Revier's Stuff of Dubious Value

 Yesterday, I was talking about the classic Fallout games' openings with a friend of mine, and we both arrived at an uncannily accurate observation: most RPGs in general, no matter the developer or the culture it came from, have terrible, or at best mediocre openings that don't exactly put their best feet forward, compromising either on the gameplay with really long expository or story centric scenes, or on the story with an uninspired early dungeon featuring really weak enemies. Why is that? Well, I posed the question to a few places, and came across what I think is a comprehensive answer: 1. I credit my friend for bringing this point up, but essentially RPGs find themselves needing to come up with good reasons for their characters to be adventuring the world instead of going on with their regular lives at home, like regular people. This imposes certain narrative limitations, as there's a very limited width of explanations that satisfactorily meet this need, and often RPG ...

  Quick links to all the Let's Plays(generally abbreviated to LPs) I've done so far: 1. Time Gate: Knight's Chase 2. Final Fantasy Adventure 3. Secret of Mana

On @Beowulf 's advice, I return to the Mana Fortress. To my surprise, Jema is here, and gives the party a quick pep talk, and directions to find the Mana tree itself! I find Neko's shop, but the armor is too expensive to buy even one set! I decided to hold onto one piece of the body armor and helm, in case the upcoming fights prove too much. I try entering the flying fortress, only to be shooed away! I keep looking around the world map, until I find a conspicuous island with a small clearing surrounded by tall mountains! Turns out, it's the dungeon they're supposed to go to! It's filled with exceptionally nasty enemies that punch anyone for three digits of damage, and I was immediately glad to have bought the new set for Revi. Of course, now I needed to grind out the money to get it on everyone. What a pain! Thankfully, Revi was capable of soloing the monsters with the new armor on, so I painstakingly grinded out all of the required money with him. This took him all...

I head back to the resistance to ask for help with Thanatos and his constant escapades. They brush the matter off, instead talking about how the evil emperor wants a truce with them. Why? What did they do? The empire was going pretty strong last we saw it, and I'm fairly sure we've done nothing to impede its march. Oh. Of course. Then they get dropped into a mantis ant recolor, but well, it looked decidedly unimpressive against three attackers, and was fried in record time. The dungeon's guards fared little better, with even the obnoxious slimes going down quickly. Talk about a wobbly power curve! Soon they faced the emperor and his gang of colorful losers. The emperor lets Gesthar fight a "honorable" duel. He's a reskin of the imperial bike rider, and Kard fries him in about two thunderbolts. Yep. Next! Geshtar threatened to blow up the imperial palace, taking the team out with it. Luckily for them, the mushroom king came in, flying on Flammie. It had matured...

The team worked their way back to the Fire Palace's orb, hoping they now held the tools to fix it. They discovered that the ultra hot orb could be disabled by...the spirit of fire. Why? Who knows! Even more amusingly, it requires the highest power spell of the spirit to be cleared. And yet even more amusingly, there was an orb later that did get cleared with water magic! Arrgh! Why is there no consistency?! The enemies here? Mostly chumps, the team had already absorbed two dungeons worth of XP and these folks weren't exactly threatening them before that. Still, the burning inflicted by the red slimes, combined with their incessant breeding, made them quite obnoxious, and I even broke out some ice spells at one point to kill them faster! The boss of the place was a minotaur, who was, surprisingly, not weak to fire! He was weak to wind magic instead, and so got fried to a crisp regardless. Then they absorbed energy from the seed, which had magically shown up on the elevated altar...

The party travelled through the fiery sands, and eventually reached the Fire Palace. There, they ran into an orb so hot, it couldn't be frozen! They also ran into this rather nasty room. I thought it was a puzzle to get a frozen snowman on the button, much like in FFA. However, I soon discovered that there was no way to reliably get the bandit rats onto the button, only my whip could reach that far, and while they were on the button, the whip straight up refused to connect! After burning about half my stock of sweets, I decided to get out of there! The team then headed off to an icy island, where they first landed into a village full of strange walrus men. They talk about strange happenings in their surrounding forests, and one of them complains about the weather being uncomfortably warm lately. Hmm, that's a definite sign of either the fire spirit or the fire seed being here. The forest outside serves up the prettiest scenes of the game so far. The trees are made of dazzling i...