For Tomorrow. For Everyone. For the Children. Let's Play Shadow Hearts: From The New World

[Dragolord09]

Sat Timrod, if the Shadow Hearts franchise in general does get remade, in all seriousness what changes would you suggest (plot, battle, artwork, characterization, etc.)?

[Timrod]

It is my honest hope that they never make a Shadow Hearts 4. That does look like it’s going to be the case anyway, as a couple of people from the original developer did come back and Kickstart a spiritual successor last summer, with a protagonist who looks like Not-Yuri. The most I would want is a 1:1 remake (think the Crash Bandicoot or Spyro remakes) with updated graphics and a better translation, and I would hope that if they ever make a new game, it would be a new franchise where they don’t have to worry about ruining anything and can go nuts creatively.

That said, I think it’d be really hard to suggest anything, simply because the developers at Nautilus seem like they know how to learn things. Even though From the New World is generally considered the weakest entry in the franchise, you can tell they were learning things - the dungeons are way shorter than Covenant’s, because they knew that a lot of the dungeons in Covenant dragged. I can almost guarantee that if Shadow Hearts 4 had been made in the early 2000s, they would have figured out that Stock was a bad addition and that things like the early parts where you’re playing as Johnny alone and die if you whiff an attack aren’t great and would have cut them.

I also don’t think I could improve on anything Nautilus wrote, or that X-Seed translated, apart from adding more Frank. The writers and creative types at Nautilus were pretty clearly the most skilled people the company had. They clearly enjoyed making this game and this franchise - you can tell because they already had concept art for characters in what would have been Shadow Hearts 4 before this game even finished production. After four games, it’s obvious that they’re actually talented and not like Satomi Tadashi where he captured lightning in a bottle and was never a good writer.

Gameplay is really the one thing I could improve on, specifically the battles - but a lot of that is already obvious. The difficulty is still kind of all over the place, which was a problem that existed since Koudelka, and I feel like the developers should’ve focused harder on removing Combos as a thing than trying to regulate them with Stock, since the end result is still that boss fights consist of alpha striking with a Combo or D-Combo and then mopping up the rest. Snaps are also irritating, but admittedly they’re totally optional unless you really want the reward for getting them all.

If I had to have a Shadow Hearts 4 though, I’d love to see them do one set in the 1950s that isn’t afraid to get political.

[Timrod]

Summary

: “Welcome home, Master! It’s good to see you’re safe… but who are the guests behind you? Are they your new friends? Quite rich in variety…”

: Lenny’s capacity for surprise apparently died in Covenant, probably when he got tossed out that window.

: “Well, a lot of things happened… but I actually have a favor to ask. It’s urgent! That’s why I came… I want you to prepare a boat. The fastest one you can get.”

: “I see, very well. I’ll have it ready by noon tomorrow.”

: “Tomorrow? That leaves some time open… what should we do?”

: “You haven’t been home for some time, so why don’t you relax just one night? Everyone, you’re welcome as well. As your humble servant, I will do everything in my power to serve you.”

: “Everyone needs to rest once in a while.”

: “You’ve got alcohol, right?”

: “It’s the duty of the master of the house to listen to the attendant’s advice too.”

: “Well, I guess it’s OK.”

: What they don’t realize is that Frank has already taken the bed.

: We get an explanation screen about Hilda’s forms here. I’ve already explained how Curvy and Slim work, but there are two other forms: the Pink Bat (-10 to 10 calories) and the Mask form. The Mask form kicks in if Hilda reaches -100 or 100 calories, and gives her a stat boost for three battles. At the end of those battles, she’ll revert to the Pink Bat.

: “Miss Hilda? Well, yes, you ARE wearing the same clothes, but… you look very much different.”

: “My figure tends to change easily. Earlier, I ate too much of your cooking, and…”

: “It’s your… your metabolism…? Ah… I apologize. I did not realize you were Miss Hilda, I did not mean to offend you.”

: “It’s all right. I was the one who surprised you… by the way, I have a question. What is this magazine?”

: “Hm? Oh yes, an old acquaintance of mine started this magazine. I bought it to take a look at it… but honestly, it is fairly boring, no? After that I didn’t see it on sale, so perhaps it isn’t published any more.”

: “Really… well, it’s certainly not very interesting… but the feature article on magic arts was very informative! I think I got a new idea for a fighting technique!”

: “Is that so? Hm… well then, Miss Hilda, I’ll give you the magazine.”

: “Is it really all right?”

: “Of course. In any case, I was planning on throwing it away.”

: “Thank you so much! I’ll cherish it!”

: This skill is a direct callback to Covenant, where it was Joachim’s second technique. We can assume Joachim is probably the magazine’s author.

: Grand Slam is only usable by Curvy Hilda, and is a multi-hit physical attack that has a chance of instantly killing its target. It is Curvy Hilda’s only offensive skill.

: Before we do anything else, I missed a very important item back in Roswell.

: Roswell still has random encounters, so I throw Natan back in the party for a bit.

: The item in question is in this area, which is right near where Gerard and Buigen set up, just outside the main control room.

: And now it’s time to max out Frank’s Ring. Speaking of which, let’s look at Frank’s new skill.

: Seismic Wave hits about as hard as Hilda’s Thorn Whip, but only hits Low.

: “OK, OK. Good afternoon, Johnny.”

: “Here’s another fragment.”

: “Wow! Thank you. This is the fourth time, isn’t it? I knew I could count on you, Johnny.”

: “Hey, I was thinking…”

: “Hm? About what?”

: “Being a Ring Spirit is a pretty important duty, right? So, shouldn’t you try to act a little more… I don’t know, dignified or something?”

: “Ugh… you’ve touched on a sore spot. Everyone always tells me that if I don’t shape up, I’ll never come of age even if I do gather all the fragments…”

: “I see… hey, why don’t you practice with me?”

: “Are you sure?”

: “Of course!”

: “OK then, I will. Well, I’ll practice for next time!”

: Frank now has his attacks maxed out… though we’re going to have to give two of them up to Shania again soon.

: This scene plays as soon as the cutscene with Hilda is over, but I left it because it’s the start of Nautilus’s favorite sidequest: the Pit Fights.

: “What? Did you see another ghost or something?”

: “Hmm… sounds like you’re telling the truth.”

: If we go back to the room where we fought the boss at Arkham University…

: Of course the first actual historical figure we meet is… this guy who looks nothing like the actual HP Lovecraft.

: “Oh, no. I’m just a… an acquaintance of someone who used to work here.”

: “Nice to meet you too… I didn’t really come for anything, so we’ll just get going then!”

: That’s probably a good idea, the faster we can get out of here, the less chance he has to start talking about his cat.

: “Help you? Do we have to do something bad?”

: I mean, you’d be indirectly supporting all the godawful fan material.

: “What!? No! No way!”

: “Why are you still talking about this? How do you think I feel about this?!”

: “…Well, if you insist.”

: We can’t actually do any of the Pit Fights yet, which is strange because in both of the earlier games you could do at least some of them when you first met the NPC for it.

: This, by the way, is the other method of getting Snaps of non-boss enemies if you happen to miss them (or just not get enough to trade). Anyway, let’s head to Chichen Itza.

: Wait… what?

: Is this a shitpost?

: And this is why we needed to let Frank keep the nuke… though I’m willing to bet everyone but Frank immediately went “Yeah okay, just kill him, it’s not like any of us give a shit.”

: Keep in mind that this game released four years before the Maersk Alabama got hijacked by pirates.

: A bit of context here. This girl is meant to be a descendant of Jean Lafitte, an actual pirate based in Louisiana who started off as a smuggler and eventually upped his game to pirating British ships during the War of 1812.

: She throws a temper tantrum in the background.

: I can’t believe this girl can’t see that Frank is a REAL AMERICAN HERO.

: If you’ve played Covenant (or read the LP), you’ll know that this scene is copied straight from Veronica’s torture scenes in that game. You might ask “Does it still work the same way?” and the answer is yes.

: For the uninitiated, you get an item after the torture scene based on who you picked and how you answered. The possible rewards include a Third Key, a Strike Area Expand, or a new weapon for the character you picked.

: Now, the obvious question is “What happens if you pick Frank?” and the answer is that you are taken to The Hague. Frank doesn’t get a weapon - he instead gets an accessory.

: Each character has a line of dialogue when you look at them, so let’s go around the semicircle.

: The obvious solutions are to pick Johnny (since he’s more or less always in the party) or Shania, but I picked Johnny after a careful analysis of the plot. Why? It’s because Johnny would probably spend the entire time sobbing uncontrollably and screaming, meaning he can’t give them anything useful.

: Of course, the problem is that the torture scenes are partially voiced, and I was only able to find Frank’s scene on Youtube because there are some goddamn war criminals out there. This means I had to record all of them.

: Let’s start with Johnny. Click here for the video.

: “No way! Let’s do something more interesting.”

: The three questions are always the same, so from here on out, I’ll only be showing off the answers, which do differ between characters. I’ll probably do the rest in a second update.

: Here’s how the reward works. Picking the first option each time gets you the Third Key. Picking the first option at least once, but then answering with the second or third option, gets you the Strike Expand.

: Answering only with the second or third options gets you the weapon. Here, I tried to answer as in-character as I could.

: Anne teleports another sword into her hand. You’d think she would be a party member, given that she has a portrait and everything, but no. We only have one more party member left.

: “…You’re kidding, right?”

: “Don’t laugh like that – it’s creepy.”

: Johnny launches out of the barrel cartoonishly and you can hear a splash in the background.

: This should’ve been another scene where Frank whips out a ninja technique, but no.

: Frank could pull a Morgana at this point and I would not blame him.

: Admittedly, that’s a pretty good plan. We could make Frank a pirate captain and ruin the entire early-2000s “ninjas vs. pirates” discourse before it ever begins.

: “Well, we’re all the way out here… let’s do some exploring.”

: “This isn’t the time for sightseeing!”

: “At the Grand Canyon, Zonda told me something… that the Ocean Spirit is worshipped by the tribes of the Caribbean.”

: “Grand Canyon… oh yeah! I do remember, now that you mention it…”

: “So as long as we’re here, why don’t we look around?”

: “Good idea… wait! But…”

: “Huh? Don’t worry. I won’t faint this time.”

: If you look in the top-left, you can see the chest where our reward got dropped off.

: I’m kinda surprised that they didn’t put in a Frank/Mao segment that works like the prison escape in Final Fantasy 8. Frank would use his hilt on the treasure chest that has everyone’s gear in it to make the Treasure Saber.

: In the “canon” recording, I wind up torturing Frank for the accessory.

: The Zodiac Bracelet protects against both Paralysis and Petrify - but this isn’t why we want it. The reason we want it is that it sells for 5,150 Cash… which is almost enough to buy two Mirror Bracelets.

: Mirror Bracelets protect against Petrify, and the enemies in the next area can do that - so it’s better to have three people protected (there’s a free one) than two. Gerard sells all the weapons.

: We can grab another Shield stellar from the bowl, which… given the rate we’ve been nuking bosses down, I doubt we’re going to see much of this until later.

: Our next destination is that shack there, right up the stairs from where we ended the cutscene.

: “He doesn’t seem to be much of a threat. Sorry for startling you.”

: “Huh? Uh, yeah. We’ve had some rough hospitality, but yeah, you could say that we’re the Captain’s guests.”

: “We will. You don’t happen to know of any ruins or other unique places that would be good for sightseeing, do you?”

: While we’re here, we can pick up a lottery ticket.

: This kinda surprised me because if I was going to put a lottery ticket in this room, I’d have hidden a chest between the stove and that shelf in the background like in Alcatraz.

: Our next destination is right behind the shack, going into that cave. There’s a healing item in the laundry press to Johnny’s right.

: “There’s two guards even here. Give me a break…”

: “Could be. Whether there is treasure on it or not though, there is definitely something odd about that ship.”

: “It’s no use just waiting here. Let’s go see if there’s another way.”

: We can head south of the prison cell, so let’s do that. I was not aware that Comic Sans existed in 1929, but that doesn’t surprise me. My bet is that it came from a cursed Welsh printing press.

: Just past the Comic Sans monstrosity is the torture barrel… except someone’s asleep in it.

: “Sorry for waking you, but we’re looking for the place where the seafaring god was worshipped. Do you know of it?”

: “Thanks for the advice. But dangerous or not, we need to get through that ship.”

: “Huh? Uh… yeah, sure. We’ll take care of it so sleep all you want.”

: Afterward, we can open that chest visible in the background.

: Ordinarily, I would leave the dungeon to next update… except we have a Frank scene coming up.

: There’s nothing much here except a save point and some stairs, so let’s go up the stairs.

: We could go to the right and make progress… or we could go up those stairs behind Johnny. Considering there’s a Frank scene there, this isn’t really a choice.

: Let’s ignore that chest for now. You see that grey thing sticking out near the bottom-left corner of the screen?

: This is a re-used model from Covenant - Joachim also used a fish as a weapon, except he used it like a club.

: “Yes. It is a marlin.”

: “Ma… ma… ma…”

: “Ma?”

: “Mike? Michael? But who’s Michael?”

: “Oh… how COULD I forget? It was 5 years ago, when I was in a fishing tournament…”

: “Gonna start another one of your stories?”

: Johnny, shut the fuck up, this is important Frank Lore.

: “My rival was beating me badly, so to reverse the score, ol’ Frank had no choice but to go for the BIG CATCH. What bit then was Mike, and our historic battle stretched out across several hours.”

: “Yes, it takes a fair amount of strength and time to catch a marlin.”

: “Who cares? Plus, your stories are so long. Natan, don’t encourage him.”

: I care. This hasn’t even begun to reach the threshold for an Allanson Monologue, let alone one of those 20+ minute Akechi cutscenes in P5R.

: “In the end, Frank suffered defeat. But after the battle, Mike came to the surface and said: ‘Let’s meet again, my fair adversary.’ But before that could happen… why did he have to DIIIIIIE?!”

: If Frank had Fusion, this would be where he’d get his second Fusion, and his second Fusion would be strapping Mike to his head and ramming the enemy with Mike’s horn.

: “Yes… I mean, I just a fish. But I guess that’s sorta sad… right, so can we get going already?”

: Next time, we’ll finish the Sunken Ship and fight a boss.

[Timrod]

Summary

: I thought when I was recording the last part that this would be a fairly long dungeon. I was wrong. The sunken ship is honestly about as long as the tunnels under the university.

: “Hey, look at that.”

: Great idea, I’m sure if the boards will collapse under the weight of a person, it should have no problem holding a probably several hundred pound boat with people walking over it.

: “But, how do we lower it?”

: “Hmm. So this is called a ‘capstan’? Well, let’s try turning it.”

: “What the…? All the handles are too short or rotted off. I can’t get a good enough grip to turn it.”

: This really feels like something Frank should be able to solve, like by using his katana hilts to extend the handles.

: “A sturdy pole to replace the handle… I wonder if there’s one around here…”

: I can picture Frank, just off screen, waving his arms and going “Hey! Guys! I can solve this! We don’t even need to bother looking for a handle!”, only, as Warren points out…

: Frank deserved better.

: There’s a hatch in the floor near the mast that we can investigate.

: “Are you scared?”

: “W-who’s scared?! Watch, I’m going in.”

: It’s a nice touch that we already know Johnny has a lantern, so this all just kinda works. This part of the dungeon is three rooms and can be traversed pretty quickly. I only got into… I think 4 random encounters during this recording.

: These things are called “Heinz”, and are why we needed that Zodiac Bracelet, because…

: They can petrify on attack. Worse, we need SIX snaps of these fuckers. This fight consisted of me nearly running Johnny’s sanity out snapping ghost photos while the rest of the party got beaten to shit.

: Heinz is the first enemy we can run into that is worth negative calories - but even if the encounter rate here wasn’t really low, you don’t want to grind these because we need Hilda in Pink Bat form soon.

: We can find another Rage here. We’ll probably be using this on the next boss, since it has enough HP that I don’t think we can combo it to death.

: To the left is a Mirror Bracelet, which prevents Petrify. I toss this on Johnny, mostly because there’s one enemy here that’s kinda rare and that we need four Snaps of. It only spawns in groups with a Heinz, at least as far as I can tell.

: To the right is this room, which doesn’t have a whole lot in it. If we keep going…

: I’m not even going to ask how they got a motorcycle here. Gerard doesn’t sell the new tier of weapons yet, but he DOES sell new armor, which I pick up for everyone.

: I’d like to point out that even with 1929 firearms, it’s unlikely that chainmail would stop a bullet, though I’ll leave that to all those sweaty fuckers fishing for Youtube views to prove.

: Just outside where Gerard is, we run into Okeron, the other common enemy type. Okeron has 240 HP and can Seal - and to top it off, we need three Snaps of them.

: And then, Frank comes through. He manages to Paralyze both of them, allowing Johnny to Snap three times without any issues.

: This room is just to the right of where Gerard is, and puts us in a cutscene.

: “It looks that way. The Ocean Spirit lies beyond that door.”

: “If we turn this rudder in the opposite direction, maybe we could cross over?”

: “Turn the rudder… so I guess we need to find that spinny thing, huh?”

: “…It’s called the helm. Try and remember.”

: In the back of this room, we can grab an Apathy ring item, which prevents enemies from building up Stock if they’re hit by it.

: I need a mod for Power Wash Simulator right the fuck now where you play as Frank with a Brush Saber.

: With the boat down, we can cross over to the last room of this dungeon.

: The room on the other side is big and empty - there’s a chest with a Daphne Fruit in it on the far side. The trick is that there’s a doorway hidden on the bottom of the screen.

: In this room, we run into the third enemy type here: Bablovia. These are caster-type enemies with only 55HP. Everyone but Natan can take these out in one turn easily, and that’s only because I didn’t give Natan any extra attacks.

: And… that’s it. We’ve seen the entire sunken ship. All we have to do now is spin the wheel.

: I know a lot of people who have their own meta-thoughts on different media, and mine is usually “You know, how do ordinary people in all these RPG settings deal with a world full of monsters?”

: It’s one of the problems with your classical RPG world design - you try to answer it and you get shit like World of Warcraft where there are level 110 peasants that could shitstomp earlier game bosses.

: Anyway, we fight a group of Heinz and everyone levels up. We’ve got full Stock, so we should be ready to go for the boss.

: Ann was later brought to The Hague for Crimes Against Frank, was immediately found guilty, and is now serving a 40-year prison sentence.

: The next boss has a pretty solid reward for getting a Ring Perfect (ie; hitting all Strikes) and we want it. The trick to this is that you can set Shania’s attacks to 1 and put the Coral Lariat on her so it’s almost impossible to miss.

: “That’s just what the pirates say. This ground is dedicated to the Ocean Spirit. Let’s go.”

: This boss is called La Sirene, and has a grand total of 308 HP. The game kind of expects that you’ve been evenly pumping up Shania’s Fusion forms, but really I’ve just been putting all the points into Thunderbird.

: Bar Blast probably isn’t the best spell, given that it only hits for around 75 damage, but between that and Shania’s attack we can down this boss in two turns - three if you’re not using ‘handy tools’.

: The boss has both an ice attack (which counters Tatan’ka) and a light attack (which counters Thunderbird) but we don’t really care.

: For Ring Perfect, we get Shania’s next tier of weapon for free.

: Shania’s new tattoo is… I don’t know what I’d call that. It’s like a tramp stamp that decided the tramp wasn’t enough and it was just gonna keep on stampin’.

: La Sirene sports the rare Double Ahoge. Seriously, I can think of maybe a handful of other character designs with a double ahoge.

: I don’t think this even qualifies as a fusion monster. This looks like the cover art for an Everquest expansion, or one of those early-2000s graphics benchmark programs.

: There’s an unspoken “When I grow up, I want to go to Hot Topic just like you” here.

: Actually, you know what would be frightening? If Hilda had Fusion. Her hair alone would probably reach the PS2’s memory limit.

: Update: I contacted Salty Vanilla.

: This isn’t even her final form. No really, it isn’t - Salty couldn’t fit all the details in the sketch.

: This sounds like that time I got stuck in an airport for a full day waiting for a flight that never arrived.

: You might have noticed a chest in the background. We’re not done with the Caribbean yet - there’s still a bunch of stuff we need to do.

: “You followed me all the way out here? It must be something pretty big, huh? Speak up.”

: “To Las Vegas? He didn’t say anything else?”

: “I see… he’s such a high maintenance man. Hey kid, sorry, but I…”

: “If you go to Las Vegas, we’ll go too. We’ve been worried about Edna too.”

: “Yeah. Sorry, but we’re in kind of a hurry.”

: We’re not going to Vegas just yet. Instead, we’re going back to Arkham University - this is because we’re about to do a UMA hunt, and I need Shania to have Stock.

: The Pit Fights are now open. Technically, it would be optimal for me to go to Vegas first because we’re short on a couple of early-game Snaps and Vegas gives us something that will help with that, but meh.

: Most of the Pit Fights I’m going to wait on until much later in the game, but this first one is easy - it’s five fights with whichever party members we want and no other conditions.

: This is how we can get Snaps of enemies that no longer show up, but fortunately, we’ve got all the Snaps we need.

: The final fight is against a couple of robots from Roswell, which we can destroy pretty easily.

: For our efforts, we get… an item that probably would’ve been useful in the opening part of the game, but is useless now.

: You know, somehow I’m not surprised that the pirate show would be in Miami.

: Anne’s room has no fewer than three items in it, so let’s get grabbing.

: We can now bring Frank up to 5 attacks while keeping 4 for Shania.

: Outside, the First Mate is actually…

: He has a powerup item for Shania, so we might as well do this.

: The gimmick for this one is that the hit areas on the Ring go invisible after a second. I got this on my first try, no ‘handy tools’ required.

: The Whale Statue is required for La Sirene to learn new spells, so it’s kind of a must if you plan on using La Sirene at all.

: This is one of the first second-tier spells we’ve found, so I’ll probably spend the money to upgrade someone’s chart to hold it.

: Up by the shack, there’s a Snap trader. We actually can’t do this first one because it requires Snaps of enemies from the university that I need to go back and get, but we can do all of them up to Difficult Request (1).

: I’m sure there’s some gimmicky use of these that will come up later, like there was in Covenant. Let’s go turn that Ring Fragment in, and then we can go to the Grand Canyon.

: “Hey, that’s pretty good…”

: “I am the will of, um… the Judgment Ring which rules over all fate!!”

: “…”

: “…No good?”

: “Uh, no. It wasn’t so bad, but that slip in the middle, and the outburst at the end were a little off.”

: “Hmm, this is pretty difficult… Again! I’ll try it again!”

: “OK. Give it your best!”

: “Deep breaths, deep breaths… here I go!”

: “I-I am a Ring Spirit… I am the will of the Judgment Ring… which rules over all fate…”

: I’m picturing her saying this like the infamous “Bone of my sword” speech from Fate/Stay Night.

: “Hey! You did it!”

: “R-really? That was kind of embarrassing. H-here’s your reward! Bye!”

: Now that we’ve got our attack count maxed, let’s go UMA hunting.

: This is where the UMA hunts get a little more involved. If we check under the stairs here, the UMA icon pops up.

: If all you read was the description in the dialogue, this would make sense - we know that Tihozhodi is covered in slime.

: This makes it clearer that it uses the slime specifically to hold its eggs in place. There’s no eggs here - and if we were to set out the bait, we’d get a random encounter instead.

: This is the right spot.

: Tihozhodhi is an invisible Womp, from back in Alcatraz. It has 900 HP.

: First we get a Snap. Now, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea to not combo immediately and instead have Johnny Double, then use Snap and his Vacuum to get his Stock back… but I don’t do that.

: Natan hits for a rather anemic 105 damage, but that’s because I forgot to equip magic on him.

: Shania follows up with Bar Rod and Bar Blast.

: If I didn’t care about people dying, I’d use Combo Magic and win this in one more turn.

: The problem is, if we do this, the boss now has two back-to-back turns on top of having full Stock.

: Instead, I have Johnny Double and use Shield on Natan to stop the boss killing him, followed by a Vacuum to reduce its stock.

: The boss can inflict Small Ring, but that’s not a big deal - certainly not worth dumping a ton of money into pocket watches.

: On the way out, I cash in the last Snap Card trade - I had to farm a couple of fights to max Shania’s Stock anyway, so I figured I’d just do it.

: Looks like a Castlevania boss. Let’s go turn in the UMA, and then we’ll do Vegas next update.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’ve got nowhere to go but Vegas, so let’s do that. We’re going to watch a cutscene, and then immediately leave.

: Ricardo has made his way here, and we’re about to see what I can only really describe as “a John Wick scene where John Wick just kinda kills people by walking past them.”

: Ricardo walks by one of McManus’s guys, and he drops dead apropos of nothing.

: Ricardo is up to three kills without doing anything.

: I, uh… that’s a line, alright. I mean, it’s a line I’d expect in a time travel story or an isekai, but at this point, FTNW’s writers are taking every style guide they can find behind the woodshed. I love it.

: The second I saw this subtitle, I went “Yep. That’s it. That’s my update title.”

: I’d also like to point out that I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a piece of media where somebody gets offed by a mariachi. Somebody in the writer’s room was definitely crossing shit off their bucket list.

: This whole thing feels like the writers went to Blockbuster (remember, this is 2004), emptied the action movie shelf, and binged it all over a three-day weekend.

: The Dark Id actually did that at one point - he binged all eight (at the time) Fast and Furious movies and then did regular movie nights where he’d show two at a time.

: That’s how I got into the franchise - I watched the first eight with him, and then watched 9 on my own just recently. He’s also how I saw the first two John Wick films.

: I’m not missing any screenshots - Ricardo fucking teleports behind this guy and grabs him.

: Is it mono? I’m guessing it was mono.

: “Don’t say that. I’d say you have some loyal men. Anyway, is this the place?”

: I’m having flashbacks to Persona 5 and I don’t like it.

: “How about calming down a bit?”

: “Oh, I’m plenty calm, see. Trespassing on my turf, dragging Edna into this… those bums don’t deserve to be Mafia. You watch. I’m gonna go in there and pound 'em all into hamburger meat!”

: “OH, such great FEROCITY.”

: “Ho-hold on, before you start fighting, shouldn’t you search for your sister?”

: “What’s the point of searching? I already know they got Edna in there! That McManus bastard was always making eyes at her.”

: “Aah, I don’t think he’s listening…”

: “Yeah, he’s gotten all worked up…”

: “Well, we’ll go take a look and see if they’ve got your sister.”

: “You guys?”

: “If you go, it’d turn into a war, right? Besides, finding people is my specialty!”

: His specialty with an amazing track record of finding one guy who died ten seconds later.

: Shania hits him with the double ellipsis.

: “McManus doesn’t know any of us, and even if we fail, it still wouldn’t be too late for a fight.”

: Wouldn’t McManus know Mao, since Mao was running the Chicago Outfit in Capone’s place?

: And now, it’s time to turn around and go back to New York. Trust me when I say you want to do this as soon as you possibly can.

: “Huh? You don’t mean…”

: “Yes. Another letter has come from the mysterious Tinkerbell.”

: “Another one! Let me see it…”

: Ah yes, Times Square, well known for being empty at all times of day and also the best place to plan an assassination.

: “What the!? Why!? He’s making fun of me again!!”

: “What’s the matter, master? It could just be a prank…”

: “You think I can just sit back and let him say things like this!? I’m gonna go and teach him a lesson!”

: If we head to Times Square, there’s an NPC standing under the lamppost that wasn’t there the first time we came here.

: “That’s right. And you’re Tinkerbell’s assassin!?”

: Yep, we’re going there. I don’t know what it was with the early 2000s and doing this in games.

: These are all fairly easy and you have 10 seconds to answer each one.

: “Heheh, that was too easy!”

: “Hey that’s right! Where is the other one!?”

: “Harlem, huh. All right, just you wait!”

: It’s kind of a crime that Nautilus made a game taking place during the Harlem Renaissance and the best they could do was put it in as a sidequest destination where you do math.

: “That’s what I want to know. Lenny’s much better at that stuff than me.”

: “Lenny!?”

: “Yeah, he may look big and dumb, but strangely enough, he’s really good at math.”

: I mean, there was the whole part where he ran a third of a Vatican-based secret society in Covenant, and he probably had to count how many of his weird sword-hand guys got murdered by Yuri.

: We do another ten of these. This sidequest is at least pretty short.

: “Where is Tinkerbell!?”

: This is the entire reason we wanted to do this sidequest. The Panoramic Lens is an accessory for Johnny that makes Snap hit every enemy on the field.

: “Hm? Another letter…”

: “Hmm… well, at least he’s giving me a little respect this time. Hey mister! Are you sure you don’t know where Tinkerbell is?”

: A year before this game released, a Norwegian programmer by the name of Jon Johansen was arrested and put on trial for his involvement in a program called DeCSS - used for decrypting DVDs.

: Technically, he was arrested for doing math. He was tried twice and acquitted both times, and during the trial it came out that he had never written the decryption code in the first place.

: “Grr… all right! Argh, back to square one.”

: We’re done here, so now it’s time for Vegas for all of about a minute again before we head back off to New York.

: There’s a big parking ramp on either side of the entrance, and on the right side is the Hawk Statue. This one pumps up Thunderbird’s stats with each level.

: This is… I think the last Cure stellar we pick up before we start getting more useful healing spells.

: “Huh? You already know the way, Master Meow?”

: “No, I’m just heading for the elevator. Mafia bosses tend to enjoy a drink from a top floor bar with a view.”

: “Oh, I get it…”

: The casino has a ton of NPCs to talk to.

: If you’ve been following closely, you’ll notice that we usually pick up lottery tickets near a Lottery Member, and this is no exception… except the Lottery Member in this case is like halfway through the hotel.

: “Huh? We don’t have a key…”

: “What’ll we do?”

: “I don’t mind forcing my way, you know, but I don’t feel like making a scene. Let’s go look for someone with a key.”

: To do that, we’ll need to go through the casino to the right.

: Gerard and Buigen are here - you can find their motorcycle parked out front. Gerard now sells the next tier of weapons, so let’s grab those.

: There’s two chests in both of the lower corners - this one’s just a Seal of Strength, but the other side…

: Yeah, we’re going to want to cash this in.

: “…”

: “…”

: “…Hey Johnny, what’s the matter?”

: “Huh? Oh, sorry! It was just so perfect, I was shocked.”

: “R-really? Heheheh! I’ve been practicing every day!”

: “Really… that’s great though. Now all you have to do is collect the fragments.”

: “I…I guess so… it’s all thanks to you, Johnny.”

: I think you mean “It’s all thanks to Frank.”

: “Huh? Me?”

: “Hee hee, never mind. Here. Today’s reward.”

: With this, we have now maxed out Frank and Shania’s attacks.

: “Well then, see you next time, Johnny.”

: “Thanks to me… Heheh, I’m kind of embarrassed.”

: Back in the casino, we can slip through this door to enter a new area.

: “What’s wrong, Master Meow?”

: “McManus’ cronies are inside… hmm… sounds like they’re having a stupid argument about who gets to have a room on the 8th floor.”

: “Of course, cat’s ears!”

: “We don’t have to hold back with these gangsters. Let’s go, kid.”

: It’s a little confusing, but this is the door we need, even though the one in the cutscene is pretty clearly the one in the bottom-left of the screen.

: “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me a costume cat…”

: Ordinarily, this fight would be a pain in the ass, not because of the enemies, but because we need three Snaps of the Petty Gangsters - the taller, thinner ones - and two of the Gangster Hoodlums.

: For reference, they each have around 70 HP, meaning Frank and Shania can vaporize them without even trying.

: This is where our new accessory comes into play.

: The Panoramic Lens snaps all enemies on the field, including those that would be duplicates - meaning you can get more than one of the same card at a time.

: One thing I think I haven’t mentioned is that Snap gives Johnny a huge speed boost until his next turn, so I quickly take two Snaps in a row, giving us more than enough cards.

: “Good. For one guy, he sure put up a fight. Hurry up and get rid of him!”

: “What?”

: “What?!”

: “…I see. It can’t be helped then. Hey, take me to the mariachi. I’ll make him talk before we kill him.”

: “Didn’t you hear me? I told you to take me to the mariachi! Now!!”

: I will admit it’s really noticeable how “bastard” is the only swear they can use when it’s in like every other line of dialog.

: This feels like every game of Town of Salem I’ve ever played.

: McManus spends a good like… ten seconds kicking Ricardo.

: Now that we have control again, we can go back to the elevator and use the key we just found.

: We can go left or right, but either way, we’ll run into more mobsters.

: “Important guests? Could it be…?”

: “Well, we have a little situation here. We’re going to need to take a peek at your ‘guests’ faces.”

: This is another fight against four Petty Gangsters and two Gangster Hoodlums. I didn’t even bother screenshotting it because it was over in one turn.

: The group closer to the elevator goes down in two attacks - Frank managed to be in just the right position to hit five of them at once.

: With those two groups down, there’s a couple of things we can do on the 8th floor. First and foremost is going to Room 812.

: This one was kind of a pain in the ass to hit - the Ring sweeps backwards (not really a problem) but also has a delay on it so you have to press the button early. It took me five or so tries to get it.

: This is another returning accessory from the earlier games. There’s also a Step Tripler later on, but we want this in order to get the rewards from that guy at the university as early as possible.

: We can also enter this room, which is… I think it’s 824, but it’s hard to read the signs.

: “…I don’t recognize your faces. Why don’t you quit with the acting!”

: Two attacks later and they’re all dead.

: The other reason I wanted to do this first is that we’re about to get our last party member forced on us, and I wanted to get Natan a quick levelup before we have to replace him.

: This gets us the key to Room 807, which has…

: I’m not sure what the advantage of using this over Paralysis is, if any. With that, we can finally go to Room 818 and progress the story.

: Frank is not having any of Ricardo’s bullshit.

: Fuck yeah he is!

: We now have a fight against the same mafia guys, only this time, Ricardo is replacing Natan. Ricardo is Nautilus’s apology for how bad Lucia was in Covenant - he’s basically Lucia but not garbage.

: His main attack is a gun hidden in his guitar, which would be an Innocent Sin ripoff except that Eikichi used a guitar case that was also a gun, not the guitar itself.

: “What’s wrong? If we don’t go soon…”

: “It should be around here somewhere. Damn, they really made a mess of this place…”

: The Fade-Fast Flower is Ricardo’s first “Muse Item”, which unlocks his first four character skills. It works almost exactly like Lucia’s aromatherapy ability in Covenant, except each item has four skills.

: You don’t know what each combination does until you use it, but typically each item has a heal, an MP and SP heal, an attack, and a support ability.

: “What is that?”

: “Edna gave this to me right after we met. At the time, I’d lost sight of my music. I was thinking about putting down my guitar for good. When she saw that, Edna just held this out to me without saying a word.”

: “Hmm… but why would she give you a dried flower?”

: “I think she wanted to teach me that there is such a thing as beauty that doesn’t fade over time… even now, this is like my lucky charm. I can’t play my guitar if I don’t have it.”

: We should definitely make sure to grab this - you can see it sparkling in the cutscene - because, well…

: That’s the game’s way of telling us that random encounters are now on. This is why you want to grab the Step Doubler before you save Ricardo - because that means our steps now count.

: The two big guys are Butchers, the little one is a Ghoul. Let’s see what Ricardo’s special ability does.

: We get a choice of four melodies. I already know which one is which, so let’s pick Melody: Rage.

: I’m not entirely sure where Ricardo had space to put a flamethrower in a guitar that’s already got a rifle in it, but it works.

: We wipe the Butchers out pretty quickly (they have 150 HP) and the Ghoul wastes its turn buffing. Even buffed, Ghouls tend to do less damage than the mafia guys did.

: I took a quick trip back to New York for a free heal, and now we can go to the 4th floor.

: Not shown: another mafia fight where we destroy them in one turn.

: Down to the right, we can find the second tier of SP restorative. We might actually need a couple of these for the boss.

: There’s another item hidden around here, but first, we run into the final new enemy of this area: the Automaton. Automatons are spellcasters, and generally need to be taken out first.

: Otherwise, this happens. Right after this, I got into a fight where the party got surrounded and one of these things beat Johnny down to 1 HP through a D-Combo before anyone could move.

: This room, past the healing item, is our next destination.

: I can’t read these room numbers worth a shit, but this one, to the right of where we got the Stellar in that last shot, is our last real stop on this floor… for now.

: The Angel Souffle is an item for Hilda that increases her calories by 25. Very useful if we need to make her switch forms fast - which we will need to do at a few points in the future.

: Directly across the hall is the room we picked up the key for. Surely there’s a miniboss in here…

: Or we’ll just get the key without a fight. We’ll see the 9th floor, as well as the rest of the dungeon, next time. I’m already running late this week and I need to grind a bit.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Floor 9 is pretty small compared to the rest.

: If we head directly south-west from the elevator, there’s a room we can open.

: “Huh? See what?”

: Now, you can’t see it, but I actually fucked up real bad just before coming in here. You see, the button to change the battle party is L2 - but L2 also cycles between the three possible battle parties.

: The problem is, our other two parties consist of Ricardo, Hilda, and Mao - this is because they get put there by default during the sections where you’re forced to use them.

: What I didn’t realize is that while I was checking my screenshot directory, I had my PS4 controller in one hand and nudged the L2 button without realizing it.

: This turns what would ordinarily be a piss-easy fight into a struggle for survival.

: We can at least see Hilda’s Calorie Drain in action. As it turns out, you can only Calorie Drain an enemy once, meaning that getting her to -100 for her super form is a massive fucking grind.

: What made it worse was that Hilda had no magic equipped, and Thorn Whip can’t hit anything.

: One thing I haven’t shown off yet is that you can look at key items in the inventory, and they all have descriptions. This is how you can figure out what room this key is for.

: You can pretty clearly see “406” on it. Let me show off the other keys as well:

: Room 406 is right here, just past the elevator… and sure enough, it’s the one the key goes to.

: I put this on Frank, but probably should have put it on Johnny. We’re done with the 4th Floor now.

: Back on the 9th floor, Room 904 has an optional fight in it - which I take because the gangster fights are piss easy. To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing in Room 904.

: Directly across the hall is Room 903.

: “Yeah… and unless you want to die, move!”

: By the end of this fight, we have about 8200 Cash - which is actually enough to get the items we need for the boss.

: An explosion goes off. It’s probably Frank-related.

: Gotta love that I got this shot exactly as the army of mobsters starts clipping through Al Capone.

: Room 903 has the key to Room 1004.

: The penthouse VIP room, soon to be known as “The Frank Suite”.

: Floor 10 has a chest with a Thera Root to the left of the elevator. This is the third tier of healing item.

: Room 1004 has an Arc Barrier stellar in the plant that I forgot to get a shot of. You DEFINITELY want this for the boss, and I equip it to Ricardo since he’s going to be on support duty.

: This is the last group of gangsters. They go down just like all the rest. Also gotta love that probable Jojo reference, even if it’s to Part 5.

: Immediately afterward, I run back down to the first floor and grab three Silver Bracelets - we found one of these back in the Grand Canyon, so we only need three.

: We’re now at the point of the game where we’re fully expected to have status protect accessories on everyone. The good news is I think we can sell these back as soon as we’re done.

: I also grind out a couple of battles (just two) to get everyone to level 18. Theoretically, you don’t want to bring Frank into this next boss - but the way we’re going to do it, it will not matter.

: “We got kind of busy with those bullets flying around… but, we finally made it!”

: By bullets, he means the bullets that were never fired because all of McManus’s guys died before they could attack.

: “Edna!? You’re starting with that nonsense again!? If I were you, I’d take a quick look around!”

: McManus’s guys are clearly 10 years ahead of schedule on their guns, given that those are apparently MP-40s.

: And now, just for a moment, I’d like to bring you to the version of the game where the writers let Frank have a nuke.

: “You don’t have the BALLS! Frank has a powerful NUCLEAR deterrent!”

: “Wha-”

: “What a RIP-OFF! I don’t think that was even a kiloton!”

: “Clearly, Britney removed most of the fissile material. I, too, am disappointed, both by the explosion and at Britney’s proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium.”

: And this is why we should have let Frank keep the nuke. I apologize to The Dark Id.

: “You should be saying your prayers… along with these punks here!”

: Capone puts the gun down, but… wait, why do his guys have even more ridiculously oversized magazines?

: Edna just kind of has a shield, which doesn’t show up all that well in screenshots.

: I’ve had a headache like that before. Didn’t quite reach the “mutate into a demon” level, but it was pretty close.

: There’s a non-subtitled voice line here where Johnny goes “Ricardo! Get back!”

: Welp, Edna’s a demon now - and even worse, a demon with nearly double the HP of the last real boss we fought.

: It’s time to bring out the buffs. First, I have Ricardo use Arc Barrier - this is CRITICAL, because otherwise Edna can and will murder your entire party with her insane Stock regen.

: I have Frank cast Surge on Ricardo, because Ricardo is fire-element and therefore strong against Edna’s water element.

: Johnny casts it on Shania.

: Shania uses Arc Gale, which is important because it lessens the chance of Edna getting multiple turns in a row. At one point, she gets 3 in a row during this fight.

: Edna has three main attacks - this is the first one. Mental Break inflicts the status effect by the same name (which drains MP) on everyone…

: Unless we have Silver Bracelets on everyone. Then it’s a waste of a turn.

: 36% defense may not sound like much, but without it, Black Hole can hit Frank for over 100 damage - due to being a Dark-element spell against his inherent Light element.

: I have Johnny Snap, and because he has Arc Gale on him, he gets an immedate second turn that I use to nuke some of Edna’s stock before we initiate our D-Combo.

: Between Frank, Shania, and Ricardo alone, we do almost 900 damage out of Edna’s 1600 HP.

: What I learned is that there’s a trick to the way Combo Magic works - the four spells you get are based on who is in your party, and they’re secretly always in the same order.

: Edna has two turns coming up back to back, and has full Stock… so ordinarily, this would be a bad idea. Except…

: Johnny sends her to the Combo Dimension.

: Tempest is Johnny’s Combo Magic, and it’s also a Stock nuke. That’s a good 1200 damage between that one Red Nova and the Combo.

: Fortunately for us, Edna has a hidden mechanic where once she goes below a certain HP threshold (I think it’s 40%) she activates Surge on herself.

: Even Surged, she barely damages Shania due to her innate Dark resistance, and then throws away her second turn doing Mental Break.

: Somehow, she winds up at exactly 1HP after Johnny and Frank go again.

: If I had delayed the Combo a bit more, we could have gotten a Strike Expand for finishing her off with Combo Magic.

: Oh look, it’s Chichen Itza. Weren’t we supposed to go there?

: Wait, how did they get from being on the sign in Vegas to Chichen Itza that quickly?

: This is every time I’ve ever tried to date someone.

: 5 foot 11 versus 6 feet.

: Why do I feel like Johnny should be asking Roger where the Emigre Document is? I have a feeling it’s “lost” again.

: Anyway, as you might be able to tell if you’ve read the LP of Covenant, Killer and Lady are basically a “dark” Yuri and Alice, with Gilbert being an evil Roger Bacon.

: I don’t know why the writers chose to do this. I really don’t. Evil Roger Bacon was already a plot point in the first game.

: “Both Chicago and Vegas… should have some peace for a little while… thanks to you guys.”

: “Hey, Ricardo… you going too?”

: I mean, you kinda already watched Capone kill the guy responsible.

: We could head right to Chichen Itza, but there’s a Frank cutscene if we go back to Vegas again, and you know my policy on cutscenes involving Frank.

: “Yes. It’s Britney.”

: Oh look, it’s the bitch that stole Frank’s nuke.

: “W-what’s wrong? How can ol’ Frank help you if he doesn’t know what the problem is?”

: Wait, what. There are German ninjas now? Maybe I should have Salty Vanilla design a Venezuelan ninja after all.

: “Oh… is this the rumored Alter Ego Arts?!”

: “German ninja arts, huh… He appears to be QUITE powerful. Leave this one to ol’ Frank!”

: “It’d be better if we worked together…”

: So… I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of glitch here. The guides I’ve read say that the real ninja is supposed to have a heart over his head. That didn’t happen for some reason.

: If it wasn’t such a pain in the ass, I’d load it onto my hardware PS2 and do a console verification.

: I wound up using some ‘handy tools’ to bypass this.

: “Hey, YOU! You’re the REAL one!”

: “He he he… you have the right to remain silent. You’re under arrest!”

: “No! You’re taking all the CREDIT again!!”

: “Only the Jonin understands how HARD ol’ Frank has worked…”

: Next time, we’ll go to Chichen Itza. For real this time.

[Timrod]

Summary

: There’s another UMA in Chichen Itza, so we’re going to need to bring Natan along. Like all South American themed dungeons in RPGs, Chichen Itza SUCKS.

: I swear, it’s like Nautilus saw the end of Innocent Sin and went “Why don’t we do that”, complete with it being the biggest pain in the goddamn ass.

: The Vine Bracelet is an accessory that prevents Apathy. Unfortunately, it did not prevent me from not wanting to record this dungeon anymore and go back to playing Pikmin 4.

: Gerard and Buigen are up the stairs to the right, and we need to spend all of our money again because the boss here is another one that requires an accessory.

: To be more specific, we need four of these Bell Bracelets.

: If we go up the stairs to the left, we run into this.

: “I do not believe it to be dangerous. Do as you wish.”

: “The door has opened… I see, it opens when the floor lights up.”

: Johnny spends like ten seconds meandering up to the door.

: “It looks like a timed mechanism. You must move quickly once you step on the floor.”

: God dammit, I swear to god if this is a crystal skull, I am turning this entire goddamn LP around and going back to The 25th Ward.

: Fuck!! Fuck this! I’ve already gone through two games worth of this bullshit!

: Off to the side is an Arc Heal, which is useful given that all of the enemies here have status effects that we do not have the money to prevent.

: Shortly afterward, we get into our first random encounter. The flying enemy at the top is a Jig Ruta, which has 164 HP. Kinda high compared to the previous dungeon enemies, but not that bad.

: The real issue is this motherfuck right here. 345 fucking HP, extremely resistant to physical attacks, AND it inflicts Apathy on hit.

: Holy shit, Frank’s going fucking Super Saiyan!

: Or, you know, he’ll just tap the hannya on his stomach and fire an explosion. That works too. The only problem is that Demon Bomb costs nearly half of Frank’s total MP and doesn’t do more damage than Seismic Wave does.

: Back in the entrance room, we can open this door.

: “Didn’t you find a creepy skull before? What about that?”

: “OK, I’ll try it.”

: The next area has a left and a right side, both with a timer on them. The left side leads into the next area, but we’re going to want to grab all the stuff anyway… and we need money.

: Evil Shade is a Dark-element Red Nova, in that it’s an area attack that also performs a Stock nuke.

: The right side also has a UMA spot - but it’s a fake.

: I noticed we had a ton of Soul Energy saved up, so I leveled up Tatan’ka a bit. The reason is that the abilities Thunderbird gets from its next levelup both kinda suck, and Tatan’ka gets Arc Rage and Arc Surge, both of which we’re going to want for the boss.

: We have enough money to get four Bell Bracelets, but we’re also 51 points from being able to get a 30% discount, so I buy two of them to rank up.

: This allows me to buy all four Bell Bracelets, but also Stone Belts, which will help Johnny and Natan kill the smaller enemies.

: I spent over an hour just running around the entrance room trying to farm enough Cash to upgrade everyone’s armor - and was just able to do it after selling some old armor.

: I can’t imagine that clothing capable of generating negative ions would be particularly healthy to wear, given that ionizers produce ozone as a by-product.

: The next area past the first skull door is another tile maze - fortunately, this one’s super easy.

: This one is actually a clever bit of game design. You can see where it starts, and it doesn’t go anywhere… or does it?

: Right near the end of it, there’s a hidden chest. You can see the edge of it in the last shot.

: Here is a tip I did not think of: once you get Arc Cure, what you do is simply go to Buigen and upgrade its MP Cost Reduction to maximum, then stick it on a party member you’re not using.

: Saves a shit-ton on consumables in the long run, plus you can use all of Mao’s MP because let’s be real here, even though Natan sucks mechanically I’d rather have him than Mao.

: There’s another UMA spot near the Arc Cure chest, but this one’s also fake. Here’s how you can tell:

: The UMA description says that the UMA never attacks the same place twice - so if there are feathers, that means it’s already been there.

: Before we go through this door…

: We definitely want to grab this. Mana Extract is a late-game MP restoration item.

: There’s another Lottery Ticket in this hallway, though unfortunately Chichen Itza breaks the rule of “Lottery Ticket means there’s a Lottery Member nearby”.

: It would have ruled if you went down a random side passage and there’s a Mayan skeleton who tries to get you to play his lottery.

: This room is a slightly more complex puzzle, made worse by the fact that the UMA is in here and the random encounters here tend to include multiple Jig Ruta, who have a Stock nuke.

: Let’s get the UMA out of the way first.

: The UMA this time is the Chupacabra, which is not going to last even a single turn against us.

: The Chupacabra has 1000 HP, and Frank takes off nearly a quarter of that by himself.

: By the time Natan and Shania go, we’re pretty close to killing it. The only bad part is that it’s in the air, which means that Tempest won’t work - Tempest only hits Mid, not High or Low.

: That’s fine though, because the Chupacabra is Dark element and Holy Pulse DOES hit High.

: Now for progress. You can see here the tile that powers the door down at the bottom near where we entered. That’s where the next skull is.

: The trick is that there’s a second tile just off-screen that opens a door near the save point, which stops you from having to go all the way around to get to the bottom level.

: We’ve got everything in this room now, and we’ve got the UMA, which means I can replace Natan with Ricardo… only I kind of forget to do that and go into the boss with Natan anyway.

: To top off this shit dungeon, I get into a random encounter two steps before the door leading to the boss, so I have to run back to the save point to heal.

: This is about as close as the game gets to a Drakengard cutscene. I guess that’d make Johnny Inuart, wouldn’t it?

: God dammit, why didn’t we get the laser, Frank needs a laser to replace his nuke.

: I think Gilbert has malice confused for orphan juice, the substance of choice for people attempting to do stuff like that. This is why he’ll never be more than a third-rate villain.

: Yeah, that’s… kind of exactly what he just said.

: Man, I wish we were still in the days when there were only two Malice sites in the entirety of the American continent.

: They put Killer in the wrong game. We needed him in Persona 5, so he could punch Akechi every time he repeats a plot point.

: I wish I could rip models, because I would rip Frank’s model and re-do this cutscene in Source Filmmaker with Frank running at Lady with the Ullapool Caber while this plays.

: It’s hard to see, but Killer’s weapon is a set of brass knuckles that are effectively Wolverine’s claws… which was a weapon Yuri used in Covenant.

: Does he… not know that McManus killed Edna in the first place?

: I don’t think Wales counts as another world. Does it?

: It took you THIS LONG to realize that? Johnny as originally written is about as dense as The Dark Id’s version of Yuri.

: Oh look, it’s that dumbass eyeball monster on that snap card we got in the Caribbean.

: Jeb Niglas has 2020 HP and is Light element. I actually wound up having to reload a save here because I forgot to equip Johnny with the Bell Bracelet. You ABSOLUTELY need those, by the way.

: I have Johnny buff Frank with Dark Edge, which changes his attacks to be Dark element.

: Natan uses Arc Barrier, and Shania follows up by Fusing into Tatan’ka and using Arc Surge. Now, here’s the thing: you do NOT want to do what I did and try for a D-Combo finisher.

: The reason is that Jeb Niglas has a physical attack that doubles as a Stock nuke.

: I start off by alternating between Dark spells (Ebony Cluster and Evil Eye) and Red Nova as a Stock nuke. We have Evil Shade - which is a Dark-element Stock nuke - but I didn’t feel like running back to Buigen to be able to use it.

: The boss wastes a couple of turns casting Seal, which is great for me because by this point, I’ve got the boss down to D-Combo kill range.

: I also discovered an exploit of sorts. Normally, during a Double or D-Combo, the game won’t let you use the same spell or action twice. There’s an exception to that rule.

: If you have Shania switch Fusion forms, she can cast the same spell twice.

: Yep, that’s nearly 600 damage in a single turn.

: Frank follows up with Ninja Star and Seismic Wave, which I THINK are affected by Dark Edge because they’re both physical.

: I could have done even more damage if I had Shania buff everyone’s physical damage as well, but we did the job.

: Yep, boss is dead.

: God dammit, why does it get a cutscene laser? Why doesn’t Frank get one of those?

: I call bullshit.

: And now I guess we know what’d happen if Yuri ever met Johnny.

: That’s… probably not a good sign.

: Next time, we take our first foray into South America. No, Mexico doesn’t count for some reason.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Trust me, I was as confused as you probably are.

: I can’t tell exactly what happened here. It feels like the developers planned on recording another cutscene in between Chichen Itza and now, only they ran out of time.

: Frank is going to that direction to give his agent a stern talking-to.

: Ricardo does a hat tip and walks away.

: I should point out, by the way, that this game was written during Death Note’s original publication run - Death Note started publication in late 2003. This probably would’ve been a fucking groaner back then.

: This is actually true for 1929 - the US had not signed extradition treaties with most of South America (including Brazil) until the 1970s. Of course, I have a feeling that if the US government was to approach Brazil and say “Hey, we want this guy”, they’d probably do it.

: If you’re playing this game on actual hardware, and you’re planning on doing the bonus post-game dungeon, you’re going to want to talk to that lady near the fountain.

: We will do that later, because there is a Frank cutscene nearby. Doing the Frank cutscene skips a lot of dialog, so we’ll do it now and then rewind.

: If you head out of the north exit, you wind up in the favela. Let’s just keep going up the stairs.

: Huh… there is that brightly-colored thing off in the distance… nah, couldn’t be.

: Frank is dumpster diving, which predates a different Frank dumpster diving by a full four years.

: “Oh! Boy! Can’t you tell just by looking? I’m collecting information!”

: “I dunno about that… it looks like you’re just scrounging for trash.”

: "Har har, Boy’s still GREEN, isn’t he? Wise man once said, ‘The fundamentals of detective work are in the TRASH!’ "

: “Oh, is that right… well, knock yourself out. Good luck with that.”

: Gerard and Buigen are right near Frank, and they have new weapons for everyone. We do not have enough money to buy them all - plus we need new accessories for the next boss.

: Between where Frank is and where Gerard is, there’s a park with a tube in it. Let’s look at this.

: “A fireworks tube. You better not touch it.”

: Oh no. This isn’t going… Frank’s not going to… did Frank fucking beat the TF2 Demoman in using an explosive as a melee weapon by a full five years?

: “Fireworks?”

: “You don’t know what they are? Uh… how should I explain…?”

: “By mixing different chemicals with the gunpowder, you can change the color. They’re mainly for signaling or fun.”

: “Y-You really know a lot about them…”

: “…Actually, Daddy was a fireworks engineer, famous across the States.”

: “Huh? Really?! Why didn’t you say anything until now?”

: “Daddy wanted me to succeed him, but ol’ Frank chose the path of the ninja to preserve the peace of the States. Of course, I don’t regret it. But sometimes I just WONDER…”

: Has there ever been a character in an RPG who uses explosives as their main weapon? I feel like they should’ve gone for that.

: “That’s pretty heavy…”

: “But this is my fateful meeting! If ol’ Frank does this, his regrets will be instantly resolved!”

: Goddamn. Someone should mod this into TF2.

: I feel like Frank operates on Final Fantasy logic where having someone magdump a gun into your chest is equivalent to a papercut.

: Anyway, let’s rewind a bit and go look around some more.

: Most of these questions are fairly easy… apart from a few. With ‘handy tools’, this isn’t a problem.

: It’s football.

: The mobsters do this every time you get a question right. Someone at Nautilus clearly had a lot of fun with this whole thing.

: Ah yes, all those U.S. Army bases, well known for flying the imperial Japanese flag. Lots of weeaboos in those days.

: This one’s “an overhead structure”, which might not be totally obvious except that none of those other things exist in Chicago.

: Favela is the Portuguese slang term for a slum. The name comes from the aftermath of a war in the late 1890s, when the Brazilian army was sent to put down a peasant uprising.

: The name comes from a type of tree, under which the soldiers built rudimentary housing during the war - they were given a parcel of land in Rio and built the same kind of houses there.

: The Brazilian government has traditionally… not been kind, to put it lightly, to the people who live there.

: The Big Buddha of Freedom sounds like something some crazy middle-aged white guy would build out in the desert in Arizona or Nevada because aliens told him to do it.

: It’s three.

: This one is also three: there’s the chief’s tepee, the one that had an item in it, and Nvwoti’s tepee.

: The Warning Device is another returning accessory that isn’t really any more useful than it was in the first two games - except in the bonus dungeon.

: Of course, we have ‘handy tools’ to fix that little issue. I really should’ve titled this LP something like “Handy Tool Assisted Speedrun”.

: “Japanese culture in South America… oh, that brings back bad memories.”

: This guy has a skill for Hilda if she’s in Pink Bat form, which we could easily do by having her drain a single calorie off the enemies at Arkham… but I won’t.

: There’s a super-awkward to find lottery member on this screen - Hilda is looking right at her, she’s in a straight line to the left from Johnny.

: The reason is that if you try to talk to her, you’ll wind up on this screen where she’s only partially visible.

: If you’re using the Warlock Earrings we picked up earlier, and are either a super pro at QTEs or have access to ‘handy tools’, Magic Mind’s Eye is a gamebreaker.

: This is half of an accessory from the first two games that DOUBLES your magic damage, but makes the Ring invisible. I will probably make use of this at some point.

: Just past the Lottery Member is another Snap trader. We can only make two trades here.

: This gets us another ??? card, which is presumably for the next boss.

: Mind’s Eye is the physical version of the Magic Mind’s Eye, and works the same way. I like how one of these is just a blindfold, while the other is a magic blindfold soaked in the tears of children.

: We probably should get around to upgrading some of the star charts.

: This is going on Frank. I think the difference is how often it procs.

: I sell all our old equipment to buy three Shell Bracelets. The next boss has Poison as a gimmick, which can escalate easily to Deadly Poison, which is a real problem.

: I also grab Hilda and Mao’s new weapons, just so I can show them off. That wand sounds a lot like those “5000 dB” truck horns on Amazon - which would be classified as a WMD if they were actually that strong.

: This moves us up to Rank B, which allows us to try for a 40% discount with an increasingly difficult Ring spin. That’s about all we have to do here, so let’s talk to Frank and leave the area.

: “Quiet! That loud voice is embarrassing.”

: Johnny, shut the fuck up.

: “Frank did it! Frank got the SCOOP!”

: “Man, never thought we’d find a clue in the paper. Anyway, we hafta go there!”

: “I saw that article earlier too. According to the locals, this paper is ALWAYS full of lies…”

: “But this photo doesn’t look fake…”

: “Why don’t we just go directly to the person who wrote this and ask them?”

: “Yeah! Good idea! Rio de Janeiro Sports Publishing. And… they’re located in this town!”

: The appropriate subtitle to have any time Johnny is on screen.

: There’s some un-subtitled dialog here where Hilda and Mao realize what the stories are about and start going “Oh my god! It’s you! It’s you!”

: A quick map search tells me that the drive from Rio de Janeiro to Cusco, Peru (the closest city to Machu Picchu) takes 60 hours by modern car.

: From Cusco to the closest road to Machu Picchu is probably another hour or two, and then it’s a 3 to 5 day hike to the ruins.

: I mean, if you assume the editor is the Doom guy and can run at speeds approaching 100 MPH without stopping - which is pretty much what he’d have to do to get that picture - then yeah.

: This is every cutscene in Resident Evil 2 with both Leon and Ada in it.

: We could go right to Machu Picchu, but there’s a few other things we can get in Rio. There are also some new Pit Fights, which are… not great.

: One of them makes you fight a Thug with 200+ HP that can kill Johnny in two hits without being able to use items. We’re not doing that one anytime soon.

: There are a couple of interesting ones though, like this fight where the boss has exactly 35 HP and you need to do a 30-hit combo to finish it off… with no character skills allowed.

: This one kinda sucks admittedly because Shania can’t use magic due to it counting as a character skill, but I didn’t even need her.

: I missed an item earlier - in the corner of the little park where the Fireworks Saber was, there’s a chest with an Arc Surge stellar in the corner. This should help with turn economy.

: If we head back to the newspaper office, Boulde is here at the table. There’s also a Lottery Ticket in that trash can behind him.

: “No, not really. Just came to chat. Do you work at this newspaper too?”

: “Journal? You must have a lot of free time then.”

: “Wow! You have a hundred of them?”

: “Chicago… I have lots of friends in that town. Shall I ask around for you the next time I visit?”

: “Yeah. So, we’ll look for it, but don’t get your hopes up.”

: The diary is inside Capone’s club/casino in Chicago.

: “No, no. It’s about this guy Boulde who used to live here a while back. Weren’t you born here?”

: “Yes. Just met him recently, though… why? Do you know him?”

: “By ‘kids’ do you mean me?”

: “Anyway. We’re looking for a diary that Boulde said he lost in this town.”

: “That was quick.”

: “Yes. But why did you have it?”

: “…Do you have any messages for him?”

: “…That’s pretty cruel.”

: This feels just like a NieR sidequest, except it only took like, two minutes instead of an hour. The sidequests in NieR all sucked, and I won’t apologize.

: "I see… I at least wanted to give him this journal. Do you know where his grave is?’

: You know what game could have used almost this exact scene? The Silver Case. It should’ve been a scene after Hikari but before Yami with Tokio and Kusabi.

: “Really… but what should I do with this diary? Can I hand it over to you?”

: “But what should I do with it?”

: “…I understand.”

: Next time, we’ll explore Machu Picchu.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Before we leave the newspaper office, I forgot to grab this. The level 2 ring effects proc way more often.

: Surrounded… by being a dungeon I really did not feel like recording.

: Yep, they’re all dead.

: “That one might still be twitching a little… wait, no, that’s just rigor mortis.”

: “This is it, right? The Ruins of Machu Picchu?”

: “Yes, but do you think they’re really here?”

: “Yes. I’m positive.”

: Before we go into the ruins, there are a couple of items we can grab.

: One thing I should mention is that you probably do not want Shania in your party for this dungeon. I kept her in just long enough for Johnny to get all the snaps we need.

: The writers did realize the Camel was a plane, right?

: “Now, now. There’s no need for you to go kill enemies Lady overlooked, is there? Why don’t you leave them to me?”

: “You saying you can do something?”

: “Well, I can at least buy you some time.”

: I’m going to skip a bit of dialog, because this dungeon has a really simple gimmick that the game feels the need to overexplain.

: Each door has two colors. There are switches that are the same colors as the doors. Two switches can be pressed at a time. This is effectively an easier version of a bad dungeon from Covenant.

: “What’s that? It looks like this big face.”

: I wish there was an option to have Frank smash this puzzle in half. It’s really more annoying than anything.

: We find a yellow switch, which…

: Turns the eyes to Yellow/Red.

: Two steps away from the cutscene, we get into our first random battle. Wariche is the resident “big boy” enemy, but doesn’t actually do that much damage - maybe 60 to 70.

: The real problem are the little fuckers, which are called Dicteo. Dicteo have 98 HP and can inflict Instant Death on hit.

: The problem is that the only person who can reliably one-shot the Dicteo is Frank - Shania also can, but I have to ditch her and Ricardo/Natan can’t quite get there with 4 attacks each.

: Anyway, we don’t give a shit about the Red/Yellow door. It has an Angel Souffle behind it, and we aren’t using Hilda right now. Instead, let’s open up this Blue/Yellow door.

: This area has a bunch of items we want, the most important of which is a Ring Fragment.

: It’s hidden in this corner that you can only kind of see Johnny through. This means we have to backtrack through the door puzzle - including resetting the switches - to turn it in.

: “…Good! You seem a lot more relaxed now.”

: “Hee hee, I’ve been working hard! Even my father praised me!”

: “Father? You have a family!?”

: “Of course I do! What, did you think I was just born in some cabbage patch!? My father just so happens to be a veteran Ring Spirit who’s been in service for over forty years.”

: Poor Ring Soul, forever cursed to be remembered by the wrong name.

: “My dream is to become a splendid Ring Spirit like him one day.”

: “…But in forty years, won’t you be an old lady?”

: “What! You’re so rude! Just for that you don’t get a reward!”

: “What!? It was just a joke. I was kidding.”

: “Ahahah, I was just joking too. Here you go.”

: This sounds like they’re headed for a divorce.

: I should probably get around to using these at some point.

: This is here purely to give you options in case you get hit by Instant Death.

: Gerard and Buigen are down the stairs, along with a Lottery Ticket.

: Here’s the rest of the enemies in this area - Xantak is a flying enemy that is mostly just annoying, and the blob (Xi Dazun) is a buffer.

: Oh, right. We have a new battle theme now that we’re in South America. It’s… not as good as Dead Fingers Talk.

: The new area has a second set of switches that are separate from the ones in the first room. Now, here’s the fucking annoying part:

: As you can see, the room has two ways out: a Red/Green door and a Yellow/Purple door. There is also a red button and a green button - they’re both about the same distance from the entrance.

: Now, you might think “Oh, all I have to do is press the two buttons”, but the game very clearly expects you to hit the green one first - because if you hit red first, you’ve just wasted like 10 minutes.

: I should mention that this dungeon, like all RPG dungeons set in South America or that are South America-adjacent, has an obnoxious encounter rate. It’s like… probably three times higher than every other dungeon in this game.

: I just can’t escape Ameno Xibalbafune, can I?

: Anyway, like a total dumbshit, I hit the red button first. There is no way to go back and change this once you’ve pressed it.

: The next area is this big fuckoff maze with… I think four sets of doors in it. One of them is that purple/yellow door that leads back to the red and green switches.

: Now, the problem is that there’s a fairly good Ring item in this room, locked behind a Purple/Red door. Unfortunately, because I pressed Red first, hitting the Purple switch (which is in the bottom-right corner of this room) will give us Purple/Green - and unfortunately, not the good kind of Purple/Green.

: The Yellow switch is in the bottom left corner, two screens away from the purple one. We have to do this in order to reset the green/red switches.

: We can grab a Mana Root here, and then go up through that door.

: So I do that, and fight like ten random encounters doing so. I then go back to the purple switch and open the door to the item room.

: The other two items are a garbage stellar and a healing item. We want SP-Defend Down 2 because like all second-level ring items, it has a higher chance of hitting, and hitting the boss with it would be a good idea.

: I mentioned in the last update that Natan sucks, and here’s why: both Slug Shell and Rapid Shot do less damage than his regular attack string.

: Compare this to Frank, who does more than an attack string’s worth of damage with both Seismic Wave and Demon Bomb, and has a larger AOE.

: The good news is that we’re going to get some things shortly which will make it worthwhile to replace Natan with Hilda.

: Now that we’ve done that, we have to reset the switches to purple and yellow. The guide I was using neglected to mention that you can skip an entire lap around the room if you hit the yellow one first.

: Another lap around, and the switches are now purple/yellow. At this point, we can leave and go back to where Gerard is.

: If we go up the stairs and all the way to the left, there’s a second entrance into the switch puzzle.

: This allows us to go back into the big room.

: We then run down and hit the yellow switch for blue/yellow, and now we can make progress.

: This room has one immediately obvious exit, but if we go down and to the right instead…

: We get what’s actually a surprisingly good item for Hilda. You see, what I didn’t realize is that Hilda has 40 Sanity Points - nearly as many as Shania does.

: Hilda at this point is four levels behind the rest of the party, but with the Small Jug equipped, she has virtually the same stats. We can also give her the Warlock Earrings to negate the S-Def boost from the Jug but give her an additional 20% S-Atk, which will make Hilda an amazing caster.

: This next room is the last one - and is another switch puzzle.

: “Oh yeah. But…”

: “Wonder if there’s a way to put out the fire? Let’s look for another way out.”

: There’s a red switch to the left of the exit. Unlike the last room, there’s only one solution.

: “Oh, the flames went out.”

: “But only the red flames went out? Can’t determine anything yet…”

: To the right of the exit is this chest, which is unlocked now that we’ve removed the red fire.

: The center room has eight directional hallways - the one directly to the right leads to the next switch.

: We can only have one switch active at a time, but that’s not a big deal.

: The green switch is right over here, and now we can all get on with our lives.

: Before we do though, there’s a stellar in this chest. It would be really good against the boss… if I had any star charts that could use it. If walking back to Gerard and Buigen wouldn’t be a gigantic pain in the ass, I’d do that.

: Before we go through the next door, I unequip Shania completely.

: I had probably been in this dungeon for nearly 90 minutes real-time at this point due to the encounter rate.

: Frank is looking at Hilda like “Why are we even in this dungeon again?”

: “No! Gilbert’s getting away!”

: And this is why I switched over to Ricardo and Natan. We’ve just lost Shania for the rest of this dungeon.

: The game gives us the opportunity to switch our battle team - which I have no reason to do, because I wasn’t using Shania anyway.

: The game gives us a fight with exactly the combination of enemies you can see in the cutscene.

: Fortunately, there is a save point after this, so we’re free to let Frank go all out.

: Demon Bomb fucks hard against multiple enemies.

: Before we leave this room, there’s a Fruity Fiber in the corner. We’re going to need a couple of these in the next area to change Hilda’s forms.

: Several empty corridors later…

: Man, Shania really sucks at stealth, doesn’t she?

: I didn’t get a shot of it, but Shania’s eyes turn red for a second.

: Oh look, it’s that thing we traded for a snap card of. The bad news is that we need a second snap card of it because that’s how this game rolls.

: This boss is called Kerufe, and it has 2,380 HP. Kerufe’s gimmick is that it’s very fast and likes to spam Poison - but that’s not a big deal for us because everyone is immune.

: The boss will get two turns in a row quite frequently, and will probably use Gale at some point to buff its speed even further.

: Its only other attack, outside of a physical combo, is Pre-Ignition, which is a fire spell with a large AOE.

: I start with buffs - Frank uses Arc Surge, Ricardo uses Arc Barrier, and Natan buffs Frank with Earth Edge to do more damage since Kerufe is Wind-element.

: What I do is set up so that we use the D-Combo on the last turn that Arc Surge is up, and in the meantime start reducing Kerufe’s HP with spells.

: And then, Frank does it. Kerufe gets slapped with a 36% special defense reduction - this is on top of the 36% buff to special attack the entire party has from Arc Surge. It’s D-Combo time.

: Even Johnny, with his absolute garbage star chart, can hit for almost 300 damage - and that’s using Gale Rod, which is at an elemental disadvantage. The reason I do this is to set up for Frank.

: Frank follows up with a Seismic Wave/Demon Bomb combo thanks to Johnny knocking the boss to the floor, and adds an extra 400 or so damage.

: By the end of Ricardo’s turn, we’re most of the way through Kerufe’s HP bar. And now, for the finisher.

: Yep, that’ll do it.

: Hell yeah. I could have done it even faster if I had equipped the Warlock Earrings to someone, or had bothered to level up Hilda for the Small Jug/Warlock Earrings combo, but it works.

: Speaking of Hilda, Salty Vanilla finished that piece showing what it would be like if Hilda had Fusion.

: I’m surprised Frank’s people don’t have GPS trackers on Lady and Killer at this point.

: That’s a facial expression all right.

: Next time, we’ll head to the Marquesas Islands for a brief stop before another Machu Picchu sized dungeon. We’ll also get some new stuff for Hilda, which is great becuase

[Timrod]

Summary

: Man, Loloma must’ve had one fast boat to get from the Marquesas to Peru.

: Gilbert is loving this shit.

: “I’m just a little bit excited! You see, scholars from all over the world have been searching for this ‘something’ for over a hundred years! Without success, of course… that is, up until now!!”

: I need to clarify this a bit. Vilcabamba was the last capitol of the Inca before they were wiped out by the Spanish in 1572. By the 1700s, no one remembered where Vilcabamba actually was.

: One of the earliest theories, advanced by a guy from Connecticut by the name of Hiram Bingham, was that Machu Picchu (which he claimed to have discovered in 1911) was Vilcabamba.

: Side note to that, Hiram Bingham didn’t actually discover Machu Picchu - that honor goes to a Peruvian farmer by the name of Agustin Lizarraga, who had originally found it in 1902.

: What Bingham DID discover was a site called “Espiritu Pampa”, which is another name for Vilcabamba. He didn’t bother to investigate it, and due to his theory about Machu Picchu, neither did anyone else.

: For Gilbert to have correctly recognized Espiritu Pampa as Vilcabamba would put him fifty years ahead of everyone else - but at the same time behind everyone else because people knew where Espiritu Pampa was, they just didn’t know that it was Vilcabamba.

: The real Vilcabamba is, of course, not underground. The Inca had a lot of engineering projects to their name, but an underground city was sadly not one of them.

: It’s probably an elevator.

: The first thing we want to do is head into that house directly to the right of the party.

: Here, I realize that I have fucked up - the guide told me I only needed two snaps of Kerufe. You actually need three. This meant I had to fight the boss again.

: I know there’s a boss coming up we have to snap a total of 7 times. I’m not sure if it’s this one.

: In a few years, she’ll be summoning demons to do her bidding, just like the kids in England.

: You might notice we don’t have Weekly Arts 2 - that’s because we need Hilda to be in Pink Bat form for that. It’s back in Rio de Janeiro.

: Gerard and Buigen are nearby, and since we have a ton of money and also don’t really need an accessory for the next boss, we can buy armor and start pumping stellars.

: I grab a couple of Andes Ponchos for Johnny and Frank, and a Dancing Samba for Hilda. We got a Dancing Samba off the last boss, so Shania is covered.

: Now, we COULD grab Vine Bracelets for everyone, since the next boss has Apathy as a mechanic - except we really don’t want to waste the money on that.

: The reason is that the way the boss is set up, we want to D-Combo right away, which will (probably) disable the boss’s ability to use Apathy.

: I’ll take a free stat boost, why not. It’s in the same spot Loloma’s grandmother was in the cutscene before Machu Picchu.

: This one’s an invisible ring, and is… actually kinda hard to hit with the amount of input lag the emulator has. I definitely had to use some “handy tools” on this one. The red area is between 4:00 and 5:00.

: The Seraphim Straw increases the number of calories Hilda takes in… but only positive calories. We don’t want those because those make her magic stat suck.

: We also finally get the second-tier water spell, which will be very useful against the next boss. We’re going to give this one to Hilda.

: Our next cutscene is in Loloma’s house, which is just to the right. I actually bothered to record this one because it has Frank having a Joseph Joestar moment.

: Speaking of Frank, I got Bomb Rush Cyberfunk on launch day. The first rival gang is called The FRANKS, in all caps. After several seconds of screaming, I immediately contacted Salty Vanilla.

: “I never would’ve imagined that I would find any of my family here.”

: What’s funny about this is that it makes Nicolai’s achievement of releasing all the Malice in the Vatican look weaker with each passing moment.

: “Yes it’s all true… but how do you know all this?”

: Hilda and Frank are desperately trying to get a look at the bone shard.

: Okay, so we’re fighting a gate at some point. Got it.

: “Gate?”

: It isn’t subtitled, which is why I took the video, but you can hear Frank in the background going “Oh my god!” in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Joseph Joestar.

: “You mean the world will be destroyed… you’re exaggerating, right?”

: “And so… you’re asking us to stop this, right?”

: “We can’t do it. I’m very sorry.”

: “More importantly, tell us where Vilcabamba is… if you don’t mind!”

: Shania’s VA kinda fails this entire scene. I think I mentioned before that her VA is some nobody and this was the largest role she ever got.

: In fact, I think her VA is part of the reason I don’t like Shania as a character all that much, given that her entire personality is “She’s kind of a bitch”.

: I mean, I figured we got asked to come here because of all the items lying around. Speaking of which, the guide tells me this area is the source of one of the more irritating sidequests.

: “Thank you.”

: We’re pretty much done here. There is another thing we could get for Hilda if she was in Curvy form, but we don’t want her in Curvy form ever.

: And now we’re done. We’re going to go into Vilcabamba for a bit and then turn back, because there’s a Ring Fragment located not too far inside.

: “Hey, look.”

: “Ah, and that… red light…”

: “Let’s go. Let’s get that woman before the red light is released.”

: What we’re actually going to do is go back up the elevator. Why?

: Because there’s a Seal up here. It’s behind the bottom-right pillar.

: Wait a second… wasn’t this in Eternal Punishment? You know, in the room where we fought that one guy who mutated? The one at the end of Ameno Xibalbafune.

: “Lady, I’m gonna stay here. They won’t get in the way again!”

: We are going to fucking steamroll Killer’s ass, at least if the amount of damage Hilda is doing is any indication.

: "So I’d be able to check up on Lady’s power… wonder if that was such a good idea… at the worst… they may not break the seal.

: “I understand, Mr. Killer! I’ll look after Lady, don’t you worry!”

: “You’re not going anywhere, little man! Get this straight… I don’t trust you one teeny tiny bit… so there’s no way I’m letting you alone with her!”

: There’s a tutorial cutscene I really should skip, but it’s short.

: “Hm… it doesn’t move.”

: “What’s this switch?”

: Come on Johnny, you can see the other three switches from where you’re standing!

: Heat Resist is the first in a line of elemental resist spells that are… probably useless. They require a 3rd-level stellar slot, and are single-target.

: Shortly after we pick the stellar up, we get into our first random encounter. Ghatanothoa is a re-skin of the Byakhee from Alcatraz, with more HP and better spells.

: We only need two snaps of most of the enemies in this dungeon, so let’s have Hilda test Pumpkin Bomb - since we’re leaving shortly anyway.

: Oh shit, Hilda’s a devil buster! I saw this and opened the chat window with Salty Vanilla. “Can I get a picture of Hilda dumping Makoto from Persona 5 into a trash can?”

: Holy shit. Hilda is a full four levels behind Johnny and Frank, which is a huge gap for this game, and yet she’s able to oneshot enemies. Pumpkin Bomb is admittedly a pricy (and therefore damaging) skill, but still.

: Most of the enemies here are nothing to worry about. They hit for 70-80 damage, can cast spells for a bit more than that, and are pretty easily brought down.

: It takes maybe a couple of minutes to start the elevator up, counting the encounters.

: The chest has a Lottery Ticket in it.

: The Ring Fragment is directly across from the elevator, behind this pillar. Let’s go cash this in.

: On the way out, we run into two more enemy types: Tindaros and uh… “Wormy Worm”. There’s no way that’s an accurate translation. Unfortunately, I don’t know what its Japanese name is.

: Anyway, Wormy Worms are weak but have a Stock nuke, and need to be taken out immediately. Frank and Shania can do this easily with physical attacks, as can Hilda with spells.

: “Wow… that’s great. Today, even your voice sounds deeper! Your body’s a different color, too. It’s like you’re a different person! …Hey, wait? Are you really…”

: This is, as I’ve mentioned, the Ring Soul from Covenant.

: “Whoa! I knew it!”

: “Th-thank you very much… um, where is Aya today…?”

: “Hey, I think you’ve got it all wrong…”

: To end this update, I put the Small Jug/Warlock Earrings combo on Johnny and did this Pit Fight, because it awards a stellar chart that’s actually pretty decent.

: Two rounds of this and the thug is dead.

: Taurus comes with a second Hail Solid, which will be useful against the upcoming boss. Most of the rest of the stuff it comes with is mediocre, but the slots on it are good.

: Next time, we’ll finish Vilcabamba.

[Dragolord09]

Incidentally, what attack do you get out of Weekly Arts 2, and what is the item you get if you have Curvy Hilda at that particular location?

[Timrod]

Weekly Arts 2 gets you an ability that is basically useless: it increases Hilda’s physical attack (and ONLY physical attack) by 150% while in Pink Bat form. This would be useful if, say, it were possible to switch forms in combat or glitch it onto Frank or something.

The item you get from the guy in Moana Village is Weekly Arts 4, which gives you an ability called Happiness Gift (which is only for Curvy Hilda) that revives a KOed party member at full HP. Given that I’ve never had a party member get KOed (outside of the start of the game), it’s useless outside of maybe some very specific situations near the end of the game.

[Timrod]

Summary

: I’d like to start by saying I had to re-record this entire update due to an inopportune save state. Basically, Hilda wound up killing the boss before I could get a Snap.

: The second area is very straightforward - you can see our destination in the background.

: This room is a pretty simple teleporter maze - it’s also the last room of Vilcabamba. Despite being simple, it takes a while (probably half an hour) to finish with encounters.

: We’re now on the top floor.

: “Which means we have to find another four switches.”

: “LOOK! There’s a switch way over there!”

: When I recorded this, I had gotten… maybe four hours of sleep the night before, if we’re being generous. This was after getting maybe five the night before that. My cat is an asshole.

: I looked at this and my brain immediately went to Frank running around like a demented Captain Olimar picking up the party members and hurling them at the switches like they’re overgrown pikmin.

: The first switch is directly north of the elevator. I’m kind of amazed I was able to read the guide for this, given that I woke up and found my car keys hanging from a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in the fridge.

: You can see another teleporter in the background, but there’s an item we want to grab first.

: This would be useful against the boss if I didn’t use the Forbidden Handy Tool Technique from Covenant, which I spent like fifteen minutes reloading savestates to do.

: In theory, the technique works like this. First, you put Gamble Ring on.

: Gamble Ring makes it so that the Ring is reduced to one hit area, and hitting that area makes everything hit. In Covenant, the hit area was always consistent. That’s not true anymore.

: The technique in Covenant was to use Mind’s Eye for double damage, and turn on Gamble Ring so as to avoid missing - since the hit zone used to be the same, it was pretty much free damage.

: From the New World makes it so that the hit zone is slightly randomized (in Hilda’s case, it will always be between 4:00 and 8:00 or so) the first time you use the Ring in combat.

: Not shown: fifteen minutes of me going “What the fuck? Where’s the hit zone?” while mashing the “Reload Savestate” button.

: From there, all we have to do is push the switch and then use the teleporter.

: SP Lowering is the biggest non-issue in the game. There’s one enemy here (Tindaros) that can inflict it, but I’ve never had a fight last long enough for that to be an issue.

: This chest has a Fruity Fiber in it, and it’s at this point I realize I can show off Hilda’s final form.

: When Hilda reaches either -100 or +100 calories, she transforms into Mask Hilda (either Slim or Curvy, based on calorie count). This gives her a stat boost for 3 fights.

: At the end of those 3 fights, she turns back into the Pink Bat with 0 calories. I could use this on the boss, but I won’t. We want to save these until after we’ve obtained Hilda’s last ability.

: Someone asked about the missing abilities for Hilda, and I’ll explain them here: the one we missed in Rio is a buff for the Pink Bat that increases physical attack power (for Hilda only) by 150%.

: The other one, in Moana Village, is a revive + full HP restore, which… we have no reason to use. The only time anyone has gotten KOed was Natan during the UMA fight on the pirate ship during a take I didn’t use.

: The in-game model also gets the mask, but doesn’t have any abilities that Hilda wouldn’t normally have or anything - it’s a stat boost and nothing more.

: The purple teleporter takes us to the bottom level, and you can see the third switch in the background.

: More borderline useless stellars for our collection of useless stellars.

: “Uh oh, it looks like a dead end.”

: “Wait. There’s a design on the floor…”

: “Huh? This?”

: These bridges are mostly shortcuts, and my brain on 3 hours of sleep completely missed one. If you look, there’s a chest behind the yellow teleporter.

: It’s at this point I realize we have a lot of soul energy, so I pump up Tatan’ka a few more times.

: Tatan’ka reaches level 5, which is the maximum level. Inspire is an upgraded version of one of Ricardo’s Serenadas that increases the rate at which you gain Stock.

: Rumble Roar, on the other hand, is an upgraded version of Shania’s starting spell, Dusk Proud. It’s a dark-element spell that hits the “low” hit zone.

: Here’s where I totally miss a shortcut bridge. The chest has an Angel Souffle in it, which we do not give a fuck about outside of maybe Hilda’s final sidequest.

: I run all the way around the map instead of taking the shortcut, which is fine because Hilda can use the EXP. We’re also going to need a significant amount of Cash soon.

: I grab the shortcut anyway, because I remembered something about having to come back to the boss room, but forgot that doing so would not entail coming down here again.

: From here, it’s a nice, straightforward run to the final switch.

: On the way back, I grab another Evil Shade stellar. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but Evil Shade is another spell that performs a Hard Hit, and does more damage than Red Nova.

: “Yes.”

: “How do you know?”

: “I can always sense someone I’ve fought. All the more given her immense power.”

: Oh look, another thing from Eternal Punishment. How long until we fight Nyarlathotep?

: “I see… we’ll get her this time!”

: At this point, my brain on 3 hours of sleep is going “I am gonna fucking DESTROY this boss fight” and equips Hilda with the Magic Mind’s Eye.

: “Killer!”

: “So where is she?”

: “She’s gone ahead.”

: “I see… then move aside!”

: “I finally got the chance to kill, and I’m itching to do it again!”

: “You… you’re the one… who killed all those people?!”

: “Yeah! I didn’t even work up a sweat! It was really pathetic. They hardly put up a fight.”

: We’re now in a fight with Killer…

: And this thing, called Daoros. Daoros has every buff in the game, heals, and a pretty damaging physical attack.

: It can also use Apathy, which we don’t give a shit about. Go, Hilda!

: Shania sets Killer up for Hilda by launching him.

: And then Hilda vaporizes him on the spot. Frank and Johnny haven’t even gone yet… which means that I forgot to Snap. Worse, I had saved over my only savestate and forgot to hard save. Well, shit.

: Anyway, that’s a reset. My last hard save was in Machu Picchu, and my last non-boss savestate was… at the end of last update. Time to record again!

: Most guides for this game will tell you to take down Daoros first. Don’t do that! That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do! Let me explain why.

: See this turn order? Shania goes, then Johnny, and then Killer… except there’s a scripting thing the game does that becomes unintentionally bullshit if you kill Daoros too early.

: This is a run where I launched into a D-Combo immediately, and nuked Daoros to the ground while still doing a good chunk of damage to Killer.

: Except now, Killer gets four turns in a row, three of which he has maximum Stock on and can Double. This wipes the entire party except for Shania.

: What’s meant to happen here is that after your initial turn or two, Daoros is scripted to get several extra turns so it can buff and spam Apathy. If Daoros is dead, these turns go to Killer instead.

: If we kill Killer first, we still get the Combo Magic bonus - it applies as long as something in the combat died to Combo Magic, even if it didn’t end the fight.

: Meanwhile, Daoros uses its three extra turns and full stock it keeps feeding itself to sit in a corner spamming Apathy and buffing.

: All we have to do is nickel and dime it to death. This is FAR easier than trying to kill Daoros first, even assuming you’re not blowing your D-Combo on the second turn.

: By the way, I abused “handy tools” hard this dungeon to try and up our perfect ring rate. This is because there’s a hidden accessory that is only obtainable if you have a 95% ring hit rate and a 75% ring perfect rate.

: The accessory is… kinda bullshit. It’s called Extreme, and it’s basically Mind’s Eye except the ring is totally blank, including the needle. Doing full ring perfects is kinda miserable.

: For reference, the Ring Perfect rate at the end of this dungeon was around 48%. I don’t plan on turning this LP into a handy-tool assisted speedrun.

: We used a lot of MP that fight, but Hilda is now a lot closer to Frank and Johnny level-wise.

: Hilda dancing in the background is just what this cutscene needed.

: “All right, no more Mr. Nice Guy…”

: “It appears that Lady has broken the final seal! We have to go!”

: “Come back!!”

: Well, guess we’re not going that way.

: Shania kinda sorta punches the boulder, putting her a good… what, three years ahead of Chris Redfield?

: The funny part about all of this is that we have to come back to this very room in order to get an item that is practically a requirement to get the good ending without extensive grinding.

: This shot is so close to the “Watchers” cutscene from Drakengard.

: Wait a second… this is just the Xibalba cutscene from Innocent Sin!

: Oh god dammit! I already did this shit twice!

: I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to get out of a South American-themed RPG without Xibalba showing up, but god dammit.

: Why couldn’t they have had the ship spawn directly under Frank, and then Frank takes it over and crashes it into Space Brazil?

: It even looks like Eternal Punishment’s last dungeon inside.

: The wheel starts spinning.

: This cutscene is voiceacted, but looking at the screenshot there’s only one thing I can hear.

: “So just what are all of these ‘procedures’?”

: “Now if I were to go and tell you that, you’d turn right around and kill me, wouldn’t you? Hmm?”

: I didn’t capture it, but the camera goes on to the gem above Lady’s head and it glows blue for a second.

: “Could it be? I hope it was my imagination…”

: We’re now back in Moana Village, and Gerard’s motorcycle has some fucked up lighting. There’s a sidequest we can take almost immediately upon entering.

: The guide tells you not to do this, because you’re required to go through the next dungeon (where the sidequest is) twice anyway, but it’s a Frank sidequest.

: “Oh! The next MISSION!”

: Okay wait, defectors to who? Are there Polynesian ninjas? I mean, of course there probably are.

: “NINJA defectors!? Then ol’ Frank shall become a NINJA hunter!”

: “Britney, you sound kinda different.”

: “Are all of Frank’s friends… strange?”

: “The guy’s special.”

: We can also turn in some snap cards for what’s actually a pretty good reward.

: Gale Vortex is an 11-hit spell that hits the “high” hitzone and is a knockdown. I give it to Hilda, even though I probably shouldn’t since Hilda is entirely anti-air spells.

: This girl is the start of another sidequest for Ricardo, but we can’t activate it until after the next cutscene (and after leaving the village).

: What I’m going to do is skip the next plot cutscene (for now) and do some sidequests instead. First, we have a handy tool for Johnny that… is actually useful.

: “Aaaah! M-m-master, when did you get here!?”

: “Whoa! Quit with the yelling! I just got back… you know, you’re acting kind of funny.”

: “No, it’s nothing. You know I could never hide anything from you, right?”

: “Now you sound even more suspicious…”

: “Ah! I’m saved… no, I mean… Master, there’s a visitor!”

: “You’re trying to hide something… aah, never mind. Yes, how can I help you? What’s the matter? We don’t get too many little girls coming here by themselves.”

: “…A missing cat?”

: (Hm… this might be just what I need… if the master goes and handles this job by himself, then I can…)

: “Huh? What’re you so worked up about? I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it…”

: “So, that means you accept, right!? Just what I would expect of the master!”

: “Hey, I didn’t say I accept yet either… aagh, oh well. First off, I’ll need to talk to your dad. Where can I find him?”

: We need to go to Times Square anyway, because there’s a Lottery Member there now.

: “Yeah. A little while ago, I got a request from Mia…”

: “Do you think that the cat could have wandered off on its own?”

: “So, you think somebody stole him…?”

: “Hmm… maybe I should go and talk with them. Do you know where I can find them?”

: “Here, Chelsea, and Harlem, huh… got it. I’ll go and talk with them.”

: The lottery member is on the same screen.

: This one is supposedly a standard Ring, but it took me some significant usage of ‘handy tools’ to complete.

: Cure Plus heals more than Arc Cure but only hits a single target. It has its uses, but outside of combat it will almost always be cheaper to use Arc Cure.

: This guy shows us the location of our first suspect, who won’t show up there otherwise.

: “I want to ask about the cat that’s missing from the shop you work at.”

: Let’s head off to Chelsea now.

: Again, there’s an NPC we have to talk to in order to make the suspect come out.

: “Yeah, he seems like a generally bad guy.”

: “I’m a detective, and I wanted to talk to you about the missing cat at the shop you work at…”

: Finally, let’s go off to Harlem. There’s an item there I totally missed the last time we went.

: It’s kind of a mediocre chart, but with a couple of slot upgrades it wouldn’t be too bad.

: This guy at the corner unlocks the final suspect.

: “I’m a detective looking for a missing cat. Can I speak with you for a moment?”

: We then need to go talk to Lenny, at which point Johnny repeats all three stories. I’ll summarize them here:

Wells: Says he was the last one out and that the cat was already gone when he left. Randy and Taffy are both lying.

Randy: Says he was the last one out, that he doesn’t know if the cat was there or not when he left, and that Wells is lying but Taffy is not.

Taffy: He was the second one to leave, the cat was still there when he did. Wells did it and is lying, Randy is telling the truth.

: “What’s the matter?”

: “Ah, I was just trying to figure out this case, but none of the stories match up.”

: “Hmm… then that can only mean that somebody is lying, doesn’t it?”

: “You think so?”

: “Yes. It might be a good idea to go back and ask the shop owner a little more about each of their personalities.”

: “I think you’re right… I’m going to head down there now!”

: “So when they lie, they tell complete lies, but otherwise it’s the complete truth. Hmm, I think I may have it!”

: We can now solve the case. There is no way to fail this, because this isn’t Persona 4.

: “First, how many of them are telling the truth…?”

: The answer here is one.

: “Now, who was the last one in the shop?”

: Wells was.

: “Finally, who’s the guilty one!?”

: Taffy.

: “All right! Now it’s time to confront the culprit!”

: “I’m not here to ask for information. I’m here to get you to return the cat.”

: I hit the capture button at just the right time on this one.

: “Wells told the truth, but you and Randy both lied. Once I figured that out, it could only have been you!”

: “Why’d you do it?”

: “No, we’re going to give you a cat” and then Mao was gone forever.

: “I’m just a detective, so I’m not going to arrest you. Besides, the girl only asked me to find her cat, not hunt down and capture the culprit.”

: We can then go and speak to the other two suspects before turning in the sidequest.

: “Heheh, yeah, well… there is one thing I have to ask though. Why did you lie to me?”

: “Wow, you’re a pretty nice guy after all.”

: “Yeah. By the way, I wanted to ask… did you really not know anything about the cat?”

: “…Could it be possible that you knew who the criminal was all along?”

: The funny part about this is that Leon fucking vanishes from existence the moment you finish this dialog, and my headcanon is that Johnny made the whole thing up. That cat is gone.

: “Oh yeah… that’s great!”

: “I’m very impressed, Master. You handled that case all on your own.”

: “What’re you talking about? That wasn’t even close to a real case.”

: “No, no, I mean… ah, aaaaah! Oh no! I forgot something…!!”

: “Hm? What’s wrong?”

: Phone Call is Johnny’s final Handy Tool, and is actually useful for something in that it’s one of the biggest AOE attacks (if not the biggest) in the game.

: “Another package? There’s a letter as well… hey, this looks like it was written in a hurry.”

: “T-that’s just your imagination! Your imagination!!”

: “…I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

: “…You hear that! Heheh, sounds like he’s finally starting to realize how good I am. And he’ll know even better when I catch him! Lenny, keep investigating this guy!”

: One thing I didn’t know is that it’s actually possible to see Phone Call in action right at the start of the game. It happens if Johnny dies while in the theater, before you get Shania.

: Of course Johnny has a flip phone in 1929. Frank has a goddamn satellite laser.

: The only problem with Phone Call is that it costs a whopping 88 MP, which at current levels Johnny can use I think three times before he runs out.

: Our next two sidequests take place in Moana Village - we have to go to the next dungeon first and then immediately exit.

: “Huh, that’s curious. Isn’t that a Japanese kokeshi doll?”

: "A kokeshi doll?’

: “Yes. It looks coquettish, that’s why it’s called kokeshi!”

: I looked it up, and there’s apparently no concensus on where the word “kokeshi” came from.

: “Why are you talking nonsense?”

: Kokeshi are not at all meant to represent gods - they were originally meant to be toys.

: Karoshi is a Japanese term for “death by overwork”.

: “Huh? Was that supposed to be a pun?”

: “Not again!”

: “Humph. Well, it’s not like his sticky fingers are anything new.”

: This, sadly, is the last one of these cutscenes in the game. This is Frank’s penultimate weapon - his last one is part of his character sidequest.

: There’s one last sidequest, and that is Ricardo’s.

: We then need to leave the village and return.

: “I see… so did you write back?”

: The next part happens after visiting the next dungeon.

: “Hm? Why yes, but… what’s wrong?”

: “You can’t read it at all?”

: “If that’s the area, then I may be heading there sometime. If I have time, I can go take a look.”

: “But don’t get mad if I don’t find him.”

: This quest is a bit of busy work. First, we have to go to Arkham, just outside of Gilbert’s lab.

: “You seem to be really flustered. Was it something I said?”

: “Jail? Why?”

: “In jail, huh… Hmm, I wonder what really happened.”

: And now, we need to go trudge back through Alcatraz to the left area of cells beyond the metal detector gate.

: “I just want to talk.”

: “Hey, hey… we came all the way to this prison just to talk to you.”

: Another trudge back through Alcatraz to Moana Village later…

: “You mean you already learned to write?”

: “That’s pretty impressive. All right. How about if I deliver the letter for you?”

:" ‘Mister’? Am I really that old…?"

: Ricardo is 27, and funny enough is the third youngest character in the game after Shania (21) and Johnny (16), which is rare as shit for a JRPG.

: Going up from there, Natan is 35, Frank is 50 (though I fucking refuse to believe that), Mao’s age is listed in the art book as “Maybe 100?”, and Hilda is around 400.

: My theory is that Frank is actually older than Roger Bacon and simply respawns every time he dies.

: “He’s okay, I’ve been to see him.”

: “Yes. You threw a letter into the ocean a while back, did you not?”

: I tried to see if this was a reference to a particular novel from the time period, but didn’t find anything. What I did find was that there was a noteworthy message in a bottle experiment from 1929.

: The experiment involved a bunch of Germans throwing a message in a bottle (set up so that it could be read without breaking the bottle) with instructions to report where it was found and then throw it back.

: Supposedly, the bottle went 16,000 miles in six and a half years, though I only found one source (a book from 2010) to corroborate it.

: “I’m not the one, but I was entrusted to deliver a reply from the one who did happen to pick it up.”

: “A little girl wrote it. She learned to read just so she could write to you.”

: “Hm. Maybe because she was happy? Isn’t it sort of romantic, to pick up a letter carried by the ocean?”

: “There was even a pushy mailman that came all the way to your cell to deliver it. …Maybe somewhere in your heart you were actually hoping for a reply?”

: “No, I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I’m the one to tell her. Do you want me to deliver your reply?”

: “I see…”

: “I don’t mind, but… is that what you really want?”

: This is the point at which Ricardo becomes worth using, and is probably the point at which I will ditch Shania. The Girl’s Letter gives Ricardo his second Serenada attack, as well as two skills - one of which buffs the entire party’s physical AND magic damage, and one that buffs physical AND magic defense.

: A lot of Shania’s skills are shittier versions of Ricardo’s. As an example, that one we got last update? Ricardo has that, but it costs half the MP and he can do it upon picking up the Old Man’s Diary.

: There may be a single… tiny problem with this, but we can solve that with ‘handy tools’. I’ll explain that at our next destination.

: And now, let’s finish this update off by going back to Vilcabamba and heading to the room where we fought Killer.

: There’s a chest here, which was only not visible in the cutscene thanks to some very specific camera work.

: This is the reason we might have a problem benching Shania. You see, what ending you get in this game (unlike the original and Covenant) is based entirely off one thing: did you max Shania out?

: By that, I mean that you need all of Shania’s totems AND all of her totems must be upgraded to their maximum level. That is the ONLY thing that determines what ending you get.

: I think these are Shania-only, so I don’t think you can just equip Johnny with them, for instance.

: Next time, we’ll watch that cutscene and then go on to the next dungeon. We will be doing the Frank sidequest. There is always time for Frank quests.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Let’s finally get back to that cutscene I skipped earlier.

: Shania’s eyes here are an emulator glitch and not a sign that she’s going to probably become a villain someday like that one catgirl in Final Fantasy 14.

: I think this lady has Polynesians confused with Vikings. Come to think of it, Vinland Saga started publication not long after this game came out.

: “Hold on…”

: I wish there was a button to do this with any cutscene in the game apart from cutscenes involving Frank, which would block it.

: “I have to go back to avenge my tribe!”

: I like this cutscene a lot, because it feels like whoever the cutscene director was knew that people were probably getting bored of this game being a movie.

: “Seal the Gate’s power…? Is that possible?”

: Uyuni is a giant salt flat in Bolivia that’s named after a nearby town. It’s home to an animal called the Viscacha, which is related to the chinchilla. I feel like if Big Dick had a rival, it would be one of these. Get on it, Suda.

: You might notice the reflection of the weird tower in the background. That’s an actual thing - when Salar de Uyuni gets rain, it becomes a giant mirror.

: They must have had the Brazilians involved on this one, because the salt crust isn’t that thick and has brine underneath it.

: “Really? Blue?”

: If this is 2005, does that make the red light the “And Grace” of the equation?

: “So why have you not used that power until now?”

: My read on this is that Okaganan went “Well, shit” and then did what every old person does and starts quoting Nietzsche.

: “This is complicated stuff…”

: “So the bottom line is…”

: “Is that right?”

: Frank absolutely fucking destroying this cutscene. That’s what the “walk out of the cutscene” button would be called - the Frank Button.

: Oh good, we’re already headed there to do a sidequest involving Frank. I think that means we have to do Aito Cave twice, but that’s fine because it’s a sidequest involving Frank.

: “The northern tribe…”

: “I’ll have to ask Zonda. I’m sure he’ll scold me again though…”

: “No matter. First I think we should head to Aito Cave. After all… there’s no guarantee we’ll find the other ring quckly.”

: Zonda has the other ring and will simply give it to us as soon as we’ve cleared Aito Cave. Have I mentioned, by the way, that we’ve only got four dungeons remaining in the game?

: Well, four major ones. There’s a couple of minor ones we have to do for the character sidequests, one of which is recycled from Covenant. A lot of this game is recycled from Covenant.

: Thank god that’s over. We can talk to Loloma on the way out to get a new star chart.

: This chart’s really good once it’s filled in.

: Before we leave, I make sure to buy two more Pocket Watches so we have enough to cover the entire party. All of the enemies in Aito Cave inflict Ring fuckery, and even though I have “handy tools”, I don’t necessarily want to make every random battle into a half-hour affair.

: The entire dungeon is shaking as he says this.

: We’ve got a fight against two Cabracans, which have around 450 HP and a pretty high damage combo. It’s around this point that my recording software fucked up, so the images are a little cut off for just this part.

: I’ve replaced Shania with Ricardo for the first part of this dungeon, so let’s start off with his new character skill.

: The interesting part about Ricardo is that all of his Serenadas actually have different guitar songs that go with them - it’s a really nice detail.

: That was one of the things that pissed me off about Bravely Default - you get the Dancer class off an idol singer who has actual songs, and… none of its abilities have any music whatsoever.

: I’m not sure how Ricardo has room in his guitar for a missile launcher, a flamethrower AND a rifle, but okay.

: The damage is mediocre only because it’s a Fire-element attack and Cabracan is a Fire-element enemy. Against anything else, he’s hitting Frank numbers, which I’m okay with.

: Anyway, it’s about half an hour after this that I realize my recording fucked up. I re-recorded, only Bandicam fucked up because Bandicam is a piece of shit. Seriously, it does screen capture in the most back-asswards way I can think of.

: “Didn’t that old woman say something like ‘so that evil doers couldn’t steal it’?”

: “Oh NOOO!! Does this mean that we’re EVIL DOERS?!”

: I really, really wish that City of Heroes private server hadn’t been like three years ago and had instead come out now, because I absolutely would’ve made a Frank of Darkness in that.

: “Either way, this means that we can’t be careless from here on out…”

: We can walk another two steps before a second cutscene pops up.

: “What’s a petroglyph?”

: “It’s an ancient form of communication from long before there was an alphabet. This picture’s saying something.”

: I’m pretty sure this is how actual mariachis work. There’s probably a mariachi cave somewhere with ancient mariachi cave paintings.

: “That is correct. This picture is communicating with us - beware of the Tiki guarding the cave.”

: “What’s a Tiki?”

: “That thing that looks like a big face.”

: “The blue Tiki is a watchman. It will not let any intruders pass.”

: Blue tikis are those one-way passages from every Shin Megami Tensei game and also Personas 1 and 2.

: “The red Tiki is a magician. He sends away intruders using his magic.”

: And, of course, teleporters. Fortunately, this dungeon isn’t nearly as bad as a late-game Innocent Sin or Eternal Punishment dungeon.

: “Uh… so you’re saying that depending on the color, they’ve got different jobs?”

: “So that’s how it is. Humph, seems like people back then liked making elaborate contraptions.”

: “Hah hah hah!! You might be right.”

: Ricardo nearly revealed the secret of the mariachi cave, which is the teleporter the mariachis use to get to all those quinceaneras.

: “In any case, we’d probably be best off remembering each of the different roles.”

: Anyway, because we’re behind as-is, and my last hard save after my last fucked up recording run was right before the boss, we’ll do the boss.

: We have to come back here later for Natan’s UMA anyway, so I’ll re-record the dungeon itself then. Trust me, you are not missing anything except the Frank sidequest.

: Before we continue any further, we want Mirror Bracelets on everyone and Pocket Watches on everyone except Hilda.

: Johnny tries to sneak around what is absolutely, positively not someone’s furry OC and fails.

: This boss is called Delget, and it kinda sucks.

: We need four Snaps of it, and that means that Johnny is going to waste four turns (out of the five he’d be buffed for if we cast buffs) snapping instead of doing something useful.

: The first thing you want to do is Arc Shield, because Delget is primarily a physical attacker. It does have a single spell, but we’re not as concerned about that.

: Delget has a full-party Petrify and a few single-target Ring statuses he can throw on his physical attack. At 3,000 HP, he’s out of range of a single D-Combo.

: He also starts out with Stock, so we’re going to want to nuke that. A Double from the boss is enough to instakill pretty much anyone in the party except maybe Frank.

: Frank and Hilda chip away at the boss while Johnny wastes his turns snapping and Shania casts buffs. Finally, we’re ready.

: Frank opens with Demon Bomb, and then uses his newest and final ability from the sidequest I did offscreen. It is not only his strongest ability, but also makes him a PERFECT setup for Hilda.

: “Fast Snowball” is definitely a mis-translation.

: Frank asks someone to give him power, and I’m not sure who that would be. Do we know what Frank’s religion is?

: Yep, Frank’s final attack is a bowling ball made of energy.

: You might ask “Does it make the bowling pin sound when it hits” and the answer is yes, yes it does. Fast Snowball also knocks enemies into the air, which puts them right into Hilda’s range.

: Hilda puts that Gale Vortex stellar to use and nukes the boss for a shit-ton of damage, while also knocking it to the ground for Shania to use Rumble Roar.

: Not too bad. There is a gimmick I didn’t show with this boss, which occurs if you get its HP down below half. This is why we didn’t want to immediately D-Combo it.

: Once it reaches half HP, the boss uses Energy Charge. This DOUBLES its attack for one turn, and also gives it three turns in a row, making it virtually guaranteed that someone is going to die.

: And that’s that. No cutscene, no anything - the game just dumps you to the map, because even the game admits that Aito Cave was a filler dungeon. Next time, we’ll go grab all the items and do the sidequests.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Now that I’ve gotten over losing the recording, let’s start doing Aito Cave by doing Frank’s sidequest first.

: Just past that first room, where we had Natan explain the tiki colors, is a pair of blue tikis. Because they’re not facing us, we can walk past them.

: This brings us to a large central hub room with a Ring Fragment in it. I uh… may have forgotten to re-record that scene. It’s not important anyway, it’s just Aya’s dad complaining at Johnny, and it’s real short.

: To do the first run of this dungeon, you want to start by going all the way to the right.

: “So if I step on that, I’ll get sent off elsewhere?”

: Can YOU spot the ninja we have to capture?

: “I’m going to capture the other two just like this one!”

: On the way out, we’re attacked by a Saskachilli, which is a buffer and has a Stock nuke. The reason you can’t see the HP is because this is a re-recording where I didn’t bother Snapping.

: We now head up a side tunnel from where that ninja was, and…

: “Yeah?”

: I wonder, is it the spirits that give her that resting bitchface, or is that just a natural thing? Does that happen to the Persona cast?

: “Our tribe… was destroyed by that woman.”

: So what you’re saying… is that the white (wo)man came… across the sea… and brought you pain and misery? She killed your tribe, she killed your queen, she took your game for her own need?

: I haven’t done one of those in so long and it feels so good when it just clicks.

: You know what’s funny about this cutscene? If you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Suikoden games, this could very easily be a Suikoden cutscene.

: “Well, aren’t we in a talkative mood today…”

: “Please forgive me.”

: “There’s really nothing to forgive… I’m just surprised.”

: I mean, it was kinda obvious what must have happened.

: “We’d better get going… we’ll be left behind.”

: “Yeah, sure…”

: Let’s keep going.

: What we did here is make a loop and started heading off to the left.

: This leads us to the second of three save points in this dungeon. If we go to the right…

: There’s our second ninja, but we can’t get to him because we’re on the wrong side of the tikis. Fortunately, there’s a very obvious path around.

: I’m disappointed we don’t get to fight Jimmy, because then I could make a reference to that one meme loop of that Weezer song.

: I think the character designer had a lot of fun with Frank, and it makes me wish this game wasn’t as obviously rushed as it was, because I wish they’d have fleshed out the other characters this much.

: The final ninja is found by going back into the loop we took to get behind that last ninja, and then going all the way to the right instead of going down at the end.

: This leads to a teleporter that will take us almost directly to the boss room.

: You can see the ninja’s head sticking out of the wall, but we can go ahead and grab the only chest we’re going to bother touching on this run.

: “Ha ha! Mission COMPLETE! Now Frank will go and report the news to Britney. PLEASE wait here.”

: “Ah, I’ll go with you.”

: “He he he… There is NO ninja in the world that can elude Frank!”

: “Why!? Wasn’t this a job for Frank…?”

: “Ah… well, that’s…”

: “I think I missed something…”

: “He’s become a familiar face…”

: Unfortunately, we cannot complete Frank’s final sidequest just yet. I wish we could. It’s the best one, and also the only one to not be recycled from Covenant.

: At this point, we fight the boss from the last update - once you go through this cutscene, the game puts you right outside the boss room.

: What it means is that we have a really annoying quest in front of us where we have to use Natan.

: First, we need to come back here - this is the room where we picked up that Ring Fragment. Our first destination is the top-right cave.

: We then need to run all the way up here (the chest is a healing item) and place bait.

: However, this isn’t enough to call out the UMA. We have to do this four times at four different locations, because the game hates me.

: The second bait spot is in what is probably the most fucking annoying room in this game.

: “So we can’t relax now, huh…?”

: Each one of those tiki pairs spawns a fight with two of these fuckers, on top of the usual random battle that happens far too often for a dungeon we have to go through twice at a minimum.

: This one needs Maiden’s Hair, and now we can run halfway across the dungeon to the third point.

: This is another teleporter room near the one we used to get to the boss room. We drop a Grapefruit here.

: This one’s honestly a little bullshit if you don’t know it’s the Gold Ore, because it could also be Honey given that the pillar is yellow.

: This boss is called Rogotomhere, and I grab a Snap quickly before we nuke it into oblivion.

: The boss has 1500 HP, and if we had Hilda, we’d probably have killed it before even using Combo Magic.

: Frank launches the boss, and Shania proceeds to use her new skill (which I bought off-screen) to further launch it into fucking space.

: Even with his absolutely trash stat-line, Natan does enough damage to get us within kill range.

: And then Johnny summons a demon from the Frank Dimension to vaporize the boss.

: The rewards honestly kinda suck, and we already know that Natan’s character specials are garbage, but whatever.

: Seriously, I see all these people who play this game and never use Frank, or use Natan/Ricardo over him. I don’t know why you’d do that. Natan sucks, Ricardo also sucks.

: The reason I stopped using Ricardo, by the way, is that his full-party multi-buffs have a major downside: they’re less efficient than Arc Rage and Arc Surge by 6%.

: As it turns out, we’re basically done here. There is a chest in the boss room I missed, but it’s just an accessory that boosts HP by 20%. It’s not something we’d ever use.

: There’s also a Blood Loss 2 ring accessory behind one of the teleporters, but I didn’t feel like grabbing it and it’s kinda useless anyway. What I did grab…

: Is this, on the way out. Before we progress the plot, there’s a couple other side things we can do.

: We want that Step Tripler, so I grab that. It’s pretty easy, I got it on my first try without slowing the game to 1 FPS and going Handy-TAS mode.

: These questions are of the “Would probably be mildly annoying if you’re Japanese and the questions are in English, but are just kinda stupid if you’re a native English speaker” variety we saw in Persona 5.

: This probably would’ve made more sense in Covenant, which takes place in 1915… which is when Einstein wrote the General Theory of Relativity.

: Technically, coffee could also be a correct answer given that it comes from an (admittedly small) tree that grows in Africa, among other places. However, it’s Cola.

: I went over this one… how many updates ago was that? It’s the first radio broadcast.

: I don’t see the correct answer here, which is “heavy use of savestates” but that’s okay.

: I wish we had a lamprey. It would probably be one of Frank’s specials.

: This one’s easy even if you haven’t read the item descriptions.

: Leo is a pretty decent stellar char, even if the damage spell slots are kinda underleveled. It comes with a third Evil Shade, which is great for Stock nuking even though we’re about to get a better version of it in the next dungeon.

: There’s also some new pit fights, which… yeah, we’ll come back for these.

: Mao is just kinda in this cutscene. I think the writers might have forgotten that Mao exists, which is fine by me.

: I really wish Natan wasn’t as mechanically garbage as he is.

: “It sounds to me… like you know what’s going on.”

: “It was that woman who summoned it!”

: You know, given that in this timeline, the world has almost ended three times in the last 30 or so years, that’s… actually a pretty valid response.

: You can see Johnny and Hilda freaking out in the background. The rest of the party doesn’t seem to be bothered.

: Johnny shakes Mao, who seems to be in some kind of booze-induced stupor. There’s a reason Mao has been perma-benched.

: Johnny realizes he never had a chance and I love it because it’s exactly what he deserved. If only Square-Enix had the balls to do that in Final Fantasy 12.

: And now we’ve got the other key we need. Next time, we’ll do Uyuni Salt Lake.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’ve got nowhere else to go except Uyuni Salt Lake, so let’s do that.

: Yuri wants to know how long he has to wait until he can be the protagonist again. The thing is, if Nautilus had survived this game, I could probably see them doing what Capcom did with Ace Attorney in the post-Apollo Justice era and retconning this game’s existence.

: Everyone would be non-canon except for Hilda and Frank.

: Gilbert’s voice actor is the only one of the villain cast who really seems into his role.

: “What’re you mumbling about? Are you talking about those kids again?”

: “Uh… don’t worry! It’s nothing to get all upset over really! Just something I’m thinking I have to do… with the Gate not opening and all…!”

: “What!? If you know what’s going on then tell me now! This standing around here is getting on my nerves!”

: This sounds like the start of one of those Twitter threads where the end conclusion is that the IRS is illegal. What I’m saying is that Gilbert is a libertarian.

: I will also fully admit that when I was recording and saw this line, my brain went “It was Bible Black, wasn’t it?”

: “It told about some ruins located at a lake called Uyuni! …And those ruins actually contained a blue light… which was meant to oppose the Gate of the red light, you see?”

: “Is that what’s keeping the Gate closed?”

: “That could be it, yes!”

: It’s amazing to me that they perfectly captured that one guy from that Ancient Aliens show in Gilbert, especially given that Ancient Aliens didn’t air until 2009.

: “There’s a chance… that the Gate… might even be destroyed completely…”

: “If the Gate is destroyed, then what about Lady’s wish?”

: “Her wish? Why, it would remain ungranted.”

: This reminds me of Maruki, who should be dunked into a garbage can. Speaking of which, Salty Vanilla finished that picture I ordered while on like two hours of sleep.

: “This is serious!”

: Let’s be real here, Killer’s going to wind up in one of those Brazilian barbecue restaurants where the server continually shovels beef onto your plate. That’s just what happens.

: Is this going to be one of those cuckolding things?

: You just fucking know that the cutscene director was going to end the cutscene two screenshots ago, and then the writer saw it and went “Wait, this is just one of those NTR doujins” and added the two lines.

: Gilbert is getting dangerously close to Maruki territory, and I don’t like it.

: Gerard and Buigen are here, so we might as well visit them first. They have new weapons (I forgot there was one more tier between what we had and the final weapons for each character) with some Dark Souls-ass item descriptions.

: Damascus steel is, in fact, named after Damascus, the capitol of Syria. These days, it’s mostly used by shysters trying to scam idiots out of their money.

: For reference, there’s nothing special about it - it’s not “better” than modern steel, it has no mystic properties, it was steel made by a bunch of Middle Eastern blacksmiths working on vibes.

: This is the most Dark Souls out of any of the new weapons. Also, what the fuck, there are elves in the Shadow Hearts universe? I mean, I’m not surprised, but still.

: These look like something an idiot would buy at a gun show.

: Miracles around us every day. I could absolutely see an alternate timeline where ICP went Amish after the whole “We’re Christian now” bit.

: Magical ponchos.

: There’s a Seal of Strength outside, which I should probably use on Frank.

: There’s only one door out of the room with Gerard and Buigen, so let’s take that. We’ll be back soon enough.

: One giant annoying spiral staircase later…

: And we’re at the top… where I immediately get a random battle.

: These are Ikcheon, which have 518 HP. They don’t hit particularly hard, especially with everyone having upgraded armor, but are still annoying to deal with due to having Ring fuckery.

: They’re also the only enemy in the dungeon that we do not need 6 snaps of - we only need 4.

: This second room introduces us to this dungeon’s gimmick, which is effectively a less annoying version of the Machu Picchu puzzle.

: “What about this crystal? It must be this.”

: “Hey, don’t be so rash…”

: “But in turn, I think some pillars went down, too. Well, I guess it’s OK.”

: Three feet later, we get introduced to two new enemy types: Harukigenia and Ludirus (the umbrella-looking thing). Harukigenia has 130 HP but has a stock nuke and can inflict Apathy.

: Ludirus has 262 HP and can inflict Mental Break and Paralysis. The game really, really wants you to waste something like 44,000 cash buying Cosmic Bracelets, which prevent most status effects.

: I prefer the alternate (and also cheaper) method of simply nuking everything with magic.

: This second switch lowers the green platforms and raises the red ones.

: “Like I thought! The pillars moved!”

: “The red-topped pillars rose, and the green-topped pillars went down. Perhaps the crystal’s color and the color of the pillar tops are related…”

: “Huh? Is that how it was?”

: God I love Frank. By the way, you might have noticed that even though we upgraded everyone else’s weapon, Frank hasn’t gotten one. It’s coming, but for the time being, Frank’s damage is a little low.

: There are two more switches that both have dialogue that is effectively a repeat, so I’ll skip those. This is how we want the pillars - and all we really have to do is touch every switch in the order we find them.

: You might notice the chest, that’s just another Angel Souffle for when we eventually want to switch Hilda’s form.

: The door is locked, but fortunately there’s a white crystal nearby that… honestly doesn’t stand out very much.

: This is what we’ll be doing for the rest of the dungeon. We have to do all these puzzles twice - because of course we have to come back and re-do the whole dungeon for a UMA afterward.

: I missed a Lottery Ticket at the bottom of this spiral hallway (it’s in the corner near the door we just came through) and didn’t feel like going back to get it because of the obnoxious encounter rate.

: This room is another simple puzzle - we want to touch the switch on the left first, then the one on the right.

: This opens a path to the chest in the back, which has another Cosmic Bracelet in it. I should mention that I did wind up going down to grab those from Gerard, and here’s why.

: The Cosmic Bracelet replaces a bunch of other status-protect accessories, a few of which we had 3 or 4 of. Selling those was enough to buy three Cosmic Bracelets and then some.

: The rest I put into MP restoratives and boosting Hilda’s star chart, because we’re about to come across some upgraded spells.

: You might notice that this last crystal is only reachable by standing on a pillar.

: This is going to be a mechanic now - in fact, this is how we’re going to get Frank’s second-to-last weapon.

: Nearby, in a corner, is our first Red Gravity stellar. Red Gravity is the third-tier Fire spell, and is also a Hard Hit. I throw this on Hilda.

: There’s a Fruity Fiber on the other side of the room, which we may as well grab.

: The door crystal is back near where the Red Gravity stellar was.

: Now we can raise the red pillars…

: Then the yellow ones…

: And finally, we can hop on this pillar to get back to the second level and leave.

: The next spiral hall has this near the top, which I throw on Frank.

: This room has a hidden Frank cutscene that is… actually kind of involved to get to.

: We start by going left, and raising the red pillars.

: We then lower the red pillars and go to the floor.

: The green pillars go up, and this allows us to reach a chest on the right side of the room.

: This also goes on Hilda.

: The yellows go back up…

: And so do the red ones. We can hit the white crystal now, but there are two items hidden in here that I’m not sure how you’re meant to find.

: The first one I botched my screenshot of, but if you look at the exit door in the back and follow to the right, where that red/green switch is, there’s a Ring Fragment on the yellow pillar.

: It’s this one on the right side of this picture, the one in the back.

: We then want to lower red and go back down, then lower green and raise red.

: There’s a hidden green/yellow switch here, and we can use this to go up again.

: What’s this?

: “Huh? Cou-could it be… the legendary holy sword Zondeek!!”

: “You know it, Hilda?”

: “It’s a legendary sword they say was created at the same time as the world. Its blade is incomparably sharp. The earth, which was whole before, was supposedly cut by this sword.”

: “…It’s that special?”

: Oh shit, Frank’s gonna pull the sword and go forward like 70 years in time.

: “It looks like the real thing… Oh, I wonder if I can take it out…?”

: I wish the cutscene director had put in a scene of Johnny struggling to pull the sword.

: It’s time for this cutscene to go places. This shit? This is what I love about this game.

: “Frank!”

: “Ah, yes. The legendary sword… this is appropriate for ol’ Frank to bear. This challenge is NOTHING!”

: “Frank’s finally going to get a decent weapon…?”

: Yep! Frank’s going to invent the fucking Kirkhammer from Bloodborne.

: Frank is fucking amazing.

: “Just like I thought, feels just right… from today you are no longer Zondeek… you’re Legend Saber!”

: “Hey, what do you think about the way he’s using that legendary sword?”

: “I think most of the power’s still sealed in the stone. But, it’ll do the job.”

: The rest is fairly easy - we put the yellow pillars back up, and then use that green pillar we came across earlier to ride back to the top.

: Then we just lower the green pillars and we’re done.

: Wait a second… wasn’t this a room in Banjo-Tooie? I’m pretty sure it was, only it was lava and not salt.

: Nothing special here, just some items we want to make sure to grab.

: One more copy-pasted spiral hallway later, and we’re at the final room of this dungeon.

: “What? Where? Oh! You’re right!”

: Johnny steps on one of the rocks, and the lights change. Yep, this is the world’s simplest “lights out” puzzle.

: “The light moved. Something happened on both sides of the floor. I see… all of this door’s pattern is lit up, and all of that one’s off. In short…”

: “If one lights up or turns off the floor, the doors each open respectively.”

: Frank is ready to fuck this puzzle up.

: “Hey! Now you’re just doing as you please, too?”

: “It SEEMS like some sort of reset switch. Heh heh, ol’ Frank’s great discovery!”

: “Just ignore the fool. So, do you want to try it?”

: And this is why the cat stays out of the active party. That and she’s mechanically the second-worst character in the game after Natan.

: Anyway, my theory on this room is that initially, this was what the main gimmick of the dungeon was going to be, but at some point in development, one of the designers realized it kinda sucked.

: There’s supposedly a hidden thing where at some point (and I’m not sure what exactly triggers it even though I did try to trigger it) if you haven’t cleared the puzzle, Johnny will do it for you.

: I should probably get Salty Vanilla on that, but I feel like I’ve made him draw Frank too many times.

: The “no lights” door leads to a new weapon for Mao that I think is slightly stronger than the one you can get from Gerard - I reloaded the game after buying it, so I can’t say for sure.

: I would love to see someone do the math on how much land you would need to make a bottle of this stuff. The USDA published an article in 2013 claiming that the average size of a rice farm is 3,030 acres.

: And here we are at the boss fight. I will warn you, this boss fight sucks enough that I strongly considered going Handy-TAS.

: I dodged going to a wedding this weekend that was in the backwoods of Maine, like an hour from civilization. The only food they had there was artisan grilled cheese from a food truck.

: The redneck side of the family was there and… yeah, I’m not dealing with them.

: I like to think that both Natan and Frank could have knocked that knife out of the air, they just chose not to.

: Oh god dammit, Killer really just is Shadow the Hedgehog, isn’t he? He’s Shadow if Shadow was too edgy for guns.

: I mean, she did kinda get her wish in that Nautilus ceased to exist after this game.

: Man, Killer’s a simp.

: Here’s why this boss fight sucks. Killer is the first boss to have a stock nuke. Worse, his stock nuke is an AOE that can and will hit multiple characters.

: Now, my problem with this is that there’s a time and a place for AOE shit. If you’re playing a game where you have total control over your character’s movement and positioning, that’s fine.

: But we don’t have that choice. The characters move on their own, and by default are clustered up enough that Killer can hit a minimum of two people.

: We get our Snap, and… okay, Killer’s got 3600 HP. We can wipe out at least 3/4 of that in one D-Combo. Clearly, the logical thing to do would be use our Stock before Killer can nuke it. Makes sense.

: Johnny casts Arc Surge, Shania casts Arc Rage as Tatan’ka, and we’re good to go. Let’s kick his ass.

: 2,193 damage and we haven’t used Combo Magic yet.

: Goddamn. Even better, because Killer starts with full Stock, he can’t gain any during that D-Combo, so we’ve effectively nuked him to one Stock. Surely we can win this…

: Oh, except Killer has that hidden mechanic where at a certain percentage of HP (it’s around 45%) he casts Beast Eye and gives himself six extra Press Turns and 400% stock regeneration.

: Six full turns of Killer doing Doubles later, and the entire party except for Shania is dead. Now you see why this fight is bullshit.

: You need to get Killer to just over the threshold where he hits the “Fuck you, I win” button, and then D-Combo him to death… while he nukes your stock.

: By the way, his other attack inflicts “Chain”, which is an unblockable super-Apathy that PREVENTS YOU FROM USING STOCK. AT ALL. This can hit multiple people.

: He also has a single-target physical attack that inflicts Instant Death. That’s why we bought the Leonardo’s Bears.

: Essentially, you’re gambling on Killer wasting his turns using Instant Death instead of stock fuckery or chaining everyone. Atlus pulled this shit in Eternal Punishment. It sucked.

: On my second attempt, I figure out how to make it work. What you want to do is wait until Killer is at about 1800 HP, then have someone cast Arc Gale to speed the party up. This will prevent him getting multiple turns in a row.

: On the final run, Frank still had 2 Stock and was fully buffed, while Hilda had 1.

: Dark Angel is a key accessory which increases Sanity by 20%. Why would that be important when Shania has well over 50 SP and we’ve never really been in danger of going Berserk past the start of the game, you ask?

: No reason. Uyuni Salt Lake is actually the last dungeon in the game. We’re done with the game, everyone can go home, I’ll just do Frank’s sidequest in post.

: We could, I dunno, have Natan shoot him in the head a few times to be sure. Or have Frank slam the Legend Saber down on his head. That’d do it too.

: Mao looks like she has two black eyes. I don’t know if that’s an emulator glitch or not.

: Canonically, the game ends on this exact shot. Johnny gets fucking stabbed to death, and that’s it. It’s over. He died just as he lived: being a little bitch.

: This is why Frank has the hanya on his chest. Can’t stab him if you can’t get through the giant metal demon face. Natan probably keeps steel plates under his little chest flaps.

: Oh man he’s even almost in the Yamcha death pose. Johnny is that much of a bitch.

: Can anyone say they didn’t see this coming?

: So yeah, remember how the entire message from Koudelka, Shadow Hearts 1, and Covenant was “Don’t fucking try to ressurect the dead!”, in addition to “Wales is fucking cursed!”?

: It’s Ni no Kuni 2 all over again.

: Meet Johnny’s fusion form. It’s called the Awaker. I’ll talk in-depth about why it sucks in the next update, when we actually get to use it in combat.

: The Awaker is a giant naked man with no dick. This clearly makes him the opposite of Big Dick. I really want to get back to The 25th Ward.

: I’d just like to point out that literally every character in the party is a better candidate for Fusion than Johnny is. We could have had a demon mariachi, or Frank going oni mode, or Natan just straight up becoming Turok.

: This is supposed to be your big clue as to who Lady is.

: Oh my god this shot is fucking perfect in so many ways.

: I’d just like to point out that mathematically, Frank could turn Johnny into paste in one Double. Johnny could not do the same to Frank.

: Shania: “Oh no, he’s hot!”

: Johnny doesn’t seem to give a shit and goes to backhand her into a wall.

: In the canon script, Frank and Hilda kill Johnny inside of one turn and then roll dice to see who becomes the main character.

: Fuck this!

: The big wheel over Lady’s head slowly grinds to a halt.

: At this point I was rooting for Killer to get back up again and finish the job.

: Next time, we’ll continue through this horrible non-canon hellscape.

[Timrod]

Summary

: “And I… hit Shania… and everyone else… I’ve got to apologize later! I didn’t do it on purpose, but will they all believe me if I tell them I lost control of my own body?”

: Pfft. This looks like something out of Toy Story.

: This next section is effectively a miniature version of Gone Home, complete with Johnny finding secret rooms in his house. I tried to speedrun Gone Home once.

: There’s three things we can examine - the basketball hoop, the bed, and a dresser in the bottom-right.

: “He bought me lots of toys, but he didn’t play with me very often.”

: We can leave now.

: There’s a Lottery Ticket hidden near the save point, so let’s grab that. I wish I was rich enough to have a save point installed in my house.

: For some reason, we get to keep this even though this is a hallucination.

: We can’t go any further down the hall… at least, not until we come back here and do this place as the penultimate story dungeon. There are three or so side dungeons we’ll be doing as well.

: The first thing I thought of when I saw this was Resident Evil: Code Veronica. Johnny really is just Steve Burnside when you look at it.

: I never got the appeal of having a study. I mean, imagine having to dust all that shit. Sure, vacuum cleaners existed in 1929, but that’s only gonna get you so far.

: For some reason, Johnny’s dad has a bunch of vampire food in his office. We’re free to leave now.

: Did we just step into Silent Hill?

: “We have Silent Hill at home, son.”

: I feel like Roger Bacon is kind of like the Nanjo Group in Persona 2, where they’ll just pile money on anybody who knocks on the door and goes “I want to take over the world because I’m crazy”.

: “And Marlow? Roger too? What is this?!”

: See, this is the problem right here. Everyone knows that the Emigre Document only works through mass human sacrifice. This is some Space Pirate “Let’s clone the Metroids!” shit.

: That’s the problem with those breakable glass tubes - they break.

: “You were all in such a terrible state that I decided to bring you here.”

: “Yeah… but hey! What happened just now?! What was that, Lenny?!”

: “Just now? What do you mean?”

: “Hey… do you know anything about when I was in that accident?”

: “Huh? Ah, not really. I was in Italy working on some things for your father at the time. I returned as soon as I heard that you had been in an accident, but by the time I got back…”

: “I see…”

: “Finally come around, have you?”

: “Hey. Why did you change shape at Uyuni Tower? You looked almost like…”

: “Master, what are you talking about?”

: “Lady! She was in the basement! And so was dad… but by the time I realized, he had already been killed. And Roger was there… and Marlow. I was too… but I was in this water tank and couldn’t move, and…”

: Even Frank thinks this is bullshit.

: “It wasn’t a dream! Maybe, maybe I did see it in a dream, but it was just so weirdly familiar… aah! No more!”

: “Master, your home was destroyed in a fire 3 years ago… and was there even a basement in the mansion?”

: Lenny is clearly one of those people who denies that Resident Evil Director’s Cut ever existed. You know, the one with the fart trumpets.

: “I saw it in the dream! And not everything was completely burned in the fire, you know!”

: I don’t know what the real estate market was like in 1929, but I know earlier this year some dipshit bought a house that had burned to the ground in Tennessee.

: Before we go there, we have a couple of things we can take care of - such as finally getting all of Hilda’s Magic Arts. First, let’s turn in the Ring Fragment, which I think is the last one.

: I’m too lazy to make a portrait for Ring Soul, so I’ll just use Aya’s.

: “Huh? Oh, well, I wasn’t really bothered by it. But why the sudden change of heart?”

: "Really? I’m glad to hear it… I was a little drunk and out of control yesterday. I asked Aya about you. What do you think she said? She said ‘Johnny’s not my type at all. He’s so childish and unreliable, like a pesky little brother.’ "

: " ‘I like older men… like you, father’. So, it looks like I got a little carried away! Ha ha ha!"

: Man, Yuri really fucked up the Ring Soul’s life, didn’t he?

: “Hmm… I see…”

: “Aah, I’m so relieved. I guess Aya has good sense in men after all! This means I can get back to my own work now. Anyway, I’ll give you this, so perk up!”

: I also took a look and found out that as it turns out, you do NOT need to snap Killer in Uyuni Salt Lake if you’ve already done it in Vilcabamba.

: Our next stop is Harlem, to pick up Hilda’s final skill for her Slim form.

: Hilda, no! Don’t do it! You’ll create an entire lineage of simps!

: And that’s how Onlyfans was born.

: Floral Ray is Hilda’s only Magic Art that doesn’t hit the “Upper” area, instead being a “Mid” area spell. It’s also a knockdown.

: There’s also a Lottery Member here we want to grab, because it unlocks Lottery Member No. 2.

: The Ring here spins backwards and has a lag to it that I think goes beyond normal input lag. The red area is obnoxious to hit and I can only imagine how much of a pain in the ass this would be on real hardware.

: What we’re going to do now is head to Moana Village.

: “Hey, calm down.”

: “Vice Chairperson?”

: The final lottery member is… let’s just say that we can’t access them until after we’ve done Hilda’s final sidequest. That one’s also one of the better ones - even if it’s a recycled Covenant sidequest.

: In fact, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who it might be when we finish getting Hilda’s moves and I show off what the Weekly Arts magazines look like.

: “Huh… so then you became Vice Chairperson?”

: Loloma’s Ring is, as far as I can tell, completely random. The first time I tried it, it was Reverse Ring, Accel Ring, and I think Fickle Ring as well. The second time? Completely normal.

: Cure All is a lie. It’s the best healing spell in the game, but is not a full-party heal.

: I make a quick trip back to Machu Picchu to get Hilda into Pink Bat form - with the Seraphim Straw, it doesn’t take very long. One thing I found out is that if Hilda reaches a new calorie threshold in battle, she will switch then and there.

: If I had been willing to grind a bit, I probably could’ve made that fight against Killer way easier because in Mask form, Hilda’s magic stat DOUBLES - and Killer is worth -10 calories.

: Energy Charge is a terrible skill. It costs 25% of Hilda’s max MP, and gives Hilda a 150% boost to physical damage for one turn. To get an idea, in Pink Bat form, she has the same physical stats as Natan.

: Because I had to grind out calories anyway, and the Seraphim/Devil straws make it much easier to grind calories, I go back to Machu Picchu and get Hilda to Curvy status. Now we can head back to Moana Village.

: I will, however, take a minute and show off Curvy Hilda’s only damage skill, which she inherits from her brother. Grand Slam is a physical attack that hits all enemies, regardless of which zone they occupy.

: It’s a Hard Hit and has a chance at causing Instant Death, but otherwise isn’t nearly as good as what Slim Hilda has.

: Happiness Gift is a revive with full HP, which is only useful in one very specific fight very late in the game, which is (as far as I’m aware) the only point where someone is near-guaranteed to be KOed.

: Hilda’s last skill is back in Chicago. I do a quick Snap trade to get Demon Earrings, which I probably should’ve grabbed several dungeons ago.

: Demon Earrings are the physical equivalent to the Warlock Earrings - they boost physical damage by 20% but lower physical defense by 20%. These go on Frank.

: My goal now is to kill the next boss in a single D-Combo.

: Full Bloom is a full-party full heal. If Slim Hilda had it, it would be very good. Now that we have all six Weekly Arts, I’m gonna post the item descriptions.

: “The Great Q” is Joachim’s title after undergoing The Man Festival in Covenant. The less said about that, the better.

: Graphic design is Joachim’s passion.

: I think I mentioned this before, but the “waiting for Tuesday” part is a direct reference to Weekly Shonen Sunday, which used to publish on Tuesday until it switched to Wednesday in 2011.

: Funny enough, Sunday’s biggest runner right now is Yofukashi no Uta, which is a vampire romance manga with a protagonist who could practically be Hilda.

: This is also remarkably like Shonen Sunday, which usually has exactly one manga anyone gives a shit about at a time. Currently, that would be Yofukashi no Uta, with Soso no Freiren in a distant second.

: The next UMA is another multi-bait one, but is FAR less annoying than the one in Aito Cave. All we have to do is traverse the entirety of Uyuni Salt Lake again.

: With the Devil Earrings on, Frank hits a lot harder, doing enough to nearly one-shot most enemies in Uyuni. I think the reason for this based on how stat scaling works.

: As far as I can tell, the Devil/Warlock Earrings don’t boost damage by 20%, they boost whatever stat governs damage by 20%, which means you’re getting a much bigger boost than a flat 20% multiplier to all damage.

: There’s also something kinda fucky with stat scaling when it comes to physical-based special attacks. Before, Demon Bomb was doing a significant amount of damage over Frank’s regular attack.

: We also upgraded Natan’s Slug Shell, which makes it do more damage than his regular attack for once. It’s still not great, given that you can see how much more damage Frank is doing.

: The Uyuni UMA is another multi-bait one, but is MUCH less annoying than the Aito Cave UMA, even with the pillar puzzles resetting. We want to put Morpho Scales here.

: And then we put Fly Paper in this spot.

: Sky Fish is an invisible version of the Byakhees from Alcatraz. It has around 1500 HP. I get the Snap and then D-Combo. Sky Fish doesn’t even last long enough to get Combo Magic’d.

: If we had Hilda, I think I probably could’ve killed it with just her and Frank.

: This gets us the Wise Calmet, which is Natan’s character accessory. Each character (except Hilda and Johnny) has one, and they’re usually gated behind the final sidequests.

: Shania’s is probably the best one, followed by Frank’s, followed by Mao’s.

: I have to climb back down Uyuni off-screen, so let’s call it here and do Johnny’s house next update.

[Timrod]

Summary

: One long, annoying walk down from the top of Uyuni Salt Lake later, and we’re now ready for the game’s penultimate dungeon. Off-camera, I spent all the party’s money on maxing out Hilda’s star chart.

: “Master was still very small… and your father, and sister…”

: “Here… it’s open. Nobody has been in this mansion for many years now, so I am not sure of the condition…”

: I wonder if this was from an earlier draft of the script or something, where it had been a longer time since Johnny “died”. Remember, the house was still standing in 1926.

: Two steps in, we get into a scripted random encounter with Blupe (the blue jellyfish things) and Ledope (the red ones). They have 132 HP each, putting them within oneshot range for everyone but Johnny.

: One Snap here takes care of most of our snap card requirements for this dungeon.

: Both Blupe and Ledope inflict Ring statuses if not killed. What I should mention is that these two enemies are why I haven’t been using Mao a whole lot.

: You see, Blupe drop Octopus Coins and Ledope drop Shrimp Coins. Mao can one-shot them with Cat Fist even being several levels behind the rest of the party, making this an ideal place to farm them due to the high EXP they reward.

: “Wh-Why would a monster be here?!”

: “What? You’re going to get in my way too, Hilda!?”

: “This is the ‘9 Ward Curse’. I read about it in a book, but this is the first time I’ve seen it.”

: “Is it very involved?”

: “It’s a ward to stop powerful phantoms. If you don’t enter properly, once you get in, you won’t be able to get out.”

: My first thought was “Is this going to be that fucking stupid digital root puzzle from 999?”. The answer is no, it’s merely ALMOST the stupid digital root puzzle.

: “The correct conditions?”

: “For example, for a ward that responds to odd numbers, if you don’t go through a 3 or a 5 first, it won’t let you pass. But the book said a lot of magic power and knowledge are needed to make these wards, so why would they be here?”

: “That beast earlier, and now this ward… what ever happened in this residence?”

: “What are you going to do? You want to find out about this?”

: “Yeah. Of course I do.”

: “Wait a second… whoever made this ward was meticulous. There are notes left behind. This is Ward 1. The start of all doors. It’ll let anyone in, but won’t let you out if you don’t pass the other doors.”

: By Ward 24, you start finding talking chinchilla detectives and people talking to ghosts.

: “So if I just wanna get in, I can, right?”

: We could go right in, but we don’t want to - at least, not just yet. There’s a stellar in this room… and also, you may have noticed I forgot to grind enough nega-calories for Hilda.

: Hilda’s chart unfortunately does not have a Light-element slot in it, so this goes to Johnny. I then head back to Machu Picchu and quickly grind Hilda back to her Slim form.

: “I’m telling you, it’ll be fine!”

: “Master, a moment please? Please allow me to go a separate way. It appears to be a complex contrivance, and would be better if we split up.”

: “Hmm… I guess you may be right. Be careful, Lenny.”

: The obvious way through is past Seal #6, but we don’t want to do that because there’s a mission-critical accessory for Johnny on the right.

: We’ll just ignore this hallway for the moment and keep going straight across.

: This room has Seal #5 and Seal #4… and also a chest you can see at the bottom of the screen.

: Even though it doesn’t look like we should have to, we have to pass through Seal #5 to get to the chest.

: Before we can reach it, we hit a random encounter with the third and final enemy type of this dungeon: Alyosh. Alyosh has 280 HP, placing it in a range where Frank can sometimes one-shot it with Demon Bomb.

: Or we can Floral Ray them. Hilda starts this one out by going “Come on, everyone! It’s time to photosynthesize!”

: Floral Ray has a massive AOE and is capable of ending fights by itself.

: Now we can grab the chest. Like most accessories, this one is a returning accessory from the earlier games.

: If you’ll recall, I said Johnny’s fusion form kinda sucks - I was wrong about being able to use it after Uyuni, it’s actually this dungeon that unlocks it.

: The reason for this is that Fusion costs 4 SP a turn, which I believe is on top of the standard 1SP a turn drain rate for a total of 5SP a turn. For the record, Johnny has a base of 12 SP.

: This makes the Flare Brooch a virtual requirement to use Johnny’s fusion, along with the Dark Angel accessory we got off Killer to boost his SP to 14.

: We go through Ward #4 because at this point we don’t really have another choice - we can’t go back through Ward #5.

: Here, we go up and around the corner.

: We’ve done that, so we’re good to progress.

: Next, we want to use that door on the left.

: On the way, Frank deletes several random encounters using Demon Bomb.

: The item we need here is a tiny sparkle that’s actually a little hard to see through the giant fucking “VIII” in the middle of the screen.

: In a world where the suits didn’t force Johnny as a protagonist, this would be Frank’s final fusion item that would allow him to fuse into Frankthulhu.

: Two divides cleanly into Eight, so we’re good to go.

: Apathy 2 is a good description of how I feel about math puzzles.

: Seal #7 takes us back to the start of the dungeon, so we never need to go through it.

: Instead, we want to use the other door and end up back in the main room.

: From there, we head to the door on the north side and then into one of the doors we passed earlier.

: This looks familiar.

: It’s hard to see from this angle, but Seal #9 is directly north of where Johnny’s bedroom is.

: All of the wards are now gone. I’m not sure why this dungeon was so much easier and so much faster than Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba, Aito Cave, or Uyuni.

: “It really did just disappear… the other warded doors must all be gone too!”

: “Right. Now we should be able to look around here freely.”

: We’ve already been through every other room in the dungeon, so let’s go on to the final one.

: The study has somehow gotten one more item in it that didn’t exist in Dream-1926. It’s in the bottom-right corner.

: We don’t really need any more of these, but we might as well grab it anyway.

: This picture was here the entire time - you can see it in the dream sequence, just not up close like this.

: “Right, the book I found earlier. Maybe it can fit in here…”

: The screen shakes.

: “What’s that noise?”

: “Sounds like something heavy moved…”

: “The noise came from the courtyard. Let’s check it out!”

: I was hoping the game would play with expectations a bit and not have the staircase under the statue.

: “A staircase to the basement…”

: “What is this? There truly is an underground room?”

: “Yeah. I wonder what’s under here…”

: You would think someone from the electric company would’ve shut down the power after 3 years, but apparently not. Before we go in that door, we want to equip the entire party with Cosmic Bracelets.

: This weird fetus-sphere is a recurring enemy that has existed in some form since Koudelka.

: Tamaris is a Light-based enemy, and we need SEVEN FUCKING SNAPS of it. It also has two gimmicks, one of which is shared with most of the bosses in the final dungeon - that being that if you use a buff spell, Tamaris will use the same buff on itself. Given that Tamaris hits pretty hard, we don’t want that to happen.

: Instead, we have Frank and Hilda bash it. Even with the damage penalty from being the same element, Frank is still pulling really impressive numbers.

: Tamaris has a full-party spell that causes Panic, which is completely blocked by the Cosmic Bracelets.

: It also has Bright Decide, which hits hard enough that we don’t want it to get a Double, especially given that it can melee combo for 250 damage or so.

: I start a D-Combo with Tamaris around 2300 HP, specifically to show off its other gimmick. Because we’re not buffed, the party is not going to hit that kind of damage.

: At low HP, Tamaris uses Spirit Ward - this is an attack it had when it was a boss in Covenant - and erases Frank from the battlefield. Fuck that.

: I let Frank take his turn, and then had Hilda initiate a D-Combo with Tamaris at around 1700 HP.

: Unfortunately, this does hit a minor snag because of Shania - her strongest attacks are air juggles and Tempest can’t hit the High zone, so we instead use Holy Pulse, the worst possible choice.

: The Priest earrings are a necessity if you plan on using Ricardo.

: We have a lot of Soul Energy, but I don’t know that we have enough to do Shania’s final sidequest yet.

: Clearly the “little bitch” gene runs on the male side of the family.

: “Yes. She’s grown since that photo was taken, but there’s no mistaking her.”

: “So that’s why the kid looked like did when he transformed at the tower.”

: “Well, now that you mention it, we were unable to find Miss Grace’s body after the accident. But that doesn’t mean…”

: “Johnny…”

: “That’s right! Let’s go and see Roger! That day, he and my father were in the basement together. Roger will tell us the truth!”

: Do we have to? We’re… maybe like 20 minutes in game from being able to do Frank’s final sidequest.

: Yep, we’ve still got one more boss fight against Killer coming up - after I do all the sidequests. My goal is to do Shania’s as soon as possible, but we need to max out her fusions to unlock it.

: Next time, we’re going to watch some cutscenes, go to the Gate, watch some more cutscenes, and then immediately turn around and learn what a “Momonga” is as we reach MAXIMUM OVERFRANK.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We have nothing else to do but talk to Roger Bacon, so let’s do that.

: “It’s been a while, Roger.”

: “Huh? Ohhh! Lenny! Is that you? This is unbelievable!”

: “You know each other?”

: “Yes… except, we were enemies back then. Yes, back then he suddenly kidnapped me, and tortured me with various…”

: From what I remember of Covenant, that was mostly the dominatrix lady that did that.

: “Please do not talk about such things in front of my master.”

: “Lenny!”

: “Oh! I-I’m sorry, Master… I didn’t come here today just to reminisce with Roger…”

: “You were in our basement 3 years ago with my dad and Marlow… weren’t you?”

: “Johnny, you… you remember?”

: Roger’s internal monologue: “Shit, does he know about all the orphan juice?”

: “In my dream, you all were doing some kind of ceremony. And then Lady appeared… and dad was…”

: “Are your missing memories returning, or could it be…”

: I have something to say that people may not want to know or hear, which is that I’ve been giving some thought to LPing Xenosaga, a game The Dark Id said he would rather eat a bullet than LP.

: Fortunately, the first two Xenosaga games already have an LP on the archive… but then I have this unopened copy of Xenoblade sitting on my desk…

: “OK, then I will tell you everything. It’s a bit of a long story, but… Johnny. How old will you be this year?”

: If there was a meter for how much of a little bitch Johnny is, this is the moment at which it would shatter from an overload of being a little bitch.

: “That’s correct. From when he was 13, Master spent 5 years almost entirely in the hospital. Your father was worried that knowing this would create hardship for you and ordered me not to speak of it.”

: “Does that have some sort of connection?”

: And that explains the whole ghost logo on Johnny’s jacket.

: “Roger! You can’t be saying?”

: “Yes. It is the truth. Johnny, you and your sister Grace died 8 years ago.”

: “It can’t be…”

: This is how you know Graham Garland was also a little bitch. Papa NieR figured that shit out by Ending A.

: Unfortunately, his career didn’t take off and he wound up as that one guy in Silent Hill 3 before vanishing from the public eye.

: Roger’s new VA cannot pronounce the word “Emigre” and it makes me angry.

: You know, I kinda wonder where it was at the end of Covenant. Covenant’s entire canon status is weird because the good ending is a time loop.

: My bet is that Roger had Yuri throw it back into the godawful shitfuck block puzzle dungeon that no one liked, except Yuri didn’t feel like going all the way back down there and hid it under a rock.

: “Surprisingly, they were nearing success. Never before had anyone successfully performed the Ceremony of Emigre… as a magician, and as a scientist, I couldn’t resist my desire to see the moment of its completion.”

: “If only I had stopped them, the tragedy that occurred could have been averted.”

: “That’s what I’ve come to ask you about! Tell me what you know!”

: He had more orphan juice than anyone has ever had. I wonder why Roger didn’t tell Yuri any of this in Covenant when they tried to resurrect Alice.

: Yuri as written by The Dark Id would go “Okay so how many people do I need to punch to get that much juice?” to which Roger would respond “I don’t know, it’d be an inestimably huge number… a million?”

: “A million? Yeah… I can do that.”

: “Malice… why was there Malice involved?”

: “Malice is the crystallization of humanity’s evil intent, and thus is detestable by its very nature. However, Malice is needed to form the deceased’s body during the Ceremony of Emigre.”

: “Past magicians had relied solely upon the deceased’s desire to come back… in short, the power of the blue light. The result: the deceased would come back with no body, or even transform into a monster and devour the magicians…”

: He’s talking about Koudelka here, where it took a miracle from the Judeo-Christian God to put down that guy’s wife.

: You would think that this would make Johnny’s house about as cursed as Nemeton Monastery, but you’d be wrong: that was just because Wales is cursed. Don’t fucking go to Wales.

: “The Malice coming from these remains, combined with the high level of Malice left in the world by the recent war… it was the power of that Malice, Johnny, that brought you back to life.”

: Unfortunately, it also made him a bitch.

: “H-Hold on! The ceremony was a success, right? So how come my father died? And, what happened to my sister?!”

: At least that’s not too long of a trip. We can pick up Johnny’s second-best weapon on the way, which… is kind of pointless because we get his best weapon for free shortly after visiting the Gate.

: The thing is, we have probably 20 minutes of cutscenes coming up, and I really, really do not want to have an entire update of cutscene, so let’s skip all that shit for now. We’ll get back to that when I do the final dungeon.

: Back in Roswell, Roger’s ship is repaired and we can go to the Gate.

: We then immediately turn around, because there is a sidequest involving Frank to be done. Visiting the Gate unlocks all of the final sidequests. While we’re in Roswell, though…

: “Since when have you guys been so close?”

: “Ha-hah! Mr. Strange understands Frank’s ninja arts better than anyone else!”

: I have absolutely no idea how you’re intended to find this without a guide. The Phoenix Suit is Frank’s ultimate armor.

: “Oh…! It’s so BEAUTIFUL, and EXCITING!”

: “For me…? I don’t have the words to THANK you!”

: “Of course! Leave it to me!”

: “A strange friendship is budding…”

: “Yeah. Two weirdoes hitting it off.”

: To start Frank’s sidequest, we need to go to Rio, more specifically to the dumpster Frank was searching through back when we first got here. Britney is here, presumably because it’s where she belongs.

: “A MESSAGE from the Jonin?”

: “Dear Frank, I suck and also you should be the hokage. Signed, the Jonin.”

: “Britney’s personality is… well, she lays it out there for ya.”

: “If she’s a ninja, pigs can fly.”

: Oh fuck yes. We’re doing this shit right now.

: Yes, the village’s name is Brazeel.

: Welcome to the very best part of this game.

: “Training? You had training here…?”

: “Ha ha! I JUST got here.”

: “Master Meow, you lived here too?”

: “It was youthful idiocy. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

: For this segment, we get to control Frank. This is how the game should have been the entire time. Let’s talk to all of the NPCs.

: This is kinda funny because on the surface, it’s a reference to Goemon from the Mystical Ninja games - who does in fact throw coins as a projectile. However, that’s not what it’s meant to be a reference to.

: You’ll notice this NPC’s last name is Zenigata, which makes this a reference to Heiji Zenigata, the hero of a series of detective novels written in the 1930s.

: Heiji Zenigata was, of course, where Monkey Punch got Officer Zenigata in the Lupin III anime from.

: Let me explain how this works. “Kunoichi” is written like this: くノ一 (Ku no ichi). If you look at the kanji for “woman”, it looks like this: 女. Each of the characters in “kunoichi” is part of that kanji, though you have to twist the “ku” a little bit.

: It’s like the donut place across the street from where I work that makes only like two dozen donnolis each day. Donnolis are a donut with cannoli filling. They are amazing.

: This little thing here is actually a funny little gimmick: note that he says it’s a male-only sport. If we try to enter with Shania, Mao, or Hilda in the party, he’ll turn us away.

: Hell yeah. Frank already does a shit-ton of damage. This is only going to make him do more damage. We are nearly at MAXIMUM OVERFRANK.

: He’s talking about a “shishi-odoshi”, localized in Animal Crossing as a deer scare.

: That’s everybody. Let’s go to the Jonin’s house, which will soon be Frank’s house.

: “He he he. The short sightedness of a mere LAYMAN.”

: “Well… that’s all it looks like to me.”

: “It is disguised to avoid public notice. This village is really the base of a secret society protecting the states.”

: “A secret society?!”

: “Like Frank, the ninjas in this village take orders from the Jonin and covertly maneuver in society every day!”

: “Almost sounds like you’re the bad guys. But if that’s true, isn’t this place a little too… flashy?”

: Clearly, Johnny never played Evil Genius. The first one. We don’t talk about the reboot.

: “I couldn’t get used to this place, and tried to make a hasty retreat, but… just my luck, this guy caught me.”

: “Must’ve been rough…”

: Frank, hit him.

: “So his is a long-nosed goblin… not that it’s a big deal anymore…”

: XSeed, please, I know what a tengu is.

: “Nothing’s changed around here. You haven’t, the village hasn’t.”

: “Don’t know much about ninjas… but no way you’re passing it down right.”

: We’re here so that Frank can become the hokage.

: “T-the Ninja Master Test?! ME?!”

: “Britney?!!”

: “Bob… you were the Jonin?”

: “So that guy’s name was Bob…”

: Fuck yeah! Now give Frank his nuke back! And… wait a second, is that an actual photo on the wall there? I wonder what that’s from. My guess is some kind of company golf outing.

: “Yes sir! Frank… Frank will work hard to become the highest level ninja!”

: Hang in there, Shamiko! Become a mazoku that… wait, wrong series.

: I’m surprised Frank didn’t already have one of these from when we met him at the start of the game, back when he was using it for the Art of Hiding.

: “Oh! Pleased to make your acquaintance! …By the way, what exactly is Ol’ Frank supposed to do?”

: “Momonga” is the scientific name for the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel, which are fucking adorable.

: “The Momonga Arts? The art of flying squirrel?”

: Momonga is basically Neo Turf Masters, if you’ve ever played that.

: The caddy at each tower will tell you how far it is to the next tower… but some of them lie, and we have to go off-course to find some items.

: Notice the “0 Times” in the top-right. If you reach 20 attempts, a ninja will show up and offer to sell Frank the secret writings.

: You hit X, and the white bar goes to the right to select distance. There is a little leeway on this, as you’ll see when I do it.

: The caddy tells us to go 150 feet, but even though I’m a little over, it’s fine. We then need to get the bar back into the blue zone and hit it.

: Now, I had a very different image in my head of what this looked like, and I have contacted Salty Vanilla to make that happen.

: I wish they had incorporated this into a special attack for Frank.

: I way overshot this one but still got it.

: We need to head down a couple of screens here.

: Thera Extracts are a full heal. Gerard sells them for 10,000 cash each.

: The Ultra Belt is the final belt accessory. It’s only slightly better than the Stone Belts we’ve been using since like Machu Picchu.

: This is really misleading - we do want to take this advice, but it’s actually meant for the NEXT platform, not this one.

: “Hey! YOU! Do you happen to know where the Secret Writings are?”

: These ninjas have around 170 HP and can inflict every Ring status in the game with their regular attack. We want to nuke them down before they can do that.

: This part of the game is where Shania really starts to fall off - she just can’t do the damage that Frank and Hilda can. This does improve a bit when we do her final sidequest… but we can’t do that yet.

: Shania’s ring gets so fucked up that it becomes unusable.

: The good news is these ninjas are worth a shitload of experience.

: “But, who ordered him to take my life…? This Master Ninja Test may have another side to it.”

: This is still true, so we’ll fly 160 feet.

: We get ambushed by another ninja almost immediately, and now it’s time to show off Johnny’s Fusion form. It makes him… slightly less sucky. He still sucks at combat.

: As Awaker, Johnny has exactly one skill: an attack called Dual React that hits every zone and has a rather large AOE.

: The thing is, Dual React has a pretty annoying Ring, and kinda sucks unless you manage to nail a Perfect.

: Just hitting every spot on the Ring does just enough damage to kill the ninjas in one hit.

: Compare that to a Ring Perfect, which is still underwhelming compared to a Demon Bomb or Floral Ray.

: We can grab the final Seal ring addon here as well.

: This is the caddie that’s lying to us. We want to go 160 feet instead.

: There’s another ninja hiding behind that tree, which we promptly annihilate.

: The rest of these are all straightforward - we just follow what the game tells us, fight a couple more ninjas, and eventually…

: Wind up at the end. Theoretically, it would have been better to do Hilda’s final sidequest first - the reason being that I think the game assumes you have a certain accessory we don’t have. It won’t matter.

: Is he saying what I think he’s saying? Frank, kill this fucker. Cut him in half.

: “Hm…? Now that you mention it…”

: “WHY?! Why would you do such a thing?”

: “Then… that’s the reason you’re having Frank take the test?”

: “Frank did not know that Jonin existed in such a complex world.”

: “No, no way. Is that guy on an ego trip or something?”

: “Oh! Spoken like a TRUE ninja! Jonin. YOU are the ninja that stands tall above all others. However… for the sake of peace in the States and to become the highest ranking ninja, I will bring Jonin DOWN!”

: This is, in fact, Frank’s ultimate weapon.

: “Humph! Looks like a right tasty weapon. This might not end up so well for Frank.”

: “Whoa, Master Meow – what are you saying?”

: “That sharp konjac pierces the skin, and the heat of the broth stored in the paste grills the body from the inside. It is a very well-conceived weapon.”

: Konjac is a root vegetable used in oden, among other things. It’s usually made into a jelly.

: “No way! When you put it like that, it sounds like a strong weapon, but it’s a skewer! A skewer?!?”

: “Jonin! Now, let’s fight fair and SQUARE!!”

: This is a one-on-one fight, which is apparently pretty difficult… if you haven’t been using Frank the whole game. Why the fuck would you play this game and not use Frank at all times?

: The Jonin has 900 HP and one of the nastiest spells in the game. You’ll notice right away that he has three turns to Frank’s one.

: We’ve done over half of the Jonin’s HP in one Double, and as long as Frank survives until his next turn, we’ve got this.

: Red Bounce is nothing.

: Well, shit. Gale Crest is the highest-level Wind spell in the game. All the top-tier spells are (Something) Crest.

: Yeah, that’s not great.

: Frank is barely standing, and the Jonin has FOUR turns to his one now… but we’ve already won.

: This fight wasn’t even hard to Ring Perfect, given that all we did was Demon Bomb/Fast Snowball.

: “I-it can’t be… Jonin put Frank through such danger just to test his power?”

: Honestly, I liked Legend Saber more.

: “Sir, yes sir! Frank is now officially a Master Ninja!”

: “Did you say something?”

: We are not done ruining this man. In fact, we’re going to do the Momonga course again.

: “F-fifth rank?!”

: “Hmm… well, NOW I can’t back down! Frank will TAKE this promotion test!”

: This goes on Hilda. We’re going to need it for when we do her quest. I haven’t decided whether I want to do hers or Ricardo’s first, simply because Hilda’s quest requires you to use all the party members.

: The NPC here will tell us a little about the Momonga Test, which is about reaching the end in the fewest number of jumps. You have to experiment… or just use a guide.

: For reference, we want to go 200, 220, 240, and then 180 feet, making the trip in four jumps.

: The only new thing here is this area with the two bridges, which has an Angel Souffle hidden near the start.

: Fuck yeah it is.

: We get a couple of other things too, including a Hit Area and Strike Area expand and a Third Key… along with a Zodiac Bracelet for some reason, which we’ll promptly sell.

: The Crucifix is a returning accessory from the other games, which is the ultimate status protection. This goes on Hilda for now, specifically because we’ll need it for her sidequest.

: We just need to Momonga one more time, and that’s for the final Ring Fragment in the game.

: The first two jumps are 200 and 220 feet again, followed by a 230-footer (which is a little tricky to pull off).

: Pure Extracts are a whopping 30,000 Cash at Gerard, and we’ll probably need it for Johnny if we plan on using his fusion form against a couple of the later bosses.

: Finally, we make a 280-foot jump to the Ring Fragment. We’ll turn that in next time, before we embark on the return of THE MAN FESTIVAL and max out Hilda.

[Timrod]

Summary

: “…Yeah.”

: “I’m sorry. I guess my father must have given you a little trouble… are you mad?”

: “No, not really. Just a little worn out…”

: “Really? OK then… here you go.”

: “You don’t look so well, so I’ll just be on my way. I’ll see you again next time, Johnny!”

: It’s weird, but this is in fact the last Ring Fragment in the game - I counted, and we have them all. There aren’t enough to max everyone’s Ring, probably due to last-minute cuts.

: While we’re here, I’m going to grab Johnny’s final armor and final weapon - they’re both pretty quick to get, and we want them because Johnny will need to participate in THE MAN FESTIVAL.

: “Yeah, pretty soon.”

: “Is that right… I understand. Well, I will make Master’s most favorite meat omelet and await your return.”

: “You’re not gonna stop me?”

: “If this were a year ago, I may have tried to stop you for a number of petty reasons… but considering how much you’ve grown, I have no need for concern anymore.”

: “Really…”

: “One moment. I just happen to have something ready for you to wear.”

: This is a call-back to Covenant, where Yuri got his best armor (which was also just the jacket he’s been wearing the entire game) from Lenny.

: “…Did you make this, Lenny?”

: “I was up last night making it for you. I tried to make the design the same as your regular garments… how is it?”

: “Yeah. It fits really well. And it’s easy to move in.”

: “I’m flattered to hear that.”

: “My detective equipment has always been just right, and this is perfect, too. Lenny, you really get me, huh?”

: “I have waited on you for many years. But, Master… how long have you known?”

: “I kind of had an inkling. Your attitude was sort of fishy. And Tinkerbell isn’t a very cool name. In New York City, I figured only you would use a name like that.”

: I call bullshit. Natan or Ricardo probably told him off-screen during the timeskip in Brazil, after which he spent a week crying.

: “I see…”

: “Thank you for this. Well, I’m off then.”

: “When I had collapsed in the desert, and Master happened to pass by… and offered me a cup of water…”

: “Yeah… my dad told me you looked like a bad guy and that I shouldn’t get too close. But I couldn’t just leave you like that.”

: For reference, Lenny is 40 in 1929. I mean, he’s also at least part Malice monster so who knows how that works.

: “Another 50 years?”

: “Of course. Until I can hold your grandchild in my arms, I have no intention of dying.”

: PFFT. We’ll see what the writers think of those odds when we get Johnny’s final weapon.

: “Ha ha… got it. I’ll come back for sure. Well, I’ll see you then!”

: “Yes, be careful… please, be careful!”

: Johnny’s final weapon is in Roswell, and is another call-back to the original Shadow Hearts and Covenant.

: “W-what is it? Why are you getting all serious?”

: “I have something to ask you, man to man.”

: “Man to man… I see. I’m listening.”

: “… Thanks. Actually, the reason I came all the way to this continent is because I held a single aspiration. Of course, I have not told anyone about it yet. So…”

: “I get it. I won’t tell anyone.”

: An interesting thing I learned is that the Japanese collector’s edition of this game came with a high-res copy of the item pic for N.Y. Heaven, and I can imagine people being very confused as to why.

: “…Huh? An economic periodical?”

: “A LEGENDARY one, that is. They say if you manage to get but one copy of N.Y. Heaven, people on Wall Street will dance wildly all night…”

: Yep, we’re now in the third game where we have to get Roger Bacon a porno mag in exchange for the protagonist’s final weapon. At least this time, it wasn’t hidden in some obscure side area and isn’t missable.

: “Wha? Whaa? Whaaat! No! Don’t say anything else!”

: “…Well, it’s not really something to be talked about openly anyway.”

: “A-anyway, that’s what I want. Johnny, you’re my only hope! Please! Help me!”

: “OK, I get it. I got it but…”

: “…You ask too much, too soon.”

: We now have to go all the way through Alcatraz again.

: “Do you have a book called N.Y. Heaven?”

: “Huh… so you have it after all?”

: “Not purposely, but… there’s someone who really wants that book. Do you think you could hand it over?”

: “Hm… well, I don’t really care either way. A detective with a bright future in possession of a banned magazine… it’ll give the public a good laugh.”

: Here’s a high-res scan of the notepad that came with the Japanese collector’s edition.

: I kinda wish they had done high-res versions of the Weekly Arts covers instead.

: The collector’s edition also came with a shirt version of Johnny’s jacket, because who wouldn’t want to wear something that screams “I’m a little bitch that the writers don’t even like”.

: “Oh, don’t open it. It’s got a lot of problems.”

: “Problems…? Hey, it wasn’t like you to help out like that, Master Meow…”

: Maybe Mao doesn’t suck as much as I thought.

: “Oh, oh, ohhhhh! That’s it! The N.Y. Heaven that I’ve been dreaming about! Ah, to think in my lifetime, I could revere this right before my very own eyes! Thank you, thank you! Ahh, how can I express my gratitude?”

: “Well, I wouldn’t mind reading it…”

: “Huh? Was he even listening to me…? Well, whatever.”

: “OK, here it is. My utmost gratitude!”

: “This… knife?”

: “That’s right. Because it has such a sharp edge, I’ve secured it away for a long time. According to legend, it has the power to even cut a planet as easily as if it were a cherry.”

: “Sounds incredible…”

: “Yes, it’s incredible. The gods, so frightened by its power, did not give this knife a name.”

: “Really? Kind of inconvenient, not having a name. What should I call it?”

: There’s a dumb pun here that I should probably explain because it’s not logical in English: in Japanese, “Cherry Boy” is a slang term for a male virgin. This is what I meant when I said Johnny isn’t ever having kids.

: “Huh? Natan! What are you doing…! Coming out of nowhere like that? And what does it mean?!”

: “It does not have a deep meaning. Why are you upset?”

: “Shania, you too?!”

: “Hm… it seems it has been decided. Well, Johnny, please take it!”

: What’s funny about this is that with his ultimate equipment, Johnny has only slightly better stats than Ricardo does, and he’s got 6 levels on Ricardo.

: I’m also going to get Hilda’s final weapon before we join THE MAN FESTIVAL, because we can just kinda get to it.

: “A bat?”

: This is yet another callback - in both Shadow Hearts and Covenant, the Valentine sibling in the party gets their final weapon by fighting the sibling that shows up in the next game in bat form.

: Keith in Shadow Hearts 1 gets his from fighting Joachim as the Golden Bat, and Joachim gets his from fighting Hilda as the Pink Bat.

: “Don’t. Wild animals are usually pretty fierce.”

: “…Huh? That voice… that body… there’s no mistaking it! It’s Grandpa!”

: “Grandpa? Yours!?”

: “I haven’t seen him myself for 100 years.”

: “Whoa, what’s he saying? He’s not mad or anything, right?”

: “Ooh… he’s not, but his words are extremely close to those of an animal, so I can’t understand him.”

: “Master Meow, you understand bat talk?!”

: “Bat language is easy. You guys aren’t going to get anywhere like that, so I’ll translate for you.”

: “Thank you!”

: This really does sound like Nautilus knew there wasn’t going to be a Shadow Hearts 4, because in all of the other fights like this, they explicitly say there’s going to be a next game. However…

: In 2018, Miyako Kato (the character artist for the entire Shadow Hearts series) posted this on Twitter. This was meant to be the Black Bat’s human form.

: Miyako Kato is apparently working on Penny Blood, assuming that ever sees a release, so I suppose there’s the possibility that he shows up there somehow.

: “Why are you being so emphatic?”

: “What?! How could I beat my powerful Grandpa? Won’t I die?!”

: “…What will you do, Hilda?”

: The game gives us the opportunity to back out, and if you’ve played the first game or Covenant, you know that these fights are always damage races - after a set number of turns, the bat uses a Key and kills you.

: “Oooh…”

: The Black Bat gets the first turn, and…

: Uses a Seventh Key for absolutely laughable damage.

: The Black Bat has… I think it’s 90 HP or something like that. He will die in one hit to pretty much anything Hilda can do. Let’s test out Hilda’s new orbital laser on him.

: Goddamn.

: “What is it? This cane looks like a key.”

: “…That’s way too long.”

: “Too many words! And now it’s my cane, so I’ll name it Magic Key Hilding!”

: I just realized that they spelled “Translation” wrong.

: Hilda understands the magical girl genre.

: “Do you really have to worry about that?”

: “Be quiet! I’ve already decided. From now on, this cane is Magic Key Hilding!”

: Hey fellas, you ever hear about THE DARKNESS? I remember The Dark Id spending multiple days watching through every cutscene from the entire Kingdom Hearts series. I have no idea how he survived.

: “Now, Grandpa. I’ll accept this graciously. Bye for now. I hope you live for lots longer. Ho ho ho ho!”

: And now, it’s time for THE MAN FESTIVAL. We need to head back to Rio, but I made a quick stop off-screen to Arkham to use all those stat-boosting items we’ve been picking up.

: In total, Hilda gains about 20 points of Magic Attack, Frank gains around the same in Physical Attack, and Johnny gets 6 extra SP to keep Awaker going longer. We are going to need it.

: “Looks like it’s still alive… it’s barely breathing though…”

: “Kind of a dumb bat to fall dead right here. Let me see.”

: “Your brother!?”

: “What are you saying? Hang in there!”

: “Wait. There’s something in his mouth.”

: “You’re right. What is this? It’s green, and smells strong…”

: “It’s wasabi.”

: “Wasabi?”

: “There’s no doubt about it! This is the doing of that restaurant! Wait here. I’m going to storm in there and get you some hot green tea!”

: Unlike the Man Festival in Covenant, this Man Festival is not a joke.

: “I thought we went into a sushi shop…”

: These guys are a clever re-use of assets: in Covenant’s Man Festival, they were themed after curry.

: “W-what are these people?”

: “What did you do to Keith?”

: “What a terrible thing to do! Hand over the tea already!”

: “Uhh… all right, we accept your challenge!”

: “Can’t we just buy tea at the market?”

: Ideally, we’d have done Ricardo’s sidequest first - it gives you a second pair of Warlock Earrings, which we’d put on Shania. Fuck that though, we’re using Frank even if it’s not super optimal to do so.

: You know, there’s a sushi place ten or so minutes down the road from where I work. Maybe I’ll do that for lunch tomorrow.

: We bring Johnny along solely to get Snaps of all the sushi men - they do show up in a Pit Fight later on if you don’t use him.

: The Cucumber Rolls get destroyed pretty hard by Floral Ray.

: They also hit surprisingly hard.

: We are then immediately launched into the next fight with no chance to save or heal.

: This is kinda misleading, so I’ll explain it. Tekka rolls are made from lean tuna, which is most of the meat from a tuna. This is as opposed to something like an otoro roll that uses the fatty belly meat and is generally more expensive.

: Anyway, these guys suck because they can Arc Shield and also have a physical attack debuff on hit, which is obviously not ideal for Frank. With the Demon Earrings, Frank still does pretty good damage.

: Natto is fermented soybeans.

: This fight sucks mostly because the enemies will buff their physical attack and then nearly instakill Hilda.

: It was about this point in recording that I got hit with the Shadow Hearts curse - the same one that killed The Dark Id’s computer during his LP of the first game.

: As it turned out, the hard drive I had all of my LP stuff on was near death. Fortunately, I managed to save everything to another drive with no issues and a replacement is on the way.

: “Oh. Finally, one that looks expensive.”

: “Well, aren’t you high society! Bet I could polish you off all by myself!”

: I forgot to heal Hilda to full after the last fight, and quickly get stomped because Shrimp Roll starts with a full stock gauge. That’s a reload.

: The second time, I simply Double and instakill Shrimp Roll before he can move.

: Unfortunately for us, this fight automatically puts Hilda into her Curvy state. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that now I have to gamble on getting a one-turn kill instead of getting it automatically.

: “What should we do, Hilda?”

: “Leave this one to me. I’m awfully fond of eel!”

: This could be a potentially nasty fight given Hilda was running low on MP, except for one thing…

: None of the Sushi Men are immune to Instant Death.

: “That was tas–, hic! Oh no! I should have known better…”

: “You ate too much… isn’t anyone here?”

: “There is a slight smell of saltwater… or, is that the smell of sea urchin?”

: “Sea urchin? This is the plate that Keith should have been…”

: “Well, that’s perfect timing. I’ll take a little break from eating.”

: We can now leave the sushi dimension, and probably should - the next six fights are all one-on-one and require you to use every party member.

: While I have no doubt that Frank, Shania, and maybe Johnny could do their fights, I’m not so sure about Ricardo, Mao, and Natan. There’s also a lot of setup work involved. Let’s give it a try anyway.

: The trick to these next couple fights is that they more or less have to be cheesed. The sushi men have a bullshit high defense stat, to the point where I’m not even sure Frank or Hilda could kill them easily.

: I’m pretty sure you’re meant to do this after you’ve done everyone else’s sidequest (including Shania’s).

: By the way, the game resets Hilda’s calorie meter every time you re-enter, which is a little rude.

: “Natan.”

: “Huh? But…”

: “Do you want to save your brother?”

: “Thank you… you won’t be risking your life in vain!”

: You can see from the turn bar why this fight is bullshit: Salmon Roll not only gets three turns to start, but also has Instant Death on all of his attacks AND has stock. We have to cheese this.

: The way we do that is by equipping Natan’s Ring with Petrify, and then using a Hard Hit.

: I think I mentioned this before, but Hard Hits have a nice side effect of increasing your chances of getting a Ring effect to proc, and in this case we easily petrify Salmon Roll for an instant kill.

: “Sorry, I’m not interested in suckers or tentacles.”

: I tried actually fighting Octopus Roll, but he was taking a grand total of 60 damage from Rumble Roar, which… yeah, that sucks. For reference, all of the Sushi Men here have 570 HP.

: Instead, we want to equip Shania with Instant Death and Hard Hit. Now, you might ask how the fuck I’m going to handle Mao’s fight if Shania, who is among the highest-leveled people in the group, can’t win this without cheese and the answer is uh… I don’t know.

: We may have to resort to some very handy tools to get past that part, since Natan and Shania used the only two instakills we have.

: “What’s this? It doesn’t seem like there’s any sushi here…”

: “A phony, I see… I’ll still challenge you.”

: Rice Ball uses Gale, and has a 66% slow on his physical attack. This isn’t great, especially given that Ricardo is underleveled for this. Ricardo isn’t affected by his own Serenatas, so we can’t use his buffs either.

: What we do have is Slow 3, which procs almost every attack and slows Rice Ball down by 60%. Combined with a Gale, Ricardo is now getting three attacks to Rice Ball’s one.

: “It’s almost Ol’ Frank’s turn…”

: “Ginger…? What a SHOCK! Just Ol’ Frank’s luck to get stuck with the free add-on…”

: As far as I know, there’s no such thing as “pickled ginger sushi” - pickled ginger is a side thing that’s meant as a palate cleanser.

: Pickled Ginger is by far the easiest Sushi Man to fight, which sucks because we’re wasting Frank on him.

: Pickled Ginger’s thing is casting Ring Abnormality, which I think inflicts every Ring status at once. Fortunately, Frank has a Pocket Watch.

: Of course the cat gets to fight Fatty Tuna. This is where we’re going to run into a bit of trouble.

: “At last, a respectable fish. I was getting tired of waiting.”

: “I’m not interested in sushi. I don’t need the rice, just give me the sashimi!”

: This fight sucks because Fatty Tuna will always go first and will always open with Rage. Now, my idea was to equip Mao with Mind’s Eye and Blood Loss 3 and try to bleed him to death.

: Turns out I forgot to set Mao’s attacks to maximum. Well, shit. This is another thing you want to do beforehand, probably taking the attacks from Natan since he’s relying on Petrify anyway.

: Through the use of copious amounts of “handy tools”, I manage to poison Fatty Tuna. It’s funny how Mao at 2x damage is almost, but not quite, as good as Frank at 1x damage.

: Several minutes of fiddling around later and Fatty Tuna is gone. The other 150 or so damage was all poison.

: Pfft. Of course it’s the children’s plate.

: “If it’s an egg, and if there’s no wasabi in it, even I could eat it.”

: “Uh, what? Where’s the soy sauce?”

: First we grab a snap, and then it’s a pretty straightforward slugfest where Johnny becomes the Awaker and spams Dual React.

: In total, we got two Fruity Fibers, a Strike Expand, and a Hit Area Expand. Not too bad.

: “Wh-what’s that voice?”

: Meet Joachim, Hilda’s gay himbo brother.

: “I knew it… big brother! You’re Joachim!”

: “That’s my line! And Q the Great!? Publishing all those magazines, suddenly opening a sushi restaurant… neglecting the castle all those years, what exactly do you think you’re doing?”

: “Uh… it’s a long story. Ten years ago, after my journey to save the world, I wanted to share my skills, and started a weekly magazine. But it didn’t sell, and went out of print in only 6 weeks.”

: “All I had left was a massive loan. I sold the furniture to pay it back, but when Keith found out, I couldn’t face him… so I ran away to here, Rio.”

: “Keith and I made up, he was even going to help with the store, but he tried to escape… then, I had no choice.”

: “This was all while I was sleeping in the coffin… you were wrong to do that! And how could you make money with a weird sushi shop like this?”

: “Ha ha ha, what a naive young girl. Regular sushi is boring!”

: He has gay sex once, and now all he can think of is man festivals.

: “The He-Man Festival…?”

: “It’s a trial that tests the limits of body and mind to find the true He-Man. But by the cruel irony of fate - my blood sister became my first challenger!”

: Joachim is disappointed because this isn’t going to end in him getting laid.

: “You’ve rendered me speechless. In any case, hurry up and pour me some tea for Keith.”

: If we’re talking Covenant Joachim, probably not unless Hilda goes first.

: “Oo… now that you mention it, I never could beat you when we fought. I always won on the brains side though.”

: “That last comment was pushing it! You big bro will go ahead and make you a dish to remember before the beating of a lifetime. It’s the least I can do…”

: We have three choices here. The pudding makes Hilda into Masked Curvy Hilda, the tuna into the Pink Bat, and the salad roll into Masked Slim Hilda. We want the salad.

: By the way, Joachim has a theme that plays here which I think might be from Covenant, but damned if I can find it.

: Joachim has the Great Gama’s old weapon, which makes sense given that in real life, the Great Gama’s last pro wrestling match was in February 1929.

: As far as I can tell, Joachim will only use Grand Slam every turn - this is a call-back to his first fight against Great Gama in Covenant.

: With her mask on, Hilda’s already insanely high stats are DOUBLED. I probably could’ve oneshotted Joachim except that I forgot he’s Earth-element and used Floral Ray on him.

: “Oh ho ho! You’re not just weak in the head, you’re weak in the body too!”

: “Ooh… well, I’m sorry to lose, but more so I feel… ennobled. I finally understand now how Master felt…”

: “Master? Who’s that?”

: “The patron who taught me the he-man way of life. I fought that patron 14 years ago and finally surpassed my master. He gave me this mask then… now I pass it on to you!”

: Blatant advertising for Covenant, which would have still probably been on shelves in 2005, given that it came out in 2004.

: “Huh? What? I-I don’t need it! That ugly mask!”

: Joachim probably has a contract in his back pocket with a provision that says that whoever owns the Mask of ??? also owns all of his debt.

: The description doesn’t explain what the mask does - nor does the fan wiki, for that matter. The answer is… I’m not sure it actually does anything.

: People on Gamefaqs claim it works like it did for Joachim in Covenant, causing his stats to triple instead of double, but I checked and Hilda’s stats only double.

: I should add that on further inspection, only her offensive stats (P-Atk and S-Atk) double. Her defensive stats remain untouched.

: “I’m going to travel and work on my combat skills. I leave the rest to you!”

: “Ooh… I don’t want to put on this sweaty mask.”

: “Are you OK now?”

: “Well, I did him in good… good enough for the both of us.”

: We now want to immediately turn back around and talk to Keith, because…

: “Your real job?”

: We still have the absolute worst lottery ring to do.

: “Lottery Chairperson… Keith… you’ve been involved in that foolish thing too?”

: The Lottery is serious fucking business, as established in the first game.

: “Huh?! You’re actually upset…”

: “Whoa, looks like he’s serious.”

: My guess is he’s talking about Alice and not Yuri, because the only thing Johnny and Yuri have in common is that they’re both technically the same species.

: Anyway, this Ring uses Fickle Ring, where the needle randomly changes speed. It took me something like 10 minutes, but I did get it without resorting to speedrun tools.

: That’s not really gothic lolita, because I can look at gothic lolita (which is usually all black, hence “gothic”) and not want to vomit… most of the time.

: This is what we’d call “sweet lolita” or “classic lolita”, and is primarily the realm of weirdos on Youtube and horror movies.

: I hope that some day, I run into a bat who challenges me to spin a wheel for JRPG equipment. I’d want a pair of those big fuckoff shoulderpads from World of Warcraft.

: “Hmm… I can kinda see the truth in that, and I kinda don’t at the same time.”

: Considering that The Dark Id had Keith on bench status for the entirety of his Shadow Hearts LP, I’d say she probably already is.

: “I’m not helping him, he’s helping me! Johnny’s helping the heroine who’s going to save the world!”

: I think you mean you’re both helping Frank.

: Next time, we’ll do Natan’s final UMA hunt. My plan for the rest of the sidequests is to go Natan, Ricardo, and then activate the handy tools if Shania still doesn’t have enough soul points to unlock hers.