After yet another long hiatus in this series, we continue where we left off: Dan, his children, and Sancho are en route to the hometown of Dan’s mother, Mada, but have decided to take a few detours along the way to see some of the people Dan hadn’t seen in the eight years he was a statue.
At one point Dan went into an inn in Whealbrook and had a nice chat with an old lady. Incidentally, her only line of dialog was to tell me that whenever hard times struck, she was able to get by thanks to being able to watch her daughter grow up. I wanted to laugh at how pointed the comment was, but I found myself struck by how tragic it was that Dan was denied that simple pleasure. Here was Yuji Horii reminding me that family is something worth fighting for, especially considering that Dan had next to no childhood and didn’t get to raise his own children either.
That little aside completed, Dan went on over to Mostroferrato to help out my father-in-law with a little problem he was having. Suddenly the task he set me on earlier in the game (check on a jar in a tower) made sense. There was an ancient evil sealed away in that jar by Rodrigo Briscoletti’s ancestors that he was tasked with protecting. When Dan went on over to check on it again, he found that the seal was broken. Immediately following that, a giant moose monster (Bjørn the Behemoose (haha)) rose from the sea, walked across the ocean, and attacked my party in a pretty cool-looking in-engine cutscene. After a hard-fought conflict, Bjørn was bested and resealed, saving my in-laws from certain doom and netting me the Ultimate Key.
A quick aside:
Looking at the boxart for this game, it seems that the “canon” choice for the Hero (Dan) is to marry Bianca since she’s the only option featured on the boxart and the Hero’s children are also blond in most of the official artwork.
Dan finally made his way to his mother’s hometown, Lofty Peak, and learned about her role in the events that had taken place. Madalena is being held in the Demon World by Grandmaster Nimzo. From there she was doing her best to protect the other world. In order to seal off the evil in the world, Dan would have to continue to gather up the Zenithian armaments with the Zenithian Hero, Dave.
Dan’s first step would be to find and restore the Castle of Zenithia, which seems to be submerged under water. On his way to the castle, he met a man named Dr. Agon (pay attention to this, it will be important later). As he descended underground and to the throne room, Dan and company discovered that there would be a problem with raising the castle. They needed the Golden Orb to do this. If you don’t remember, this was the same orb that Dan and Bianca found adventuring as children and that the Bishop Ladja smashed shortly after killing Pankraz. Dr. Agon suggested that the party go talk to the fairies…
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