Friday, July 26, 2013

TEXT PLAY: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (Taito, SNES 1993): Issue #20: Charlie Brown Tower

Good Grief...

It's not so much that this was a particularly long or difficult dungeon to get through. It's just that I had Charlie Brown's luck getting it done. It seems like that when I wasn't getting my ass handed to me because I'd done something stupid in a random battle, my console was hanging up on me. Even if this particular unit is a good 20-plus years old now, I have to wonder if that's a bad sign.

It's a funny thing, though. One might think that something called “The Tower of Grief” would have turned out to be more difficult than this actually was. Getting through was a fairly straightforward thing, with only maybe six floors, if that. Yeah, the monsters in there did wail on me a lot, but then again, most of them were the same monsters we've been fighting on the map and in caves for awhile now. The only one they really switched out was the Giant Oak monster for one called the Yeoman, simply because I guess it didn't make much sense to have big trees growing in the tower. Gotta say, though, over the years, I've played quite a few games like this where things like that didn't really seem to bother the game designers much. Then again, parties with more than one of the Yeoman guys in it were frequently the ones to kick my ass, on account of their ability to use Hi Arrows on the party.

As for what's actually in the tower, the only really notable items are the Purple Ring, which gives an overall stat bonus to the user, and a Dragon's Egg, which I left behind since I'm not . I think I'll be using the ring on Lufia, at least until I find something better. On the second-to-last floor, there's also some special tiles on the floor that restore HP and MP. It's a nice ruse to make a guy think there's a boss fight on the next floor.

It's kind of a letdown when all that's up there is the old guy that the folks back in Arus told us about before. I think this scene might have been a bit of inspiration for the scene in Team Four Star's Dragonball Z Abridged Parody where Guru ups Krillin's power level. He says he's going to unlock some deeper abilities for Lufia since she was good enough with magic to open the tunnel from Odel to Arus, but about all it does is give her a few extra MP, if memory serves.

The old man also says he knows that the hero has fought a Sinistral because of the way his power feels. There's not much else said about that.

After all that, he tells us that Professor Shaia was there but we've just missed him and he's gone back to his lab. So, I guess we're going to have to follow him back there. It's getting kinda late for that now, so I've just gone back to Arus and saved the game.

Actually going back to Odel and Shaia's lab next time, when we go Off To See The Wizard.

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