Seasons of Love

Recently, Lily has started making wishes on little puffballs. Anyways, she's generalized this to wishing on dandelions. She'll pick one up and say her wish out loud and blow. For a while, she was all about wishing for more wishes, but now she's hoping to influence real world behavior. Eric and Gavin were at our house past her bedtime on that day that they visited. They were getting ready to walk back, but I told Lily that we could walk to the corner with them, but no further. She immediately seeks out a dandelion, picks it up and blows on it, saying "I wish I could walk all the way to Gavin's house!" My usual explanation is to cite The Princess and the Frog movie, the moral of which is that wishing isn't enough for your dreams to come true; you have to work at them too. Unfortunately, that wouldn't work in this situation, because she would have been quite content to make her dream come true by walking halfway there, and then asking daddy to carry her the rest of the way. I think the problem is that she didn't stock up on enough wishes. She should have wished for more wishes, then wished to walk all the way with them and that would have worked.

The other day she made a wish that mommy and daddy would never get mad at her. And I told her that's a wish we can work on together. Mommy and daddy can be more patient, and she can think about what she does that makes us mad and do it less.

She's been very cute. We were playing Candyland, and she was very careful about assigning us each the proper color for our game piece. "Mommy, you get red because flowers are red and you like flowers, daddy gets green because he likes green and mine is purple!"

Jen and I saw a performance of Rent at a local playhouse. I wanted it to be a surprise, but I was having difficulty reserving the tickets, so I mentioned it Jen, who was happy that she had the chance to anticipate the show. We got to Belvidere early and got some Chinese food and wandered around town for a bit. It was nice to get dressed up and have a real grown up date.

and I wasn't sure how I'd take to a stage performance, because I associate the characters so strongly with the actors who played them in the theatrical release, but I got over that pretty quickly. The actress who played Maureen reminded me of Kimya Dawson. Everyone was really excellent, and it's a pretty demanding play, with lots of singing and climbing.

Rent always makes me think of the one story in the Wake, the final book of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (which itself reminds me of Roger Zelazny, as the Wake based directly on his memorial service in 1995. I can connect anything to Zelazny in six degrees or less!) Anyways, Hob Gadling's girlfriend said to him something like "When I first met, you, I thought you were gay" and Hob says, "Why, because I'm English?" and she says, "No, because you have so many friends who are dead."

And on that subject, When we were at Eric's house, I complimented him on his blue shirt. Specifically, I said it brings out his eyes. I took a little flak for that and sure, it sounds a little gay when you take it out of context like that, but can't one guy tell his buddy that he has eyes like two limpid pools of azure without having it misinterpreted?

Jen was telling us that she was trying to get home early, but got delayed by a train crossing in front of her, so she told us that she started singing "Hello, Goodbye by the Beatles". Lily thought about this and asked, "Mommy can you sing the Hello, Goodbye song by the bugs?"

We watched Charlotte's Web. I still remember the first time I saw it. My parents were still together so I couldn't have been that much older than Lily. We were moving some furniture around and the big couch was in the middle of the room. I always liked it. The name Charlotte A. Cavatica reminds me of Vecna's skull fortress Citadel Cavitius but probably just a meaningless coincidence. Charlotte was the perfect friend to Wilbur. I think she may have been the first cartoon character whose intelligence was presented as an asset. Also, I happen to like spiders. Plus, she's Princess Leia's mom! It's a sad story and it's all about dying, but I was pleasantly surprised that Lily watched it all the way through without a freakout.

The Justice League

On Wednesday, Ancker and I walked over Eric's house and watched some of the Justice League series. Eric actually prepared a mini-arc for us, by playing certain episodes that advanced the overarching plot for the season and skipping most of the standalone character episodes and monster-of-the-week things. When viewed together, they were pretty awesome and made for nice storytelling. I'm not sure if I'm a bigger comic nerd or Eric is. I think he's read more comics, but I've read more about comics. Poor Dave was the odd man out.

Sample exchange:

Eric: I was reading a comic where John Constantine pees on the Phantom Stranger's shoes.
Josh: I remember that! That was his birthday issue!
Dave: (Sighs, covers eye with hand)

Every time he went outside for a cigarette, I thought he was just going to keep walking until he got home.

But the Justice League series is really cool! The animation is a bit clunky in parts and the stylized look for some of the chracters was distracting. The exaggerated character design works for Superman, but not so much for mere mortals. Green Arrow, in particular, was about as wide as he was tall. Seriously, he looked like Gorilla Grodd. However, the dialogue was top notch and the character interactions were believable. They retold some cool, classic comics stories and showcased some nice ongoing stuff. One episode was about twenty minutes of super-powered brawling and you'd think it would get boring after a while, but it didn't!

And it was nice to see some of the B-listers. (A C-listers. And you too, Vibe. I'm not sure which list you're on, but I'm pretty sure we'll need a letter from Grant Morrison's 64-Letter alphabet to describe it. Hey-o! Invisibles Shout Out!)

Me: (Squinting at dude on screen for half a second) Was that Aztek?
Eric: No, I think was the Ray. But there's Aztek

And it was! Fucking Aztek, man!!! Huzzah!

I really like Aztek. Grant Morrison wrote most of his appearances, and he thus had some great stories. Corey sometimes accuses me of stealing shamelessly from published materials to populate my games, but he's just seeing patterns where there are none.

Consider this line from Aztek.
Now consider this threat from a Mazeworks character.

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/MazeworksII/message/29987

"You're gonna love this! Arcanowave devices are powered by a Fourth-dimensional energy field. The only thing preventing it from erupting into third dimensional space with an explosion more powerful than any weapon on earth is this little fader switch on my belt. And guess what I just pressed! So unless you want Avalon to look like Tunguska, I'd back the fuck off!"

Corey's probably going to claim that I "stole" this too, but he's just got an overactive imagination. Now that we've put that delusion to rest, let us press on and leave Crazy Corey to his conspiracy theories..

Anyways, part of the story arc was the US government assembling their own team of superbeings to take down the Justice League in case they went rogue. I commented, "Bah. They can't even handle a bunch of zombies" in reference to the ongoing World War Z debate and got a couple of chuckles for that.

Dave brought up a criticism that I've never seen adequately explained. If you've got Superman on the team, why do you want Hawkgirl? Eric said that they try to explain this in the series by saying that Superman can't be everywhere. While I'm glad that they made the effort, I'm not buying it. "Oh noes! Amazo is tearing up Coast City! Quickly, this looks like a job for the Star-Spangled Kid, Liberty Belle, and possibly...Mister Terrific ("Fair Play!")

Fortunately membership seems to have ballooned to roughly five thousand members, so they can afford to use human wave tactics.

I've always loved superheroes. (Except for Batman, of course. He just sucks) I think I always will. I think they're like the heroes of ancient myth, updated for the modern world. (I know, not an original observation, but an apt one.) Grant Morrison explicitly modeled his version of the Justice League on the twelve gods of Olympus. I just reread, "Soon I will be Invincible", which rocks on toast and when Eric and Gavin were over the other day and Lily couldn't name her favorite superhero, I felt like I had failed her as a father.

Now I must take her on my invisible jet to the fortress of solitude where we will sit atop the giant penny, and I will teach her the manifold ways of geekdom. We'll start with Wonder Woman. She liked Adam Hughes' Wonder Woman piece,


and I think she could do worse for a super hero role model than Wonder Woman. (Though Wonder Woman's new costume is crap. Even Gloria Steinem says so. Wonder Woman needs a Sassy Gay Friend to prevent these kind of fashion missteps in the future.)

Hey mom, a little bit of Lily stuff!

I've been trying to get enough material together for a post my mom might enjoy, but it never seems to gel, so I'm left writing about zombies and video games.

At the dinner table last week, Lily said "That scared the HOUSE out of me!" It was clear what she meant, but she had apparently misheard someone swearing. Dave was there and he asked "Someone scared you out of the house?" so hopefully her nascent profanity will transform into something unrecognizable.

Lily's picking up some good phrases too. When she tells us that she loves us, sometimes we'll respond, "Well, I guess that works out!" and she did that yesterday, but the other way around. I said, "Come here. I've got a secret to tell you. I love you!" and she smiled and says "I guess that works out! Cause I love you too!"

Jen had a girls night out with her sister on Friday and they had some exciting adventures, but I'll leave her to blog about that if she's so inclined. For my part, I just stayed home, watched a little TV and played video games. I decided that I wanted some Chinese food, so I figured I'd just use my smart phone to order it on the way and then pick it up when I got there. Everything is integrated on my phone. I push the voice search button and it recognizes what I say and performs a Google search from it. Then I can click on the phone number in the listing and make a call.

So I said "Chinese Food" and since the phone has a GPS and knows where I am, it just does a search for all the restaurants in the local area and pulls them up on an interactive map. Maybe twenty places popped up, little pushpins on the map. I was driving at the time and I couldn't give this my undivided attention, and I was suddenly struck by something a friend had said.

My buddy Tim keeps a blog too. One of his posts has the observation: "I love Chinese food but let’s face it, most Chinese restaurants have name issues. They use so many of the same words for their names that eventually you forget what that place around the corner is called when somebody asks the name of your favorite spot."

I blinked and thought "China Wok? Golden Bowl? Great Wall?" I was suddenly struck by how apt Tim's observation was. When we want to place an order at home, we grab the duck-sauce stained menu, pick up the phone, call in an order and then get in the car to go out to pick it up.

I think Tim is right that there's not a lot of point coming up with a clever name because people are just going to call it "That Chinese Place on the corner." It reminds me of something that I heard about That 70s Show. I'm told that the producers came up with any number of clever names before deciding that people would just call it that 70s show anyway, so why not go with the flow?

Anyway, if you want to buy me some Chinese food, the local place is called China Fun. (Amusingly, Tim made a rather exhaustive mix and match list in that same post, with words like Golden/Jade/Peking/Szechuan/Hong Kong etc in the first column and Palace/Treasure/Blossom etc in the second, but Fun is not in fact part of the list.)

We watched "Looney Tunes: Back in Action", which I am convinced that is a movie that is impossible to be enjoyed non-ironically. I happen to like Brendan Fraser, Steve Martin and Jenna Elfman, but the movie never seemed to rise above a level of abstraction.

It has cartoons interacting with real people, but the toons never seemed a part of the environment. There's a scene early on where Daffy was moving across the table. Also, some pencils spilled where he was. It didn't seem like he had knocked them over, but rather they fell over on their own. So that was crappy.

On Sunday we were supposed to meet Jen's friend Sandy for fireworks near where she lives, but we couldn't find her there. We had a good time though and Lily enjoyed the fireworks. It was a bear getting home though. It was like escaping from a rock concert. We were parked 15 feet from the edge of the lot, but it took us a good half hour to get out of there because of the way the traffic patterns had formed around us.

Eric dropped me a line on the way home last night, and he and his oldest son braved the hundred degree heat to walk down to our house. Lily had a ball, though they insisted on gravitating inside to the parts of the house that don't have any air conditioning. She incorporated some of his vocabulary expanding her phrase of cuckoo head to "Silly goose cuckoo head."

Everybody's a cuckoo head.

"Dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!" "He was a zombie?"

Over at my play by email game (plug! http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/MazeworksII/, click on the link to join today! We're awesome!) we were discussing the Battle of Yonkers from World War Z. Tim gave me an advance reader's copy of World War Z a couple years back

I said that I liked almost everything about the book, except for the Battle of Yonkers, which fills me with untrammeled NERDRAGE!!!

Bob said that he liked it because it was so true to the military way of thinking and that it sounded just like something he'd have seen as an enlisted man.

We talked about it a little further, and since I don't post enough on my blog, I thought I'd put this up here. This post is revised from an email exchange with the Lord a while back.

Zombie fiction works best on a small scale like in Night of the Living Dead, or if you have a plague/comet/what-have-you wipe out 90% of the human race, devastating the infrastructure and leaving the zombies outnumbering the living. As All Flesh Must Be Eaten tells us, if you can't beat a bunch of slow moving stupid undead things in a straight up fight, then you deserved to die.

If you have a bunch of rednecks beat a ton of zombies in Night of the Living Dead, then the army can do it. The US military has its flaws, but that's true of any large organization. I think they're pretty good at what they do, and modern weapons are absolutely devastating. I think they might lose the first several engagements, but once they comprehend what they're dealing with, they'll be able to hit back with overwhelming force while taking almost no casualties. With a couple exceptions, the US military has generally done well at adapting to changing situations and circumstances, and we've already established at this point that they're familiar with the zombies.

Mostly it comes down to this: Zombies are essentially humans who keep shambling at you until they are so damaged to be incapable of doing so. Those are their assets. The also lack assets human beings have. Range, instincts of self-preservation, tool use, mobility, tactics and planning, for starters. On the whole, their liabilities significantly outweigh their assets. They're certainly in worse shape structurally than a healthy adult human (they're dead after all), but the thing is, they don't stop moving until they're unable to move. And they move, in a slow, steady, straight line, directly at their targets. People say "how do you kill something that's already dead", but if it's still bound by the laws of physics, it needs its bones and muscles to move. Damage slows them down, and it's not they're Steve Prefountaine to begin with. If the knee bone is no longer connected to the thigh bone, it's going to move even slower.

I logged on to one of the message boards I frequent to find that this topic was already being debated. They were talking specifically about the Battle of Yonkers in the novel World War Z, with "full military might of the United States Army" against a couple million zombies. The zombies won, and those with actual military experience cried foul. Since they express my points better than I can, and have broader experience with these matters. I've included some of their comments, italicized below.

Air Burst Fuses: If you're going after soft targets, like infantry, light armor, supply convoys, etc., you use airburst fuses to increase the efficiency. 155mm HE artillery rounds with airburst fuses set at a 50m altitude will pretty much guarantee a lethal headshot on every last zombie withing 120 meters of the point of detonation. And with a range topping 11,000 meters, they could have parked a half dozen batteries of Army and USMC artillery on the north side of Yonkers and walked the fire right down the damned highway into the heart of freaking Manhattan, easily annihilating all 4 million of whatever zombies that were clogging the highways. Forget zombies, the damned highway wouldn't have survived as anything recognizable.

Not only that, the 270mm artillery rocket systems (HIMARS and MRLS) Have their lovely M326 rockets which explode in the air and scatter 644 submunitions each of which sprays fragments in a lethal radius of 4 meters. I'll let you figure out the coverage they get when a single MLRS launches its full load of 12 rockets. A full artillery battery of M270's can launch 108 rockets simultaneously. That's 69,552 little bombs covering 4 meters each. And it doesn't matter if the zombies are full packed. Those bombs go off when they impact something, which means the 'ground zero' zombie gets a shaped charge burning a hole through it from brain down to crotch, while easily a dozen or more zombies right around it take head shots from nickel-sized fragments of steel travelling in excess of 3600 feet per second.

I went to the effort of digging up that youtube video of a 155mm shell exploding again. VT fuzes (the kind that expode before impact) have been in use since the later half of WW2 and before then we tried to get the same effect with mechanical timing. Artillery shooting at people does not use impact fuzes. Fragments would be coming from the top down, hitting heads and shoulders before anything else. The kill radius is commonly quoted at 50 meters and a causualty radius of 100m. Zombies not caring about how scary artillery is would only increase the casualties because they wouldn't do common sense things like dispersing.

For a 155mm shell, that "very center" where things pretty much vanish or get reduced to gobs is pretty decent sized. And when fired into a shoulder-to-shoulder mass of bodies?

If one shell hits a spot with densely packed zombies, there will be dozens surely "destroyed" with possibly dozens more destroyed or at the very least greatly reduced in threat.

Multiply this a thousand-fold and keep the shells coming at a steady pace and the Infantry shouldn't have had to fire a single shot.

That's discounting shrapnel removing heads, arms, legs etc. Yeah, a zombie with only 1 arm is still coming at you, but he'll at least have a harder time grabbing on to you.

Any shells that actually strike the ground will also create nice big craters that the shamblers will have a hard time negotiating. If they move around it, that creates additional choke points to pick them off with marksmen.

It's unlikely that the military would do something they have rarely done since Korea.. dig in and conduct a static defense. Why no hit and run or methodical withdrawal as the shamblers came closer ?

A unit that looks remote close to be overrun can be evacced by vehicle or chopper, redeployed 300 yards down the street and resume firing trivially.

The reason why artillery is not such a great Infantry-killer as it was in WWI? Modern Tactics. Squads tend to disperse and not walk in close formation. Guess what a few million brainless Zombies will not posses?

This should have been a turkey-shot, even with 4 million zombies walking.

Hell, they could've done it with a couple of C-130 gunships.

Damn, why not, rig a few steam-rollers to head on forward and let 'em roll forward!

Also, as others have pointed out: Artillery will create trenches, destroy bridges and generally distort the landscape to a modern-art sculpture look-a-like. This will slow down the horde immensely!

Everyone should be carrying at least 180 rounds in their pockets and the enemy is giving them all the time in the world to aim. Then if there seems to be any danger of getting overrun, the scenario we are presented with allows the men to escape easily by walking away.

You don't have to think very mobile warfare to just keep backup up/avoiding close combat with a foe with nothing else.

Tanks, APCs, IFVs, etc. are immune to zombies, save via starvation/dehydration of the crew if they're trapped in there for too long.

If you did firebombing with aerial units it'd also do quite a lot of damage.

I think that in a straight up engagement, the army would win, and win overwhelmingly. The whole book was a critique of policy the author didn't approve, and the chapter assumes the worst possible mix of leadership, tactics, and weaponry and presents it as if this was the only possible outcome of the encounter.

I get the idea of the chapter is that they let Lieutenant "Flame units only. I want rifles slung." Gorman run a Dog and Pony Show for the cameras, but the contortions Max Brooks goes through to justify a zombie victory (digging trenches for tanks? Really?) cross the line from poor decisions to outright absurdity. And there is something clearly wrong with me in that this is the part of a zombie book that I'm complaining about, but there it is.

Now for something topical! A review of Working Designs' video games for the Sega CD

What's the phrase for the opposite of a "sweet spot"? "Falls through the gaps" is the best I'm coming up with. Anyway, this post about some obscure video games from a decade and a half falls in the anti-sweet-spot of geekery. If you 're familiar with the games, you probably know most of the stuff I'm going to discuss. If you're not, you almost certainly won't care.

In this post, I'm going to review three of the games Working Designs localized for the Sega-CD! It's got spoilers for some games that are almost two decades old, so reader beware and all that. This will be your final warning.

I covered covered Popful Mail in an earlier post, so I'll skip it over here. Suffice it to say, it was awesome and hilarious. Life is like a box of fish indeed!

VAY

Vay is a fairly run-of-the-mill turned based RPG with a neat twist. It's pronounced Vye, by the way. A thousand years ago, some high-tech power armor crashed to earth and went on a rampage until the world's five greatest sorcerers lack away its power and seal it in five McGuffins scattered across the world. Other than that, it's really pretty generic. An evil empire to fight, some stuff to find, new spells to learn, and random encounters to fight every three steps. The Evil Empire reverse engineered technology from the power armor, but I had already played Final Fantasy 3 (FF6 for you purists) by this point and I think they handled the idea better in that game.

One thing it did handle extremely well was that it discouraged backtracking, and the dialogue gave a real sense that things were changing in the game world as a result of your actions. "Oh, we' know who you are! You shut down the Empire's military base on the peninsula? Because of that, X, Y and Z happened."

Later in the game, you're fighting your way through a submarine. The ship's captain is observing your progress and taunting you over the loudspeaker every few minutes. Her name is Betty June, where most of the characters in the game have weird pseudo-medeviel names. The main character is called Sandor, for example. The fight to the bridge is kind of a slog, but I laughed when I finally got there and had this exchange.

Sandor: And now we fight! But first I have a question. Betty June. Is that your real name?
Betty June: What's wrong with my name, San-dork?

Overall, it's pretty standard. I enjoyed it at the time, but the plot isn't good enough to let me overlook the tedium of the dungeons and the random encounters. Interestingly, it's been released as a download for the i-Phone. That's kind of cool.

LUNAR: THE SILVER STAR

Lunar was awesome. I played it when I was working nights and before I met Jen, which was just a strange time in my life. I'm much happier now than I was then, but part of me misses being able to spend fifteen hours a day working through a video game. I remember renting Final Fantasy II for the SNES. Tim said "That needs at least 36 hours of play time and the rental only lasts for two days. You're never going to finish it in one try" and I said "That sounds like a challenge!" Lunar used actual speech in the cut scenes and I had the volume turned low because I was playing at 3 AM on my day off and then a cut scene begins and Ghaleon starts mumbling, "My apprentice Nash speaks well of you" and I had to run to the TV to hear what he was saying. Speak up, dude! You're the Premier of the Magic Academy! Do you mumble like that during graduations?!

I was looking through old posts to see if I had mentioned Lunar before, and I had forgotten this, and when she was really little, Lily was sitting in her little pink chair and I was singing to her. I was taking Fur Elise, the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, and Ode to Joy, and singing "La" for each of the notes. She was smiling broadly at each of these, but what really made her laugh was when I "sang" her the song from an old video game. I think Tim is the only one who'll know the song I'm talking about, but it's the La La La song from Lunar: The Silver Star, which really does have "La" in the place of the notes. It's a catchy little tune and she laughed out loud at this. That was her first laugh.

I figured out two of the big revelations in Lunar pretty. I had just finished up another game called Lufia and the Fortress of Doom and it had the same plot twist, which is an element of Asian folklore that goes back to the Princess and the Cowherd, that of a goddess falling in love with a human and choosing to live out a mortal life with him. In each Lunar and Lufia, the amnesiac blue-haired girl is a fallen goddess who falls in love with the main character, recovers her memory but renounces her divinity to be with him.

The other plot twist in Lunar that Ghaleon, the Premier of the magic academy was a bad guy. If you watch the opening cinema, he's practically twirling his mustache and that gave it away. I'm not sure if knowing that diminished my enjoyment or not. It certainly provided a different experience than I would have had otherwise. It's a great game. The gist is that the world is in trouble, you have to save it, blah-blah, crying cakes, and that the people who saved the world the last time are the parents or the mentors to this generation.

Ghaleon is the one who drives the plot. He's probably my favorite video game villain of all time. He saved the world, but then ten years after that, he and his best friend had to save it again. He hates the goddess that empowered his friend for turning away from him. He hates himself for being unable to save the world.

As part of his plan, he feebleminds one of the former heroes, turns another to stone, butchers the dragons he was sworn to defend, enslaves a goddess and uses her power to blast a floating continent from the sky. And yet, there's this bit at the end... As you're fighting your way through the final levels of his fortress, where the most powerful monsters in the game are hurling themselves against you, there is this level where peaceful music plays and gentle pixies flit around in an idyllic garden. The faeries will talk to you and it's clear they have no idea of the things Ghaleon has done. It's like he's trying to convince himself that he's not a monster. They believe him a kind, gentle man. And he was, once upon a time. One of the characters remembers how he used to take here on long walks when she was a little girl and wonders what must have broken inside him to make the monster he has become.

LUNAR: ETERNAL BLUE

As good as Lunar:TSS was, the sequel was even more awesome. It was the last game I did without easy access to a walkthrough and Jen bought it for my birthday when we were first dating, so it's special in that way too. It's set a thousand years later and the broad outline of the plot is pretty similar at first. You rescue a mysterious girl named Lucia, and run all over the place, assembling a ragtag band and eluding the White Knight Leo, who pursues you like Javert across the country. While fleeing him, your team arrives at an ancient temple where a recording shows you the events of the last game. As it's showing the defeat of Ghaleon it's suddenly interrupted by Ghaleon himself, somehow back from the dead.

It's worth noting that I was thinking it was great game and the only thing that could possibly make it better would be an appearance by Ghaleon.

Part of the game is to become the heroes out of legend, the Dragonmaster, the White Knight, etc, only to discover that...those roles are already filled. And Ghaleon, the traitor from the first game is their leader.

The game had so many scenes that I loved. You know how in these kind of games, you're always running against a clock before the the villain takes over/destroys the world, but nobody on the team has any problem stopping to get a kitten out of a tree. When you get to one village, Lucia, who was raised away from humans, says "Fuck this noise," and quits the party when you delay the main quest for yet another humanitarian mission.

When traveling through a Sherwood Forest type area, "We're close to Taben's Peak, everyone. Keep your eyes peeled and your hands on your valuables. Ronfar! Get your hands out of your pants!"

Lunar:EB has a lot of the tropes of that era of game, and one of them is that the main character has stats that are significantly better than those of the secondary characters. Leo is a special exception, as he has stats that match the main character's precisely. There's a bit where you've just finished a punishing boss battle and Leo catches up to you. One of the cultists shrugs and activates the runes that summon the boss again, and Leo and Hiro team up to smack it down.

Leo was pursuing you because he believed that Lucia was really the Destroyer, but he was starting to have doubts. When he asks you if you really think that Lucia is the destroyer, you have the option of answering "Only once a month". Heh.

The characters are awesome. I mentioned Ronfar, the lovable rogue who had been a priest, but who fell into despair and all manner of vices because he was unable to save Mauri, his beloved and Leo's sister.

There's Jean, who was raised as an assassin, but who found peace as a dancer, who is fleeing from her former mentor, Master Lunn. He is one of the four false heroes, and she has to defeat him in single combat. Everything about the game feels epic.

Leo was another great character. There's a scene where he realizes that he's been played and that he's been serving a false goddess all this time, and he faces up to the consequences.

It has the best scene ever in a video game. Zophar, the dark god that had been impersonating the goddess Althena, Lucia, the mysterious blue-haired girl whom you had rescued absorbs Althena's power into herself to destroy Zophar, thereby eliminating all magic in the world. Zophar then reveals that such power would destroy the world of Lunar as well. She hesitates, beat...beat...beat...each accompanied by a party member's face, and then she does it, "Althena's light shine forth!" unleashing the forces that will destroy a world.

She hesitated too long to actually do, and Zophar siphons her power, but she still has enough to teleport our heroes to safety. Cut to a town where Hiro is absolutely crushed by despair. Ghaleon shows up and threatens to kill everyone in the town unless you can stop him.

When you do, he reveals to Hiro that he allowed Zophar to revive him so that he could atone for his actions in the first game, but because Zophar could withdraw his power at any time, he could never overtly aid the heroes. And now that he has betrayed his master openly in order to rekindle Hiro's spirit, he will return to the grave once more.

At the very end, Lucia returns to her duties in a spire on the moon and the heroes go back to their lives. There's an ending song and a montage showing the fates of the main characters, and then it goes back to the title screen, where you have the option for a fully playable epilogue! It's not just a tacked on thing, but a full scale trek as Hiro gets the band back together and you get to see the outcome of all the good you've done as you search for a way to be with your beloved. At the end of it, you find Lucia, and the game ends while together they watch the Earth arm in arm.