Romancing Saga 2, Part III: HOW many years!?

Okay, so now we're Gerarl. At one point I find a store room and, after blundering through the menus I'm able to withdraw all the stuff, not that I can tell what it does. Then they kick me out of the castle and won't let me return. Don't know if that's good or bad, but let's load the game, huh?

After wandering in the castle I find these people. The woman on the right must be important because her hair color is too interesting for a generic NPC. The name seems to be Andromache, or at least that's all I can make out of Andoromake.

In a similar room I find a girl named Mary, and a guy who looks like Guile gone gray. His name is Henry.

On the left is Emerald, on the right is Alieth. Emerald teaches me Fireball, I think.

Yup, that's Fire Ball. Gerarl now has a matching proficiency level which I will call Foom.

After wandering through the castle and finding what I think are all of the unique characters, I head out to town. I discover that the X button will instantly take you up one level if you're not in a dungeon- castle to town, town to world map. Depending on whether or not I remember that the menu is Select, this could be very useful or damn annoying.

As I'm saving the game to take a short break, I notice something.

I assumed the number by each save was money, or something collectible. But that symbol behind the numbers? That's the Japanese symbol for "year." So since this is a used cartridge, I know that this game's story spans at least 1200-some years. Woof.

Town is pretty standard: a couple equipment shops, an Inn, etc. I buy a glove (well, a "Knuckle Cover," specifically) to replace the Doublet he's wearing and get his defense to 22.

This guy looks like he came out of FoxTrot. The generic guy-with-vest kind of reminds me of a similar sprite in Final Fantasy VI- I wonder how many people from that game worked on this? After I've looked around town a bit, I set back out to the cave alone. I don't know how long I'll be playing Gerarl, but he could stand to raise some levels in Foom.

...except Leon has ordered the cave sealed. Damn. I guess whatever I'm doing is in Avalon. And now that I've talked to everybody and their cousins, I can get back into the throne room.

Okay, yeah: Gerarl and the other guy, Victor, are Leon's sons. I understand exactly that much. Now I'm Leon again and the whole party's back together. We'll figure out what we're doing next tomorrow!