TEXT PLAY: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom (Taito, SNES 1993): Issue #30: North By Northwest

I could have sworn that was a Jimmy Stewart movie, but IMDb said it was Carry Grant in the lead.

At least I knew it was a Hitchcock movie, right?

The good news here is that beating the pirates that had Professor Shaia locked up for trying to rescue Lou, who turns out to be the professor's son, is not a terribly difficult task, just a tedious one. This is a compound boss, made up of one little guy called Boson, who uses healing magic and items, and a big guy called Pirates, who attacks. Take out Boson first so he can't keep healing his party, and before long, all Pirates' base will belong to us. Once both of them are taken out, we get to collect some treasure and take Lou to his dad. One of the items is the key to the pirates' tower, the other is something called the Silver Tarot, which I'm assuming is another of the useless items we've run into so often in this game.

Once the associated cutscene takes us out of the tower, Lou and the professor start bickering about how their relationship is, but then start acting like a real father and son, when Lou says he could have written more than he did, and Shaia says that he's invented the “voice box”, which will make letters obsolete once they get all the wires strung to connect the things.

I should point out that I said Lou and Professor Shaia were friends before and father and son now. That's because I forgot about these two being related for a minute. But that's understandable, I guess, since I've not been playing much lately, and the last time we had much to do with Lou was when he was horking things out of the shops in Lorbinea, almost at the beginning of the game.

Anyway, since we've got all seven pieces of Alumina, which is what I'd though had happened last time, we're supposed to meet Professor Shaia back at Lab #3 so he can fix his fancy ship and we can get on our way to finding the Fortress of Doom and the Dual Blade inside. But that's a story for next time, since we've come to a good place to call it a night.

So, until next time, folks, “Allons-Y”!