Part 26: SoM Theater: Bits, Pieces, Glitches and Compilations

Part 1: The Search for Extra Dialogue



Spurred on by someone mentioning that there was special dialogue for doing these two areas in reverse order, so we'll begin by setting off for the ice country. I'll warn you ahead of time, there isn't that much.



One neat thing I didn't mention before was that due to a bit of glitchiness with this bridge you can walk up onto the ice a bit. This doesn't do anything special, it's just weird.




For a second I was thinking that this was weird dialogue since we hadn't seen these guys yet, then realized that I was confusing the Sand Ship and the underground area that opens up under the Dwarf Village. It's easy to see how it could happen, as the tilesets are nearly the same.



While checking out the Ice Palace, I recalled taking the other fork here and missing something, so for the sake of completeness we'll head down this path.



A switch to connect the two areas..



And a Glove's Orb hidden in a ghost haunted room. Nothing terribly special, but it's more proof about how important exploring can be.



The only special dialogue I found was at the Cannon Shop. You can't go from the Ice Country to Kakkara until after clearing the Sand Ship. That's probably to keep you from skipping the entire event.



Speaking of which, on the Sand Ship you can't proceed without getting any of your characters. If you try to enter Morie's room the guards tell you to bugger off and Boy just takes it and leaves.



One thing that I missed on my initial playthrough was this guy on the very top of the Sand Ship, who will allow you to save your game before they throw you into a boss fight. That's only marginally helpful, however, as if you're not ready for the boss you can't exactly change anything at this point.



One more missed treasure chest from the Fire Palace has another 1,000 gold. Other than that, the survey of this area didn't reveal any dialogue you wouldn't see playing through in the other order. But while we're here...

Part 2: Karon and the Sea of Stars



There's no reason to do this, but if you head two screens east from Kakkara you can get to a southern region of the Sea of Stars where we went for the Lunar Palace.



There's a pathway you can see from that screen, but the sand here will make you slip backwards if you enter it. It usually sends you down and left, so with a bit of care you can get to this notch where the sand narrows..




A weapon that has a charging attack, like the glove, can be used to make Boy do a flying jump kick across the sand. Your other characters can't make the jump yet, but they're close enough that you can head north and the game will re-collect your party at the beginning of the next of screen.



From there we can head toward the Ferry. Now, it'd be really neat if we could sequence break a bit and get Lunar Magic early..



But they actually covered their back and had a message saying that the ferryman was out to lunch. Lazy little bastard, I'll show him..



As you can see here. Because they used a monster sprite for Karon, you can target him with magic even if the game's scripting won't let you get close enough to hit him with a weapon.



He goes down with one hit, which makes this sentence amazingly creepy in context.




One neat thing that's revealed from this, though, is that if you get frustrated in the Lunar Palace and try to head back, Karon will give you some hints about finding your way forward to the Seed. I imagine most people wouldn't get a chance to see this.

Part 3: Whip it Good

Level 5 Whip Glitch



The next glitch we're going to see is a way to skip some tedious winding paths later in the game. You can't do this until you have the Whip at level 5, but one you do the process is simple. All you have to do is get to one of these post locations where the game locks you into place for the transfer. Then, gently tap in the direction you'd like to go.



Charge up the whip to level 5, and then when you let go you'll spin around and, when facing in your original direction, get dragged up as though you were connected to a post up there.



You can't use it too many places, but it can work as a shortcut. The results if you should face toward a non-walkable surface, however, are about as bad as you might expect.

Part 4: Map Oddities and Passage



Our next few strange sites are mostly locations on the map. Here in the mountains South of Empire South Town there's a face in the middle of a cliff. It looks like some kind of programmer easter egg, similar to a face on the moon in Final Fantasy II/IV.



Another one is located in the middle of the ocean, in the northeast corner of the map. If you pull up the brown and black square map you'll see a single point that marks the spot.



If you decide to cruise around the map a little bit, you might also find this offshore island in the vicinity of the Empire.



Landing on the spot will reveal a five story lighthouse with no room to explore the island.



Your reward for climbing the whole five stories is to meet this guy, who could possibly be a Star Trek reference being a bald guy named Pecard.



The whole thing reeks of cut sidequest, but all he does now is give you a bit of background on the Mana Fortress and its actual purpose.




Finally, we have a weird area in Empire Northtown where it's possible to walk between the trees through this little gap in the hedges and end up below this house. Again nothing terribly earth shaking, as you can walk in here, but an amusing mystery none-the-less.

Part 5: Permanent Mana Sword!?



This next trick is probably the one a lot of you have been curious about, and it's such a strange thing to do that I can only imagine how someone figured it out. The first thing you need to do is find this island off the shore of the Ice Country on Flammie.



You'll know you're there if you see Neko hanging out to sell you crap from around the Ice Country. You have to use Neko to save your game and then do a soft reset of the game by pressing L, R, Start and Select at the same time. This will work on an emulator as well.




Once you return to the title screen, you need to start a new game and play it up to the point where the first boss fight against the Mantis Ant takes place. As soon as the various NPCs stop talking, go ahead and do another soft reset.



Reloading your main save will have your high level characters appearing in, of all places, the Mantis Ant cave with the boss fight going on.




As you might expect, he goes down quite easily to end game weapons and such. The important part here is that when you beat him he's going to give you a sword orb.



The game will act like you're back in the first village including having Jema give you his introductory speech, but if you fly off with Flammie all of the event flags you've triggered will remain that way. In other words, you can continue the game from where you left off. As soon as you can find somewhere with Watts, he can use the Sword Orb to level up your sword even if it's already at level 7.



It's.. quite a substantial upgrade. Now, you weren't supposed to have this sword until the final battle, so it can be a fun way to cheese a lot of fights that are supposed to be fairly difficult. In order to show it off a bit, the final few boss fights will have multiple videos. One will be playing through the game in the way the developers expected while the other will be murdering bosses using the Mana Sword.

Part 6: Level 8 Magic and Attacks (Video Only)

Boss's Rum Fueled Rampage

For our final bit of showing off, by all means turn your attention to these videos. Once you've leveled your magic up to level 8, there's a small chance that each spell will have its own special animation. The chance increases as you continue to climb toward 8.99, the maximum spell level in the game. To show this off, I took one of my saves from right before fighting Lich and tore through the final dungeon using nothing but Boss's magic. And yes, I was drunk at the time.

Kid's Magical Modifications

Next up we've got a video of Kid's spells. They're nowhere near as flashy as Boss's magic, and most of them are cast in a room with nobody else around. If the difference is subtle, one way you can tell is if the characters suddenly stop moving. The special animations freeze all motion on the screen while the spell animation is playing.

Boy: He Only Does Everything

For our last video, we've got Boy demonstrating the Level 8 charged attacks for all weapons. Some of them are a bit lame, but this is the payoff for actually grinding your weapons up to level 8. For anyone repeating the same insanity, you get points for weapons based on killing something with the weapon regardless of how weak or strong they are. Going through the Ice Country one shotting everything was my chosen method of training up the last couple weapons, which explains why I did this video there.

Spell Name Differences