Click Here for Update 3
: Free from Kickstarter Hell, we can take the road to Volta.
: Like everything the Allansons have ever made, this dungeon is significantly longer and significantly more empty than it has any reason to be.
: The way this game works, it doesn’t clear the dialog box until you run into something else that fills it up. Therefore, we’ll have this line on screen for quite a while.
: I dove down the hole to see if it was a secret.
: Doing so reduces you to 1HP.
: We can push a box out of the way and talk to some lady who is bathing in a hot spring. I thought this might be a recovery point, but no, it’s just another Allanson brand NPC to make a dumb gag about a man in the women’s baths - the sign right by her says “Women’s bath, no men allowed”.
: Unlike the games it is clearly “inspired” from, you can’t find health pickups anywhere. They’re only in chests.
: I then bump into this guy, who hits Roy for a quarter of his HP.
: North of that guy are two chests with spiders in them. These damage you when you open them and then spawn spiders that can damage you if they touch you. You learn pretty quickly that Roy’s arrows are the best way to kill anything because the sword doesn’t have any kind of knockback.
: The second cave has two chests with money in it. I’m not entirely sure if money in this game is real or a gag or what - there’s no shops in Volta.
: The two chests on the left have hearts in them.
: He’s referring to the tile sticking up from the grass right in front of him that triggers the big, obvious arrow trap right next to it.
: Touching that path to the right will automatically put us on the world map again.
: Volta is the source of a convoluted quest chain which I did out of order. I’m going to put it in order so it makes sense.
: First, we need to head here, to the Pelican Bar.
: Not to be confused with this one, which just has a dumb NPC in it.
: Once you go into the Pelican Bar, you have to immediately try and leave. This triggers a flag for the bartender to give you a letter.
: God dammit. This is a direct ripoff of a similar thing in Earthbound, when you get the Trout Yogurt machine in Fourside from a deliveryman who just kind of doesn’t give a shit. Because, you know, asking the Allansons to come up with a single original idea is too much.
: The major breakthrough is that he’s going to kill himself. I’m not even joking.
: The only direction we can go other than back to Kalta is to this road block.
: Just off-screen from the worker is a building shaped like an octopus. This is the Kelby Water House.
: This is another hint as to what we’re supposed to do.
: Back in Volta, we have to push this woman all the way into a giant dead fish that’s just to the right of this screen.
: We need to push her to the Fish King, who for some reason is different than the giant fish that killed Roy earlier.
: We’ve done the stupid excuse for a puzzle, but now we have to do something even dumber: we have to find Two Brothers’ inventory system. The Allansons were far too good for a simple menu.
: The inventory system is a guy named Mark, who is a generic sprite in a field of generic sprites in the Pelican Bar.
: This stuffy city with like, three whole buildings in it.
Typo Counter: 4
: Let me show you how the inventory system works. As long as Mark is with us, we can press C and have Roy dive into his backpack.
: You can see the two stairs leading to the equipment rooms. Our items are in the top-right corner.
: Down here, I equip the Krobroc Blade. From what I understand, the Giant Foam Finger (another item in Kickstarter Hell) is very weak damage-wise. While it looks like the hitbox on this should be gigantic, it can only hit one enemy at a time even if multiple enemies are in it. It also doesn’t extend as far as the sprite does.
: This is what the finger looks like in action. The other two items are the dagger we started with and an axe that has a really short hitbox and is only questionably useful.
: And with that, Mark fucks off. This means we can’t change weapons, and the Krobroc Blade does have one downside in that it can’t cut grass. Oh well.
Typo Counter: 6
Typo Counter: 7
: That crack in the wall can be hit to make a ladder, but I had no real reason to do it. Also, I have no idea what exactly “walking sword combo” is. There’s a special move with the sword if you press both the sword and arrow buttons at the same time.
: We can then drop down further, into…
: Rats. Rats take three arrows to kill and are generally pretty annoying. It’s better to just treat this like a survival horror game and run past everything. It’s not like there’s EXP or levels or rewards for killing things. I guess it is a survival horror game and the horror is the writing and game design.
: Just take these lines in. This sounds like something you’d hear in Dirge of Cerberus, or like.. some teenager’s vampire fanfiction.
: This entire area down here is full of armored guys who deflect arrows. I made the mistake of fighting a bunch of them before I remembered this isn’t Persona 5.
: What the fuck IS this shit? Seriously, is Roy supposed to be an edgelord? He didn’t seem like it, but now he’s going full-on Shadow the Hedgehog. I mean, I know this is an Allanson Brothers game and we can’t expect things like consistent characterization.
: Anyway, once you leave the cave there’s another generic armor enemy. I’m not entirely sure you even have to fight him. One of my problems with this game now that combat is a thing is that I don’t think the Allansons understood why games like Zelda and Metroid have combat at all.
: The point of combat in those games is usually as a gating mechanism - they put in enemies that are difficult to beat without having certain items. If you’re running into enemies you can’t beat, that’s signposting to go find an item that will let you beat them. You see this a lot in Super Metroid speedruns, because a lot of Super Metroid speedrunning (especially in low% categories) is bypassing enemies you’re supposed to have super missiles and power bombs for.
: Here’s an arrow switch. This is another mechanic where I’m not entirely sure why it exists: it’s not a gate because we have arrows equipped by default. The only way I could ever see this being a thing is if we go into a dungeon and lose our arrows for some reason… but then why show them off this early?
: North of that room is a cave with an axe in it. Even though it says we “equipped” the axe, it doesn’t actually equip the axe. I’m not even certain that this is a different weapon than the axe we saw in the weapons room.
: Outside are some more chests with money and a broken glass idol. I have no idea what they do, because our ability to access Roy’s inventory is nonexistent right now.
: There’s a two-way path with an armor guy in it. We want to take the one on the left - the one on the right just leads to a health drop.
: This is where you first have to break a wall to make a ladder - there’s no signposting for this anywhere. I honestly assumed you had to find bombs or something to blow the wall up, but no, you just attack it.
: Once you start moving to the left, hordes of enemies start spawning. Bivare will throw knives (you can see one next to Roy’s weapon) for minimal damage. There’s no point fighting - just keep moving.
: Six or seven screens of enemies later, we reach a ladder.
Typo Counter: 8
: Next time, we’ll witness Bivare’s master plan and set sail for adventure, and by adventure I mean more screens full of enemies we have no reason to fight.