Romus of 7th Saga fame returns, as I finish up Brain Lord.
Either that or it's Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters fame. No, pretty sure it's Romus.
The last 3 dungeons are an absolute grueling slog, just trying to get the next key, over and over. This game has a lot of strong elements and it certainly has potential; unfortunately, it doesn't meet that potential because it's such a slog.
The third of the five dungeons, the Ice Castle is particularly obnoxious because the floors are all slippery. So you're sliding all over the place for half the dungeon.
The spike traps from the first dungeon make a return. At this point I can pretty much just run over them and let the Life Jade heal me up as I go, so that works.
This dungeon is just as much of a key-fest as the others. Find the next key, slog through the ice, find the next key.
Yeah, we probably shouldn't have tried to invade Romus' Castle in the winter, huh?
Since the beginning of the game I keep running into this Random Girl, and I think she's supposed to be a love interest for the hero. Not sure though because she mostly tells him to bugger off!
Dammit! No! Vanessa!!
VANESSA WHY
VANESSA
This is a bit of a Godsend for marching through the ice. You still slide around, it's just much much less now and makes the remainder of the dungeon tolerable.
The other NPCs marching on the Ice Castle seem to be roundly annoyed by this whole ordeal. Which is very understandable, because I too am ready to tap out on this game. I'd have probably stopped after the first dungeon if I wasn't putting it on here.
All right! 33 left!
This sword isn't as awesome as it sounds. It's a regular sword that produces a small puff of fire. It's mostly used as a tool because it can clear out some ice blocks.
Not sure what's going on with the description on this item. Makes it sound like it's cursed or something.
Doesn't help that the room where you get it is the one room in the game where you automatically lose HP just standing around (due to the extreme cold). At first I thought my HP was dropping because of the helmet, due to the helmet's description, so I unequipped it and was still losing health. That was a little confusing. No, it's the room doing that. Weird that this particular mechanic isn't used anywhere else besides this room, not sure what purpose it served.
Finally, our heroes find Vanessa. Thank God. Just....just Thank God.
Alright, get outta here.
Since the game has to earn its moniker, it takes a break from making me find keys to throw some puzzles my way. Now with ice blocks included!
Here's Romus...and he doesn't look at all like Romus. Well, that's disappointing.
The Strategy Wiki on this game has some info on this dude and his connection to 7th Saga:
A potential connection between this game and 7th Saga? Maybe. The two games look so similar that they might as well have connected them a lot more.
I was really hoping to fight 7th Saga Romus here, probably with a visual makeover given how impressive the first two bosses were. Instead, the boss is a trio of ghosts. LAAAME
It's a weird fight where you have to hit them with magic (the new Stop spell is what I used, not sure if anything else works) to make them corporeal, then whack away.
Back at Toronto, the old man has finally finished decoding the plaque. If he took any longer, he might have died of old age.
The plaque tells the history of the world, kinda like how the oldest surviving human written works are on stone tablets...and all seem to talk about a mega-flood. In this case, the cataclysm they speak of is the arrival of the Demon King, who was once held at bay by the Dragon Warriors until they ceased to exist.
Now, he's about to return, so it's going to fall on the last surviving descendant of the Dragon Warriors to take him out.
First, Lemele has to find the last dragon, which is resting up on Droog Mountain. What a name.
Droog Mountain: No relation to The Droogs from A Clockwork Orange.
Getting to the dungeon requires going through an annoying mountainside area and finding this well-hidden cave.
Droog Mountain is the shortest of the five dungeons, and yet somehow it might be the most annoying out of all of them. A lot of the rooms are full of damaging lava, which can be crossed by firing the Ice spell across the room. The real annoyance comes when you get to...
...these "Silent Stone Maze" rooms, where unbreakable rocks form a maze that changes every time you exit and re-enter the room. Most of the time, the place you're trying to get to is inaccessible unless the rocks happen to land on just the right configuration. It's incredibly annoying.
Got the best Axe in the game. The weapons remind me a lot of Final Fantasy Adventure, in that each one has several tiers/upgrades that are their own weapons, and a lot of them have a tool usage like breaking rocks.
Guess what, though...this axe has no effect at all on the stones in the maze rooms. Giving this to the player now seems like intentional trolling, like that helmet earlier.
More keys!
More platforming!
Finally, I get to the end of this gruel-fest. What will the fourth boss be?
...there isn't one, it's just the last dragon. He isn't long for this world, and he's got a lot to say.
Much like how The Flood was said to have annihilated the ancient world's great cities in a day, the Demon Lord took out everything in a week.
So this guy is the last thing holding the Demon Lord at bay and he's about to expire. The game has all pretty much come together here.
The dragon gives Lemele an Eldest Namek stat-boosting powerup. The Guard boost is the most important part, as it basically gives him 50% more defense.
Returning to Toronto, the town is now crawling with GIANT BEETLES and people are afraid to walk around outside.
Lemele: "Maybe we should call in the National Guard to stabilize the area?"
Old Guy: "Are you CRAZY?? The NATIONAL GUARD?? We'll all be killed!"
He then ran and hid under a desk.
At this point I discover that this weirdly-named weapon is actually a boomerang upgrade I could have gotten a WHILE ago. Has 2x the attack power (not as big of a deal with my leveled Power Jade) and more importantly, about 30% more reach. I think most of the weapons in this game have three different tiers, so there's probably a final boomerang out there too. Hopefully it's in the last dungeon and I didn't miss it somewhere.
After being rude to Lemele for the entire game, this elf girl is now apparently digging him. So that's a thing. Anyway, the various NPCs gather to see Lemele off as he goes to take on the Demon Lord at the final dungeon, the Platinum Shrine.
I'm super glad to see this grueling slog of a game grinding to an end here.
Getting there is a matter of going through a maze of tunnels, fighting off giga-ticks. It really sucks. ...get it, sucks, because they're ticks.
I'll show myself out.
The Platinum Shrine is the final area of the game, and the biggest dungeon. As if the dungeons weren't already sprawling and ridiculous enough, this one beats them all.
So it's like the Slayer in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Wait, town NPC Ferris was the Fairy Queen this whole time?
The final dungeon is filled with these inscriptions that read like Toad penned them in the blood of virgins.
An action-packed sequence, as I flee from collapsing floors! The controls are not really up to the task of this sort of action, but that's okay, I'm thrilled to be getting almost a normal action-packed game dungeon here.
Yeah, thank you Toad. Anyway...
Wait, what? Who turned out the lights?
Yep, at the 11th hour, the game starts dropping these dark rooms in. There are a bunch, and they're a pain in the ass. "Rooms" probably isn't the most accurate way to describe them either, they're large chambers (probably around 6-8 screens in size) with a maze of walls (that you can't see) and numerous dead ends.
Lantern faerie doesn't work here, nor does fiddling with emulator layers. There's literally no trick to this. Just have to feel your way around. I got through the first of these rooms by blind luck.
I went back to town and bought all the spells that follow the tracing of walls (specifically, Ghost and Bounce). Ghost is the best one, seen here, as the lasers will follow walls around and outline them for you. Except when there's a one-square wide space, then they often just jump right over it. So even with this, I can't find my way through the second room.
After around 15 minutes of feeling around in the dark like a proctologist and not being able to find the way out of this room, I give up. Take a good look, this is the last screenshot I took from Brain Lord. The dungeon design in this game has always been tedious as hell, but they took it to a new level in this last dungeon. This isn't fun, it's enough to make you squirm in your chair with the kind of restlessness that only comes when your time is being blatantly wasted.
I'm gonna go ahead and tap out, and just to make sure I don't go back and waste another 2 hours of my life finishing the game, I'm deleting all the saves too:
The sad thing is, the game would be fine if Enix would just put out an apology for their creation of pitch-dark maze rooms and retract their statement that "the kids will love it!"
However, the Brain Lord dev team refused to issue a correction of their mistake, despite it clearly being factually inaccurate, and instead decided to LAWYER UP before being escorted out.
What else is left? I don't even care, but I'm watching it on Youtube.
A few more puzzles, which is good...
...and a bunch more of this complete garbage.
Fun Fact: The last time I gave up on a game before finishing it, Gremlins 2, it was also in the final area and also due to a dark room where you couldn't see where you were going. What kind of dementor creates things like this and thinks it's good game design?
Final boss is the Demon Lord, and it's this unsettling freakish monster. Late in the fight, limbs break off and become other monsters. Nothing the boomerang can't whoop up with (never did find another upgrade to that, don't think there is one).
The Platinum Castle falls apart and it looks like Lemele didn't make it. He falls through the floor just as it cuts to black and the credits roll. They made it look like he died, just to upset kids!
Post-credits, he shows up back at the pub and the four main NPCs are all thrilled to see him alive. They then jump up and down like the hobbits at the end of Return of the King.
This was a good game that clearly had some real talent behind it. Unfortunately, all of that got ruined by them turning over the dungeon design to someone's nepo baby, who proceeded to draw the dungeon layouts with their butt.
Dishonorable mention for this borderline-incompletable game, and it's a bit of a black mark on Enix's record. Really had high hopes for this to be one of the good ones, a hidden gem. But nope, just a letdown.
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