Game 8 - Light Fantasy Part 4 (Final)

The second half of Light Fantasy is mostly wandering around on the world map, with a major dungeon near the end and then the final complex of dungeons. Once again, I had random encounters off for the majority of this.

We have three main goals in this section: retrieve the Earth Sword, power it up with the power of various goddesses, and then defeat Maryu.

The Earth Sword can only be drawn by a true hero; fortunately Kurisu qualifies. After we beat some sword ghosts, it's time for Kurisu to play King Arthur:

I don't know what's up with the dog paw emoji.

Unfortunately the Earth Sword is a mess, and we need the power of 8 goddesses to power it up to its most powerful form. This sounds like it could be a huge quest, but it's actually not that long. The first two goddesses come from going back and forth between a living tree and rock, eventually coming up with the two powers from there. Then snowmen kidnap Minea, leading you to snow country. It turns out the Snow Queen just did that to get your attention so you can search for her baby.

Your apologies will not redeem you!

You have to backtrack again to the living tree, who calls the baby out, and now you can return and get the next Goddess power. Giltz village has a lot of the strongest equipment, but nobody will talk to you because their trust has been robbed from them by a goddess. Visiting her sister goddess, you find out that for some reason you need the Moon Dew to heal her, which you can find in the Moonrock cave, represented by a moon on the map. Minea gets captured again, this time by dragons.

This is the second good levelling place, because you can buy Mammoth from Giltz once you get past this part of the quest, which hits all monsters for ~150 HP, with this silly animation:

!?

After getting the moon drop and healing the goddess, you get two more upgrades for the Earth Sword and then can buy stuff from the shops. They have the "sling", which is the strongest missile weapon in the game, and what you want everyone who's not Kurisu to have. With Mammoth I moved up to level 35 and then turned off random encounters again.

At this point we're ready for the final series of dungeons. They're huge dungeons that would be annoying if you had to fight random encounters during them. The first one is the "Mole Road", a multi-level labyrinth where you have to find a goddess of rock, and then find a Dragon Scale so that you can survive in the Dragon area past the Mole Road. Arriving there, it's time to fight some dragons:

Grrrr

You can see my more-or-less final party composition above. Kurisu, Satan, Ariel, Fido, and Kotaro (the son of the Dark King). You can freely rename the non-destiny characters. Beating the dragon frees the fire goddess who powers up your sword more, but Kotaro steals it, wanting to defeat Maryu on his own. Of course, this is a terrible idea, and you find him in Maryu's castle, dying. At least you get the Earth Sword back, but first you do have to fight a boss, who isn't too bad.

What did you think was going to happen?

Minea has rejoined you as well, and has a surprise:

"We (Minea and Lefina) are the goddesses of Light and Dark -- since those are the most powerful, the power had to be concealed."

So Minea didn't know she was a goddess until you visited the Moon Cave. Now Lefina is the only one left we haven't gotten power from, but we have to fight another boss first. The Dragon bosses in this area cast "hit all" spells that also inflict status effects like fire and ice. Fortunately since fire does a set amount of HP, it's not quite as devastating now as it was earlier in the game. However, the penultimate boss casts Mammoth. If Minea is very low levelled she can die from two Mammoth hits; overall this isn't a big problem if everyone has the Genkirun spell (100 HP heal to all). But every so often he'll get two turns in a row, and if for some reason Minea wasn't defending, she's dead and it's game over. This happened to me once.

Lefina is dying, unofortunately, but Minea now gives up her life to save her. Lefina then grants you the final goddess power, and joins your party. Immediately the final fight happens.

Maryu

As you can see, there's no way to get to Maryu. The final form of the Earth Sword has a range of 3, so the main character can stand across the lava river and hit him, but everyone else has to use Mammoth or the sling. This was a long, protracted fight. Level 35 is a bit low perhaps, but I did manage it. Maryu casts a lot of hit-all spells, some of which inflict status effects, but the worst one does around 150-200 damage from everyone. As you can see, Ariel only has 340 HP so it's hard to keep her HP up. If you want to make it much easier, there's a second card game you can cheat to get items, the best prize being an herb that heals 999 HP and MP. I hadn't done this, but I had picked up enough of them that I was able to keep everyone's HP and MP levels up. You have to be very careful with Lefina since she has 500 HP and can't die or it's game over.

Once you beat Maryu, he admits that he just wanted to create a good world for monsters, who were sidelined by both Light and Dark. But he sees that he went about it the wrong way, and makes you promise to fight for a world that accepts everyone.

Since the status effects don't cure at the end, we have an on-fire character for the final scene.

Now for some reason the game gives you control. You have to escape the castle and then take Lefina to the Moon Rock cave again. I'm not sure if there would be any encounters normally (I assume not). Once there, Minea and Kotaro are revived. Then you have to walk all the way back to the Light Castle, where you started the game. This is tedious and pointless -- if you visit the towns the people will say some generic words of congratulations, but they should have just had you automatically go there.

The Light King wants Kurisu to succeed him to the throne. Kurisu basically agrees, but first wants to go out adventuring with Lefina to try to work on the promise he made to Maryu. And that's the end. Now the game shows various images to tell you what happened to the characters.

Torui is studying magic to take over for their master.

Lefina and Kurisu get married, and the game ends with a cutesy picture.

I hope we can meet somewhere again!

There is a Light Fantasy II released in 1995, but I don't know if the story has any relation. It seems like they improved some elements of the gameplay but it's still considered a kusoge. Fortunately I won't have to do that for a while.

Review to follow on Saturday.