Lunar Playthrough Part 5 - From Thieves to Myght
Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2013 4:05 pm
Wow, so I've spent over a month not updating. In that time, I've been very busy, but have kept some notes and have played some too. With my internet at home out this week, I've been unable to update with the notes, but I'll go from memory for now.
First, I had forgotten how much is involved in getting to the Red Dragon. It is one of the most involved parts of the game, since you have to do the following:
Arrive in Reza, have Wings stolen. Explore.
Find male baths. Lather up.
Go through forest to Meryod. Explore forest, fight hard monsters.
Get to Meryod, have bridge collapse, gather party, find Kyle with guild guy.
Go back through woods; fight Plaster Mel with Kyle.
Go to Damon's Spire. Long dungeon - lots of levels, monsters, riddles, books.
Go back through woods.
Get to Meryod, pass test.
Go back through woods.
Get thieves' crest from guild in Reza. See Lily; get Wings back; see Lily get taken. Get blueprints for balloon.
Open every red chest.
Go to Iluk. Give blueprints to inventor (Shira?). Go to get a bug.
Hunt everywhere for bug.
Get in balloon; go to Red Dragon's cave.
Whew. Don't get me wrong - these feature some very interesting parts of the game. Visiting Damon gives a sense of the enormity of the world of Lunar and its history. Kyle's confrontation with Plaster Mel and Xenobia is the point where I really begin liking him. The riddles going up gives a lot of cohesion to the party - we see Nash being somewhat arrogant and also somewhat knowledgable, Mia being nervous but wise, Jessica facing the conflict between healing a mean man or letting him suffer, and Kyle proving that he too has a brain. So there's a lot going on, but the pacing was necessarily slow, and I think a couple of those traversals of the woods could have been dropped for, I don't know, a ferry from Meryod to the coast near Reza.
I've stopped playthroughs in Iluk before. It was a great place to level up before the Red Dragon, but I was plowing ahead rather recklessly. It was about at this point when I started seriously using Alex and Kyle's magic in combat. I often reserved their magic in case of bosses, but I was building up a store of Star Lights and they would later be a decent drop from some monsters in the Blue Dragon Cave.
Even my nifty battle-avoidance skills can't get me to the women's baths yet.
In Lyton, my party was level 26. This and level 27 featured Jessica getting two attacks, Alex getting three attacks, and new spells for Mia, Jessica, and ... Nash? Not having a boss prior to the Blue Dragon made the dungeon easier. If I hadn't had a map, that dungeon would have been even harder to muddle through. As it was, the Ice Pups are particularly brutal, since they go first and can usually down a character (like Nash) before anyone else goes.
A couple of things I'm struck by - sometime in the sequence of finding each dragon, we have a demonstration of how important Alex and Luna are to one another (Alex and Luna at the spring playing together; Alex sculpting "Althena"; Alex and Luna singing apart at the Lake). One of the implications is that Alex's love is a huge part of his motivation and ability to become Dragonmaster, and is becoming more central even as Luna is becoming more absent. Whether that love is for Althena (important for a dragonmaster) or for Luna remains to be seen.
Another is the communities that find themselves close to the dragons. We have a small village at the outskirts of civilization, an inventing community, a singing community, and a group of nomads. There isn't any clear allegory here for the traits of the towns and the traits of Althena, but especially in the case of Lyton there's a sense that they realize a form of participation in the ways of the goddess, embracing the power of music. (It used to bother me some that the four dragons didn't fall into a complete elemental relationship with one another, beyond red/blue and white/black being rough contraries, but thinking about it more the dragons aren't representations of the elements, but protectors of the goddess. They have forms, but their forms aren't the point of their being, if that makes sense.)
First, I had forgotten how much is involved in getting to the Red Dragon. It is one of the most involved parts of the game, since you have to do the following:
Arrive in Reza, have Wings stolen. Explore.
Find male baths. Lather up.
Go through forest to Meryod. Explore forest, fight hard monsters.
Get to Meryod, have bridge collapse, gather party, find Kyle with guild guy.
Go back through woods; fight Plaster Mel with Kyle.
Go to Damon's Spire. Long dungeon - lots of levels, monsters, riddles, books.
Go back through woods.
Get to Meryod, pass test.
Go back through woods.
Get thieves' crest from guild in Reza. See Lily; get Wings back; see Lily get taken. Get blueprints for balloon.
Open every red chest.
Go to Iluk. Give blueprints to inventor (Shira?). Go to get a bug.
Hunt everywhere for bug.
Get in balloon; go to Red Dragon's cave.
Whew. Don't get me wrong - these feature some very interesting parts of the game. Visiting Damon gives a sense of the enormity of the world of Lunar and its history. Kyle's confrontation with Plaster Mel and Xenobia is the point where I really begin liking him. The riddles going up gives a lot of cohesion to the party - we see Nash being somewhat arrogant and also somewhat knowledgable, Mia being nervous but wise, Jessica facing the conflict between healing a mean man or letting him suffer, and Kyle proving that he too has a brain. So there's a lot going on, but the pacing was necessarily slow, and I think a couple of those traversals of the woods could have been dropped for, I don't know, a ferry from Meryod to the coast near Reza.
I've stopped playthroughs in Iluk before. It was a great place to level up before the Red Dragon, but I was plowing ahead rather recklessly. It was about at this point when I started seriously using Alex and Kyle's magic in combat. I often reserved their magic in case of bosses, but I was building up a store of Star Lights and they would later be a decent drop from some monsters in the Blue Dragon Cave.
Even my nifty battle-avoidance skills can't get me to the women's baths yet.
In Lyton, my party was level 26. This and level 27 featured Jessica getting two attacks, Alex getting three attacks, and new spells for Mia, Jessica, and ... Nash? Not having a boss prior to the Blue Dragon made the dungeon easier. If I hadn't had a map, that dungeon would have been even harder to muddle through. As it was, the Ice Pups are particularly brutal, since they go first and can usually down a character (like Nash) before anyone else goes.
A couple of things I'm struck by - sometime in the sequence of finding each dragon, we have a demonstration of how important Alex and Luna are to one another (Alex and Luna at the spring playing together; Alex sculpting "Althena"; Alex and Luna singing apart at the Lake). One of the implications is that Alex's love is a huge part of his motivation and ability to become Dragonmaster, and is becoming more central even as Luna is becoming more absent. Whether that love is for Althena (important for a dragonmaster) or for Luna remains to be seen.
Another is the communities that find themselves close to the dragons. We have a small village at the outskirts of civilization, an inventing community, a singing community, and a group of nomads. There isn't any clear allegory here for the traits of the towns and the traits of Althena, but especially in the case of Lyton there's a sense that they realize a form of participation in the ways of the goddess, embracing the power of music. (It used to bother me some that the four dragons didn't fall into a complete elemental relationship with one another, beyond red/blue and white/black being rough contraries, but thinking about it more the dragons aren't representations of the elements, but protectors of the goddess. They have forms, but their forms aren't the point of their being, if that makes sense.)
