I was going to open this with the same joke I made the last time I did this, but calling the Alekian knights sissies seems in poor taste somehow now.
Not that it doesn't still sorta fit. And the song from the Mel Brooks movie is a good one.
As for the game itself and getting to the point where I would have made that joke, the game starts with a prolouge that tells us about how this mysterious floating island showed up in the sky one day and got taken over by four evil entities that became known collectively as the Sinistrals, who rule over the world for a time before the people rise up and eventually send their four best warriors against them. These four great heroes, Maxim, Selan, Guy and Artea, eventually defeat the Sinistral one by one, at which point, the monsters merge their life forces in an attempt to end the world since they can't have it for themselves. The heroes counter by doing something similar and win again, but at the cost of Selan's life. The seemingly final defeat of the Sinistrals causes Doom Ismand, as the floating island is called, to break up, and as it does, this party of heroes is seperated, with Maxim staying with Selan as the island crashes into the sea while Guy and Artea escape, Selan telling Maxim that she wishes she could hold her child one last time in their newly freed world.
We then cut to 90 years in the future, where we meet a little boy with the same bright red hair as Maxim, who has a chat with a dude called Roman. This Roman fellow tells the kid that he's also got the same penchant for adventure and heroics that Maxim did, which seems to imply that he's somehow a decendant of Maxim and Selan. Since the player gets to name the hero, I gave him my own name, as I tend to do in these things.
As the hero and Roman chat, this shy little girl with blue hair like the Sinestral Erim shows up and eventually befriends the hero, and they go running off to play tag.
From there, we cut another nine years forward to find that the hero, who I've called Jesse, has joined the knight brigade in the Kingdom of Alekia, where Roman's inn is, and Lufia works in his kitchen, where she's become a little bit famous for making the local cinnamon tea and cinnamon pie. Because the world's been at peace for almost a century, Jesse's the only one who takes being a knight anything like seriously, so he goes to hang with Lufia in a field of flowers after drills are cancelled once again on account of only him and like two other guys even bothering to show up. All the other knights are off watching one of their own creep on his girlfriend, it seems, so after some teasing, Lufia agrees to make Jesse some of her famous pie and tea because he actually likes it.
As Lufia works, Jesse overhears some guests at the inn talking about an attack on the Kingdom of Shran, er, Sheran, which I think is meant to be pronounced “Sharon” after all these years. Since he's who he is, our hero can't leave it alone. This means going to check with the head knight and the king, and since neither of them are willing to act officially, it means going on his own to have a look.
One thing I did a little differently this time around was gear up a little better, with the stronger weapon from the shop and the helmet available in the knights' base. Plus, I took advantage of the inn at the town along the way to the castle we're going to, so that probably helped.
When we get there, the best way to describe what we find is the everybody's dead scene from the first episode of a show called Red Dwarf. Once I had a look around, I went back to Alekia, and healed up at the inn, which I think was a little backwards, because Roman said something about Lufia still being upset, and I don't think we've heard about her being upset at us yet, so I don't know if I've messed something up. But since it was time for me to quit for the night, I saved, quit and came to get all this written down. Seeing where things go from there would be another session.
When I came back to the game a little later, it turns out I hadn't messed up as badly as I had thought, or this wasn't as big a sequence break as I had though, because this section still played out fairly normally. Lufia was in a room on the top floor of the inn, all upset at the hero for having run off on his own to have a look at what was going on in Sheran.
Meanwhile, the knights at the base were all “Well golly gee, we actually have to fight, huh? Guess we really should have been training after all...” After that, I went to see the head knight in the castle, who says that the rest of the brigade is going to do the whole “meet next week to decide to decide” thing that prompted me to go for the whole we should do something clip from Atop the Fourth Wall the first time I did this.
With all that taken care of, when Jesse tries to leave town again to rescue the king of Sheran, Lufia comes after him, saying she's going with him regardless of if he likes it or not, to which he says he would rather she didn't because he doesn't know if he can keep her safe on this journey. All this is to say that they're in love and can't just come out and admit it to each other yet
I'm never sure if I have to stop in Chatam along the way to Sheran to actually activate the scene where the hero and Lufia rescue the Danil guy in the cave, telling him that they'll save his sister, who's with the king in Sheran Castle. He hands over a key the party needs to open a few doors in the castle that'll allow for letting the king and his party out of the cell they're in in the castle dungeon.
On the way back out of the castle, the party, now with the King of Sheran and his attendants in tow, runs headlong into the Sinestral Gades, who says that yeah, he pretty much did the place in and is proud of himself for it. The hero tells Lufia to take the king and the others and run for it while he holds Gades off. It's not much of a fight because the hero's only at like level four at this point, so Gades offs him in one hit.
Lufia shows right back up, and after scaring Gades off, says that the king and his party are safe at Alekia and that the knights are still doing the whole “should we do something?” bit. After a moment of pondering what's really going on, they return to Roman's inn at Alekia, where Jesse says he's going to get Danil back to his family in Chatam, at least, before going on a world-saving adventure because that's what he do.
Lufia asks him to give her and Roman a minute so she can tell Roman she's going with the hero, and Roman says that'll be OK because that's her destiny too. But I'll pick that up next time because this is turning into a Dire Straits song, which ain't a bad thing, unless one's maybe a little short on time.
Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!
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