It is destiny...it is fate! Let's Play The Adventures Of Alundra

And here we are in Inoa Village! No sooner has Alundra stepped out of Jess's front door than he is confronted by a dishevelled red-eyed girl babbling about her dreams.



Yep, this is Sybill, but they might as well just have called her "Cassandra" and have done with it.




And this, obscured by the life meter, is Yuri, who we have previously learnt "spends most of his time roaming the land in search of herbs". He is also married to...




...Naomi, who runs the village shop just down the way from Jess's place (and for some reason I get the feeling she's hot for me). The shop sells the healing herbs Yuri finds as well as other sundry goods, and as Alundra can only hold nine herbs at a time, we'll be coming back here quite a lot.




Up in the north-eastern corner of the village is the house where Sybill lives with her mother Sierra, who we can see here. Isn't it odd that she refers to Alundra as "Young Man" even though the sprite they've used doesn't make her look particularly decrepit? Heeeey, wait a second...



It's just the same sprite as Naomi with the colours slightly changed!




Is that a polite way of saying she's crazy as a loon?




Gustav, town drunk. I'm not sure the game ever delves into his backstory in any detail, but we might get some clues by talking to his wife.





But then again...

Nadia, who has no time for any of your nonsense. But to be fair, she's got more serious things to deal with than answering inane questions than pointy-eared strangers.




Basically, whenever she goes to sleep, stuff blows up. She also has a serious case of the unrequiteds in relation to this guy...





Yay, it's Bonaire! And more wacky localisation hi-jinks from Working Designs. What do you mean, "why is there a mid-nineties surf-dude stereotype in the middle of a pseudo-medieval village?" Erm...why not?




Phineas, who is some kind of...old man, I expect. Ah, the character guide says he's Bonaire's dad. Gotcha.




Blocking our way out of the village, Kline the hunter. He seems friendly enough but there's something a little...odd about him. What could it be?





Fein and Lutas. Not sure what to say about them...erm...they seem like a nice couple?




Woah, steady on! I'm not ready to be confronted by the horrific realities of aging! Who's Wendell? Well, well be meeting him in a minute.




No, not that one.

I started playing this today. This LP originally got me interested in it and I finally hunted down a copy so... Hopefully, it'll be fun.

Too bad this I couldn't play through it with this LP, but such is life.

Wow, where did the last two years go...

Has it been too long to bring this one back? It still kind of bugs me that I had to let it die so early on. Who knows, might even get to some gameplay this time...

It's never been too long to revive an LP!

Well, flying in the face of common sense, I'm doing it anyway! I'm not sure if this is the longest time an LP has been revived after being left dormant, but it's certainly long enough that I should feel very, very ashamed.

So join me now as we once again LET'S PLAY THE ADVENTURES OF ALUNDRA!

Technical Note: For reasons best known to itself, photobucket is refusing to display the first three images at full resolution, so they'll just have to be tiny for now until I work out a solution.

Let us now cast our minds back to the space year 2010. When last left him, our hero, Alundra, was in the middle of a house-to-house tour of Inoa Village, meeting and greeting the locals...

----

We've reached the house of Septimus, who judging by his appallingly unfashionable hair and pre-occupation with SCIENCE, must be the Village Nerd.



Huh, he seems a bit too distracted with his SCIENCE to talk to some total stranger. Let's leave him be for now and move on to the next house along, which just happens to be the biggest in the entire village. And who lives here? Why, the Mayor lives here!



WOAH. That's better.


Why would a village this small even need a mayor, you ask? Alas, I don't know. Mayor Beaumont's function in this tiny community remains somewhat of a mystery. I tell you what though, he must've pulled some serious strings to get his hands on that sweet crib. Yeah, that's right Beaumont, you can't hide the stench of corruption forever. I'm onto you.

I do know, however, that this punk-ass jerk is the mayor's son, Talis. I know this because he delights in reminding you at every opportunity. Jerk.




There's a couple more places to drop in on before we get to Wendell. This is the house of Kisha(no, not Ke$ha) and Giles, a slightly creepy brother and sister who've recently travelled to Inoa to spread the Good Word.





I know what you're thinking. This guy has "potential villain" written all over him. But is he? Well, we'll find out...

Yustel, the fortune teller, serves two purposes in the game. Firstly, she can clue you up as to where to go next if you get stuck - more explicit directions require a cash donation, however - but she also dishes out full healing for free. Nice.

Now, enough stalling, let's get on with the plot. Arriving at Wendell's house immediately triggers a cut-scene:








Poor old Grandpa Wendell is trapped in some kind of endless nightmare, and Meade is clearly no help whatsoever, so he has resort to calling out Septimus to try and sort things out. Or rather, he's talked us into going to see Septimus to beg for help.





Septimus's amazing SCIENCE powers have deserted him, but something has finally caused him to give us the time of day.






Well, that explains Alundra's persistently recurring nightmares - he's a Dreamwalker.

Phew. So after all that, we have finally have our first quest - get to Tarn's manor and find something to help cure Wendell's sickness.




From this point on, we're now free to leave the village, but we're not going straight to Tarn's just yet. This game gives you quite a large area to explore from the start, and there's some bits and pieces we should really collect before getting on with the main quest. Quite a few places will be blocked off or otherwise inaccessable, but there's still a lot of ground to cover.

Taking the top left exit(it's the nearest one) leads us out into this big swampy area, which i'm not sure has any particular name. What this place is useful for is grinding for coinage, should you wish to do so. Most of your currency in this game is aquired by chopping down plants, of which this area has no shortage. It's also completely free of annoying enemies.



As my HP is still pathetic, I could do with stashing a couple of healing herbs before I go anywhere. Now, I could spend a few minutes hacking at the foliage to collect the requisite number of coins...



...but thankfully I don't have to do that right now, as there's a couple of healing herbs just lying around not far from here.



There's a coal mine to the east of here, and the Magyscar shrine is to the north. The mine is one of the first big dungeon areas in the game, but we won't be going there for a while yet. Instead, we'll be heading north.

Just up in the north-west corner is the house of Olen, the miner, who evidently has the hots for a certain churchy girl. Notice the chest in the back there - we can't reach it yet because he's standing in the way.




These steps lead up the cliff towards Magyscar. Let's check out that cave to the left...




And we find our very first reachable chest, containing...a medical herb! Yeah, it's not really exciting, but it's useful seeing as we have very little cash right now. A second chest on a higher ledge is not reachable until we get the springy seeds, which is not until much, much later.

This is the area around Magyscar, which has lots of nooks and crannies to investigate. We also encounter our first monsters, which are, of course, slimes. Two flavours of slime in fact!



Aside from just charging into you, they each have their own unique attack. The blue ones are content to just spit blobs of goo at you, whereas the pink one actually morphs into the shape of a dude with a sword and then stabs you, which you have to admit is pretty badass for a slime.




Actually, considering these are your typical base-level ARPG monsters, they take quite a beating before they finally go down. Maybe five or six hits each.

I forgot to mention, these red diamond-shaped things are small health refills, useful if you get stuck in a corner and don't want to waste your precious herbs. At the moment it is quite annoyingly easy to take hits, because the range of your sword is extremely limited. We'll have to access to some longer range weapons before too long, though.

So pumped to see this one come back.

Found out why my images keep changing size. It seems that Photobucket, seemingly at random, sometimes inserts extra characters into the image URL which shrinks it by half. No, I don't know why either.

Anyway...



Up on the ledge to the left of the entrance, we can grab our second herb from a chest just behind the trees. Just below here to the left is an exit leading to the lake area, but as we'll see...



...it's blocked off by these stone barricades. They won't be a problem once we get the iron flail, but for the moment there's not a lot we can do here.

Back to Magyscar again, to the right of the entrance, there's a ledge with two reachable chests. Something good?



Bah, 20 gilders. Pathetic. There must be some better loot around here...



That chest probably has something good in it, but we just can't get to it from this side. Here we encounter one of the slight flaws in Alundra's design - due to the odd three-quarter perspective, it's sometimes impossible to tell at first glance if something is actually on the same level as you. This can make precision jumping something of a problem, as we'll find out.



Up in the far left corner of this area is this mysterious stone archway, which is actually a warp portal that give you a handy shortcut to most areas of the map. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work yet, though. The process for activating these involves an extremely frustrating minigame that we'll come to eventually, but is not actually necessary to finish the game. I tend to go through with it anyway, just because it saves a lot of time in the long run.

Here's the actual Magyscar Shrine itself. We can't do anything in here yet, but if we go in, we can see Rumi's already here, offering a prayer for Wendell's survival - nice touch if ultimately futile.







Stone slabs and trees block any further progress through here for the moment, so lets head back down and check out something else instead. Hmm, how about the Coal Mine?




Uh, don't you normally need eyes to be a coal miner? Anyway, you get the idea. We're not supposed to be here yet. But perhaps if we approach this from a different angle...

Heading back to Inoa once more, we now take the south-west exit. It took me an embarrasingly long time to work out that text above the arch says "INOA." For years I thought it was some mysterious arcane language that the game designers had employed for some reason.


We'll encounter a enemy here, these rather obnoxious bees. Their size and speed, plus the fact that you can't always tell how close they are to the ground, makes them rather difficult to kill, and they can often score cheap hits on you if you're not careful. A buzzy nuisance more than anything else.



The other new enemy we'll encounter in this area are these rock-shelled turtle creatures. They have two forms of defence: One is to retreat into their shells, during which time they're completely indesructable. The other, as demonstrated in the screengrab below, is to try and toast you their fiery breath. Dude, he's totally flaming you!



These guys take a lot of hits to kill, and won't become easy to deal with until we get the mining bomb and the iron flail. And since we don't have either of those yet, they're best avoided. Anyway, let's see what happens when try to approach the mine from the northern side.



Oh Working Designs, once again your humorously anachronistic dialogue makes us smile! This pudding-faced gentleman isn't budging, so the mine is definitely a no-go for now. So where else can we go?



All the other paths are blocked off for now, so it looks like the only thing to do is hit the beach.



We find this elaborate jetty like structure with yet another unreachable chest just to the left of the entrance(are you sensing a pattern yet?), and Nava's cabin to the south. You'll recall Nava's name came up in the scene with Wendell earlier on. Perhaps he'll have some words of advice for a newcomer to these shores?



Jeez. Okay, I guess I know when I'm not wanted. Ignoring for now yet another chest that can't be reached, we leave this grumpy old sod behind and decide to explore the beach instead.



Sand has some slightly peculiar properties in this game. It not only slows your walking speed to a shuffling pace, it also impedes your already inadequate jumping ability.

That chest, for instance, should be within easy reach, but Alundra can barely get his feet off the ground. We'll eventually be able to cross that shallow water to the right, but for now that's as far we can go in this direction. There are couple of those rock turtles here as well, pictured here in their stationary forms. Best not to hang around.



A couple of other points of interest before we move on. This house is currently vacant, but will serve a purpose in the game, eventually. And what's that in the bottom right corner there? Oh yes, another unreachable chest! This is just getting cruel now.



If I remember correctly, these big rocks can be destroyed once we get the Alundra equivalent of the Zelda Power Glove, which is called...the Power Glove. Hmm, obviously had trouble thinking of an original name for that one. How about...the Mighty Mitten? The Gallant Gauntlet? No? Ah well.

Man, I don't think I'd have ever noticed that.

I think that the swamp area is called the Dark Swamp. I seem to recall there being a sign saying as such, but I could be wrong.

That's right - you can't improve on the Power Glove. It's so bad!

Ah, I think the Dark Swamp is somewhere else in the game. It's the area with all the lizard men and a hidden shrine you can't open until you have the arrows.

My bad. I forgot that there were two swamps.

I think there's a few other instances of readable text on the walls and stuff, which just looks like fantasy symbols at first.

I thought this game was great up until the about the Magyskar. From then onwards there's just more and more frequent examples of cruelly precise platforming in a perspective that really shouldn't demand that from the player, combined with many, many rooms where falling in a pit means you'll be re-playing a large part of the dungeon. I hope that comes through in the LP. Also the bosses have way too much health. I finished this game, but it was out of spite.

Yay for the revival!