Hundreds and hundreds of randomly generated floors! Lufia: The Legend Returns

Oh shiiiiiiiit.
(You probably shouldn't read this LP because as someone who consistently puts out high quality work, the content of this game will probably offend your sensibilities as a professional.)

(Note: The first update is going to be pretty image heavy. I'm still getting adjusted to working with screencaps with dialogue that the majority of you will actually be able to read)

Chapter 1: Minim and the Woman Adventurer


Music:Cave Two

The game begins innocently enough. A woman arrives at a port by boat, and makes her way into a nearby town. The boat is going to be one of the game's great mysteries, but we'll get into that later.


Music:Patos Village

In the village, she looks around, muttering to herself about someone she's supposed to meet. As it so happens, our protagonist Minim is strolling by.



The girl stops him and asks if he's a swordsman. Minim, ever one for manners, gets all huffy about her manners and modestly states that yes, he feels that he is "a pretty decent" swordsman.



Upon hearing this, she tries to incinerate Minim with lightning.



She's very impressed that he was able to avoid it. Minim is understandably upset that she just tried to reduce him to ashes.



Being a good hero, Minim just kind of walks off, leaving the crazy witch who nearly killed him standing in the middle of the village. Let's hope she doesn't try to test any small children passing by.



Minim is an idiot. This is the player's cue that to advance the plot, all you need to do is walk outside and then reenter the village. But first, we have business to attend to around town.



First of all, Lufia: The Legend Returns (hereafter TLR) brings back the items hidden in the scenery from the first game. It also keeps a tally of how many of these hidden items you've found and displays it at the end of the game. Completionists will not enjoy this, because it eventually devolves into pressing the A button on every single surface in the non-dungeony parts.

Here, Minim has obtained a few useful sounding consumable items. Hi Magic restores around 50 MP to one ally, Potions restore around 30 HP, CharredNewt restores a piddling amount of HP and MP to one ally and is generally not worth spending the time to use it. Revives sound useful, but are basically worthless because they only bring you back to life with a very small amount of HP. Like between 1 and 5 HP. You're basically guaranteed to die again almost immediately unless you can time it so that you can revive and heal before or after the enemies act.

Life Seeds increase your max HP by a few points.



Another thing TLR does: Most stores and inns have backdoors you can enter by pressing the A button around back. Shop keepers have different things to say to you, and inn keepers will usually give you a discount. Minim recovers a Dragon Egg and finds a Res Ring, which he cannot equip because I think it's for ~ladies~ only. The Res Ring will raise magic resistance (REG). Players familiar with earlier games will recognize the Dragon Egg, and yes they will be serving a similar purpose in this game.

Pretty much everything sold at the store is an upgrade for Minim, so he purchases a Small Shld, Cap, Hard Lthr armor and (stupidly) a Batl Knife.



As it so happens, Patos Village is located southeast of something called the Tower of Death. A number of the villagers comment on how foreboding the tower seems lately, which, you know, it's called the Tower of Death. Of course it's foreboding.

The Tower of Death is a very misleading name if you've played the previous games or even watched the into to this game.



In the southeastern corner of town is Minim's home. It's kind of neat that he comes walking from this direction at the beginning of the game. Anyway, he's got a Hi Potion (Restores about 80 HP) stashed on the dresser and... something in the treasure chest. I didn't pay attention or get a screencap of it. It probably wasn't important.

The book on the table is his diary, which will be updated throughout the game to talk about various events that have happened. Right now it's the same old "Blah life is so boring here I want to go on an adventure" crap we see so often in anime and manga and vidjagames.



There's another house here that's special, if only because the characters inside aren't named "Brother" or "Sister" or "Grampa." Lamika and Lamika's mother invite Minim over for dinner. It's almost as if the game is trying to endear the two to the player by giving them dialogue that reflects personal relationships instead of just explaining gameplay mechanics. It sure woul be surprising if something bad happened.

They also have a Dagger in a treasure chest. Minim can equip it, and it boosts his attack power (ATP) by 20 and critical rate (CLT) by 5. It's also more powerful than the Batl Knife he wasted his cash on earlier. Whoops.



Moving right along, the last important building in town is the Church. Churches act as save points and sell magic. Magic is purchased for individual characters by using Learning Points (LP), which are earned from battles. The Church in Patos only has two spells available: Strong, which is the basic healing spell in the Lufia series, and Poison, which one would assume is used to poison enemies, but actually heals the whole party of poison. Minim can't learn Poison, but picks up Strong.

Onward, to the plot!



Stepping out to the world map and returning to the village is the plot trigger. When Minim sets foot back in Patos, the screen flashes black a few times, and an ominous voice rings out. The camera pans from the village up to the Tower of Death.


Music:Sinistrals of Destruction and Terror

At the top of the tower, a strange being appears. Resurrection? Destroying the world? Looks like we're cutting right to the chase.

Gades, Sinistral of Destructionthe mysterious entity starts firing lightning bolts from the tower and...


Music:Enhancement

We switch back to Minim, who has accurately surmised that whatever the hell is going on came from the Tower of Death. That, or the people of Patos just blame everything bad that happens on the Tower of Death.

Sister comes calling Minim for help, because it seems that one of Gades'sthe stranger's bolts lit Lamika's house on fire. The two hurry up to her house to find the rest of the town (and the Woman Adventurer) standing around watching the blaze.



Oh, and little Lamika is still inside. Her mother tries to rush in to get her, but Brother stops her. Minim surprises the Woman Adventurer and Lamika's mother but no one playing the game by volunteering to go in and get her. He tells the Woman Adventurer to take care of them when he comes out with Lamika, and rushes in.


Music:Rescue

A few seconds later, he comes out holding Lamika. After passing her off to her mother, he collapses. The Woman Adventurer rushes over to him to cast Strong, showing that we're in a game where characters use their battle skills during the story. Boy is this going to seem silly when people start dying for real.

The Woman Adventurer berates Minim for being so reckless, asking him what he would have done if she wasn't able to heal him. He helpfully points out that she was able to heal him, so hypothetical situations don't matter. Then our hero passes out again. The Woman Adventurer asks for help carrying him to his house...


Music:The Wounded Warrior

Minim awakens in his bed, achey and sore and probably missing his eyebrows. The Woman Adventurer has been busy cooking a special soup to make him feel better. (Look at her sprite, she's holding a bowl! It's neat that they did it, because it's such an unnecessary little detail)

As it turns out, the soup is pretty friggan nasty. Don't ask me where she found chicken broth either, I'm pretty sure there aren't any chickens in this game.



She orders him to finish the soup, and while Minim whines and protests like a child, the Woman Adventurer collapses. Apparently, she'd been up all night casting healing magic. He helps her into his bed to let her rest.



The next day? A couple of hours later? A week later? At some point after the previous scene, both characters are back at 100% and exchanging pleasantries. Minim introduces himself to the Woman Adventurer, who is actually a fortune teller named Seena.



The game keeps insinuating that Patos village is some bumfuck village, but it doesn't seem any smaller than most of the other villages in the game.



Seena explains that recently her fortune telling has become scarily accurate, and the cards... or crystal ball... or whatever has told her she's going to have a great adventure in the Southland.

A note: The world of Lufia, which is named Estpolis (hence the Japanese title for the series), is divided into different regions as a way to not reuse the same world maps over and over. The original game was set in the Westland, while the sequel was in the Northland. It's actually pretty stupid because in these three games you're capable of circumnavigating the world with your boat and airship and what have you, so there's literally no place on the planet for these other regions to exist.

My personal theory is that the games take place on a Phantasy Star-style World Ship and the regions are connected by those little teleport shrines from the first two games.

Anyway, Minim is intrigued by the idea of a great adventure, but skeptical of such a thing happening in this day and age.



Hello plot.



Seena's plan is to find and loot a mythical island that she swears exists and possibly kill a few Gods while they're at it. You're crazy Seena, you're crazy.

She invites Minim to come along, and he quickly points out that they barely know each other. This will be the first and last time anyone in the game expresses any concern about going on an incredibly dangerous mission with someone they've just met.

Seena explains that she knows all she needs to know about him: He's stupid and reckless, but in that "main character in a shonen manga" way that'll ensure he's indestructible.



And that's enough to satisfy him. She tells him it'll be a dangerous journey, but he doesn't care because "The greater the danger, the greater the rewards." That's... that's not necessarily true. Sometimes DevelopersGod decides to be a dick and create a powerful enemies that give very little in the way of rewards. Just ask the folks who fought Yiazmat.



Seena says the first stop will be the tower to the north. In a surprisingly amusing exchange, Minim explains that they call that the Tower of Death, to which Seena nonchalantly responds, "Oh is that what it's called?" as if the Tower of Death is no big deal.

Despite Minim's surprise, he says he was planning to go anyway because he thinks the thing that destroyed Lamika's house came from there.

Now I would like to present an uninterrupted conversation between Seena and Minim:


Smashing. Seena's a damn yankee.

Once all that's settled, we're free to get back to playing. Seena has joined the party, and the couple pop over to the shop to buy Seena a nice new Blouse and Hairband. It also appears that Seena has her own traveling money, because I'm pretty sure I had substantially more cash after she joined the party.

Seena also learns Poison from the Church.

World Map Music:Epsis Continent

Lamika and her mother are outside their ruined house. The townspeople have volunteered to help rebuild it, but Lamika's mother says they'll need a carpenter and asks Minim if he knows of one. I smell a sidequest.

On the world map, Patos Cave is a short walk to the west. TLR does not like sequence breaking, so there are many, many, many gateway caves like this throughout the game that rope off your access to new locations.

Inside the cave, an old man named Ibla is waiting on Minim. I uh, don't know who Ibla is in relation to Minim. This is the only section he appears in, but he seems to know Minim really well.

Ibla praises Minim's fighting skills, but then says he'll have to learn the basics before he continues. In other words, we're going to have to sit through a tutorial dungeon before we can hit up the Tower of Death.


Music:Cave

Trying to pass on through without doing the dungeon will cause Minim to stop and say he wants to waste time with Ibla. Great.

Ibla explains TLR's central gimmick: In the Southland, dungeons, towers and caves change in composition every time you enter, so there's no point trying to memorize maps. And that is the last time anyone is going to acknowledge the randomized dungeons.

This is what's about to go down: We're going to go down some stairs and find Ibla and treasure chest. Ibla will explain some of the gameplay, step out of the way and let us travel down to the next floor where we get to try out what he was just talking about. Once we've done what he wanted us to do, some stairs will appear and we'll come to another room with Ibla and a chest, and so forth. So, I'm going to do some summarizing here.



Lesson 1: Positioning
Item: Wake Rng (Prevents Sleep, increases DFP by 5, allows equipper to cast Awaken, a party wide spell that heals sleep)
You have a 3x3 grid for your party's formation in battle. Eventually, we will have enough characters to fill out the entire battle grid. Only one character from each column can act each round. People in the back row will do less damage than people on the front row. If the frontmost character on all three columns are defeated, it's game over. That means if Seena is standing behind Minim in the first column, and Minim is defeated, it's game over.

Monsters will move around in dungeons when you move. If they get you from the side or back,your formation will be screwed up, potentially putting you in a dangerous situation.



A slime appears. Command?

Lesson 1.5: Fighting



This is the battle screen. When you first enter battle, you have three options:

• The Sword icon will commence the battle and let you input your party's commands.
• The Running Man icon will be your attempt to escape.
• The Arrows at the top will allow you to alter your party's formation while in this battle.

Once you select which character you want to use, you'll have this menu.

• The Sword icon will make your character attack with whatever weapon they have equipped.
• The Staff icon is for using magic.
• The Bag icon is for using consumable items.
• The Fireball is for using IP attacks, which we'll take a look at next update.
• The Shield makes your character defend for that turn, reducing the damage they'll sustain.

After a battle, you're awarded experience points, LP, and Gold. The game will also display your current total LP and Gold, as well as how much experience your characters need to level up.

When the Jelly is defeated, a set of stairs appears.



Lesson 2: Using the Wave
Item: GoddessTear (As far as items go, this is a good one. It'll heal your entire party for about 200 HP)
By holding down the A button, Minim will charge up his spiritual force. When you release the A button, he'll release a projectile that can stun enemies, cut grass and destroy walls. You can also do a no movement turn if you're getting your wave on.

Hitting the Jelly with a wave makes the stairs appear.



Lesson 3: Cutting Grass
Item: Magic Pot (Restores 20 MP to one character)
Just tapping the A button will cause Minim to swing his sword. He can use this to cut bushes to reveal traps and treasure. You can also use waves, so I don't know why this is the third lesson instead of the second.

Cutting all three bushes will cause the stairs to appear.



Lesson 4: Traps
Item: Boomerang (A consumable item that hits all enemies)
Sometimes traps are hidden under bushes. Stepping on a trap will cause it to go off, regardless of whether or not you've uncovered it. This here is landmine and it'll damage the whole party something fierce if you step on it.

Uncovering the trap causes the stairs to appear.

I'd like to take a moment and point out that the "Do a thing to make stairs appear" isn't something we'll be seeing after we finish this training dungeon. So uh, enjoy it while you can, I guess.



Lesson 5: Demolition
Item: Jet Ring (Increases SPD by 20 and DFP by 10)
Wall decorations sometimes hide secret passages. You can uncover them by using Minim's sword or his wave. Here Minim has to cut through two walls to reach the stairs. Once again, this isn't something we'll ever see again. Hidden passages will exclusively lead to either a single treasure chest or a small room with four treasure chests inside. They will never uncover passages to pre-existing rooms, or lead to stairs, or anything cool like that.



Ibla is waiting on the bottom floor, along with two chests. One holds a Miracle, which is by far the best item you can find in a chest because it's a full heal/revival for one character. The other chest is unimpressive, holding only an Antidote. Ibla praises Minim's ability to follow basic instructionsmad skills, and tells him that he can run around in dungeons and towns by holding down the B button.

He heads through the teleport pad behind him and Minim follows. Now that we've got that out of the way, Minim can finally pass through Patos Cave and reach the Tower of Death.



How exciting!

Next time: Ibla returns.

If the Tower of Death wasn't dangerous before now, how did it get its name?

This game has amazing music. You screwed up several of the youtube links, though.

To be honest, it still isn't particularly dangerous.

That's... odd. Oh wait, I see the problem: I had all the music links copied into Google Docs, and apparently the quotation marks caused some weirdness because they're “” instead of ".

The Tower of Death is where they do all their sacrificin' Octo.

Wait, so your other six party members will just give up if the three in the front horizontal row get killed? This sounds as ridiculous as how Final Fantasy X handled death. "What's that? You other four friggin' people on the sidelines aren't even gonna bother switching in because the three who were fighting fell? Some summoner bodyguards you are." For some of the more archaic mechanics it had, Golden Sun: The Lost Age got the whole "multiple party members traveling in the same group" angle right.

Griping aside, I'm looking forward to the randomly-generated sights we'll see.

I'm probably remembering wrong, but wasn't the first town in Secret of Mana also called Patos? Or, wait, was it Potos? That's still pretty close.

To be fair, it doesn't happen that way very often. Or, at least, I don't really remember it happening to me at all.

Then again, there is a little bit of this here too, because you do get more than 9 party members.

Secret of Mana's village is Potos, and I remember this because they kicked you out of that crappy excuse of an RPG town for the rest of the game because you pulled a rusty sword out of a swamp to get back home, and that was (barely) holding some monster seal that was gonna break anyway. Yeah, real nice way to treat someone who just beat a praying mantis/ant hybrid to death with a dull chunk of metal and has to head off on a dangerous adventure anyway. Your town has a shop and inn I'll never be able to use again after I leave!

I'm still unsuccessfully searching for that alternate ending where you burn your hometown to the ground with your flying dragon out of spite for the villagers' sense of self preservation. =/

You know, now that I think about it...

Isn't Minim's attraction to Seena really, really creepy considering she's possibly his ancestor?

I'm not really sure if I should spoiler that, since it's like Lufia 101 who Seena really is.

By the way, you gonna get the Egg Dragon to join you?

At least it isn't the Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem system where if your leader dies its game over... still annoying though

You know, I'm really not sure if Minim is actually a related to Maxim. A lot of websites and stuff say he's Maxim's descendant, but I don't think it ever comes up in the game, even when they're talking about Maxim and the Sinistrals and Dual Blade.

Yes, but it will literally be the last thing I do.

I see what you did there with the battle menu and I like it.
Are you planning to say anything about Seenas starting magic in the next update? It's kind of a nice gift from the developers after Lufia 2.

Chapter 2: Minim and the Tower of Death

First off, let's talk a little bit about our current team:



Minim (Age 17)
Officially listed as a Magic Knight, just like Maxim and Maxim's Descendant, he'd probably be closer to a Paladin, I think. He can use magic, but his spell list is more similar to the party's cleric than it is to the magician's. He's a typical hero character: Grossly overpowered, lots of swanky, unique equipment, and can hit things really hard.

Seena (Age 16)
She's the party's resident squishy magician. There are a couple of other characters that skew towards magic, but she's the only one who can equip crystal balls, which boost her MAP (Magic Attack Power) instead of ATP (Attack Power). She has some healing spells, but most of her magic is offensive.

Seena starts out with the IP skill First Aid, which heals a row of allies for an amount that's roughly 1/3 of the user's max HP. It's nice to have healing, but Seena's too squishy to really make good use of it.

She also begins with a handful of spells:

• Flash (Basic Bolt elemental damage to one enemy for 6 MP)
• Spark (Basic Flare elemental damage to all enemies for 7 MP)
• Light (Effective against "Nocturnal" enemies, which is the game's codeword for Evil/Dark-elemental/Undead enemies. Costs 1 MP. If you've played the intro to Lufia 1, or Lufia 2, you'll know immediately why she has this spell.
• Strong (Heals about 50 HP for 6 MP)
• Courage (Raises all allies' REG for 8 MP)

Seena begins with only 6 MP, severely limiting her usefulness for her first couple of levels.



There's another gateway cave near the Tower of Death. The Guard says that monsters on the other side have become more aggressive, and he thinks the Tower of Death is the cause. I guess this means I was right and the people around here blame everything on the Tower of Death.


Music:Tower of Death

Naturally, the game's first real dungeon has the most irritating music in the game. Seriously, who thought this song was a good idea?

A little ways into the Tower, Ibla rushes in to explain one last part of the battle system:
IP Attacks
Every turn in battle, characters will accumulate Infuriating Points, or IP. IP can be used to unleash special attacks, learned from things called Ancient Texts found in dungeons. IP Attacks are not tied to your equipment.

Learning an IP Attack requires two things: (1) An Ancient Text that contains said skill, and (2) The proper levels of "Spiritual Force." Each character has a natural SF color: Minim's is Red, while Seena's is Blue. Different colors have different properties. Minim's Red SF increases ATP by 1 point per level, while Seena's Blue SF increases MAP and REG by 1 point per level. You can increase the level of a character's SF by spending LP.

A character's Spiritual Force will flow to characters standing on their row and column. So if Minim and Seena are standing on the same row and Minim's SF has been boosted to 3, Seena will also have 3 Red SF, and as such her ATP will be boosted by 3. However, if you were to move Seena down a row, she would no longer have those 3 Red SF points, nor the extra ATP.

After his explanation, Ibla gives Minim the Ancient Text "Drive."



Drive requires 4 Red and 2 Blue SF to learn, but only character we currently have that can learn it is Minim. Minim will need to raise his SF to 4, and Seena will need to raise her's to 2, and they'll need to stand either on the same column or the same row. If you think you're going to get clever and game the system by just sticking Seena on the front row long enough to teach Minim how to Drive and then toss her to the backline, think again: If a character's current Spiritual Force levels are lower than what it takes to learn an IP Attack, the cost of using it will be increased by 50%. Seen above: Drive normally costs 25 IP to use, but if Minim has insufficient SF levels, an asterisk will appear beside it and the cost will rise to 37. Positioning is important.

What it says vs What it does I
I'd like to take a brief moment to introduce a very special feature of this Let's Play called "What it says vs. What it does," where we'll be examining some of the places where TLR says things that are... inaccurate. Here we see that the description for Drive is "Vertical attack. Damage x 1.5" The first question that comes to mind is probably, "What the hell is a vertical attack?" and the answer is, "The people at Natsume are incompetent."

Instead of vertical attack, it should say normal attack. In other words, Drive is an attack without attributes.



Where were we? Oh yeah, Minim and Seena had just entered the Tower of Death. The first floor has a Save Point and a Heal Pad. The second floor is where the random dungeoning begins. As you can see, there are bushes here. There will be bushes in every dungeon, regardless of how much sense it makes. I guess they didn't have the space to make different obstacles for every dungeon.

In the center picture, you can see a new trap. This one will put you to sleep if you step on it. While Minim's dozing, the enemies will still move around, and you really don't want to enter combat with the whole party sleeping.

The doohickey on the wall that Minim is looking at in the third screenshot can be struck with a sword or a wave, potentially revealing a hidden pathway. While every dungeon has bushes, they all have unique wall decorations that might be hiding secret passages, so at least they got that part right.



On the second floor, Minim finds a chest containing the Ancient Text for Bolt Attack, which deals Bolt-elemental damage. Good thing they listed that in the description isn't it? Unfortunately, he lacks the SF to learn it.



If you find a doohickey on a wall in a hallway, it will always be a secret passage. Always. No exceptions. Here Minim finds one of the single treasure rooms, and another copy of Bolt Attack. Which is fine, I guess. There's like half a dozen characters who can learn it, and Ancient Texts are consumable, so...



Pressing Select will open up the dungeon map. Stairs to the previous floor are highlighted in purple, while stairs to the next floor are highlighted in blue. As you can see, TLR sticks heavily to the "Boxes and hallways" design you see in roguelikes. Enemies won't follow you into hallways, either.

On the third floor, Minim finds Head Crush, which reduces the target's HP by 1/8. Virtually useless on regular enemies, but pretty effective on stronger bosses.

Minim and Seena don't get to spend a whole lot of time wandering around the third floor. Why?


Music:Battle Theme

Because Bats are fucking bastards. Normally when I play this game, I spend a little bit of time grinding up some levels on the world map before coming to the Tower of Death, so I never noticed it before, but the Bats in this dungeon are total assholes! They can use an attack called Shriek to confuse the party (but... Shriek is the name of the item that heals confusion...), they can call companions, and their regular attacks can cause paralysis. They're jerks when you're at a low level.

Since Seena and Minim don't have enough MP to cast Strong, a limited supply of Potions, and Seena's First Aid is only healing 8 HP, they make a strategic retreat down to the heal pad and save point on the first floor.



On the way down, they discover a new type of trap. Stepping on the katamari will cause every enemy in the room to surround Minim and begin gang banging the party. Luckily, there was only one Bat in the room when Minim touched it.

PoisnNeedles are consumable items that can inflict poison on an enemy. About 95% of what you find in dungeons is useless. 2.5% are Ancient Texts, of which only about half are useful, and the last 2.5% are items like GoddessTears and Miracles. Outside of the Ancient Cave, you will not find equipment in dungeon chests. It kind of puts a damper on the joy of finding treasure chests when you know there's nothing useful inside.



First Aid can be used by several characters, including Minim. His high max HP ensure that he'll be able to use it far more effectively than Seena, although it's a shame that he'll have better things to use IP on.

Here's one of those four treasure chests secret rooms you can sometimes find when breaking walls. Hi Bombs are consumables that deal medium damage to all enemies. At this stage in the game they're a welcome addition to the item bag, but they'll quickly become obsolete.



An example of treasure chests extremes: One contains a GoddessTear, the other a CharredNewt. Sigh.



The fourth floor has a new enemy: The Ghost. Ghosts can cause confusion with their regular attack, and they're highly resistant to physical attacks. They don't do so well with Light, though, and at 1 MP a pop, Seena is a ghost busting machine.

That's a new trap in the last image. It's a pitfall and will drop Minim to the floor below if he steps on it. These can be useful if you're in a dungeon that goes down instead of up, but here in the Tower of Death they are a bad thing. You'll never find a pitfall above a floor that isn't dungeon, so you'll never see one on the second floor of the Tower of Death.

Minim and Seena finally arrive on the fifth floor, which contains a healing pad and is noticeably not a randomized dungeon. They come to a large, ugly throne room. Now, if you'll recall from the previous update, this is definitely not the room that Gadesthe mysterious stranger was in when he destroyed Lamika's House, so there's really no point in wasting time here, right?



So Minim walks around the throne in the center of the room and through the back door. Unfortunately, TLR hates sequence breaking, so he refuses to continue in that direction. Minim and Seena have no choice but to approach the throne in the previous room.



When they do Gadesthe mysterious stra---Oh wait I guess I don't have to do that anymore. Gades appears before them.



Going off the name, Minim accuses Gades of destroying Lamika's house. Which he totes did, and but says that was nothing compared to his real power, and that's when Gades recites his immortal line:



He launches his Spiritual Force of Destruction all around the room, depicted by lightning bolts raining from the sky while Seena and Minim look around helplessly.



Yeah, he blows the hell outta that throne room.



Minim's all like, "Hey dumbass, this is your house, not mine, you're just wrecking your own stuff," and questions whether or not Gades has destroyed his braincells as well. Gades's response is pretty priceless. It's hard to believe that's the worst he's ever been insulted.



Minim just won't shut up though and keeps provoking Gades, who is the God of Destruction and therefore not someone you would likely want to upset. At least Seena is smart enough to tell him to put a lid on it.


Music:Sinistral Battle.

Before each boss battle, TLR gives you the option of preparing, which will open up the menu so you can heal and change equipment and adjust your positioning and so forth. Exiting the menu will take you directly to the battle.

Gades won't do anything for the first few turns except taunt you, allowing Minim and Seena to feebly scratch at him for single digit damage. On his forth turn, he'll use the Spiritual Force of Destruction... to raise his ATP.



On the following turn, he'll unleash Spiritual Force of Destruction (no ellipsis), which will do massive damage to one row of characters. As you can see, it hit Seena for over a hundred more than her maximum HP. You're not going to survive the Spiritual Force of Destruction.

His actions after that are a toss up. He might use the Spiritual Force of Destruction again, or might just attack. Here he used a regular attack on Minim, which was substantially more powerful than his SF attack.

Gades makes short work of Minim and Seena. They didn't even have a chance... or did they?

As it turns out, Gades is beatable here. The strategy boils down to farming nine or so Hi Bombs in the dungeon and learning the Head Crush IP skill. Minim needs to open the battle with Head Crush to knock off 1/8 of Gades's HP, then he and Seena need to spam Hi Bombs over and over. He has about 2000 HP, which means it'll take about five turns to take him down, which is convenient because you'd be wiped out on the sixth turn.

The reward for defeating him is the Gades'B. (Gades's Bracelet), an excellent Shield for Minim that boosts his ATP and DFP by 100.

Unfortunately, this strategy is really tedious because you have such limited options (lol grinding), so Minim did not go that route. There will be unwinnable battles later on in the game that he'll overcome with sheer pluck though!



Minim do you think he can't chase you. He's a God! You can't run from him, he'll just bring the whole Tower down around you and



...oh. He just lets Minim and Seena go, because he finds them entertaining. That's... unusual.



Minim and Seena didn't run very far, just back to the stairs, where they stop and have a chat about how powerful Gades is. Minim brings up an interesting point that will never be elaborated on by recognizing that Gades seemed awfully "human" for a God. It seems like they're hinting something about the nature of the Sinistrals, but it doesn't really come up again.

The two plan their course of action, which boils down to: (1) Get stronger, (2) Fill out the party some, (3) Not looking for allies back in Patos.



When Minim tries to head down the stairs, Seena stops him and tells him to use the heal pad because they're both at 1 HP. Which was kind of pointless because he finds a heal pad under a bush on the very first room of the fourth floor.

Their trip back down the Tower of Death is uneventful.

The gateway cave is now open! The Guard has stepped aside, and tells Minim that he can go straight on through and then head southwest to reach the town of Albano, or he can turn right to go deeper in the cave. Most, if not all, of the gateway caves are like this: They serve primarily as a passage between two areas, but they also contain a brief side dungeon as well. Most of these dungeons contain enemies that are well beyond your capabilities when you can first access them.

For that reason, Minim does not venture deeper into Laphon Cave (yet), and instead heads outside.


Music:Majari Village

You know how I've been bitching about the linearity? Well, occasionally you can break sequence, and you better believe I'm gonna do it every chance I get. The Guard told Minim to head southwest, but instead he heads northeast to circle around some mountains to reach the small village of Majari.

Unlike Patos, Majari really does come off like a small village in the middle of nowhere. The music is peaceful, the buildings are made of wood, and the inn and store are located in the same building. There's nothing to really do here yet but loot and go shopping, but might as well take a stroll around while we're not supposed to be here, right?



First order of business: Looting around town:
Body Seeds increase Constitution by 1~3 points. Constitution is linked to DFP.
X-Potions restore about 300 HP to one ally.
Speed Seeds increase Agility by 1~3 points. Agility is linked to SPD.



Sneaking in the back door of the inn allows Minim to stay for free.



In the center of town, there's a park full of flowers. Prefia flowers, to be exact. In the first game, they were known as Priphea flowers, and they were the titular heroine's very favorite. There's a young girl amongst the flowers, who says she's been getting scared lately when she looks at the Tower of Death, but she's not sure why. Please raise your hand if you know why a little gir might get scared from looking at the Tower of Death.



One of the houses has an Angry Ring, which boosts all stats but CLT by 10. Useful.

The Church has two new spells: Drowsey, which attempts to inflict Sleep on enemies, and Drain, which reduces the DFP of one enemy. Seena gets Drain, but the Church can keep its useless status effect spells.

The shop is located up the stairs in the inn. Minim buys a Rapier and a Chain Mail, and sells off all the crappy consumable items like Poison Needles and Confusion Powder he found in the Tower of Death.

And that's about all that can be done in in this village right now, so Minim begins his trek to the southwest toward Albano, where plot triggers await.


Music:Albano Town

Albano provides a stark contrast to Majari: The music is upbeat and exciting, the roads are paved and the houses are big. The buzz around town is that there is a very rich man living there. He is so rich, he actually owns the entire town. I guess we know who we need to speak to about some plot.



First off, a little bit of looting. Minim isn't nearly done with this town, but this is what he found on his first sweep.



The Grandpa living next door to the shop provides Minim with a surreal moment.



He's right though, there is a door on the backside of the shop. The proprietor is considerably less thrilled with Minim than the little boy from Majari's inn. But that doesn't matter, because Minim picked up a Sonic Ring, which is an improved version of the Jet Ring: It boosts SPD by 25 instead of 20. It replaces Seena's Earrings.

Minim also purchases a Mini Shld for Seena (+ 8 DFP) and a Spike Shld for himself (+ 5 ATP, +5 DFP). The Church doesn't have any new spells that weren't in Majari.

Next time: Would you believe a rich man gets burglarized?
Random Floors covered: 6

Oh man the next party member is great.

Most of the party members are great, but I love the next guy.

Now now, I'm sure that where she comes from everyone Flashes all the time and if she knew how we felt about it she would try to accommodate us.

I'd hate to see this guy's True/False tests from high school.

1. F
2. F
3. F
...

Wow, it's so strange seeing Gades wearing a face-obscuring helmet instead of showing off his red hair like we've come to expect.

So the game's primary Mage starts off with an MP pool so small, she's unable to cast a chunk of her spell set, and no spell more than once? That's... different.

I like the little portraits in the status screen. They're cute.

The one thing I never liked about the Lufia series were the spell names.

Perhaps it's because I'm so used to games just spelling out to me what the spell does in a description window or in the name, but when I first played Lufia 1 and was confronted with that huge list of available spells in the prologue, I honestly thought Strong was an attack buff.

And with a sprite no larger then Minum and company. He's a teeny, tiny little God of Frue Destruction.

Wow, this game looks surprisingly good for a GBC game... Seems to be more than I thought the handheld had in its RPG library all around, really. The character portraits are, perhaps, too cute. Watching those adorable faces fight epic battles would just leave me giggling at them all the while.

For whatever reason, TLR's art style makes most of the humanoid enemies look like robots.

She gets better! I like the portraits too, and it's one of the reasons I'm thankful it was released on the GBC. Otherwise, the ingame art would probably mirror the official Japanese art.

I...I really like the spell names. They're a lot more descriptive than the Japanese ones, which are your standard nonsense. Est, Estriit, Esto!

The graphics in the random parts are pretty awful, but yeah, otherwise it's a really neat-looking game for the GBC.

OMAKE:
Creepy Grandma Densetsu~!
A lot of the NPC's dialogue changes as events happen, so it might be worth speaking to NPCs again after plot happens, if for no other reason than some of the weirder comments they make. The Grandma in Albano is clearly suffering from schizophrenia:











Note: Actual Plot may be considerably less interesting than schizo Granny's comments might lead you to believe.

I'm also uploading the music to Youtube myself now, so you won't have to sit through those asinine openings from the previous ones I've linked.

So I can guess what Seena's deal is, given that I've played the other games, but what does her having the light spell mean?