Saturday, December 27, 2014

Lufia: The Legend Returns #5 - Blades of Amon

Copley Forest... no relation to Boston's famed Copley Square. I played this game in Boston, coincidentally.

Previously on Lufia III, Rudo tamed some of that strange. Today... he battles Amon.

Our heroes read this sign...and of course they go in. They're worse than the Bebe's Kids kids.

The forest looks just like every other dungeon. Randomly-generated rooms with tiny hallways linking them. It's still boring.

At this point, Rudo takes Seena to task for her general awfulness.

"It's my period, okay?"

Dei is all "I hate it when they fight like this!" while clutching his ears and rolling up into a ball.

I would like this game 200% more if Rudo just put his hands up right now and walked away, leaving her here in the woods to be eaten by bears. ProTip: Bears can smell the period from miles away.

Instead of just ignoring the troll, Rudo sinks down to her level and perpetuates it. He's like 90% of the commenters on the internet.

Moments after this, we find what may or may not be a capsule monster, who promptly joins the team. He noticed the babes we have and went "homina".

He is then immediately shot and killed by Sarah Palin in a passing helicopter. NO! HE WAS JUST A BOY DAMN IT!

As opposed to Bad Tree?

Another tower. This one must be Amon. The people of this world should just STOP BUILDING TOWERS. They draw Sinistrals like leaving pigeon food out on a New York rooftop.

As for Mousse, he functions similarly to capsule monsters in the previous game. Can't be controlled, dishes out a fair amount of damage. His output seems completely random, ranging from 50 to 1000 damage. If he does the latter, it's insanely OP at this point. Weird. This "random damage output attack" is a dumb design choice that would be revisited quite a bit in the next game in the series, the abysmal Ruins of Lore.

At the top of the tower is...some sort of giant machine. It gets carted off, leaving our heroes to deal with Amon...

...'s goon's goon, General Gohl.

As far as grand-goons go, this guy isn't much to worry about.

Gohl is defeated, but we have bigger problems. That mech was some sort of Vegnagun-style world-destroying machine.

Complete with COCK-CANNON! YEAHHHH!

Moments after this picture was taken, Rudo realized that he had a babe on either side of him. He then turned and gave the camera a thumbs-up.

HOW DOES HE KNOW WE'RE HERE?

Deckard shows up again, and this time he joins for real. Be A Man, Hulk.

What follows is this game's version of the Tank battle. It's a weird fight because regular attacks don't reach it, forcing you to use specials to do damage. It takes way too long, but at least we get to look at Deckard being all cool.

Seems this Deraf guy has control of the continent. He's Amon's chief goon at this point. He also has a name that weirdly sounds like a backwards word. It isn't, but it sounds like it is.

Another dungeon! ...I'm going to stop taking dungeon shots.

Emerging from the dungeon puts our heroes in a spacious castle. This is giving me flashbacks to emerging from the Dog Maze in Secret of Evermore.

Here's Deraf, chilling on the throne previously occupied by Princess Melphis. Which explains why he was burying his face in the cushion a moment ago.

Perhaps due to catching him off-guard, this is a fairly easy fight. He's no Idura, as far as goons go.

Ah, this is why the fight was easy. He's got Vegnagun lurking in the other room.
This has got to be the most technologically-advanced boss in the series; makes sense considering this is 200 years after Lufia II. That's more than enough enough time to go from engines being novel to super war-mechs.

After a more difficult fight, I emerge victorious. Your plans are foiled, Deraf!
Now that Deraf is dead, his master reveals himself. Not content to just stand around like in previous games, he hovers smugly.

At Amon's invitation, our heroes head for the nearest tower, where they battle pot-smoking hydras.

Hail, Hydra.

What follows is lots of weird dialogue where Amon challenges Rudo's trust in his comrades. Rudo gets all defensive and angry in response.

Aima flings baseless insults at Amon, while we're at it. I'd say Amon put a lot of trust in Deraf to deal with us, only to be let down.

Uh...yeah. These guys sound like chapters from a self-help booklet.

After this very deep philosophical discussion, it's time to BRAWL!

Amon...does not look much like his previous incarnations. Gold armor, yes, but otherwise he looks vastly more futuristic. I think the designers of this game should have gone all-in with the fact that this game takes place well into the future. Just put advanced technology everywhere. Rudo should be firing lasers at people instead of using a sword.

This fight is VERY DIFFICULT, and hands me my first loss of the game. Not only does he reflect magic spells most of the time, but he casts reflect on the party as well (making it much harder to heal people). He also dishes out nasty status effects like confusion.

AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, HE HAS BROKEN RUDO IN HALF!

That fight was so rough that I actually thought that it was another of those "you're supposed to lose" optional fights. Unfortunately for me...it isn't.

I had two Sanity Rings, which prevent confusion. That would allow two characters to mount an uninterrupted offense during his confusion waves. Question is, who? Rudo is a given. My gut told me to go with Deckard as the second, especially since Melphis (the obvious choice normally) is useless here due to all the reflecting going on. Eventually, I settled on Aima, since she has a ton of HP and survivability.

Even still, Aima bit the dust before the end. Now THAT was an awesome battle. I didn't pull it off until the fourth try.

ProTip: Get as many Sanity Rings as you can in this game. I was woefully unprepared for this fight.

::Deckard makes a "whacking off" motion as Amon continues to speak::

As soon as we leave, he immediately reappears! This guy no-sells death more than everyone in the Buu Saga!

Oh. He isn't alive, it's just his residual spirit. Okay. We know from the previous games that they can keep materializing for a little while even after they're defeated.

What follows is a huge revelation for everyone...

...Deckard is Melphis' long-lost brother. So they're both descendants of Dekar? And isn't it good that they never had sex?

"I'm an honest to God prince!" says Deckard.

The second continent is now done, onward to the third. The fourth and final continent is tiny, so I'm pretty far along now.

The theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly plays as I arrive on the third continent. This place looks like a combination of a desert and the surface of Mars.


7 comments:

  1. "The fourth and final continent is tiny, so I'm pretty far along now."
    What is it with games and having disappointing last levels anyway? Course, sometimes the final levels are the most well designed, but a lot of the time it feels like game developers run out of steam near the end. Is the last continent like that?

    Also, the battleship fight where you can only hit it with magic reminds me of Final Fantasy X against Overdrive Sin. Every turn its overdrive bar fills up and if it gets to the top it's an instant game over. If you've been neglecting to train your magic users and saved right before it, you can't grind since you're on an airship, so you're screwed. At least the battleship fight lets you take as long as you want...

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    1. Overdrive Sin was a total pain in the ass, if I remember right. It didn't force me to start the game over, but it was close. I hate stuff like that. The Velius fight in FF Tactics is another one. At least that one taught me to make backup saves, though I still forget sometimes.

      Almost every time a game has a disappointing final area, it's indeed because the developers ran out of steam/money/development time.

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  2. The forest actually looks pretty nice except for it being functional identical to the caves.

    I guess towers are like this world's skyscrapers. The people wanted a skyline dammit!

    Oh, so that's why they both have green sprites.

    Hey, the last shot is an 8-bit Wild ARMs.

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    Replies
    1. Towers are, by definition, skyscrapers. Except the towers in this game look more like obelisks, like the Washington Monument or Space Needle than actual buildings. Of course, the Tartarus-like interiors prove otherwise, but on the outside...

      Copley Forest threw me for a loop when I saw it because I was near Copley Square at the time, playing on a laptop. Cool coincidence.

      The last shot is indeed 8-bit Wild ARMs, but unfortunately it doesn't have the same music.

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  3. Out of curiosity, would you consider playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic at some point?

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, I'd definitely like to play that. I need to get ahold of an OG XBox first that can play it (or find a way to play it on a PC), so I'm not sure when it'll be, but I'll put it on the list.

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  4. The forest -does- look nice.

    I wish Rudo would stand up for himself too.

    I get the feeling everyone working on this game was a programmer--they had no story people--and they were told to make the interaction "simple enough for the kids to understand." Sigh.

    Good Tree...God forbid it be one of those trees with bugs or moss or something.

    I believe the towers were built to worship the sinistrals. Do you think everyone always has resisted them? Surely many communities saw that to get on their side was the better choice.

    "Grand-goons," that's a good one. Totally get what you mean about Deraf being a backwards name too.

    Listen up Rudo, if you don't trust the people with you that's fine, since you just met them and you've already met so many duplicitous people.

    Agree with you about how bad this dialogue is. Also agree it'd be cool if every 100 years saw notable technological progress and the Lufias got more and more techy.

    How'd this brother and sister get split up?

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