: I checked to see if we had enough eggs, and no we don’t. I think there’s exactly 10 near Tristan’s farm, but I only found 9. Anyway, moving on. This guy here gives us another sidequest that I’ve never actually bothered to complete because it can’t be finished by just bashing someone’s face in.
: Basically, he wants us to find a buyer for his fish stall. From what I remember, it doesn’t award a whole lot of EXP. Instead, we’re going to go ahead and hit the next main quest.
: Down the stairs from the fish stall is Rodriguez, who we have to talk to in order to pick up the quest even though he’s an Order member.
: First though, we want to beat the shit out of him and steal his weapon. Rodriguez is an EXCELLENT target for this because he’s almsot completely alone. Even at minimum strength, assuming you can get a single hit in on him you’ll eventually take him down. We don’t really need the money, but each NPC gives you experience the first time you knock them out. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you fight all of the NPCs involved in the quest he’s about to give us, you get more EXP than you do from completing the quest itself.
: “There’s a hungry look. If you don’t have any coin, Master Belschwur is handing out stew to the poor. Though you don’t look that poor.”
: “What’s your job here?”
: “I guard this warehouse. Not a plum job, but when you decide to switch sides from the Don to the Inquisition, takes time to earn trust.”
: “That’s why I’m stuck guarding meat. Although that’s certainly increased in value now the storms have curbed the fishing trade. People are as likely to steal steak as they are artifacts!”
: “Have there been many break-ins?”
: “Several, but there’s not much we could do apart from keep an eye on local troublemakers. I am positive Cid’s behind it though.”
: “If I can prove Cid’s behind the burglaries, maybe I can improve my standing in the Order. But I doubt anyone would talk to me. The Don’s men feel betrayed and the Inquisition are suspicious. So, I need someone who doesn’t have my baggage.”
: Of the quests that you have to do to progress the story in Harbor Town, this one is probably the easiest. We have to talk to three people who have been burglarized - and the first happens to be right next door to the building Rodriguez is guarding.
: Baxter is notable for two reasons: one, he gives what is possibly the dumbest quest in the game. Two, he has a locked chest with a food recipe that increases your MP. Needless to say I knocked his ass out and looted his house before talking to him, which is kind of ironic given that we’re supposed to be investigating a burglary. I should note that his bookstand does not give wisdom, it gives 5 EXP instead.
: “If I take three at twenty-five plus eighteen hams that’s.. I can’t do this with you staring at me. I keep the books for the butcher’s shop. You think calculating’s easy? There’s not many round here who can do it.”
: “You want to test me?”
: I realized reading through this on my laptop that this game has some severe lighting issues. If you can’t see the text, he’s asking us what 14 x 17 is.
: The answer is 238, and for doing it we get 100 EXP. You actually have to do this quest (even if you fail) to get him to talk to you about the burglary.
: “About the break-in.. what was stolen?”
: “What else? Gold, of course. The gold belongs to the Order. Now it’s gone!”
: “How much gold was taken?”
: “All of it. I don’t know exactly how much.”
: “Who was here on the day of the break-in?”
: “Well.. Doyle tried to sell me fish, but I don’t like fish. That fat oaf Vasili brought beer. I paid for that. And of course, Mo was here a few times. But that isn’t unusual. He works here after all.”
: The second person we need to talk to is Nelson. Nelson is a cartographer who will sell us a complete map of the island once we leave Harbor Town. He also uses the same model as Arno, Baxter, and a few other people.
: “I heard you had a break-in. What was stolen?”
: “A ring. I received it from Commandant Carlos personally in return for a map of the island.”
: “Who was here on the day of the break-in?”
: “Er, a few people. Mo from the slaughterhouse brought me a delivery of meat.”
: “Anyone else?”
: “The laborer, Doyle, sold me fish. And.. Pavel, one of Flavio’s men. He sold me a couple of wolf pelts.”
: We can find Nelson’s ring by going directly next door to where Cid is.
: Cid’s wife, Kayleigh, will fully admit that she has the ring and that Cid stole it for her. Remember that pearl necklace we found in the swamp? This is what we need it for. She’ll only give us the ring if we give her a pearl necklace in exchange. I actually tried knocking her out, and that (surprisingly) doesn’t work.
: Nelson’s Ring gives us the Acrobatics skill, which causes our protagonist to do a roll when he hits the ground after a fall. It works kind of like the Silvercat Ring in Dark Souls 2 or 3 in that it mitigates most fall damage. This is mostly useful if you’re doing a speedrun, but I don’t think the current speedrun strat gets the ring.
: The final person we need to visit is on the other side of where the fishmonger is.
: This is where Belschwur is. I’d beat him up, only Belschwur takes a little bit of finagling to properly knock out because attacking him will also cause a bunch of people nearby to become hostile. That’s not to say I couldn’t pull it off.
: I’m going to skip his dialogue solely because there’s a fuckload of it. The people that visited him were Vasili, Pavel, and Doyle.
: Going back to Rodriguez forces us to choose a suspect. We have Mo, Doyle, Pavel, and Vasili to choose from. If you’ll notice, Doyle was the only person in all three locations. This quest is extremely janky, as the game just kind of expects you know where Doyle is so you can get him to confess.
: Doyle is in the hotel near where we entered Harbor Town.
: “I sleep here. Nothing wrong with that, is there, mate?”
: “You were seen in a house that was burgled. You’re the only person seen in all the houses that were broken into, which makes you a prime suspect.”
: “Come off it. You can’t prove that and you know it!”
: “I can beat a confession out of you. Or we can skip the beating and get right to the truth.”
: “I cased the houses for Cid.”
: “But what do I do with this information?”
: “And if the Order finds out, they’ll send me to the Monastery! You’ve got to keep this quiet.”
: So yeah, this quest kind of makes no sense. Basically, you either make Doyle leave town and magically the Order will know and like you for it, or you make him leave town and the Don will like you for it. It’s real dumb.
: We get 500 EXP from it though, plus 80 more for knocking Doyle out before he leaves town.
: Cid will tell us that our reward is reputation with some guy called Scordo, who is apparently the Don’s main contact in Harbor Town. This quest is still inexcusably bad.
: Moving on, there’s another combat-oriented quest we want to do for a gear upgrade, but first we need to stop at this lighthouse on the way and use some dank weed magic.
: There’s a golden bowl up here we’re going to need for a quest later. The problem is that we have no way of reaching it. Objects in this game don’t have physics attached, so we can’t just shoot it off the ledge. This is what that telekinesis scroll we picked up in the ruins is for. If we had used it to do the ruins puzzle, we’d have to buy one to do this.
: Around the corner from the lighthouse is Don Esteban’s old mansion, which is under heavy guard by the Inquisition. We could get in there by doing one of the possible story quests, but there’s one that I think is.. more suited to our skill set.
: Sitting just outside the mansion (you can actually see him on the far-right side of the last screenshot) is Weasel, who is the town’s weedlord.
: “So what’s going on here?”
: “Not much. I can’t do anything while those scum-sucking White Robe bastards won’t let me out of their sight.”
: “Why are the White Robes watching you?”
: “Because they know I hate them, and they think I’m a thief.”
: “And are you?”
: “Of course not. I even used to offer protection to the merchants. That’s how business works. And now? Carlos is just waiting for me to give him a reason to banish me from the town.”
: “I could help you.”
: “Why? Why should I even trust you? This town’s full of spies and collaborators.”
: There’s a bunch more dialogue if you haven’t done anything for the Don yet, but since we’ve done two quests for him at this point it’s enough for us to skip it.
: “You don’t just go door to door collecting protection money. Those White Robe bastards are everywhere, and they see everything. Before I show you the tricks, you’ll have to do something else for me.”
: “Don Esteban controls most of the weed on the island. Leonardo the alchemist processes it for us, and then Garth, his assistant, brings it to us. But recently, some of the goods have gone missing.”
: “Bring me the missing packages of weed, and I’ll show you how we separate rich merchants from their property! We’d be prepared to trust you more as well.”
: “Who do you suspect is taking it?”
: “Garth, the alchemist’s assistant.”
: “Why don’t you just punish him?”
: “I can’t risk those infernal White Robes finding out. Even though Garth is a coward, I don’t know that a beating would make him talk.”
: With that, we get a quest to follow Garth and find out what he’s doing with the weed. You don’t actually need to be able to sneak for this.. nor do you actually need to follow him, so long as you know where he’s going. I’d post screenshots but since everyone in this game wears pretty much solid brown, it’s kind of hard to pick Garth out of a crowd.
: Garth basically makes a loop around town to reach a spot on the other side and meets up with a guard by the name of Cutter. Cutter has a shield we want - and honestly, we could’ve just beaten Cutter up and stolen the missing weed off him before even talking to Weasel. That’s actually the easier way to finish this quest.
: Doing it this way is MUCH harder. I’ve done this at minimum strength with no armor and boy let me tell you, even WITH armor and the stats we have it’s not great. You wind up fighting Cutter and Garth at once.
: Thankfully, with our stats, I was able to KO Garth in one hit, and Cutter in two. Cutter has some blunts (which we, of course, take) as well as the missing weed packages.
: The War Shield is a significant defense upgrade, having twice the stats of the wooden shield we were previously using. It’s good enough that I wound up switching back to the Skullsplitter. Next time, we’ll finish up the Harbor Town story quests.