Update 10: Boy Sampson
So, Batu warned us that the King’s Cradle is so dangerous that no one who has come here has ever returned. Clearly, we should be ready for a boss fight on this massive staircase, because that is absolutely something the early Final Fantasy games would’ve done.
Any second now, we’re going to have some big, dumb-looking boss swoop down from the skies and…
Okay, maybe not on the big staircase. Maybe it’s on that OTHER staircase. Definitely.
Nope, no bossfight. That would be giving this game more credit than it deserves. Instead, we get a 15-second or so walk up to the Cradle with absolutely nothing on the way there.
: “Yes… if we can prove ourselves worthy.”
When I heard this line for the first time, I was absolutely prepared for a time skip or something, like how in Ocarina of Time Link isn’t ready to wield the Master Sword when he’s a kid. Like, we’d just walk up to that Shenron ripoff in the back and get told “Nah kid you’re like, ten years old and ten year olds are horrible kings, come back in ten years” but that’d be good writing.
So here we are. There’s nothing else here apart from the giant statue in the back, so let’s check it out.
: “What’s this?”
: “Talking statues?! What’s next?”
Roland is immediately fascinated by a statue that could easily just be a speaker and some LEDs.
Wait a second… this isn’t going to be like that moment in Sonic 2006 where they had Sonic do stupid trials as filler, is it? (that’s exactly what this is)
So here we are, in… a blatant ripoff of the final chapter of Gravity Rush 2, a game that not only did this same thing better but also had better music. By the way, go fucking buy that game and play it because it’s a hundred times better than this trash heap even with the online disabled.
Anyway, now that we’re here, the first thing we want to do is check that glowing pedestal. There’s an overly long tutorial thing for this, but I’ll explain it as we go. Essentially, there’s three rooms. Each one has one of these book pedestals at the start. Instead of a gravity block puzzle, we get a thing where we have to make an Euler circuit (that’s doing a circuit around a room without ever doubling back) and hit checkpoints to match the story.
Here’s the first story. Now, you might ask me, “Hey Timrod, is this foreshadowing for the rest of the plot?” and the answer is no. I have absolutely no fucking idea what this is supposed to be. It SOUNDS kind of like the plot to the first game, only it clearly isn’t because the main villain of the first game was the white witch.
We can press Z to get an overhead view of the maze. The little blue spheres are “bonus orbs” that award items if you pick them up and complete the puzzle on the same run. We can also hit Tab to reset the puzzle. The blue sigil thing will warp us back to the Cradle. So yeah, hard to see how anyone died here.
Stepping on a tile causes it to fall as soon as you step off it, and we need to make a complete circuit, touching those three yellow circles in order. However, this one has a bit of a twist… we need to turn the orange statue to face the red one. What I’ll do is post the solution in the overhead view first, then the screens of what the stuff looks like up close.
It’s hard to see from this angle, but the “fairy” statue looks a little like Drippy from the first game. But again, there was no dragon in the first game as far as I know.
After each segment, the game will ask you if you want to move forward just in case you didn’t grab all the bonus orbs. I honestly shouldn’t have bothered, because the rewards are uh… a soreaway, a “strong sixth censer” which restores MP and is useless, and a leather armor that is okay if you’re playing on normal, but we’ve already got better stuff on extreme.
Once the puzzle is solved, all of the floor tiles spring back up and the door at the end opens.
So again, this isn’t foreshadowing. We’ll actually have six party members by the end of the game - and none of them are a wizard or a bard of any kind.
So as you can see, this statue looks nothing like anyone in the party.
The pistolier looks nothing like Roland either. For finishing this puzzle and collecting all the orbs, we get a wand for Evan that does about half the damage of Roland’s gun, a three-leaf soreaway, and another sixth censer. Three-leaf soreaway is basically a hi-potion, and we won’t be able to buy those until way later in the game.
With a name like Mornstar, I’d suspect the kid is actually the Demifiend and this is an allegory for Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne.
This last puzzle is so large that I can’t actually show the solution on one screen… and actually, I can’t because I forgot to take overhead shots after rotating the dragon statue. The idea is that you start on the left, and then use the switches to turn the dragon.
Now we face the second part… the boss fight that really isn’t much of a boss fight. I also may or may not have accidentally forgotten to set the difficulty back to normal. Whoops.
Thogg is a normal, if somewhat rare, enemy type. They’re almost exactly like the Porcs in Cloudcoil Canyon - high HP but very slow. Thankfully, I left the best equipment on Evan… though the game is nice enough that you can warp out and get stuff off Roland if you have to.
The Thogg only has three real attacks, the first of which is a series of slow punches while moving forward in a line. This makes it very vulnerable to Flurry.
The second is a charge attack that fires off a large projectile. It’s easy to avoid because it’s telegraphed for upwards of 5 seconds, and you can stun him out of it using a zing-powered attack (since we don’t yet have the right higgledies to power up Evan’s attacks).
Finally, it has a flying tackle that does a lot of damage and has a very wide hitbox. Most of the damage I took in this fight was from this attack, because even rolling usually isn’t enough to avoid it if you’re in the line of fire.
The best tactic for this fight is simply to stay behind Thogg at all times and use Flurry when he finishes his punch combo or charges up his projectile. You’ll notice that Roland and Tani both levelled up despite not being in the fight at all - that’s because this game works like Final Fantasy 7 in that even characters not in your party gain EXP from fights… albeit at a reduced rate.
Speaking of, both of them get warped in just in time for…
Oh man, I can’t wait to get a 50-foot-tall murderbeast in the party.
No, instead, we get this fucker. This is Lofty. He is, as you will soon learn, the worst character in this already mediocre game. I mean, he’s that Boy and Mom Sampson costume in pseudo-Ghibli style.
Part of what makes him so annoying is his appearance, but also the fact that he has a stupid “low British” accent that makes his text annoying as hell to transcribe. Thus, I’ll be doing as little of that as possible. If I could somehow edit the screenshots to pretend Lofty doesn’t exist, I would.
So anyway, he confirms that he is indeed Evan’s Kingmaker, and gives us permission to build a kingdom… but first, we need to make a “kingsbond” which is basically a Pact straight out of Drakengard… with the unfortunate side effect of not being as cool as it was in Drakengard. What I’m saying here is that I was fully hoping that this would lead to a darker future in which Evan becomes a Caim-like figure and starts out by throwing Lofty into a meat grinder.
My canon explanation for why this scene sucks is this. Actually, I’ll just write another fanfic. Fuck this game.
So one day, Fred gets assigned to work on the storyboard for this segment of the game. He looks at his folder of concept art, and realizes that really, this is just that one part from Sonic 2006. So Fred goes to his boss.
I love Roland’s smug-ass grin, as if even he realizes how dumb this scene is.
“Boss,” Fred says. “This scene makes no goddamn sense! Why did Oakenhart let Mausinger use a sword to swear the oath over, but Lofty forces Evan to use a twig? We could’ve had a really neat mechanic where the player chooses a weapon and has it grow as they develop their kingdom!”
“No,” says his boss. “That would make this game far too original. We’re doing the 4Kids thing and keeping the stick.”
“Well,” Fred replies, “we could at least do a thing where the stick sprouts leaves and a flower, like they did in Okami with Susano’s sword. I mean, people fucking loved the art direction in that game and I’m sure I could-”
“No,” says his boss. “Just draw a scene where they both look really constipated and add some lighting effects in post.”
As shit as Lofty is, he does give us one very important item: the Tactic Tweaker. Remember how in the last update I said farming for the better gear that playing on Extreme gets you was pointless at the time? This is the item that will make farming for gear work.
This is it right here. Each time a character levels up, you get a number of “battle points” - I’m not sure what determines how many you get or if it’s even random at all. The tweaker is divided into four sections, each of which can be levelled up using battle points to allow you to move the bars further from their starting positions.
The top-left quadrant is for “monster affinities”. Every monster in the game is divided into one of six types, and moving the bars allows you to do more damage to monsters of that type.
Next up is the top-right “elements and ailments” section, which is purely for defense. Status effects in this game are few and far between: I think in a complete playthrough, I only saw maybe a handful of them late into the game. The other side of each bar corresponds to an element, and reduces elemental damage taken. This actually IS useful, but is not a top priority.
What we’re interested in right now, especially with the difficulty-boosted drops, is the bottom-left quadrant. This segment is all about drop manipulation, and contains four categories that can only be levelled up once each. I first unlocked this one, Cash vs. Kit, for 5 points and naturally set it to “kit” because money is useless in this game.
I then levelled up this one for 10 points. We’ll be setting this to EXP because again, money is useless.
Finally, I spent 15 points to level up this bar, which we’ll be setting to maximum equipment droprate. High-end crafting materials are used for certain sidequests later in the game, but crafting itself is as useless as money.
Shortly afterward, we’re warped back to the sky pirate base… where we’ll pick up next time, when we get introduced to yet another mechanic we will see once and then never, ever touch again.