r/Alundra

Way waay back, somewhere around the time Alundra 2 was released in Europe, I distinctly remember absolutely losing my shit when I saw the game at our local supermarket. I begged my folks to buy it, being a huge fan of the original game. Like most of us, I quickly realized the sequel was only barely related in name, and became very disappointed, but the game still grew on me.

Still, however much I wanted to beat the game, I simply could not, because I got hard stuck on the Ocean Cave dungeon.

A quick refresher: Ocean Cave is a pretty early-game dungeon where you have to unlock a series of gates blocking your path with keys you get from the dungeon. You get one key per "trial room." There are four trials, so four keys in total.

But, I swear this is true, my game had five gates! I felt like an idiot, thinking I'd missed something, or miraculously missed a key from one of the trials, but I double, triple, quadruple checked - no luck. I simply got stuck and could not progress past the fifth gate. I even restarted the game on multiple occasions.

Now, I've since lost the original copy, but have beaten the game on a separate PAL copy. I'm now on my (technically) third playthrough on a NTSC copy, and wouldn't you know it, there are in fact only four gates. Four gates, four keys. I must've been an idiot and simply fumbled something when I was a wee lad, right..? Right?

I've sort of brushed all of this from my memory, because I feel like an insane person every time I think about it. There's no evidence of misprints for this game that could explain something like this. Disc rot? Nah, that surely wouldn't produce a fifth impassable gate out of nowhere.

So, maybe I'm a loony, an idiot, or both, and the copy was fine all along. Maybe it wasn't? I still needed to get it off my chest. But if you're out there, decades later, stuck on a fifth gate that by all accounts shouldn't exist: you're not crazy. Or we both are. Either way, I believe you.