. She's a kid but she has RIDICULOUS MAGIC. Seriously her magic dmg is so freaking high she'll murder everything.
    Flash, Zane and the other mercenaries are upgrade from the non-iris and non nikita mercenaries from andel.

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    Replies
    1. I thought about recruiting Joynus. Actually, she was going to be my main caster until I stumbled upon Iris.

      Nikita is IMO the best character in the game. The fourth spot was one I had trouble finding someone decent for. Kinda wish I had rotated more mercs for the fourth spot to see more of what the game had for characters. Ultimately settled on Dark who was pretty bad-ass. If I could do it over I'd rotate character #4 until Dark, and replace Iris with Joynus and later RichJr. Farus and Nikita shouldn't go anywhere.

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    2. Joynus is basically knowns as the most talented mage in the history of Lennus and she's still a kid lol.

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