Monday, August 12, 2019

Sword of Mana, Part 6 - Lorimar

With the world in crisis and Julius looming large, is there any hope for the world of mana? And what's the deal with Cibba's head?



This next town has a very cool Arabian look to it. Unfortunately our time here is short, and we're off to Lorimar via...

...Cannon Travel. My God. It's finally here.

Our destination is the Republic of Lorimar, the one country that resisted the overreach of the Vandole Empire during the great war.

Do it! Fire Britty! DO IT, YOU COWARD!

"OHH MYYY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD"

She crashes somewhere in the snowy northlands of Lorimar. Luckily, characters in this series are impervious to falling damage.

Our hero slides around, battling Snow Rabites. They're like normal Rabites, only with a frosted sugary taste.

Here's Lorimar Castle, which gets a sweet pan-over. This is some quality fleshing-out of FFA's story.

Everyone here is mysteriously frozen.

Everyone, that is, except the king and his maid. Weird how that Dyluck-looking guy seems to be frozen mid-swing at the throne. Is this a hint of treachery?

Another unfrozen person pops up. It's the maid from the airship. Apparently everyone was frozen by Marilith, which doesn't make much sense since she's the demon of fire in all of the Final Fantasy games.

Hmm, wonder if Tiamat will actually show up in this remake.

I head north to battle Marilith, passing by a gate that looks suspiciously like boobs with SUPER erect nipples.

Past more icy terrain (and lots of tonpoles) is the lair of Marilith.

Sorta FFVII looking dungeon here. You could splice in the cave theme from that game and it'd fit right in.

I stop to gain a few levels and get the last Magician points I need, which gets me the next class-up:

This isn't the best class, but it's the one I wanted for my style of punching away and healing. This game follows a similar class tree to Seiken Densetsu 3 where you go through three different classes as you evolve. Once you start on a class path by attaining a tier 1 class, you're locked into that class tree and have a few choices for tier 2 and tier 3. Not the most optimal way of doing classes, but it works.

Stats at this point. We've got Dark Lord defeated, now all that's really left is to take on the Fiends, Dime Tower, and Julius. Let's get to it.

Marilith is horrifying and bears little resemblance to the Mariliths of the FF series. WHY IS HER TAIL SO LONG?

Here's the original Game Boy version of the fight. It has close to nothing in common with the Sword of Mana version.

After that horrifying battle, the game tries to make me feel bad about winning...as usual. Also, the AI character got killed right away...as usual. Poor Willy. THE BOY DESERVES BETTER AI DAMMIT!

Marilith's epitaph continues. This is making me miss Winter even more than I already do. Used to be a time of year I dreaded up until a couple of years ago, now I can't wait for the snow and winds and rain of the later parts of the year.

Marilith weeps tears of blood for all of the death caused by the Vandole Empire and now the Granz Empire.

...let's just move on.

With the kingdom of Lorimar unfrozen, nobody knows what to think. So they blame the king, naturally.

Durac doesn't just look like Dyluck, he's got a similar name. He could also be a reference to Duran, or both.

I've always thought that if Secret of Mana had a fourth playable character, it should be Dyluck. Turns out, Squaresoft had the same idea, but it was one of the many ideas that went completely unused due to time and memory constraints, another casualty of the cut content fest.

And the only cure... is a healing item. Well, at least I finally need one for something.

Here in Lorimar, the engineers are sizzling.

The local cannon travel is unfrozen, so we can get the hell out of here. ...why did we come here again?

"CANNON-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL"

Those talon enemies from Pure Land make an appearance in the mountains at this point. Always liked these particular enemies.

Crab People gets whacked!

Remnants of the Vandole Empire are found en route to Granz. These old mechs are no longer functional...well, most of them.

We saw how Kraken looked in FFA and AoM during the FFA series. Well, in this game he's completely different, and pops up around the battlefield to attack with tentacles.

The next area is the Subsea Volcano, last known location of the actual Sword of Mana.

Here's another inactive warbot. I really want that nonexistent Mana game set in the Vandole/Lorimar war of the past. They sure spent a lot of time building it up in these games.

The boss here is Ifrit, who isn't much to write home about. Weird how Marilith isn't the boss of the volcano.

That said, it's a rough fight if you're underleveled. Here's the fight whilst playing as The Boy.

Oh My God. It's the Rusty Sword itself. Can't use it for much now, but it'll digivolve into the ultimate weapon later.

Everyone's disappointed for now, but don't worry, we just gotta find Watts.

You're glad she's okay? Amanda JUST died, man! Have some shame!

At this point, enough with the Vandole stuff, since we never got the prequel game. They could have easily framed Secret of Mana as the Vandole war, which I thought they were doing earlier, but ceased to be a possibility when they revealed the party that brought down Vandole in said war: Granz, Cibba here, Bogard, and an unknown woman who was the leader of the group and became the Mana Tree.

So basically:

Vandole Empire War
|
|20 years later|
|
FFA/Sword of Mana
|
|Many many many years later|
|
Secret of Mana

If we want to really try and put a timeline on this. The only constant is Emperor Vandole, or Julius, who appears in all of these eras. So does Thanatos, if he's Goremand. Not sure where Seiken Densetsu 3 ends up, or the later lesser-fanfared Mana games.

Time for Dime Tower: The only tower in history with FDR on it.

I don't know how much rest Willy is gonna get. Britty isn't giving the poor lad a break. She's a MONSTER.

I think everyone is ready, but more importantly, what's going on with your face?

Our heroes have one final dinner together before heading to Dime Tower to confront Julius.

The Boy and The Girl take a moment to go out to the desert. At night it looks like a Scarface-esque mountain of cocaine. Unfortunately for our heroes, that isn't the case.

The Boy says he'll protect The Girl no matter what, and she's immediately like "because your ex wanted you to do that?"

Wow. WOW.

After that they agree to be allies and have a firm handshake. Great job, everybody. That romance really worked out.

Lester makes a speech, then The Girl and Willy retire to their room for Vigorous Plowing while The Boy retires to his room to cry. Nobody got any sleep. Just selfish behavior all around.

The route to Dime Tower is cool. You travel through the desert and traverse sparkly pathways over pits.

But wait! Here's Goremand, who may or may not be Thanatos.

He's letting our heroes get as strong as possible before consuming their power, Highlander-style.

We never actually see him again after this, or fight him in this game. Not sure what the point of his existing was if they weren't building towards something else. If he's supposed to become Thanatos later on they should have made that a bit clearer.

I almost forgot about Lich, and here he is. This isn't Dark Lich/Thanatos/Goremand?, it's regular Lich from the Four Fiends. He's just here to test our mettle.

This...is the hardest fight in the game, quite possibly. The AI character gets instagibbed. The only reason the fight is difficult is because he has a scythe that tracks you and prevents close-up damage. The fight is simple if you just wait for the scythe to go away and use that momentary window to attack, though.

And then I suffer a bunch of losses to his nearly unavoidable tracking scythe.

The only way to even get in close to damage him is to stun him with spells, then get in close while he's stunned and punch away. Trying to attack head-on in a normal way just gets you obliterated by scythes.

MY GOD MAN.

He has the same spell-casting hand-motions as Dark Lich from Secret of Mana, so maybe it is supposed to be the same thing and Thanatos doesn't actually exist in this story and none of these games are actually canon with each other after all.


Finally defeat him. That was the hardest fight of this playthrough.

Trying it again as The Boy, I completely roll the fight due to just waiting out the scythe. Also, having your main weapon upgraded to Lorimar-class (aka Lorimar Sword, which I have here) completely destroys the guy.

The amount of damage he managed to do even in that short time shows why Lich is probably the hardest boss in the game.

Here's the Game Boy version of the fight.

Winning gets you Shade, the last and most story-important of the elemental spirits in this game. Suck it, Dryad!

Wisp, the Lumina stand-in, reluctantly joins forces with Shade to open this door.

They weren't happy about it, to say the least.

Next time: The Final Battles.







1 comment:

  1. With Mana Power! Blows your mind drastically, fantastically!

    Number OOOOOOONE!

    ReplyDelete