Sunday, February 22, 2015

Lufia: Ruins of Lore #3 - Save Us

............
::holds ears:: THE SOUNDS! THEY DON'T STOP.

Boss fight with a broccoli

Are any bosses in this game, you know, bigger? Like...bigger than regular enemy size?
At this point I discover the greatest exploit ever, which I'm now going to share with you. In the event that you ever play this game (or are playing it now and stumbled upon this site while looking for info), this exploit will make the game much quicker from here on out. And once you're midway through Ruins of Lore, it being over quickly is the best thing.

The exploit is thus: For whatever reason, Blue Tea can be sold for 150 G. Now I'm no Asian, but even I know that this is more than they cost to buy.

I turn around and sell them at a 50% profit, 99 at a time, and quickly go from 5k to 150k gold. Now I can buy all the overpriced equipment without any grinding.

I run into Cain, a Gratze soldier who doesn't want to fight. I bring him back to his mother, and she yells at him to get back to the front lines.

Does this game have any likeable people in it?

This guy just got done having a one night stand with a horse, apparently.

Someone or someTHING is killing off Gratzean soldiers. And that someone is...

...no, but good guess. It's actually...

...the next boss, a snake. The bosses are actually getting SMALLER now.

I can't really adequately express just how boring this game is. At least one thing keeps me on my toes: I still don't know how much HP my characters have due to the transparent meters.

Next area? The badlands. And they're bad alright. This place is even more confusing than the snow area, resulting in me roaming around for what felt like hours. It doesn't help that I was wildly depressed when I played this, and it legitimately started to make me question why I play games at all.

Moments before this picture was taken, RVD turned sharply and his massive dong CLUBBED RAMI IN THE KIDNEY.

I guess he never put it away after Rubius told him to show it off before. Speaking of Rubius...she still exists.

The next town is all wild westy. I guess this is cool, but... I don't know, man. This game is adept at making everything as boring as possible. NPCs don't matter, the good guys are lame, and the bad guys are tiny.

Our heroes walk through town until they arrive at the casino. This is where the Native Americans conduct business.

Man, I'm all over race jokes today.

Some blue-haired guy is here bein' a dick and telling people that no one can defeat him. And by "people", I mean this one guy that he trapped in the corner.
Wait, what? This guy is Dekar, of Lufia II fame, here to single-handedly save this game from being completely worthless. That's right, it's genuine Dekar, not that "Deckard" knockoff from the third game.

In any case, he's having some kind of fling with that dancer lady from earlier. I guess she didn't work out with the douchebaggy guy and decided to spend her considerable talents on Dekar instead.

That's right, Torma! You believed in false idols all along!

Man, the one passable character in this game now suddenly looks lame too compared to one Lufia II character showing up. At least no one uses the word "stupid" in this game. It replaces moronic dialogue with snooze-worthy dialogue.

Meanwhile, in Gratze, an officer berates a group of soldiers while pacing about. Looking at the costumes, it just occurred to me that Gratze rhymes with Nazi.

Dekar is like 40 now and this is an oldschool RPG, so everybody talks on and on about how ancient he is.

YES! Now, if he stays on as the fourth party member for the rest of the game, this might amount to something yet...

The king of Parcelyte is hip to the goings-on in Gratze.

Predicting it now: The four statues that I'm trying to light up in Fort Dragonia (two down now) for Rubius for whatever reason... are going to resurrect the beast in question once they're all lit. Then Rubius will turn out to be the bad guy controlling Gratze, who needed a bunch of kids to do her dirty work for some reason. Then I'll fight the beast and win and the game will end, and if it's particularly ballsy, it'll end with a "To be continued in Lufia 1".

"As opposed to my wife," says the king, "Who complains about never having one of those. Next thing you know she'll be whining about how she can't vote!"

Dekar: "Silly woman!"

Here's my party, now with...something that vaguely resembles Dekar.

After maxing out Swordsman (yes, already) RVD switches to Thief for a few fights to learn Escape. Very useful skill for getting out of dungeons. After that, I make him a Fighter like Torma.

ProTip: As it turns out, Fighters quickly learn an attack that does random damage...and even though you can get it early on, it's the best attack in the game. That'd be Chance Hit. It does anywhere from 1 to 200 damage. When your attacks average in the 30-ish range and special attacks top out at 80, odds are that this attack is going to blow everything else away if you have anything resembling good luck. It definitely skews high for me. Best part is, it's good right up until the end of the game because other special attacks never really surpass it.

To put it in perspective, it's like if Edgar got the Chainsaw at the beginning of FFVI, it did random damage from 1 to 5000 (usually skewing high), could also be used by Locke, and the game ends at the end of World of Balance. FFVI would be pretty easy then.

The doorways here look like vaginas! I didn't even notice it when I first walked by. I knew there was something fishy going on, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Nimona Mines is a confusing mess of suck. I barely got through the last few dungeons, but this one caused me to put the game down for a month.

...The school psychologist would like to see you in their office, Torma.

BREAK ON THROUGH! TO THE OTHER SIIIIIDE!

The heroic RVD stumbles upon a stash of what might well be drugs for all we know. There are enough kilos here to shut down the streets of Miami, Tubbs.

This game may have come out in 2003, but unlike most games that came out after 1992 or so, you have to go into the menu to use key items. It's annoying. So you go up to a guy who wants a key item, and he'll be like "Oh! You have the Head Of Saddam Hussein!" and then... nothing happens. Then, you have to go into the menu and use the Head Of Saddam Hussein while next to the NPC to get the conversation to continue. It's a minor annoyance, but it makes things more tedious when NPCs don't directly ask for what they want.

You shut your mouth, Rami! You shut your damn mouth!

At this point, the game makes you re-do the entire mine dungeon a second time. Because this game loves to make you re-do finished dungeons just to pad things out. Which would be fine if the dungeons were fun or interesting, but they're not.

Unfortunately, this miner, who joined the party in a non-fighting capacity for the second mine run, leaves afterwards.

In honor of this character, who no doubt meant a lot to a great many players...

"Everybody! (Everybody!) Come take my hand! (Come take my hand!)"

 "We'll walk this road together! Through the storm! Whatever weather!"

"Just lettin' ya know that! You're not alone! Holler if you feel like you've been down the same road (same road)!"

He will be missed.

Rubius has a more appropriate response than I do. ...until she starts blowing the guy.

Wait, what? Who? During my month lapse, I forgot that Rubius existed. She doesn't DO ANYTHING.

Yeah, Rubius looks like an able-bodied priest. Surely she could sling some spells! Instead, she contributes nothing while you cart her around for the whole game following her story. If she turns heel at the end it'll be icing.

Don't ever put this game down for a while. It's so vague that when you return you'll be totally at a loss as to where to go next. After a bit I figured out that I have to go back to Gruberik, but when I zone in, it's starts me in this spot. There's a way into the town from here, but good luck finding it.

At this point, Dekar sadly leaves the party so Bau can rejoin us and get onto the boat with us. Then Bau leaves the party and Dekar rejoins before also getting on the boat. WTF?

What follows is a sweet Mode-7 boat ride, during which we can see the entire overworld of Zelda: The Wind Waker. HEYO!

Check this out, I can actually choose which character to have in the fourth slot. I fully expected it to force new characters on me, but this way I can keep Dekar in the group.

What follows is another super-shitty outdoor dungeon maze, with more super-shitty loot everywhere.

The place stumps me until I look it up and find out that I'm supposed to put Bau in the lead. He can smash these rocks with his hammer. Yep, for the first time since Torma whipped across that one pit, I have to use a character's out-of-battle skill to proceed.

"I can poison these and send them to my enemies!"

At this point, THE LEGENDARY DEKAR senses something nearby...and NO ONE BELIEVES HIM.

Why so dismissive? When the one person on the team with fighting experience says something, you listen!

God. I just... you're in the middle of a dangerous jungle, and danger is a foreign concept. Okay.

......

I give up.

But wait! The thing Dekar sensed was the next boss, and it's actually larger than a normal enemy!

I find one of the hidden classes, Brawler. Since RVD and Torma have long-since mastered Fighter, I switched them over. Rami stays a priestess, even though she mastered that too. Whatever.
Brawler learns some good attack skills. Not that it matters, since I already the best attack in the game.
At this point I get vastly-stronger armor. It's very expensive, but thanks to the Tea sploit I'm fine. There's also a new weapon that doubles RVD's attack power. Nothing says "rushed game" like when equipment surges in power very suddenly.

At this point we meet RVD's dad. He has an emotional conversation with his son, but even this is dumb because RVD doesn't talk. So you'll get this guy talking to himself, with occasional cuts to a wildly-grinning RVD going "....."

Whew, that was a long post. At least, it felt like it.

3 comments:

  1. The blue tea exploit is without a doubt conclusive proof this was not tested. Oh, sure, the rest of the game so far could just be bad Q&A (Or no Q&A), and it could just be them being idiots or genuinely believing the dungeons and battles and other designs were good, but that is not something subjective. That is an objective, factual mistake. My guess is they switched the buying and selling prices.
    My god, this game...I shouldn't obsess over such a little mistake, because I know this is gonna get worse...

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  2. "I bring him back to his mother, and she yells at him to get back to the front lines." ...man.

    I wonder what the Blue Tea trick would have been like as a tip blurb in the Nintendo Power days. It's not like the game counselors or whatever used their mad testing skills to discover something. "This isn't so much a trick as it is a poorly made game, but if you're playing it for some reason, here you go, infinite money!"

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  3. "Boss fight with a broccoli" sounds like something that would also happen in the normal life of a 5-year old.

    MAD PROPS for your Blue Tea sploit. If I am ever forced to beat this game to save my family from capture I will thank you sir.

    That Mom sending her son back did something no real mom would ever do, unless his desertion would lead to them all getting killed. Which would be very interesting to flesh out if that's what they were going for.

    SNAAAKE! SNAAAKE! OHHHH IT'S A SNAAAKE!

    Dekar, poor Dekar, how much money do you owe if you had to sign up for this one?

    That Chance attack sounds amazing, I approve of you sploiting it.

    Usually in games the hero's dad is already dad. Glad RVD Sr. is still kickin.

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