Intruders
Deren is the dude on the right. You can tell he’s the protagonist because he’s the more boring looking one.
Also I bet that Delita Hyral X’s name is either Derren or Darren (and leaning towards the former). I just get that impression for some reason.
his name is skeet? as in the clay pigeon thing??
Well… I sure doubt that this is a Doug reference, because c’mon. I bet it’s not even a sports thing, considering this is doing the Generic RPG But In Space schtick.
No problem. Eh?I still need to get paid though.
"Haha. I know.
I know animation can be difficult, but a closed > opened treasure chest is not anything resembling hard. At all.
How’s 200Gil. It’s all I have on me right now.
Hmmm…That’s really low! But since you’re a buddy of mine, I’ll do it.
I also know that after the writing masterclass that was the prologue, this clunky-ass exposition should not come as a surprise.
But somehow it does.
Thanks Deren! I’m in your debt. If you need anything in the future I’ll do my best to help!
That sounds great but you still need to tell me what exactly I have to do?
What’s a Wisdom Orb? It’s basically Magicite But Worse. You’ll see when we find one. That won’t be for a short little while, though.
Their was nothing I could do.
This particular round of clunky exposition ended up being, uh, not GOOD but better. A tiny, tiny bar I realise. Then it declined a bit at the end there and now? Oh now it gets worse.
Yeah. That’s another reason I asked you to do this for me. I knew you had a history dealing with him.
Endless Nova. Stars Bliss. Ally Luna.
Space. Do you get it? It’s space. A fantasy game in space! Do you… Do you maybe get it?
Also yes that is a “Q” and not cutoff. How does THAT ONE happen?!
I’ll get the weapon back for you. All I have to do now is get a ticket for the next space flight.
Motor. I wonder if they might just be a robot or something.
You once told me that Sho has a storage facility in the sewers. Do you think he would keep it there?
I do. Once I meet up with Motor we’ll head to the Space Station. See ya.
Good luck…
Kind of an overworld map, I guess? It’s really not at all useful, though. That one tiny rock is Stars Bliss? How considerate of you to tell me. I can barely see that thing because the arrow is mostly obscuring it.
Also holy shit the galaxy or whatever is called Hell’s Dome that is so generic edgy at least its not a space thing for once
its also not a dome so uh
Also, did you guess that Motor was going to be a blue haired, blue skinned(?) anime android? And also a woman? Because she is.
Because anime.
Hey Motor, you ready to bust into this joint?!
Sho usually relies on everything electronic like cameras and gates. So I highly doubt he would waste
Gates. Gates are electronic. Also generic nonspecific android “computer hacking advantage.” You could make something up here, you know. Technobabble exists for a reason.
Also this just proves 100% that we’re going to meet actual people in there. Derren just said as much by saying that there won’t be any. Welcome to cliche generic writing 101.
I will do my best.
Great. Lets go then.
Hey look, gameplay! It only took about 8 minutes, which is short for a Final Fantasy game nowadays but way too long for a 2d one. Doubly so one made with a shitty engine like RPG Maker 2000.
We can’t go left either, so we gotta enter the only other door we can. I’m surprised he had the foresight to set the event trigger HERE and not past it though. That would be awkward.
Can’t just open the door though. No, you gotta be told by a textbox that this gate that is a door has been opened. And it’s a Gate with a capital G so it’s important.
Except its a fucking door so it isn’t.
Never Look Back
Your theory of no guards seems to be incorrect.
Well I guess we have to move to plan B.
What is plan B?
God, that is so bland. It’s not even funny bad, it’s just… bad.
You wont get pass me!
No music change here, so that one Final Fantasy VIII track plays for the entirety of this area. Enjoy…
Anyway, this ripped static image of a Military Police guy from Final Fantasy VII is our first fight. Just like in Final Fantasy VII for that matter… except that was animated but shush.
Our options are all fairly self-explanatory. Battle lets us input commands, Berseker autobattles for the round (and its not just basic attacks) and Escape flees. But we can’t do that which is fine with me.
Deren has no skills at all, because he’s a shit protagonist.
Motor is Deren with lower Strength but she has Scan. Which is ever so helpful.
FC Soldiers have one trick. They cast Blind. Because fuck you, that’s why. It obliterates your accuracy (reduces it to 20% of what it was!), but at least it doesn’t last after fights; very, VERY few ailments do that, thankfully. It also has a 20% chance to just end after 3 turns.
I’m sure not expecting this to mean much right now, and it shouldn’t. HP and MP are all that matters, really.
12 HP means 3 hits and we’re done; 12 MP means he can cast Blind exactly once and that’s it.
They have a decent chance of dropping Eye Drops, nicely enough. Cure Darkness of course; it’s not guaranteed though, which is kind of bullshit at this point but whatever.
Notably, we didn’t get any EXP from this. Hmm…
And now we have to deal with a scene. Kind of.
I’m finished. All security cameras, locks and alarms are disabled.
Great. Lets get moving!
Moving ever so swiftly on.
And now we fight two of these guys, sure okay.
I’m sure these will prove nice to have later on at some point. We can’t exactly heal without them and all.
Moving swiftly on, because this is just rote simplicity right now.
That must be where the weapon is! Well there are three levels to this storage facility. There has to be a way inside some how. Lets check the third level.
Well at least he didn’t also ripoff the part where you have to go through a tedious sidequest just to get a shit card.
Hungry Cookpot is pretty nice tho’. Devour is never a bad skill.
It must have gotten in by mistake.
Anyway, this thing ripped from Final Fantasy VIII (because space!) is our savepoint. It also gives us really generic lore!
There is a casino here. I am sure that won’t ever come up in any sidequest way in the future or anything. That would be silly.
Those inaccessible options do open up later on, at varying points and are of equally varying degrees of useful.
We could go back to where we just came from, back to this same one room or we could… not.
And wouldn’t you know it, there is A Man here.
He immediately attacks, and mercifully spares us any and all dialogue. I already like this guy better.
Shame about his awful palette, which is due to RPG Maker itself having an awful internal recolour slider thing. I don’t know why you’d ever use it for things that aren’t just placeholders and yet here we are.
Anyway, this guy is marginally LESS annoying than his weaker buddy paradoxically enough.
Like sure, he’ll fully heal if you give him a chance but that’s it. He doesn’t even do an ailment, and he is guaranteed to drop a Potion too. How nice!
So anyway he jobs out and… oh boy, this isn’t at all ominous.
Also vending machine! Let’s see what we can get from it!
…Oh, well fuck you too, Deren.
Another room, another fight. 2 more Soldiers, very ho hum. Moving ever-so-swiftly along!
Can you solve this puzzle? It is a very tricky one, I assure you.
And by “tricky” I mean “tricky if you’re not looking at the screen.”
Spot the difference, push the computer.
Fortunately, the obvious thing to move IS the obvious thing to move and we advance ever onwards. Yay?
And another dude. Sure, whatever.
Just lucky I guess!
Your luck ends here!!!
Somehow, I don’t think it does. But I do a bit of a heal here just to be safe. For reasons. Not because this guy’s dangerous but because I can.
Pictured: my thoughts slogging through this; it doesn’t LOOK so bad right now but its really, really slow. Everything is so tediou–
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. Motor gained Strength following that fight, which is not a good sign. We still haven’t gained any EXP because you don’t level up here. You gain stats based on your combat actions.
It’s Final Fantasy 2’s infamously terrible stat gains with no easy way to game the system! God fucking dammit.
Where do you think you’re going!
Do, like, ANY of these guys have any sense of self-preservation? Like, at all? Why would you do th–
Actually, we disabled literally everything already. HOW can you do that?
I don’t believe for one second that the android lady missed the “self-destruct” protocol during her mercifully offscreen hacking scene. But apparently she did. Remember how FF7 and 8 in particular had a timed sequence in their first dungeons? Yep. I’m fairly sure that’s the entire reason this exists.
Motor we gotta get that weapon and get the hell outta here!
Bio… Yoma? So it’s either a Mystical Demon or a Butterfly.
Or I guess a really bad sprite of… I don’t even know. Whatever this is meant to be.
But it’s kind of a boss fight I guess, but not really, so we’ll se-
It’s the Sealion from Final Fantasy IX. What.
WHAT.
At least it’s called a Demon, which is sort of accurate. I don’t think its name is actually based on Youma though for some reason!
Bio Yoma is not really all that threatening. Sure, he CAN cast Bio more times than you can cure it, but it at least can also wear off on its own. It’s only a 10% chance after 3 turns but hey. It also mercifully does not persist after the fight.
It also drops your HP by 10% of your max every round, though it doesn’t tell you the amount you lose ever-so-helpfully. That’s just an engine limitation rather than spite at least.
Oh and after he loses 22HP, so long as he has at least 4, the fight just ends. If you can kill him here, he has a 100% chance to drop a Phoenix… Tail…
It’s obviously impossible to get that Phoenix Down Tail when actually playing, though. Not even sure why it’s there, other than spite or something, or even renamed. Does Delita Hyral the Tenth, esquire, somehow not expect people to realise what a Phoenix Down is, or maybe even not know what down feathers are?
It’s really obvious where it’s going to be, but it was only really visible in one screenshot. Gonna set up an easy way out first though.
Or not. Because we can’t animate that, even more than usual.
We’re also not allowed to try and disable the self-destruct because shush. We’re just not.
So we’ll grab the non-specific Prototype. Only way out is to obviously jump down through that other new grate.
And then we fight one last FC Captain in an attempt to whittle away what little time we had left. It’s not at all a difficult fight, naturally.
…I genuinely don’t know why Motor’s Magic went up here, but it did. It is semi-random in general but still.
Oh right but we can’t have the thing on-screen when it “explodes” because we can’t animate that AND have it change easily on-screen simultaneously, I guess. That’s sort of fair, because RPG Maker is kind of not great at things.
The Gestahl Empire
Which is part why we unceremoniously cut to a scene in a different area altogether.
i It felt like an explosion.
Of course it was an explosion!!! What I want to know is where it came from!!!
(1) It felt like it came from underground.[/i]
How would you not notice that immediately. It’s not like an explosion is SUBTLE or anything.
You guys told me you would guard it from intruders!!! Remember this is your fault, not mine!!!
(2) Please calm down. It could not possibly be the storage faclity. If someone broke in, the guards would have quickly set the alarms.
“You have a point?” The guy who’s so shittily written he’s perpetually megashouting as per those myriad exclamation marks instantly calms down and becomes a completely different person?
look i know writing is hard but this is the easiest thing in the world to make one guy be consistent within the space of 30 seconds
Anyway, there is that guy peeking through the text box now.
What do you want! Do you have news on the explosion!
Yes. Two intruders entered the storage facility and disabled the security. Afer that they took out
How do you know any of this. If you fled THE INSTANT THE SELF-DESTRUCT was activated, that was before the thing you are saying happened happened.
Things that are difficult:
- Animating
- Writing
- Designing
- Characterisation
- The Chronology of Things That Just Happened
…Wait no that’s not right.
I don’t think it was them. I never heard of an android becoming a Su Karu Hunter.
The word android immediately conveys this one specific character, huh? I guess Motor is the only one in the entire universe then. No other sentient humanoid robots anywhere at all…
Yes. They seemed to know the area pretty well.
how do you know this
Remember how I said in the OP that this game got good reviews as recently as this year? One of the things it got praise for was successfully capturing the spirit and feel of actual Final Fantasy games.
Y’know, actual Final Fantasy games and their gendered sexist insults. Those sure are my favourite parts the whole zero times I can recall them happening. …If you can actually recall any, feel free to keep them to yourself 'kay, thanks.
Collect your men, find them and lock them up in my dungeon! I want the pleasure of turning them both to dust! And don’t you dare forget that weapon!!!
Intruders
So that sure was a scene that happened. It was basically just to mask that this map is not the same one as we were on before. Because the storage area or whatever exploded.
All systems seem functional.
Great! We have to get back to the Residential Area as soon as possible, before guards storm these sewers like army ants. Lets go.
…FC is an actual thing that means something? And it apparently means Finel Quartet?
Finel. Is… did Delita Hyral X mispell “final”? Final Four? That… is a really bad name for anything.
Like ever. Fortunately, it may not actually be a mispelling. At least not entirely. It’s dumb. Surprise.
But we can worry about that when we’re back at Arleah.
Oh boy, now that we’ve finished the dumb prologue-y area, we unlocked the ability to recolour windows! But only at save points!
Fortunately, there’s one right here.
Yep, that’s the best option alright. So fucking gauche that you can’t read a thing. It fits perfectly.
Oh right, uh, the reason that the Final Fantasy VIII requisite sewer dungeon music is playing here at least makes sense.
It’s because we’re about to immediately dive into our first real dungeon.
And it’s a sewer level.
for fuck sake
"Do you feel better now? It is important that you maintain a clear mind.
You said you retrieved three out of four pods! Was one of them Gold!?
