Lennus 2: Apostles of the Seal
Mar. 16th, 2011 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroYou are Sir Farus, the Young Raigan who has just been awakened from a 10,000-year sleep of endless dreams, destined to usher in a new dawn and the Great Union. Unfortunately, you have no memory and don't know what any of those words mean. Turns out that there are four treasures hidden in the world of Andel, and you're just the legendary hero to go find them.
Lennus 2: Apostles of the Seal was purblished by Asmik in Japan at the tail end of the SNES era. It was fan-translated a couple of years ago by Dynamic Designs (previously known as Magic-Destiny).
Farus is mostly, but not always, a mute hero. Occasionally he'll respond to NPCs. At least once, he recaps what's happened so far in an inner monologue. The translation is very good, and tends to try to be helpful in terms of spelling out clues and reminding you not to miss things that can be Lost Forever. Many characters have distinctive speech patterns (at least, when not in your party. Your sidekicks never speak.) And then there's Efram, one of the villains who speaks in a jarringly casual, modern and abusive way. Didn't see it coming, thought it was cool.
There's an interesting issue with fan translations that hadn't occured to me before: With games like this and Mystic Ark, which spent a decent amount of time being circulated by the emulation community before there was a translation patch, the available FAQs may pre-date the patch, so the translations for characters, places or items may be different. Some choices work better than others in terms of mood. Such as the "Temple of Duran Duran," which sounds so much more refined as the "Dorandoran Shrine" in the FAQ.
(The translators also put themselves in for a couple of cameos, as non-hirable mercenaries hanging out in various bars, giving hints and breaking the fourth wall.)
Like the first Lennus game (brought to the US as Paladin's Quest), you have no MP score; your magic is cast by using the same HP that keeps you alive. Obviously, there's no healing magic, so you also have refillable potion bottles for your healing needs. This means that most magic use is a considered tradeoff: Will this spell save me more HP (from enemy attacks that don't hit me) than it costs me?
There are eight spirits that make up the magic system, and spells come from combinations of them, which you can swap around as the game progresses. Elemental rock-paper-scissors plays a fairly large role in battle strategy. Some weapons also have elemental attributes, most do not.
Like the first game, this game allows you to fill out your party with mercenaries. You have six partners to choose from at the beginning (to fill out a party of four) and periodically meet others you can swap them out for as you journey. The number of available mercenaries explodes in the last quarter of the game, with two or three in every town, and a sidequest in Korma that lets you build a robotic mercenary from various parts. My favorite was definitely Nikita, whose magic is unimpressive but who can equip "fist" weapons on both hands and beat insane amounts of ass.
The gimmicky control scheme is also a carry-over from the first game, where menus are arranged to match the controller's cross-key and you select things by pressing up, down, right or left. Honestly, it's the kind of idea that sounds better than it plays, because it slows down both battle and menu navigation for very little benefit.
The graphics are a pastel-themed landscape of weirdness that an artist obviously took great pains on. It looks alien--both to the real world and to most jrpgs. Most people in Andel are giant-eared elf things. The monsters are typically even more alien--if you can imagine a pastel Lovecraftian horror, this game will let you fight it. And they've definitely been upgraded from the original game, with more detail, depth and shading than before. The tradeoff is that it can often be difficult to tell what things are supposed to be because of this--I got briefly stuck in the overworld at one point because I couldn't tell if something was a lake or a patch of grass.
The game has a quirky sensibility that reminds me a bit of Mystic Ark: When you reach a new town, problems tend to be a little more unusual than in most rpgs. The fourth area has a town of people who are named according to the body part of a giant that they represent. You need to figure out how to reassemble them. It's kinda like the traditional Fantastic Voyage, but it looks like a mansion full of dwarves, except for the Head and Heart, which have transformed into dungeons. There's another town where you are the problem--you come into the town cursed and turn every NPC you talk to into stone!
It's also a "stealth sequel," plot-wise. Though you can tell from the graphics and system at the beginning that this is a sequel to Paladin's Quest, you get the impression that it's a Final Fantasy-style sequel, with an unrelated plot and characters. In the last quarter or so of the game, you learn otherwise.
The actual gameplay leaves a bit to be desired. The game opens necessitating a grind-fest: You're at level 1, and you probably can't take on the first boss until you hit level 10. (Levels effectively max out in the 40s, unless you use cheat codes or grind insanely.)
They did make an effort to make the dungeons interesting, though it's mostly by way of floor tile-triggers you need to step on rather than actual puzzles. There are a few action-esque sequences, though the game engine isn't really designed for them, so playing them is awkward. Maybe two-thirds of the way in there's a sudden gameplay change--a race you need to win that has problematic controls, especially if you’re playing on a keyboard--which is particularly annoying. After that, though, you’re back to the classics, with the next two dungeons being a teleporter maze and a temple of the pushable block. (Neither is particularly difficult or particularly original.)
The game also tends to drag on a bit. (My play-time estimates generally ran higher than the game clock, I think because of this.) Battles are frequent and fairly repetitive, and the world is large (especially for the era) with big towns and big dungeons. The encounter rate is a bit high, especially given that the game also features the wandering around common in Enix-style games of that era, where you're trying to figure out where the next dungeon is or what you're supposed to do next. To their credit, the translators made an effort to make sure "Talk to everyone" remained a useful strategy. (And in at least one case, make a really blatant listing of the ways you'd enter a password if you were using a Famicom controller, SNES controller, Logitec controller, or keyboard.)
It's a decent rpg from the tail-end of the SNES era, but unless you particularly liked the quirkiness of the original game, most of it is done better elsewhere.
Lennus 2: Apostles of the Seal was purblished by Asmik in Japan at the tail end of the SNES era. It was fan-translated a couple of years ago by Dynamic Designs (previously known as Magic-Destiny).
Farus is mostly, but not always, a mute hero. Occasionally he'll respond to NPCs. At least once, he recaps what's happened so far in an inner monologue. The translation is very good, and tends to try to be helpful in terms of spelling out clues and reminding you not to miss things that can be Lost Forever. Many characters have distinctive speech patterns (at least, when not in your party. Your sidekicks never speak.) And then there's Efram, one of the villains who speaks in a jarringly casual, modern and abusive way. Didn't see it coming, thought it was cool.
There's an interesting issue with fan translations that hadn't occured to me before: With games like this and Mystic Ark, which spent a decent amount of time being circulated by the emulation community before there was a translation patch, the available FAQs may pre-date the patch, so the translations for characters, places or items may be different. Some choices work better than others in terms of mood. Such as the "Temple of Duran Duran," which sounds so much more refined as the "Dorandoran Shrine" in the FAQ.
(The translators also put themselves in for a couple of cameos, as non-hirable mercenaries hanging out in various bars, giving hints and breaking the fourth wall.)
Like the first Lennus game (brought to the US as Paladin's Quest), you have no MP score; your magic is cast by using the same HP that keeps you alive. Obviously, there's no healing magic, so you also have refillable potion bottles for your healing needs. This means that most magic use is a considered tradeoff: Will this spell save me more HP (from enemy attacks that don't hit me) than it costs me?
There are eight spirits that make up the magic system, and spells come from combinations of them, which you can swap around as the game progresses. Elemental rock-paper-scissors plays a fairly large role in battle strategy. Some weapons also have elemental attributes, most do not.
Like the first game, this game allows you to fill out your party with mercenaries. You have six partners to choose from at the beginning (to fill out a party of four) and periodically meet others you can swap them out for as you journey. The number of available mercenaries explodes in the last quarter of the game, with two or three in every town, and a sidequest in Korma that lets you build a robotic mercenary from various parts. My favorite was definitely Nikita, whose magic is unimpressive but who can equip "fist" weapons on both hands and beat insane amounts of ass.
The gimmicky control scheme is also a carry-over from the first game, where menus are arranged to match the controller's cross-key and you select things by pressing up, down, right or left. Honestly, it's the kind of idea that sounds better than it plays, because it slows down both battle and menu navigation for very little benefit.
The graphics are a pastel-themed landscape of weirdness that an artist obviously took great pains on. It looks alien--both to the real world and to most jrpgs. Most people in Andel are giant-eared elf things. The monsters are typically even more alien--if you can imagine a pastel Lovecraftian horror, this game will let you fight it. And they've definitely been upgraded from the original game, with more detail, depth and shading than before. The tradeoff is that it can often be difficult to tell what things are supposed to be because of this--I got briefly stuck in the overworld at one point because I couldn't tell if something was a lake or a patch of grass.
The game has a quirky sensibility that reminds me a bit of Mystic Ark: When you reach a new town, problems tend to be a little more unusual than in most rpgs. The fourth area has a town of people who are named according to the body part of a giant that they represent. You need to figure out how to reassemble them. It's kinda like the traditional Fantastic Voyage, but it looks like a mansion full of dwarves, except for the Head and Heart, which have transformed into dungeons. There's another town where you are the problem--you come into the town cursed and turn every NPC you talk to into stone!
It's also a "stealth sequel," plot-wise. Though you can tell from the graphics and system at the beginning that this is a sequel to Paladin's Quest, you get the impression that it's a Final Fantasy-style sequel, with an unrelated plot and characters. In the last quarter or so of the game, you learn otherwise.
The actual gameplay leaves a bit to be desired. The game opens necessitating a grind-fest: You're at level 1, and you probably can't take on the first boss until you hit level 10. (Levels effectively max out in the 40s, unless you use cheat codes or grind insanely.)
They did make an effort to make the dungeons interesting, though it's mostly by way of floor tile-triggers you need to step on rather than actual puzzles. There are a few action-esque sequences, though the game engine isn't really designed for them, so playing them is awkward. Maybe two-thirds of the way in there's a sudden gameplay change--a race you need to win that has problematic controls, especially if you’re playing on a keyboard--which is particularly annoying. After that, though, you’re back to the classics, with the next two dungeons being a teleporter maze and a temple of the pushable block. (Neither is particularly difficult or particularly original.)
The game also tends to drag on a bit. (My play-time estimates generally ran higher than the game clock, I think because of this.) Battles are frequent and fairly repetitive, and the world is large (especially for the era) with big towns and big dungeons. The encounter rate is a bit high, especially given that the game also features the wandering around common in Enix-style games of that era, where you're trying to figure out where the next dungeon is or what you're supposed to do next. To their credit, the translators made an effort to make sure "Talk to everyone" remained a useful strategy. (And in at least one case, make a really blatant listing of the ways you'd enter a password if you were using a Famicom controller, SNES controller, Logitec controller, or keyboard.)
It's a decent rpg from the tail-end of the SNES era, but unless you particularly liked the quirkiness of the original game, most of it is done better elsewhere.
