Oh! Emperor Vandole is a DOG. - Let's Uncover the Secret of Mana!

But first, let's have Watts upgrade our digs again! The Javelin is, once again, not anything special upgrade-wise. But the Black Whip is another weapon we'll be looking at shortly for its features!



♪♪ Distant Thunder ♪♪

The Black Whip causes Speed Down status on targets, while the Sprite's Spear causes Balloon status! This is quite awesome, and a trait that will pop up on other weapons as we upgrade them too: causing status ailments on attack at random.



♪♪ Did You See the Sea? ♪♪

Uh oh, looks like there's trouble at the Water Palace! And a new enemy type! Better known as Sahaguins, these guys are demihumans through and through. Like Chobin Hoods, they have a ranged attack, so the old diagonal approach is a good idea (especially since the damage quotient to knock them down is immense compared to previous demihumans!).



Even the interior is crawling with fish-men! What evil awaits us here?



Some green-haired guy in elaborate armor! OF COURSE!

Geshtar: Well, well... now who have we here? I'm Geshtar, personal guard of his majesty, Emperor Vandole! {Who, I remind you, is a DOG.} Hand over that seed or Luka's had it!
Luka: NO! DON'T!!
What will you do?
Hand it over/> Run for it! {Lesser of two evils, really...}
Geshtar: Did you REALLY think you had a choice in the matter?
*The party is knocked backwards!*
Boss: Ouch! I can't move!
*Geshtar faces the dais and puts the Mana Seed back on it*
Geshtar: Well, at least the seed's back where it belongs. Too bad we have to break the seal on it!
Luka: Stop it, you monster!
Geshtar: You certainly are a rebellious bunch, aren't you?

What can I say? Boss does things his own way.



Again with the implications that our party in any way owes alliegance to Vandole! What is up with these people?



♪♪ Crisis ♪♪

So yeah, this is the Jabberwocky. This is the Jabberwocky on Acid Rain. Any questions? (It did jack as usual, if you're curious.)



While I am running short on Vorpal Blades, the Earthquake spell does make a pleasant snicker-snack, so it should do.



This Jabberwocky's got more than just jaws that bite and claws that catch! He can also poison you! Yeah, it's about as threatening as you'd think it is, and that's not very threatening at all, now is it?



Before long, we strike the beast dead and come gallumphing home with its head! Callooh-callay! The Empire is going to rue the day!



Shootin' power UP!

♪♪ Calm Before the Storm ♪♪

The Imperial forces are apparently a pack of ninnyhammers.

We managed to defeat their monsters in Pandora, too. I recovered this from one of them. You should have it.
*Got Whip's Orb!* {Sweet! Well, we had THAT whip upgrade for nearly 15 minutes before replacing it!}
Jema: Boss! We're running out of time...! I'll return home, and try to stop the Empire's plans from taking root there. Remember, only a restored Mana Sword will be able to beat the Fortress. Talk to the Cannon Travel man near Potos. He'll send you to the Upper Mand. I suspect the Seed of Air is somewhere in that area. Find it, and fast!
Percy: Woohoo! That means I'm going home at last!

It's good to be the Percy, I guess.



Sure thing, Luka!



Received the Seed's power!

Signed, sealed, and delivered!



As opposed to what we've been doing so far?

Go to the Lofty Mountains and seek out Sage Joch to learn about real courage. Then travel to all eight of the world's palaces and reactivate all the seeds! You will be able to receive Mana power from the seeds once you reactivate them!

Luka is, of course, both foreshadowing future LP updates and lying her ass off. Only chumps visit Joch before visiting all eight palaces!



♪♪ In the Thick of It ♪♪

Sure enough, we have a new destination available from Cannon Travel! And next time, we'll be heading to the highland forests! Yes, it's time to bid the delightful Potos/Pandora/Gaia area farewell. Be sure to come back next time to find out what madness awaits us!

I see what you etc.


Most players outside Japan might not realize that the Scorpion Army is based on the Dorombo Gang from '70s anime series Yatterman. Led by a femme fatale served by two bumbling henchmen, the Gang has served as the template for incompetent-yet-incorrigible villain teams in innumerable works of Japanese media, from the Grandis Gang to Team Rocket. The Scorpion Army is particularly egregious, though, because the sprite for the henchmen is a dead ringer for the lanky, bucktoothed Boyacky:

Don't charged attacks hurt them?

They do indeed.

Also I am surprised at not recognizing the Yatterman connection before.

Goddamn, that is groovy.

They must have taught you everything you know.

*Ahem* Sorry, thought we were swordfighting there.

Fun fact: The first time I saw Thanatos' sprite I thought he permanently had his hands held up to his cheeks in a shocked expression. It made his dialogue even funnier. I can't remember when I finally figured out that it was a skull.

This revelation does not particularly shock me. I've mentioned before that I do not use powered-up attacks, so I never bother to try them when enemies take no damage from my regular attacks.

You seem to have picked up every Orb chest so far (I always miss the ones in Pandora). Are you planning to talk about the double-chest non-glitch?

I certainly will if I remember what (non-)glitch you're talking about! It does sound very familiar.

EDIT: Aha, I looked it up and I do in fact remember it. I'll bring it up when we get to the appropriate chest(s), but we'll never actually "need" it.

Your assessment of Gnome magic is almost the opposite of my own. Gem Missile looks cooler and is more MP-efficient, Speed Down is ineffectual (but good for leveling), Speed Up is way more effective on monsters than on you, and Defender is a cost-efficient alternative to a spell you'll be getting later.

Then again, I like charged attacks so what do I know

I'd chalk that up to different play styles. My focus tends to be on taking care of problems quickly and with a minimum of hassle. To that end, higher damage output from spells, faster attacks with weapons, lower probability of being hit, and higher probability of landing blows matters far more to me than MP efficiency or doing as much damage as possible per strike from weapons via power attacks.

Maybe, but lower cost plus higher efficiency means Gem Missile keeps bosses stunlocked longer.

They really just should've switched the two. I would've shilled out 3 MP for Gem Missile, while Rock Slide is visually lackluster. Doubly true when you get to the level 8 superspells.

In retrospect the only way to rank offensive spells is animation frames/MP. Next to stunlocking everything else is pretty much irrelevant...

I don't know that I ever saw the skull. Or at least, not a human skull--I think I saw a cattle skull, or some kind of knight's visor. Now whenever I see him I see a shrunken-down version of the Dark Lich sprite.

As for the Scorpion Army, it just goes to show, even when Yoshitaka Amano isn't involved with a game, he can still have an influence on it.

I wonder if that was intentional?

I had meant to add before, "Which would make sense." I always used to wonder how that weird helmet and cloak morphed into that thing, and why he turns into Dark Lich. If he's wearing a skull on his face, it makes a bit more sense. Now, are we sure that's a mask?

Count me in the pro-Earth Slide club too. I used Nintendo Power's awesome Days of Mana feature as a guide through my first run of the game. Nearly every boss battle was described like this:

"I attacked the beast with my sword, the Girl used her healing magic and the Sprite used Earth Slide. After a ferocious battle, we defeated the creature."

I considered NP pretty infallible back in the day. As a result, I never even considered using Gem Missile.

The sprite's magic set is overly repetitive, truth be told. It's mostly "damage spell, other damage spell, status/other effect spell." Breaking the mold, we have Salamando with THREE damage spells!, Luna without any direct damage at all but still managing to be the best anyway, and Dryad, where we very rightly ought to have had two damage spells.

Seiken Densetsu 3 made status (de)buffs extremely useful, meanwhile. Who's gonna LP that game?

SpoonyGundam already tried that. It... didn't go so well. And I've got FF12 lined up for my summer LP, so I wouldn't be able to get to it until fall at earliest unless SoM goes so fast that I can justify an SD3 LP between SoM and FF12.

I would be interested in doing a parallel LP of SD3 with whoever actually ends up doing the full thing. I'm not ready to do a full SD3 LP, but I'd be happy to do a highlights reel on the three characters that don't get chosen.

Or perhaps we do something similar to our LAP FFV thing? That was pretty successful.

d6 three times to select your characters. It's up to you to determine how best to assign those characters' class changes.

You may be on to something there... Well, we'll see what happens. Anyone who has the initiative can start an SD3 solo LP at any time since the original's been abandoned. But I suspect we'd have to submit a request to get a group LP going. Not sure; PapillonReel's the one who decides on that sort of thing, and he hasn't been in the LP forum for a month and a half or so.

Out of curiosity, do the villain's dialog make more sense in Japanese?

I was never sure if lines like "He must be receiving some kind of special inner power" were hinting at something or were just badly translated.

I would also be interested in this. I love that game and have been debating doing an LP of it for quite a while. I probably couldn't do it until fall though.

While I still think Seiken Densetsu 3 is still amazing awesome, Secret of Mana is... kind of indifferent to me. Unlike the Final Fantasy titles on the SNES and some other Square game about Chronos and Triggers, it isn't something I eagerly try to replay.

Still Sky, this is a very impressive LP and I will eagerly follow it until the very end. Question though, how many fan made patches have been made for this game aside from the one you are playing right now?

I'm not surprised that SoM didn't leave that much of an impact on you. It was kinda the... well, the Legend of Mana of its era, really. Great game, but often overlooked for the more popular games that came out around the same time.

There are a LOT of translation hacks of Secret of Mana. Discounting the official PAL versions that translate the game (poorly, from what I can tell) into French and German, there's also fan translations of the game into Italian, Spanish (no less than 3 different ones, in fact!), Portuguese, and even an in-progress translation into Greek. As for hacks of the game in English, however, FusoYa's is the only one I can find.

It was a SNES game that had the Kawazu touch? ;D

That's a good way of putting it. Akitoshi Kawazu really does get a bad rap. It's not that he has bad ideas; if anything, his ideas are downright revolutionary and hugely influential. It's that he doesn't take the time to really sit down and refine just how to make his idea work as a whole. With enough refinement, pretty much everything he comes up with can be made into something truly groundbreaking. And indeed, just about everything he's come up with HAS been made into something truly groundbreaking... by someone else.