Tuesday, July 17, 2012

TEXT PLAY: Legend of Mana (PlayStation; 2000): Issue #20: Latrine Miner


OK, so maybe I didn't fuck this up as badly as I had thought.

When I was going to go in and finish this one, at first I had thought I'd take my chocobo, Dalton, but then I remembered something I'd read about how it might be smart to take Bud, the little boy who's “mighty jack-o-lantern army” we smashed earlier, along instead, because meeting that Pokheil guy is part of his “Seven Wisdoms” quest. I'll be getting back to that later. At least there's good news here in that we've already met one of the wisdoms when we had Bud talk to Pokheil, and I already know where two of the remaining five or six are. But like I said, I'll get back to that eventually. Hopefully it won't be another 18 issues or however long it's been.

So, here we are, back in the Ulkan Mines, looking for a Gnome or Dwarf named Watts, who runs a mining business in there. He really wasn't all that hard to find once I actually got down to the business of doing it. It's just a matter of continuing to bear left from the save point in this dungeon, pretty much.

Once I actually got to the man himself, the game's boss music started playing, and there was clearly a big monster there I had to kill, but the only way to start the fight was to talk to Watts three times to get things going. All three times, the jackass pretty much tells you to go fuck yourself because he's too busy and it's dangerous in there. Not entirely off base, as I did have Bud with me, but then again, I did make it through the fight without either Bud or myself getting killed or really hurt too terribly badly.

This particular boss is one of those compound things, where to kill the whole thing, it means killing off little bits of it one or two at a time. This one's a giant man-eating orchid sort of thing who's minions can inflict status ailments. Kind of like Tropicalo and at least one other plant-themed boss in Secret of Mana. Surprisingly, this boss wasn't as hard as I was expecting, all things considered. It was 500 of the easiest XP I'd gotten in awhile.

But this particular instance was one where I was reminded of why I don't like having NPCs with me in this game if I can avoid it. The AI they use seems a little off, which is something that I guess I can't really fault in a 12-plus-year-old game that came out when such things were in a state of transition from the minimalistic stuff we had on cart-based games to the more advanced versions we see nowadays. Still, it seems like most of the NPCs, required or otherwise, mostly just wander around battlefields hoping to blindly stumble into something to hit with whatever weapon the game designers thought they should have. Oftentimes, I found myself almost quoting one of Joel's lines from the MST3K version of MANOS: The Hands of Fate.

Once the monster is dead, Watts takes us back to his lab in the mine, where Pokheil starts telling us about how wonderful Watts is. Turns out the supposed poet, storyteller, and prophet has a little trouble doing that because Watts hasn't actually done a damn thing of note thus far. Not surprising, considering how much he looks like one of the stormtroopers from Spaceballs. At the very end of this quest, we get the Moon Mirror, I do believe it was called. That's one of those things I'll have to get to later, though.

And really, I've got some thinking to do before I get around to any of it. The question here is which way I want to go with this. I could just [go ahead on] and use another artifact as is and see what happens; I could go back and do what I should have done before and use a different one where I put the mine; or I could do both. No matter what, though, that's a matter for later, and I'm sure we'll all find out what I decide soon enough.

In the meantime, though, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA! See you soon, folks!

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