I have covid and am trapped in my basement, away from my family and with all my plans cancelled. On the plus side, that means plenty of time to play FFL2.
Entry #5: Ashura’s Desert
Ashura’s world opens with a new town easily accessible.
Ashura wants to get the ultimate MAGI and conquer other worlds.
He’s clearly making efforts on the “conquering” front. (This phrasing implies there are some MAGI that are stronger than others. I suspect a better translation would be that “he wants to get the ultimate power from MAGI”.)
Ah, conflicting reports of where the tower is. Helpful.
Giants used to live in the next world, but not any more.
If we buy a drink from the bartender, he says:
I saw a shadow of a tower in a sand storm. It must be Ashura’s Tower! Go 7 to east and 7 to south from the cactus south of this town. You see a cactus there. The tower is south of it.
That’s some actually useful info. If you don't get these directions, you'll end up wandering in the desert and discovering sandstorms that will push you around.
Did I mention that this town has random encounters?
I don’t need any weapon upgrades at the moment, given that I’m replying mostly on mutant abilities and R2’s lightsaber loadout. I upgrade everyone’s bronze helms and gloves to silver at the item shop, hit the Inn to recharge, and head out into the sandstorm.
The main gimmick to the sandstorm is that the segments function like “rooms” in a dungeon, and are covered until you enter them, so it’s easy to get lost.
Here’s a cactus south of town.
We go 7 east and 7 south, and there’s a cactus over there. You can't tell from the screenshot, but the covered parts of the sandstorm use animated tiles, so you can see where stepping off the path will put you in another area.
And south of that… a town?
A goblin used the power of MAGI and became a monster with 3 heads and 5 arms. That’s Ashura.
This town is affected by the same sandstorm “roofs” as the rest of the area, but that’s just a gimmick here that might make you miss a person to talk to. There’s no challenge from it.
Hey, let me know if you see Guardian’s spy. He’s a guy with a hat on.
A hat?! The only guy who wears a hat is Dad!
A spy went into the Tower to get Ashura. But he got caught!
This town doesn’t have any armor for sale and the weapon upgrades aren’t worth it for me right now. I hit the Inn and continue on. (As a note, HP totals and a few stats have ticked up, but I’m not going to note things unless there’s an exciting now power.)
Just south of town is Ashura’s Tower.
It has a collection of enemies that are mostly bigger groups of what we find in the sandstorm.
I like the art style of the Tower. I don’t think it appears anywhere else in the game.
The BabyWyrm that was the boss of the very first cave is a normal enemy here. Even without Mr.S, it’s not a big challenge.
Most of the floors are small and straightforward.
We also find our first upgraded enemy (that would be a palette-swap if this wasn’t a Game Boy game). The Red Bone is an upgrade from the Skeletons in the first world.
On the lower floors, you can see the shifting sand outside the Tower.
The Sabre is an Agility weapon; I’ll either toss it on Han or Leia. (Leia’s old Bow is basically useless now.)
The Woodman has very simple dialogue.
Man: Thanks a lot! I am.. well.. Call me Mask! I came here to defeat Ashura. But you saw what happened to me! Why don’t we work together?
Mask joins, and in a break from video game tradition, was actually stripped of his equipment in the jail cell.
Fortunately, you find his equipment on the next floor. He has crappy equipment, but his stats will make up for that.
You can add equipment to NPCs, but you can never remove it. In this case, giving Mask a Long sword or Axe would up his damage output, but his Hammer will still one-shot any enemy here and I don’t need the help against Ashura.
We head up a few more floors, and we get a gun and a silver shield that under other circumstances would be great on R2.
I pop the single-use potions on Luke and Han, and give Han the Battle sword. Nobody needs a new silver helmet because I already bought a set back in town.
Ashura: HA! HA! Well, hello. I was about to send someone to tell you.. that.. My man already micronized and went into Ki’s body!
Luke: What did you do to her?!
Ashura: Ki was born with MAGI in her which gave her the power of healing. I get those MAGI and she fails!! ….Killing 2 birds with 1 stone…. Well…. Now I get yours and that’ll make it 3 birds!!
Luke: …. Never!!
Ashura has roughly 1,000 HP, meaning that after R2’s lightsaber attack, we needed Mask to hit him with a hammer to finish him off.
Luke gets Cure, which is nice even though Leia already knows it.
Ashura: No.. No!! .. I .. don’t .. wanna .. die.. .. AARGH!
We receive Power, Speed, Mana, Fire, Ice, Thunder and Poison MAGI. Then we teleport outside.
Mask: I’ve done what I wanted to. See you!
Mask left.
Luke: Ki must be in a trouble! Let’s go to her!
We are teleported to the Shrine of Isis. We’re also fully healed in the process.
Ki is seriously sick from MAGI in her body! They are trying to get out! Take them out or she will die!!
This feels like another mistranslation: The MAGI in Ki’s power gave her healing powers and weren’t a problem before this. The micronized monsters are making her sick, are trying to take out the MAGI, and are what we need to remove. Right?
The only way to get inside a body is to micronize! Giants should know how. By the way, Ki told me to give you this.
Received Defense. Please ask Giants how to micronize and save her!!
The reason for us getting that Defense MAGI is story-gating: We could turn around and leave the Shrine without talking to the fairy and learning about the giants and our need to micronize, but then we wouldn’t be able to open the door to Giant’s World because we wouldn’t have enough MAGI.
This gating also makes it obvious how bad the Prism is at doing its job. If you use it in the first world, it’ll say there are 6 MAGI, which is the correct number that we find: Three in the ruins and three in Ashura’s base. But! The Rhino implies there were more MAGI that had been in the base (and possibly in the ruins—the ones stolen from the dead Guardians) that had only recently been taken to Ashura’s world. There are also MAGI in Ki’s body (and Ki lives in the first world) and this random Defense MAGI that the fairy had. So the Prism, like the automatic doors on the USS Enterprise, clearly has read the script and only tells us exactly what it’s supposed to. (This problem will come up again!)
Also: How on earth does someone get born with 15-pound chunks of stone in their body? I think we’re adding to the commentary about MAGI with several important new fan theories:
1. MAGI can change size and shape. Clearly most of the MAGI that make up fingers, toes, nipples, whatever are in more generic shapes most of the time, and perhaps they shrink for easier carrying. For that matter, maybe they’re harder to recognize in the wild than we’ve guessed because of this feature, so normal people have a hard time just stumbling upon them. You can only recognize MAGI if you already have some, which is why Dad leaving us the Prism was so important.
2. MAGI randomly—or not—teleport around the worlds when not actively being carried or used. That might explain why none are forever lost by getting dropped off the side of the Celestial world and how the ones in the ruins went unfound for so long—especially if Dad was searching for them. The new gods, particularly Ashura, seem to have come to power relatively recently, and it might be because the MAGI came out of hiding and started appearing in findable places only recently. Ki was born with MAGI in her body because they teleported in when she was born, magically shrunken to a size that fit without hurting her.
3. Ashura had seven MAGI, and it transformed him from a goblin to a god-beast. Our characters can only equip one type of MAGI at a time, and they only get small benefits from them despite now carrying twice as many as Ashura had. Either you become a god by using more than one MAGI at once (which our party somehow knows to avoid) or—and this is my preferred theory—there is a more complicated method of “using” MAGI, perhaps a secret ritual, that draws out greater powers than the casual equipping would.
Here’s the Nintendo Power coverage of Ashura’s World.
Luke’s Log, Days 5-8: We traveled through the Celestial world and to a new world, Ashura’s Desert. Boy, it was hot and sandy. I haven’t really spent much time in the sand before, but for some reason I feel like I should hate it. It’s rough and course and it really does get everywhere; but that doesn’t seem so bad. Weird, that. Anyway, we met a man who dressed just like Dad except for a big ugly face mask. He didn’t have a gun or whip like dad usually carries, and Dad never wears masks, so clearly it was some other guy. I should have asked if they knew each other.