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.”
Sure, why not. Replace Leander with her, since his plot arc seems to be over for now.
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.
Have fun! I’ve been to Magfest several times; unfortunately, I’m not going this year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Update 49: Sidequest Grinding, the Final Frontier
We now have to go back for Khunbish, which is probably a giant waste of time because that guy is borderline useless.
Roland will say something about trying to take a route that avoids guards, but there’s really only one route to the dungeon as most of the doors are now closed.
It doesn’t matter much though, because all the enemies here will die in either two or three basic melee attacks.
Mostly, this is just like the dungeon in Broadleaf - the enemies here are all roughly analogus to the robot enemies there. There are a couple of gun-toting mice who can knock you out of a combo, but since we’re a good 9 to 10 levels above the majority of the enemies here, it’s not really anything to worry about.
So yes, Roland apparently either planned out that Batu was going to send someone after him and that person was also going to get caught - or he’s pulling stuff out of his ass.
: “Charming. Listen, calm down and ask yourself this - if I’m a murderer, how come you’ve still got breath to curse me with?”
Well, clearly it’s because Roland is actually the president from one of those bad mid-2000s shooter games where enemies can take like twelve pistol bullets to the skull and not even flinch.
: “I, er… that is, umm… ahem.”
: “I shot you, sure, but not with real bullets - with ones designed to make you look dead.”
: “With what now?!”
I’m pretty sure that line has been used in a porno somewhere.
So yeah, uh…
: “Stay calm, it’ll wear off before long. At least, it’s supposed to.”
: “My turn now, I guess. Well, down the hatch.”
One thing that’s always kind of bothered me about fantasy scenarios like this is that no one ever thinks to check for magic. You’d think the first thing Mausinger would’ve done is had his guards pat Roland down for magical shit.
: “You have seen through our artifice, your majesty?”
: “Of course I have. Roland would never betray us, at least not so clumsily.”
: “I have to say, I expected more of him.”
: “The plan could have been executed with a little more finesse, I concede.”
: “What in blazes are ye both blatherin’ about, curse ye?”
: “In order to decieve one’s enemies, one must first decieve one’s friends. Is that not what they say?”
: “What?! Ye mean to say this whole sorry mess was one of the blasted scoundrel’s confounded schemes?”
: “I might not have chosen to put it quite that way but… yes.”
: “These devices allow one to surreptitiously watch over a location remotely through the use of scrying magics.”
I was okay when Persona 5 did this because Persona 5 had at least solid gameplay. This, not so much.
: “Being familiar with sorcery of this kind thanks to Queen Nerea’s surveillance of Hydropolis, they attracted my attention right away.”
Remember when Leander wasn’t just a re-worded 4chan meme from 2007?
: “Upon sharing my concerns with Roland, we investigated together and discovered the presence of an agent of Ding Dong Dell in our midst.”
: “The first step was to make a show of expressing certain… disloyal behaviors in full view of the eyes.”
: “The next was to make sure our allies, too, grew suspicious of his motives. This is why he contrived to carry out his dubious liaisons just as the guard was being changed.”
There’s another series of cutscenes coming up, but I’m going to skip them for now because it’s sidequest grinding time. We’re going to reach Kingdom Level 3.
Before we go back into the factory (and as it turns out, we had all the factory-related sidequests so we could’ve done those earlier) I wound up doing this quest where we deliver a package to this asshole kid. Why, you ask? Because he has a military unit that is better than our current spear unit and I wanted to grind some skirmish mode sidequests for loads of KG.
He asks us for a couple of items that we already have in spades thanks to all the grinding we did.
Dark crystals are super common in the factory, and we had 15 of them so I just handed those over too.
Next up is getting that quintillion-core processor for Andrew. We already had another quest that needed us to go to the Smartstick Lab, and the enemy carrying the processor just so happens to be on the way to the lab.
Blitzer 2.0 is essentially a weakened version of the first factory boss. He goes down pretty quickly and we get our quest item.
Next up is going into the lab, which for some reason is now locked and summons enemies to fight us. Fortunately, this only happens once.
Roland has so much attack power right now that I actually managed to kill the entire enemy group in a single flatliner.
From there, we just need to interact with a computer and unlock the door for that guy we met a few updates ago.
Andrew is EXTREMELY important if you plan on finishing Kingdom Management mode. We’ll see why as soon as this update concludes.
Oz has a military unit, but shields don’t really do a whole lot.
Next up are these two. Price is useless, but Morgan actually comes with an unlisted side benefit: she adds new items to the general store in Evermore provided that your healing item research level is high enough.
Price’s quest is also one of the most dickish in the game if you haven’t been grinding skirmish mode.
In this skirmish, we have two allied robot units that we have to protect. They will run headfirst into the enemy until they die. The robots cannot attack.
As you might notice, one of the robot units only has their leader left. The recommended level for this skirmish is 17. Our army was around 20-21 and still barely made it.
I also stopped to pick up a person I had bought through Swift Solutions but forgot to pick up (it wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyway).
Morgan is in Capstan, so I picked up this quest. Remember how, a bunch of updates ago, we researched that spell that lets us talk to ghosts? This sidequest requires that spell.
There’s also these two people we could pick up if we were desperate. One has a pretty long quest chain for a useless citizen and the other requires a fuckload of crafting.
Morgan here has a simple request: buy the most expensive item in her shop.
She also sells Savior’s Tears, which are not only a resurrect but also a full heal. They’re incredibly expensive, but also a massive help in tainted monster fights. Sage’s Secrets heal both HP and MP and are also useful for tainted fights.
Oh, fuck off.
The Sundelion is in a hilled area near Ding Dong Dell. There’s a level 70 dragon patrolling around, but all you have to do is just spot the blue sparkle from the airship and land right near it.
This is why Morgan is incredibly useful. Not only do we get one step closer to Kingdom Level 3, we also get the ability to buy high-level healing items at a discount.
By the way, I haven’t mentioned it and probably regret not doing so, but if you plan on doing all the sidequests, Morgan has one that particularly sucks.
You see, “smelly shoes” aren’t a single item - “smelly” is actually a curse that can be randomly generated on certain pieces of armor. We have the facility to dispel curses, but thankfully I never sold any gear so we had exactly what we needed to do this and get a bunch of extra KG.
Next up is killing Skrych for some guy back in Broadleaf. Skrych is highly annoying, and flies around more than the average wyvern chieftain.
He also has some severely broken hitboxes and moves around so much that it’s hard to melee him.
There was another generic tainted monster nearby that I killed for this quest, which I forgot to get a screenshot of. Whatever.
Several largely uneventful quests and one tainted monster later…
We’re now at Kingdom Level 3. Technically, we no longer need to do kingdom management - I believe we have everything we need to actually finish the game at this point. I’ll leave it up to the readers as to whether we keep doing kingdom management or not… but I do want to show what you should do if you’re playing along at home.
As soon as we unlock KL3, we finally find out what goes in that empty spot next to the Institute of Innovation - an upgraded version of it. Unfortunately, most of the upgrades that the Higher Institute has require us to have levelled one specific person up all the way… and we haven’t quite gotten there yet.
You want to immediately upgrade the Higher Institute as high as you can (we had enough to get it to level 3) and get the two research-based upgrades out of the way first. What we really want at this point is the extra 20% discount on buildings… but that requires us to level the institute up to 4 first.
Next up is this place, the Hyper Hubble Bubblery. Like the Higher Institute, the Hyper Bubblery does NOTHING until level 2 or 3… but once we level it all the way, we can get some of the best healing items in the game in the general store.
I also upgraded the Higglery to level 4. With a bit of luck, we’ll be able to see the one thing the Higglery is actually good for before the end of the game… possibly before we finish Ding Dong Dell. I may actually have to do another sidequest update after we finish that in order to have enough time to show you what the kingdom looks like fully upgraded.
By the way, you might also ask: is Kingdom Level 3 the final level? No. There’s a Kingdom Level 4 that exists solely for bragging rights which requires every single building and every citizen - all 100 of them. A bunch of citizens don’t even show up until post-game.
I checked my end-game save from my first run, and the LP kingdom is making a bit more than half of what my first run did. However, that’s because in my first run I kind of ignored the Institute until it was useless and idled the game so I could upgrade Aranella Square and the bar to max.
Next time, we’ll go to Ding Dong Dell after a series of cutscenes, and also reach Chapter 8.
Side Update: How To Break The Game
If you’ll remember, back when we got the first sidequest for Martha, we got a second one to visit all of the randomly-generated dungeons in the game and finish them. This is not the worst sidequest in the game - the actual worst sidequest is a post-game one needed for Kingdom Level 4 that requires you to have done 200 errands for Swift Solutions. However, it is a LONG sidequest and also requires a few kingdom management upgrades that exist solely for this quest.
We’re going to do this, mostly because I want to be able to finish kingdom management by the end of the LP.
One thing that’s real confusing about this sidequest is that you don’t necessarily know where all the dreamer’s gates are… but the sidequest will tell you, so long as it’s your active sidequest. It will put a marker on the next gate in order of difficulty.
Before you start this quest, you’re going to want to build the Dimensional Lab (there’s an upgraded version you can get at KL3 but it’s largely meant for NNK2’s equivalent of the Pit of 100 Trials/Chrysler Building/Mementos) and get a couple of research items done.
The big one is this one, which will outright show you where the exit to each floor is. The first two items will reduce the amount the danger gauge builds, and the rest I mostly got just to show off how useless they are.
Our first target is right near the Forest of Niall, easily accessed by the airship.
As long as you’re on the sidequest, the game will show you which route you have to take through these mini-dungeons to reach the dreamer’s gate.
You can’t see it because the door was almost in a straight line forward from the entrance, but we now have an addtional option for our “detection section”.
Notice how Roland has that little door floating around him - that’s what you get from the door detector research. Even though the description says it only detects nearby doors, the detector is always active and will get brighter the closer you get to the exit.
When we reach level three of this four-level dungeon, the detector kicks in to notify us that the door is behind our current position. This is kind of an annoying trick the game pulls where the door is off-camera and is actually just inches from where you are.
In fact, it’s right there.
The boss on the final floor is a carbon copy of that one we fought as Evan way back when. It goes down extremely quickly due to the fact that it’s about half our party’s level.
Two down, seven to go.
Next up is the Eert Grove, which as far as I can tell is a copy-paste of Sundown Woods.
I don’t really understand why the developers didn’t just put the doors on the map, or make these locations (which usually have nothing else in them) a single room.
The Eert Grove is six floors, but most of them for this run turned out to be extremely fast. Here, I took maybe four steps forward and the detector is already emitting a strong glow.
On Floor 2, the door was literally right in front of the starting position. Here, we can see the idol detector on Roland’s back. The idol detector actually works as advertised: it pops up when you’re within a certain range of an idol and gets brighter as you get closer. In this case though, we got through the maze so quickly that there was no point.
The third floor has the “floor of respite” modifier, which means the danger level won’t increase. This floor was more or less one room, and with the detectors on it was beyond simple to find the door.
The reason this quest is the worst is because of how tedious it is. Most of the monsters up until the fourth or fifth maze are going to be well below our level. You might ask why I didn’t do these at a more appropriate level, and the answer is mostly because I wanted to show off how trivial the research makes these and didn’t have the money to spare. Plus, the item drops in most of the dreamer’s mazes suck.
The final boss of this maze is another golem-type enemy. This one, while a bit higher level than the last boss we fought, still goes down in seconds.
The next target is by Makronos, but I waited a bit to do this one… because there’s still another set of research we could be doing.
The one I have active here adds a THIRD tracker, which tracks chests. This is primarily in the game for the final dreamer’s maze, which actually has items worth a shit in it. Why they let you start researching it as soon as kingdom level 2, I have no idea.
But here’s the question: could we make this already dead-easy, mindless sidequest even easier? Why yes, yes we can.
I left the game idle for… a while… and built the Multi-Dimensional Lab, a building only available at kingdom level 3. In addition to having two more “slower danger gauge” upgrades, the Multi-Dimensional Lab also has this one, which… you’ll see. I actually upgraded a bunch of shit in kingdom management mode to get our income closer to where my first run’s was while I was waiting for this stuff to finish.
For the sidequest-related mazes, we absolutely do not need any further upgrades. In fact, we’ve already got more than enough.
By the way, one thing I forgot to add because I didn’t really understand it myself: the way research in this game works is that each research costs a certain number of points, minus the discount from any upgrades. Every second, the game subtracts the total IQ of all of the citizens in the building from that total, meaning that upgrading buildings will make research go faster as it lets you cram more citizens in. The game never tells you this at any point.
Enough talk though, let’s land at Makronos and head to the Shrine of Pining. We were here not all that long ago and fought a tainted monster, so now it’s time to do the Dreamer’s Maze.
The first floor is dead simple - the door happened to spawn maybe ten steps down the hall from the start point. Shrine of Pining is a major jump up in difficulty from the earlier mazes, however.
All of the other levels of this maze look like this, with a large staircase right near the spawn point. The first thing you’ll notice about this place is that if you don’t have the advanced door detector upgrade, your door detector won’t be present at the start because the levels here are so much bigger than any of the mazes we’ve done so far.
You’ll notice that we also have a blue chest marker on our ring. The ring will spawn a new marker for any chest in range, though nothing in here is worth picking up.
The other trick is that even though the detector is pointing to the right, the door is actually upstairs.
You can see there’s no hallway over there and no door.
For reference, this is what the chest detector looks like when it’s near a chest.
The rest of this dungeon is more or less the same floor copy-pasted a bunch. In every single instance, the door wound up being upstairs. On the fourth floor, we get a new floor modifier. This one causes a bunch of extra monsters to spawn, which can either be nothing or kind of a big deal if you’re in the Pit of 100 Trials.
Yep, that sure looks overcrowded to me.
On the 6th floor, I purposely let the danger gauge go to level 2. This raises the average enemy level from about 34 to about 37. It’s not a big deal, really.
Final boss here is a reskin, which spent most of its time charging up an attack that it never got off because I kept knocking it down.
One other shot I wanted to show off quick: double chest indicator.
Next up is Tidewash Cave, which actually has its own trip door. Thankfully, you can in fact land on the tiny island it’s on using the airship.
Tidewash Cave is a step back and a step forward from the Shrine of Pining. The levels are smaller, but…
There are now enemies scattered throughout the maze rather than grouped up like they were in the previous ones. In fact, this got a bit annoying once I hit danger level 2 later on in the dungeon.
Most of the floors here are nondescript caves, so I’ll hit the highlights.
On floor 3, we run into a “Rumpus Room”. Other than being a term so old-fashioned even my grandparents are probably too young for it, the Rumpus Room is basically an unmarked miniboss. This is why the door detector is important, because the miniboss is significantly higher level than the other enemies on the floor. Here, I took the time to seek it out.
For this part of the game, it’s basically a trash enemy, but if we had done this at the first opportunity we could have (back when we first got the boat) this would be a pretty difficult fight.
The fifth floor also has a few new things to it. First up, we have the “fast-filling danger gauge” modifier. At the level of upgrades we have, this basically equates to the danger gauge filling up about as fast as it would without them.
We also run into a random merchant. This guy just sells materials that we can already get at the general store, but without the discount we get there.
The faster gauge is enough to boost us into danger level 2, which raises the level of the enemies enough that they’re now in aggro range for us. This makes things significantly more annoying. Thankfully, Tidewash Cave only has seven real floors.
The last two are mercifully short.
On the final floor, we have an idol. I COULD have used that to lower the danger gauge, but I wanted to see what the boss was first.
Naturally, it’s the revenge of Spider-Squid. With the superweapons that Roland and Bracken have, this thing went down way faster than it did when it was still a boss enemy.
Oh, and if you’re ever wondering why I don’t bother with any of the chests… you see the notification in this pic where we got a starfall sword? That sword is maybe seven less offense than the one Roland found in Evan’s room during the last story segment.
The blue chests in the mazes cost orbs to open, but we had a ton so I opened one up… and got absolute trash, even for when we first could’ve done this maze.
Now comes our most challenging maze yet… and this one actually proved to be more annoying than difficult.
I went ahead and got the second idol locator upgrade. This is mostly important for the final maze, but is useful in this maze because it’ll tell us if an idol is anywhere on the floor.
The Sublime Shrine is just north-east of Broadleaf. Unlike Tidewash Cave, the enemies here are our level even before we reach the gate itself.
Floor 1 has yet another new modifier - Items Aplenty, which increases the drop rate. I didn’t stick around though, because the door was right behind the start location.
On Floor 2, we run into another random NPC type - Higgledies that will give us items if we talk to them.
Seraphic Silk is pretty hard to come by, and you need a bunch of it for a sidequest in Hydropolis that’s available now but that we couldn’t do because we lacked any way of getting it.
There’s a couple of random NPCs that do basically the same thing.
Floor 2 proved to be significantly more annoying, mostly because of the way random encounters in dungeons work in this game. Inside a dungeon, the entire zone is treated as a battlefield - you can actually pull out and swing your weapons around at any time as well as do combat-only skills like Bracken’s heal field.
The problem is that random encounters are always a group of enemies, and because of the way the dreamer’s mazes are laid out, that group might encompass six or seven enemies spread out across an entire floor - and you have to kill all of them before you can interact with the exit.
Sublime Shrine is actually high enough level that it drops gear upgrades - nothing better than Roland or Bracken’s weapons, but stuff that is definitely an upgrade for Evan. Sleep is kind of a shitty status effect: it puts an enemy out of commission for like 5 seconds or until they get hit. It’s more useful for the enemies than it is for the player.
Floor 3 I want to show off mostly because it’s a trick! This is one of those floors like we saw in Shrine of Pining, where there’s a staircase on the side. You’d think the door would be up there, but…
It’s actually on the ground floor, hidden behind a pillar.
The dungeon stays pretty uneventful until we run into another new NPC on Floor 7. This guy will reset the danger level to 1… at the cost of all of the pink orbs we’re carrying. The only way he’s ever going to be useful is if you’re in the 100-floor dungeon, because the idols cost 5 to reset and I think double in price every time you use them.
We also run into a new enemy: the light incarnate. Guns in this game tend to add darkness damage to weapons, and Roland actually has a dark-based special attack, so this thing goes down fairly easily compared to the other ones we’ve fought before.
By the time I reached the door to the boss, the danger level was almost at 3. This was mostly due to all the fights that we probably wouldn’t have had to do if we had done this after Ding Dong Dell.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to reset the danger level or not. The average enemy level at danger 2 was actually a bit beyond the party’s - Roland and Bracken both hit 48 but I was seeing 51s and 52s pretty consistently.
I saw this, then I went back and reset the danger level.
The incineraptor here is identical to when we fought it as a boss, minus the boss health bar.
Between spamming circle cuts as Roland and Bracken and Evan beating on it, the boss spent most of its time on the ground until it died.
Sixth Chaos Emerald complete, three to go.
The next one is in the desert near the Sky Pirate Base. I started going there… and then I remembered something.
Near this area is a trip door and a level 69 dragon whose sex number energy is too strong for us to penetrate.
However, just BEHIND the dragon (you can squeeze through without fighting it) is an unassuming red chest containing…
A new outfit for Roland that turns him from a shit version of William “Bushido Bill” Adams into Viggo Mortensen’s character in The Road. Each character has four alternate costumes, most of which require us to be in the final chapter (or post-game) to unlock. However, one of the outfits for each character is in a chest on the world map.
Bracken’s is hidden just to the west of Goldpaw, and turns her into Ada Wong.
Evan’s is near one of the other mazes we haven’t been to yet in the desert area near Broadleaf.
It makes him look like he went into the costume area for a live-action version of Aladdin and just kinda came out with whatever.
Tani, Batu, and Leander also have alternate outfits but since we’re not using any of them at the moment I’m not going to bother to grab them right now.
Crooked Cavern is our next maze location. I’m pretty sure the “intended” time to do this is after Ding Dong Dell, but fuck it: gear upgrades!
The enemies here are still more or less our level before we get to the gate, meaning we’re going to want to err on the side of caution when deciding whether to lower the danger level.
You definitely also want to pick up as many items as you can here: the next few mazes all have crafting items that are beyond what we can buy at the general store, even after I built a few more gathering buildings to upgrade the level of what’s available there.
We haven’t even gotten to the gate yet, and I found a spear for Leander that rivals Evan’s sword.
There’s a spirit in here too, which I never bothered to talk to the first time I played through this because I still didn’t know about the talk to ghosts spell.
Crooked Cavern may as well be Tidewash Cave - same rooms but with higher level enemies. The first floor had a bunch of chests on it, but none of them had anything good apart from a bunch of high-end crafting materials. I got the three Seraphic Silk for that sidequest in about 30 seconds.
By the way, remember that bone mail we found forever ago off a tainted monster? It finally starts dropping here, as does the steelpounder (Bracken’s hammer).
This dungeon has a few new palette swaps. Meet the Darkness Incarnate, which goes down about as easily as the Light-based one did.
Of course, there are also dark-based goos…
And an NPC who trades orbs in exchange for increasing the danger level. I felt like living on the edge and just accepted it blindly, bringing us to DL2 by floor 2.
If we hadn’t gotten grass-green thread for that one sidequest way back when, this is where it first starts dropping.
There’s also dark-based fairy enemies which aren’t anything to write home about.
Floor 7 brings us both a new level type and a new NPC. Slow-filling danger gauge works exactly as advertised. I had finished the third level gauge upgrade before I started this dungeon, so the gauge on this floor was raising extremely slowly.
The fortune teller will make it so the next floor always has a special type, and will then tell you what that type is in exchange for a fuckload of money.
Just before the final door, I let the danger level tick up to four. This made most enemies over level 60, which as it turns out actually isn’t a bad thing. If you notice, Roland is almost level 49 when he was 47 just a few dungeons ago.
I also forgot that idols only lower the level by 1, so I used two of them to get the danger level back to 2. The boss, as it turns out, was pretty easy even nine or so levels above the party.
Zagg is a total pushover when he doesn’t have scenery to jump onto. I purposely got hit by an entire chain of attacks and it didn’t even come close to killing Roland, even with the scant amount of armor upgrades I found along the way.
And that’s the seventh chaos emerald out of… nine. After a quick stop at Evemore to drain the coffers, it’s time to go to the penultimate dreamer’s gate and hopefully find some worthwhile shit.
I mean, apart from this wand, and a ring for Roland that increases all of his damage by like 10%, along with some other minor armor upgrades.
If you’re wondering how much I managed to grind kingdom management mode during this whole thing, the answer is that the LP kingdom is now actually better than my first playthrough’s kingdom in terms of income, and I still haven’t upgraded a few of the big-influence buildings all the way.
I also did that sidequest with the seraphic silk.
Our next stop is Blowtorch Cave, which I grabbed the warp point for when getting Evan’s alternate outfit. There’s no enemies between us and the gate, but there is one group out of the way. Let’s just check and…
Hoo boy, that’s not good. They’re a good 10+ levels higher than us. We want to go in, stay to Danger Level 1, and…
SET THAT SHIT TO EXTREME, I’M GOIN’ IN DRY.
This dungeon has a new enemy: the Skelepaladin, a dark-element skeleplasm that has a new multi-hit attack that can and will instakill via stunlock on Extreme.
There’s also the light-type fairy enemy, which… heals other enemies. Great.
Not much interesting happens until Floor 3, when we get an effect that boost all EXP earned. I got Bracken to level 50 here, which I believe is higher than I was at this point in my first playthrough. The fact that I built the second-tier training ground in Evermore and got the extra EXP boost upgrade definitely helps.
But you know what, fuck it. I went all the way through Floor 3 and got… THIS.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a weapon from a tainted monster get beaten by a random drop.
However, I dicked around so long that by level 9, even with rushing to the doors, I was at DL3. What’s the worst that could happen?
Oh right, I get oneshotted. Thankfully, we upgraded the General Store (to maximum, actually) and have Soreaway Sweets, which restore HP to everyone. I didn’t game over here, either. I mean, how much worse could it…
Oh right. I used a ton of revive items here.
I dropped the danger level all the way to 1, because I was honestly afraid I was going to game over.
Floor 10 has one of the most dickish effects in the game if you’re not ready for it. This floor type disables one type of elemental damage. If your best weapon by a mile happens to be that element (thankfully, no one was using light at this point), you get dicked over pretty hard. The door spawned right behind the starting point, so it was real short.
Floor 11 was a Floor of Respite, which is guaranteed to have an idol (along with not raising the gauge while you’re on it). I took advantage of that and paid 10 orbs to the idol to get back to level 1.
The next idol, by the way, is 30 orbs. Mr. Reset definitely comes in handy (he spawned on the next floor but I didn’t use him) at that point.
The only other good drop I found was a ring that boosts all damage and also boosts sword damage, so I equipped that to Roland straightaway.
On Floor 15, I turned Extreme off and paid the 30 orbs to go back to danger 1.
Meet the Porchestrator. He’s a unique model (as far as I know) but he’s relatively simple for a boss.
His most damaging attack requires a long charge before he does a forward dash attack that carries him clear to the other side of the room. This is by no means a threat because it’s dead easy to dodge.
The real threat is his sword, which can hit a full 180 degree arc in front of him and has some insane range. The Porchestrator also can’t be knocked down, so you have to hope he doesn’t turn and hit you mid-swing while you’re behind him getting hits in.
Eight down, one to go. I stopped at Evermore again, and uh…
Advanced institute status: fully levelled, all important research completed.
Aranella Square costs 240,000 KG to max out without that research done.
By the way, even though this is a side update, it turns out you definitely want to level the training ground because it gives you more EXP for your citizens. Whoops.
It’s time for the final charge. The last door is in the frozen area that is never used for anything.
Shivery Shrine has a tainted monster in it that I did go ahead and kill, but killing tainted monsters is going to be fucking pointless. Remember how I said this game’s gear progression is broken? There’s a way to make it even more broken.
We can see right away that the enemies are way higher level than we are. Get used to that.
Doombo is a dark slime that, like all other slimes, is highly damaging and has broken hitboxes and also splits when it loses HP.
I can’t tell you how many healing items I wasted on this.
Roland finally hits level 50, and we also get a bow that is going to be a trash drop after we finish the final dreamer maze.
Behind Doombo is a ghost that tells us about the Faraway Forest, which is the 100-floor dreamer maze.
In this maze, I didn’t fuck around. I ran right for the exits, dodging as many fights as I could.
On Floor 3, I ran into this fucker. Do not talk to him.
Here we can see a fuckload of high-level enemies guarding the door. The trick to these kind of rooms is that enemies take a good couple of seconds to spot you even if you run right past them. If you run along the outer edge of the room, you might have just enough time to interact with the door before combat can start.
Well, that’s not good.
Thankfully, the door was right behind the starting position.
The rest of the dungeon is pretty uneventful, but here you can see what I’m talking about: the enemies are about to engage and I’m just slipping through the door.
It’s a good thing I did too, because there’s no idol here.
Time for a rematch with BL-Iterator. He’s exactly the same as he was in Broadleaf, only without the crazy sword beam spam attack.
Instead, he likes to waste time by rolling around a lot.
I swear, he spent like two full minutes just rolling around.
And with that, we have the last dream fragment.
Milleniyah gives us the key to get into the Faraway Forest.
We also get her as a citizen, which is pointless. Her skill doesn’t unlock anything and she can only really be effective in the dimensional lab… which we’ve already almost maxed out.
The Faraway Forest is on an island east of Broadleaf.
Unlike the other dreamer gates, the Faraway Forest is truly random: it uses all of the existing rooms from the other gate types as well as a few new ones. The enemies are also somewhere between level 65 and level 70 to start… and get harder the deeper you go. I believe the danger gauge also goes higher in the Faraway Forest than it does in the other mazes.
As you can see, the trash drops from the Faraway Forest outdo pretty much anything you can find in the base game. They get even better if you somehow manage to do it on Extreme.
The only bad part is that you’ll find a lot of items like this, where the second bonus is a series of question marks. This is because it’s used for a system that only exists in the paid DLC… but they still put this shit into the base game to fuck you over.
Honestly, just running into the first floor or two of the forest and exiting will get you gear good enough to finish the game with and then some. Nothing that drops between now and when we finish the game is probably going to be better than what we’ve got… including tainted monster drops.
Now you know how to break the game. The question is… should we? If yes, I’ll stream a farm session in the forest and grab more gear.
0 voters
Side Update: We Broke The Game (kinda)
I did three more Faraway Forest runs on Extreme on stream. These were the results.
With the gear I found there, I was able to kill a tainted monster I never killed on my first playthrough. Batu is now super strong and super naked. I replaced Bracken for him because Bracken kept getting oneshotted. We have another hammer with almost as much attack power if we want Bracken as well.
We also found some real good armor. Batu has the second-best equips.
Leander I used mostly because his dodge roll is the fastest, which is useful because in the Faraway Forest you’re practically required to run away from/dodge encounters so that you can make it to the gates. While his spear has the second-highest attack value of any equipped weapon we have, his attacks aren’t typically as damaging as Roland’s.
Leander has the third-best armor, mostly because his attacks aren’t all that useful. However, his spear makes him a confusion machine that can stunlock enemies.
Unfortunately, I never found a sword for Roland with more attack rating than the one he’s been using. His gun, however, is a different story.
Roland has our best armor, because he’s the best at knocking shit down, which is how you win when the enemies are 50+ levels higher than you.
With the gear we have (plus a sword if I can grind one), we are in more than good enough shape to destroy the rest of the game. The question is, who are we bringing along, assuming I don’t find a better sword? Post your opinions and I’ll check before the next update.
Edit: I went back in and as it turns out, the best gear in Faraway Forest is in those blue chests that require a fuckload of orbs to unlock. You’re intended to have a research done that we can’t do yet (I think it requires a person from Ding Dong Dell) done so that you get three orbs every time you pick one up. Anyway…
Update 41: The Final Fantasy 8 Sewer Segment Only More Anime
Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing a half-naked Batu in these cutscenes because I did this part before the massive amount of sidequest grinding in the last real update and the Faraway Forest runs that got us the gear we’re going to use to break the rest of the game.
: “We were so worried about you, Roland! But now you’re back, and that’s the important thing.”
: “Look, I want to apologize. If I didn’t have to trick you all, I wouldn’t have done. I’m sorry…”
He’s only sorry that the writers didn’t leave in the draft where he actually turns evil and the plot actually went somewhere.
: “Well, ye certainly had me goin’, lad! Hook, line, and blessed sinker!”
: “You had all of us going, you horrible man!”
: “But I think we all believed in you, somewhere deep down.”
Thanks, Bracken. Too bad I don’t believe in you because you were too busy getting your ass oneshotted in Faraway Forest and wasting all my recovery items, even if your attack animations are way better (read: shorter) than Batu’s.
: “Did my gifts prove useful in the end?”
I mean, if you count the whole teleporting forward instead of rolling thing that let me get into a bunch of the doors and chests in Faraway Forest, sure I guess.
: “Sure. Lock-picking bugs, frog pills… you sure know how to keep things interesting.”
: “And here’s what made it all worthwhile. Evan, this is for you.”
You’re going to give me a game with an actual plot where I can enjoy more than just mindlessly grinding for equipment that will utterly break any semblance of balance or gear progression? You shouldn’t have!
There are almost moments where I think this game looks good, and then I remember that it’s almost impossible to get a still picture of it without the entire artstyle falling apart.
: “Now you can open the Kingsway and get back into Ding Dong Dell without having to go through all those soldiers.”
: “Mausinger was desperate to find it, just like I thought he’d be. It might just be the bargaining chip we need to get him to sign the declaration.”
: “Back to the home he stole from me.”
I think I mentioned this once before, but I dropped the game on my first playthrough just after finishing Chapter 8, which we’re about to go into.
Ding Dong Dell, specifically the cutscenes there, were about half the reason I did that.
What we’re about to see once we get there is… a place where I feel they could’ve given Evan some actual character development and completely failed to do so.
: “Before we ask Ding Dong Dell to sign the Declaration, I need to know how its people are faring under Mausinger’s rule.”
: “I… should also like to know what they thought of my father. Perhaps they might be able to help me understand why he was murdered.”
Here’s the writing team forgetting the plot in between drafts again. If you’ll remember, Roland got isekai’d before Evan was coronated king. He was never actually the ruler of Ding Dong Dell, even though he had the mark of kings.
I think this game fucking sucks! And also that you’re a marysue! That’s what I think!
: “Which is not to say that caution will not be required. We cannot take the risk of flying too close to the city. A roundabout approach will still be required.”
Funnily enough, while the game won’t let you land anywhere near Ding Dong Dell once you have the airship, you can still fly over it freely. In fact, we had to do so in order to get one of the alternate costumes.
: “So the ol’ sky pirate full-frontal assault ain’t the order o’ the day then, hm?”
I really, really wish I had known about that shirtless outfit for him before I did this part. That outfit is more or less a full-frontal assault no matter where it is.
That last sidequest grinding update takes place after I did this part. By this point, we’ve reached kingdom level 3 and have pretty much every building maxed out. We also have game-breakingly powerful equipment… which is good because the area we’re about to go to is a pretty significant difficulty spike the way Broadleaf was.
I know I said I’d wait for people to post party suggestions, but this next segment is more or less pure story… and a dungeon that we’re going to fucking destroy because of all the farming. I went with the same party I used for Faraway Forest - Roland, Batu, and Leander.
Whatever you do, you DEFINITELY want to bring Leander with you when you do this… or at least swap him out at certain points. I think I already explained why, but I’ll show it off when we get there.
Chapter 8 is when the game desperately tries to get you to fight stuff. The final content for this area is level 60, and I think my party was around 46-47 when I got here on my first run. This time, everyone is either 55 or 56… though they probably would be much lower had we not taken the unusual step of grinding the Faraway Forest.
As a result, we’re forced to land pretty far back from Ding Dong Dell.
Most of the monsters in this first area are too low level to even aggro onto the party. I didn’t know it, but I was still on Extreme when I did this part.
As we approach the bridge to the Kingsway, you might notice all those red dots on the map. Those are guards, basically there to block us from going to the front door.
Once across the bridge, we run into an encounter that will actually aggro the party.
One Flatliner from Roland almost kills the entire group on Extreme. Had I remembered what button I had assigned the upgraded Flatliner to, this would have been a one hit kill on everything.
Pretty much as soon as that fight finished, the cutscene zone took over.
Welcome back to Ding Dong Dell, which I will remind you is not in any way a thinly-veiled reference to WWII-era Germany.
I mean, no shit? Last time you were here you were running for your life with a man who had just recently been isekai’d out of his job as the worst president ever.
: “This town seems so peaceful, and yet… one cannot help but notice a distinct lack of grimalkin.”
: “They’ve all jumped ship and set sail for safer shores, I shouldn’t wonder.”
: “I heard they’d all been moved to some kind of underground slum somewhere, although I don’t know much more than that.”
: “That sounds… miserable.”
: “Well, if there are no grimalkin left to speak with, we shall have to see what the mice and rats have to tell us.”
: “Only if you and Roland will agree not to remove your hoods. You are both too well known here for comfort.”
: “It’s not exactly the world’s best disguise, but it’ll have to do for now.”
Now we get to do a repeat of the beginning part of Hydropolis.
Nope, no similarities at all to late 1930s Europe. None whatsoever.
I think you have Germany confused with - nevermind.
So you could go so far as to say it’s… springtime for Germany and winter for Poland and France?
: “And why would it be? They’re finally getting preferential treatment after all these years.”
: “So, let me see if I’ve got this straight… it used to be the mice and rats who were discriminated against, but now the tables have turned and the grimalkin are on the receiving end?”
: “It seems so, yes.”
: “Tit for tat, eh? Folks ain’t never so different as they’re the same.”
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
: “I…I never knew things were so hard for mousekind…”
Again, Evan was never coronated. As far as I’m aware the only time he’s ever called himself king was to Roland at the start of the game.
By the way, I haven’t mentioned it and the game does a really poor job of showing it, but Tani is supposed to be Evan’s love interest. That Evan, not me.
: “I’d like to hear what the grimalkin have to say for themselves, only there aren’t exactly many around to ask…”
: “What’s this?”
: “Flip, mun! What are we, errand boys?”
Shadow, who is just blatantly Floyd after dying his fur, is crouching behind a tree just down the road from the sandwich stand.
I’m going to skip a couple lines of dialog here because they get repeated shortly after this.
You know, with all the talk about sardines this might as well be Disgaea 4… except Disgaea 4 (barring its godawful plot which unlike this game was entirely skippable) was a good game.
What we’re about to head into is the last dungeon I did before I dropped this game the first time. That isn’t to say I dropped the game immediately after it - I did do the bossfights here and did a bunch of sidequest grinding after this only to find out what the ending is. That pretty much made me just give up.
One thing I do want to address is that there was some reviewer at PC Gamer (I think) who called this her favorite game of 2018, calling it a “light-hearted romp” or some shit. This makes me believe she either never got this far into the game or was somehow playing a different game and confused it for NNK2.
The sewers are annoying as fuck to do if you’re not insanely overgrinded like we are right now. You want to bring Leander with you even if you don’t normally use him.
Oh hey, it’s all those enemy recolors we ran into doing the dreamer’s gate sidequest.
There’s a trip door at the start and I have no real idea as to why. Not to say it’s not appreciated.
Most of the enemy clusters here are too low-level to even aggro onto us. That slime in the back is the only thing that will, and we can run past it pretty easily.
If you’re running low on healing items for some reason, there’s a chest here with 3000 guilders in it.
Most of the side paths here lead to a chest, but there’s actually two higglestones in here. I grabbed them just because I had the stuff for them.
Strangely, Bawbee the Bandit here actually has worse overall stats than the three other wind-element higgledies we already had.
Past that is this room, which is designed to force you through a long route to fight as many enemies as possible. Batu’s so naked that none of the monsters want to deal with that shit.
Along the way, a monster aggroed the party. This is one attack’s worth of damage… on extreme. On normal, we’d have oneshotted this thing.
There’s a few more monster groups we could run right by thanks to Batu’s amazing chest. You see those three orange dots on the map? Welcome to what is probably the most annoying dungeon feature in this game.
In case you’re wondering, this is one of two direct links to the first Ni no Kuni that exist in this game. The statue is of the king of Ding Dong Dell from the first game.
Oh boy, a puzzle with the most obvious solution since Bioshock Infinite and “Wait a minute… that card…”
Each brazier has a number carved into it. This is how long it will stay lit, which kinda makes no sense considering we’re using magic to light it.
As soon as we light the brazier, a 15-second timer appears. This timer does not pause unless you enter a menu - it even continues to count down while you are doing the spell animation.
Thank you for restating the obvious, Bracken.
We’re now about halfway through the sewers, except… oh no, that’s another orange dot up ahead.
This is one of the reasons we brought Leander along. Everyone else has the same dodge move - they’ll roll forward and ignore damage during the animation. Leander is a bit different. He goes invisible and does a Chaos Control thing that warps him forward far more than the roll animation does. This also has a much shorter animation than the roll does, which allows us to chain it for maximum speed.
Now, you might think “Oh, I can just light the brazier and then run forward to get the other two.” You’d be wrong. For one thing, all three of the braziers in this section have enemies around them… and the timer keeps ticking down in battle.
In between brazier number one and brazier number two is a big, annoying zig-zag path that you can’t jump over despite the fact that you totally could. Astute viewers might notice the path to the right.
Unfortunately, that’s a one-way path that is only accessible from the other side. Sure is Dark Souls around here.
Here’s a better shot of the zig-zag from the other side.
Brazier 2 is on the other side of the zig-zag, along with Brazier 3 on the statue in the room behind it.
With a 25-second time limit, going back across the zig-zag path takes too much time. We actually have to do this puzzle in reverse, starting at the statue. I ALMOST managed to get back to the first brazier using Leander’s warp-dodge over the zig-zag, but was off by a third of a second or so.
Oh, but here’s the dickish part. That side path isn’t actually accessible from the back either. Instead, you have to wake up a prop-leaf clover to boost you up there… which will take too much time if you haven’t done it already.
Past the door is another enemy recolor, this time the squid. This is about where I remembered I still had the game on Extreme and turned it down to Normal.
That jelly was dead before I could even get into range as Roland. I didn’t get a good shot of it, but I got a single crit on the move that replaces Flatliner for over 6000 damage right after this part.
The second higglestone is near where that jelly is in that last image.
From the description, you’d think we’d need to offer it a spiky bone, a common drop in the Makronos area. Instead, we have to offer it a forked tail bone, which are rare drops in the sewers and also in the dreamer gates.
This higgledy is also worse than our current dark-element one.
We’re nearly done with this dungeon, except… we have to go all the way around to reach the end door.
Sounds like a mid-boss that’s about to get destroyed.
The third brazier puzzle is much easier than the second one. While you’re intended to do the one up here last, there’s nothing theoretically stopping you from starting here - except that the next two or three rooms are full of enemies.
This dumbass jelly in the next room gets a taste of one of Roland’s late-game attacks: Executive Order.
It’s a Stinger ripoff at the start, kind of like what Evan has…
Which builds into a Flatliner, albeit with a shorter reach…
And then ends with Roland blasting the enemy several times with his gun before launching out a giant fireball (if you charged it or have zing). While it looks cool, this attack is a pain in the ass to hit with and the animation takes roughly forever, leaving you incredibly open.
I wound up starting at the last brazier and working my way up to the middle one, then back to the one near the door. Like the last puzzle, there’s a hidden prop clover that you need to get to the one near the door in time if you’re doing it this way.
The reason you can’t see any of the characters in those screenshots by the way is that Leander’s teleport-dash has him invisible for so long that it’s hard to get a screenshot of.
Time for a bossfight that kind of just comes out of nowhere.
The boss starts with two trash enemies - a fire fairy and a light element fairy. The light element one will occasionally heal the other two if it isn’t taken out.
The boss itself alternates between calling in more trash mobs and flying around and dropping explosions.
Because we’re so overpowered, this fight was over in about 30 seconds. Everyone got a level regardless.
Anyway, there’s another stupid “gather info from the people!” segment I’m not even going to bother with because it boils down to “The mice took over and are basically the gestapo.”
: “Gah! Ding Dong Dell’s rotten to the blessed core!”
: “But it’s all because we used to persecute mousekind… I’m sure there are plenty of people who are very happy to have Mausinger in charge…”
: “I-I don’t condone what he’s done, of course. A leader must be above petty vengeance.”
: “There’s certainly no way we can form a union with such a kingdom.”
: “So what are you going to do? Get some vengeance of your own?”
Well, yeah, I’d say that’s EXACTLY what he should do! That would make Evan less of a marysue and more of a character with flaws.
If you want to know why I dropped this game, remember these two lines. Fucking remember them.
Fucking of course he was! His closest adviser poisoned him to death so he could start a fucking fascist dictatorship and he had no idea it was even coming!
: “Think about it. Why would he make Mausinger his most trusted friend and adviser?”
Because like Pugnacius and Nerea, he was a fucking idiot! And now he’s a dead idiot!
: “Well, I suppose he… um… I’m sorry, I need some time to myself.”
Why is Batu the only one with any goddamn sense?
Next time, we’ll go through two more long cutscenes, meet Evan’s dead dad, and see the part where I dropped the game as I fly into a rage about how much potential this entire area had.
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Update 42: The Part Where I Dropped The Game
This particular cutscene feels really tacked-on, and I want to believe it’s because at one point, the game’s plot was going where I was hoping it was going.
: “Ratja!? Gosh, it’s been so long! How are you?”
I feel like there should be a rule of plot writing that you aren’t allowed to bring in side characters and act as if the main character has known them for years this late into the story.
I can’t remember if Ratja joins as a citizen later on (as most NPCs with a unique appearance do) but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t and I’m too lazy to verify with my first-run save.
: “Thank you for your concern, but I came here to speak with him as one ruler to another. I mean to forge a union between our two kingdoms.”
: “I…I know…but…”
: “Can I ask you something, Ratja? Is Ding Dong Dell… better now? Are the rats and mice happy?”
So yeah, this is some grade-A bullshit right here. This scene feels tacked-on as fuck to make you feel like Mausinger isn’t the villain that the last 30 to 40 minutes of gameplay have just shown us he is.
: “Really?”
: “But Mausinger believes that… he believes that my father simply used him to keep mousekind under control.”
We now have our next objective: open the tomb and get King Leonhard’s diary.
Unfortunately, we can’t just land there because as I’ve established over the past year, this game sucks.
It basically involves taking the exact same route we did to get to the sewers, only we take a right instead and wind up at the crypt. Here’s the screenshot of Roland’s other new move doing enough damage to instakill a group of enemies.
Like I said, you just take a right instead of going straight.
I’m not entirely sure why this is something you actually enter in-game, considering that it exists solely for this one cutscene.
The door only opens with the Mark of Kings, so…
For some reason, Evan’s father is interred right in the center, and also they left the diary out in the open. I honestly have to question how Mausinger never saw it… or why he didn’t simply take the mark of kings when they opened the door to the crypt to put the body in there rather than try to kill Evan for it.
So yeah, Evan’s dad? Total bara lion furry. We never meet his mother, but presumably she was human and somehow Evan winds up with just ears and a tail.
Also he’s a complete idiot. “Yeah, I know you’re poisoning me to death but I still trust you.”
And that’s why he’s dead.
: “So, Evan, what are you going to do now?”
The correct answer should be “I’m going to put him to the sword”.
: “From old Mausinger himself, is it?”
: “I knew it was just a matter of time.”
: “You planned this, didn’t you Roland?”
: “He wants to trade for the Mark of Kings? Guess you knew it would make a good bargaining chip all along, huh, Roland?”
: “It is a trap, of course.”
: “I don’t think he’s trying to disguise the fact. He knows that we can’t refuse.”
Shut up, Boy Sampson.
Going into this, I’d like to talk a little bit about what I assumed was coming. I knew that Studio Ghibli tend to avoid violent character deaths and always have the whole anti-war pro-environment thing going on, but that doesn’t mean they’re against doing that to make an impact (see: Mononoke). I was really, really hoping this wouldn’t turn into another Undertale.
I’ll probably catch shit for this, but Undertale in retrospect had kind of a shitty plot. Yes, the characters were likeable, but the whole message about violence not being the way to solve problems kind of gets undercut by the fact that one character gets away with murdering like six kids and that in the end there’s still a living avatar of death running around that will not respond to pacifism.
We can pretty much just warp back to Ding Dong Dell and head right to the castle.
: “And did you bring the Mark of Kings as requested?”
: “Ah, yes. I must commend you on your new realm - and your persistence. Having failed so abjectly on the first attempt, you would be forgiven for not trying again.”
: “I promised Aranella. I said I would build a kingdom where everyone can live happily ever after.”
Why is the nazi mouse the first person to point out how fucking stupid of an idea this is?
: “King Mausinger, please, we have to stop this before it’s too late!”
: “I see now why you overthrew me - so much has happened between our two lands.”
Technically you can’t be overthrown if you were never king but whatever.
: “But we can’t let it go on! We have to bring the hatred between our peoples to an end!”
We have to stop this possible civil war in order to uh… what was the plot again?
I know that I hate this fucking game!
With six people in his throne room and no guards around to defend him, Mausinger makes the brilliant move of challening a party carrying overpowered bullshit weapons from the post-game dungeon.
This is the very start of the fight. Two seconds in, before I was even ready to take a screenshot, Leander hit Mausinger for over 6000 damage. Batu followed up with a special that hit multiple times for some 3000-4000 damage per hit.
As a result, Mausinger immediately went into Phase 2 within about five seconds of the fight starting. In Phase 2, he’s shielded and hurls fireballs in two patterns: a single-wide column and a conical spray. The fireballs do jack shit for damage.
Boy Sampson will say something about needing the Higgledies to help, but they don’t actually do anything here. Mausinger is on a timer right now.
I got hit by like 50 fireballs on purpose and Roland still was not dead.
Mausinger drops his shield…
And then teleports behind you. Nothing personnel, kid. I’m also pretty sure he has hyperarmor or something during the time he spends near the throne after his shield goes down.
This is how overpowered Roland is right now - one special (and this isn’t even Executive Action, which hits multiple times) and Mausinger loses a good 15% or so of his lifebar.
The twist is that we never get to defeat him: he surrenders when his health gets low.
We have about two minutes until the part that made me decide I was going to dunk on this goddamn shitpile of a game.
Oh boy, a two-for-one boss rush. Not like we’re not going to murder Action 151 Garuda in ten seconds with all the overpowered shit we have.
Or… maybe not. I was honestly hoping Doloran would kill Mausinger here because that would at least give you kind of a motivation to want to kill him.
I never freeze-framed this part but it totally looks like Doloran is jacking the kingsbond off.
: “V-Vermine?!”
This is reason number one I dropped this fucking game. Mausinger didn’t kill Evan’s father because Doloran had possessed him - he did it of his own free fucking will. He literally killed a man because some asshole just kind of insinuated that he could.
So either Mausinger is the world’s biggest, most gullible dipshit or he’s actively malicious and either way should probably wind up with his head rolling.
: “Vermine… h-how could you?”
Vermine has now been banished to the shadow realm.
Even better, not only was Evan’s dad “too good” to be corrupted… but this apparently also applied to Mausinger. If “killing your best friend just because someone implied you could” is the grounds for being too pure to corrupt then this is probably an officially written Pathfinder scenario.
Oh right, this asshole’s still around.
: “Oakenhart… has it really come to this?”
: “Wait! You needn’t do this alone! We’ll fight him together!”
Not only is Mausinger not fucking dead, he’s not even going to sacrifice himself to take Oakenhart out. I would’ve rammed a knife into his jugular like five minutes ago.
Welcome back to the Fiddy Zone.
The black winds embrace a bloody moon.
The screams of a thousand thousand souls on their knees, begging for pleasure, for pain.
Down from the mountains of madness and into the heart of an endless storm, an evil wind rises…
Oakenhart Action 151 Garuda is a complete pushover of a boss and not in any way worthy of Garuda’s arranged theme.
Boy Sampson will point these flowers out right away. The flowers have higmakers in them - but unlike Discount Alexander and Bootleg Leviathan, we don’t need them to fight Action 151 Garuda.
I did go for the flowers just so I could show off how pointless the higmakers are, and this fight didn’t last much longer than the time it took me to do that. Oakenhart flies around the arena with his weak point shifting between his four legs. He also spits out poison clouds - you can see one on the right side of the screen.
True to his word, Mausinger is actually on the field. He won’t attack the boss unless it’s on the ground, but will shoot streams of fireballs at the flowers to free higmakers.
Eventually, Oakenhart will land and start firing his first ground-based attack: rows of thorns that erupt from the ground and do damage and a knockdown if they hit.
After a few seconds, he launches a slightly different attack where he’ll throw out streams of plants that move faster than his thorns and home in on a target before erupting into vines.
Once I got serious, it took me about ten seconds to get Oakenhart to move into his second phase, where he attempts to cover the entire arena in poison.
You can go to Mausinger, who will put up a shield around him that will protect from the poison…
Or you can use the higmakers to get a shield that moves with you, allowing you to damage the boss.
One Executive Action on its legs got the boss down almost instantly, and it never had the chance to get back up.
Boss down, everybody go home.
Now, I hope everyone is ready for the exact moment that made me drop this game. The exact moment that made me start this LP purely out of spite for how bad this game is.
: “Take my life, Tildrum. It is your right. You must avenge your father…”
You know what would’ve made this moment really, really fucking good? Really, really memorable? If Mausinger just killed himself right here. It’d be a powerful scene: the adviser who was at one point supposedly uncorruptable realizing that he blindly betrayed his only friend and killed him in what is probably one of the most slow and painful ways and that there is no redemption for him.
I mean, his friend is dead. Ni no Kuni 1’s entire message was that death is a very permanent and serious thing that cannot be taken back, only dealt with by the survivors who are left to cope. I could even see him not sacrificing himself against Oakenhart as a sort of “I had to keep you safe, it’s what my friend would have wanted” kind of thing before he takes his own life. They wouldn’t even necessarily have to show it, just have a shot of him holding a dagger or something.
There’s people who would say that isn’t really appropriate for a game like this, but I counter with the fact that the writers were pretty clearly setting something like that up. They wouldn’t have shown Mausinger as being a ruthless asshole the way they did if they had originally intended for him not to die. I mean, sure, he’s no Luca Blight, but he’s pretty goddamn close.
Hell, if they wanted to, they could’ve just had Mausinger exile himself or something. That still would’ve been good writing without directly or indirectly showing a suicide.
…But this isn’t a good game. This is Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom. This is a game that is about to take a big, fat shit all over the first game and all over any of the rules of good storytelling.
: “No, Mausinger. There will be no more needless death.”
Anime was a fucking mistake.
This game was a fucking mistake.
The idiot suit that okayed this was a fucking mistake.
This game just took the first game’s entire plot and stuffed it in a goddamn trash can.
Death is permanent? Nah, fuck it you can just come back as a ghost when-the-fuck-ever.
So yes, Mausinger is going to get off scot-free for killing someone.
By being publicly executed and having his head stuffed on a pike? That’d be about the only way he could make things any better.
“You see far, despite the fact that you kinda murdered me because some dipshit implied you could. What I’m saying is that ultimately, I was probably going to off myself through my own stupidity.”
The correct answer should be “Hahaha fuck no, my son is going to put you to the sword.”
Yeah, who better to run this country than a dipshit even bigger than the last dipshit who ran it?
: “If it please you… your majesty.”
I would prefer to think that Mausinger is actually dead here, because of course you’re not going to let the dipshit who killed the last king live, much less be king himself. Unfortunately, I know for a fact he shows up later.
“Which again, won’t be long because as we speak, Roland is loading his gun to pop you in the head twice just in case being impaled doesn’t do the job.”
This game was a fucking mistake.
Anyway, there’s yet another repeat of this stupid cutscene we’ve seen three times already. What’s strange is that they didn’t use the same take from Evan’s VA for these repeat cutscenes - in this one, the VA sounds like she’s had more than enough of this game’s bullshit. Probably because she was called in at the last minute.
So much for “one step at a time”.
From here on in, apart from the kingdom management/sidequest grind, I am as blind as you are… apart from having seen the end cutscene.
Next time: More pointless cutscenes in the endless parade of trash that is Ni no Kuni 2. Plus, Roland has an isekai heart attack.
Update 43: A Final Boss Appears
I’m just gonna go ahead and give this cutscene the Tim Buckley treatment.
You see, it’s a better cutscene when I reduce it from like twenty lines of dialog to two.
You mean the plot, or the fact that this game actually got released, or the giant cloud of smoke?
We walk in on Roland having an isekai heart attack as he tries out for the role of Hisao in Katawa Shoujo. Remember that LP? I want to get back to that LP.
: “Anyway - never mind me, did you see the sky? Batu and the others went out on patrol over there, didn’t they?”
This is… actually a pretty big ripoff of the opening cutscene in FF14 where Bahamut descends from the sky in almost the same way.
The game is not trying very hard to make this not look like a giant Sky-Goatse taking a shit.
The sky-turd opens up to reveal…
That one guy from Berserk, now in the form of a giant rock monster.
Somehow, all of the other kingmakers (barring Boy Sampson) come back and put on a light show.
It’s like I’m on that Bootleg Stuff twitter account.
And now, in a complete ripoff of the barrier towers from Final Fantasy 5, the Horned One is surrounded by a shield.
This scene is another FF ripoff, making it a whopping three ripoffs IN THE SAME CUTSCENE. In this case, it’s the scene from FF8 where the monsters start descending from the moon.
Wait… you’re telling me we could’ve skipped that ENTIRE GRIND by just going full-on Drakengard and stealing everyone’s soul? Why the FUCK didn’t we just do that in the first place? Shit.
The game actually interrupts a cutscene so that we can save. Here’s a game design protip from me: if at any point you have to break a cutscene in multiple parts so that people can save in between it in case they don’t have time to watch 20+ minutes of unskippable cutscene at a time, your calling is not in game design, it’s in filmmaking.
Anyway, the next part is literally the EXACT SAME CUTSCENE we just saw, only with Bracken and Leander fucking explaining what we already know. In fact, hold on I think I have the perfect summary for this:
Not even joking.
Boom, cutscene summarized.
Nerea just teleports in, and it makes me wonder: if she can teleport, why the hell didn’t she just teleport all the idiots out of Hydropolis? Actually, if there are trip doors everywhere, why didn’t they just use those?
Anyway, Nerea is here to recap what we read about Allegoria back in the library segment way back when about how Doloran lead it and it blew the fuck up because he let his kingmaker get out of control.
This kinda proves how badly-timed the library segment was. If I had to estimate, I’d say that if you’re playing this on your own, this is about 25 hours or so ahead of where the library segment was back in Chapter 3.
Gotta love that reference to a movie that is much, much better than this game.
: “Whatever happened, Doloran would appear to be determined to revive this vanished land.”
: “But why? Why would he want to bring it back after all these years?”
: “I don’t know, but I think I understand now why he needed all those kingsbonds - without them, he couldn’t hope to control something so powerful.”
: “But if Doloran got what he wanted, why is he stealing everyone’s souls?”
: “He needs followers. Subjects. The more powerful he grows, the more powerful his kingmaker becomes in turn.”
: “And one whose ambitions stretch so far as enlisting the aid of an utterly evil being will surely not be satisfied with merely recovering his lost realm.”
: “So he wants to take over the whole world? Well, we can’t let him! We won’t!”
: “And how exactly are we supposed to stop him? You saw the size of that mountain of spikes he calls a kingmaker, didn’t you?”
: “There is one possibility.”
: “Alas, its whereabouts are no longer known. But there is yet time. The great evil gathers its forces still.”
: “If the sword can be found before it reaches its full strength, we may yet stand a chance.”
: “But how do we find it?”
Now we get to do the library thing all over again.
The weird thing is, the quest calls it the “Sword of Union” and not “Mornstar”. Again, probably from an earlier draft of the plot.
I’m going to skip most of this cutscene, but this line in particular stuck out to me as making no sense. All of the “books” in Goldpaw’s library are actually stone slabs, which was established the first time we got here.
Boddly gives us the only thing she has left from 2000 years ago: a stone tablet she can’t even read.
Naturally, this is a fetch quest. It honestly reminds me of the end of Final Fantasy 14’s base game, where right before the assault on the imperial stronghold, you get to do a quest to bring soup to a couple of faceless rebel soldiers.
Li Li, of course, wants us to go on a second fetch quest. This one is actually not so bad, mostly becuase we did the dreamer maze sidequest and have the warp point near the desert area. On a side note, there’s probably a good fifteen to twenty sidequests that have opened up and I’m touching exactly zero of them.
I also took a tainted monster out. No particular reason, just wanted to see how the OP shit stacked up against it. This thing is still a damage sponge, but it basically can’t hit you if you’re in melee range.
Executive Action does a TON of damage to it and there’s absolutely no reason not to spam it because the worm is large enough that the entire thing will hit.
The only characters that levelled here were Evan and Batu, who both were pretty close to levelling up to begin with. Roland barely got half a bar out of that.
The quest itself involves landing on three different spots. There’s no indication (apart from the one on the minimap) to show where the spots are, but you at least get the ! indicator when you walk up to them.
: “It was a clue about Mornstar!”
: “So the sword became a cup, and was hidden away until such time as it was needed once again…”
Fetch quests! Artificial game padding! Oh, and the game crashed during this cutscene so that part where I killed the tainted monster never actually happened. Worse, it was dropping frames before that and I missed a bunch of screenshots so I had to do this whole part over again.
The Coldera is on the easternmost point of the frozen area, on the other side from the wrecked plane.
The shrine is basically a generic dreamer maze floor, so we’ll just skip the entire thing (it was full of enemies that Roland or Batu could oneshot anyway).
Oh man, time for a challenging boss fight that isn’t just a blatant reskin of the stone golem miniboss from the forest!
And by challenging I mean he went down in under a minute and only got a single hit off (it’s a chain of fireball like Mausinger uses) on Roland.
For some reason, we need to bring it back to Evermore to have Bracken turn it back into a sword.
My lord, bless thy safe return.
Let Kaathe, and Frampt, serve your highness.
Let true dark be cast upon the world.
Nah fuck it, even Dark Souls and its lack of a plot was better than this shit. Not to say Dark Souls 1 wasn’t an amazing game because it’s the only good Dark Souls game.
By the way, that sword is absolutely bigger than Evan is. That thing is probably bigger than Bracken is.
Next time, we’ll face the Horned One… and this endless nightmare will finally be over. I think. I don’t know.
Update 44: Anime Was A Mistake
: “I have informed the other rulers of the sword’s completion.”
: “They’ll be readying their armies as we speak. It’s time for the final showdown.”
One thing I was wrong about is the cutoff point for getting Kingdom Level 3. The cutoff point is actually right here. There are a whole bunch of sidequests that open up after Ding Dong Dell just in case you’re not quite there yet - but fortunately we already are.
In terms of kingdom management mode, I grinded out absolutely everything: all buildings are maxed out save for a few that I couldn’t get because they require people we couldn’t have until this point. They’re all gathering buildings anyway.
I hope everyone is ready for the game to simultaneously pretend it has a plot and also attempt to take itself seriously in this, the last… maybe two hours of gameplay.
There’s a stupid war council scene which I’m not even going to bother doing - it’s a blatant ripoff of that one scene from Lord of the Rings. Also, at least two of the people in this war council should be fucking dead.
The game makes it pretty clear we’re about to go past the point of no return. There IS a post-game, though it’s largely pointless. It’s not like, say, Disgaea where there’s actual content beyond the story mode. We could just keep grinding, but there isn’t much of a reason to…
Nope! Fuck you, Level-5! I’m finishing this shitty game before you can shit that DLC out! You can’t stop me from going back to work on an LP I actually like!
The thing is though, the Conductor was a major character in Ni no Kuni 1 and although I’ve never actually played it (I’ve only read a plot synopsis) I kind of want to see how badly they shit on NNK1 beyond what they already have.
There’s also a plot point in NNK1 I forgot about, which is that
What’s coming up is a series of two of the most boring possible skirmish battles. They’re not difficult - in fact I pretty much wound up plowing through them - they’re just long and boring.
Now, I’ll give this cutscene this: it actually does kinda, in some respects, feel like something you might see in a Ghibli movie.
This is why we needed kingdom level 3 for some reason.
I don’t really know how Roland knows this, but given that the rest of the plot makes no sense, I suppose I shouldn’t have expected this to make sense either.
I want you to remember this line for oh… let’s say about five minutes from now.
I’d say they’re not listening because you’re the dipshit who got New York nuked, but go ahead.
Yes Evan, I’m sure all of the people who aren’t from Ding Dong Dell totally know who Aranella was. Also, if she meant that much to you why did you not kill the guy who killed her?
My exact reaction to this was “Oh boy, a fucking clip show. They ran out of content hours ago and now we’re getting a clip show.”
When the fuck did this ever happen? Why were we never at any point shown this? Why are they just now bringing it up a good hour-plus of cutscenes after we fucking fought the guy who killed her? ANIME WAS A GODDAMN MISTAKE!
It also occurred to me around this point that the reason Evan has such long hair is to hide the fact that he doesn’t have human ears. Honestly, I’d rather have a four-eared cat-person than cat ears but no human ones because that shit’d be freakish.
No you haven’t! No you fucking haven’t! You haven’t at all! You’re still taking orders from some dipshit who teleported into your bedroom!
This entire scene, by the way, is a total ripoff of the start of Final Fantasy 14.
If only Bahamut would come in and just fucking obliterate Evan the way he obliterated Louisoix.
The game is also about to rip off Final Fantasies 5 and 8 in a massive way, and I feel like Laguna Loire was a way better president than Roland. Laguna wouldn’t have needed some dipshit catboy to control an army.
Really, the plan is “blow up the towers and then destroy the giant assfuck rock monster before it can devour everyone’s souls”. Doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
There’s like four screens after this, but I missed taking a screenshot on a few of them and didn’t feel like going back for it. While this sounds a lot like the Northern Crater in FF7 or Kefka’s tower in 6 where you have to split people into groups, here it’s just one prolonged skirmish battle.
Here’s the penultimate skirmish of this game. We start with 10,000 military might…which is a pretty considerable number compared to the enemy’s starting might of 6,040. However, you’ll notice that we have an assload of KG to spend.
Now we’ve got 15,000 and all of the other upgrades.
The enemy starts out with a bunch of hammers, a spear and a wand unit. Our units are over level 30 at this point, and with all the boosts the enemy goes down in about ten seconds.
Roland could probably kill Longfang in one hit at this point.
We lose a bit of military might healing the army, but the rage meter is maxed out. We’re going to need that soon.
You know what would’ve been cool here? If they had done boss refights, only you’re playing as the various country leaders. I say this because there are boss refights right after this.
At the next gate are some big fuckers who will absolutely destroy the two hammer units we have. Thankfully, we have rage mode ready to go.
I forgot to show it, but unlike other skirmishes Boy Sampson will drop spheres that boost the rage bar by half, so I used rage mode and then got another rage bar instantly. We’re also over our base military might again.
Bootleg Alexander now looks like a Warhammer miniature that someone half-painted and then forgot about, which from what I gather is more or less the average Warhammer experience.
Once this cutscene plays, we get a new objective: wait until more cutscenes can come along. I’ll just skip right to the next one.
Those are some words coming from the guy who killed his king for being a cat.
After another like… two waves of enemies… the first tower goes out. Didn’t Roland say they had to all go out at the same time?
Weirdly enough there’s a call-in from Nerea (which I forgot to cap) and Mausinger (who is pretending to be a Metroid) but not from Zark. It’s… almost like Zark was supposed to be dead, but they forgot about it the same way the writers forgot that all four towers had to go down at the same time. There’s a good five minutes between when the red one goes down and when Mausinger calls in.
Oh man, I am ready to tear this boss a new-
Oh wait, it’s another fucking skirmish!
This fight is trash, and let me explain why. If you just run your army straight at the Horned One’s chest, it’ll be over in under 20 seconds. Easy. However, as with… I dunno, all of the other Kingmaker fights. I was expecting there to be something we had to do before hitting the chest.
All the Horned One does is smash the ground with his hands, which will kill any units caught underneath it.
Every so often, one of the leaders will report in and set up defenses: the first is Nerea, who sets up some command posts that’ll spawn trash units. I never got to see the second one because at this point, I figured I’d just go for the chest.
One of the un-listed benefits of Mornstar is that it can turn Boy Sampson into Horner Sampson on command.
The real question is why we’re never at any point able to do this during any of the upcoming boss battles.
Yeah, I’m surprised that it’s a total ripoff of the Chaos Dimension thing from the end of Final Fantasy 5.
The thing is… there are no monsters in this dungeon. Let’s take a look at how Mornstar is stat-wise. Surely it’s better than our overpowered stuff from Faraway Forest…
Yeah no it’s trash. Even with the fact that everything we’re going to fight up until the final boss is dark-element and also takes the extra damage from the “vs. Horned One” bit, it does nowhere near the damage Roland’s current sword does.
A few feet in, Boy Sampson will take the time to point out that there’s a trip door here.
Game designers, that’s who. I can’t fault them for doing this, but it’s kind of a strange choice given that we have no reason to come back here and there’s no fights between here and the next trip door.
Down the other path is… wait, isn’t this just the Shadowlord’s Castle from NieR?
Doloran’s city is two giant chains short of being Zeal.
That’s the problem with those isekai nukes. You can’t tell whether you’re having an isekai heart attack or it’s just isekai heartburn.
Oh yeah, and here’s this douchebag.
Doloran then just kinda disappears off-screen and leaves you to do… four tainted monsters that are all technically boss re-fights.
The next area is a big, symmetrical map full of chests and ghosts and stuff. None of it is anything we need, and the ghosts are either hard to find or don’t really say much.
Our first re-fight is another spider-squid. This WOULD be annoying if we didn’t have the most overpowered bullshit imaginable.
Rotwobbler spends most of its short life being stunlocked and taking thousand-plus damage hits.
Everyone gets a level off it, which we don’t really need but is still pretty nice to have.
I didn’t even stop to look at the gate, but we have to free the… uh… four chaos emeralds to open it.
Second out of the gate is this thing, a re-color of the usual stone golem miniboss.
The first two-thirds or so of the fight went really well, but then…
Roland gets lasered and knocked back into last week.
Then lasered again during the wakeup animation…
Then shot at a bunch trying to get close enough to get a special off.
Batu killed it just as I got close enough.
Two down, two to go.
Third refight is another snake boss, which like all snake bosses before it sucks at hitting anything even vaguely close to it.
Like Rotwobbler, Inkywriggle spends most of the fight knocked out while Roland spams Executive Action on it.
Congrats to Bracken who has learned to how successfully crowdfund.
Finally, we’ve got another dragon boss. Like the other three, this one is easy but takes longer due to its ability to fly out of melee/special range.
Somehow, the AI stunned it and I used that opportunity to spam even more Executive Actions.
I guess all those specials really took a toll on Roland. We’ll switch him out… after the next bossfight.
Oh fuck yes, it’s finally happening! He’s fucking dead and this game can be over and… wait a second… isn’t this just the actual Shadowlord’s castle from NieR? I mean, the whole horned one to medieval city was only kind of the Shadowlord’s castle, but this is literally the Shadowlord’s castle.
Oh, god dammit. Well, guess I was wrong about them never bringing up his son… I suppose. He’s only in this one cutscene and to be fair I had dropped the game before seeing this cutscene.
I sure hope Roland’s not-isekai son (as opposed to his isekai not-son) doesn’t die of… let’s say White Chlorination Syndrome because that’d be real bad.
Let me guess, you’re going to do the whole “you can share my cookie” thing because it’s a NieR ripoff.
Man, I sure hate it when I’m right. Well, cheer up Roland, at least your kid died quickly.
Well, your son died of White Chlorination Syndrome, and your world is fucking doomed because the Japanese SDF shot down a dragon. Maybe next time tell them to be a little less trigger-happy with the F-15s.
The game takes the liberty of climbing the giant fuckoff staircase for us. There are trip doors above and below so you never have to actually climb it.
We have a save point, we have a trip door. If we needed to (we don’t) we could go back to Evermore to stock up.
Doloran’s castle is basically just a series of automatically opening doors.
Shut it, Shadowlord! Give back Yonah and… oh wait, forgot this isn’t NieR.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re about to see the game’s main plot twist. Remember how I said the game completely forgot about the whole “everyone in the real world has a counterpart in the isekai realm” thing from the first game?
… I lied. They only MOSTLY forgot about it.
: “What did you… do to me…”
: “Me? Hm hm hm! Why, nothing at all!”
: “You have the Horned One to thank for this. It means to protect you… for if harm comes to either one of us… it comes to the other also…”
This is kind of a thing from the first game as far as I understand it, but they never (to the best of my knowledge) imply that death is one of those things that carry over. In fact, the only time this occurs in NNK1, the character who died was an isekai native who had no real-world counterpart.
I should also mention that I re-read the plot synopsis for the first game and there’s another thing (that I should’ve mentioned way the fuck back when Evan first became king) that there’s a child-king in the first game who winds up going murderously insane because their advisers are using them as a puppet. Shit, I would’ve fucking loved this game if it had that in it.
: “You mean you and Roland are… you are…”
: “Yes, Leander. You see it now - see what others must be shown.”
Before I post this screenshot, I’m going to congratulate any of you who figured out that “Doloran” is basically Roland shoved through the Nobody name generator from Kingdom Hearts.
Oh fuck, Roland’s that one guy from the Ginyu Force except green instead of red!
This plot twist is so dumb, Roland is having an actual heart attack instead of an isekai one.
I sure love how they all of a sudden pull a direct link to the first game out of their ass some 30 hours (minus grind) into the game with absolutely no buildup beforehand.
: “But how does this… what does this mean?!”
: “It means you face a dilemma, boy.”
: “You have no choice but to join me, Roland. You know it, deep in your heart.”
When Roland gets home, he’s going to declare Square-Enix a terror group.
Gee, you know what would’ve made this scene have a hell of a lot more impact? If Zark died the way the writers had originally planned - given that he uses the same words and all.
: “No!”
: “Besides, if I can’t kill you, you can’t kill me either, right? If I die, you die.”
: “Hm hm hm! Very true. Which is why, if you will not join me, I must banish you instead to a dimension where you will no longer be a danger… to either of us.”
He’s going to isekai Roland into Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s.
You might think this is weird editing on my part, but it’s not. I’m not entirely sure how this line at all follows logically from Doloran’s last one.
: “Your country - Allegoria - it was destroyed… and my country was destroyed too…”
I wouldn’t say that New York is the entirety of the United States and we only actually saw one missile hit, but sure why not.
: “You and I are the same… two kings with no kingdoms left to rule.”
It’s like he doesn’t understand that they are literally the same person, only one’s a saibaman.
If the game hadn’t already shit on the entire “death is permanent” thing from the first game, I’d probably go into another fit of rage at the thought that they’re probably going to pull a DBZ and wish everyone back to life or something but fuck it, this game’s almost over.
: “I’m going to make you see. I’m going to defeat the Horned One and remind you who you really are.”
The game has already stolen from Final Fantasy 5, Final Fantasy 14, Drakengard, NieR, and will shortly be lifting from Final Fantasy 8. This might as well be a direct ripoff of every boss fight in Persona 4 so I’ll add that to the list.
Also, “defeating the horned one” sounds like a euphemism for masturbation.
“How big’s my Horned One, you ask?”
“THIS BIG!”
I don’t quite understand what the point of putting the snake helmet back on was, since if he can conjure weapons from nothing you’d think he’d conjure something easier to move in, but whatever.
Doloran is basically a mirror match against Roland. Even though he has a staff, Doloran has Roland’s sword moveset and is capable of using Flatliner.
He has a few moves of his own, namely a screenspam laser attack and a single overhead slash with a really long reach.
Once he loses about a third of his health, Doloran pulls a Mausinger and shields himself… only he’s a lot more reasonable than Mausinger is. Rather than having to wait for him to shoot, he instead summons a couple of trash mobs that go down in like three hits.
He’s also got a beam attack that is a clone of Roland’s only ranged special, Heavy Ammo.
Eventually, Boy Sampson dropped an awakening orb.
While Doloran can’t be easily hit by Executive Action, he can get hit by Roland’s other skill that I am not going to bother learning the name of before the LP ends. With Awakening, you can just spam this until he dies.
Killing him gets us a level-up all around… and gets Evan to finally learn a technique that will allow him to stand against the true final boss. That’ll be next update.
Final Update: I Strongly Feel that this Game is an Affront to Life Itself
Voyager ended in 2001, after seven seasons… and then CBS/Viacom orders a new series. This one was just called Enterprise, and started a few months after Voyager ended. I wasn’t even in high school yet when Enterprise started its run.
Enterprise was… not a good show. For starters, you had the captain, played by Scott Bakula. Scott Bakula cannot act to save his life. Beyond that though, there were a lot of instances of the network coming in and demanding certain things. Enterprise was a prequel to pretty much the entirety of Star Trek up until they rebooted it years later.
Enterprise starts with a time travel arc that is incoherent at best - this was apparently something the suits ordered - and kinda slides downward from there. No surprise that the ratings took a nosedive early on and never really recovered.
To the credit of the people behind the show, they apparently tried to reboot it at the start of Season 3, hoping to be more coherent and start a sort of prequel plotline leading up to where the original series started. I think a friend of mine got me into watching it around the middle of Season 3.
So anyway, Season 3 ends and the show goes into Season 4. According to the dates the show ran, this must’ve been in my junior year of high school. A few weeks pass, and suddenly the network is announcing the series finale of Enterprise. It wasn’t exactly a shock given how bad the ratings had been, but the show had sorta, kinda started to pick up again.
I don’t remember much about the meat of final episode. I remember Scott Bakula’s character boarding another ship - might’ve been Romulans, might’ve been the Borg, fucked if I remember. He does some really, really unconvincing fight scenes and is hanging off a railing after getting shot at.
All I remember about this episode is how it ended. Scott Bakula is hanging off this railing and lands on a catwalk while shooting back at whatever it is that’s shooting at him, and then the show just abruptly cuts to black.
Then out of nowhere, the set changes to the holodeck door from Next Generation, and out steps Riker and… Troi I think. This was at a time when Patrick Stewart was starting to do the X-Men movies and refused to have anything to do with Star Trek anymore (until now, when CBS started paying him gobs of money again).
Riker turns to Troi and goes “Oh, so THAT’S what Captain Archer would’ve done. I have to go report this to Captain Picard” and just walks off-screen.
Enterprise was considered so bad that they had to retcon it into a (possibly inaccurate) holodeck simulation just in case they ever planned on continuing Star Trek as a TV series. They didn’t. In fact, Enterprise killed Star Trek as a TV series until 2017, and the new one (from what I gather anyway, I haven’t seen it) is a reboot.
: “We did it! Only just, perhaps, but we did it!”
This right here is the real point of no return. If we had anything else we needed to do before post-game, we could do it, including stocking up on healing items. We’re good on everything.
: “You’ll never rule the world! Never!”
: “Rule the world? You have read too many fairy tales, boy. The world was never my prize.”
: “What?”
: “It was beautiful, my home. A realm of peace and prosperity.”
Oh, one other similarity between Enterprise and Ni no Kuni 2: the entire point of the Enterprise’s mission in that show was to form the basis for the Federation. A sort of… space Ni no Kuni 2, if you will.
You want to see an offense against the gods? Let me LP Monster Girl Quest you cowards.
Now I want to know if Discount Leviathan and Action 151 Garuda can turn into monstergirls.
: “And so I vowed to bring her back. She and my beloved kingdom.”
You mean like Ending A of NieR, which was titled “Call Her Back”? Because that’s literally what Doloran is. We’re playing NieR as like… I dunno, the shades? The shadowlord?
: “How did you know that was even possible?”
Oh Leander, stop trying to be plot-relevant.
: “If so, the strength of the kingsbonds might serve to reach that which lies dormant deep within. To reconnect king and kingmaker. And free her of her prison…”
: “It is as you say. If Alisandra can be revived, Allegoria may yet rise from the ashes… and I shall have regained my beloved and my kingdom both.”
Honestly, I still kind of have questions about this. They never really explain why it is that a kingdom needs a kingmaker in the first place.
: “…Now you know what it is I seek.”
How does Doloran even know about Roland’s son?!
: “I… I…”
You just know he’d do it in a fucking heartbeat! Roland gives absolutely no fucks about anyone other than himself!
: "No! He can’t! He won’t! Not that way!’
: “Just because you would do anything to bring a loved one back doesn’t mean you should!”
I’ll give Evan this much: he’s less of a dipshit than Inuart or that guy from Koudelka. Still a dipshit though.
: “You’d really do that? You’d destroy whole countries, steal countless souls, just to get what you want? You think that’s love?”
Try telling that to Papa Nier, you fuck!
: “Then you don’t deserve to love! And you sure as hell don’t deserve to be a king!”
: “You would defy me? You ARE me! We want the same thing!”
Level-5: “Hey Atlus, can we copy Persona 4?”
Atlus: “Sure, but change it a little bit so they can’t tell you copied.”
: “You wish to be reunited with those you love, just as I do!”
: “No. It’s not that simple.”
People are apparently reading this again, so I figured I’d finish it. Damned if I remember what I was thinking in 2019 but I’ll try my best.
On a side note, I was doing absolutely everything wrong back then. I just had all my screenshots in one folder and deleted it every so often. I also feel naked without my little brown orb thing.
Oh no! It’s using the Cosmic Goatse maneuver!
I’m desperately trying to remember what I would’ve said about this in 2019 and it’s not coming back. I was so much more innocent then, when I thought this was the worst game I’d ever LP.
Well, your kingdom is now a gigantic, gaping space anus. Congrats, you’re the mayor of the Space Goatse.
Looking back, it’s funny that I thought that finishing this update would take forever. I also wish I had indexed the updates better - but that was how I operated in 2019.
No shit! I mean, unless Doloran was married to a muscled scaly thing in which case… yeah, I guess that could be it.
: “No. I sensed the same darkness as before. I fear it was merely the Horned One unleashed. Which begs the question… where is Alisandra?”
If it’s anything like the rest of the game, she’s probably alive somehow because fuck Ni no Kuni 1. I actually gave it a try when it came out on PC a couple of years after this LP concluded. It’s not a good game, but it’s better than whatever this was.
: “Never mind that, ye addlebrained swabs, ye! What about that there tear in the very skies themselves, damn it all!”
: “Did you see how the edges were crumbling? If we can’t close it up somehow, the whole world could be sucked inside. We need to close it. We need to beat that… thing.”
: “What are you sayin’, mun? ‘Course I flippin’ can! Come on, Evan - let’s get up there and give old Horny Boy a piece of ouer minds!”
Oh man, that’s some phrasing right there.
I mean, it’s kind of a waste of a perfectly good sword if we’re not using it to brutally conquer an entire isekai realm. Can’t call it a sword if it’s not dripping with the blood of the innocent, I say.
: “…Mornstar? The very sword over which Alisandra and I swore our pact so long ago…”
: “Huh. Which might explain why it’s the only thing that can penetrate the Horned One’s defenses.”
I remember almost nothing about this final boss fight, other than that it was a slog. You have to use Evan, and Evan has to be equipped with Mornstar even though at this point we have better swords. That much I do remember.
And now we’re in that one area from Gravity Rush. The one where you fight the Neu Hiralleon or however you spell it.
At the final boss, that’s where. Like I said, I remember almost nothing about this boss fight. The only thing I can tell from my screenshots was that he has like six health bars and uses the moves the other Primals… I mean Kingmakers had.
As far as I can tell through the shots I took of this, you basically run around spamming attacks on the boss until he hyperarmors.
If I remember right, he has four phases - one for each of the other Kingmakers. Though like I said, I remember almost nothing about this fight. I really wish I’d had better internet back then so I could’ve streamed this.
It’s hard to believe I worked on this only a couple of years ago. I didn’t think my LPs really improved all that much since then, but clearly they have.
Once you take his bar down four times, he goes into a new phase.
In this one, he has lasers.
Yes, lasers. I probably should just have replayed this fight to remember what the deal was, but I don’t think I have any desire to play this again.
Eventually, Evan (both that one and me) have had enough of this shit and decide to power up to Super Catboy II (him, not me).
At this point, you get a super form where Evan shoots sword beams when he attacks. I remember this because this one screenshot wouldn’t originally upload and it’s been sitting on my desktop for years.
Finally, this thing is dead and the game is over.
Yep, called it. Remember the part where death is a very permanent and serious thing? Neither do I.
No one can ever be free from the horny.
I checked, and 2019 me didn’t do a dialog portrait for Alisandra, so 2021 me won’t either.
I’m not sure I get this. His wife was some kind of horrible human sacrifice made so he could hold onto power… and then she didn’t want to be a dragon thing anymore so she un-sacrificed herself… only to re-sacrifice herself and… yeah, I think I lost the plot a while back. Not that there’s really much of one at this point.
I can’t even tell you how much I hate this ending, or how little sense any of it makes. Why was none of this shit about soul sacrifices brought up until now? Why wasn’t there ever a moment where Evan finds this out and goes “Okay that’s kinda fucked up maybe we should stop doing that” or questions who it was that died in order to get his father to where he was.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this in the LP but Boy Sampson isn’t a soul sacrifice, he’s just kinda there. It’s in this one bit of optional dialogue somewhere. Because, you know, that might be interesting if he was.
: “Alisandra is no more… Allegoria will not rise again… all that I have loved is lost… Roland, tell me… what great wrong did I do to deserve this?”
Well, let’s see… there was the whole eating people’s hopes and dreams thing, the bit about trying to end the world to bring your wife back…
: “Was it in surrendering to love that I erred? Or in accepting a crown of which I was not worthy?”
I mean, when you live in a world where the only rule is “Don’t fuck the dragon” and you fuck the dragon anyway…
: “That’s life. People do what they can - try to live as best they can… and then the tide of history comes in and sweeps them all away. My country was swept away, too…”
: “I tried to stop it… tried to prevent the war that would end it all… but you can’t hold back the tide. And so it rolled in…”
I mean, it surely can’t be helped that he caused a nuclear war.
: “A what!?”
: “Huh!?”
: “If it can’t be brought back, I mean. We can build a new one instead.”
: “A new one…?”
And then he’s like “Yeah! I could find a new wife, and then sacrifice her to make another dragon I can fuck… and then… god dammit.”
: “We did it. We built a new kingdom from nothing. A kingdom where everyone could live happily ever after… it was small at first, but it grew and grew and… thanks to its wonderful people, it eventually became a great nation. You can do the same, Doloran.”
I mean, apart from the part where he apparently can’t because he doesn’t have a Kingmaker.
: “You truly think this possible?”
: “Maybe that’s why I was brought here. The country Evan and I built together… it changed things for you, Doloran. For this whole world. No one needs to be a slave to the past anymore. Now we can look to the future.”
: “You really think so?”
Nah, he’s saying that because you’re a dumbass twelve year old who will believe anything.
: “I will start afresh. I will build a new kingdom. For the sake of my departed subjects. For the sake of my beloved…”
: “Hear, hear!”
Is it just me, or does Evan’s jaw look like it’s dislocated in this shot?
This game would be much better if four of the people on screen were dead.
: So it’s time, huh…?
: “There you are, Roland! Is it… are you…?”
: “Looks like this is goodbye. I guess it’s about time I was heading back home…”
: “You… you’re not going to stay here with me?”
Evan gets abandoned by the third parental figure in probably about as many weeks.
: Doesn’t look that way… I can… feel it. It’s… pullling me back."
: “But your world is…”
: “Yeah. Before I came here, I watched it be destroyed. I may be returning to nothing but death and despair. I know that.”
: “But whatever’s waiting for me, I’ll be able to face it. I built this kingdom with you - If I can do that, I can do anything. You taught me a lot, Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum. I won’t forget. Not ever.”
Yeah, like not to do boss fights on extreme, and uh… what else? Was there anything else?
: “Roland…”
Roland then emerges into a nuclear hellscape. Due to the high levels of radioactivity, he dies a swift yet very painful death.
Ferdinand is a fucking ripoff of Laguna’s daughter in Final Fantasy 8! And people wonder why Level-5 went bankrupt! They went under a few months after this LP originally concluded, which I wish I had known in 2019. I like to think I helped kill them off.
This is the moment where Riker comes out of the holodeck and suddenly the last four seasons of Star Trek are non-canon.
Are you sure you’re actually his son? I mean, your hair’s a totally different color, you’ve got no cat bits whatsoever, and… oh.
This is probably the dumbest plot twist I had ever seen in a game except for maybe the end of Indigo Prophecy.
We just spent the entire game doing fucking nothing! Ferdinand does everything off-screen! Fuck this game!
This is a lot like that moment in No More Heroes 1 where Henry kills three or so of the bosses off-screen because he’s a smug fuck.
The best part is that I’m pretty sure this implies that Evan is already dead at this point. How much do you want to bet he was killed by some chancellor who realized how easy it would be to kill him and get off scot-free?
Hey, wait a second! Where’s Fred’s name in the credits!? Fred deserves credit, you assholes!
Well, I guess that explains where Ferdinand came from.
And here’s the only shot we get of Evan’s mother. Inter-species relations were a mistake.
And that’s the end. Roland died a horrible death, Evan got poisoned by his chancellor after being fooled by Leander into thinking he had a son, and presumably the isekai realm got nuked shortly after.
That’s one of the worst parts of this game, too. You’d think the isekai realm or Doloran or something would have to be the reason for the nuke, but no. Roland was just that bad at being President.
Hold on a second. Are those supposed to be the Twin Towers? Was that nuke just a metaphor for 9/11 the entire time?
And then Roland got nuked a second time.
And with that, this LP is once again complete. Anime was a mistake that Level-5 paid dearly for.
