La-Mulana - Wishbringer

[Alice]

I'm not suggesting the same thing could happen here, but I predict raocow will be fighting Mother by episode 53, and Hell Temple by itself is gonna take maybe 20 episodes by itself.

I don't think it'll take more than 10-12 videos honestly. Hell Temple isn't great but other than one room I absolutely despise it's not actually all that bad. It's mostly just gotchas that are going to get you the first time. I don't think there'll be more than 70 episodes in total for the lp and no more than half of the remaining videos will be Hell Temple, approximately.

[repairmanman]

Oh wow, I just realized that you can't really do the mantra puzzles without the manual

or brute forcing it like raocow

[Sebby19]

Alright, step two of... 5?, completed to being able to fight the Mother.

But yeah, the game's manual tells you how the ruins are structured, which helps when reciting the Mantras. In the original, the Djet Pillar didn't exist, so you had to actually type out the Mantras on the keyboard. This is probably a reference to cheat codes in Maze of Gallouis (umbrella!)

I smiled when rao finally noticed Shrine of the Mother disappeared from the warp menu. You can logically assess it has left the Frontside. I'm excited to see raocow go through the True Shrine of the Mother tomorrow.

[FPzero]

I think you can do it without the manual through the hints provided, so I'll try and intuit it using the clues in the first post:

Mantra solution spoilers (this is the whole solution spelled out step by step):

So the hint for what to do is said by a philosopher, not a tablet. "Drive the wedges from the heels" is supposed to mean you recite on the backside fields. As for the location, the tablet hint about the glowing crosses ("The glowing red crucifix is a beacon that connects the seen and the unseen") is supposed to inform you that the crosses are where the frontside and backside align with one another. Though from there I will admit you have to really think hard about where in the backside you're supposed to use it.

The answer is that the 8 Guardians are also guardians of the wedges, according to a tablet in the Temple of the Moonlight: "The guardian protects something else. There will be a wedge there. Eight wedges will give form to the soul." Drive the wedge from the backside is supposed to mean that you need figure out what room in the backside area corresponds to each Guardian's room on the frontside, aka which room is "behind" the boss room. Then you chant the appropriate mantra there and that's why the symbols show up where they do.

There's a good reason the crosses show up on the map, and it's to help you count the distances between the cross and the boss room. Take the Dimensional Corridor and Endless Corridor maps for instance:





Tiamat's boss room is located at the ! on the Dimensional Corridor map. Recall that other tablets mentioned that Tiamat's powers warped the positioning of both corridors, and that the Dimensional Corridor is actually a "frontside" area and the Endless is the "backside". Tiamat's boss room is located 2 Rooms Up and 1 Room Right of the cross marked on the map. This means that if you go 2 Rooms Up and 1 Room Right of the cross in the Endless Corridor, to the room marked S1, you are sitting on the backside of Tiamat's room. Reciting the mantra there will drive the wedge through, and as we saw, that's exactly what happened.

You are then supposed to repeat this with every other field pair, looking for where the boss room was, counting how far away from the cross it is located, and then finding that equivalent room on the backside field. Of course, the Twin Labyrinth is really weird and I think you end up mirroring the results because of how it's organized, which is why you chant 2 Down an 2 Left from the cross on the backside, when the boss is 2 Down and 2 Right from the cross on the frontside.

Of course, I'm not new to this game and I knew the solution going into today's episode, or at least was able to remember it as I watched. But who's to say anyone would look over all these notes and put it all together. So while the clues all appear to be there, it'd probably take someone a lot of time to figure it out if they were playing completely blind with no knowledge and a concentrated effort to understand puzzles before solving them. It's really the game's largest puzzle, spanning the entirety of the world and requiring you to piece together a ton of information and structure about the ruins.

Or you can just brute force it.

[Draexzhan]

The Mantra puzzle is a neat idea, but holy crap is it easy to brute force.

[Validon98]

The mantra puzzle has a few hints but putting them all together in the way that is expected of you is just, a bit? Kind of expects a lot of figuring out honestly, and of all the puzzles in the game, it happens to both be extremely easy to brute-force but honestly so vague that brute-forcing it is just as valid as solving what is expected of you. It's neat, it just needed some more clarity.

[Lostsoldier20]

We all saw this coming... Brute Force and then Mulbruk tells raocow about Hell and THEN raocow accidentally starts the Hell quest...

This was the most raocow episode.

[Chirei]

I brute forced this puzzle almost exactly how raocow did - and even found Dracuet the same way. I wonder if they intended you to find him just on this repass?

[Crow]

Yeah there would have to be some penalty for screwing it up to make the puzzle not just "flail around until you win" for the average player

it's actually super neat how the maps are designed when you sit down and organize them the way the manual tells you to, too

[Zummorr]

Intuiting the order and then chanting the most recent mantra in every room is the typical way of solving this puzzle. That's basically how I remember solving it.

Taking the time to understand the solution and solve it based on information simply takes longer than treking to every room and jamming the square peg into every wall you can see.

[Voltgloss]

I really appreciate what they were trying to do with the Mantra puzzle, but I have to agree that it suffers from undercluing and from being so easy to brute force. My own experience mirrored raocow's: attempting to solve it by deduction, getting confused when rooms I thought would work didn't and when rooms I didn't expect to work did, and realizing it was much simpler to just go on a tour of the entire ruins screaming mantras at the top of my lungs. (And honestly, that end-of-game "world tour" is enjoyable in its own right.)

Mantra solution spoilers (this is the whole solution spelled out step by step):

FPZero's explanation covers most of the solution, but leaves out one aspect (which isn't relevant for the Endless Corridor/Dimensional Corridor, but is relevant for several of the other fields). Explanation below.

Consider the Gate of Guidance and Gate of Illusion as an example. In the Gate of Guidance, the boss room is two rooms right from the Cross of Light. So you'd need to chant the mantra two rooms right of the Cross of Light in the Gate of Illusion, correct? But looking at the map, that room appears to be empty space outside the map boundary:

Part 1.png (406.33 KiB) Viewed 4061 times

What's going on here is something that is only spelled out in detail in the manual: Each field (except the Surface) actually exists a 5-row, 4-column grid of rooms. The "real" layout of each field isn't what its map shows; it's actually a more compressed version of that layout, generated by "wrapping around" the rooms that lie outside the 5x4 grid. Using the Gate of Illusion again as an example, I've placed the 5x4 boundary in the below, and marked all rooms that lie outside it with numbers:

Part 2.png (395.19 KiB) Viewed 4061 times

And to compress this into the 5x4 grid, rooms 1 and 2 wrap around to the bottom-center; rooms 3, 4, and 5 wrap into the matching reverse-L gap on the right side; and room 6 wraps around to the bottom-left. Like so (with lovely beautiful gaps remaining for emphasis):

Part 3.png (351.87 KiB) Viewed 4061 times

So what's two rooms right of the Cross of Light? Thanks to the wrap-around effect, going two rooms right of the Cross is also equivalent to going two rooms left of the Cross. And what's there is Room 1, which is the room where raocow fought the giant bird Ba, and which also happens to be where the mantra is chanted.

This mapping into a 5x4 block is what makes the Mantra puzzle make internal logical sense. And it's only spelled out in the manual. The only oblique hints in the game itself about this true nature of the ruins are the "room transitions that don't make sense" - such as when raocow went to the right of Annunaki and wound up by a hatch in the Spring in the Sky; or when raocow went through a wall to solve the puzzle for the Holy Grail way back at the beginning of the game. When the field is mapped to a 5x4 grid, those room transitions all actually make geographic sense.

[Draexzhan]

I just realized a fun little tidbit: With the exception of Hell Temple, every area in La-Mulana, including the Gate of Time, made an appearance in today's episode, and even Hell Temple was relevant to some degree.

[Crow]

not the original shrine of the mother

[repairmanman]

I think he skipped spring in the sky too?

[Alice]

Totally didn't see raocow brute forcing the mantras coming, nor him paying lip service to feeling bad about brute forcing it while putting zero effort into figuring out how you're intended to do it. People have been asking him to take a bit of time to read the manual for awhile now for good reason. I can see the scales puzzle going the same exact way tomorrow too, just with more reloading.

[Sebby19]

I don't see him reloading though. Especially since he knows it's justna whip upgrade now.

[ZephyrBurst]

About what the manual says on map layout.

It's not incorrect the manual says you can place all the map squares into a 5x4 box, but a less misleading explanation is that the maps all tessellate. Doing that rather than trying to figure out where to logically place the squares seems easier and more straight forward.

[Alice]

I don't see him reloading though. Especially since he knows it's justna whip upgrade now.

Unfortunately that wouldn't be terribly surprising either. He's likely to just resort to the single most suboptimal weapon possible to try and beat the game, just as he has for 90% of the lp up to this point anyways. Especially since he seems to think the whip isn't a good weapon despite the fact that it's overall the most balanced one.

[BobisOnlyBob]

About what the manual says on map layout.

It's not incorrect the manual says you can place all the map squares into a 5x4 box, but a less misleading explanation is that the maps all tessellate. Doing that rather than trying to figure out where to logically place the squares seems easier and more straight forward.

I've always expressed it in a simple gamey way:

each map wraps vertically and horizontally, like an old JRPG map

[raocow]

I have no idea how I'm gonna edit this half hour of footage

[ZephyrBurst]

I have no idea how I'm gonna edit this half hour of footage

Every time the words; La-Mulana, Ninja, Porcupine, Lettuce, Spikes, or Mother are said, you cut to the 2 seconds prior to the word being said and the 10 seconds following.

[CrappyBlueLuigi]

I have no idea how I'm gonna edit this half hour of footage

Every time the words; La-Mulana, Ninja, Porcupine, Lettuce, Spikes, or Mother are said, you cut to the 2 seconds prior to the word being said and the 10 seconds following.

seconding this

[SAJewers]

I have no idea how I'm gonna edit this half hour of footage

don't and just say you did

[Ivy]

Take the golden key in hand.
Challenge Palenque.

Nobody acknowledged this when it was posted so I'm gonna quote it now

[Filbi]

so this is the power of compulsive note-taking...

Got it in one! And y'all said he'd just brute force it!