Anime Was A Mistake: Let's Dunk On Ni no Kuni 2

[Timrod]

Update 25: Collective Brain Damage

Oh trust me, you haven’t seen anything yet. By the way, I want to mention that Ni no Kuni 2 is still incredibly unstable on PC. I hadn’t really run into the instability until just now, but it tends to crash a lot and also will crash if it ever goes into windowed mode. Supposedly they fixed this months ago, but it’s still bad.

Once we get back to Evermore, Roland not-so-subtly reminds us to go check kingdom management mode, because the game kind of assumes we haven’t touched it since we unlocked it - this would be a mistake. The reason I’m grinding it so hard off-screen is because I don’t want to end up in a situation where we’re locked out of progress because we haven’t reached Kingdom Level 3 yet.

As you can see, we’re far ahead of the curve. I have to pick up the KG every 40 minutes or so to not waste any.

In fact, we had enough to upgrade this building to level 3, which lets us unlock a new level of healing items in Gerel’s store. Upgrading the Hubble-Bubblery is important, and this was not something I realized on my first playthrough (mostly because the lower-level upgrades are trash).

Oh man, you mean we’re going to get together and give this game an actual plot? I vote for doing the entire thing over only this time it’s a battle royale game.

Step 1. Acquire a nuclear deterrent.
Step 2. Go to Costa Rica and find a scientist specializing in the development of bipedal nuke-launching tanks.

: “First and foremost, we’ll need to sign a treaty with the other major nations of the world, effectively forming a single united realm. We propose to call this treaty the Declaration of Interdependence.”

You can’t see it because the scroll is blank, but further up there’s a picture of Roland riding a nuclear bomb like in Dr. Strangelove.

Evan, please stop looking at me like your plan to end race-based civil wars by creating a single nation ruled entirely by one race makes any kind of sense.

: “We think that’s highly likely, yes. But we can’t worry about that right now. All we can do is visit each nation and try to convince them to sign up.”

Again, Batu is the only one with any kind of sense. Someone on Twitter a few months back said that this scene was like everyone in the room realizes it’s a bad idea but they’re doing it anyway to not make Evan cry. I think everyone has severe brain damage.

: “Sure, this plan o’yers is a noble one, and a fine banner for an up-and-comin’ kingdom to unite under… but ye’re about as likely to get all the nations o’ the world to sign yer little pact as I am to grow a third leg!”

: “Don’t say that. We can do this.”

I’d say he knows more than you, Roland, given that you got New York nuked.

: “Stop it!”

: “I…I don’t know if we can do this. But it doesn’t matter. I want to do it anyway.”

: “I’ve realized something. Now that we’ve been to all these places and met all these people-”

What the shit? You went to one kingdom! One! The one that’s right next to yours!

That’s right, we’re doing it for an NPC we knew for all of ten minutes! This is like how all of the NPCs in Final Fantasy 14 talk about Louisoix all the time, despite the fact that he was in one cutscene where he immediately dies from being fantasy nuked by Bahamut.

: “And I don’t care if we might not succeed! That’s no reason to give up!”

: “That’s right.”

: “Of course, it won’t be easy getting all of the countries of the world to sign our agreement. But if there’s even a chance of success, I have to try. And I’ll need all of your help to do it.”

And he’ll cry if he doesn’t get it, and then Roland will be very upset because the isekai realm version of his son who doesn’t exist in the final version of the plot didn’t get to live his non-canon son’s dream of taking over the world!

And with that, we’re off to Hydropolis! And by that, I mean Goldpaw again because Ni no Kuni 2 will be damned if it’s going to let you walk off without going through a bunch of padding!

: “Indeed it has. It is good to see you well. Since you so kindly shared Doloran’s identity and the details of his wicked scheme, my men have been working tirelessly to apprehend him… without success, I am sorry to say.”

Well no shit, the guy can teleport. How are you going to keep a teleporting man locked up?

: “Even now I cannot believe that he stole - that I allowed him to steal my Kingsbond. Whether I was manipulated or not, what happened was unforgivable.”

If you ask me why this cutscene exists, my best guess is that it was added near the end of development, probably around the same time that the final scene in the library was, because the writers realized that Pugnacius was kind of an asshole and got off scot-free.

: “I read somewhere that the majority of the taxes generated by Lady Luck are intended to help the poor. Is this true?”

I’d like to point you to the update directly above this one, where Roland reads about Goldpaw. I did not skip any of the text boxes for that segment. Nowhere does it mention this.

: “It is. And in my weakness, I allowed her noble purpose to be corrupted… but enough about my woes. How may I assist you?”

: “We came to ask you to join your kingdom with ours in the name of peace.”

: “All of the great nations agreeing on something? And something as momentous as this? The chances of such a plan succeeding are remote…”

: “But Goldpaw will stand beside you in your endeavor. After all, there would be no Goldpaw if not for you.”

: “That’s wonderful!”

: “Indeed. We must hope that Lady Luck agrees.”

Yep, he’s going there.

: “Are you kidding me?!”

: “I am not. In Goldpaw, all decisions are entrusted to fate, as you well know.”

So yeah, we’re going through this cutscene for… what is this, the sixth time now?

Lady Luck is the smartest person in the entire room.

: “The world is in danger. We stand together or fall apart. Goldpaw must join you.”

So yeah, the dice thing was a ruse the entire time. Why do they even have it then? Who the fuck knows.

Now it’s time for a cutscene we’re going to see three times in this game.

There’s one part of this cutscene I wasn’t able to capture, where it shows a mysterious green dragon next to Goldpaw’s kingmaker. You can sort of see part of it in the corner.

So yeah, we’ve got another step to go before we reach Hydropolis.

Fuck off!

: “Yes, I have Roland to thank for that. And Boddly.”

No, Pugnacius signed it because he had his heart torn out by a guy in a stupid-ass snake costume.

Dude, he’s like ten years old! Plus he’s a catboy, and there is no such thing as a straight catboy. Not even Rule 34 has come up with a straight catboy. They just don’t exist.

Yep, he’s gay.

Anyway, that guy has fucked off. Now what?

Hey, this is just a Legacy of Kain ripoff! Those are the pillars of Nosgoth!

You know, it’s real disappointing they didn’t get Tony Jay to voice Doloran.

Well, shit. Next time, we’re off to Capstan-upon-Hull. We also fight another superboss and basically triple Batu’s attack power.

[Timrod]

Update 26: Broken Gear Progression

Capstan is a good distance south of Goldpaw, so we’re going to have to walk.

The mountain pass separating Goldpaw and Capstan is pretty nondescript, and also full of enemies that are about our level. We don’t give a single fuck about them, but since they aggro I had to fight off a couple.

We also run into a new enemy type: fire incarnates. These have a truckload of HP compared to the wind ones in Cloudcoil Canyon, and also are virtually impossible to kill without using Evan’s water spell. If they’re not killed after a few minutes, they teleport away.

There’s an entire area off to the side of Capstan, which is going to be our destination soon enough. That dragon is level 50 and is pretty difficult even for an end-game party to handle.

Capstan itself is in an area surrounded by high plateaus that we can’t reach on foot. I wonder why that could be? Anyway, near the town is a tainted monster that we absolutely want to kill right now.

Yvan is a wyvern who acts pretty much like every other wyvern except-

Whoops, I forgot to turn the difficulty down and got oneshotted.

Anyway, Yvan is a wyvern who behaves like every other wyvern we’ve fought, except that he does about ten times the damage they do. A single hit from him on normal does about 350 damage to Roland.

Most of the time, he’s going to be on the ground swinging his axes around like a dumb asshole.

And just like the others, he’ll start flying, which means we need jump attacks or ranged to knock him to the ground. Fortunately, Yvan’s defense is really low.

He also has a divebomb that does a load of damage.

While the fight itself wasn’t terribly difficult, I did have to revive Tani and Batu once each - this is because the AI tends to stand around and try to shoot it, which leads to them taking some pretty major hits. Everyone gets a free levelup, and…

We get ourselves a bitchin’ hammer. How bitchin’, you ask?

It has over twice the attack rating the second-best hammer we have has. That’s how good it is. We won’t find a replacement for this hammer for a long, long time.

We could go into Capstan, but there’s a couple more superbosses I want to take down first. Tani has been hurting for a good weapon for some time now, and I think it’s time we got her one.

Near the exit from Cloudcoil Canyon is this area, which has a cave across a gap. I actually wound up doing this much too late in the game when I played the first time for the reward to be useful, but now’s the perfect time to do it.

To get there, you have to stand right here and mash the action button until you cast Bridge. There’s no prompt for it.

This makes a bridge so we can get across and kick this thing’s ass with Batu’s hammer.

Normally I’d advise against fighting any lightning-based flying monsters with a hammer, but a hammer’s what we’ve got.

This is Stormigan. Compared to Yvan, he’s a total pushover.

Stormigan spends the entire fight flying around, which allows Batu to jump and hit him for massive fucking damage.

His only attack is a charged projectile, which can be completely dodged by just standing behind him.

Evan and Batu level up, but more importantly…

We get a spear for Tani that doubles her attack power. Tani now has a higher attack rating than Roland does. Don’t worry - we’ll get Roland a good weapon soon… but we need a boat first.

I also went back and murdered Googah because fuck that piece of shit. It is completely identical to the other slime superboss we fought, only without the fire element. Batu’s hammer made short work of it, and everyone got another level-up.

Oh, and one more.

Right near Niall’s forest is this area, hidden to the side at the start of the bridges that lead to Niall’s tree. It’s basically a procedurally-generated maze that isn’t actually procedurally generated.

At the end is this fucker. We’re actually higher level than it is, so it’s clobbering time.

I couldn’t tell you what the actual strategy is here, because I had Batu charge up a hammer spin and knocked it unconcious, then beat it to a pulp in about ten seconds. We got about 3/4 of a level off it.

Welcome to Capstan-upon-Hull. It’s a largely unused area, with only a handful of later-game sidequests that revolve around crafting.

There are only a few NPCs here, including an item shop and an inn.

This is Wright, the shipbuilder.

: “Really? Has something happened?”

Sounds like free EXP! Let’s go kick that thing’s ass!

Making sure to grab the trip door on the way out, we can go destroy not only the story boss, but also another tainted monster.

Right near the shrine is another fairy-type tainted monster. With our party levelled and geared the way they are, we’ve essentially broken the game.

Lily is one of the easiest tainted monsters in the game. She sits perfectly still and shoots water balls directly in front of herself, so Batu just gets behind and shoves his foot straight up her ass.

Follow up with a charged hammer spin, and Lily is out of commission for quite some time, allowing Batu and Tani to beat the crap out of it.

I sacrified Batu to show off the only other attack Lily has: a charge forward that will probably instakill whoever it touches. Again, just sticking to her back will stop her from doing any kind of damage.

Not only does everyone in the active party get another level-up, we also get a pair of sandals that are almost as good as that armor Roland got earlier.

Combined with some drops from the common enemies in this area, we’ve gotten a pretty substantial power boost. If there were any other tainted monsters we could reach right now, you bet I’d be murdering them too.

At the end of the beach area is the shrine.

Gee, that sure looks like a boss arena. Good thing I never took the game off normal mode after doing the tainted monsters. Get ready for the dumbest possible logical conclusion ever.

Oh man, I remember this from Nioh. It’s one of those Joru-Gumo things, the half-woman, half-spider youkai. Turns out all you have to do is spam katana slashes on its spider bits and…

: “Umm… some kind of coccoon or egg or something?”

Where’s Bushido Bill when you need him?

: “W-what was that?”

: “Oh my gosh, there’s someone inside it!”

Yeah uh, bad news, that dude is probably liquefying by now.

: “Ye mean to say there’s people in ‘em? Every one o’ the blessed things?”

So… it’s a giant spider or a joru-gumo, right?

Nope! It’s a fucking squid! This makes about as much sense as uniting an entire country by force to end civil wars.

The Jelly Queen is a boss that’s more of an annoyance than an actual challenge, especially with our tainted monster equips.

Batu opens up with his new ranged skill, which launches an explosive arrow that knocks off about 500 damage.

The boss doesn’t move apart from jumping and turning…

And occasionally stopping to fire a fucking laser at people. These lasers do maybe 10 damage to Roland, but they do knock him over.

So yes, clearly this laser squid spun all those webs. Makes perfect sense… unlike Devious Vacuum, who is always funny and charming and capable of saying things that make sense. She’s pretty much the opposite of this trash game. Just trust me, the guy who is LPing a trash anime JRPG.

It also has a spinning multi-laser attack that can be avoided either by being far enough away from it or from being right up against it the way Roland is here.

Finally, it has a charge attack, which is super goddamn easy to avoid. The AI rushes in anyway.

The resulting explosion does minor damage, but also hits Tani and Batu with confusion.

Confusion lasts all of… I don’t know, two seconds? It mostly just makes the AI useless for a couple of seconds and that’s about it.

A few seconds later and the jelly queen dies.

For our efforts, we get a second bone mail that is just slightly worse than the one Roland has.

: “Is everybody safe? Mr. Wright was awfully worried about you all.”

Right. Capstan. Actually, it’s been over an hour, so I should probably go grab our stuff in kingdom management mode.

Back at Evermore, we find our third silver nugget for Fai Do, as well as enough KG to start researching the next tier of medicines for the general store (which we’ll want so we can continue our tainted monster hunts). Let’s just head back to Goldpaw quick and…

Holy shit is it ever sidequest grinding time. We want to do these ASAP because we’re currently making way more KG than we can hold and almost all of our buildings are currently locked behind kingdom level 2.

First, we hand in the silver to Fai Do. The armor he gives us is trash, just like he is.

Next up is this quest, to find Evan’s old tutor from Ding Dong Dell. Clearly she’s an idiot given how dumb Evan is, but we absolutely need her for kingdom level 3. Why, you ask?

Look at her ability. The Institute of Innovation is a building we can’t have until kingdom level 2, but it reduces the cost of all buildings across the board and also reduces the time it takes to do research.

Hetty is in Niall’s forest about to be eaten by wolves.

One Flatliner from Roland later and they’re all dead. Quest complete.

There’s a couple of other sidequests (including one that was clearly one of the initial sidequests that the writers came up with that they later removed when they decided Roland’s son wasn’t going to be a plot point) that I did to hit Kingdom Level 2, but I’ll show those off in the next update. For now…

Back in Evermore, Nu Bi and Fai Do now have sidequests available that award a decent amount of KG. There’s an entire chain for each of them - Nu Bi will want to see weapons of a certain quality (you can upgrade your existing weapons in the armory once you reach a high enough level but it’s never worth it) and Fai Do will do the same but for armor.

Nu Bi’s quest here is either a total pain in the ass that requires a ton of crafting materials or a breeze based on RNG. Thankfully, we found a rarity 5 hybrid bow on the way to the spider-squid, so that one gets completed. Fai Do’s quest can actually be completed… with the armor he gave us for recruiting him.

This brought the treasury to a whopping 15,000 KG… but we’re still short a bunch of people. So, what do we do?

After visiting Capstan for the first time, this guy shows up in all of the major cities. This guy is “Swift Solutions”, which is essentially an MMO-style turn in system. He has randomly-generated quests that usually ask for crafting items or specific weapons and award “tokens of gratitude” in return.

You can then spend the tokens to buy perfectly willing and not at all coerced by what is clearly a system of human traffickers citizens for Evermore carte blanche.

I got all of these except Fitch, who doesn’t really matter. There are two recruits we ABSOLUTELY WANT here: Yung Mein and Chi Pi.

Yung Mein has the first available spear unit for skirmish mode, and thus is invaluable for a couple of skirmishes we’ll need to do coming up (apart from one I had foolishly already done before this).

Chi Pi also has a military unit, but more importantly boosts Institute of Innovation.

Spiffing Smithing is an important skill, but there’s a ton of recruits with it.

Finally, it’s time.

Hell yeah, motherfucker. We absolutely, positively want to build the Institute of Innovation first. There’s only… one small problem.

To get it, we need Aranella Square.

Aranella Square is 25,000KG. We have 11,000 left over after upgrading to level 2. At this stage, since we’re now making close to 8,000KG an hour, the best thing to do is just leave the game running in the background until we can afford it.

I also upgraded the General Store, which is an absolute must for tainted monster hunting.

Doing this gives us a 10% discount on all items, and also makes Gerel the first place we can buy Three-Leafed Soreaway. Since we can only carry a limited amount of each healing item type into battle, this gives us a significantly more powerful healing option.

Next time, after I’ve burned myself out on Smash, we’ll grind grind grind grind grind until we’ve got that goddamn institute.

[Timrod]

Update 28: Sexual Innuendo

I’m going to skip the majority of the remaining open sidequests, mostly because they’re the kind of thing where your brain goes on autopilot after a few of them. This one, however, is different. Unlike the other ones, this is a sidequest that gives us nothing but an alternate outfit for Roland.

The “vicious monster” is a down-statted version of the level 50 dragons we saw near the shrine last update. In fact, we’re so overpowered right now that this thing went down before I even had a chance to take screenshots.

Seriously, this was one attack from Batu. Not even a crit, just a regular physical attack.

: “Hm? Is something wrong?”

: “Oh no, it’s just… I was thinking about when they told us what happened… you got ever so angry, Roland. I’ve never seen you like that before. You’re usually so calm and collected. What happened?”

What happened was that Roland realized the isekai kingdom had better guns than he did.

And then he became president and had them murdered by the CIA.

: “What?! You were bullied, Roland?”

: “Sure. I was a pretty small kid, so there was no way I could fight them off. Whatever they did to me, I had to take it.”

: “I was coming home from school crying every day, and my mom got worried. That was the worst part - I didn’t mind the bullying, but I hated seeing her like that.”

I have a feeling that this sidequest was originally part of the main story, back when the writers were still going with the “Evan is Roland’s isekai son” thing. The developers probably had already done it before the writers decided to go with the mess we actually got, and didn’t want to throw perfectly good code out so they just stuck it in as a sidequest.

: “So when I heard that lady say what she did… I guess it got to me pretty bad. Sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten carried away like that.”

So there you have it, the only time Roland will ever mention his son.

Our reward… is a really dumb looking samurai outfit for Roland. I equipped it immediately.

The other sidequests in Goldpaw, in case you were wondering, were purely for non-recruiting purposes. One rewards a cookbook for the kitchen (useless) and the other allows you to take on a tainted monster for some trash loot.

There was one quest I picked up in Evermore to go fight the Goldpaw army in a skirmish for 4200KG. I took this one mostly because it features Evan talking to himself.

All that aside, our skirmish army is now around level 12-13. There are only a handful of skirmish sidequests that actually recruit people, so we’re probably good for a while.

I also took the liberty of upgrading the coffers in kingdom management. We’re making over 10,000 an hour now and will probably have both Aranella Square and the Institute by the time I’m done with this update.

Anyway, back in Capstan, we get sent to yet another filler quest.

: “Hard-wearing wood, hmm? We’d better go speak to Niall.”

: “I think I know what ye might be after. Reckon ye could do a lot worse than an Ironbough tree or ten. They grow over in the Hard Woods.”

: “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go and get some!”

: “Aye, that ye could laddie, that ye could. But you’ll not be wantin’ to go strollin’ in there unprepared, believe me.”

Yeah, the “hard woods” sounds like it needs some lube.

: “And there’s no other way of getting to these ironbough trees other than going through this thing?”

Niall then gives us a bottle of plant killer. Geez, what is this guy into?

Right across from Niall’s tree is… a giant pair of balls.

The balls are inert.

What follows is an area that is almost identical to (but a bit shorter than) the one we went through to get to the dice factory. The only real difference is that we have our first dark-element enemies, which are just a recolor of the fairy enemies we’ve been fighting since Cloudcoil Canyon. I honestly couldn’t get a single screenshot of their attacks, because between Batu’s overpowered hammer and Tani’s new spear, they were dying in seconds even on Extreme.

There’s also a few of these mushroom spots that we’ve seen before.

At the top is a spot that I can only really describe as a bootleg copy of the Elder’s Recess from Monster Hunter World. There’s also a trip door and a save point, though we have absolutely no reason to ever come back here.

Uh-oh. Sounds like someone ordered a stupid repeat bossfight!

Zagg is somehow an easier, lightning-element version of Thogg, the boss we fought solo as Evan several chapters ago. Unlike Thogg, he has… no real attacks to speak of early on. He’ll sort of stumble around trying to punch people, but that’s about it.

Once he’s lost about a fifth of his health, Zagg will run up to the tree stumps and uh… do absolutely nothing. Seriously, you’d expect that he’d throw things or call down lightning or something, but instead he just sits there and occasionally jumps between stumps.

He’ll do this for a good… probably twenty seconds before deciding to charge up and bellyflop back into the arena. This not only is extremely easy to avoid, but also provides a huge opening to damage him.

Eventually, he performs a further ripoff of Monster Hunter by copying Kirin’s three-pronged lightning strike attack, only with way more time in between when the indicators show up and when the attack actually hits.

To make things even easier, the lightning doesn’t hit all at once - it starts at the spots closest to Zagg and works its way out.

One spinning hammer special from Batu later, and Zagg is dead.

Now, we could go warp right back to Capstan… but what’s this?

Back over by Niall’s tree, one of his underlings has a sidequest for us.

Muriel is pretty useless, and we’re still a pretty long way from kingdom level 3, so we’re going to backburner this for just a bit.

The reason for that is that we can get a load of KG right now by doing a skirmish battle. This skirmish is particularly noteworthy because it’s level 20 and located right next to Evermore. In fact, this was the one I used to grind my army up from level 6 or so when I played this the first time.

No surprise, it’s that guy who we tried to murder in order to steal his land.

I won’t bother showing this one off mostly because the site is being extremely temperamental about accepting my screenshots of skirmish mode, but it’s good to know about if you want to get ahead in kingdom management. 4200KG is almost a third of what we make an hour.

With the money from that quest, we’re able to immediately build Aranella Square. This is the key to getting your influence points up, and more importantly getting that institute so we can lower the costs on future upgrades. For comparison, upgrading Aranella Square to level 2 is 120,000 KG.

Even with a single capacity upgrade, we’re still making more than we can hold an hour. Aranella Square accounts for roughly 40% of our income right now.

While we wait for more money to build that goddamn institute, let’s head to the Jumblewoods and save Muriel. The Jumblewoods is actually a special location of sorts.

Muriel won’t come with us until we save her dipshit animal.

Now, Batu can clearly see that there are two forks in the road, and the quest arrow is pointing to the one on the right. However, if we go the other way…

We run into… oh god. Evan, close your eyes.

So yes, this is uh… “Mr. Higglesworth”, who is not at all a flasher and did not by any means arrive in the Jumblewoods in a windowless van.

I mean, he says he’s a higgledy. Checks out.

Mr. Higglesworth will uh… offer us candy for ten pebbles. Pebbles are an incredibly common drop both from gathering points on the map as well as from the mining camps in Evermore. Batu, you should uh, probably take Tani and leave.

His candies give minor boosts to certain stats, and are generally worth it if you have a ton of pebbles to offload. Eventually, we’ll have tons of useless citizens to send to the gulags, so we’ll have a bunch.

Muriel’s llapaca is on the other side of the map, surrounded by enemies that are too low-level to want to fight us.

In the time it took me to to do that, we made enough KG to get the institute. Not only is it worth a fair chunk of change per hour (1200 or so) but it also gets us the single best research item in the game.

1200 KG for a 20% discount on all buildings and upgrades. Considering that Aranella Square costs 120,000 to level up, this saves us more on that alone than it costs to do the research. This is why you ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY want to make sure you have Chi Pi and Henny if you don’t already.

So yeah, we’re now raking in almost 19,000 KG an hour. The most efficient thing to do is save that income until the institute finishes its research. By the way, good luck figuring any of this out without having played the game before. Our next step will be to grind influence until we can afford to upgrade the institute, which at level 2 or 3 (I forget which) offers us a second cheap research item that reduces the time and cost of all research.

By the way, while working on this update, the first paid DLC for this game launched. It’s $10 for a single procedurally generated dungeon. The boss at the end is a copy-paste of the Black Knight from the beginning of the game. It also has “voiced cutscenes that delve into each character’s past” as if we’d want to know more about these dipshits.

Enough about that shit though, let’s get on with this trainwreck of a game.

You know, I figured there was enough innuendo in this chapter already, but I guess not.

I like that Boy Sampson is actively trying to make Batu’s life harder, and that Roland can’t even be bothered to help at all.

We then get our new boat… after a cutscene that warps us to Evermore. There’s more to it than this, but I’m skipping a lot of it because it’s not really important.

Also, Ketch joins us. Ketch is borderline useless. His only skill is operating the boat workshop, which gets superseded immediately after we leave Hydropolis.

: “It’s a nation built on the ocean, where merfolk and humans live side by side. And it’s ruled over by a queen named Nerea.”

You know, they had that in Monster Girl Quest. It was one of the least body-horror centric parts of the game, though it had a lot of copy-pasted art assets. Strangely, it also had no plot holes, which Hydropolis has a FUCKLOAD of. I wish I could be LPing Monster Girl Quest right now.

: “As for the food, I hear the fish is very good this time of year.”

Roland reveals his secret vore fetish.

We now have our first vehicle: the boat. The trick to the boat (which the game never mentions in the tutorial for it) is that you can hold down shift to make it go faster.

Instead of going right to Hydropolis though, we’re going to head upriver. Just north of Evermore is a waterway that eventually dumps you out here, at the Dugout.

Going straight down the middle path leads us to another tainted monster.

At this point, all I had to do was have Batu charge up his hammer spin and just let loose.

Whammity is a bog-standard whamster with a club. Easily knocked down, low defense.

Everyone but Tani gets a levelup… and Roland gets a sword that is only slightly better than a random drop I got somewhere and forgot about. The nice part though is that it has confusion on it, and a very high chance of inflicting it. Confusion works better on enemies than it does on the party, so we’ll definitely get some use out of it.

Next time, we’ll head to Hydropolis.

[CommanderKeene]

Wow, an RPG where confusion isn’t useless in the player’s hands? I guess this game had to get something right.

[Timrod]

Update 29: A Blatant Draken-NieR Ripoff

Before we leave Evermore, I dicked around for a couple of minutes to build up some KG. Why, you ask? So I could upgrade the Institute to level 2 and start its second research project… which reduces research costs by 20%.

Basically, from here on out, if there’s ever a question as to what we’re upgrading in kingdom management mode, the answer is probably the institute.

Wow, an RPG where confusion isn’t useless in the player’s hands? I guess this game had to get something right.

You’re damn right it’s not useless. Confusion isn’t really what you’d think - it’s really a stun effect. Allow me to demonstrate how good it is by fighting a particularly annoying tainted monster with it.

Right near Capstan, on an island that blocks us from reaching the other side of the world by boat, is this fucker. Notice how it is surrounded by level 50+ dragons. We want to avoid those.

Quilla is a giant hedgehound whose primary means of attack is being fucking annoying.

It spends most of its time either dashing or jumping, and moves quickly enough that Batu has trouble keeping up with it.

However, with Roland’s new sword, Quilla gets stunned on practically every other hit. This allows Batu to use some charged specials that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to hit with.

Batu makes it eat dirt, and then as soon as it gets up…

That’s right, Roland stunlocks its ass to death, giving everyone about half a level-up.

As a reward, we get a gun for Roland that has freeze on it. While we have a pistol that does slightly more damage, this one will turn Roland into a stunlock machine when combined with his sword.

That tainted monster is the last one we can reach before the Hydropolis area, so let’s press onward. On the sea, every monster shows up as a blob. There’s nothing new here per se - the enemies are all recolors of ones we’ve already fought.

There’s a water-element skeleplasm, a water-element goo, and a water-element fairy enemy… and that’s about it. By the way, I should mention that Roland’s newfound ability to stunlock shit also applies to his special attacks - that means we can open with a Flatliner and potentially confuse several enemies (you can see one of the enemies in the front has it here).

As we near the middle of the ocean, this giant coral area that is blatantly not a Nausicaa ripoff appears.

We can’t land on any of the corals, so we’re forced to go to a nearby beach.

There’s a trip door right there that we can grab, which is good because by this point the coffers in kingdom management mode were almost full and I had to go empty them.

First, we need to go up these corals. There’s a few tainted monsters here - neither of them offer anything great - and a Dreamer’s Maze.

The first tainted monster is in a clearing just after starting the climb. It’s a whamster.

Grimpopo is level 37, which puts him significantly above our level 33-34 party. Fortunately, he’s extremely vulnerable to confusion and gets knocked down with ANY special attack even if it’s not charged. Strategy here is to go for a flatliner, hit him a few times, and then flatliner as he gets back up.

You’ll want to do this as his only real attack is charging an explosive arrow with an insane AOE that does a truckload of damage.

As our reward, everyone levels up and Batu gets his own means of stunlocking shit to death. I should mention that I used some of the money in kingdom management to build the training ground, which is another thing you’ll probably want to build sooner rather than later.

You can probably guess why.

A bit further up and we find the third dreamer’s maze inside this shrine, which also houses a tainted monster. On the way, we also encounter a new enemy.

Meet the Stellar Jelly. It’s the regular enemy version of the spider-squid we fought near Capstan. It attacks in more or less the same ways the boss did, but its jump has a shockwave and it has a flying headbutt.

The maze is to the south, while the tainted monster is to the east.

Yeah, it’s another one of these fucks. Thankfully, the water-element slimes don’t seem to harden as often as the other types. Other than that, it’s exactly the same as the ones we’ve fought before.

The reward isn’t even good - it turns all of Roland’s attacks to water element. Using this in a land of monsters that are immune to water makes about as much sense as this game’s plot.

Even further up is this cave, which is used for I think a sidequest later on, but there’s one thing inside I do want to show off, because I didn’t figure this shit out until I looked it up near the end of my first run.

See that green thing in the back? That’s a “lost spirit”. They’re supposed to be a source of lore, but most of them don’t have anything important to say. In fact, they won’t talk to us AT ALL right now.

To speak to them, we first need to upgrade the spellworks to level 2. 4000 KG is pocket change at this point (we’re making almost 30k an hour). We also need Hau Ling, who is a citizen I picked up in Goldpaw during that last sidequest run. Hau Ling’s quest is extremely straightforward: you run around talking to people in town and find out he has a guy impersonating him, then he joins you.

The spell itself costs another 5400, and that’s with our 20% discount. That’s a much steeper price to pay, but I’ll do it for two reasons: one, we need it for a single sidequest after we finish Hydropolis. Two, I never bothered talking to any of the spirits in my first run.

I also built the Kingmaker’s Cathedral, which is largely useless except for its notable cost - influence ratio and the fact that you need it to unlock one of the major influence generators later on. The ONLY reason I’m showing this off…

Innuendo!

One other thing in this quick kingdom management roundup: once we reached kingdom level 2, we unlocked the ability to build better versions of each resource-gathering building. The reason we want to do this is because some buildings later require us to level up our citizens, and the higher-level resource buildings give more EXP.

Hydropolis is just north-east of Makronos, the island we were just on. We didn’t actually need to go through Makronos, but it’s good that we did.

Welcome to Plotholia, where the risen corpse of Ni no Kuni 2’s plot goes to die, so that other fledgling game plots might feast on its remains and flourish. Pay no attention to the giant Eye of Sauron in the background.

: “It’s ever so pretty, and the weather is so lovely and warm and… ah!”

: “L-Lovely me, I’ve never been so seasick in all me days…”

I wonder what that could be about?

: “A pretty gift from back home an’ a few sweet words’ll do the job nicely enough, I’d wager.”

Meanwhile, in a blatant ripoff of Drakengard 3…

So, remember Four and Decadus? Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly who these two are, albeit more family-friendly.

: “Without you, our nation would be nothing, Your Majesty. I above all others know this.”

There’s something I want you to think about with this conversation, and it’s this: think about how fucking weird it is for two characters to be explaining something they both already know to each other. What’s worse is that we’ll totally get this explained to us a second time IMMEDIATELY AFTER THIS CUTSCENE.

: “If they did, then… what, exactly?”

: “Then your life would be in danger. Malign forces would plot your downfall. This is the way of power.”

: “So I put myself forward. If the people see me… deal with me… they can only become discontented with me. Can only wish to harm me.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Pugnacius had the whole purple corruption aura when we first saw him, and clearly Nerea is going to have the same thing. Wrong. Even then, it wasn’t like Doloran was possessing him.

: “Not without reason, your majesty. But if it would prolong your life for a single second, that would be reason enough. Such a death would bring honor on me. Upon my entire line.”

What really bothers me about Nerea is not only that she’s a blatant Intoner ripoff, but also that she doesn’t have a fucking nose. She’s supposed to be human, by the way. Evan is the only furry-human hybrid in the entire world.

: “You are too kind, your majesty.”

: “Well? You wished to see me?”

: “Yes, your majesty. A ship has arrived from a foreign land. It is a vessel unknown to us, but most likely it brings travelers… or perhaps traders.”

: “Is that so? Well, whoever they are, they must obey the word of the law. There will be no exceptions. Is that understood?”

We get about maybe three steps into the city before another cutscene.

Now we know what the Eye of Sauron is for.

: “We’ve traveled here from Evermore, a new country in the Heartlands. We’d like to request an audience with Queen Nerea.”

I mean, we can’t have Zero killing her off before we get there.

: “Something tells me news of our illustrious kingdom hasn’t spread too far yet.”

: “Well, it will have soon! They’ll be singin’ our praises from the rooftops next time we’re here!”

This next part will be… pretty familiar to you if you’ve played NieR or read The Dark Id’s excellent LP of it.

Well damn, illegal to blast this fucker in the face to make him shut up.

…what? There’s no actual indication of how high we can go, but we can go everywhere in Hydropolis (as far as I know) without any issues so it has no real gameplay impact.

I, uh… you know… it seems like you’d probably have thrown half your population into the dungeons at that point.

If you had any hope of the people in Hydropolis being any less stupid than the people in Goldpaw, yeah no.

: “Wait, wait, what, what did you say? That’s crazy!”

Even Roland, the president who probably had the CIA take his childhood bullies to a blacksite and execute them, thinks this is nuts.

Next time, we’ll explore Hydropolis, do a mandatory “sidequest”, and probably start heading toward the second dungeon.

By the end of this update (I left the game running so I could get that spirit spell done) we have a pretty significant chunk of income. Because I’ve grinded kingdom management so hard, we’re well beyond where I was at this point in my first playthrough. I also took the liberty of upgrading the Institute (again) and getting a thing that makes research faster.

I also went back to that spirit (ignore the active quest) and talked to it.

Riveting stuff that is absolutely worth the 5400KG.

[Timrod]

Update 30: The Priests of the Temples of Syrinx

As soon as that cutscene ends, we’re given a new mission - go to each corner of the city and talk to people. If you’ve played Final Fantasy 14, you’ll recognize this as the quest each major city has to find all of the warp points in it.

Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the giant fucking eyeball that is visible from anywhere in the city.

Wait a second. Ocean kingdom, has a unique marriage-related item… we’re in what Super Mario Odyssey might’ve been had it been a shitty anime JRPG.

I kind of wonder if at one point this area was intended to be a homage to the Japanese folktale of Momotaro, which involves an underwater palace full of dragons.

: “No, but we sure heard a lot about this Leander character.”

: “Ye’re thinkin’ the swab might be our way in?”

: “Interesting. Yeah, if we can get to him, we might be able to use him to get one step closer to the queen.”

: “But how would we get to him?”

: “…Ooh, I know! Me, me, ask me! Actually… I’ll fill you in on the details in a bit. Let’s get us one of those thingumybobs first, shall we?”

: “What?”

: “Yeah, exactly! Let’s try somewhere that sells accessories and all that. Reckon they might have one by there…”

Now we get a mandatory delivery sidequest. That soreaway sweet is something we’re going to want for later tainted monster fights - it’s NNK2’s equivalent of an X-Potion. We can buy them from Gerel’s store much later on… after we reach kingdom level 3.

The three deliveries are located in almost exactly the same spots as the people we talked to before.

This guy tells us the origin of the “no high places” rule, which actually does prohibit us from going into one particular area.

With that done, we get ourselves a wedding ring… and a cutscene that seems like something that’d be in Lupin III if Lupin was ten years old and a complete idiot.

In case you’re curious, this shot is ripped straight from Lupin III Part 2 - specifically the end credits.

Evan is now in a disco outfit for some reason.

Also Boy Sampson is now a film director despite there being no mention of film existing in the isekai realm.

I wish I had recorded this because he walks like a robot and it’s kinda hilarious.

I feel like this should be an early 2000s-era Youtube Poop.

Man, it’d fucking rock if instead of going the way everyone thinks it is, Evan just fucking decks her off the bridge. That’s what you get for trying to ruin Princess Mononoke.

: “Oh, get on with it, will you? It’s just make-believe!”

: “Y-Yes! O-Of course. I um… ahem… I…”

Man, he REALLY has to shit.

Now, there’s something I want you to keep in mind about this scene for later. Neither Evan nor Tani are from Hydropolis, and there’s no clear reason they’d want to settle down in Hydropolis. This will become part of a bigger plot hole when we find out why it is that they have the law against love.

Oh shit, it’s the anime police! Hide the h-manga!

Yeah, why won’t the police crack down on anime crimes? This used to be a nice neighborhood!

Thankfully, these horrible criminals are promptly taken to anime jail.

: “Jail indeed, my boy! Which means my plan went off without a hitch!”

: “Hmm… if that be so, where’s this Leander swab then?”

: “What business do you have with the Archon?”

: “Are… are you Leander?”

Well, that’s what his dialog box title says.

: “I am.”

: “Yay! We finally got to meet him!”

: “My apologies. We were forced to use a little… artifice to gain your attention.”

: “…is that so? And why would you go to such lengths? Who are you?”

: “I am Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum, King of Evermore. And I’ve come to ask you to sign a treaty.”

: “If you speak of a union, I am afraid I must refuse. If it were up to me, yes, but Her Majesty has ordered that you be brought before her.”

So here we are, in the royal palace of Queen Dipshit of Plotholia.

: “We cannot, Your Majesty. To enter into a union would be… I must advise against it.”

I like how in his previous line, he says he’d do it, and now he’s saying he wouldn’t. I don’t know if this is just a bad translation or if Leander is just an idiot.

: “Silence, Leander. I have but one condition…”

: “Really?”

: “Yes. Leander will join you.”

: “So… where exactly is this labyrinth?”

: “It lies in the sea south-east of Hydropolis.”

With that, Leander joins the party as a “temporary” member (hint: there are no actual temporary party members in this game).

Like Tani, Leander uses spears as his primary weapon. His ranged weapon type is magic wands, which would eliminate the overlap of ranged weapons between Tani and Batu if we were to get rid of Tani.

Tani’s stats, for comparison.

I couldn’t get a screen of Leander’s skills due to a glitch introduced with the new DLC that causes the game to not let you change equipment or view skills, but he’s more magic-based than Tani. He has a few elemental ranged attacks like Evan does, which would make him invaluable against goo-type enemies.

At this point, I’ll be taking votes on a potential party reshuffle while I wait for Level 5 to make the game playable again. Post your vote in the thread.

[CommanderKeene]

Well, Evan needs to be the one to kill the monster, and Leander needs to bear witness. That’s how this works, right? As for the last party member, I dunno, let’s not split Roland and his isekai not-son up.

[Timrod]

Update 31: EcoQuest II - The Search for Cetus

I’m probably only getting one vote, so we’re going with Evan, Roland, and Leander. This won’t change too much apart from the fact that since Evan and Roland have weapon overlaps, we’ll have to stick with one or the other. As it turns out, the way around the menu bug is simply pressing G, which is never mentioned anywhere in the game. Great job on that, Level 5.

Here’s a rundown of Leander’s skills. He’s pretty much useless skill-wise right now because his only magic attack is water-based. I’ll probably replace him with Batu (or our final party member) once we finish the upcoming dungeon. His second skill boosts his magic damage, while his first and third skill are physical attacks with his spear.

Before we head out to fight Cetus, I went ahead and did some kingdom management stuff - most notably increasing the coffer size to 30,000 so I don’t have to collect as often. We’re still well over the limit we can hold per hour though.

I also finished off everything we can currently build in Aranella Square, which includes a bar for Batu. He’ll actually ask you for it if you talk to him on the kingdom map.

He even makes a Leafbook post about how much he loves beer. You just know that Evan is going to pass a law that lowers the drinking age to 10, and Roland will realize how bad of an idea letting a kid run a kingdom is.

One thing I didn’t show is the big whirlpool right outside of Hydropolis. This will become relevant… shortly.

Cetus is on an island that is so far away from Hydropolis that you can’t even see the city from it. This island is only ever used for this one segment, and a couple of sidequests later on. We’ve explored about 3/5 of the map at this point.

So, are we in for a boss fight? A dungeon? NOPE! It’s skirmish time!

I don’t know if the site will let me post the skirmish mode screenshots since I’ve had a bit of an issue doing that recently. As you can see, I grinded the army up a fair bit doing that one sidequest for KG earlier. We want to take two hammers to counter their spears, a sword to counter their hammers, and a spear because swords are weak to spears and we don’t want two units of swords.

This fight is against units of ghostly mer-people who decided to build palisades and shit for no reason. Because our hammers are so high-level and because hammers are strong against spears, we destroy them without even taking a hit.

The real threat comes from their monster units, which are a class of enemy called “fangfish”. We won’t actually fight these in regular battle format for a while, and they only appear in a handful of optional skirmishes.

Fangfish have the annoying ability to burrow underground, where they stay for a few seconds before popping up and instakilling any units caught in their radius. This can be quite annoying if they’re the last enemy you need to kill to progress, or if your military might is low because even if you give the order to sprint away as soon as you see it dive down, your units won’t likely be fast enough to run away in time.

Just beyond the end of the skirmish is this area, which looks like a boss arena (because it is).

: “Fearsome though he may be, Cetus is no threat to Hydropolis. So why risk all our lives on this errand?”

: “There must have been an important reason for the queen to have sent you, Leander.”

Meet Cetus. He’s a reskinned version of the fangfish. I didn’t fight too many fangfish in my first playthrough so I don’t remember if their moveset is the same.

Just like in skirmish mode, Cetus likes to burrow underground.

He’ll then come out at an angle and try to bite people. On normal, this does piddling damage.

When he goes below half health, Cetus will start tossing around kelp pods when he burrows. This is a total joke of an attack - the green ones do no damage and drop craft items when broken, and the red ones take forever to explode for maybe 150 damage. You’d basically have to be trying to get hit by this.

Batu and Evan both level up, and we’re more or less done with this area.

: “Which means we can get Hydropolis to sign the declaration now, right?”

: “Assuming the queen is as good as her word, yes.”

It looks like Evan’s head has come detached from his neck in that pose. It’s definitely one of the ways in which the anime-shading really doesn’t work well.

: “The Ocean’s Aether… so this is what her majesty meant for us to retrieve. Could she really intend to…”

: “Is everything alright, Leander?”

: “…Yes. Very much so. Let us return to the palace.”

I’ve got twenty bucks this is going to be one of those “You will NEVER… believe… what happened” situations. I want to make a JRPG someday where the main character leaves his idyllic fantasy town for a day and comes back to some guy shouting that, only instead of the village being on fire and everyone being dead somebody had a baby or something.

So remember when I said that we had explored about 3/4 of the map? Right now, we’re on that purple island in the bottom-right corner. Thankfully, we can just trip door back to Hydropolis and actually land right on the trigger for the next cutscene.

Who ever could have seen this coming?

: “The Abyss? But…”

: “The vortex in front of the entrance was placed by the queen herself, and only she could have removed it.”

: “So she’s gone into the abyss for some reason?”

Probably to escape this godawful plot.

: “It would seem so. But for what? What reason could she possibly have for making the perilous journey to the king’s cradle?”

: “I don’t like the sound of this. Could this be Doloran’s doing?”

Evan is slowly devolving into Kazuhira Miller. Next thing you know he’ll be waving his fist and blaming Cipher for everything.

Anyway, we can now venture out where that giant whirlpool used to be.

Welcome to the Abyss. This dungeon is godawful, but it’s not nearly as bad as the third one - mostly because we only have to go through it once.

The first thing about this dungeon that is really fucking weird is that Leander points out that we can destroy the red corals. There are, as far as I know, only two of these and they happen to be right here. You can just walk around them.

But the real reason this dungeon sucks is because of these things. These are “puffer whelks”.

Leander then gives us a spell that we’ll only ever use in this one dungeon. What does it do, you ask?

It makes the water into a grind rail. Strangely enough, it’s possible to grind upward to get back to the exit… though since trip doors exist, there’s no reason to do it.

Now I know what you might be asking: did I take screenshots of Roland and Leander grinding? The answer is yes, yes I did.

Anyway, this dungeon is basically a clusterfuck, because once you start activating the whelks there’s no easy way to see which one leads where. Fortunately, the game gives a quest marker at the ones you’ll need to activate to progress.

Leander looks like he has a promising career in early 90s rap ahead of him.

The rest of this dungeon is basically “go to quest marker, fight a single group of enemies, activate whelk, repeat” for about 15 minutes or so.

We do get a few armor upgrades and sword for Evan that has better stats than Roland’s, but without the confusion. By the way, I did get hit with confusion from one of the Stellar Jellies on purpose and it inverts your movement controls.

The weird part of this is that there are whamsters in here somehow, despite the fact that until about ten minutes ago this dungeon was sealed with an impassable whirlpool. The goo enemies and squids I can understand, but how the fuck did the hamsters get in?

Eventually, we reach the bottom. There’s a trip door and a save point in case you need to return to Evermore (I did to spend KG) and then…

A grind into the void. Next time, we’ll fight Leviathan of Final Fantasy 14 fame.

[Timrod]

Update 32: Squall Is Dead

At the bottom of the grind void is, of course, a grassy field with a giant shell on it. Makes total sense, with all that sunlight at the bottom of the ocean.

I think a question a lot of you probably have is “Was Nerea possessed the entire time?” and actually, as far as I understand it the answer is no - Doloran possessed her only after we left to kill Cetus.

Wait a second… haven’t I seen this somewhere before?

Somehow, it’s less threatening when you’re using bubbles instead of giant ice spears. Honestly, what is that even going to do, other than maybe get people wet?

Leander, never one for a water balloon fight, immediately puts up a Cutscene Barrier to block the completely non-threatening projectiles. This is not an ability he learns in actual combat at any point.

Top ten anime betrayals. Also holy SHIT is she smug.

No shit, dumbass! She knows and that’s why she launched a bunch of water your way!

: “Please, you must come to your senses!”

She calls him daddy now.

: “Your queen is gone. Henceforth, she shall be my puppet. Nothing more.”

Gotta love Roland with the “Don’t talk to me or my isekai realm not-son ever again” pose.

: “Hm! Tell me - why do you even care? Her people think little of her. She is powerless. Weak. Unloved.”

: “Hydropolis would be nothing without its queen.”

: “And why is that?”

: “Even if I were inclined to tell you, you would not understand.”

We’ll learn the reason right after this bossfight. It’s extremely simple, and also extremely stupid.

Doloran is loving this shit.

: “I surrender to none but her majesty!”

I actually did this update once before, then the site lost it. I’m too lazy to look it up again, so go youtube the Leviathan theme from FF14 (the female vocals one is the best version) and play it here because it is infinitely better than the generic orchestral shit NNK2 gives us.

Oh look, it’s Discount Leviathan! Did someone order up a stupid MMO bossfight, because I think someone ordered up a stupid MMO bossfight.

Discount Leviathan is a boss that is slightly more complex than Longfang was, but still manages to be more tedious than anything.

He starts off the fight in air, which of course makes perfect sense for a creature with no visible means of flight.

As you can see, he has three weak spots: two on his middle set of fins and one on his chest. We have no way of hitting these while he’s flying: even Roland’s gun isn’t accurate enough.

Thankfully, when he lands, Discount Leviathan’s weak spots shift to his upper set of arms for no good reason whatsoever.

Discount Leviathan then takes a page straight out of Vaal Hazak’s playbook and starts firing a laser in a 45-degree or so arc in front of him. Since you’re naturally going to go for the glowing weak spots, the chances of ever being hit by this are slim to none.

After a few hits, the weak spot on this side breaks, and Discount Leviathan takes off again. This is the one spot that’s actually difficult on Extreme: he has a MASSIVE hitbox when taking off that does enough contact damage to oneshot the entire party - something that’s more likely to happen than not given how the AI behaves.

The cycle then repeats on the other side: he fires his laser, you run to the side and slice the weakpoint in half, and then…

A weak point on his head opens up. I didn’t show it off (mostly because it’s very hard to see when you’re hitting something with it) but Evan learned a new skill that is essentially a multi-hit combo done in a large area in front of him without him moving much.

Said skill also has a power rating of 120, which is about triple what Roland’s Flatliner or Circle Cut have.

After one good hit, the boss decides he’s had enough of this shit and puts up a barrier over his health bar while at the same time filling the area with ice spears.

The spears break in a few hits each, and drop higmakers the same way the meteors in Longfang’s fight did.

You can activate the higmakers with as few as three gathered, but the more you have, the faster this fight goes. Discount Leviathan spends this time flying around and shooting very slow-moving ice projectiles that will never hit you.

Activating the higmakers gets us… a minisentry from Team Fortress 2, only flying.

The minisentry has a targeting reticule, and will constantly fire pellets at whatever you’re aiming at with no input needed. All we need to do is hit the boss, which quickly depletes his barrier.

The next part is a little harder: we then have to hit the weak spots on his fins and chest with the sentry, which requires leading your shots a bit. You might also notice that the blue liquid in the sentry is at about half. The more higmakers you collect, the longer the sentry lasts.

Busting the weak points forces the boss to land again, and allows Evan to use his new ability to hit for tons of damage again.

Repeating this for a second cycle sends Discount Leviathan back to the bargain bin from whence he came, and levels everyone up.

: “I am fine, Leander. Cease your fussing.”

: “Not one, but two Kingmakers have fallen at your hand. Impressive. But it matters little. I have what I came for.”

: “It is no more than she deserves. Without her, our nation would be nothing.”

: “So you keep saying. But what do you mean by that, exactly?”

: “…Very well. Perhaps it is time you knew the truth.”

So yeah, if you thought Evan was a dipshit for building his kingdom for dipshits in a barren land with no resources or that Goldpaw was the dumbest the isekai realm could possibly get, think again.

: “It is her gaze that protects us. Her magic, channeled through the great, watchful power of the Eye, that turns back time to save us again and again…”

: “But there is one great problem with this method of survival.”

Remember when I said Hydropolis was a giant plot hole? Now you see why.

: “So that’s what all the laws were about…”

: “One more life or one less, and it all comes tumblin’ down, eh?”

Now, what I want to know is, what was the logic behind throwing Evan in the dungeon? If they have to reset time every so often, wouldn’t there be the distinct possibility that Evan’s existence fucks everything up if they left him there?

Oh yeah, everyone in Hydropolis is also 300-plus years old and yet somehow no one there realizes what’s going on. Clearly, the time warp doesn’t erase people’s memories because Leander knows about it, but you’d think after people had celebrated 299 birthdays they’d start realizing something was up. Then again, there was that episode of Space Dandy where they got caught in a groundhog day loop for like six years and didn’t realize it.

: “You too would be short of temper. You too would vent your frustrations on those around you. But all that she has done, she has done for us. All that she has sacrificed, she sacrificed for her beloved subjects.”

: “Y-your majesty! You are unharmed, I hope!”

: “You did. You knew all along.”

: “…Yes. And so I vowed to serve you, no matter what.”

: “…I see.”

: “But the cracks are beginning to show at last. I fear that Hydropolis does not have long…”

What cracks? What fucking cracks? This is another one of those tell don’t show bits where the writers just kind of hoped people wouldn’t ask too many questions. Just like all those wars going on outside that are never shown at any point in the game or mentioned by anyone.

: “Indeed. And that is why we need the Aether.”

There’s also no explanation for why they couldn’t just, I dunno, load everyone onto boats and move somewhere that isn’t on top of an active volcano.

: “… it is?”

: “Do you remember the promise we made together as children, Leander?”

I would be amazed if he did, given that it was probably over three hundred years ago.

Oh boy, a sequence that has absolutely fuck-all to do with anything! I watched a playthrough of The Quiet Man recently and I think even that game had a narrative that was more together than this shit.

Here’s my theory about this. Someone at Level 5 had probably just replayed Final Fantasy 8 and when asked what the fuck they should do to fill the other half of the game, they just went “Uh, I dunno, FF8?”

: “How could I forget? It is my most cherished memory, and the reason I gave my life to you in service.”

My other theory is that Ifrit or Shiva or something slipped into the isekai realm and equipped themselves to everyone as a guardian force and that’s why literally everyone in Ni no Kuni 2 has brain problems.

: “But that was not what I asked of you. I asked you to become my husband. My king.”

I’d also like to point out that if Leander marries her (he will), that makes our party consist of a child-king, a president, a pirate king, and the king of all dipshits. Clearly a party of all royalty can relate to the struggles of the common man. Let them eat cake and all that.

: “But the law of Hydropolis forbids it. I could not become king. I cannot.”

: “Do not pretend, Leander. You know. You know better than any man of this realm. Whosoever possesses the Aether possesses the right to rule. It was the first king of Hydropolis who brought it back with him, and with it claimed his crown.”

: “But your majesty… I cannot.”

: “Why? For the sake of the kingdom? If we are joined in marriage, then all must end. Time cannot repeat itself. Hydropolis must fade.”

: “Yes, and I cannot allow that to happen.”

: “Let go, Leander.”

: “It should have happened long ago… but I could not let it. I had to have one last day by your side. Again, and again…”

And IF it brings your destruction? Don’t you already know that’s going to happen?

: “… Your mind is made up then?”

: “It is. So come take your place by my side. Be my husband… my king.”

: “…I will.”

And with that, we abandon any illusion that we were at any point going to get rid of Leander.

We also get to see that stupid cutscene again… next time, when we proceed to the latter half of this game. That’s right, we’re halfway done with this trash fire.

[CommanderKeene]

He starts off the fight in air, which of course makes perfect sense for a creature with no visible means of flight.

Asian dragons don’t even pay lip service to the laws of physics, unlike their Western cousins.

And with that, we abandon any illusion that we were at any point going to get rid of Leander.

The game just straight-up abandons all pretense, just like that? He doesn’t even have any real reason to keep traveling with Evan and co. Are we just supposed to believe that he’s that enamored with the whole “treaty” business? Is an explanation forthcoming? This brings up more questions than the goddamned stable time loop business!

[Timrod]

Update 33: Sidequest Grinding IV… but also progress.

Before we proceed on with the plot, there’s some kingdom management stuff we need to do. We can’t technically leave the throne room in Hydropolis, so this takes place immediately after the cutscene, but it’s stuff we should get cleared up now.

After the cutscene, the first thing I did was spend the obscene amount of KG we had piled up during our visit to Hydropolis. I put Leander (who is now a citizen) in the now maxed-out Hubble Bubblery trying to get the higher-level healing items. As it turns out, we can’t do that yet. However, notice that Gerel, Floyd, and Tani all have blue arrows next to their portraits.

This is part of a mechanic that NNK2 never tells you a damn thing about, which is that all of your citizens are capable of levelling up. There’s three levels - “Beginner”, “Veteran”, and “Master”. Most citizens start at Beginner, but a few (Batu and a few others) start at Veteran instead.

I mentioned this in an earlier update, back when kingdom management mode was first introduced. Each character has to be manually levelled up - so if you’re like me the first time I played this, you might not realize the option even exists until far too late into the game. There are certain research items that require specific people to be at Master level… and once a character reaches the EXP they need to rank up, they stop gaining EXP altogether until you manually level them up.

To do this, we have to go into the “Citizens” menu…

See that tiny “Alt: Level Up” prompt in the corner that is easily missable if you’re not looking for it?

Pressing it levels the character up, giving them a slight stat boost for kingdom management mode.

There’s also this, which unlocks when the Hubble Bubblery is maxed out. We’re probably going to want this, so I went ahead and got it.

We also need to build the Shipyard. It’s not particularly expensive, but we need it to progress the plot. I actually wondered the first time I played through the game why I even bothered building it.

There’s also a whole list of new people at Swift Solutions, and assuming we want to 100% the game (I’m not going to but whatever) there are two people we absolutely want right now over all others. This guy, Hansel, is one of them.

He’s sitting in a tree in the Forest of Niall. By himself, he’s not important - what IS important is his skill.

His skill allows us to build the gardens directly outside of Boy Sampson’s cathedral, which is a major influence point generator. How major, you ask?

This major. The gardens are worth almost a million influence by themselves.

The other person we want, ESPECIALLY if I had any plans to buy the shitty new DLC (I don’t), is this guy. He was part of the wedding ring quest we did earlier, and has a unique weaponsmithing skill. If we were planning on doing any crafting in the end-game (which is about the only time that becomes viable), we need to have this guy and one other at master level. By the way, notice how he’s an armorer but he has weaponsmithing skills.

I did go ahead and get all of the other people available through Swift Solutions, but the rest are pretty inconsequential: they all have skills that someone else already has.

The only other quests that open up are this asshole, who wants three specific items found in the Hydropolis area.

The first thing he wants is a venomous fish, which we can thankfully find at the fish market on the other side of town.

Next up is a piece of poison coral, which is commonly found all over Makronos (the coral island) and in the Abyss. We had a couple of pieces lying around, but could buy more from Gerel because one of the things I took the liberty of doing is upgrading the general store again.

This asshole wants a lot of shit for being a useless fishmonger. We can buy the seaweed he’s looking for from Gerel.

Finally, we’ve got Nereus. He is one of those single-purpose villagers: his only purpose is manning the Symphonium, which allows us to change the music that plays in Evermore.

The “witch” is actually a generic fairy monster inside that cave where that spirit was from a few updates ago. As it turns out, Nereus kinda promised to marry her and is also kind of an asshole.

In practice, she’s just like every other tainted fairy we’ve fought so far.

Wow, it’s fucking nothing! All-Be-Gones are the equivalent of an Esuna in Final Fantasy. Since status effects never really matter, they’re useless.

And done.

Back about an hour ago, in Hydropolis’s throne room, we get to witness a cutscene that is a carbon copy of the one we already saw in Goldpaw.

Come to think of it, what was the point of allying with a country that is about to be blown to shit by a volcano?

This time I captured the weird astral wheel thing with the strange dragon on it. Funny how Longfang is on there, but Boy Sampson isn’t.

So vital that I stuck him in the Hubble Bubblery where he’ll probably stay forever unless we decide to keep doing kingdom management past kingdom level 3.

If you’re wondering why I keep saying that blue boy here is a plot ruiner, this is about half of it. Think about why he’d know what Evan looks like when he’s older and you realize pretty quickly that he’s like every other blue-haired anime in existence.

Well, glad we’re done with that shit. Now, let’s go progress with the gamepla-

Meet Zark Muckerberg, CEO of Facebookistan.

Zark is already possessed, which is kind of impressive given that Facebookistan is halfway across the globe from Hydropolis.

I have to say though that basing a kingdom that is ostensibly supposed to be benevolent on Facebook was a goddamn mistake. By the time this game came out, the whole story about Facebook allowing the Russians to post propaganda and buy political ads in other countries was already pretty well known.

In fact, I think the week the first paid DLC came out was the week that the press found out that Facebook was (and likely still is) selling people’s private messages to China and Russia.

His kingsbond is already fraying and… wait, what? Why does this dipshit have one of those?

For being a dick, Leander gets to work under Roland. The guy who runs a kingdom that technically explodes every day working under the guy who got New York nuked is like a totem pole of terrible leadership.

: “Well, there are only two major nations left, correct? Broadleaf and Ding Dong Dell… which means we’re going to Broadleaf, I guess.”

: “But isn’t Broadleaf on the other side of that great big oceanic rift?”

: “An oceanic rift?”

: “You have not heard of it? Interesting…”

Considering that everyone else seems to know that Roland is from Earth, it’s strange that Leander doesn’t know.

We actually heard a little about this from that ghost: the rift was created by the Horned One when Allegoria exploded.

: “Well, we ain’t flyin’. Our craft may be rare beauties, but they ain’t made for distances o’ that nature.”

: “I didn’t take you for a comedian, Leander.”

: “Can it really be the case that you have never seen a boat jump before? Forgive me. It is an everyday sight in Hydropolis. I had thought it must be so elsewhere, but it seems I was mistaken.”

: “And you can make our ship jump too, Leander?”

Yeah, all uh… one of them. This is why we built the shipyard, by the way. If we hadn’t, Leander would stop us here and make us build it.

Instead, we get a buffalo shot of Ketch as he informs us the work is already done. We’ll head over there in the next update. Normally, we’d want to suspend all sidequest grinding at this point until after we finish Broadleaf - but there is one more sidequest we need the boat for.

Back in Goldpaw is Bao Wao, who scams Evan out of 10,000 guilders for a pod of fake dice peas.

Tracking him down lets us hear his sob story, after which we get sent to a cave on the coast of Goldpaw to get the real “snake-eyed peas”.

The game tells you more or less right where they are - it’s a straight shot from the start of the cave.

Quest complete, and he gives us the ten thousand useless guilders back.

[Timrod]

Update 34: Zark “Rufus Shinra” Muckerberg Comes to Town

Now that we have our boat, there’s three ways we can take to get to Facebookistan. We want to take the most direct route, near the island where we fought Cetus.

Why, you ask? Because there are a ton of very high-level monsters in the ocean now, going up to (and past) level 50.

I tried fighting one of the tainted monsters, who is only like three levels above the party, and got wiped hard. From this point onward, the game’s difficulty shoots up pretty significantly - it’s still not all that hard, but the tainted monsters become a lot harder.

I managed to find an upgraded sword while exploring, though.

Past Cetus’s island, we run into an un-named desert island that has a couple of tainted monsters on it. We can’t reach any of them.

Then, we run into this. These wyverns are carbon copies of the boss wyvern we fought way back in Cloudcoil Canyon… only much smaller and thus less likely to miss their attacks.

Eventually, we reach Facebookistan - or at least, the irradiated wasteland that surrounds it.

This trip door is the only means we have of warping to the other side of the ravine, so we’re definitely going to want to take it.

As if to say “Welcome to Facebookistan, now get the fuck out” is a level 51 Spanglegoo, the next evolution in the Goo line of enemies. It is directly in our way.

With it are a few other recolors: we have brown hedgehounds and fairies, both of which behave like the ones we’ve seen before.

The problem is that Evan’s special attacks are really slow compared to Roland’s, and the enemies at this point are virtually immune to Roland’s confusion spam.

We also run into a new category of enemy: robots.

Robots are pretty tanky, but don’t have much in the way of attack variety. These ones just walk forward and swing their swords in a 180-degree arc in front of them. However, I was having so much trouble with these that I had to call in the big guns.

Roland gets Evan’s equipment. We also replace Evan with Batu because we need that damage and Batu is a lot tankier than Evan is.

With this party, the enemies around here go down much easier.

Broadleaf isn’t too far away from the wasteland, though it’s kind of a pain in the ass to get to. Those level 50 wyvern warlords are a common enemy around here as well.

I took a brief break upon entering Broadleaf to collect our kingdom management money, which I used to upgrade the spellworks. Remember those locked blue chests we saw in a couple of places? Spring Lock is what we use to open those. The other spell, Rejuvenate, is used to access a couple of tainted monsters we otherwise couldn’t. We want both of these… for reasons that won’t be immediately obvious since most of those blue chests are in hard to reach places.

Welcome to Broadleaf, where they have robots and fucking laser guns in an otherwise medieval isekai realm.

Say, does this remind you of say… Shinra HQ in Final Fantasy 7, which this entire area is a blatant ripoff of?

Upon leaving the cutscene, the first thing we want to do is grab the trip door here so we never have to walk through the wasteland again.

Broadleaf has kind of a confusing layout: there are stairs which you’d think would go between the major areas of the tower, but you actually need to take the elevator, which we can see just up the stairs there.

We can only go to two places right now, and Uptown is where we want to be.

There’s a trip door just outside the elevator exit that we want to grab so that we never have to use the elevator again. Unfortunately, the trip doors for Broadleaf are not labelled as to which part of the tower they’re in.

Through the park and up these stairs, we head for an extended cutscene… and our final (and the best) party member in the game.

Meet Bracken. Bracken is the final character we’re going to get for this game - we’ll get her right after this cutscene.

: “Alright. We’d better start by thanking everybody for coming.”

Clearly Evan is one of those child prodigy programmers, and the guy in the fur outfit with the bone necklace is an MBA.

: “Oh. We were rather hoping to go and meet with President Vector. What’s all this about, exactly?”

Zip Vector is the game’s name for Zark Muckerberg.

: “Ha! Meet with the President? I don’t think that’s about to happen.”

: “I’m Bracken. Bracken Meadows. I’m Chief Engineer here at Broadleaf Industries.”

: “I’m the one who gathered all these people here today. We’re going to try to make President Vector finally listen to what we have to say.”

What I like is that Bracken is explaining this shit in the way you would to a ten year old, which is actually appropriate given that Evan is ten years old (probably, I don’t think the game lists actual ages anywhere).

You know it’s Facebook because there’s a middle-aged guy dressed like a hipster.

: “He doesn’t care about anything except finishing the damn thing - not even his employees’ lives.”

: “Something like twenty people have already collapsed from overwork. These conditions… they’re unacceptable.”

Oh, right. You can’t hear it because this is a screenshot LP, but this scene is actually fully voiced, which is a rarity for this game. Also, everyone in Broadleaf speaks like an American, which means we’re probably in the Isekai United States.

: “Wh-what kind of leader would do such a thing?”

: “Hey Bracken! He’s back!”

: “Let’s do this!”

So, remember how I said we should backburner any sidequests we have left until after Facebookistan? We’re about to find out why that is.

What’s wrong with your face? What’s wrong with your faaaaaaace?

You know, this seems like the kind of thing Mark Zuckerberg would do.

We now have our new objective: hijack this asshole’s ride.

: “We’re ready when you are, Bracken. Just say the word.”

: “Thanks, Trey. Maybe now you’ll listen, Zip…”

The hipster army has descended.

Shout-out to that lady on the left side who has been blowing a gum bubble for the entire duration of this cutscene so far.

Strangely (or not), the subtitles here don’t actually match the voices - they just keep saying “We’re not slaves” over and over.

So, if this is reminding you at all of Rufus in FF7, be prepared for a total ripoff of the Junon Cannon scene.

I do like the detail that Bracken has a megaphone made of magic crystals or some shit.

I think this is honestly the best cutscene in this entire game, even though it is a COLOSSAL fucking ripoff.

And now, Zark summons… BOOTLEG ALEXANDER!

Their kingmaker’s design is a direct ripoff of Alexander, without even TRYING to look original. You can tell this is where the game starts to really fall apart, because unlike Goldpaw (where Pugnacius was just kind of an idiot) and Hydropolis (where Nerea had the Idiot Ball implanted directly into her body), Zark here is genuinely evil.

Again, this is absolutely something I think Mark Zuckerberg would do.

: “Finally decided to make an appearance, Mr. President?”

They’re straight-up shouting to each other across like half a mile of space.

: “I expected better of you, too! Have you forgotten what we said when we started out? We promised to make the world a better place, remember?”

What bothers me about this is that somehow, absolutely none of the technology here has leaked out into the otherwise-medieval isekai realm apart from the Leafbook tablet things.

: “You used to care about us! You used to be a leader people could trust!”

Lady, have you ever even seen Final Fantasy 7? Rufus is absolutely the villain up until Advent Children, which may or may not even be canon (hopefully not).

: “But that’s all gone! Now it’s progress or nothing, no matter the cost. When did you get so… broken?”

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s when the guy in the stupid-looking snake mask gave him the bad touch.

Speaking of which…

Zark really needs to learn how to dodge the Dark Hand. I mean really, who even gets hit by that?

Bootleg Alexander is loving this shit.

A bunch of shit starts exploding, but there’s no damage modelling so it makes you question how effective all those guns on Bootleg Alexander could possibly be.

Doloran is out of here, as usual.

So yes, its name is Bastion. Rule number one of game design: never use a name for a character that invokes a better game than yours. In this case I’m talking about Bastion the game. Fuck that Overwatch bullshit.

Zark starts firing the cannons on his airship…

Seriously, it seems like explosions in the isekai realm don’t do anything.

Giant assfuck lasers probably do, however.

Gotta love that smug look on a guy who just had a hand rammed through his chest.

Zark gets fucking owned, which is exactly what you’d expect to happen.

Bootleg Alexander, meanwhile, activates his cloaking device and presumably goes off to see if he can’t get back into Final Fantasy 14 somehow.

Next time, we’ll finish this cutscene and enter the worst dungeon in the game. I’m going to stop now so I can get another party vote, since Bracken is about to join immediately after this cutscene.

Bracken uses hammers and guns, but has the lowest HP of anyone: she has a grand total of 1116 despite the fact that she’s a good three levels over Roland and Batu.

The reason she’s the best party member is because she’s the only one with a healing ability. Since we’re limited on healing items and our only way to heal outside of that is via the higgledies, she’s going to be very useful for some later tainted monster fights. In fact, I’ll probably be using her for any tainted monster fights from here on out.

The question is, do we want her in the main battle party?

[CommanderKeene]

I do like the detail that Bracken has a megaphone made of magic crystals or some shit.

She looks incredibly bored in this shot. I know it’s just that you caught her mid-blink animation, but it looks like she’s just phoning the whole “protest” thing in and really doesn’t want to be there. “Yeah, give us back our lives, or whatever.”

The question is, do we want her in the main battle party?

Sure, why not. Replace Leander with her, since his plot arc seems to be over for now.

[Timrod]

Update 35: Facebook Was Never Good

: “Hey, you said you were here to see President Vector, right?”

: “Yes, that’s right. I am Evan, king of Evermore, a new kingdom in the Heartlands. We have come to ask President Vector to sign a pact with us and join our union of friendly nations.”

: “Wait, I think I heard about you guys - Goldpaw and Hydropolis already signed up, right?”

It seems like absolutely everyone gets news faster than Evan does.

: “And now you want us on board too, huh? Well, I guess I don’t need to tell you this, but now’s not exactly a good time…”

: “You can say that again! If he’s setting his kingmaker on his own people, imagine what he’d do to us!”

I dunno, I think having Leander and Tani die off wouldn’t be too bad.

: “He didn’t used to be like that. Bracken and me - we founded this whole company with him. We know him better than anybody.”

: “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was all Doloran’s doing.”

[Insert three lines of Evan explaining shit we already know here]

: “Based on what we have seen and heard, it would seem that the President has been quite seriously infected by Doloran’s evil influence.”

: “Queen Nerea, being highly skilled in the magical arts, was capable of resisting the darkness enough that restoring her to her senses was a relatively simple task.”

Oh boy we’re in Kingdom Hearts now. I can’t wait for Evan’s nobody, Avxne, to come out of the woodwork and try to murder him. I think we knew all along that Doloran was a Xehanort.

: “You said that you and President Vector used to be close, didn’t you Bracken?”

She said this literally so close that if your monitor resolution is high enough (1440p should do it) you can probably see her saying it from here.

: “Is there a way you could remind him of those times, perhaps?”

This part kind of makes no sense to me. Evan is now suddenly an expert on how to remove Doloran’s purple crap, even though the first person he “saved” was Pugnacius who no one knew was being possessed until after Doloran showed up, and Nerea who largely saved herself.

: “Try to snap him out of it by jogging his memory, you mean? Yeah, that could work.”

: “Well, this right here might be a good place to begin - it’s where the three of us started out all those years ago.”

: “We used to do all our work in the room right through there. It’s still just how we left it.”

We’re then tasked with another “find the shiny” mission. You can see it as soon as you’re given control again. It’s under the stool to the left of Boy Sampson.

: “What’s a memolith?”

: “Well, you take a crystal and run a tiny magical current through it to record visual data. Then you can run a light beam through it, focus it with a prism lens, and watch the data back whenever you’d like.”

: “By which I mean it’s… it’s a device you can use to record memories. Let’s play it back and see what we have here…”

: “That was… wow… that was from way back when we first started out.”

: “Perfect! Then we can use it to jog the president’s memory, right?”

: “I’d say so. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. Sure would be good to have a couple more just to be sure, though…”

: “Are there any other memoliths from back then, Bracken?”

: “Hmm… Zip was kinda hot on destroying sensitive data. If it wasn’t essential to the running of the company, it all got wiped.”

I’d like to take a moment and point out how little sense this makes. Zark decides to preserve the office they worked in as a reminder to himself… but then goes and destroys all of the recordings he made in a world where he is the only person who even has a computer. It’s kind of nonsensical.

: “I took a look in the database just now, and it seems like four memoliths are unaccounted for. Which means there may be another three out there somewhere.”

We need to head for the factory, which is absolutely the worst and most annoying dungeon in the game.

Welcome to the Factory Floors, the only place more visually annoying than The Abyss.

Bracken has a way of tracking the memoliths, but…

Before we do anything, I’m going to post the map of the factory floor and explain why this place sucks ass.

You’ll notice the giant blue thing in the middle. This first floor only has one of these, which makes it by far the easiest one to traverse. We can rotate the blue thing to control which path we go on, only it resets every time we leave the factory. Why is this a big deal, you ask? Because there are at least five sidequests that require us to go back through here.

We also run into some new enemies. BL-Ast Bots are effectively clones of Roland, using only a rifle to perform ranged attacks, which is weird because at no point do we ever get a rifle. BL-Ade bots are clones of Roland with a sword, and Bl-Udgeon Bots are clones of Batu with a hammer. They’re not hard to defeat, but they’re REALLY tanky.

Thankfully, we’ve got Bracken. For just 2 MP, she can put down a healing field that heals enough damage that we can pretty much tank hits with reckless abandon on normal difficulty. One of these fields will last usually for an entire regular combat.

After a few combats against enemies we’ve fought before (Spanglegoos and fairies) we reach the first furnace. These have to be turned on to activate the consoles that let us move those colored platforms.

Bracken teaches Evan the Kindle spell, which allows him to light the furnaces.

With the console active, we can now switch the position of the blue platform.

So, why is this area such a dick? Well, let me explain sort of the way Ni no Kuni 2’s navigation works (for the most part).

Normally in this game, you can’t fall off of anything - usually the game has very strictly placed invisible walls. Now, you might notice something in the distance: the blue platform has changed positions, which stops us from going back the way we came to get to the archives.

See that cog directly across from Bracken?

You can fall from there to reach the bottom. There IS a no-falling route to get to the blue panel, where you use a console on the other side of it to turn it, but falling like this is actually REQUIRED later on. I got stuck a few rooms ahead of this one on my first playthrough because I had no fucking idea that you could do this.

For our efforts, we get a pair of boots that I immediately equipped to Bracken.

Once we fall, we can simply walk across the blue platform and reach the archives.

Finding the memolith in this room isn’t exactly a challenge. Also, I’m pretty sure Bracken’s last line is a plot hole - they didn’t move the old offices over here because the old offices are still on the other side of the city where we started in the first place! Just the way you left them! You gave an entire speech on this!

Oh boy, a crowdfunding reference.

The memoliths we’re going to find aren’t in chronological order, and don’t really make a lot of sense when taken together.

It also kind of bugs me that Zark and Bracken have barely aged, but Trey looks like he’s about fourty years older.

The Smartstick Lab is the biggest dick of a location in this game. Why, you ask? Because there are no trip doors leading to it, and it is the focus of all of those sidequests that require us to come back here later.

First up though, we have a new wyvern reskin exclusive to the factory.

So yeah, no trip door up here, where there definitely should’ve been one.

This is the layout for the Smartstick Lab. If we needed to come back here, we’d have to do the puzzle in the first area and this one to get there.

This floor is a bit different in that there’s two furnaces: a blue one and a red one. The blue one is easy to reach - we simply walk across the platforms in their original position.

From there, we turn the blue platforms to reach the red furnace. What I should mention as well is that the enemies here are on a pretty short respawn timer, so unless you know what you’re doing in advance you’re probably going to run into repops.

We then need to turn the red switch, so that we can reach the other blue control panel on the far side of the map.

Post-Magfest update:

I didn’t get a picture of the signature but I signed it “Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum”. Let’s dunk on Ni no Kuni 2.

Anyway, like I was saying, we have to go to the far end to use that blue control panel, as opposed to using the one closer to the red furnace. If we were to do that…

We’d run into a higglestone - one that wants an item we can’t possibly have yet. There’s an achievement for finding all of the higglestones, and I pity anyone who tries because there’s two of them in the factory.

There’s a save point just beyond the puzzle, which I only really used because of how hard the enemies here hit.

Once we head up the stairs, the Smartstick Lab is right there.

Surprisingly, the developers modelled the smartstick - which is really impressive because I don’t think it shows up anywhere in the game. There was the thing Zark had during the fight with Bootleg Alexander a few updates ago, but I went back and looked and it looks like that’s a different model altogether from all of the ones here.

: “We were a team back then… we all thought the same way… wanted the same thing…”

: “How did it all go so wrong?”

That about does it. Next time, we’ll go through the third (and final) puzzle.

[CommanderKeene]

I ran out of time to finish this before going off to Magfest, so I’ll post this as-is (so I don’t lose it) and finish it up when I get back.

Have fun! I’ve been to Magfest several times; unfortunately, I’m not going this year.

[Timrod]

Update 36: BU-llshit

Once we reach the third area of the factory, we’re almost immediately herded into a cutscene trigger.

Batu is the best character in this otherwise garbage game.

This map has a new contrivance: not only do we have the switching platforms like we did in the other two areas, we now also have platforms in that central cylinder area that change position when the switches are pressed. This is also the worst designed room in the goddamn game.

The first door switch is easily reached without lighting either the blue or red furnace. It’s a straight walk right there.

The blue furnace is just past the first door switch… and then we have to walk all the way around the room to get to the blue platform switch.

So as you can see, we can reach that second door switch… if we had the red platforms as well.

As if we didn’t need another reason to hate Zark, Bracken explains that this is how he tests his employees. I feel like if Hideo Kojima couldn’t get away with Quiet and the “she breathes through her skin” thing, Level 5 shouldn’t be able to get away with this shit.

The red furnace is on the right side of the room - with the blue platforms moved, there’s a tiny bridge between these two staircases that allows us to access it (you can see it in the screenshot before this one).

The red switch located nearby moves the red platforms so that we can now reach the other switches in the center area.

This spot right here is where I got stuck when I played this game the first time. Like I said in the last update, the game usually has invisible walls on every path to stop you falling off. You can actually complete the other two puzzles to get here without ever having to drop down. What you’re supposed to do is drop onto the blue platform… but since the game never lets you do this anywhere else, I didn’t expect they’d let you do it here.

Jumping down and across gets us to the second switch, which we saw earlier.

Oh, and here’s the other reason this is the worst room in the game. If you miss a jump, as I did here, you fall to the bottom level full of enemies.

I forgot to grab the third switch in a screenshot, but it’s in the middle across from the second one. You have to flip the red switch again and then walk across the red half-platform to the other side.

I think it’s a general rule of stage design that any area that has a bigass podium like that probably has a key item on it.

I have to wonder if that guy’s job is like, “chief fuckup officer” or something. CFUO.

: “There’s… there’s one more I want to show him.”

: “But I thought you said there were only four?”

: “There were four listed as missing in the database. This one’s… it’s more of a personal record.”

: “The Chief Engineer’s office is just up ahead. I’ll tell you more when we get there.”

Welcome to the only other warp point in this godforsaken shitpit of a dungeon. I took the time right away to go back and do some kingdom management stuff - remember, we’re making way more KG than we can hold in the collection bin and haven’t been able to warp without losing progress up until this point.

With the money, I upgraded the Institute to its maximum level and also did this research because really, most of our costs in this mode at this point are going to come from upgrades and research.

: “What’s on it, Bracken?”

: “Well, uh… I guess you could say it contains one of the most important memories of my whole life.”

: “…Anyway, with this and the others we should have more than enough to make Zip snap out of it. He’ll be in the reactor control room. It’s just upstairs. Come on!”

This looks like a boss arena, mostly because it is. See this blue panel back here? There’s at least one sidequest that asks us to look at this thing.

Oh shit. You know, I realized it’s kind of a plot hole that Bracken needed to bypass the security system in the first place given that she works here and all, but I actually have solid proof that Broadleaf was changed ENTIRELY during development of the game. I’ll get to it… a bit later.

Oh look, it’s one of those things from Bioshock. All we have to do is start quoting Karl Marx at it and it’ll go away.

This is one of the points I have that kind of proves how Broadleaf changed. We have two rather difficult (for the AI, at least) bossfights back-to-back, with this one being the first. I’m pretty sure that this was originally supposed to be a mid-boss fought way earlier in the dungeon, but then the developers changed it and decided not to just scrap the fight. The fact that they already had assets made for it kind of proves how mismanaged this game probably was in development.

Anyway, BL-Iterator is a fucking annoying bossfight that I have no idea how you’d do it on Extreme. It starts by spamming groups of three slash beam things that are pretty easy to dodge, though the AI for some reason doesn’t like dodging these. They’ll try to block instead, which is a losing proposition because these beams hit multiple times.

The boss also has an attack where it rolls up into a ball and then homes in on someone while dashing forward. It has to “rev up” for a few seconds, so you can use that to do damage and regain some MP, but you can’t knock it out of that state.

The real reason this boss is kinda bullshit is this attack. It’ll charge up in the center of the room. If you don’t have a zing attack handy (or a charged special) and knock it down immediately, it does a nigh-undodgeable screenspam attack.

Now, here’s the even worse part. Let’s say you decide to switch to Bracken and try to get a heal field down because even mashing the dodge button lost you about half of your HP during the screenspam attack. Notice how the boss is charging up again in the background. Bracken doesn’t have any attacks capable of knockdown, and neither Evan nor Roland’s AI apparently wanted to use their zing.

The boss then snaps to your position and unleashes a beam that hits for a good 600-someodd damage on normal difficulty. I’m not saying this is a hard boss by any means, because with the amount of healing items we have I was able to revive both Bracken and Evan as Roland and top off their HP, but it’s just kinda bullshit.

At about 40% HP, the BL-Iterator goes into rage mode. Most of its attacks remain the same, only now all of its projectiles are red and do more damage. The boss is also a bit faster.

Oh, and now instead of shooting ONE giant laser…

It shoots three. This is almost a guaranteed death if you don’t have the dodge timing down just right.

The BL-Iterator fight lasts several times longer than it had any right to. At least everyone gets a levelup.

And now we can take an elevator up to see Zark.

: “…Gah. Really?”

: “So you’re the intruders, huh? Makes sense, I guess. Who else could’ve gotten around my security measures but you, right, Bracken?”

: “President Vector, there’s something you need to see.”

: “Show him the memoliths, Bracken!”

: “Time for a trip down memory lane, Zip…”

At this point, the game plays the memolith cutscenes we already saw in the last update, so I’m not going to bother repeating them here.

: “There’s one last memory I want to show you.”

: “How about that, huh? A custom leg made just for you by the world’s greatest engineer - you’re gonna love it!”

: “This isn’t my leg! I want my leg! I want… my…”

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Zark is kind of an asshole. I mean, it’s pretty obvious she lost her leg because of him in the first place.

: “We’re engineers. We solve humanity’s problems.”

No, you solve practical problems. Problems like how do you stop that fucking scout from capturing the control point? Seriously Zark how have you not seen Team Fortress 2, it’s been around for over a decade.

: “I…”

: “We solve humanity’s problems, and we solve each other’s too, right? You lose a leg, I make you a new one. I lose a hand, well… I hope you’d do the same for me.”

: “Oh, Zip…”

: “But I would never do that. This leg… this leg is what gave me the courage to carry on - what got me where I am today.”

In a bad JRPG whose development could best be described as pure chaos and an utter disaster?

: “You were the best engineer, the best boss… the best friend anyone could have.”

: “You had a good heart. The best. You have to remember. You have to!”

: “I… I remember now… I remember everything. What… what have I done?!”

: “Zip? It’s you, isn’t it? The real you?”

: “Bracken, I’m… I’m so sorry. If it wasn’t for you I don’t think I would have remembered…”

This cutscene of the cog falling is like a full minute long and I don’t know why.

: “Damn it… if he reaches the reactor, he could trigger a total meltdown! If that happens, Broadleaf and everything around it will be gone in an instant.”

I wonder if Zark built a giant nuclear bomb into his headquarters because Doloran told him to, or if it’s just because he’s an idiot. If Hydropolis is any indication, it’s probably the latter.

: “What?! Then we have to stop him!”

: “You’ll have to find him first. He’s equipped with full optical camouflage. I can’t see him on any of my monitors, but judging by the patterns of interference, I’d say there’s a good chance he’s on top of the tower.”

: “The elevator will take us to the roof! Come on!”

Is he talking about the elevator, or the fact that this game exists?

: “Calm down, everybody! There must be a way!”

: “… I’ve got it.”

So many made-up words I thought this was a Tom Clancy novel.

Bravo Seven we need to scoot the goose, I repeat we need to scoot the goose, possibly with a side of fries. Alert ACRAP that we’re going to need a sitrep stat.

: “The reactor will go critical, and the core will fuse. In other words, we’ll wind up with the world’s most expensive hunk of junk. You sure about this, Zip? She’s your baby.”

: “It’s that or risk the lives of every single person in this country. You think I’d hesitate for even a second? I’m the Executive Director of this company and the leader of this nation. Nothing is more important than my people.”

One ass-pull later, and we have our stairway to a really, really shitty boss fight. Next time, we’ll fight Bootleg Alexander and witness Ni no Kuni 2 attempt to rip off Crash Bandicoot, bad camera angles and all.

[Timrod]

Update 37: Boy Sampson Becomes A Man

Now that we have a way to the roof, we can leave the elevator bot (who somehow survived this entire thing and is now useless because the only two floors he can take us to are destroyed) behind and head to our second bossfight.

Somebody order up a stupid-looking boss?

Naturally, Alejandro (shorthand for Bootleg Alexander) immediately sends us to his own private hellscape.

So, Alejandro. This boss is absolute hell for the AI - they simply can’t handle him. Really, there’s not much of a point to reviving anyone if they die, and I’ll show you why.

Right away, we can see the boss’s weak point. Simple, right?

Not really. Alejandro has a ton of health, and it takes a good minute of hitting his weak point (throwing in the occasional circle cut from Roland) to break it. Now, intrepid viewers might notice that the exhaust pipes on his underside are charging an attack…

This is his first AOE attack. The AI is typically okay at avoiding this one, because the boss doesn’t move while using it. However, they tend to run underneath him to attack (ignoring the weak point altogether) and get caught in it as the fight goes on.

Eventually, a second weak spot opens up on Alejandro’s chest. This one has significantly less armor, thus we can actually hit it for a decent amount of damage. This is where the AI starts really getting screwed up.

Once we take off about a quarter of his HP, the boss goes into rage mode.

In case you’ve been wondering “Where are the higmakers?” the answer is here, inside these flying turret things. The turrets work more or less just like the ones we used to take down Discount Leviathan, only with a far slower rate of fire.

The turrets come down so we can hit them, and Alejandro immediately starts spamming lightning bolts everywhere. These aren’t particularly hard to dodge, but you’re probably going to run into a few of them trying to bring the turrets down.

While you CAN still attack Alejandro in this stage, he has a fuckload of HP and no weak point. The AI, of course, will focus solely on him and ignore the turrets.

The turrets will continuously spawn even once you have enough higmakers to perform their special attack, but unlike Discount Leviathan’s fight, there’s no point to having more than the minimum which is something like 12.

These higmakers… do exactly what most of our existing ones do for a special and form cannons that hit for some 600 damage a shot.

Using the higmakers opens a weak point on the boss’s other leg, only…

I missed a dodge and the fire AOE almost oneshotted Roland.

And then the boss decided to use his other AOE attack, where he spews steam and rapidly spins to hit you. I had switched to Bracken to put a healing field down, and Roland immediately ran into the steam and died.

Bracken died shortly afterward from the AOE, but I somehow managed to get a frame-perfect menu just as Bracken died and was able to revive everyone.

The AI then proceeded to run right into the fire and a subsequent steam attack that killed both Roland and Evan before I could switch back.

The rest of the fight is basically just chasing the weak points on the legs until you finally break one, then hitting his chest for the kill.

Oh god dammit. Don’t tell me this fucker has a second-

Yep, he’s got a second form. Thankfully, the second form is mercifully short.

Your only goal here is to survive until the cutscene: Alejandro will use both of his AOEs and his lightning attack from phase one simultaneously, and the AI will probably die within seconds. He’s also completely invincible. Evan and Roland were both dead in the… twenty seconds or so it took for this to end?

Alejandro is lovin’ this shit.

And now… it’s time for Boy Sampson to become a man.

: “I dunno, mun, but we’d better get out by yur! Sharpish!”

: “No!”

I’m going to stop here for a brief aside. Remember how I have that theory about the game’s plot being changed multiple times during development?

In this cutscene, Evan’s voiceactor is noticeably… different. Normally, Evan’s voiceactor is a woman by the name of Claire Morgan - she had a bit part in Witcher 2 and oddly enough played Leo’s garbage son in A Way Out (shoutouts to Panzerskank and Kaubocks for their amazing LP of that game).

For this cutscene and the one immediately following it, Claire Morgan gets replaced with a different VA. It’s sort of hard to tell who it is, but in the next cutscene it becomes obvious that it’s the same VA who does the blue-haired plot ruiner in the between-chapter cutscenes. That VA is a man whose name I am not going to give you and that I ask you not to look up. The reason for this is that IMDB kind of gives away who the blue-haired boy is. This game is a shitpile, but I’m going to leave that particular revelation where it goes because it’s kind of what made me not finish the game the first time I played through it and a large part of why I decided to make this godforsaken LP in the first place.

The only explanation I can come up with for this that makes any sense is that the plot was changed after the developers had already gotten all of the art assets and voiceover work done, and for whatever reason Claire Morgan wasn’t available to record the new lines. My guess is that this had something to do with her being in A Way Out, which released the same week this game did. As far as I can tell, this kind of thing is highly unusual in game development, especially for a game with the budget Ni no Kuni 2 had behind it.

I’ll explain what I think was originally supposed to go here, but Evan (the catboy, not me) will explain that a bit in this cutscene.

: “Not now! I won’t run away! Not again… not ever!”

Behold! Deus ex plot bullshit!

Oh man, I can’t believe everyone died in a second nuclear explosion. This is pretty much the best way Ni no Kuni 2 could end and…

Boy Sampson just straight up became Shenron.

Unfortunately, we do not get to control Man Sampson… actually, let’s call him Horner Sampson. Instead, Horner simply grapples the boss while we get to play Crash Bandicoot.

As you can see, Alejandro’s new weak point is on top of his head. If Dark Souls 3 taught us anything, it’s that giant, dragon-like enemies can be easily murdered by doing a plunging attack into their skull. Zark makes another light staircase… only this one is made of those disappearing blocks from Megaman 2.

The first time up the staircase, Alejandro will try to hit you with lightning as you jump up. The lightning doesn’t hit the entire platform, so you can dodge it by being in one of the corners.

By the way, the camera angle is totally fixed and half the time you’re jumping at platforms you can’t see.

This is the part where this gimmick becomes shit. Half of these blocks randomly disappear with no clear logic as to which ones will do so. This means you’re probably going to fall down and have to climb all the way back up.

I fell off this thing a good three or four times trying to do this… including on this attempt.

A few jumps past that, you hit the end of the platforms and have to dive down to hit Alejandro in the face.

And with that, Alejandro is finally dead.

Oh, and Horner is back to being Boy Sampson again.

So, here’s where the plot was clearly changed. I’m pretty sure that Zark was originally supposed to die, and then at the last second someone at Level 5 decided to completely reverse that decision. It kind of makes no sense given that up to this point, he’s basically a stock Ghibli villain: he hates the environment (as evidenced by Broadleaf being in the middle of a polluted wasteland) and loves war (as evidenced by him owning a fucking gunship and a giant killer Final Fantasy ripoff) and in a Ghibli film that’s pretty much a recipe for death… you know, given how literally every Ghibli movie has the whole pro-environment, anti-war messaging going on.

If I had to guess, the suits at Level 5 probably figured that killing Zark off would be too depressing for a Ghibli film (and I’ve seen quotes from Hayao Miyazaki that sort of insinuiate he hates depressing films) but at the same time there’s like thirty Miyazaki quotes about films having to have a message.

So I want to ask all of my readers: what do you think the message of this game even is? Because if there is one, I sure as hell have no idea what it is. Don’t make a bad game? Don’t hire the janitor who cleaned one of the buildings Studio Ghibli worked in and expect quality animation? Don’t be a complete fucking idiot who gets New York nuked?

Wait I know, it’s “Never do bossfights on Extreme.” That’s gotta be it.

: “So you were able to regain your original form, even if only for a short time.”

: “There’s no way I would have been able to stop the core from melting down, that’s for sure.”

: “Well, all’s well that ends well. But if you didn’t scare me with that talk about the kingdom being wiped out…”

It’s really strange that this is Tani saying this and that Bracken has only one line in this entire cutscene. Bracken has already pretty much passed the point of being plot relevant.

: “I’m no president. I don’t deserve to run this country.”

At least he can admit it, unlike a certain other president in the room. Anyway, we’re about to run into a lot of shit we’ve already seen before, so I’ll make it brief.

: “What’s that? Listen, everybody!”

Zark gets off scot-free for probably working several dozen people to death.

Well, at least we know now why the dragon was on there.

This cutscene is where it becomes immediately obvious that they changed Evan’s voiceactor. I’m pretty sure that in the original scene, Bracken was probably supposed to take over after Zark dies.

: “Yes, and if we join forces with the other kingdoms, we may just stand a chance.”

: “I see. And of the big players, there’s only Ding Dong Dell left now. That could be… difficult.”

: “But I can tell by your face that you’re not going to back down. Luckily, we’ll be right behind you. You have my word, as president of Broadleaf.”

: “You’ll be going with our new friends, Bracken?”

Hell yeah she will. It’s good too, because I think the plot void has already finished devouring Tani and is now dragging Leander into its gaping maw.

In this scene, Evan’s voiceactor is back to the usual one.

: “Yes! It was such a surprise! You would never have guessed from looking at him.”

: “It does, yes. President Vector is back to his old self. I’m sure he’ll put his people first from now on.”

Now I’m sure you’re asking yourself, “Timrod, why are you doing this scene in its entirety? I thought you hated Bluehair McPlotruiner and wanted to get him off screen as quickly as possible.”

: “I only hope that I can forge such firm friendships. I’ve a long way to go before people look up to me like they do Zip though. I’m nothing like him…”

I saw this line when I first played through the game and I’m like “Holy shit. This game is going to do a complete 180 in the next chapter. It’s going to finally have a fucking plot.”

I mean, can you even imagine how good of a plot that would be? Everyone close to Evan technically has a reason for betraying him: Batu is a pirate who was ready to murder a child in cold blood and could easily be out to take Evermore for himself. Roland is an ex-president who got his own people nuked and is shown to have never given a single fuck about the people he got killed - he could easily go the route the humans took in Disgaea 1 and try to take over the isekai realm for himself. Bracken works for a guy who is clearly an evil bastard and could easily be a manchurian candidate.

Maybe if we keep believing, this game will finally grow a plot. We’ll find out… at some point. We still have at least 10 sidequests to grind, after all.

[Timrod]

Update 38: My God, Is That A Plot?!

What’s this shit? This guy looks a lot like Munokhoi (one of our early recruits from the pirate base) but it’s actually not him.

Is that… is this a fucking plot? Those look an awful lot like bullets on the table, and that thing next to them looks like some kind of fantasy grenade. I don’t get why there’s a candy there but okay.

Oh fuck! Roland is selling our shit out! I fucking called it!

The guy in the robe looks a lot like Leander. Shit, just imagine if he was corrupted the entire time and Nerea had no idea. My god, this game actually has a plot! There’s actual conflict! Anime wasn’t a mistake!

You can’t see it very well, but Roland is clutching a bullet with a skull and crossbones on it. The pink and purple color scheme is a little odd, but just fucking imagine when he caps Batu in the back of the head. I’d assume Bracken isn’t far behind.

Holy shit he’s even got the smirk of evil. It’s like everything I ever wanted - and at the end I bet there’s a fucking awesome scene where Evan just runs him through with a sword. God DAMN is this gonna be good.

This game just did a complete 180 and I am fucking loving this shit.

: “Roland? What poppycock is this you’re peddling, man? Ye were sleepin’ on the job and had yerself a little dream is all!”

Man, just imagine watching Evermore tear itself apart because its chief consul is a traitor. This could very well be this game’s Nier Automata Ending C route moment.

: “Hmm… well, I ain’t about to believe such things o’ one of our own without proof, but… ye seem convinced matey, that’s for certain.”

Or I mean, maybe it’ll be the equivalent of FF14’s “My Left Arm” moment, given how much FF14’s story sucks and how much NNK2 rips off of it.

: “I have to say Bracken, things have come impressively far impressively fast since you arrived in town.”

: “Of course they have! Why else would you have made me Minister of Ingenuity?”

I’m imagining Bracken looking at Batu’s corpse and going “But… why?” shortly before getting blasted in the face.

: “Bracken is an asset indeed. But we have made precious little headway in other areas - not least the question of how to encourage Ding Dong Dell to sign the declaration.”

You know, I hope when Evan inevitably winds up stabbing Roland to death that he loses his cat parts and it’s just like Ico. That’d be cool.

I wonder if Roland kills Bracken himself, or has Leander do it.

God dammit Zark, no one wants to… wait, is he going to catch a bullet? Definitely come in then!

So remember how I said that our entire objective in Broadleaf was to jack Zark’s airship? Mission accomplished.

: “That was quite an entrance, Zip. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

: “Well, I just got done fixing Broadleaf after all the… uh… trouble, and I thought maybe I could come over and offer you guys a little help.”

Nice try Zark, but the game has an actual plot now.

But first, we have to break his ugly-ass face off the ship.

Before that though… we haven’t touched kingdom management in some time, so I went ahead and boosted the coffers as well as made enough buildings to reach kingdom level 3.

We now have a mandatory airship training segment. The airship is… not the best thing to control. It can’t stop on its own… at least, not normally.

On the way there, let’s fly by this ice continent. Surely there’s nothing there.

So yeah, there’s a giant wreck of a bomber in the ice wasteland. There’s no story missions that take place there. Again, this is probably something that was in an earlier version of the plot that they took out. There’s a ghost somewhere who will mention that at one point, the isekai realm and the real world had a war, and that plane was one of the casualties.

The only way to stop the airship is to go into landing mode, as seen here. There’s a blue chest here we couldn’t have opened before, so let’s open it.

We just sent Bracken’s attack rating to hyperspace. This is why we want the blue chest spell, and why we got it so early. On a side note, this is why you also want to shelve any sidequests you have between Hydropolis and Broadleaf, because the airship makes things SO MUCH FASTER.

There’s a scene that didn’t capture properly where Leander says he has something he wants to talk to us about (ie; usurping Evermore) so let’s promptly ignore that and go sidequest grinding.

Right near where that box was is a tainted monster. We DEFINITELY want to kill this one.

Gryndl has a unique model (or rather, is a unique edit of the wyvern model). He’s super easy to kill, because he spends most of his time charging fireballs and can be knocked down if hit by a spell during this time.

Poison, by the way, is a fucking AMAZING status effect. I don’t think there’s any enemies that use it. It hits for a good 400-ish damage every few seconds and lasts for what feels like forever.

It drops a sword that has as much attack rating as Bracken’s hammer did. I equipped it to Evan because it’s kinda unfair to give Roland any more of an advantage than he already has.

I also fought yet another tainted whamster on everyone’s behalf, because he drops a hammer that is somehow even better than the one Bracken has. His attacks are uh… mostly just jumping and stomping for an instakill because he’s 10+ levels higher than the party.

The Steelpounder doesn’t have poison on it, but it has a stronger attack rating and boosts how much MP we get per attack. It would not at all be a bad idea to replace the traitor with Batu and have him run the poison axe.

There are also a bunch of sidequests we can do right now in Hydropolis and Broadleaf - but we don’t want to do any of the Broadleaf quests right now. There is one quest in Hydropolis we ABSOLUTELY want to do right now though.

Thetis has a skill we absolutely, positively are going to want if we plan on doing any of the higher-level tainted monsters. It unlocks the next tier of healing items at the general store.

Tidewash Cave is essentially a pushover at this point. The enemies inside are so low-level they won’t aggro onto us, so we can just walk right through and grab the stuff.

Basically, you just run through and near where the dreamer’s gate is, there’s a blue sparkle to pick up.

The reason we don’t want to do any of the Broadleaf quests right now, by the way, is that they all require us to go back into the factory, and there’s a few more that unlock after Leander’s speech. We have most of what we need anyway - we’re at 41 citizens and need 50.

I also grabbed two new people at Swift Solutions. Candy is important if we want to see the one use for higgledies in this game… which we can’t get until kingdom level 3.

Glaucus isn’t great but he has a shield unit which is very useful for skirmish mode.

And here’s a quick look at why we’re not doing any Broadleaf quests right now.

This one requires us to go to right near the smartstick lab (remember, the most annoying place in the factory to get to) and fight a tainted monster.

This one actually takes place in a cave somewhere, and we COULD get it done but Kent isn’t really unique in any way.

More factory floor shit which we don’t want to touch right now because I swear there’s at least two more of these.

On the upper floor of the factory, we can meet Yu Narukami, protagonist of a much better JRPG. The only reason we’re doing this quest is that it gives us a pretty good ring.

He just kinda turns into a generic Gears of War marine.

Since I really do not feel like making multiple factory floor runs, let’s just continue with the plot.

: “There are reports of certain resources being… unaccounted for, and of a suspicious hooded character having been sighted.”

: “These, along with several other developments, have become a cause of some concern.”

: “A robed swab, ye say? An’ a shady sort to boot? Hrmm…”

: “So we’ve a thief among our number, eh? That ain’t good. That ain’t good at all…”’

: “Yeah, because he’s obviously the one doing the stealing.”

: “Guess it’s not such a surprise - security around here isn’t exactly what I’d call tight.”

: “What say we convene a little pow-wow to talk about how to catch this pilferer of ours, hm? Tonight, after dinner perhaps?”

: “Sorry, can’t make it. I’ve been working too hard. Need to catch up on a little sleep. But if it’s urgent, feel free to go ahead without me.”

You know, that guy in The Godfather (the book at least, I’ve never seen the movies) got fucking murdered for calling in sick with a cold. You’d think someone would question this, but…

Nope, the king’s a dipshit ten year old.

Oh man, Batu is so dead. Should’ve brought your army with you, dipshit!

: “Don’t mention it. Let me know if there’s anything you need.”

: “I guess I am kinda used to performing on a bigger stage. Maybe it’s time I went somewhere that they appreciated me a little more. “Enemy” is a relative term, after all.”

Next time, we’ll see what happens when Batu confronts Roland.

[CommanderKeene]

There’s a ghost somewhere who will mention that at one point, the isekai realm and the real world had a war, and that plane was one of the casualties.

That seems kinda weird, given that the whole “Roland is from a different world” thing has only come up… what, twice? so far, and they seem pretty intent on forgetting it.

[Timrod]

Update 39: So Close, And Yet So Far

I mean, it was probably just Leander and he’s really boring, so I’d say that’s questionable at best.

: “Last night? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Roland has never heard of night before. He outlawed night two years ago.

: “Roland…surely not?!”

: “Surely so, lad! Or did ye think it a coincedence that our precious resources only go missin’ on this traitorous dog’s watch?”

What precious resources? We’ve already established that we had to pay off Niall to get wood… twice. I mean, we’ve got those fish markets but I don’t think fish count.

This is another place where the plot starts running into issues. We’ve never seen Roland tell Batu ANYTHING about him not being from this world, let alone being POTUS. You’d think that it would be something that isn’t important enough to show, but the game has done that plenty of times already for shit that is way less plot-relevant.

I’d also like to say that someone asked me today if I’m going to play Kingdom Hearts 3, and I responded by saying “Why? I have all the dumbshit plot I need from Ni no Kuni 2.”

: “…”

: “There must be some mistake, mustn’t there, Leander?”

: “One should not rush to judgment on the basis of hearsay alone, but… I must say, this does seem somewhat… irregular…”

: “What?!”

: “There ye have it! Now sling yer hook before I sling it for ye, ye scurvy swine!”

: “So that’s how much trust I’ve earned, huh? Good to know. Maybe I would be better off somewhere else.”

: “Someplace my talents will be appreciated…”

Well, there you have it folks. Roland’s going back to post-apocalyptic New York to actually do the job he was elected to do.

: “Roland, you can’t!”

: “Not even the slightest attempt to defend himself. One cannot help but wonder whether Batu’s accusations are well-founded.”

Evan’s response is to do the phantom jerk. Fuck off, Leander.

: “And we sent Khunbish after him, but he hasn’t reported back in either.”

Welcome back to Ding Dong Dell, where we’re about to run facefirst into another plothole.

All of the doors and side paths we used to sneak through here the first time are blocked off, so our only real option is to walk Roland straight up to Mausinger’s throne room. You might ask why this, of all things, is a controllable gameplay segment and not a cutscene. You’ll find out pretty soon.

On the way there, we can meet that sorceress who tried to kill us with skeletons back at the start of the game. I like that they don’t even name her.

Just outside the throne room is a save point, which we might want to use.

: “Your majesty…”

We haven’t met Vermine before, but he’s in a bunch of the cutscenes at the start of the game.

: “I have been following your work with great interest. To have made an almost viable ruler of young Evan is quite the feat! Yes, a sterling achievement!”

So, if Vermine reminds you of anyone, particularly a certain German dictator whose first government position happened to be chancellor, that’s intentional. Ding Dong Dell is… not particularly subtle when it comes to what it basically is.

: “I’m flattered.”

: “I remember very well how you thwarted my designs for our young friend. But rest assured - I bear you no ill will on that account.”

: “I have been… examining your nature. Your actions. And I have decided that you and I may be able to come to an arrangement.”

: “Glad to hear it. And good of you to come straight to the point. Shall we get down to business?”

The question is, why would Mausinger even WANT Evan at this point? He’s already been exiled and Evermore is on the other side of the continent from Ding Dong Dell.

: “…Very well. I believe in making the best use of the talents of those in my employ. But I will require you to prove yourself first.”

: “Oh yeah?”

The entirety of the castle is now open to us… though there’s not much of interest in it.

: “You… you’re one of Batu’s men.”

: “Aye, that I am! Khunbish is the name!”

Boy am I glad I remembered this part and made an icon for this idiot at the start of the LP.

He’s honestly more of an incompetent dipshit, but yeah sure why not. Off with his head!

: “Curse you, ye devils! Didn’t I say already? I was looking for Master Roland!”

: “For me? Why?”

: “Heh! Heh! Forgive me, yer honor! Seems I made a blunder!”

: “Hm. You sure did. And why am I not surprised?”

: “Now, Mr. Crane, to our test. Let us see where your allegiance truly lies.”

I’m not even going to question how Mausinger knows Roland’s last name, which he has never told to anyone at any point in this game. In fact, if you don’t know about the whole citizen profile thing, this is the first point at which you can learn Roland’s last name. This entire scene confused the FUCK out of me when I played this the first time.

Basically, Mausinger knows as much or more about Roland than we do - and there’s absolutely no reason for it. My only theory here is that maybe at one point in an earlier draft of the plot (which didn’t contain the nuke at the beginning) Mausinger had someone from the real world feeding him info or something.

: “…”

: “Is something the matter? Surely you are capable of such a straightforward show of commitment. Or could it be that we have an impostor in our midst?”

: “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s just say I prefer to use my own methods.”

I can’t believe Roland just capped a guy. I mean, he only did that three or four times in the initial escape sequence.

: “Khunbish never came back after we sent him out to look for him either. Where did Roland disappear to?”

: “We have to go out and look for him! He might need our h-”

: “He needs nothin’ from us, girlie! And he’ll get nothin’! The man’s a turncoat and a traitor, damn him!”

: “He isn’t! He can’t be! I refuse to believe it! It must be some sort of strategy of his… musn’t it, Leander?”

: “To have formulated such a thorough strategy in such a short time is… really quite something, I must say.”

: “Impressive indeed. It seems I was entirely justified in welcoming you into the fold.”

: “…Now, there is another favor I have been meaning to ask of you. The Mark of Kings - have you heard of it?”

: “Sure. It’s handed down from generation to generation of royals here in Ding Dong Dell as proof of the right to rule. And without it, it’s impossible to access certain places. It works as a kind of key too, correct?”

You know, I’d say that only a nation of complete morons would require using a one-of-a-kind necklace to actually be able to run their country, but then I remember that Goldpaw and Hydropolis are a thing.

: “Precisely. It is a pendant of brightest, blazing red. A beautiful object, indeed - and a necessity if one wishes to enter our nation’s king’s cradle.”

The real question is, why would Mausinger even need to do that? He already has the kingsbond, we saw it way back at the start of the game when he communed with Oakenhart. Anyway, pay attention to how Mausinger describes the mark.

: “Let me guess - you don’t have it, and you want it.”

: “You are admirably concise as ever. We have searched the castle high and low, and yet it is nowhere to be found. Which leads me to believe that it is not, in fact, here.”

: “It sure isn’t. It’s around Evan’s neck, every minute of every day. It won’t be easy to get a hold of it.”

: “…but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I need a few things - and a little time.”

: “And you shall have all that you need. There is no other to whom such a task could be entrusted, after all.”

So in case the game hasn’t made it painfully obvious, Roland has not actually betrayed Evan. While I understood even the first time through that it wasn’t something overly likely to happen, I still think it would’ve been a good twist.

Our first task is to go talk to Captain Buck. He’s in the room just before the dungeons, which means we’re effectively walking the exact same path we did the first time we left the throne room.

: “There’s been a change to the postings for some of the guards. All men assigned to the night shift on the east and west blocks are to patrol the outside of the castle instead.”

What we’re doing here is making it possible for Roland to escape once he’s done what he actually came here to do.

This could be part of a Loss edit.

In case you don’t recognize it, we are now back where we first started the game, at the bottom of the staircase leading to Evan’s room.

Unfortunately, there’s a slight hitch. Someone, in the probably months that have passed since the start of the game, came around and locked the door.

: “Locked? Well, nothing this little guy can’t fix.”

Roland is now going to do a series of ass-pulls more egregious than Adam West Batman.

: “Yeah. It’s time to get the Hydropolitans to sign the Declaration. But we have to think beyond that, too.”

: “Most of all, we need to think about what to do about Ding Dong Dell. They won’t be making peace with us anytime soon.”

: “Pah, they won’t be letting us close enough to even shout about peace - the whole area’s crawling with soldiers!”

I never showed it off, but if you attempt to walk into Ding Dong Dell there are soldiers guarding the bridges that will wall you off.

: “There is a way we might be able to get past them, you know. It’s a path open only to members of the royal family called the Kingsway.”

: “What’s that when it’s at home?! And why have you never mentioned it before?”

: “Well, because we wouldn’t be able to access it without the Mark of Kings.”

If I had to guess, Tani, I’d say it’s because even the writers have no idea what the fuck is going on half the time.

I’ll skip a few lines where Evan repeats what we already know about the Mark of Kings.

: “If it’s that important, you can bet that Mausinger will be looking for it too.”

: “It… it was given to me when my father passed away, but… Well, I…”

: “Well, there are hidden rooms in the castle, you see. I thought it would be safest there. In the one connected to my chambers.”

: “They were designed so that the royal family could hide in times of emergency. And, with the help of the mark, even escape if need be.”

One of my favorite things about Uncharted 4 is when the villain goes “Fuck it, we don’t need the cryptic bullshit journals” and just hires a PMC to blow shit up until they find the treasure. It’s kind of a wonder that Mausinger hasn’t just done the same. Then again, that’d be good writing.

What I can’t believe is that Evan is too dumb to have seen right through this.

There’s a useless sword in this chest which isn’t even close to being as good as the one we got off that tainted monster earlier.

So for reference, these lines confused the hell out of me when I played this the first time, because I had no idea whether it was supposed to mean that the mark in the chest was a fake or what.

Honestly, I STILL don’t know what the fuck it was supposed to mean. At first, when I revisited this for the LP, I had the idea that he was doing a Sonic Adventure 2 Robotnik gambit where he knew Roland was lying about Evan still having the mark because the real one is green.

But then the next scene will kinda confirm that Mausinger expected that to be the case anyway because he’s on another level from the plot and knows that Roland isn’t actually a traitor.

This is the real mark, by the way.

: “Wait - or maybe he was just using me to find this place…”

I kind of wonder if this is a reference to an earlier draft of the script, where the color of the mark actually matters in some fashion.

: “Oh, uh… just looking for something.”

: “So it was hidden here all along. And hidden very well. Believe me when I say we searched long and hard.”

The 47th annual isekai realm smug-off ends in a draw.

: “Indeed it is. I am so very glad to not have believed you for a moment.”

: “Now, if you would be so kind as to hand over the Mark…”

: “I don’t think so. This belongs to the king. My king.”

: “Of course, if you’ll sign the Declaration, I’ll be happy to make you a trade.”

: “You speak of your pathetic union. Though I hardly think you are in any position to bargain.”

: “Not interested, huh? Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

: “Hah! To send a spy was most… cunning. I must confess, I had not thought your young protege capable of such subterfuge.”

Sick burn.

As I said earlier, this line kind of implies that Mausinger somehow knows about the nuke. How, I have no idea.

: “It had to be done. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

: “I’m sure you would. So what is this dream of yours exactly?”

: “For too long, our kind have suffered at the hands of the grimalkin. My dream is a simple one: to see our feline oppressors prostrate themselves at our feet.”

: “Revenge, in other words?”

Revolver Ocelot, Mausinger is not.

So yeah, Roland just got shot with a crossbow.

Also, surprise! Mausinger isn’t being possessed by Doloran. No, he’s that much of a dick by himself.

In reality, a crossbow bolt would not come out nearly that easily, or without massive amounts of bleeding.

Next time, we’ll save that dipshit in the dungeon and then escape from Ding Dong Dell in possibly the dumbest way possible. Then, it’s sidequest grinding time as we hopefully reach Kingdom Level 3.