We’re continuing chapter 4, which is Parn’s adventure. I recognize plot elements from the PC Engine Lodoss game and the story seems to cover the first 8 episodes of the anime, although some of the details are different.

In order to find the priest who will heal the village, we have to go to an ice cavern where he has gone.

The best way to deal with the dungeons is to use Slayn’s Vision spell, take a screenshot, and then open that screenshot up alongside your emulation window. The map doesn’t show where you are, but as long as you know where you came in the dungeon is should be useful. The world map, by contrast, is completely useless because it’s hard to relate anything on the map to what’s in the actual game and there is no indication of where you are.

The most efficient way to fight the battles is to identify the leader and then without doing too much damage to him, try to knock him into the pit for the x2 EXP (you can’t kill him though, or it doesn’t count). This is easier to do once you get spells that can freeze the enemy — casting Quick on Parn helps as well to get more turns. It’s not always possible, though.

In the dungeon, the dwarf Ghim joins, and we find Neese, the healer who helps with the village. Now we hear about a plot to assassinate the king, and join up with Woodchuck the thief so that we can sneak through the sewers and get into the castle. After this, we get sent out to save the king’s daughter, get captured, escape, and finally have our full party of six (with Deedlit joining).

Now the king wants us to be messengers to two nearby castles to see if they will join us in opposing Beld. This is probably the most frustrating part because of how useless the world map is, and also there are no teleport spells (there’s one that takes you out of a dungeon, but not town to town). After this, the war starts.

After the war, we have the final event — Neese had told us that it will be possible to kill Karla if we can get the circlet from her just as she’s dying, before she has the chance to move into another body. If we do this successfully, the body she has now (Layla) could be freed, but this is a dangerous thing that might not work. Of course, first we have to get to Karla through some long dungeons.

This is the same dungeon from chapter 1 but there are no chests anymore. Coming out on the other side, we can finally reach Karla’s tower and the final dungeon.

Something went wrong for me in this dungeon. If you look closely at the map, there are two possible ways to go. One way is “rely on magic” and the other is “rely on sword”. You are supposed to choose one of the directions and then get two keys, which will unlock the bottom door. I could not get the second key, though — the treasure chest just opened and closed without giving me the item. I saw someone complaining about this on GameFAQs as well with no answer. I tried watching a video and also beating the room boss without using any magic, but none of that worked. In the end I just used a cheat code to give myself the key, but I really don’t know what I was doing wrong. All of the chests once you pass the double locked door wouldn’t open either.

The final fight is against Karla. She’s quite difficult; her companion golems block your way to her and barely take any damage. She can be silenced and frozen (by Deed’s Ice Pole spell). I did have to do a bit of grinding but I think the key is just to get lucky enough with your freeze/silence spells that she can’t cast too many damaging spells. I buffed with Slayn, healed with Eto, and attacked with Parn and Woodchuck (Ghim could never reach her).

Woodchuck then steals the circlet, but he then runs away and it seems like he is possessed by Karla. I’m not sure why they stopped the story here — I don’t know enough about the Lodoss franchise to know what story this is covering. From what I can tell from Wikipedia, Woodchuck doesn’t appear again in the anime after episode 8, so there’s no continuation to this story at least in that medium.

In any case, this is not a bad game. It has some quirks and annoyances that you do have to get used to, but the battle system is reasonably fun, the characters are clearly differentiated and have a lot of spells that are actually worth using. It does have a translation patch so it’s worth a try. There is also an optional boss against an ancient red dragon, which I didn’t attempt.