Zeliard (DOS) first playthrough, part 3 of 3 (from Llama to FIN)
0The last two areas of Zeliard make it abundantly clear that Game Arts and Sierra On-Line had no intention of anyone ever actually finishing a playthrough (at least, not without calling a help line).
Moreover, I can safely say that were it not for the speedrun, I would not have bothered finishing this casual playthrough, entirely because of Correr. That map can undo 5 minutes of progress in 2 seconds; fortunately, the speedrun has a way to skip those 5 minutes and get right back to the "correct" part of the map. Even using that skip, I still spent an hour being confused.
Before I even got to the "correct" part of Correr, though, there was the matter of the hilariously vague NPC advice involving riding a wind current near the "ceiling". The problem with this advice is that the place you're intended to follow it is specifically at a point where there is no ceiling! This is not the only time the somewhat-wonky translation has made things harder than necessary. But hey, at least there was an attempt at a hint whatsoever, which is more than I can say for the 8th area.
The 8th area is an absolute dumpster fire, with half a dozen instances of awful level design that expect you to know what to do with zero conveyance. More invisible air currents, a false wall, a false _ceiling_ (something the game has never done before) barring the way to the final town, a THREE-WAY door (i.e. going through it twice leads to a different place), destructible blocks that don't look destructible - and one of them is in a place that requires very specific inputs to hit with your sword... Then there's the whole Lion Head Key bit which the game expects you to figure out on your own, and the final progression item you obtain interacts interestingly with vines, in a way that you'll absolutely need to figure out for the final platforming challenge.
So yeah, this game is egregiously flawed. I'm kind of fond of the precise mechanics in a way, though they have their warts. But the level design (and unforgiving mid-game economy, even moreso on PC-88) has too many problems to expect any reasonable person to put up with.
(The playthrough videos I've uploaded here skip parts where absolutely nothing interesting happened and I was just repeatedly running in circles.)
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