Click Here for Update 7
: I stopped recording after the gator bit because I assumed this was another dungeon. It’s actually not. Hilariously, when I loaded the game, Mark was just kinda here even though we left him at the start of the swamp.
: “At last… I have found another…”
: “Never forget… I have entrusted you with this task…”
: We then have to go back through Adventure Road, because of course we do. I’ll just cut it out, but what you do if you somehow get a copy of this game is head north and there’s signs marking an exit to town.
: You then just drop down and you’re back at the start.
: Halfway through recording this update, I found out that someone (probably one of the Allansons, because we know they did this with the third ending in YIIK) put out a full guide and a world map for this game on Gamefaqs. It contains minutiae that I think only the Allansons would know… like this place.
: This place is in Adventure Road. You go down the cliffside and then head Southwest for a while until you can go north to here.
: The Blue Shrine is completely pointless.
: In one of the side rooms is a shield. You’d think this would be useful. It’s not. The shield works exactly like it does in the 2D Zelda games: if a projectile hits you and you’re standing still, the shield absorbs the projectile. It breaks after three hits.
: There’s also a boss here. There is no fucking point in fighting this boss, and it’s very hard to do anyway.
: Basically, the boss jumps around the arena diagonally. This makes him very, very hard to hit with how broken the hit detection is. He also hits for like, a third of Roy’s HP.
: Naturally, I die and go to the Game Over Zone. There’s a room through a blue warp that brings you to Palma, who was the dead lady we saw earlier.
: Going down this hole will dump you back in Adventure Road.
: I go and kill Wild Cat just because I can.
: Fuck you, Brian Allanson.
: On the way out, the shield breaks. There is a weapon we missed in the swamp, along with an item for a sidequest. The sidequest is broken and has to be save edited to work.
: Outside, Palma’s house opens up as a new location. There is no point going in there, it’s just a room full of enemies and a couple of chests with money in them.
: The mermaid line just kind of comes out of nowhere. There is no mermaid here.
: She’ll also open a cave behind her house, but again, there’s nothing in there but trash.
: I also tried to go get the weapon we missed in the swamp. It’s a spear, but for some reason I can’t pick it up. For reference, it’s in the cave that unlocked once we teamed up with Voinier, right before where we jumped into the hole. You just take the exit on the left instead of the one on the right.
: Fortunately, someone on the Steam discussion boards posted their save file, and I was able to just edit the spear in.
: I also found the sidequest item while I was at it, just because I could. It’s in this cave, which is in the swamp if you keep going to the right of where we first met Voinier there.
: The Animal Capsule is in the Northwest corner.
: I got real fucking confused as to what exactly I was supposed to do, because I recorded this part before I found the guide. There’s no option to show Professor Ulu the shard, and there’s no new cutscene from sleeping at the Inn. As it turns out, what you have to do is die.
: Not gonna lie, getting some real YIIK vibes from this.
: “…This is something I do not understand myself. Who are you?”
: We are then shunted into the regular Game Over Zone.
: There’s a guy here who tells us to go check out Fishington. Do not check out Fishington. We will, and there is nothing there but an unintentionally hilarious softlock.
: We can also trade the book we picked up for a napkin. I don’t know what this does or who to give it to.
: After going back through the North Passage that we took to get to the excavation site, we can go east of Egg Harbor to reach Fishington.
: There’s also the Western Hills, which is our real destination…
: And a shop up here.
: Most of the weapons here suck. From left to right: Razor Axe, Hook Flail, Swift Dagger and Cheap Boomerang. The Cheap Boomerang is a cruel joke and none of the other weapons can cut grass… except the Swift Dagger, which is actually a decent pickup because it has the least broken hitboxes of any weapon thus far.
: When you first equip the boomerang, you can throw it. It goes a few tiles and then drops to the ground. It doesn’t return to you: you have to manually pick it up (and yes, it can get stuck in walls so you can’t pick it up) and until you do, you’re stuck with Roy’s default dagger.
: Let’s do Fishington quick. Fishington has two buildings: this one and the Mayor’s Office. The Mayor’s Office is a dumb dialog loop. This one, though…
: Then the game softlocks. This feels like something Roberta Williams would’ve done in King’s Quest.
SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 5
: Let’s just go to the Western Hills.
: There’s a bunch of NPCs here who don’t do anything.
: I spent like 40 minutes wandering around this giant empty shithole of an area. At one point, I thought I had somehow come to the wrong place and was supposed to, I dunno, go somewhere else. You can actually see where progress is on this screen: it’s the cave entrance right by the weird lizard house.
: The lizard house is full of enemies and is kinda pointless. It has some weapons in it, though.
: Straight back, behind a mermaid who makes a dumb joke about where the hearts in the grass come from (“they come from small animals in the grass”) is a whip. The whip is actually a pretty solid weapon, but is useless because it can’t cut grass or break rocks: both of these are things we need to be able to do and can softlock you if you can’t.
TYPO COUNTER: 23
: I actually tried the “short thick sword” for a bit. It has broken hitboxes, so into the pile it goes.
: You see that rock there? Never destroy that rock. If you do, it’s a long journey back. Let’s just pretend I didn’t go through any of that shit and go into the cave, shall we?
: There’s a handful of skeletons in here but we’re not going to bother fighting them.
: Tip Top Peaks is heavily “inspired” by that one mountain area in Link’s Awakening.
: The first room in here is full of those laser eye things. They nearly took me from full health to zero before I even got in the room, so I just let Mark kill them. Mark will attack things if they get close enough.
: I managed to escape with just a tiny bit of health left.
: You would think this pillar would be part of a puzzle or something, but it’s not.
: Down the stairs is another floor of laser enemies. What I could’ve done is used the spear - it has a long reach and relatively working hitboxes but can’t cut grass.
: Instead, I just took some hits and ran for it.
: Time for a stupid puzzle.
: “Yeah… no problem!”
: “I have an idea… I will help you, and you can just owe me later? How about it. I help you, you help me?”
: Is this supposed to be the villain, or Mr. Dink from Doug?
: Voinier drops an arrow statue we can use to save this guy.
: You have to throw him an arrow, and then warp to the statue.
: And now we can go on to our real target, Birds Road.
: Birds Road is where the combat in this game really starts to suck.
: This is where the game introduces assassins. They’re not hard, it’s just that they out-range most of your weapons that can reliably hit.
: In the corner, we find throwing stars. They’re a limited ammo replacement for the arrows, and as far as I can tell do the same damage but in a spread shot rather than a single one.
: See that statue with the open mouth? Those shoot a wave of fireballs at you if you get near them. Roy doesn’t move fast enough to dodge them, and because of where it’s set to trigger you’re almost guaranteed to get hit by it.
: For some reason, when I killed these assassins it briefly flashed to this screen.
: The shield here can be obtained by kicking a bomb down to it and blowing the boulder up. I don’t know why I bothered to do this - it takes forever to kick the bomb down there.
: You have to go past a couple of these and I couldn’t get the shield to work.
: That lizard-shaped house to the right has a room full of chests. Most of it’s worthless garbage, but the bottom-right one has the Rifle… which is actually a quest item and not a weapon.
: To the north-west is the bird temple… which is shaped like a lizard and shares none of the weird totem pole kind of designs we’ve seen coming up here.
: Actually… shouldn’t this be kinda hard? Roy’s only seen her in the Game Over Zone, where she’s purple - but this world has no words for color. I’m just imagining him going “Uh, she’s a bird.”
: This dungeon is easily the most broken thing we’ve run into thus far. To open that door on the left, we need to hit this switch. This should be simple - just use an arrow, right? The problem is that the arrows won’t shoot upward for some reason. They don’t even come out of Roy’s sprite - he’ll make the throwing motion but it won’t do anything.
: What I had to do was break out the spear, which is just long enough to hit the switch. I have no idea what you’d do if you were playing this in 2013 and missed the spear but also didn’t know about the Kickstarter code thing for the giant foam finger, the only other weapon that can reach the switch. As such, I’m going to label this a game-breaking bug.
GAME-BREAKING BUGS: 2
: The next room has a statue in it.
: There’s a bomb just south of it that you can’t see from the entrance because of the arbitrary darkness mechanic.
: The floor switches in the next room cause the room to light up if you step on them. There’s a switch here that opens another door.
: This room is… honestly kind of dumb. If you stand on those white squares on the floor, it lights up the room so you can see the path, which is otherwise invisible. The light stays for a fraction of a second after you leave the button.
: It’s the other half of this room that’s the real dumb part. See those cracked walls? We can attack those.
: This statue leads to the final area of the dungeon. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to kick the bomb we saw down the stairs up here, right?
: Wrong. The Allansons handled this in the worst possible way - what happens is that if you try to kick a bomb up there, there’s an invisible wall at the base of the stairs that causes the bomb to slide underneath them - this is why it’s not visible in this shot. Either that, or the game just kind of selectively broke when I tried to kick a bomb up there.
: And so naturally, you’d assume we need some kind of item to break the statue, right? Wrong again. You’re supposed to kick the bomb up there, but we haven’t reached the event flag to give the stars collision.
: Instead, we need to drop down to another area, because that makes sense somehow.
: Off to the right of that area is where Ceila is. This is why I didn’t edit in infinite HP for Roy, because it will actually softlock the game here if you try that. Hell, the game almost softlocked with the regular amount of HP.
: It’s not at all obvious, but what we have to do is sit on one of the two mats next to her and press down.
: At this point, the game takes our controls away, and I was very afraid I had run into a softlock… or worse. No, that’s how this is supposed to go.
: A good ten or fifteen seconds after it takes control away, the game starts doing damage to Roy in a loop until he dies, because simply having a warp to the Game Over Zone wasn’t good enough.
: “How is this possible?”
: “I will show you the way, but you must walk.”
: The text being fucked up here is intentional… I think. There was a line from Roy that was on screen for a couple of frames where he asks what she’s saying.
: Ceila’s gimmick is that she can fly Roy over small gaps.
: “Now, meditate on a point and let an arrow fly!”
: If you can barely see the arrow, you’re not alone.
: “Share with me your wisdom.”
: “You are on a dangerous path Roy Guarder.”
: “!.. I spoke to you once, as if in a dream… but I just saw you, alive on Earth… how can --”
: “For a man of such self-assuming intellect, you do resort to crude methods… I do not need to destroy myself to come to this place.”
: “There exist other ways… in the temple, I meditate throughout the day, every day… I have done this since I was little. In that time I have never seen one like you…”
: I immediately decide that Roy is now horny for this bird furry because that’s exactly what Andrew Allanson would want.
: “Well… I guess I have that effect on people.”
: “You came to this place in a way many do, that is nothing new. Then you left, that is also nothing new. They all leave eventually…”
: “Then I saw it. You… returned. I wasn’t sure at first. Your people all look similar in my eyes. But then I saw you again… and this time you led another back with you.”
: I guess her entire job is just meditating herself into what’s apparently the waiting room for the afterlife so she can… uh…
: “You were not meditating, this I could see… no, you were dying – did die… a lot… on purpose I suspect a few times.”
: “Listen…”
: “No! YOU LISTEN! I don’t know why you continue to do this, or why it is allowed to continue.”
: So yeah, I guess her job is just to be a ghost cop or some shit. It makes no sense.
: “But you need to stop now. I will teach you the ways of the spirit. The techniques of my people will let you [visit this place without death].”
: “That sounds less… painful…”
: “We did it a moment ago… it was no doubt less painful than what you are used to…”
: “Do not trick yourself into thinking you can ever stay away from this place… once you have seen it, you will be forever drawn to this place…”
: I mean, you could’ve just said “forever drawn here” since the subject is kind of implied but whatever.
: “…”
: “Finish my trial with me… and I will teach you the ways of my people…”
: “… But didn’t we just…”
: “I helped you… you are weak in spirit, and could not do it alone.”
: “…Right…”
: “My father will [test your spirit]. I was tasked with this as part of my own trial.”
: “Of course I will!”
: “First I must complete my trial, and you can help with that.”
: “Of course!”
: Here, I get really, really fucking confused. I assumed that you couldn’t bomb that statue from earlier, so therefore her father must be somewhere else.
: Nope! Talking to Ceila removes the invisible anti-bomb wall.
: We can then grab the Wing Key… except we haven’t seen any locked doors. I knew where they were because I kept wandering around looking for her father, but they’re in a place you actually can’t reach or even see without Ceila.
: The locks are in an area across a gap from the dungeon entrance.
: “It is a trial. When the [chieftain] is locked away in the shrine… a temple servent (sic) must come here and do… a task to open the door.”
TYPO COUNTER: 24
: “What do you mean ‘task’?”
: “I would not tell an outsider even if I knew… It has not been done for a hundred years! But, by listening to the [whispers of the spirits] we can do it.”
: I… don’t think I get it. So you want to show Roy this ritual thing, and to do that he has to complete your quest or whatever, but you can’t let him see the quest. How does any of this make sense?
: “I see. Just have faith…”
: “This is a trial for you as well as for me.”
: You just said it wasn’t! You just said he couldn’t know of the trial or whatever because he’s an outsider! Make up your fucking mind!
: Now we have to find a saber.
: The saber is on a separate platform south of the one with the statues on it.
: I go back and hit the statue, and then go for the door.
TYPO COUNTER: 25
: Except it won’t open. This is because there’s actually three statues. They’re pretty easy to find and all do the same thing the first one did.
: Oh, you thought this was the boss? Hahaha no.
: This brings us to a switch that opens…
: A door right above that first switch at the dungeon entrance! Time for more backtracking. Don’t you just love backtracking?
: And now we’re at the boss.
: “Father - I mean Great Chieftain - I have found the spirit walker… he has agreed to learn from us.”
: “No Great Chieftain… he found his way here without my aid… but he has no wings, so I gave him aid… as was a part of my trial.”
: “His name is Roy… Roy Guarder… sir.”
: “He… does not possess the same… abilities… as his friend.”
: We then enter into a fight with the bird chief. He is a very broken boss and I’m going to have to cheat to get around him.
: As a boss, the bird chief is a direct ripoff of Agnahim from Link to the Past. He teleports around, shoots fireballs, and also has a lightning attack that is kind of hard to avoid if you’re trying to hit him.
: The boss basically does not take damage from weapons - he has a shitload of HP. What you’re supposed to do is reflect his fireballs, but this doesn’t work for a multitude of reasons.
: I couldn’t get a good shot of it, but what he does is fires his fireballs in one of two patterns: either a + shape or an X. He tends to prefer the X shape, which is an issue because they tend to either go into walls before you can hit them back or bump into the statues.
: His lightning also takes off quite a bit of Roy’s health bar. Here’s the real kicker, though.
SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 6
: If you die during the fight and come back down from the Game Over Zone, the game softlocks. This fight is a fucking nightmare.
: With the power of sex and weed, I get a shot of his fireball attack. You can see that three of them went into walls. There’s also a decent chance that he teleports away before the fireball hits.
: I should also mention I had to die once before the full 69,420 HP kicked in, but it did.
: Once his HP gets to about half, he turns into… a generic giant enemy that can be hit directly with Roy’s sword for damage.
: He likes to spam lightning in this form, but with 69,420 HP this isn’t really a concern.
: That fight was complete bullshit. Ordinarily, I’d transcribe the next part, but I want you to experience the Two Brothers ™ experience of sitting through like fifty text boxes.
TYPO COUNTER: 26
: The dialog just kind of cuts off here. This isn’t something I did.
: And now that’s three colors out of… seven? Probably seven.
TYPO COUNTER: 27
: What is this guy, Senator Armstrong?
: “I do.”