Dark Lord rules! Let's play Sword of Mana!

Been there, lady. She asks us to track down the guy what took it, but first, something dumb.



Pablo here asks for a chocolump for the kids. You seem highly impartial, sir!



In fact, so impartial, that I will give you ten of them, one at a time, for no reason!



And that's another sidequest done. He gives us Dudbears' gold, but the actual reward for the sidequest comes later.



Anyway, chasing the thief. Notice that it's nighttime now. He doesn't appear in the daytime.



You have to chase him down three times.



The third time, he only shows up in the morning. You can tell, because we're at our Best.



For wasting our time, Inger gives us some junk, including a tiny tapper.



This can be used to inflict or remove Wimp status on Gretel at any time. Which seems useless, except there are areas where you need to be a Wimp to enter.

Remember the hemp robe earlier? If we'd made that, we could use the Tiny Tapper all day and it would not do a thing, because Sword of Mana is a well-designed game.



Anyway, I don't think I hate this game enough. Let's go grind Light Coins for a while.

Now, you'll recall that I originally got Light Coins from the flowers in Scaly Lair. However, Duck GIs also drop Light Coins. Except sometimes (more often) they will drop Gumdrops or Crooked Seeds or occasionally Tough Meat. And that's if you kill them last out of everything on the screen. Which is easy enough for us to do, but harder for someone with a severe learning deficiency (like the game's AI partners). And we need ten Light Coins. Why? Because sidequests later on. Shut up.

Have I mentioned I hate grinding? I really hate grinding. A lot. Seriously, at the end of this, I was having more fun just yelling incoherently than actually playing. And that was less of "fun" and more just trying to keep my mind off the banality of it all. It only partially worked.



In the process of killing things we can oneshot, we finally attained the title of GOD HAND, though!



As you can see, our only real weak stat now is Defense, but accessories can cover it. Anyway, God Hand is probably my favorite class in the game, having a bonus to the knucks, healing, and light magic. It covers a bunch of good areas without overspecializing or wasting bonuses. Which a ton of classes do. I could rant about those now, but I won't, because reasons.



Anyway, here's how many Duck GIs I had to kill to get eight Light Coins. We started with two, remember.

I really, really, REALLY hate grinding.



Back at Ishe, it's Mana Holy Day night, so I buy up a Wisp. I can now use a two-Wisp spell for only 3 MP more than usual! I feel validated by this!

Anyway, before we go to Lorimar (because we can't go anywhere else), I'm just going to point out that you can get as many as eight of a single type of spirit. I will be getting all eight Wisps in the game, for reasons. This will break my rule about not doing sidequests that piss me off (see: the Light Coins grinding Grinding GRINDING GRINDING GRINDING YOUR SKULL AGAINST THE FLOOR), but I feel it would be a disservice to the readers of the LP to not do so. You'll understand why once we get the eighth one, and don't any of you DARE spoil it until then.

Seriously. I'll cut you.

Next Time: Achievement Unlocked: The Metal

Hey, you're only 147 ducks away from getting the black ducks!

Do it

I think I went for eight of a spirit the last time I tried to play the game.

It was... the last time I tried to play the game.

I'll let you guys connect the dots.

They made the poor localizer play through the whole game before writing anything, didn't they?

Hmm... I wonder - should Octopus Prime have been the person to LP this game instead of Kalir?

Ahahaha, you think getting black enemies is that reasonable.

You actually need to kill 1000 total for it to happen.

I agree, but why stop there?

Kalir, you should set out to kill 1000 of every enemy. Or at least as many as you can before you go insane and kill yourself me Mogri everyone.

So, to get from Ishe to Lorimar, we have to use the Glass Desert armory. Note that this is in the exact opposite direction of the Subsea Volcano. The game does not actually tell you, or expect you to know, where Subsea Volcano is. It just lets you use the armory, and then puts Lorimar on the map. And when you go there, you're stuck in an ice physics level. Which is annoying, but it's not horrible writing, so I'll forgive it.



By which I mean it's not horrible writing YET.



Hey buddy! You're not frozen!



Also, why is that guy frozen mid-swing? Is he an assassin?



Oh, okay. Thanks for explaining, Marley.

Wait, Marley? The hell did you get here?



If you recall, Marley stated she was originally from Lorimar. Why she has now come BACK to Lorimar when it's in this state, and at the exact same time as us, is a mystery.



The king is all like "I had no choice" until she points out his son frozen next to him, mid-swing.



Did... did he seriously not notice him this whole time? He was sitting in a throne, with his own son frozen in the act of swinging a sword at said throne. What the hell kinda drugs are you on, man?



This is the first time Hansel meets Marley. So he knows nothing of her connection to Dark Lord. All he knows is "I just flew into Lorimar and boy are my arms tired, also why is everyone except for you and that king frozen".



We can't, the armory and the plot are locked out.



Evidently the people of Lorimar are very nearsighted. Years of snow blindness and all that.



Thank you for contributing, Willy.



Yeah it is. But we need the cannon man thawed out.



Oh, yeah, wouldn't hurt to get a bead on the actual plot.



Rocky Wilds has an armory too, so that's convenient. However, she says it has icy devils of its own. By that, she means that apparently it hovers around erratically, so precise coordinates for armory travel are next to impossible. Unless you use Lorimar science or something. She doesn't explain any of that, and you only find it out if you talk to random NPCs here after they thaw out.



What all this amounts to is "Malyris froze everyone, kill he dead."

I think someone mentioned earlier that the four fiends of Final Fantasy 1 are in this game as well as Final Fantasy Adventure. Malyris, better known as Marilith, best known as KARY, is the Elemental Fiend of Fire. Why he got a sex change and suddenly gained dominion over the opposite sphere of influence is a mystery for the ages.

Marley gives us the key to Lorimar Castle proper. With it, we can unlock the east and west wings. The exit is in the west wing, so if you go kill Malyris while leaving the east wing locked, it remains locked even when the people thaw. Which would no doubt annoy the people trapped in there.



She doesn't hold a grudge against us for killing Dark Lord. Good, because if she turned into a griffin or something I'd have to kill someone. SpoonyGundam and Mogri have graciously volunteered to be first on my list. Thanks, guys!

Anyway let's go kill Malyris.

Malyris, as a boss, is not terribly dickish. The entire arena is ice and it hovers out of range a lot of the time, yes, but you CAN hit it with the deathblow of the knucks, and even normal attacks on occasion. The attacks it uses inflict either Silence, preventing casting, or Snowman, which prevents us from moving but also makes us invincible. Willy's virtually useless here, but then again, aside from Lee and the robot on the airship, have we ever actually fought a boss where our teammate was genuinely able to help?



You're not getting a eulogy out of us. No, go away.



Oh, so Malyris was a Gauntlet enemy?



The mist of blood spreads out over Lorimar and turns to rain, which is pretty damn metal.



Man, when they thaw out, they're gonna be freaked out so badly.



Except no, because Malyris blood is actually a convenient thawing tool! Man, blood is so handy in this setting! Why can't I be a bloodmage?



Yeah, if I got sacrificed/frozen to appease an evil spirit, I'd be annoyed too.



King Lorimar, heart heavy with regret, asks Durac to take his place as king.



But the people of Lorimar are a forgiving sort, so they're like "no biggie".

Well, that could've gone worse.



OH WAIT WE HAVE NOT HAD OUR MANDATORY QUOTA OF STUPID TANGENTIAL NONSENSE



Durac recognizes Marley, it seems.



Who?



Marley claims she knows not what he speaks of.



Well this isn't a stupidly obvious thing or anything.

Yeah, Marley is Pamela, Durac's old flame. She grew old over the years while he was frozen. Which is actually kind of sad, only we've only known Durac for all of five seconds and this was never mentioned or hinted at in the brief time we knew Marley, and Hansel players would only have as much info about Marley as they would Durac.



I FEEL VALIDATED BY THIS



Welp, we're done in Lorimar, plot-wise.



We can now go back to Professor Bomb and travel to the Rocky Wilds.



However, we won't be doing that. There are two sidequests to attend to here.



This guy, for starters. He lost his geodes while traveling the world by armory, since you can't really secure your pockets very effectively while rocketing through the stratosphere.



Each geode has a spirit sealed in it. He'll break the seal and grant us the spirit inside. We have the Light, Moon, and Wood geodes at the moment, so that makes three Wisps, as well as a free Dryad and Luna.



We can't break our Dark geode right now, though, because we first need to find and collect Shade through the plot. Why? Because shut up, that's why.



Rooney here wants some friends. We can give him Li'l Cactus, but we won't.



Anyway, we finally meet Marco!



He gave us the barbecued newt to give you. It's probably gone rotten by now.



That said, he scarfs it down and gives us the tail to return to Luke.

What, you thought we'd just have to find him and we'd be done? Hahaha nope.

Next Time: Achievement Unlocked: Decephalopod

So, because something something Lorimar, we can go to the Rocky Wilds now.



Before we do that, I want to get a few sidequests out of the way, though.



Remember this chump? Asked us to find his dad?



Yeah, the dad wasn't just being crude, it was supposed to be endearing!



Good. We get Dudbears' gold, but we are probably not going to spend it.



Right, now let's get stupid.

At this point, we have three Wisps. One we start the game with, or if we play as Hansel, we get at around the time Gretel is captured, as a gift from Cibba. One we get from a geode. And one we bought from Asaad in Ishe.

Do you recognize this place? This is just outside Batmo Cave. It's morning.



By praying to the Mana Goddess (i.e. saving) at this statue, while it's morning, and with at least three Wisps with us, a fourth will show up.

The statue, and the time of day, for each spirit, is different. To get a Wisp, we not only need the three Wisps we have (or three other Wisps, but we're going in this order for a reason), but we need to pray at this specific statue, at a specific time of day, in this case morning or day. Good luck guessing this without being a clairvoyant or a technomancer or something.



And that's still small fries in terms of the absolute nonsense one has to do to obtain extra spirits in this game. Before we get into that, though, remember this geode I pointed out earlier?



We can only reach it with the Tiny Tapper. I don't really need it, but hey, while I'm in the area.



Anyway, I get back on Salamander Day. Let's rest five times until it's Mana Holy Day. Why? Because shut up, that's why.



And then... hold the phone. There's supposed to be something here. I have the ten light coins I need, and the four Wisps I also need.



Oh for... right, it's supposed to be in the daytime there.

WELP BACK TO THE INN TO REST FOR ANOTHER WEEK



And there we go. We get to Cascade Cottage on Mana Holy Day morning, and OH MY GOODNESS A SPIRIT APPEARED OUT OF THIN AIR.



Okay, so a quick checklist for what you need to get this spirit, or any spirit like it.

1. Four spirits total for the spirit in question.
2. Ten coins for the spirit in question.
3. It has to be the right time of day.
4. You must travel to a completely unremarkable location in Nowhere, Kansas.

And no, there's no correlation between the location for this spirit and the one where you pray at a random statue in Nowhere, Oklahoma, nor is there any inclination as to what the proper location or statue is. We got it easy with Wisp, both locations are close to each other. For Dryad, you have to go to a place Gretel's never been to for this one (during Hansel's quest, when he goes through the mines), while you pray at the statue just before the Poison Vine fight for the other Dryad. Because Sword of Mana is a well-designed game.

And we're not even near done with the absolute tomfoolery! Guess where the next spirit upgrade is. Go on, guess.



If you guessed "in the Kahla Peaks at the very edge of Lorimar, back where we fought Malyris", congratulations, you are qualified to work on Mana games.

Anyway, Florent here can summon spirits. He needs stuff to do it, though.



Unlike the previous quest, and in a rare moment of player consideration, he tells you exactly what you need. 10 of the right coin...



And three spirits.



The catch is that while the quest just before needed the coins, Florent here actually uses them up. And as he both requires fewer spirits than the previous quest and plainly outlines what he needs, a player who needs all eight of a spirit could very easily screw themselves over and have to farm twice as many coins as I did.



Oh, and don't pray to the statue here, unless you feel like walking back.



Anyway, those are the six I'm getting for now.

TKFlash asked me about what skill levels really do, and this is as good a time as any to talk about them in more detail. At the most basic level, each point of skill with a given magic or weapon type increases the damage that attack does by a miniscule amount. So since we focus on our knucks and light magic, we've got +15 to both of those. Fair enough.

There's two other things they factor into, though. First, for light magic only, your skill level is added to your healing light value. So for Gretel, with a base of 30, +20 as a God Hand, and +15 from her skill, she heals 65 HP a pop. Pretty good.

The other factor is for getting the seventh spirit. We will need at least 30 points in our light magic skill to get the seventh spirit in the list. I hate grinding, so I'll just be using light magic a lot in the next area.

Which there's a video of right here. So hey.

Next Time: Achievement Unlocked: Wheat Sword

I haven't played this game, so I thought it would be a fun LP to follow.

Every update I think, "Okay, this is stupid and terrible game design, but it could be worse."

Then it keeps getting worse.

I don't even know what kind of indestructable robot you must be to keep playing, Kalir. I admire your tenacity, but I have a bad feeling that this will only end with your doom.

I thought you said you hadn't played this game before! Lucky guess?

Well, it's like climbing Everest.

If you're in the Death Zone over 25,000 feet, and there is so little oxygen your brain cells are slowly dying, you might think those brightly colored objects strewn about are discarded tents or blankets.

Then you realize they're the bodies of other climbers that failed to make it back.

It doesn't take much to get concerned at this point. But the climber is so far gone that they can no longer rationalize the danger they're in and continue dragging themselves upwards, step by step.

As an outside observer, I can only wait and hope that this one is lucky enough to make it back.

Right, before we plotz it up, I want to address something not screenshotted here, but that was very important last update.

Last update, we got the Brownie ring. It is the best accessory in the game, giving +55 to all stats. Actually finding it requires you to have the Tiny Tapper, go into the small holes those stones are blocking off, stop midway in the deepest tunnel, unWimp yourself, and then jump up onto an invisible ledge. Once there, Mr. Brown will give you three choices. No idea what the other two do, or if they're even worth the trouble, but screw trying them when I know the Brownie ring is available.



Anyway robots! Cuz why not? The owner's name is faded, and we can only make our a "mer" at the end. Maybe it's from Cyrodiil?



Iono.



The robot's eye lights up, the screen starts shaking, and suddenly I wish I was playing Cave Story. But we're not, we're playing a boss fight against the Kraken. Since the Kraken, the Subsea Volcano, and its boss are all pretty much solid gameplay, I'll squish all three into a single video.

Anyway, the Kraken. Like Malyris, it was one of the four fiends of FF1. Unlike Malyris, it's still a master of water, and it also makes no attempt to anthropomorphize itself. Which is cool by me. Best of all, while it effectively warps around the area, it at least has the courtesy to do so quickly, and to end up within range of our melee attacks. Shame this is just after the Brownie Ring, so our attacks can murder it in seconds. Also Willy's magic is useless against it but the game seems hellbent on making his magic suck anyway so whatever.

Past that, at the heart of the Subsea Volcano, is the Ifrit! Ifrit's attacks aren't too notable, and with the Brownie ring he dies like pancakes anyway, but what IS notable is the way he travels. He turns into a bouncing ball that goes around to different lava pools. You can hit this bouncing ball a ton of times in a row with magic, but if he collides with you, you'll be hit a ton of times as well. So, uh, don't let that happen.



Anyway, we found A sword. It was locked off by fire and everything. But Gretel and Willy are doubtful that such a junk sword could have been the legendary Sword of Mana.



So does any sword that's seen use. But whatever, take it back to Cibba on that merit alone.



It's assumed that Hansel and Lester tackled the Subsea Volcano at a separate time than us. Or more likely, they didn't know how to reach it and just decided to raid Selah's kitchen for the month Gretel and Willy were getting lost in Lorimar and sleeping in the Topple Inn.



Gretel shows the sword she obtained to Cibba.



Cibba recounts the legend, that the Sword of Mana would react by shining brilliantly when held by a Gemma Knight.



Bogard dismisses the shining part as a mere tale, but does confirm that they fought with it.



So yeah. This junk sword that could fall apart at any second? Really is the Sword of Mana!



Man, Cibba and Bogard are dicks.



Gretel's being an optimist about it, at least.



As bad as this game is, I kinda like this line. Oh well.



Anyway yeah, the whole point of sending us on a fool's errand was to teach us that the Sword of Mana didn't have any power on its own, it's just the heart of the wielder that counts.

Yes, very good, you're clever asshats. Now remind me again, how close is Julius to obtaining Mana power?



And by Julius I mean Vandole? Cuz remember when the Moon Mirror shattered and a shimmery image of Vandole showed up and Marley confirmed that he looked like a hero of Lorimar legend who probably was Vandole and AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.



Shut up! Shut up with the double naming stupidity! What is this, sugar-blasted Liberty Island?



Maybe it wouldn't have been if you didn't spend all this time throwing your subordinates into volcanos!



At least they have AN option. They just haven't used it until now because ??????????



METAL GEAR?



Dime Tower was built by the Vandole Empire, since they couldn't unlock the Mana Sanctuary themselves.



I'm sure he did.



Oh. Well, Cibba did say he could raise it.



Doesn't stop everyone from being all "oh no our hopes have been dashed it has sunken into the sand".



Bogard reminds them that they can raise it while secretly wondering if Hansel and Lester found out how to handle the lock on Selah's liquor cabinet.



Speaking of Selah, she shouts for us to stop as we all go sprinting out the door.



This is her last contribution to the game's plot. Good job.



We get another one of these cutscenes, while Willy eats more turkeys than any man possibly can handle.



Anyway, let's go to a dune in the Glass Desert for one of those full moon meetings between a boy and a girl.

Hansel is a smooth talker.



Anyway, this scene is pretty much him promising to protect us. Frankly, dude, I'd prefer Willy, but whatever.



They also talk about Amanda a bit. Thankfully, they spare no words on Dark Lord's family.



Does that seem like a short scene? Well, that's because it really didn't have much of worth to talk about. It was so ambiguous that the holding hands they're doing right now is more intimate than anything they said. They could've easily had this conversation just after Amanda died in the middle of Jadd with Lester watching and it would have about the same tone.



Whatever. Let's get going to the Ruined Path, which is the first it's been mentioned, but as it's on the way to Dime Tower, I can accept that.



Bye, Willy and Bogard. Your occasional competence will be missed.

Next Time: Achievement Unlocked: Like School in the Summertime

Hey, look on the bright side: at least you GOT occasionally competent allies. Had you picked Hansel, you would've had to go through most of the game with Lester as your second. A worse character would be difficult to imagine. He's got mage-like stats, yet no magic at all.

To be fair, he DOES get Dryad magic in Cascade Cave.

But most people won't know that, because in order for a teammate to actually cast magic, they have to equip their new spirit. Gretel, Cibba, and Willy start with theirs equipped, but everyone else, Lester included, does not, so you have to switch over to them, equip their spirit, and THEN they can cast magic. And you aren't told that your teammate can suddenly use magic, either.

Fitting, really. Dryad is by far the weakest of the spirits since just about everything is immune to it (particularly in the area you actually get it in). A useless magic type for a useless bard.

Okeydokey! This update, we'll start by going to the Ruined Path. It's not a very long trek, but the gimmick of the area makes it longer.



And who should meet us but this scavenger?



He doesn't seem hostile, though.



Anyway, sounds like he lost to Isabella. Not that it's relevant to the situation at hand.



Nope. We're here to open the seal to Dime Tower, dunno about you.



Hansel's worried he'll eat our souls, but he can't do that until he kills us, which we will easily stop from happening.



Anyway, I should mention that while Cibba did seal Dime Tower, he neglected to mention exactly how to break the seal.



So Goremand's going to give us a pointer. Cuz, y'know, we can totally trust him.



Well, like I said, Cibba didn't tell us, so.



Goremand says the most believable thing he can to get us to trust him. Either way it falls, he's getting some fine souls out of it.



Julius' rebuilding of the Vandole Empire will give him lots of souls to devour, but if he could devour Julius' soul, that'd be even better.

Hang on, did they just... did they just provide actual reasonable motives for an antagonist?



Well, that's what happens when you don't bend over backwards to write a character as sympathetic.



Anyway, we're off to the Sealed Cave.



Cuz there's so many other takers, right?



Anyhoo, on our way over, we start putting our windfall of materials to use. Starting with the Fossil Knucks. While Crystal is the best material in the game, Fossil gear is a close second, and sounds really cool to match. Not because it's powerful or accurate or anything, but because any Fossil weapon can petrify enemies, provided they aren't immune to earth. And unlike Crystal gear, you get a Fossil just by wandering around in the Subsea Volcano.



I don't just go about fortifying the knucks, though. The Snake Flail here sees a reasonable power boost, plus it can poison now. We also make an Altena Axe, which kicks its power up to ridiculous heights.

And since we're going to have Hansel for pretty much the rest of the game, we may as well get him a good set of gear too.



I don't think any other characters can have their gear modified. Which is fine, because their gear is all great for their level. Anyway, I just chuck the stuff that can't make good weapons onto the armor for the characters, give them a few more immunities, you get the idea.



And with that, we're off to the Sealed Cave!

Like Vinquette Hall, most of the enemies here are Amorphs and Undead. Unlike Vinquette Hall, at this point, you have pretty much everything you need to not care in the slightest about it: MP pool, effective magic, weapon selection, you name it. The only other gimmick is that you have to find five switches to awaken the gravekeeper. Just cuz.

Speaking of, the gravekeeper is a Lich! The elemental fiend of earth, as it were! He doesn't seem to have earth attacks here, but whatever. His two attacks of note are a spinning scythe shield, which you start the fight in range of and which will always stand between you and him, and fireballs that persistently track you. With the Brownie ring, we really don't care, but this could be a troublesome fight without it.



So, he understands that yes we do want to stop Julius. Goremand mentioned a way to break the seal here, thus making him more helpful than Cibba.



Okay!



Yeah, remember when we got new weapons and spirits? This is the last one!



Turns out the seal on Dime Tower is a sound-based lock. Damn it, where's the Echo Visor?



But whatever, Shade joins us. With that and our plethora of Wisps, we can enter Dime Tower easy.



Shade is the last magic type you get in the game. In Final Fantasy Adventures, the way to Dime Tower was blocked by something that necessitated the Nuke spell. Dark magic is no Nuke spell. It's tied for moon magic as the worst in the game in my book. Like moon and water magic, the support spell is stealth-based, turning Gretel invisible and rendering her imperceptible except by hearing. Offensive magic can inflict blindness, which isn't too bad. However, by this point, you can already start collecting extra spirits for the elements you prefer more, and you already have a weapon/spirit pair that hits just about every enemy. So in order to compensate, dark magic should have to be ridiculously powerful.

Undead are immune to dark magic.

Y'know, the enemies that are also immune to physical attacks.

Screw dark magic.



Anyway let's go grind out some more magic. The axe's magic trajectory has some really wonky hitboxes. When cast horizontally, it can miss even on enemies the sprite connects with, but when cast vertically, even that Ghoul to our left could be hit. Yeah I dunno either.



Once our light magic skill hits 30, we get a call for help from a Wisp as we leave the hot house. To Vinquette Hall!



Oh, and during the grinding, which actually didn't last nearly as long as the light coin farming, we got a Wood Coin. Shame we spent all our light coins, otherwise we could go clear Delmar's quest. Meh.



Oh no! It's the Black Dudbear that's guarding the Wisp!

...It dies in two hits.



Okay, that's the seventh Wisp. As a checklist, you have to grind your foo magic skill up to 30 (which is kind of ridiculous but plausible if you're the sort to grind), then go to wherever the spirit sends the SOS from, and kill the black Dudbear there. Depending on the spirit, you can either get an easy location like Wisp, or you could have to backtrack all the damn way to Granz Castle to rescue a Jinn.



Thankfully, once you have all the others, the eighth Wisp is relatively easy to get. It's in Wendel. We're just outside it to the west, on the path Hansel takes to reach the airship after Gretel is captured.

It goes through the Mushboom Forest, which is full of Mushbooms, and then he meets Watts at the Dwarf Cave, they go into the Abandoned Mine, home of the Dudbears, to retrieve Mithril, and then he offers it to enter Gaia's Facade, meets up with Cibba at Westlake, and then boards the airship briefly before crashlanding in Menos.



Anyway, that's not where we need to go, I just wanted to point it out. We need it to be Mana Holy Day night, so INN SPAM.



You'll recall that time we gave the kid here ten Chocolumps for no reason? That's a prerequisite for this sidequest, as is having all the other seven of the spirit in question.



Pray (save) at the altar, then check it again.



We're helpful!



And as long as those three qualifiers are true, we get the spirit.



wait what

...what

what



Okay, so it's rant time.

You recall back at the start, when I mentioned the class choices we had, right? Fighter, magician, grappler, whatever? Well, each of those classes has bonuses like we got here. Fighter, grappler, and barbarian are all pretty similar in the end, giving bonuses to the sword/staff, knucks, and lance respectively, while also giving assorted side bonuses.

Fair enough, although the level requirements for the barbarian tree classes are STUPID AS HELL. Example: to get the Odin class, the rough equivalent of the God Hand, you need 8 levels of warrior and monk, 7 of magician and thief, and 5 of sage. Just don't get 10 warrior, 8 monk, 7 sage, and 5 magician and thief levels, otherwise you'll become a Star Lancer instead!

That said, pretty much all the class branches for those three are passable. Thieves are not so lucky. They've got 50/50 odds of either getting great classes (Wanderer, which has a really high Bow bonus and skill in Wood and Moon magic, which isn't great but passable, and Ninja Master, which is widely considered one of the best classes in the game) or awful ones (Rogue, which has +10 to both bows and flails, and Night Blade, which has +20 to the damn SICKLE).

And then you have the magic classes. Oh, the magic classes.

Aside from a bunch of bonuses being wasted in magic defense, ESPECIALLY in the cleric line, there are certain class branches with the magic classes that do not have a single physically-inclined level to them. These are the Arch Mage and the Bishop class. Why, Bishop? That sounds familiar!

Each of the eight magic classes has a secret technique you have upon getting to it, called the 8 Spirit Hit. Depending on the class you get, you unlock an 8 Spirit Hit. Only, you don't actually unlock the move. You have to have all eight of the spirit that your class prefers in order to do it. Sucks to be you if you're a Necromancer that uses moon magic, or a Dark Shaman that uses dark magic, doesn't it?

So, the eight spirits we got? If we'd played as a Bishop instead, we'd have access now to a special attack that uses all eight spirits, that hits everything on the screen and is all but guaranteed to cause the affiliated status. But we're not a Bishop. We're a God Hand.

So, to recap. After going through all that nonsense to get all eight Wisps, the game is now telling us that we can only unlock their best move if we instead played as a class that gets no physically-inclined levels whatsoever up to and including the Dark Lord fight, who might I remind you is effectively immune to magic. And if we did play as that class, we'd say "oh, we have the 8 Wisp Hit! How do I do that?" and the game would NEVER TELL US how to get all those seven other Wisps we need to pull it off.



Next Time: Achievement Unlocked: CRUSH

Yep, the 8-spirit hits are yet another big load of crap dumped on the player. And even with all that, they're STILL not the biggest dick move of the game. Most games, that'd be enough, but Sword of Mana? It has so many dick moves on offer, why limit itself to just one?

So what IS the biggest dick move? Because I was working under the assumption that that was the biggest one.

Perhaps it is a faux-rts segment in which you control an army of fifty Lesters.

Oh that one is up there, believe me. I'd rate the biggest as the fact that there are enemies specifically designed to make you self-KO yourself. Said enemies can cause you to self-OHKO yourself if you took the time to improve your weapon levels and stats enough.

When it comes to dick moves how does it compare to Realms of Arkania III : Shadows over Riva?