Summary
: Back at the final statue gate, we run into one of the two murals just south of where we fought Bigfoot.
: Just past it is a well-hidden Third Key. I’m pretty sure this is meant to be used in the upcoming boss fight, but we have “handy tools” for that.
: The other mural is maybe a screen to the south. I ran around for just a little bit to get Shania back up to 2 stock, because the upcoming boss fight kinda sucks if you don’t use that Third Key.
: He’s not joking. The boss is effectively on a timer, and if you screw up a QTE or happen to get a random miss, you’re probably going to lose.
: We want to make sure that Shania has her maximum number of attacks. I considered turning it to Technical, but didn’t wind up doing that.
: You can’t see it, but Johnny smacks right into Shania when she stops.
: This fight would have been a thousand times better if it was Frank trying to drink Bigfoot under the table.
: The first thing you should notice is that Tatan’ka starts with a full stock gauge. We have to remove that immediately and keep it down, otherwise he will remove potentially 80% of Shania’s HP in one go.
: I could have fused into Thunderbird, and the only reason I didn’t is because there’s not much of a reason to. Thunderbird’s best spell only hits High, and we will never have the stock to Double.
: Tatan’ka’s standard attack hits three times and does about a third of Shania’s max HP in damage. If he’s ever allowed to Double..
: He has the potential to use Red Nova, which not only hits for almost as much damage as his physical combo, but also removes a full stock bar. Getting hit with this means the fight is now unwinnable.
: On Tatan’ka’s third turn, he gets to go twice, with one of those being a guaranteed Double. This is why getting hit with Red Nova is a loss - with two turns and a Double, Tatan’ka can very easily instakill Shania.
: As long as you’re consistently hitting Strikes, you can win this fight with just physical attacks in five turns.
: Because I went a little overboard on the “handy tools”, we get a Hit Area Expand for hitting all Strikes.
: Shania gets a new tattoo, which immediately made me think of Sae in Persona 5 and her canine-themed tramp stamp.
: Oh yeah, speaking of fusions, Salty Vanilla finished that picture.
: Frank has had enough of this weird pelvic tattoo shit, and moves to claim this cutscene as his own.
: The ninja whispers something unintelligible into Frank’s ear while some odd sound effects play.
: I beg you, someone make a mod for the PC version of Persona 5 Royal where during any cutscene where Akechi or Makoto show up, Frank shows up and does this and the cutscene is over.
: Johnny, stop trying to be the protagonist, you cannot beat Frank.
: Speaking of Frank, Salty Vanilla also sent me a sketch of Frank being best friends with Bigfoot.
: There is a lot of cutscene here.
: Now, I get what they’re going for here, but this is time they could have used on more cutscenes with Frank in them.
: What an original name. I’d make a joke about Christine Love’s “Ladykiller in a Bind” here, but there aren’t enough lesbians here for that.
: “Shania! Are you feeling better now?”
: “Yes, sorry for worrying you. I’m ready to go anytime.”
: We have Tatan’ka now, and could power her up - but we won’t, because we have 90 Soul Energy and we’re going to pump it into Thunderbird instead.
: Arc Gale is a full-party buff spell that costs roughly 40% of Shania’s MP at this point. It boosts speed, which means more turns, which means more stock. We’ll be opening boss fights with this.
: Chicago is now open, and because we already turned in the Bigfoot sidequest, there’s nothing else for us to do.
: This whole thing feels like a bootleg Yakuza cutscene.
: I’m not kidding when I say that Frank can oneshot the mafia.
: There is no way Al Capone will not be a boss fight at some point, given the track record of the first two games.
: “Yes. She’s been in this town for a few months now it seems. But…”
: “But?”
: “It appears my men were chased off by the mafia for some reason before they could see the Master…”
: “That’s no good. Well maybe…”
: We have to go around and talk to some NPCs, so we might as well do that.
: The Pisces chart comes with a number of stellars pre-installed, so let’s grab that. It’s not hard - I missed it by a pixel on my first attempt and used some ‘handy tools’ to get it the second time.
: I did a search to see if McManus was a real person, and no.
: Oh man, are we gonna get to see Frank wrestle a tiger?
: “A great big cat…?”
: There’s a Hit Area Expand in a box near Gerard that I grab and put on Frank’s first attack. Frank’s first attack is a little annoying to hit with the input lag from the emulator.
: We can go into the bar to progress the plot, so let’s do that.
: Someday, I want to see the mariachi equivalent of the Insane Clown Posse, where they do mariachi music about the “Dark Quinceanera”. I can guarantee it would not be good, but it’d be amusing as hell.
: I did do a little digging into the Irish mafia scene in Chicago around this time, and from what I can tell, the McManus family is based on the North Side Gang, who were rivals to Al Capone and the Chicago Outfit.
: The North Side Gang wasn’t really an “Irish” mafia, outside of being led by a gangster by the name of Dean O’Banion for a few years until he died in 1925.
: At this point in history, though, the North Side Gang was being run by Bugs Moran, who was of French Canadian descent. The thought of a Quebecois mafia is actually kinda hilarious when you think about it. The other mafias have to subtitle their dialog in both English and French, or the Quebec mafia won’t deal with them.
: In reality, Capone spent almost the entirety of 1929 in prison.
: “A really strong bodyguard…”
: I looked it up, and according to Wikipedia at least, most states had no minimum drinking age at all before 1933… except Connecticut, because Connecticut apparently sucked just as much in 1929 as it does today.
: As soon as we leave the bar (and change screens), we run into the mafia.
: We have two new enemy types, the “Petty Mafioso” and “Mafia Hoodlum”, who I’m pretty sure are re-skins of the Thug and Fat Thug from New York.
: Annoyingly, this is the only place you ever encounter these two enemies.. and of course, we need snap cards. In fact, we need THREE of the Petty Mafioso.
: Technically, we can get snaps of both enemies in the arena sidequest later on, but I don’t really want to do that.
: Frank can oneshot the Petty Mafiosi, so I have him do that and leave the other one alive but at low HP so we can farm Snaps.
: The mafia guys can inflict Fast Ring and Tight Ring - the first is self-explanatory, the second shrinks the Hit and Strike zones on the Ring.
: For our efforts, everyone who isn’t Shania levels up.
: This is Frank’s mafia now. Admittedly, ninjas would probably be really, really good at bootlegging.
: “What!? The Master’s orders?”
: “We don’t know either, but, he seems to be a student of Mao.”
: “Oh! That would be a big help!”
: We can grab a Lottery Ticket from a chest here, which is an alley to the left of where we entered Chicago.
: And now we can enter the club. Yes, that’s a club and not a casino. Don’t ask me, I don’t know.
: This confirms that Johnny’s camera probably once belonged to Anastasia Romanov, who was a party member in Covenant. She had a camera, but it worked as an Enemy Skill kind of thing.
: “So you know about them too, huh? I got this camera from my butler. It’s really incredible. If it takes a picture of a living being, it prints out the picture as a card, and for some reason it doesn’t need film.”
: There’s no way Lenny isn’t following us somewhere in the shadows and reloading the film when Johnny isn’t looking.
: Edgar was the person who invented Anastasia’s cameras, which he traded to her in exchange for clockwork eggs. At this point, Anastasia is probably busy trying to marry Yuri’s cousin.
: “Wow. You really know a lot about cameras. Are you a famous photographer or something?”
: “Umm… Masatoshi Moreno Yamaguchi… 3 year consecutive Snap Master in 1913, 14, and 15…”
: Yes, I checked. No, he’s not based on a real person as far as I know, though there is a Masatoshi Yamaguchi who directed both of the live-action Kaiji films.
: “What’s a Snap Master?”
: It is canon that Frank can do this at will, except he gets a team of those Brazilian soccer announcers who get incredibly excited about everything.
: This sidequest is how we get all the snap cards for bosses that Johnny isn’t in the party for.
: “No, I don’t think so.. are you a collector?”
: “Wow. So maybe some of those collectors would be willing to take my snap cards off my hands for a good price!?”
: “Sounds pretty interesting. Maybe I should try and collect some snap cards myself.”
: We’ll leave it here for now, since there’s even more very long cutscenes coming up. I also may have spent several hours working on The 25th Ward this week trying to get two updates out.