Part 2: Natural Selection in Action
Picking up with Eliott, he's understandably confused that the magic show he was promised by the two strange men who took him down to the basement.
Somehow revealing that they have the least magician-like names imaginable counts as a magic trick in their book.
Eliot isn't impressed. Rather the picky little guy, considering that I don't imagine they get many magic shows in Rolande.
The trick involves interrogating him about what the glowing crystal and machinery in the background actually do.
Huh. Well, there's 50% of Rolante's defenses in one room. With an idiot child and two enemy soldiers right there. This will end well.
Feel free to start banging your head against the nearest hard surface right about now. I'm sparing you a screenshot of their explanation that the wind will keep Eliott's mother from coming down from heaven.
Yes Eliott, that's right.. don't use the key..
Oh dammit. Yes Eliott, your sister has been keeping her access to your mother a secret to you and somehow has been managing this with the wind constantly going in complete opposition to the explanation you just heard about why the wind machine needs to be turned off.
Congruence. And now the pressure is on Eliott. Thankfully, he's not as moved by pressure as you might imagine.
Instead, Lise shows up just in time to see a couple of shady men piledriver her brother into some machinery. Presumably the blue glow is the crystal shattering.
As you might have guessed, Bill and Ben's excellent adventure in kidnapping was actually part of a larger attempt to destroy Rolante for some as of yet unexplained reason.
It's probably not going to work out all that well for Bill and Ben, though, considering that they're in a small room with a pissed off Amazoness.
At least, until one of them points out that her father who's surrounded by all of the castle guards is going to be awfully screwed what with his being blind and all.
Lise immediately sprints off, while Eliott is too dysfunctional to actually walk out after her. Bill and Ben, meanwhile, think they've hit the jackpot.
Naturally Lise doesn't realize this until she's climbed four flights of stairs and left him at the bottom. Eliott, Bill, and Ben have somehow slipped away if you go back down, but we've got bigger problems.
Namely that the castle is kind of on fire.
That sounds an awful lot like an excuse to me, missy. I will say that this highlights the biggest drawback with biological and chemical weapons.. they're REALLY hard to control with any kind of wind whipping up and they're as likely to get your own troops as the enemy.
In addition to being on fire, the castle is also full of ninjas. They're weak enough to go down in a few hits, but they can do the job when their opponents are incapacitated.
Things haven't gone well for the King. Evidently the guards kind of forgot about him at some point. He's far enough gone that the female voice calling him father doesn't instantly register as his only daughter.
For some reason actually telling anybody else about the impending attack on their castle just didn't top his priority risk. We don't know how exact the wind's message was, but if it included any kind of detail it probably wouldn't have hurt to put an extra guard or two by the wind machine.
Just to unsettle a dying man's mind, Lise lets him know that his youngest child has disappeared while all this was going on.
Helpful to the end, the King confirms for us that Eliott is both alive and not in the castle any longer. I suppose that beats finding out that he's dead and stuffed in a corner somewhere.
And with that, Lise quite understandably breaks down.
We zoom around to see the castle in flames and ninjas slaughtering the rest of the guard..
Only pausing for some nameless person who we shall almost certainly see more to gloat about how wonderful everything being on fire it.
Thankfully for the continuance of the story they don't bother sweeping back through the castle or anything like that, instead opting to leave and come back tomorrow.
The wind being back isn't really a problem for Navarre's army since all the defenders are dead, and the only person left is about to abandon the castle. It's nice to see that Wendel is remaining as a constant.
I don't even know how high up this has to be, considering that you can see the curve of a large portion of the planet's surface from here. She's going to feel like she's breathing soup when she gets down near the ocean.
Rather than fighting our way down the mountain we're treated to a few scenes and moved onward to the next place where something interesting will happen.
A lot of other games would probably require you to trek halfway across the world to find Wendel, going through every square inch of countryside on the way there.. in Seiken Densetsu, the heroine is smart enough to just take a boat.
The credits role after the introduction, although there's nothing in the segment much more interesting than this still shot of the ship sailing off to sea.
Mind you the boat doesn't quite get to Wendel before stopping, but it certainly beats walking.
The captain seems to be suspicious of something in the city, although he doesn't take the quite sensible action of just turning around and sailing a bit further down the coast.
Instead, we've wandered into another war zone without any apparent effort. The beastmen claim they won't hurt anyone who doesn't interfere..
Although apparently leaving is somehow considered interfering. We're a bit stuck.
The townspeople aren't taking it particularly well, but they seem to be pretty well unable to resist even if they really wanted to.
The Beastmen have even gone so far as to take all the weapons and armor out of the stores. Amusingly, we can even catch a few glimpses of other characters acting out their storylines as in this case.
Bumping into the Beastmen will prompt some of them to ask if you're trying to pick a fight.
This pretty much results in them trashing you with a single hit and you waking up in the inn with 1 hp so it's not recommended. The more I look at the beastman up there, the more I think he looks like a pixelized Dr. Zaius from Planet of the Apes.
Not all Beastmen are created equal, however, as demonstrated by this one hiding in a corner and hoping none of the others discover him doing so.
The item shop still has its selection intact, but as poor as we are it's probably not time to buy anything.
The first rule of RPGs holds true, in that all the useful information is in the pub. Conveniently enough, the inn in town is free and will wake us up at night if we ask.
This talkative soul, who we'll be seeing a great deal of, echoes the advice before starting to ramble on his own.
His request for a date isn't that interesting
But his explanation about his homeland being at war is, implicating that unless there's more wars we don't know about going on he's probably from Navarre.
The front gate is guarded by a pair of Beastmen in the daytime, as is the back gate.
The guy in the town doesn't change at all..
But nightfall changes the two guards at the main gate into pathetically weak wolves, especially compared to the Beastmen who could smack us through the bridge in their human form.
Exiting takes us to the Rabite Forest, and finally frees us to begin the game proper.