Part 59: Prism explains the Lemina Bug in more detail (Part 1)

Okay.

There are a few dummied-out items in Eternal Blue. One of them, the Dark Scimitar, is actually in the manual as a quite powerful weapon; the descriptive text read 'The Dark Scimitar is said to empower its bearer with great offensive power.' As a result there were a whole lot of attempts to find it, all of which failed because there's no way to actually get it legitimately. It was the most popular topic on Working Designs' website for a year (back in 1998; this is not a recent thing). They even asked Vic Ireland, and he said it was in the game, so of course it must be!

Well, it wasn't. The search was a failure. That doesn't stop people from making the game give it to them anyway. Specifically, they turned to:

The Lemina Bug

There was a bug introduced in the English version of Eternal Blue that wasn't in the Japanese one, created entirely out of some programmer's decision to save you about thirty seconds... over the course of an entire game. To do this, you need the following:

- 26756 magic experience points. You'll actually want a little more - just enough to level Hiro's Wind magic once. You can do it without but you won't like the results. Also enough to save the game.
- Someone whose magic can be powered up by Magic XP is leaving the party, but Ruby isn't (this cuts out a couple times when everybody leaves, like the Carnival).
- Lemina can't be in the party. She can be the one leaving, though. She just absolutely can't be in it while you perform it.

It doesn't matter if Lucia is in the party or not, but you can't trigger it off Lucia leaving because you can't power up her magic with Magic XP. I find the best time to do it is in Taben's Peak, after you defeat the Blue Dragon Cult in the Meribia sewers. Everybody leaves Hiro and Ruby alone then, so all the conditions are met.

Anyway, what you do is, just before the party members leave, go highlight their magic to level up. Just go browse to their magic and then close the menu; you don't need to spend anything now. Then do the event that makes them go away.

In the Japanese version, if you opened the menu and went to level up magic now, it would be pointing at Hiro. It always starts pointing at Hiro. In the American version, it is set to point wherever you left it... which is now a character that isn't in the party.



Thanks, programmer trying to save me five seconds!

You should now push up a few times (how many times depends on who you had it pointed at before they left, but it doesn't really matter... but it's a lot of times, it's about 17 to get from Lemina's Flame up to Mystic). The menu background will start looking weird, but it will eventually point at Lemina's Mystic magic. Mystic isn't something you should be able to spend Magic XP on because the Mystic spells Lemina knows are dependant on her level. As a result, it starts at magic level 0.



Buy it anyway.

You will get a weird message, specifically ' LEARNED A NEW SPELL! CAN NOW BE USED!' Nobody learns anything but now Mystic is level 1. Keep doing this.

At Mystic 8, you will get 'BOOMERANG BECAME DAGGER! MP COST 65'. It really does change Hiro's Boomerang spell into 'Dagger', which freezes the game if you cast it, so don't.

At Mystic 13, you will get 'BOOMERANG BECAME SOUL BLADE! MP COST 45'. Hiro doesn't actually have Boomerang anymore so nobody learns Soul Blade, but his magic and inventory go crazy! This is when you stop buying magic. You instead back out of the Magic Power Up screen but do not close the menu entirely or shit breaks. Instead, go to Hiro and push the RUBY command so he's passing items to Ruby out of his inventory. Don't push ITEM or EQUIP because that breaks shit too.

Hiro's inventory is currently bizarre. It has no boundaries; you can scroll as far as you want in any direction, and items are in 'clusters'. They overlap each other and have multiple items on the same slot. You can switch which one's up with the C button. There are two kinds at first: ones that hold exactly two items of any sort, and ones that hold all the auto-used event items. If you take an item from the first sort, all of the second sort now hold every item in the game.

Scrolling too far crashes the game, but only sometimes. Tabbing through an infinite cluster can sometimes crash it. Picking up a completely blank item might crash it if it feels like it. Sometimes just scrolling onto an infinite cluster crashes. What I'm saying is that this is super unstable. There are some things Man was not meant to know. Crashing won't hurt your saved game, though. You'll just have to try again (or not).

When you're done, go back to magic XP and spend one level on Hiro's Wind magic, which fixes it; you don't have to, but his magic will be a glitchy, crashy mess until the end of the game if you don't, as powering it up later doesn't fix it unless you do the whole bug again. Then leave the room ASAP. Then save your game, reset, and reload.



Congratulations! You just plundered the depths of the Sega CD.