Dungeon Images - Dezolis/Air Castle

The various dungeons of Dezolis. Including the game's only optional dungeon, the Weapons Plant. Every other optional dungeon was cut from the game. Curiously, the Esper Mansion has been made into a dungeon. I've also included the Air Castle here. Due to everything that's been cut from Dezolis I thought I might as well pad it out with the Air Castle rather than stick those images elsewhere.

Images and pointless commentary ahoy!

This is the final portion of the Hangar. Unlike in the original where the cutscene starts as soon as you exit the cave, here you must enter the area with the Landale (a reused Land Rover sprite) and examine it from the bottom. However, you can't actually walk through the four middle paths due to how the sprites move over the tiles. So you need to go around from the right or left. And the enemies here are deadly. Even with all the latest gear you can easily die down here before ever getting to the ship if your levels aren't good enough. I ended up dying and had to backtrack through my meseta grind for new gear. Very frustrating.

The Esper Mansion is a dungeon in this version. It uses the Ladea Tower tileset with some minor differences.

Those statues are weird. I can't tell whether they are supposed to look broken or not. To get the Telepathy Ball cutscene you must go up the stairs and check out the Telepathy Ball. It's right there inside a big hole in the wall. You can't do this until you've gotten Kyra. I originally thought that black space the Telepathy Ball was in would be the doorway to the Sword Cave. But it's not. You get the Elsydeon on Rykros after the Le Roof cutscene (it may have been in a chest. I should have rechecked).

The entrance to the Air Castle. It's got a really nice tileset. A lot of effort was made to make this place look good. In terms of design it's the highlight of the game. So it's unfortunate that when you finally get to Lashiec no dialog comes up. He's just standing there in a room full of annoyingly placed pillars, waiting patiently. I guess zombie overlords have a lot of patience.

Here the Xe-A-Thouls apparition is blocking off the path to the inner sanctum. They aren't animated. But I wasn't expecting that. Still, they look decent for phantom barriers. The amount of detail on the back wall is nice.

And here's Lashiec. Rather than hiding deep within the Air Castle basement, he's surrounded by these pillars. You still need to beat the Xe-A-Thouls to erase the barrier in order to get to him though. But the layout of the dungeon is way different. I actually really like it.

But as I mentioned earlier, there's no interaction. You just walk up to him and examine his sprite in order to start the battle. You'd think he'd have something to say. I guess they didn't have time/room to put it in. Or they just didn't bother. This blast from the past boss deserves better. However, I'm willing to allow the overall effort put into the Air Castle to make up for it.

Here's the Weapons Plant. The game's only optional dungeon. It doesn't serve much purpose other than to give Wren a rather expensive weapon for free. This place is also decent for meseta grinding. I think this pic shows the third section of the Weapons Plant. In the back there's nothing but a big wall. To be fair though, it was a pretty uneventful place in the original anyway. It just served as a way to get the Burstroc unit for Wren as well as providing a terminal that would give out unlimited repair kits. It's too bad that repair kits don't exist here. They would have come in handy. Because there's no way to heal androids other than resting at inns, using the healing tiles at Spaceports and walking around. And the encounter rate is high anyway.

The Garuberk Tower looks pretty good. There are only four rooms. But it captures the overall aesthetic well. The eye switch is used to open up the door on the far left portion of the first room. This door leads to the boss.

An interesting glitch will occur if you beat the boss then come back and activate the eye switch again. In the original game the tower is destroyed after beating the boss. So you can never re-enter it. But in this game the tower is left standing. So if you go back in and activate the eye switch again you'll be taken back in time to before you beat the boss. Gumbious Temple will still be standing. And if you go into the boss room at Garuberk Tower, Dark Force 2.0 will still be there. There is no way to undo this glitch. Beating Dark Force 2.0 again will just make the game go on normally from that exact point. So it can really set you back depending on how far along you are in the game. You could use it for level grinding though. As long as you don't do anything else in between Dark Force 2.0 battles. Otherwise you'll have to backtrack a lot.

This is the room accessible from the door at the far upper right of the first room (previous pic). Nothing particularly interesting. It's just nice looking.

I might as well use this space to talk about a rather amusing door glitch that can only be done in the Garuberk Tower. After entering or exiting a door, if your first action is opening up the menu, confirming a choice then closing it you will hear an odd sound and the door animation will repeat itself. You can keep doing this over and over to go through walls as long as you do not move. If you use a telepipe/escapipe you'll be taken outside and the area will look a bit glitchy. That's the door animation attempting to play out on a map that it's not associated with. The door glitch will also cause the party to improperly follow Chaz. They'll walk around out of formation and with no collision. So you can get them to walk over normally impassable objects. It's too bad that it doesn't effect Chaz because then you could walk through walls. The glitch rights itself when you enter a vehicle/new location. Battles don't fix it. For more info check out this video.

The boss room. I had to do the eye switch glitch to get a shot of this with the boss present. I can't remember if his sprite has those ten dots at the top normally or if it's a graphical error from the glitch. While the sprite's shape is pretty on point the actual battle sprite is a Blauzen. I'm not sure whether this was a mistake since the sprite in the dungeon has a similar shape or what. But it's pretty amusing to be fighting generic robofodder instead of what should be the game's second version of Dark Force. Maybe he took a coffee break?

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