Summary
: Now that we’ve gotten everything in New York, it’s time to head to Boston.
: We get to take about three steps before there’s another cutscene, because that’s how this game is.
: “Huh? Me?”
: “Nope. This is our first time here.”
: “No way! Walk around with a crazy guy like that? Are you kidding?”
: We can grab a Talisman of Luck from the pillar here. I then went off to the right, because there’s a cutscene that’s kind of hilarious.
: I didn’t take a video of it, but I want you to imagine these NPCs pretending to powerwalk while also having a metal rod up their ass. It’s ridiculous.
: “Huh? You mean me?”
: “N-not as far as I know…”
: "U.S.. Walking…Warriors…Brigade..? What’s a ‘pedometer regiment?’ "
: This is another returning sidequest from the first two games. The pedometer is an accessory that counts steps taken, but only in areas where there are random encounters. Usually, this eventually nets you a piece of someone’s ultimate equipment.
: No one tell Foley he’s uh.. almost four decades early for the Vietnam War and almost six for Full Metal Jacket.
: “…Yes sir…”
: This reminds me so much of another PS2 game called Covert Command, which also tried the Full Metal Jacket thing but did not understand it one bit.
: “Yes sir!!”
: “I don’t really have any idea what you’re talking about, mister.. so, I think I’ll just be on my way now…”
: “…Sir…”
: We’re going to want to slap this on someone and keep it there for the entire game. Johnny is probably a good choice because unlike Yuri, he’s not a primary source of damage. Anyway, I’m gonna skip some of this dialogue because all it does is explain what the pedometer does.
: I’m going to skip some of the NPC dialog here, even though The Dark Id showed most, if not all of it in his LPs, simply because there’s a lot of it.
: John Maynard Keynes didn’t publish his economic theories until the mid-1930s, seven years after this game takes place. Then again, given Johnny, it’s entirely possible it took them seven years to get here.
: The localizers definitely had fun with this one.
: I mean, you’d think he would’ve known that earlier given that just two years prior, the government had formed a regulatory agency for it that would later become the FCC.
: To the left of that room we were just in is the library, which we have no reason to go into given that Johnny is probably illiterate.
: I looked up what kind of choices Johnny might have had, and there’s not a whole lot. One interesting bit is that the precursor comic to Nancy debuted in 1929.
: The only thing we really care about in here is an extra Cure spell we can find on a bookshelf in the back.
: Upstairs, we want to head into the door on the left, which is just offscreen.
: In here, we want to talk to this guy to find something out that we could have found out on our own (and actually did, offscreen) but that we need a plot flag for.
: “The sealed-off room?”
: “Next to the school, huh.. thanks! I’ll go check it out.”
: Now, you might ask, does Johnny say the door is locked if you try to open it before talking to this guy?
: Yep! This door, for reference, is one screen to the left of where we entered the area.
: Before we leave, there’s a Seal of Life in the corner of the stage. Let’s grab that.
: Oh, and there’s some optional dialogue that’s kind of interesting.
: It’s that last line that gets me. Has there ever been a lesbian manga where one of the characters goes full on Weekly Shonen Jump and does the whole “I guess I have no choice.. forgive me, master.. just this one, I have to go all out..” thing, and then they pull out that “Women love me, fish fear me” hat that was all over Twitter a few years ago?
: Anyway, back at that door…
: “Oh! Right. OK, then proper detective-like, I’ll go ask around the school.”
: What this entails is going back up the stairs and to the classroom on the right side, which was previously empty.
: That’s not an ominous sign at all.
: “The under-path huh…”
: Now, you might ask “Could we go into the under-path before, not knowing it’s dark?” and the answer is no. I don’t know why they make you get the lantern when you have to unlock the door with a plot flag.
: The Chemistry lab is on the first floor, on the right side.
: “Hey, boy! We meet again!”
: “That voice… could it be…? It is!”
: Johnny clearly has the vision cone of a stealth game guard.
: I wish I had done this game before Persona 5, because I would have had Salty Vanilla draw Joker and Yusuke in this motorcycle, except it’s painted the Japanese flag colors and the sign reads “NO BEING HORNY”.
: Unfortunately, Salty Vanilla is on vacation for the next couple of weeks.
: “Cheer up, I have some good news for you boy.”
: “Well, not really good news, but something he forgot to tell you last time we met.”
: “Hey, Gerry. I thought you said that was our little secret?”
: “Uh.. if you’ve got something to say…”
: “Realigning?”
: “That’s right. I alter its attributes and open holes and stuff. Of course, I charge for it, but I’ll do it cheaply for you, boy.”
: I feel like if someone told me that their job was to “open holes”, I’d probably turn around and start walking the other way.
: Johnny realigns himself to Chaotic Dipshit.
: Let me explain how this works. You pick a slot on the star chart, and you can either increase its level (which lets you put higher-level stellars into it), decrease MP usage by up to 50%, or increase the strength of whatever is in that slot, but we can’t do that yet.
: The door to the steam tunnels is right by where we got the Pedometer earlier.
: The building I worked in two jobs ago had steam tunnels (which had since been converted to a basement for the service people) and it was my favorite spot in the entire building.
: Not far from the entrance, we get into another tutorial fight. Natan, with his dual revolvers and “GUN-FU”, goes first. God dammit why couldn’t he have been the main character. It would’ve been Turok except less bad.
: You’ll notice we have a few new attack options. These include “High Angle” and “Knock Down”. Let me explain what those do.
: If you look up in the top-right, you’ll see two blue bars next to the enemy’s name. This indicates what kind of attacks can hit the enemy - the bottom bar is “low”, middle is “mid”, and the top bar is “high”.
: The best example I can give is that Shania’s main damage spell only hits “low” targets, which means that if we run into anything that’s flying, we’ll need to knock it down first for her to hit it.
: We also get introduced in a brief tutorial to the “Combo” and “D-Combo” options. Combos are neutered from how they were in Covenant - you have to spend Stock to use them. What they let you do is have each of your party members take their turns together, which can be used to burst down enemies.
: I should mention that Shania, like Yuri, cannot use magic the way Johnny and Natan can - instead, she has to use Fusion. Fusion does not take up a turn in a combo, meaning that the one real advantage Combos have is letting you get a Fusion off for free.
: D-Combo, by the way, is a Combo that takes two Stock instead of one and allows you to Double with each character, meaning you get potentially six attacks off at once.
: Right around the corner, we run into the second enemy type here - Sergei, which is supposed to be some kind of cursed monkey. Naturally, we need Johnny to waste his turn Snapping.
: You might notice we’re missing card 3 - that’s because card 3 is the Deep One that Shania fought in New York. Most bosses don’t allow you to Snap them, you instead have to get their card through a sidequest.
: “He’s out? Or maybe.. maybe the beasts got to him first?”
: “Oh man! If so, he might be in trouble!! But, the door’s still locked… hey, let’s search for the key! Maybe it’s laying around here somewhere?”
: There’s only one way to progress, so let’s do that.
: Oh, great, now they’re going to have to re-train Johnny because he’ll get confused when there are doors with no levers nearby.
: Right behind that door is a hallway full of Gagus behind a thin metal grate. I’ve played Resident Evil, game, I’m on to your shit.
: It would, admittedly, have been a really funny plot point if Professor Gilbert was making the 1920’s equivalent to a Minecraft mob grinder.
: “I wonder… but it’s hard for normal people to catch beasts.”
: The camera moves and you can hear Johnny flip the lever off-camera.
: “They’re coming!”
: I had a shot that got a little fucked up. Gagus have 33 HP at this point (they’ll get more once we reach the next cutscene) which puts them just out of reach of being one-shottable by Natan. Shania can one-shot them if she lands three Strikes on her Ring.
: Gagus mostly use Rock Bump or a physical attack that hits for about 22 damage and reduces evasion by 30%.
: Shania levels up off this fight, which doesn’t really do a whole lot. Dusk Proud costs a whopping 20 SP, so the extra 10 SP won’t allow a fourth cast.
: “It looks like the levers open not just the doors, but the cages as well… let’s be more careful from now on.”
: This dungeon is really simple, there’s a few more doors (and one more cage) we can open.
: One of them is a shortcut back to where Johnny pulled the lever in that cutscene to open the cage, and at this point there’s nothing to do but move on.
: We’ll leave this cage for the way back. There’s a chest in it, but up ahead is progress and there’s what’s probably the best cutscene I have seen in a game in a long goddamn time up ahead.
: Thankfully, it’s already been recorded on Youtube. WATCH THE VIDEO VERSION. DO IT.
: If you’re not watching it, this guy’s name is Frank. Frank has an accent that is.. unclassifiable. At some points he sounds kind of like the Spy from TF2.
: Frank is a goddamn American hero and also my favorite character of any of the RPGs I’ve done an LP of, even though mechanically he’s a copy-paste of the gay vampire wrestler from Covenant.
: If I ever go to a convention again, there is absolutely no way I am not cosplaying this. What sucks is that I was due to go to a speedrun marathon in June, but that wound up getting cancelled.
: The sound effects at this particular point are incredible, and I really, really want whoever did the character design for this game to take over Persona.
: Natan is like “What the fuck game did I get hired for, I thought I was going to be in the one that at least sorta kinda takes itself seriously.”
: This is another fight against three Gagus, and it’s over pretty quick.
: Trust me, this gets even better.
: This game is mechanically kind of a trainwreck, and that absolutely sucks because the character designer was completely on fucking point for this game with the exception of Johnny.
: My immediate reaction to this was “I bet his original flight plan was to fly from Chicago to New York, and he wound up in South America because he’s Frank.”
: Frank is a goddamn ninja who learned to be a ninja in Brazil, something I think only Frank is capable of.
: Here’s what I want to know. How the FUCK did the Allansons play the Shadow Hearts games and then come away with.. whatever it was they came away with to make YIIK?
: Johnny does not understand what Brazilians are capable of. I started on a World of Warcraft private server a few weeks ago with a sizeable Brazilian population and let me tell you, I have seen some shit.
: The biggest crime here is that we did not get a Frank spinoff action game.
: Frank’s weapon is a giant saw mounted to a sword hilt, because Frank is a goddamn visionary.
: Yes. Frank is going to be a permanent fixture in our party. I don’t care if it turns out he sucks stat-wise and I just don’t know, he stays. This is Frank’s party now.
: Doors mean nothing to Frank. Frank goes where he pleases.
: You have no say anymore. Frank is the main character now.
: Next time, we’ll Frank our way through that door and find the inevitable bossfight on the other side. I was kinda without internet for half the weekend, and it’s already Tuesday night.