What better way to welcome my PS2 back to the land of the living than with a game that rightly belongs in the land of the dead? Finishing the light route on Elvandia Story means I have now cleared all three routes in the game and achieved 100% completion, more or less. And it only took a total of about 35 hours to do it too. If the game was worth finishing I would be quite proud of myself right now.

But I’ve already written a lot about how terrible Elvandia Story is, so I’m not going to retread old ground here. As usual Ashley was overpowered from start to finish, so I mostly solo’ed the game with him except for the few missions with mandatory party members. It didn’t take very long with Ashley gunning for the boss like a cruise missile, and to the game’s credit most of the maps are quite small so it only takes a few turns to  win. I would never have made it through 3 runs of this game if it wasn’t for that.

How does the Light route differ from the others? Mainly it has the worst ending for the main character, who ends up with brain-damage from his exposure to the light glaesums. The way the story goes, it sounds like two of his party members could have done something to prevent that by fusing several glaesums together, but both of them jumped the gun and confronted the bad guys too early, leading to them getting Killed Off For Real. Which surprised me a bit because they’d spent quite a bit of time building up the light glaesums, the importance of fusing them and how crazy Ashley was getting due to contact with the incomplete fragments. Then boom, the fusers get themselves killed, all that work was for naught, bad end, goodbye.

Other differences: There are new party members: Kai (Magdaff’s son wot is never referred to on any other route) and Townsend, some doddering old mage. And might I add that while Elvandia Story has a soundtrack far better than a game this terrible has any right to possess, the voice-acting is, unsurprisingly, horrible. I mention this because Townsend’s voice was just so, so, sooo bad. Back on topic, Roshuna of Kerasos is evil again, but he barely makes an appearance. Oh, and the sage Elpalance joins us instead of opposing Ashley at the end.

Most surprising of all, the twins Dorie and Dora are back and it turns out they’re the long-lost sisters of Ashley’s chief adviser Sax. If that’s the case, how come they didn’t recognize each other on all the earlier routes? And it’s not like they have to struggle to do so. Sax just hears their names “Dorie and Dora?! It couldn’t be…” and for Dora’s part she’s like “Sax…? Are you my big brother Sax?!” and they fall into each other’s arms and everyone is happy happy, so why didn’t they do that on the Dark and True routes?

You can’t even argue that it’s an alternate history, because no one else’s background story changes on the other routes and… why am I wasting mental energy pondering the issue? Let’s put it this way, you know how Spike’s company logo used to be a TV with an unidentified blob on top? Just imagine that blob is actually a pile of poop and that should tell you everything you need to know about them and the games they churn out.

Enough about them. Now that my PS2 is back in action, what next? I’m thinking I should just play L2: Love x Loop once and for all, seeing as it’s been on my To Do list for at least 5 years. After that I guess I’ll go back and see if I can get into Wild Arms 5. It didn’t seem so bad. Once that’s done I’ll probably be craving an SRPG, so Dragon Shadow Spell will get the nod. And then I might do Ulrika’s route on Mana Khemia 2, though I clearly remember hating that game because the characters were so unlikeable. We’ll see.

Related posts:

Elvandia Story – A poor man’s Fire Emblem Elvandia Story – So much wasted potential Elvandia Story solo run – Dark route (spoilers) Dragon Shadow Spell – Very ordinary so far