Sunday, March 25, 2012

TEXT PLAY: Legend of Mana (PlayStation; 2000): Issue #03: Getting Fruity


There are some weird-ass fruits and vegetables in this game, but there's still a couple things we've gotta do before we get to see any of it.

It's still gonna be a while before the stuff on the tree's ready, so it's back to Domina to see what's going on there. Really, there's only a couple things left, and I'm not sure how eager I am to talk to Elazul just yet. I guess that means it's off to the park to see what Diddle and Capella are up to.

Capella still just wants us to watch him juggle, but Diddle wants to send a letter, so he runs off to do that, which leads us to another Adventures With Bill sorta thing. It seems that Diddle somehow managed to get the stamp he'd bought on his head instead of the letter he had wanted to send, and because Pelican, as previously suggested, isn't exactly the sharpest character in town herself, she carted the poor fella off to the Luon Highway for some reason. A little while after this happens, Capella starts worrying about his friend and goes to look for him. First, he goes to see Miss Yuka, who says she didn't take Diddle because she can't fly. Capella suggests that she's a chicken, but she says she's a canary. Given her reaction, I'm inclined to think giant cowbird, but hey, who am I to judge?

But this conversation leads Capella to buy a stamp and put it on his head, too. Pelican takes him to the highway as well. And here's where I make my first mistake of the game. I went through the whole map for this quest before I remembered that I needed Pelican to tell me that she'd taken Capella and Diddle to the highway. Because I leveled up a few times and am also a lazy SOB, I may as well talk about a creature in this game called the Bonk. In a few places, especially in these early levels, there are big, hippo-like things called Bonks. Talk to the head end of one and it'll teleport you to wherever it's tail is. It's a weird mechanic, that its tail is in a different place than its head, but the tail looks like a little plant at the end point. It's a one way trip, but it gets me where I need to be for this.

But anyway, Pelican delivered Diddle and Capella down a side road and into a cave. There's a letter there and Capella shows up to read it because he thinks it's a clue to where Diddle is. Turns out, the letter says that Diddle wants to quit the show because he's bored with it. With that, Capella goes down the side road to find Diddle. We meet up with him at the entrance to some caves after fighting off some Chobin Hoods. Those are probably my favorite monsters so far because of all the Lucre and XP they give. But back to the story at hand. Diddle's there, too, and he and Capella argue for a bit before Diddle goes into the caves. We loose Diddle in there, but find Capella, who somehow made it past all the regular monsters only to be stopped by a gator-like thing that's the quest's boss. Killing it only leads to finding that Diddle was in another part of the cave looking for Capella.

Once all is said and done, Capella and Diddle agree to still be friends after all this and head off to points as yet unknown. As he leaves, Diddle gives you an item called the Gator Skin. After this, the pair is no longer in Domia, but fear not, we'll be seeing them again before long.

The gator skin that Diddle gave me reminds me of yet another thing I didn't talk about before. This is one of the first games I played that tends to give up more seemingly useless items than it does gold and XP. The actual first, as I recall, was Final Fantasy 8. In FF8, all those dropped items were meant to be a part of the needlessly cumbersome means to upgrade weapons and armor. In Legend of Mana, though, it serves a halfway decent purpose. Once we unlock the workshop, we'll be able to build our own weapons, armor, and other such items. Sure, there's a ton of apparently worthless items being dropped for pretty much the entirety of the game, but from what I understand, once the workshop is unlocked, it's possible to make some seriously badass items.

And I know that the transition I've got here will be kind of rough, but it kind of makes sense to talk about the Mana Orchards business now, too. The seeds we've been picking up from the plant-based monsters and can feed to the tree grow into quite a lot of different kinds of produce that can be fed to the pets we can raise. The pets develop into fighters, and I would think other sorts of useful creatures, depending on what we feed them. This can be influenced by what's grown on the tree and also by the meats that some monsters drop as well. It's a complex thing that I really don't have a very good handle on. I know that the effect each piece of meat or produce has when applied has something to do with color and type, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.

By the time I got done with the Diddle's Letter quest, there were a few pieces of fruit ready. So, I talked to Lil Cactus about the letter thing and grabbed a piece of the ripe fruit off the tree. In this case, the three that were ready were called Citrusquid, which I would think is like a grapefruit or orange shaped like a squid; a Rhinoloupe, which must be a melon of some sort that looks like a rhino head; and a Boarmelon, which looks like a boar colored like watermelon. That one had better watch out for Gallagher.

With that, I think I'm pretty much done with everything I can do in Domina, so I think I'll cut this one off here and pick up next time, in Issue #04: A New Artifact.

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