Infinitely Inscrutable? Let's Play Legacy of the Wizard!

Now this? This horrifies me.

The pastel colored wizrobes can float through the walls, live long, and hit really bloody hard. The room is full of locked doors, which means you have to grind hard to be safe. There are also three separate paths, two of which are essentially mandatory. Since the paths don’t intersect at all, you have to go through one, get the prize, backtrack all the way, and then go through again. Oh, and the locks reset for every trip!



Mimics? Oh, there are mimics, which hit for a sick amount of damage and are functionally indestructible. I especially like the one at the top, blocking any progress (I think it has 255 HP). Maia also cannot equip the magic insta-kill armor, so you basically just have to kiss your life meter goodbye. And you have to go through this one at least twice.

This room has probably killed me more than the rest of the game combined, save for the bosses. It looks so innocent, but the thing chews souls and spits them out again.



AT the end of the top path is this little number. The secret is not to be afraid to abuse your body, and to remember that the blocks will be rocketed in whatever direction you last inputted. It’s probably the cleverest block puzzle in the entire game.



Most of the items in this dungeon are pretty intuitive. This one isn’t.

Next time – more trips through the deadly room of death!

In our last episode, I got equipped with a wondrous object of dubious utility.



We dash out of the room of terror, and then brilliantly dash back in, this time using the middle path. Note that leaving the room to grab the bauble respawned the unavoidable death mimic (it’s always nightmare mode in this game).



One prize for this route is a crystal to add to my collection. I don’t think sacrificing my keys to the cause was worth it.

As for the shop…



To add insult to injury, the shop on this path sells everything at exorbitant prices.

Now, the last path.

My vital signs are becoming a cause for concern. The nearest inn is seven locked doors and a spike-lined death trap away. No way to go but forward.



The bloodstained spikes are a nice touch, especially given that my character’s life is passing by her eyes. This shop comes much too late in my run, but could help other people.



I finally hit upon the sort of rest I’ve been looking for. In a cruel joke, the treasure chest contains food. Unfortunately, Maia’s magic meter is hitting rock bottom, so I can’t save my money. Maia has to spend a lot of time at cheap hotels throughout this run, so money can become a problem. This gives me an opportunity to play with my new toy anyhow.



This hole passage has always bothered me, and caused great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In order to progress, you need to play find the breakable brick. Unfortunately, walking over it doesn’t seem to reveal it – you have to be holding down at the same time. Moreover, the brick is not in an intuitive location. Falcom generally at least tries to put the room exits in at least mildly hopeful looking locations, in order to give you an idea where to look. In this case, they chose an out of the way corner of a basement level.

And of course, should you prematurely give up and return to look for the exit somewhere else, you have to go through the terror room again.

On the other hand, it is a good indicator of what this section of the dungeon has in store for us.

Such as pulling the mouth of hell move on us, and dumping us on a pit of spikes. This pales in comparison to what is to come.



This is.

Oh, it isn’t obvious to you? That decorative bloodstain is actually an enemy. Maia’s stage is full of nearly invisible enemies in strategic locations like this. To prevent us from cheating, Maia also cannot equip the armor and bypass these. Expect to here many choice words about this as the game goes on.

To improve the situation even further, the enemies in Maia’s realm all do sickeningly high amounts of damage. I’m going to be hemorrhaging money visiting inns. Due to the fact that Maia has three special items, you also can’t use the power glove anymore to power your way through it – you just have to accept the pure unadulterated torment. Many of them have a high enough HP that they require quite the beatdown. And they respawn, so god forbid you have to backtrack.

I’ve played Roguelikes more merciful than this (including, but not limited to, Nethack).



This does give us a chance to show off the magic stick – if you encounter a locked door with it equipped, you’ll spend magic instead of keys to open it. Yes, I’m just a little upset that nobody else can use this thing.

Bonus content – can you find the bloodstain in this screenshot?



The next area is pretty bland, and shows the return of the Eggman.

In order to get this chest, you have to engage in ritual self abuse, and leap in front of the block when it blasts its way back. That way, you can trap it in the area on the left area.

Double points for the levitating spikes right above me.



We float past the carnage to our goal. The decorative spikes are not solid, and can be easily bypassed.



Wow, that’s subtle. The list of puzzles that one can come up with that involve the Keystick is rather short, which probably explains this. That won’t stop Falcom from sticking their giant rows of locks wherever they can.

These rows effectively prevent you from being able to use Lyll to collect all four crowns. Someone really dedicated that can manipulate the RNG might be able to pull it off, but it would be such an unbelievably tedious and unrewarding experience that I’d frankly gouge my eyes out before trying.

(Pondering this made me look up some web pages to see how many free sets of keys there were in the dungeon. That inspired me to compare the Famicom and MSX versions. That inspired me to play the MSX version for an hour. I failed at focusing, but did learn that the MSX version jacks prices up for items.)



In this case, it’s hardly worth the extra effort. I got another crystal consolation prize.

In a more benign display of this games unrivaled obscurity, there are secret shops in a few places. Many games include such things, but in this case, you find it by touching the sign that says “Inn”. This makes it say “Shop”, and thus be a shop.

Yes, that’s literally how this works. I have to pass on the merchandise, needing to save my coin.



Continuing onward, I find a bed of nails. Note that the game won’t let you enter places where there’s only one tile between the spikes and a solid object. You’ll want to fly past this one.



At least we can put this mess of a room in a bit more context. See if you can guess what’s disturbing me. Hint – what’s with the blue dots?

This section bothers me a lot – there’s literally no reason to find the secret passage through the bricks. But it’s there.



Note that the sphinx is effectively invincible, and will maul you if you touch him.



I suppose it’s possible to get this far in the dungeon without either of these items, but I really don’t suggest it. Grinding for keys was roughly as fun as my last root canal.

I love the sword toting bear things patrolling their locked doors. Now this is how you secure a vault.



And cat girls are never out of place. I continue my downward spiral.



This inn is another secret shop. Perhaps it’s some sort of black market. That would explain the land-mine enemy in front of it.

Next time – you see all of the above? The next time around, we have that, only bigger, faster, and harder. With more spikey things.

Technically it's the narrow spiked passages that cause Lyll to be blocked in this section, since she can't use the wings.

It's possible to get through Xemn's section with her too, but results in a lot of farming because destroying blocks eats up her magic.

Also I have named so many characters in so many games "Lyll" that I have literally lost count.

Correct -- Unfortunately, that passage was a bad example due to the fake blocks.

I haven't tried Lyll in Xemn's section before, but I had heard it works. I'm surprised about the farming thing, as she can jump over a lot of the block puzzles.

Yes, but she still has to go through the room with all the stone columns. Xemn can push them out of the way (and pretty quickly at that) but Lyll has to chop through them, and the mattock uses magic.

I also learned that trying to take anyone but Pochi to get Pochi's crown is pretty much a crapshoot, since there's a mimic in the way whose bite does like 40 damage. Xemn makes pretty short work of the level, though.

The mimic's bite is a OHKO. I had better luck with Roas (of all characters) than Xemn because Roas can use the jump boots. Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out exactly how the game determines when touching a mimic with the armor on will kill you, and when it will kill the mimic.

And Legacy of the Wizard (150% speed if you wish) video LP. You know you want to.

I had no idea. That's so completely insane...

I love this game.

The game probably flips a coin, then ignores the coin and does whatever the hell it wants.

I'm pretty sure that I don't!

Hey, everyone who commented that I was some brave hero for deigning to play Hydlide to completion for your enjoyement?

Hydlide had nothing on this game.

Nothing.

After reading through this, I really no longer feel bad that I never finished this game.

I’d like to say we’re at the home stretch now.

However, we aren’t. I do appreciate the gift of keys. They’re redundant in Maia’s level, but help out her children.



I love the enemies in this part of the dungeon. But yes, they kill you as hard as everyone else in Maia-land does.

Oh, and fake block mazes are much easier with the angel wings.



Note that the way enemy AI works in Legacy of the Wizard can really throw you off. The sprite of the enemy literally gives you no information as to how it behaves, how much damage it does, or how many hits it can take. Essentially, you have to instead remember the different built-in patterns, and match them that way.



At this point, the inaccessible Inns just seems to be a running joke by the game designers.

I really like the rising pillars in this part of the level, as well as the castle. Note the flying cyclopean enemies – these things will decimate your life total, and have the wonderful walk-through-walls trait, so you have to kill them before they get you. It’s times like these when you really wish Maia’s inventory wasn’t full.



This is some of the scariest foreshadowing in any video game ever.



Free magic armor! Note that the wonderful fact that by grabbing it, you’ll fall onto one of those bloodstains of death unless you have the wings equipped. And if the stain doesn’t get you, the spikes will.

I’ve been experimenting with the armor in an attempt to do Pochi’s section sans Pochi. The mimics in the last part of his level are entirely invincible, and will kill any humans that touch them. Sometimes, the armor will kill them and let you live, but sometimes you’ll die first. Infuriatingly, I still haven’t figured out exactly what decides if you live and die. The random number god bows down to this game in its unholy arbitrariness.



This level is a strong contestant in the “cruelest Legacy of the Wizard Room” sweepstakes. Note first the green splotch on the spikes (spoiler – it’s an enemy and will kill you!), and the twisty maze of locked doors. There area also the happy invisible enemies in the hall of locked doors, so don’t you dare go on autopilot when going through them.



In order to even start this challenge, you need to move the brick to the right side of the passageway. Timing when you should throw yourself in front of the charging brick is quite difficult.

Oddly enough, you cannot unlock doors while bricks are flying through the level.

The treasure is worth it though – a pair of bouncy boots.

One interesting facet of these boots is while they’re primary use is in Lyll’s level, Maia and Roas use them too. This is especially notable because the game generally restricts mobility items to a single family member. Unfortunately, Pochi and Xemn can’t equip them. In between, I stayed at an inn to refresh my body and soul.



In order to really get the point across, Falcom started putting these guys on top of spikes in corridors that are only a tile high. The multiple inns in this level really are necessary given the sort of stunts they’re pulling. It’s been difficult to get screenshots of them because half the time, I only notice them once they’ve already hit me.

As Brickroad noted earlier, you cannot cross spiked lined corridors like this without using the wings, and thus can’t get this far with any character except Maia. (Falcom put a single set of spikes right before the jump boots to reiterate this). I’ve been amused by the fact that this is about as Falcom goes in trying to come up with puzzles that need the wings.



And so the day of reckoning begins.



(I tweaked my emulator’s color settings a bit, which is why the tones in this section are a bit odd. This has been fixed, and won’t show up in later sections. I thought about replaying the section to get better screenshots, but then sanity prevailed.)

The most obvious sadism in this screenshot is the dirty disappearing block trick. However, it gets worse.

On the center of the right side of the screen, you might notice a tiny teal dot. As you probably guessed by this point, yes, it’s an enemy. And yes, it does heavy damage. And yes, now they can move (you can see the whole sprite if they ever decide to jump). I’d complain, but honestly by now, I’m just glad they waited until the section was almost over before they threw this at us.



You wouldn’t believe how infuriating these things are. Note the heavy damage to my life total.



A fake block dumps me into an inn. I’m going to pass for now – I’m doing my best to save my gold in order to buy an item in Lyll’s level.

The design of the room means that you can’t jump out unaided. Normally this isn’t a big deal, but this is the last chance to swap items before the boss, so it would have been nice to have one more inventory slot available. There are some fake blocks to the left of the inn, but they lead precisely nowhere.



Note the cyan dot on the lower right – in one of their least forgivable moves (and I’m ready to forgive a lot in this game), Falcom started adding enemies blocking corridors that can’t be hurt until you run into them (Pochi’s stage had these too, but for obvious reasons, it wasn’t notable there). I swear I am not making this up. Every time you pass through here, you pay a toll in blood.

After passing another row of locks with landmines, I look both ways, and then return to the inn. I want to be rested before the next boss. Hopefully he’ll be fairer than the rest of this mess was. So far, boss fights in this game haven’t been a big deal in comparison to the trip to them.



I appreciate the background – the pillars are a nice touch, and they’ve varied the color scheme.

Our enemy is a baby dragon.

Fun fact – Romancia, Dragon Slayer 3, is known as “Dragon Slayer Junior”. Here we have “Dragon Slayer Slayer Junior”.



And he’s hard. As. Hell.

Each one of his shots aimed at you hit for about a fifth of your life total. They travel extremely quickly, and are hard to see against the dark background. The first several tries, I got destroyed before I could even see him.

Remember, I’m playing on an emulator. Had I been on a console, it would have been back to start for me.

Now, the thing to keep in mind is that most people by this point will have the shield item, which is sold in Lyll’s section. When the shield is equipped, your character is immune to the enemy shots, making the game much more reasonable. I was very tempted to just go back and get the bloody thing.

Two discoveries prevented that. Usually I have the shield by this point, so I don’t have to delve into fighting bosses so intimately–

1. I found out I had been wrong about the bottles. The fancy bottle is life, and the boring bottle magic. If you have a bottle equipped when you run out of the stat in question, it’s refilled. (Yes, it would have been nice if you just had to have it in your inventory, but Falcom doesn’t work that way). This would explain why I haven’t been able to get them to work for the last decade and a half.

2. You can attack the enemy shots with your own magic to cancel them out. This means you can proceed in mild safety by simply blasting away in front of you (here’s another possible use for the flower). Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as well when you get closer to the enemy, because the shots will often come out so fast that they miss your wall of magic. In fact, several times the shots killed me after I had killed the enemy. (Guess what – this means you lose).



Like so. Poor Maia is doomed.

The difficulty is compounded in that in order to do half decent damage, you want the power glove equipped. That means you won’t be saved if you die. Since the boss and his attacks utterly devastate your life total, it’s hard to switch back and forth in time.



Eventually, I prevailed.

Next time – The final crown. And Brian learns from his mistakes and buys the bloody shield this time.

Hey guys?

Rockgaea is hard.

In our last episode, we went through the most incredible vault I’ve ever seen in a video game. Ninja-invisible enemies, line after line of locked doors, spikes, and a dragon at the end. Traps deemed to wimpy for Legacy of the Wizard find themselves an alternative position in the Tomb of Horrors module.

Before we start Lyll’s section proper, I want to buy the bloody shield. First order of business is a recapitalization initiative.



Before I get the fifty gold in the chest, I mercilessly slaughter the wandering monsters on my way. The power boot makes far, far easier than it was by allowing me to kill enemies with little life loss, and no magic loss. This prevents the drops from degenerating, and allows me to build up quite a hoard.

It turns out (after visiting every shop in the dungeon) that the shield is only accessible to Lyll, but not in her section of the dungeon. I had to verify the location with a guide.



This is actually in Maia’s dungeon. In order to get the shield, you first have to destroy the block in the same column as the pillar. Destroying that block reveals an Inn, which you can then visit (there isn’t a door, and that doesn’t matter). Next, you have to transmogrify the Inn into a shop as we did earlier. Finally, we can buy the shield (this is the only place in the game you can buy it).

How could I have possibly have missed this?



Surprising nobody, the spring shoes allow us to jump higher, at the cost of a mana per jump.

But wait! What about fall damage! Whenever you fall from an altitude higher than your normal jumping height you take damage?

Do jumping boots change the limit before you take fall damage? Do they eliminate it altogether?

No. Falcom eschews such things. This means that whenever you make a jump using the boots and you end up at the same place you started, you take fall damage. None of the sissy pandering we see in today’s video games!

Lyll’s stage represents the very essence of this game. It’s far less linear than the other three stages, and includes some very open areas. Maia in particular can loot much of the stage quite effectively (though she can’t finish it). Before I knew how the dungeon layout worked, this could crush my soul as easily as the invisible enemies, just because it was so easy to get lost!

Due to this, I don’t actually have to proceed through most of this section of the dungeon to get the crown. And that’s disappointing, because Lyll’s level has some of the most memorable and evocative level designs in the game. So the next part will be a tour!



This is the entrance level (you might have noticed we got stuck here with Pochi. The treasure chest above the spikes contains another crystal.

Above that is this section. Falcom decided to pull a variation of their favorite “fake blocks trick”. Instead of just vanishing, now the fake blocks turn into spikes!

What amazes me is that they only do this very sparingly, and it’s obvious (after you’ve been stabbed once) which blocks turn into spikes. I expected them to have an entire room, two tiles high, where you just walked over block after block, praying they were real.



To the left of that is this area. Note that people going back to the house from the dragon room use the ladders on the left. This is mostly notable for the high number of bouncy enemies.



Here we have the other side of the room where we take our leap of faith into the dragon lair. Note the festive colored Christmas tree monsters. The sphinx doesn’t even do nearly as much damage as his sphinx friends elsewhere.



Then we go here. The buildings in the background are well done, and I appreciated that Falcom isn’t throwing the demonic dire wereslugs that Maia (and Pochi’s) level loved so much.

Returning to the entrance room, we go right.



Note that the rockbeasts patrol many of the ceilings here. As I mentioned in our last visit, I would often use them to cheat my way up when I was younger. In doing so, I was cutting my own throat, since now the game expected me to have items I didn’t have.

On top of that is this room. We see a suspicious looking sword, underneath the ubiquitous woman. But how do we get it? All the walls and floors are solid.

Going up will take us to the path that eventually leads to the crown. Going down takes us to items and shops. We’ll go down first.



The red blocks here are all fake. As far as I can tell, they were just added to make the room look nice, as they aren’t going to confuse the player in the least.



Like her pet dog, Lyll’s level also has a land of mimics. The game is nice though – you have the space to jump on them with the power boot to open the chest safely, and the chests do far more reasonable damage than we’re used to (though it wouldn’t take much to be more reasonable than “you die instantly if you touch me ever.”) Below here is the area we explored to get the wings.



We already featured the rest, but I’ll note this fun feature “fake spikes”. If you use the mattock on the blocks, they turn back into spikes.

Now, we go up and into the dungeon proper.



I love pink pastel color schemes like this area. The blocks are easily chopped aside, but do prevent other characters from using this route.

I'd say the color scheme was because Lyll is a girl, but that would bring up the question as to why Maia's dungeon color was blood.

We see a little blast from when we first got the glove.



More cat girls! The mess of breakable bricks does nothing to stop Lyll, goddess of war and destruction. (The dungeons where you go right to left play hell with screenshots, because I keep getting confused.)

Bye kitties. This section has blocks that don’t show up until you touch them (or you can just use the boots to skip this mess). Echoes of Megaman anyone?



A few things are notable about this level –

1. The enemies are really unusual, and don’t appear much anywhere else in the game. I always wondered about this.
2. If you miss your jump and fall in the pit, you return here –



Thus spoiling the cheerily painless dungeon. Note that Maia can actually fly through the ceiling and cut into that area, skipping the last sections

Which is probably why they put this giant row of blocks in. Sorry Maia.



Oh, ouch. And Falcom was doing so well. This is one of those nasty jumping puzzles, and a bad note to finish the dungeon off with.

The three blocks between where the breakable bricks end and the pillar begin are all fake. However, you don’t trigger the blocks until you stand directly on them (rather than on two of them at the same time). You have to make a short hop over to the end of the pillar. If you fail, you get dumped to the bottom and have to try again. Getting this puzzle right took about as much time as the rest of the dungeon combined.



(Note that there’s an invisible block preventing you from getting the crown from the right.)

Let’s play the fourth boss, RockGaea!

I’m a failure, and get murdered.

Oh, and I tried to break the blue bricks to get a better sniping position. Falcom was too smart for that.



That’s better! Now I’m immune to shots (which hit for forty damage each). This should be easy right?

Of course not. You might notice that Rockgaea’s life meter has room for one hundred life points. He actually has two hundred fifty five. The life meter won’t actually decrease until we’ve done the first hundred fifty damage. Moreover, we can’t use the Power Glove and the shield at the same time, so our damage output is limited. Some of the other bosses also had high life totals, but because we used the power glove (and we tended to fight in closer quarters since they didn’t hurt as badly), we could cut through them like hot butter through a knife.

Oh, and did I mention that there is no visual indication when a boss takes damage?

So for most of this fight, we will be having no idea whether or not Rockgaea is taking any hits whatsoever. Several times, I spammed magic at him, only to find out when I died that I had apparently not quite been in range.

His shots travel very slowly, so they act as kind of a shield for him, making him even more difficult to hit.

Oh! I need the mattock and jump boots to get here, so I can’t bring spare life or mana! The misanthropy suppressed in this chapter has come out all at once. We have a boss that takes almost half our life meter if he so much as looks at you the wrong way, and no way to tell if we’re accomplishing anything whatsoever.



Most people suggest firing from the top left, where Rockgaea can’t go. I tried that, and then got discouraged and swore. I then used a cheat code to give myself infinite life and mana, and still couldn’t manage to win using that strategy.

What I came up was to position myself on a broken pillar, and wait for him to jump to meet me. Then I’d fire from under him while dashing to the other broken pillar. I had much better luck doing this.



In memorandum, other than the absurd boss, the dungeon section was a nice lightweight change from the horrors of earlier. Even before I knew the game, getting lost is a far better challenge then insta-kill mimics.

Please, please, please don’t let the dragon be like this.

I actually tried Hylide, and got too frustrated and quit. Legacy of the Wizard is strangely compelling, so I'm willing to put up with more (I'm like that with Roguelikes and collect-a-thons too).