Part 23: Odds and Ends #2: The Lemina Bug

Odd and Ends #2: The Lemina Bug

The Lemina bug is a glitch that only exists in the North American release of Lunar: Eternal Blue. The Japanese version does not have it, and neither does the remake. Before I go too far into this, I'd like to mention all my information came from Lunar-net. If you want to pull off the glitch yourself, I'd recommend following this guide. I'm only going to be taking a fairly cursory look at this glitch.

So how do you activate it? You have to meet three conditions. First, you have to have at least 26756 magic experience, and also preferably some extra for saving and powering up Hiro's magic (although neither is necessary). Secondly, you have to go to the magic power up menu and set it on a character that is going to leave the party. Finally, they have to leave the party.

This part is a pretty ideal place to activate the bug. The enemies prior give tons of MExp, the party splits, and there's no dungeon or boss around here. So we put the cursor on the magic power up screen on, say, Ronfar, head to Taben's Peak, and open the menu once the party splits up.



Since Lemina (or Ronfar, for that matter) is not in the party, the game gets a bit confused. Let's scroll down the menu.



Yeah, looks like we're in glitchy territory.



Perfect. This what we want. Well, let's level it up.





In case you're wondering, no, no new spell is learned.

Anyway, as you continue to level it up, you just keep getting garbage messages.



At level 8 this message pops up. And this is what the new spell does:







Well. Let's start over then.



By the way, you can actually do this with Ronfar's Soul magic as well, although there's no reason to since they both do the same thing and it's easier to get Lemina's Mystic to show up.

Anywho, let's pick up where we left off, powering up Lemina's Mystic. If we get to level 13, this shows up.



No Soul Blade spell shows up, but this is what we've been after. Let's open up Hiro's inventory.





Uhh... Okay.



So, doing this creates the "Phantom Inventory." The Phantom Inventory is... for lack of a better descriptor, an absolute mess of random items. Most of the spaces are either empty, or they have either Eye Jewel, the Battle Shadow, or the Battle Scimitar. You can give these items to Ruby.



This process is relatively stable.



At least compared to what we'll be doing later.

Also this glitch renders Hiro's magic unusable; it'll crash the game.



Although sometimes leveling up Hiro's Wind spells fixes that. I gave it a spin, and I could cast without even leveling up Hiro's magic, although I think in that attempt I just triggered the glitch and didn't grab any items.

So why do this glitch? The main purpose of this glitch is that, theoretically, you can access any item in the game through the Phantom Inventory, including those dummied out. As a matter of fact, the Battle Shadow isn't normally accessible. The trick is that you can continue scrolling off the screen, pretty much infinitely, and find some interesting bit of the inventory.

There are some spaces which are actually clusters of items. Lunar-net describes them as Key Item Clusters and Binary Clusters. The Key Item Clusters contain every key item in the game, including those we haven't seen yet. You switch between the items by pressing "C." The binary clusters contain two items.

If you give one of those binary clusters to Ruby, those Key Item Clusters... change.



They can now access every item in the game.



Theoretically. As you can guess, this is glitchy as hell and very prone to freezing your game.



Yeah.



Ruby? Where did you go?



Well this is fucked. The game froze not too long after.

There's one last thing to say about this glitch. The Lemina bug is famous for being the only way you can access the Dark Scimitar. Now the Dark Scimitar isn't the only item that's only accessible through the glitch, but it's the only one in the freaking manual.



However, getting the Dark Scimitar is a bit of an ordeal, as it involves cycling through the very buggy "all-item" cluster. However, after a bit of dicking around.



Okay, a lot of dicking around. Anyway, I finally found the Dark Scimitar!



And then the game froze on me not too long after.

Ah well, I'm happy enough just finding the damn thing. If you want to find out more about the inaccessible items, just check out that guide I linked earlier. I'll keep fiddling around with it, although I can't promise much.