Last time, we left off with Alex, Nall (who it turns out is male, despite his obviously female voice--you have to admit, it's an easy mistake) and Ramus trying to sneak off to Meribia to sell the Dragon Diamond. Ramus has the bright idea to leave Luna behind, since the journey is going to be dangerous and a healer would just get in the way. The first leg of the trip takes the party through the Weird Woods, but they're covered in a thick fog, which prompts Ramus chickens out and run back to town. This sets in motion a series of events that ends with Alex's parents giving their son's adventuring career their blessing, and Luna deciding to come along after all. Good thing, since her singing manages to clear the spooky fog that has been making the forest impassable.
Getting through the Weird Woods is easy enough, but at the end the party is jumped by a horde of monsters. A mysterious swordsman shows up and offers his services. He actually offers three separate times, and I held out until the third, when Nall is begging Alex to accept. Afterward, you get a cut scene where you learn that the man's name is Laike, and I found myself reminded of the Wolf Creek campfire as the party fell asleep around his fire. I half expected everyone to wake up trapped in a remote Australian torture compound, but instead they simply rise the next morning to find Laike gone, and we traveled on to the port town of Saith to catch a ship to Meribia.
The real importance of this segment of the game, though, is the character development. In the case of Ramus, this is done quite well. In the case of Luna...maybe not so much. Having no knowledge of the Japanese script, I don't know whether Working Designs followed the story but translated all the dialog non-literally, or whether they took significant liberties with everything. What I do know is that there are a few jarring moments in which characters' words simply don't match up with the action that is unfolding. Last time, I complained that Nall is constantly riding Ramus about being a load while, in both battles and plot, he's pulling his own weight. Given his cowardice about crossing the Weird Woods in the fog, I'm going to assume this one was a problem in the original script as well as Working Designs' translation. With Luna, it's harder to tell. Sometimes--the times when she's likable--she's portrayed as strong, capable and confident, without being overbearing. Every now and then, though, she turns into that irritating anime archetype of the overly demure wallflower who would sooner die than express herself. A really good writer could have played this in such a way as to make Luna even more endearingly human, but instead she's just coming across as schizophrenic. I'm fine with the idea that Luna is hiding her feelings for Alex behind babysitter-like nagging, because she's obviously being playful (since she quickly slips into and out of that persona). What bothers me is that one minute, she's willing to follow Alex anywhere because she believes in him and his goals, but feels that she has a responsibility to his parents to look after him; the next, she's bemoaning her uselessness and wanting to run back to Burg to look after his parents instead. Of course it's rare, even now, for video games (especially JRPGs) to create deep, nuanced characters, and just the fact that there's more than one dimension to Luna puts L:SSSC's writers ahead of the curve. It does not stretch the limits of belief to imagine Luna and Alex having a conversation that is not about saving the world, precisely because Luna, so far, has not been portrayed as a caricature. Still when she slips into the helpless anime girl personality, it feels less like nuance, more like laziness on the part of the writers, because someone with the personality she usually has just would not behave that way.
Ramus, on the other hand, shines as a character from the time the party reaches Saith to the time he leaves the party in Meribia. So far, he has been portrayed as immature but basically good, as he tries to be virtuous, but mostly for the financial rewards it will bring. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the way the translators seem to want him to be viewed. In Saith, Ramus is almost entirely responsible for exposing a local con man who has managed to shut down the town's port by tricking a ship captain into giving up his sea chart. In Meribia, Ramus screws up by trying to sell the Dragon Diamond to another con man, but at the end of the day, his business sense solves the problem that he caused. (However, it's worth noting that the player, as Alex, is given the final choice as to whether to sell the diamond, and the only way to advance the story is to tell Ramus he should sell it--so really, Alex is just as much at fault for the debacle as Ramus is.). Ramus ends up taking over the crooked jeweler's store, and he tells the party to go on without him, as he's realized he's a better businessman than adventurer. I'm a little sad to see him go, because Ramus is a character I suspect a lot of us can identify with. He's a major motivating force for his friends (without him, we get the feeling Alex would have been content to sit around staring at Dyne's monument all day, and Luna would have had no reason to leave Burg), but precisely because he sticks his neck out and acts as a catalyst, he's always the first one blamed when there's a snag. The more I think about it, the more Ramus becomes one of my favorite console RPG characters.
Which, of course, is why the game replaces him with an obnoxious, egotistical wizard named Nash. Nash joined the party back at Saith, and to make a long story short, he seems to be spying on Luna. Maybe he'll grow on me eventually, but since Nash is the first character to be introduced in such a way as to suggest that he has no redeeming qualities, I'm not optimistic. However, with Ramus out of the party, Nash has invited Alex and Luna to the magic academy in the floating city of Vane. Since the game seemed to be pushing hard in that direction, I accepted, and that's where we'll pick up next time, hopefully with Nash doing something to redeem himself.
When I was younger, it was always easy for me to get thoroughly wrapped up in JRPG plots, but of course with age and experience, I started to be aware of the cliches and other weaknesses. I didn't expect L:SSSC to be any better, given its age, but in fact it has turned out to be a pretty positive experience so far. I like the characters (for the most part), the writing is sharp (for the most part) and the simplicity of the battle system can be easily forgiven by the lack of random battles. It remains to be seen whether it can hold my interest across two discs, but right now I'm actually looking forward to seeing what will happen next. At any rate, it's kind of nice to relive my summers from the early '90s, when my friends and I would rent all the anime videos we could find in town and veg out in front of them for days on end. You know, back when anime still had good music:
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