Tuesday, June 11, 2013

TEXT PLAY: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (Taito, SNES 1993): Issue #12: A Tale Of Three Cities, Part Five: North to the Tower

Oh, goodie. A poison swamp blocks our way. What a lovely way to start.

Still, not as bad as it could have been. At least there were narrow parts to get across at. Nor is it a particularly long trip to the tower, either. The tower itself is a real bitch, though, and for the same reasons as the one where we met the Apprentice: the random encounters. Relative to where the party is, level-wise, the monsters are a little tougher than they needed to be. Probably the biggest nuisance in there is a monster called the Red Orb. It's got this spell that can cut the party's defense in half, and it's a multi-targeting spell. What's worse is that we'll see these things in groups of two or three on a fairly common basis, and they tend to spam that spell, called Drain, which will make it easy for the other enemies, usually Orcs, Straw Men, and Archers, to kick the party's ass.

And that actually happened once on the way up the tower, too. My party got overwhelmed, and I died. Fortunately, this is one of those times when I hadn't made so much progress that hitting the reset button wasn't such a big deal. Better than loosing half the gold I've gotten since last time I got to upgrade my weapons and armor, and I'm going to need to do that next chance I get.

Really, the worst part of this tower is the bottom half of I think either six or eight floors, because that's where most of the fights will happen. There's a treasure room partway up with pitfalls in the floor. The trick is to pay attention to the pattern of lighter patches on the floor below, because they match with where the hidden holes are in the treasure room. There's some good stuff to be had along the way, too.

Just before the treasure room, there's a chest with a Flash Ring in it. I think this one will make Lufia's Flash spell stronger, which tells me there's water monsters coming up.

The next three or four floors are not particularly hard because they're just big enough for the sets of stairs connecting them. Once again, there's some treasure here that I failed to get because I wound up going to the boss fight instead again. In this case, it's a big winged demon called the Follower. He's a minion of Amon, Sinistral of Terror. This thing has a lot of HP and a lot of defense. Fortunately, the hero has the Drain spell, too, and it works on this boss. It's still a hell of a fight, though, and I think all three of my characters died at least once in the course of it. And because Lufia's the only real magic user I've got right now, I had to use her to both heal everybody and attack with the Bang spell as much as I could. Good thing I had enough potions to restore her MP and revive dead party members, even if just barely. This would have been a tough fight regardless, but the fact that the Follower could use healing magic on itself was certainly no help.

Once the Follower is taken out, the party tells Jerin that she's safe and that they'll take her back to Belgen. Of course, we're going to leave Jerin at the Inn for the time being because it's not like we'll, you know, be needing her for anything in the near future or anything. After all, it's not like she's half elf or some stupid thing like that, which will come in handy soon enough. And she's even insisting on coming with us, which is something that the hero puts the kibosh on rather quickly.

For now, our quest is to the town of Surinagal. There's another familiar sounding name. I don't quite remember quite what we need to do there, but I do know it's going to lead to a lot of backtracking as a result. But that will be for next time, when we go Off To South America.

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