Ok, so now the quest is done and I felt some small vibes of The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe with the hero ceremony and the descriptions for each party member. If I personally had to establish titles, it would be "Obliterator of the Orb" and something equally appropriate for P1's Dark Lord. I suppose "Destroyer of the Dark Lord" might work. In terms of the eight beasts, I felt that some of the ST designs were pretty interesting. Fishing worked better than I expected since it took only three tries of Divine II to net both beasts. I'm pretty sure my beast order was 1, 3, 4, 2, 7, 5, 6 and 8. I did not want to lose those valuable beast amulets in the Underworld hunting, so as soon as I took out one, I'd return to town to use the amulet and then go after another one. Either the Wyvern or the Snake Dragon looked a bit like Godzilla and the Dragon Demon was almost victorious with the final casting of Fireflash 4 from any party member dropping it. In retrospect, having the thief with more than two castings would have been a bit better insurance.
In terms of the loose mythology thus far, it still seems with the Greek gods since Pluto is another name for Hades. Monsters almost always get initiative in the Underworld and there are magic draining creatures there like vampires and others. The SSI design feel was still there, but the game is far less forgiving and exploitable like P1 was. The best magical weapons for my run were in both of Pluto's places. High end shields seemed more random with numerous places handing out God shields or the giant ones. In terms of P3, I leveled two of the Gelnor imports from P1 but I'm taking a break before making an attempt to returning to P3. If anyone decides to try P1 thru P3, I definitely recommend an emulator with save states. I generally don't resort to save states if I don't have to, but in my opinion P2 definitely needs to use them to save frustration when heading to and thru the last dungeon. I felt the tone of P1 was more tongue in cheek with many of the references(JR Trolkin for example). In terms of parties, it's up to each player's preference but bear in mind that in my opinion having two rangers and two priests makes at least the first two in the series easier to manage. For offensive spells, I'd only go with wizard or monk and the thief is up to each player. I feel the thief is recommended since it is the only class besides fighter that can attack beyond the first rank(and fighters only get lunge which is basically a thrust on one monster in rank 2). My P2 thief had almost as much hit points as the priest did with ~150 hit points, but he was level 14 in comparison to 13 for the priest. The wizard can counter some of the annoyances of spell casters in P2(slow, sleep and weak were the banes of spellcasters on my P2 run). If you get a message saying armor was reduced, that is actually weakness. The cloud giants may have this effect, plus they seem to have a "shout" that tends to do damage to party members. I did try flameblast 3 for the priests, but it sure seems a waste of spell points for P2.
