Sunday, July 8, 2012

TEXT PLAY: Legend of Mana (PlayStation; 2000): Issue #18: Now I've Done It...


Sometimes I hate myself for dicking around in this game...

At first, I was just going to write this as another “running around” issue, but figured that since I was going to be up too damned late anyway, I figured I should have something a little better than that for this outing.

So, what I've done here is I put down the Bottled Spirit artifact to generate the Ulkan Mines. In these mines live yet another of Fa'Diel's varied sentient and quasi-sentient species, the Dudbears. There's a mission I usually do before this in a town called Lucidia, I believe, that comes from an artifact called the Firefly Lamp. This mission requires learning the Dudbear language so that the hero can help some lovestruck dumbass flirt with the town's novelty lamp maker because he's got a raging boner for her.

I bring it up here because in my goofing off in the mines, I stumbled upon a quest I suppose I always knew was there and just didn't want to get into yet because, as I said, I'm up too damned late and hadn't wanted to think quite so hard. But in this being a numbnuts about this, I stumbled upon a quest where I'm probably gonna have to know the Dudbear language, and I could barely get it right even when I had the tutorial on it fresh in my non-tired mind.

So, this quest I stumbled into involves the Pirate Penguins horking a religious icon from the Dudbears as they sleep in their cavernous home. The title is, as my half asleep mind remembers it, Where's Putty?, because that's the name of the deity the icon was linked to. Because the Dudbears' English-speaking priest thinks I'm involved somehow, I've gotta go looking for the statue or whatever it was the Penguins jacked from the Dudbears' room to make everybody happy.

After a bit of running about in the mine, I came across a Faerie who said something about the light being in the darkness. I know there are “Abandoned Rooms” like that in there, and I suspect they factor into all this somehow. But I'm gonna have to get some sleep and come back to this when I've got a fresher mind to think with. Maybe after work tomorrow or the next day.

As some of you who've been reading this from the beginning might remember, I said I was going to start having missions that spanned multiple issues. I really hadn't expected that to start happening until I got into the Dragoon Arc, but here we are.

But really, this is a good thing. It'll be kind of a test for me to see how well I can do this sort of thing. It'll also highlight the beauty of having multiple save files just for this sort of thing. I know I'm going to get this wrong, but at least I don't have to screw up the game worse than I already had before I put the Bottled Spirit down. Next issue, I try to finish what I started here. After that, I think I'll go back and do what I normally do and use the Firefly Lamp instead.

Until then, folks, stay safe, sleep well, and have fun gaming. Oh yeah, and DFTBA.

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