How Many Brothers Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb? Let's Dunk on Two Brothers Until It Breaks

[drcakey]

Something a little strange happened while I was reading this update.

@Timrod

Typo Counter: 75 (Failed to capitalize after a full stop)

I compared screencaps and that is definitely a comma, not a period. But it should be a period, so the typo stands.

After this moment, a power I’ve long kept sealed in the depths of my heart began to stir. A power that should have never been awakened…

@Mermaiden

Our Queen has heard tale of you

This is an eggcorn. The phrase is “heard tell”.

@Mermaid Queen

Pretty impressive right?

There should be a comma before ‘right’.

@Mermaid Queen

Now, even though I am the all powerful Mermaid Queen…

‘All-powerful’ needs a hyphen.

@Mermaid Queen

Good luck brave human!

Comma before brave.

@Mermaiden Yendi

Be carefull!

‘Careful’ has one L!

@ALLCAPS NARRATOR

HE HAD PLANNED TO MEET WITH BIVARE ON THE 19TH OF SEPTEMBER WHICH WAS ONLY SIX DAYS AWAY.

“Which was only six days away” needs to be set off with a comma.

At this point, I return my katana to its sheath and all the sentences, um…explode in a shower of blood or something.

There’s room for debate with some of the comma additions. But if I were editing anybody’s work (I’m not an editor), I would mark all of these as errors.

[LaZodiac]

I like how the game teased us with at least two Jabu Jabu Belly style dungeons, in a game where every single building is some kind of animal, only to pull the rug out from our feet like twice. And then to do it actually, and make a horrible and kinda gross looking area that has, coincidentally, is almost identical to the Jabu Jabu Belly dungeon in Ocarina of Ages, completely with side view swimming.

Oh did I say like I meant burn everything with fire.

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

I like how the game teased us with at least two Jabu Jabu Belly style dungeons, in a game where every single building is some kind of animal, only to pull the rug out from our feet like twice. And then to do it actually, and make a horrible and kinda gross looking area that has, coincidentally, is almost identical to the Jabu Jabu Belly dungeon in Ocarina of Ages, completely with side view swimming.

Oh did I say like I meant burn everything with fire .

I’ve never actually played Oracle of Ages/Seasons past the first couple of minutes. I just found them kinda hard to get into. It does not at all surprise me that they ripped that off though, and I’m willing to bet that it has better swimming controls. I’m trying to remember if Link’s Awakening ever had swimming and the answer escapes me at the moment.

@drcakey

There’s room for debate with some of the comma additions. But if I were editing anybody’s work (I’m not an editor), I would mark all of these as errors.

At one point, I was going to count them. Then I realized that if I did that, the typo counter would be well into the four-digit range by this point; the LP would be significantly longer as a result and would require a lot more explanation as to exactly what all the errors are (as otherwise you’d just see the typo counter go up three or four times per line).

The fun part is that for YIIK, the Allansons claimed they had a professional look over the script for corrections… but YIIK was pretty much just as poorly formatted and typo-ridden as Two Brothers was.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

I’ve never actually played Oracle of Ages/Seasons past the first couple of minutes. I just found them kinda hard to get into. It does not at all surprise me that they ripped that off though, and I’m willing to bet that it has better swimming controls. I’m trying to remember if Link’s Awakening ever had swimming and the answer escapes me at the moment.

That’s fair. Also yeah Awakening did have the occasional swimming section like that. It wasn’t great, but it was sure as shit better than this. And speaking of rip offs- the entire fishing thing is definitely lifted from Link’s Awakening as well.

[Timrod]

: So, uh… hi everyone! I’m busy working on the next update, I swear, but I wanted to share this with all of you.

: I’m a big fan of NASA - the North American Speedrun Assembly - and at one point during a casual marathon they had a spot open up so I offered to see how fast I could softlock Two Brothers.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 10

: I managed to softlock it in ten minutes using what I believe to be a frame-perfect trick: by giving the water lady near the start of the game to the fish and attacking him on the same frame, it causes the game to trigger a dialog during an animation and softlocks the game.

: I had only run this once, doing the save-breaking permafuck with Bivare in Marins Bay (which we saw in the update titled “Save-Breaking Permafuck”) and this happened in 10 minutes. I have a video, as soon as it’s uploaded to Youtube I will post it.

: I’d like to thank Brian Allanson for making this possible, and my godawful squeaky keyboard for hitting X on exactly the right frame. Next update as soon as I finish recording it.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 12

: Well, shit. Now we’re Bivare again.

: We can’t go anywhere, so the only thing we can do is go up to Ceila there.

: What the fuck kind of punctuation abuse is that?

: We then have to fight off a bunch of “Imp Buffs”, whatever the fuck that means.

: “Yes, thank you. You look so familiar. Are you a Guarder?”

: “Indeed. Bivare Guarder. Do you know my brother Roy?”

Typo Counter: 86 (Missed another one last update, plus this one)

: “I need to ask, where did you get this marvelous piece of color?”

: “This is the sacred treasure of my people. As part of a pilgrimage, I am taking it to see the world. My father did the same, many years ago, and his father before him.”

: “And that’s where you met my brother…”

: “Your brother came and helped me on my journey to find it in our temple. I promised him I’d bring it to him should he ever find a need for it.”

: Christ, this grammar. This seriously reads like something someone ran through a machine translator multiple times, then back to English.

: “Do your people know anything about the origins of this object?”

: “My people have achieved a strong harmony with nature… when we put ourselves in to a deep meditation we can see beyond. Beyond this world, and into the next.”

Typo Counter: 87 (“Into” is one word)

: “My ancestor stayed focused too long, and tried to steal this object. His body returned with it, but not his soul.”

: “…interesting story. I had my own encounter with the after-life.”

: “Your brother told me how you attempted to end your own life to see it. Such a crude method of seeing the beyond.”

: This is the third fucking time he’s told us about it, and we saw it the first time!

: “The things you do for science… you know. That actually wasn’t my first encounter with the after-life. Before I had been too afraid to tell Roy, or anyone else for that matter…”

: “I am willing to listen if you’d like to tell me. Traveling to the beyond is a life changing experience.”

: I… this should absolutely be added to the typo counter, but there’s so many levels of wrong with these two lines that I’m not entirely sure how.

: Let’s just do two: one for the random capitalization on “were” and one for the hyphen.

Typo Counter: 89

: This should also be on the counter, but there’s nothing spelled incorrectly. It’s just… off.

: “I took one, while Roy and Jane took the other.”

: I really, really don’t get it. Is there more than one “cursed land”? Where’s the other one?

: “It would have been wise for you to take a traveling partner in to those lands. But of course, that is now irrelevant.”

Typo Counter: 90 (INTO IS ONE FUCKING WORD!)

: I’m starting to realize it would’ve been easier to count the lines that don’t have something horribly wrong with them.

: “While exploring, I encountered a strange tiny box.”

Typo Counter: 91 (Where’s the fucking period, Allanson?)

: “Strange box?”

Typo Counter: 92 (It’s SCALE model, you fuckwit!)

Typo Counter: 93

: I don’t fucking get it! Was there a man in the box? Why didn’t you mention that there was a man in the box? What the fuck is even going on?

Typo Counter: 94 (Into. One fucking word!)

: “The guy took his spear, and rammed it through my back. That’s where I got this. This spear killed me. I was always a sword guy myself, but I lost mine in the Cursed Lands.”

: Nothing about this fucking story makes any goddamn sense!

: “What a strange and interesting experience. How did you return?”

: “I can’t remember. I remember faceless people around me… they patched me up. They told me I wasn’t meant to be one of them…and then I woke up, back in the Cursed Lands.”

: “I wandered and finally found my way out. People had come to look for me. They told me Jane was dead and Roy was badly injured…”

: “Jane… died? Your brother didn’t tell me of his wife’s death. …I see now. I understand his quest.”

: Really? Because I sure as hell don’t. Let me just ask you something. What was the entire point of Jane’s death? What did it add to the plot, apart from one dream sequence?

: “Where are you heading, Bivare Guarder?”

: “I think I located a Color Shard. Want to come along?”

: This is another problem I have with this game’s writing. Half the time, they’re called “Spectrum Shards”, the other half “Color Shards”. The game also has some five different ways of spelling “afterlife”.

: “I see no reason not to. I am Ceila by the way.”

: “Nice to meet you.”

Typo Counter: 95 (Otherworldly. It has two L’s.)

Typo Counter: 96 (2x Typo Combo!)

: I quit out of the game after entering the Walrus, because I had to attend to some stuff mid-recording. When I came back, I got this (thankfully not game-breaking) bug where Roy’s sprite is randomly overlaid onto Bivare’s.

: There’s only one exit out of this room, to the left.

: We’ve got a bunch of switches, but no clear idea as to what we’re supposed to do with them. This is a stupid reference to the “color puzzle” in the Gameboy Color version of Link’s Awakening.

: The tablet that tells us what we’re supposed to do is down a ladder for some reason instead of being, I dunno, anywhere near the puzzle itself.

: I go through and hit all the red switches like it says, and then hit the switch at the top… only the game tells me I’m wrong for some reason. This is because like the Fish Dungeon puzzles, this one is very broken.

: I couldn’t really get a screenshot of it without fucking it up, but here’s the deal with this puzzle. For some reason, the switches here can activate under two conditions: the first being that Bivare gets close enough to them and the second being that Bivare’s weapon makes contact with it. These two states are not mutually exclusive - you can have the switch toggle twice by meeting both conditions.

: Instead of designing the puzzle so that it recognizes you hitting the red switches, it actually has all the switches in a specific state: two are in the “on” position and one is in the “off” position. If you hit the switch twice, which is easy to do if you don’t realize that these switches work differently than EVERY OTHER SWITCH IN THE GAME, that fucks the puzzle up because the game is looking for the switches to be in a single, specific state. In this case, that state is the top one being “off” and the bottom two being “on”, which is achieved by hitting each switch once.

: This means that if the puzzle gets fucked up because you didn’t realize how easy it is to hit them twice, you’re essentially softlocked unless you took pictures or a video of the initial state the switches were in, because their positions don’t reset on failure. I’m definitely counting it as a softlock.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 9

: This puzzle should’ve been simple, provided the switches had a clear on/off state and all started in the same state… and reset if you leave and come back to the room.

: Thankfully, the game will reset the room if you load a save. It took me four reloads to realize that I was hitting the switches twice.

: The puzzle opens a new path on the right side of the first room.

: I thought this platform was a softlock, but it’s not. My thought was “Oh, you have to move the statues to the switch in the middle to open a bridge” and for some reason, Bivare was throwing his knives backwards.

: The answer is much dumber than that. You have to destroy this pillar - not for any particular reason, but because it’s hiding the one-pixel space we need to be in.

: Yes, the answer is that Ceila can fly you over to the next platform, but for some reason she’ll only do it if you stand on the exact pixel where that pillar was and hold left. The rest of the platform? No dice.

: There’s a chest here with a “Giants Sword” (which I assume is a sword with either the New York or San Francisco Giants logo on it and not a typo) in it. It’s one of those sidequest collectibles.

Typo Counter: 97 (Who am I kidding? It’s a fucking typo.)

: The top of the ladder has a locked door with no key. So what are you supposed to do?

: There’s a switch far enough off-screen that you can’t see it without standing in front of this mirror.

: We can’t actually do anything about the medusa head, so it just kind of turns Bivare to stone.

: Now that we’re Roy again, we get to backtrack through the entire opening part of the game. Hooray.

: Remember when I started this LP? When we all thought “There’s no way this game could be THAT much worse than YIIK”?

: “I haven’t seen you in forever. I’m so glad to see you’re safe.”

: “It’s good to see you too!”

: I like how I found a photo of Sylvia Plath that looks like she’s looking at Roy Rogers with an air of disgust. I can only imagine the poem she’d write if she was ever subjected to this game.

: “How’s Bivare?”

: “He’s great last I saw him. He went off to see you-know-who…”

: “And you let him go…? That poor girl has been nothing but trouble in his life… ever since she ran off and joined that cult.”

: “Ah… I probably should’ve stopped him.”

: “Nothing you can do now…”

: “How much trouble can he get into anyway…? He’s with an ascetic…”

: “She wasn’t always!”

Typo Counter: 98

: “Enough about him. How have you been?”

: “Can’t really complain… working. I’m hoping to take some time off and travel a bit.”

: “I’d highly suggest it.”

: I mean, who knows, maybe her wife can die and then she can join the “my entire character is that my wife is dead” club.

: “Of course you would. Roy Guarder great explorer!”

Typo Counter: 99

: I mean, I HOPE that’s a typo and she’s not a caveman or something.

Typo Counter: 100 (It’s ROMANTICIZE, dipshit! With a Z!)

: Oh look, we’ve hit our 100th typo!

: “From what I read in the journal you left you’ve been doing some pretty… how do I put it …”

: “Crazy science?”

: “Exactly… that’s how I’d label it. Did you find them? The colors I mean.”

: “I did indeed. I’ll show them to you tonight.”

Typo Counter: 101

: Is this a fucking game script, or an early 2000s AIM chat log?

: “I’ve been great. I’ve found a lot of purpose from this research. Being out there and exploring really gives you time to think about what’s important.”

: I want you to imagine something for me. I want you to imagine that this game has voiceovers, and that the VO for Roy is Tommy Wiseau.

: Seriously this entire script feels like cut content from The Room. It makes me wonder if Andrew Allanson was made in the same factory as David Cage.

: “And what’s important?”

: “The people I have in my life… people who are still around.”

: Why does she fucking talk in emoticons? Why? What’s the fucking reason for it?

: “It’s getting late. I should turn in… my old room still available?”

: “Yeah, no one has touched it… but…”

: “No…”

: And now we’re Ceila. We have to fly to Kalta, because cutscenes are beyond Brian Allanson’s coding ability. Shout-out to the 10 minute softlock the game % run.

: “Ciela, is that you? What are you doing here!?”

: “Roy! You must come with me quickly! It is about your brother!”

: “My brother? How do you know my brother?!”

: “Never mind that! He is in grave danger!”

: “Wait!!”

: Guess what we get to go through… again… again…

: After going through basically the entire game again (minus the dungeons) we arrive at another bridge.

: We couldn’t go through here before because the bridge is out, but Ceila can just fly us across.

: Guess what we get to do again? Only this time, the signposting is COMPLETELY FUCKING BROKEN.

: See this? The sign hasn’t changed since we were here as Bivare - and logically, the puzzle should still be the same - hit the red switches and then hit the one at the top… only if you do this, it won’t work.

: To progress, you have to hit the grey switches as well. This is never said anywhere and I have zero idea how the guide author figured it out, unless the guide author is actually Brian Allanson… or they decompiled the game.

: We go through the exact same place we went through with Bivare, only now there’s this on top of a pillar.

: Is the knife fragile, or the giant, or both?

: The knife breaks after five or so swings, even if it doesn’t hit anything.

: By the way, looking at Bivare breaks the knife, because the game counts progressing through dialog boxes as swinging it. I had to get yet another one, because we need to use it to break those statues.

: Now we’re in a battle with the medusa head. This is the worst fucking fight in the entire game - and I count the bird king or whatever in that.

: What you have to do is lead the head to a mirror (it moves slowly but can go through geometry) and then it smashes the mirror and takes damage.

: The fun part is that sometimes (read: about 75% of the time) the medusa head will smash the mirror and then appear right on top of Roy. Touching it is an insta-kill.

Typo Counter: 102 (That typo wasn’t even there the first time! How do you even fuck that up!?)

: This is the last mirror I knew of - it’s right near the entrance room. I figured “Oh, okay, this is the last mirror and then the boss dies”. I was so very, very wrong.

: If you’ll remember, the last time we came through here there were arrow statues we couldn’t use - this is how Roy gets past all the spots where Bivare needed Ciela. She’s not here for some reason.

: What we have to do, against all logic, is hit this statue here.

: This pushes it off-screen to a place you can’t even see, and you can then shoot it to warp to a new area.

: This area is a giant fucking maze.

: The first mirror is just north of that last screenshot. I accidentally got this one LAST, not knowing it was there.

: There’s another right here, which is just to the left.

: What I didn’t show here is that there’s multiple dead ends. The medusa head will spawn in the doorway of the room you’re in about two seconds after Roy gets there. This means that it’s possible to get stuck in a death loop (which somehow is neither a softlock nor a save-fuck) until you can wiggle out of it.

: There’s a room where we can pick up a new shield and then we have to head all the way back to Bivare.

Typo Counter: 103

: “I figured that out… I was worried about you.”

: “-Wait. Let me guess.”

Typo Counter: 105 (After all. Two words. Also, what the shit. “I was stone”? What the fuck kind of sentence is that?)

: “I kicked ass and took names.”

: “Alright, now that that is out of the way, let’s go claim our prize!”

: “We can’t yet. I haven’t found the key.”

: “You mean this key?”

: “Let’s just get out of here before another Gorgon shows up…”

: We get taken to a room with two skeletons that have bombs in them, and have to dodge their explosions.

: Except the only thing here is Roy telling us to go back.

: This boss fight is as bad as the bird king, only it’s cheeseable by exploiting the AI.

: Normally, the “walrus” flies around faster than Roy walks and does ridiculous contact damage - one hit is like half of Roy’s HP.

: When you hit her enough, she flies down into the center of the arena and you can hit her for actual damage. The walrus has a metric shitload of HP and this fight takes forever.

: The trick is to stand down here by the door and shoot arrows upward. The boss won’t come down this far, especially if it gets hit.

: “Indeed. Why are you testing me?”

: “My thoughts exactly… this entire experience has been one trial.”

: God the writing is so fucking bad.

: “What are we trying to prove?”

: “I have a theory about you. One that I believe I can now prove.”

: “And what is that theory?”

: “For a man to die, and rise from the dead… he must surely be chosen.”

: Oh fuck you that’s almost a direct ripoff of Dark Souls!

: “But chosen by who…? I couldn’t say before. The ability to cross the boundaries of life itself is unique indeed…”

Typo Counter: 106

: “What made you worthy of it, and at what cost?”

: “I’m guessing I’m being asked to believe in pre-destination now AS WELL as an after-life?”

: “You use such trivial expressions to speak about something you don’t understand. The wise Guarder brothers… so brilliant… and yet so lost…”

: “Do you believe something gave me this ability to cross between life and death?”

: “I can’t say. There is no way to know. But surely it is an ability you have used for good. It could be easily abused…”

: How, exactly?

: “I haven’t abused it… and you seem to know this.”

Typo Counter: 107

: “You are good at heart, and I see no reason to not let you continue your quest.”

: What the fuck? Is this even English? “You seem full of traps” sounds like something you’d read in a machine translation.

: “What are you…?”

: All this broken English makes me think that the Allansons are illiterate and they just fed a bunch of scribbles into an OCR program.

: “The great Gator Lord, the true King Fish, and some others.”

: “I don’t believe I’ve encountered others.”

: “That is grave news indeed… I wonder what fate befell them.”

: “Can you explain to me where you come from?”

: “I can indeed. I came here to this Earth many ages ago. We came to create it… the Gator Lord brought life to all reptilian beings… the King Fish gave life to the Fish Men, and eventually your kind.”

: Sure is Shadow over Innsmouth around here.

: “The Eagle Overseer watched the skies… and I held it all together on a physical level.”

: “Ourselves, along with seen guardians, protected this planet and made sure it grew.”

: “What of the [Color Shards]? What are they?”

: “Before I tell you this… I must ask the prupose of the question.”

Typo Counter: 108

: “And what will come of them then?”

: “We will study them, and do no harm to them.”

: “Very well… the [Spectrum Shards] are the result of the creation of this planet. In our world, they are very powerful… on this planet, they are used to craft the very things that make up life and matter. Without them, no life would exist.”

: That’s great but uh… what do the color shards do?

: “What would happen to our planet if they were destroyed?”

: “Nothing now. They serve no purpose anymore… they are retired you could say.”

: “I met a being with wings… he told me to keep them safe.”

: “Did you really? Curious… I see no reason for this to be so… however, I would listen to him… perhaps he knows more about them than I do.”

: That’s a fucking incredible pivot from “Oh yeah, the color shards make up all life and matter” to “They don’t do anything” to “I don’t really know what they do”.

: “Where did you come from…?”

: “Isn’t it obvious? The ‘after-life’ as you call it. Or rather, the previous-life… as this is the after-life to me.”

: “Alas… there are some secrets even I can’t know. Leave now Guarder brothers… tell the world of what you’ve learned. Just know that it won’t be met with praise. But before you leave… I have one more shard to give you…”

: The walrus turns into a color shard, which… wasn’t she the thing holding reality together?

: “Sounds good to me!”

: “This is the whole spectrum, right?”

: “Yes, I believe so.”

: “I’m docked just south of here. I’ll go prepare the ship. Roy, come and find me when you are ready!”

Typo Counter: 109 (More typos than characters in Suikoden!)

Typo Counter: 110 (2x Typo combo!)

: Oh look, it’s a badly done version of the opening cutscene to Link’s Awakening. Who ever would’ve guessed the Allansons would do something like that?

: Next time, a beloved party member will die. We’ll also probably run into more typos.

[SpammyV]

I am the egg man.
They are the egg man.
I am the SNES JRPG sprite of an anime lady boss.
Coo coo kachoo.

[LaZodiac]

This game is genuinely miserable and has lost track of what tenuous threads it had.

Also every time they call them Spectrum Shards I grow more and more certain they’re gonna make an autism joke.

[CommanderKeene]

@Timrod

Typo Counter: 91 (Where’s the fucking period, Allanson?)

It’s actually on the next line. Still a typo, I think, but it’s there.

@Timrod

This is starting to look a bit like a Game Boy palette limited Undersea Palace from Chrono Trigger.

[drcakey]

@Timrod

“You seem full of traps” sounds like something you’d read in a machine translation.

ROY: I suppose I should be thankful… you seem full of traps.
WALRUS: Mr. Speaker, I am for the big. Do not want.

[LaZodiac]

Not to jump to the defense of this train derailment in process, but to be fair the walrus IS full of traps.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 13

: I hope you’re all ready for a horrible Link’s Awakening ripoff, because here it comes.

: This entire area is basically a direct ripoff of Koholint Island. It’s less broken than a lot of the other places we’ve been to, but is still just as tedious and un-fun.

: Oh look, it’s the area with the Flying Rooster statue, only now it’s a fish.

: First, we have to make a long and tedious trek across the island to this one house where there’s a dead girl.

: Because we don’t have Mark with us, we can’t just go to the Game Over Zone, so we have to use this bomb. This bomb is a full-screen instakill the second it gets activated.

: “Aren’t you the girl from the island?”

: “Yes… that was my home.”

: “Your family’s very worried about you… I think it’s time you went back.”

: “Is that possible? I don’t see a way back…”

: “Let me take care of that…”

: What we’re supposed to do is either push her off the edge or push her into one of the holes. Unfortunately, due to this game’s usual godawful hitboxes, I wound up falling off.

: Please note that all of the following dialog lines (apart from where I’ve noted otherwise) are in ALL CAPS. I have gone ahead and not done that because it’s annoying to read.

: “…Mark? How did you find me?”

: “I didn’t.”

: “Ready to head back with me?”

: “…I can’t I’m afraid. This is it for me.”

: The game goes from all caps to regular capitalization for this screen, and I don’t know if that’s a typo or not.

: “Oh… wow… I’m truly very sorry…”

: “I would love to continue helping you guys, but I died.”

: “Yeah, but that never stopped us before!”

: “This time they tell me it’s final.”

: “…”

: “Don’t be sad. I just walk through this door, and I start a new life. I don’t know where exactly, but I know I’ve never been there before. That has me kind of excited actually.”

: Mark has gone on to a better place, and by that I mean he’s no longer in Two Brothers.

: “I wish you well then.”

: “…Thanks. Roy, take my bag. You’ll find it on the beach. I don’t need it where I’m going.”

: Yeah, he’s got a job as a structural engineer in Finland now.

: “Of course.”

: “The bag and all its contents belong to you now. Most of that crap was yours anyway. Take care Roy!”

: “You too Mark.”

: After a second run to the bomb screen, I manage to push the girl off the ledge.

: “Thank you for bringing me back. I am so sorry that you are trapped on this island.”

: “It’s okay. I’m just glad you are well again.”

Typo Counter: 110 (There was a single non-typo involving a seemingly missing period in the last update, but this sentence DEFINITELY does not have one.)

: “I…um… borrowed this key from the Mayor. Take this and stop the sacrifices… it is your only way out.”

: Now we have to go find three locked dungeons and go through them to get the weapon parts. They’re all pretty short, and you’ll notice that a lot of them are going to feel very much like a tutorial area.

: The chest here has a sidequest item in it.

: When we try to get to the book, the floor collapses.

: There’s a hidden switch under the barrel that lowers the floor again. It probably isn’t obvious what you’re supposed to do here.

: There’s actually a door hidden under the entrance door. This gets us another new ability for Roy.

: I’ll skip the tutorial and explain how it works - it’s basically the same as meditation but with a different end result. See that light brown spot on the floor?

: By the way, I did check the dictionary because I was almost positive that the only way to spell “Archaeologist” was like that, but as it turns out, “Archeologist” is also valid. Doing this opens a teleporter out of the hole.

: When we leave, the dungeon puts up flags outside so we know we’ve cleared it. This entire area (up to the boss, at least) ALMOST goes without a single egregiously bad design element. Almost.

: Here, we have to teleport our way in with an arrow.

: This would be our egregiously bad design element. See these pillars? We have to destroy all three of the ones going up the right side to progress… but the axe won’t damage them.

: What happens is that three mermaids spawn in this room: one you can see up top, one just below where Roy is, and one near the pillar in the water behind Roy.

: The mermaids shoot fireballs with gigantic fuckoff hitboxes, and only the fireballs can destroy the pillars. Each one takes four shots to fully destroy, and it takes several seconds for the mermaids to cycle.

: Have I mentioned there’s also a second room we have to do this in? And that the fireballs do a shitload of damage if they hit Roy? I died three times in this room just trying to get past this bullshit. The fireballs are so wide that you can’t really dodge them if they come at a bad angle.

: Thankfully, the game warps you out of the dungeon once you pick the weapon part up. That’s one out of three.

: The next dungeon is easy, but also badly designed. What we have to do is get that bomb in the bottom-right corner to the boulder in the top-left.

: You’ll recognize the floor switches (which become solid once activated) and the heart-shaped pillars from the first dungeon.

: Pressing any one of the floor switches causes the door to open (it just warps you back to the entrance) and lowers the pillars. What’s weird is that even though a room with these elements caused a softlock in the first dungeon, it’s actually impossible (as far as I can tell) to softlock here: if you get stuck in the bottom-right you can just die on the bomb and retry.

: Several minutes of finagling the bomb around those trees (it tends to get stuck easily) later, and we’ve got it where we want it.

: It was not immediately obvious to me why you’d even want to do that, but the answer is that there’s a ladder here.

: It leads to a boss fight that’s the kind of broken where we can beat it really easily, and not the kind of broken where it softlocks the game.

: All the boss does is launch dust clouds going straight down from its position - it has no other attacks, so we can just stand beside it like this and kill it quickly.

: And that’s two out of three.

: This last one is the one that feels most like a repurposed tutorial dungeon.

: There’s signs alerting us to gameplay mechanics we’ve already had to deal with dozens of times, a really simple layout… this was definitely a tutorial at one point.

: All we have to do is get the statue onto a switch, and then step on the other one to open some stairs down.

: The next room has an axe, which we’ve already picked up (we also had it at the start of the game).

: Then we have the boss. It’s a dipshit octopus that launches fireballs out of its mouth. I didn’t even get shots of it because the fireballs home in on you.

: The fireballs turn into… soccer balls I guess… once they fizzle out, and then you just kick them back into the octopus’s mouth.

: Once we finish the third dungeon, everyone just kinda vanishes.

: “Stop it!”

: “It’s alright… it’s for the good of the island.”

: “Stop this! I can defeat this dragon, I just need more time!”

: “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something?”

: “Friend, why do you forget me so quickly?”

: “Wait… the swamp?”

: “Yes… I know that you wish to help these poor people… but they refuse to listen to you, right?”

: “They will be their own undoing, not this “Dragon”.”

Typo Counter: 111

: I think that’s the longest we’ve gone without a typo since the beginning of the game.

: “Uhh… no thanks. I’ll handle this.”

: “Wait - think about this! …Now… are you sure?”

: “Yes, go away!”

: “…So be it…”

: “If I can assemble it into something useful… I think it’s part of a…”

: “Ha! I know what this can be used for! I need some space to build this. To the beach!”

: This starts what is, without a doubt, the most tedious bossfight of them all, save maybe the “Missing” boss.

: There’s a spot on the dragon’s back where you can use the archaeology skill to dig.

: Doing that opens up a staircase you can use to get into this room, where you just walk up and whack the heart until it dies.

: Every couple of seconds, the dragon will roar and Roy will come to a dead stop. While it looks like we just opened a new staircase, we actually have to jump out of the hole.

: This puts us back near where all the villagers were. The dragon will rain fire down every few seconds that does a shitload of damage.

: We then have to walk all the way down to the beach, launch out of the cannon again, and then walk over to the dragon’s leg. This is much more complex than it seems.

: Walking off the south side of this screen will deposit Roy back on the island. To get to the leg, you have to exit via a small number of pixels in the bottom-right, near the right-side wing.

: This next screen is one of the most dickish things in this game. Notice where Roy is on the screen here.

: If you don’t walk all the way over to the right on that last screen before going up, you walk right into the holes when the screen transitions. Apart from some mermaids, this heart is just as easy to take down as the last one.

: All those black marks are where the dragon’s fireballs hit.

: On the third run, we have to go back to the leg again and then us that to get to the head. Don’t ask me how this makes sense, I don’t know.

: Oh, right. Remember that screen with the instakill bomb? I set that off by accident trying to dodge a fireball.

: We now have to jump off the dragon a THIRD time and run all the way back across most of the island.

: This time, for whatever reason, there’s a staircase in the dragon’s head.

: “What the Hell IS this!?”

: “It’s a ship?”

: “Why- Why do this to these people?”

: “Inventory? I see. You sell them as slaves don’t you?”

Typo Counter: 112 (Theses? What are you, a Warhammer ork?)

: “No! I’m putting an end to this right now. Hang in there Madam!”

: This phase of the fight is… extremely bad, both in terms of coding and design. The boss will block in whatever direction Roy is facing, and then will “attack” with his sword - he can’t actually hit you.

: The only things that can are cannonballs that shoot out of the three holes in the wall.

: What you’re supposed to do is get him to attack, and then run around to the other side and hit him to knock him off the platform. This took me a good few minutes to accomplish due to how slowly Roy moves.

: I thought this was a ripoff of Broken Age (as bad as that game was) but then I realized that Broken Age came out in 2014. The Allansons beat them to the punch, though I’m sure they got it from somewhere.

: “The Dragon was a machine!”

: “Yes clearly. But I was referring to my brother.”

: “Ah. So it is.”

: “Greetings Roy Guarder!”

: “Ceila? How did you find me?”

: “A man dressed in green and gold came to me in a dream. He told me of the storm. I came looking for you Roy, when I ran into Bivare again.”

: “I’m glad you came Ceila. You see there are some girls here who would like to go home, only… somebody blasted this ship full of holes and I don’t know how to fly it anyway.”

: “Oh! Coming!”

: “I knew you could do it!”

: “Hey, I never got your name…”

: “I am Keilani. You should have asked me before.”

: “Yeah, I was distracted. Sorry.”

: “It’s okay. I gave up my name before the ceremony. But thanks to you I have it back. I am Keilani again!”

: “That’s sort of strange, you know that?”

: “You must be exhausted. Go get some rest. Tomorrow we celebrate!”

: “Celebrate?”

: “You defeated the Dragon God! You were also reunited with your friends! We have so much to celebrate!”

: “Yeah… we do.”

: “There will be dancing and music. Oh… Roy?”

: “Yeah?”

: “Could you meet me by the [statue of the Queen of the sea] tomorrow, before the ceremony?”

: “Sure.”

: “Oh, and Roy?”

: “Yes?”

: “Don’t blame the islanders for the sacrifices. It’s not their fault.”

: Such riveting fucking dialog. I’m already asleep. I am doing this LP in my sleep.

: “If that’s how you feel.”

: “It is! It really is! I love them, and they love me. I’m getting tired myself now. See you tomorrow.”

: “You’re embarrassing me!”

: “Don’t joke! I’m going to miss you. Perhaps it’s only because you saved my life twice…”

: “Oh, I’m sure that’s all there is to it!”

: This entire thing feels like it was written to be like Indiana Jones without realizing that Indiana Jones has a lot of issues.

: “Would you marry me Roy Guarder? Hahaha!”

: “Alas, I am already married Keilani.”

: “No you aren’t.”

: “Huh?”

Typo Counter: 113

: “People are married for as long as each is still alive.”

: That’s horrible grammar, but not a typo.

: “When I met you… I’m just not sure you even CAN be married, Roy.”

: He can’t be because he’s a fucking cardboard cutout with no personality beyond occasionally spouting stupid one-liners.

\

: “Oh no! I’ve upset you… look… I didn’t mean it! -I’m sorry! That was so stupid of me!”

Typo Counter: 114

: “Everyone left is alive and well… let’s enjoy ourselves on your last day here!”

: “Yeah, I’d like that.”

: Now we get to sit here for like… probably four minutes while this song that is a total ripoff of Ballad of the Wind Fish plays. You can still move around during it.

: Oh, and PhisPhace is somehow here. I checked all the NPC dialog and there’s no typos in it.

: “You’ll need somebody to carry your items now, right?”

: “Oh… yeah…”

: “Well… as you know I’m on a journey… to help people and see interesting things. The thing is, all the interesting stuff happens around you two!”

: “So I’ll carry your stuff, but only if you take me with you.”

: “Can I borrow the color shard you carry when I give my presentation?”

: “Of course! …If you give it back when you are finished.”

: “Sounds good to me!”

: “I do have other things to do on my journey but… when you want me… Bivare, play the [Clay Flute] using the item bag button to call me!”

: “Great!”

: Next time, it’s back to sidequests. We might encounter a game-breaking bug or two (if the guide and Steam forums posts are correct) and hopefully a couple of softlocks because boy do I love softlocks.

[Timrod]

@CommanderKeene

It’s actually on the next line. Still a typo, I think, but it’s there.

Noted in the next update.

@LaZodiac

This game is genuinely miserable and has lost track of what tenuous threads it had.

Also every time they call them Spectrum Shards I grow more and more certain they’re gonna make an autism joke.

Nah, that’d require planning and actually writing shit in advance, which the Allansons clearly didn’t do. I don’t think they even did a read-through of the script before release, let alone any kind of playtesting. The script, like the game itself, feels like a bunch of random disconnected bullshit that Brian Allanson came up with over the years, cobbled together without tossing any of it out, and then just published it on Steam because he could (and also because Steam doesn’t have a cert process).

@SpammyV

I am the egg man.
They are the egg man.
I am the SNES JRPG sprite of an anime lady boss.
Coo coo kachoo.

I am the softlock.

Oh, right. I forgot to mention that I’ve been monitoring Ackk’s twitter page every now and then, and they posted what people believe is a replacement for the Golden Alpaca in YIIK - it gets replaced with a generic Entity that looks like Rory.

Of course, I’m not afraid because they’ll never release it, but if they do and it’s substantial (as in, adds more endings) I’ll probably have to go through the game again and re-open the old LP.

[CommanderKeene]

@Timrod

This entire area (up to the boss, at least) ALMOST goes without a single egregiously bad design element. Almost.

I hate that that’s a distinction that needs to be made in this game.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 14

: I hope you’re all ready for some godawful sidequests, because there’s four we can do right now. I accidentally missed a a couple of items during recording (one on purpose) and I’ll probably have to save-edit them in.

: First off, kind of a funny glitch. Mark has an item in a room we couldn’t access before inside the bag that is for one of the collection sidequests. I tried to open it and uh… apparently we don’t have a bag for items even though we’re IN THE BAG.

: The new bag is… very difficult to access. About 75% of the time, it’ll just fail if you use it on anything that isn’t the world map.

: There we go.

: In the Game Over Zone, we can find Link, who gives us a wooden sword and tells us to go all the way back to the start of the game… where we just fucking came from… to upgrade it.

: First though, we need to take this warp in the Game Over Zone to get to a sidequest that’s a ripoff of an entirely different game.

: There’s another collection item here.

: And a hole. This is where I missed an item. The problem is that if you quit the game at any point after you enter this hole but before you finish the sidequest, it renders the sidequest unwinnable - so I couldn’t reload a save to get it.

: Little did you know that years before Square-Enix released the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the Allansons released their own remake of the Nibelheim reactor scene where Sephiroth burns the town.

Typo Counter: 114 (That should be a question mark.)

: Originality!

: “I’ll meet you over in the mine.”

: There’s actually three mines, the one we’re going to is on the far east side of town.

: “We don’t know where they’re coming from, or why they are attacking. All we know is that we have to stop the attack any way we can.”

: “Unfortunately it looks like the path splits. I’ll take the left path. You take the right and we will meet up later.”

: One long path full of enemies later…

: Enemies will continuously spawn here, and you have to wait a good minute until…

: Now, in any other game, you’d think this would be a sign to turn around… but it’s not. You have to keep waiting.

: Eventually, the mine will collapse and then you can leave.

: “But it didn’t so no need to worry. You should have a look around now that the town is safe. When you have cooled down I’ll be on the bridge.”

: What the fuck… what even is this line?

: “What I did stopped those monsters and saved the town. What I am sorry for is any trouble I might have caused you.”

Typo Counter: 115 (Blast it. Two words.)

: “Also if you can, check in on the villagers make sure that they are safe on your way there.”

: This cave here is where I missed one of the sidequest items. The good news is you don’t need them all to finish the sidequest… plus the save file is easy enough to edit. The item is the “Cloak of Invisibility”.

: I believe it’s here. The item is in the top-right, whereas I just went down to the boss. Yes, there is a boss here.

: A boss named “Boss” to be precise.

: This is another one of those bosses that falls squarely into the “broken in the sense that it doesn’t do anything” category.

: You can just pelt it with arrows and the arrows will push it back. I think this is on a timer rather than having an actual health bar.

: At this point, I just walked up and hit it once and it keeled over.

Typo Counter: 116

: “Instead of letting the people suffer through captivity he himself killed them all.”

Typo Counter: 117

: The Color Busting Blade is basically a straight downgrade from the axe - it has pretty broken hitboxes, does the same damage, and swings far slower.

: After I finished the sidequest, I realized I had missed that item and reloaded a save that I made after going down the hole. What happens if you do that is that the script here just kinda breaks. It’s technically not a softlock because you can leave the cave and come back to respawn the enemies and then die to leave the area, but it renders the sidequest unwinnable.

GAME-BREAKING BUGS: 2

: For our next sidequest, we need to go all the way back to the start of the game. I just took this to point out that in some spots, the color weapons just don’t work right. Quality Allanson programming right there.

: On the way down the mountain area, I found this line of dialog which I think appears if you just hit the sword button near that tree-looking thing.

Typo Counter: 118

: On the way back, we want to stop at Bivare’s house to get another collection item… and a typo.

Typo Counter: 119

: We have to go all the way back to the first room of Road to Kalta.

: “You carry the sword of a great warrior! This was the sword of my student… you see… I am the SWORD MASTER!”

: “I will restore that blade for you. It is the least that I can do for my fallen student. We must go to the [Cave of everlasting Darkness].”

Typo Counter: 120 (Why isn’t the e capitalized?)

: I’m not sure whether this is a Zelda ripoff, a Cave Story ripoff (specifically, when you trade the Polar Star in for the Spur) or both. Probably both.

: “Where is that?”

: “Just around the corner… I’ll take you there!”

: That’s not even a fucking sentence! Those words can’t be combined in that order! Unless you meant “see” some stuff, in which case…

Typo Counter: 121

: “It will look kind of hokey… or it may just blow your mind. Either way, don’t laugh or panic.”

: “Never!”

: “O! Spirit what haunts this blade! In death you could not give up the ways of the blade!”

: “Give your power and courage to me! So that I may infuse it into this blade of wood!”

: “No my student! Not master! Not me - not anymore! You are now the master! Give your spirit over to the blade completely! Let it be indestructible!”

: Stop fucking abusing exclamation points!

: “Wow! I have a lot more wood left over… I’ll make another wooden sword out of it for you!”

: Translation: The Allansons were too lazy to figure out how to program it so that the wooden sword would disappear from your inventory after you do this quest.

: “But more importantly… I now give you… [The Masters Sword]! It will give you great powers. Try it out when you get a chance!”

: “Thank you for doing this for me! I was heart broken when my student had passed.”

Typo Counter: 122 (HEARTBROKEN! One word!)

: “You have given me much hope. Take care!”

: Let’s just leave the poorly-capitalized cave, and…

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 11

: Immediately get stuck on the wall and softlock the game.

: The “Masters Sword” is the best weapon in the game, hands down. It has hitboxes that work most of the time.

: It also shoots an arrow with each swing if you’re at full health. These arrows work just like Roy’s regular arrows, but I believe the sword fires them slightly faster.

: Back on the new island, we can walk North a bit and end up…

: In a desert that is absolutely a ripoff of the one in Ocarina of Time where you have to follow the poe through it.

Typo Counter: 123

: There’s a great heart here that we can grab by going… I think it’s one screen east and one screen south.

: If you fuck around for a bit, eventually you’ll just die.

: Benjamin Cannoli. His name is Benjamin Cannoli. That sounds like a fucking rejected side character in The Sopranos.

: “If you don’t mind me asking, what were you thinking trying to cross the desert in the middle of a sand storm?”

: " ‘Ey Tone! Get a load’a this panook, thinks he can cross the desert durin’ a sandstorm!"

: “I’d rather not share my comings and goings with others.”

Typo Counter: 124

: “If it’s the University that you want to reach, you must pass through Alamnia Marketplace. One thing that you need to understand about this desert is that your sense of direction can’t be trusted.”

: “If you walk North and then change your mind and want to walk South, you usually end up in a different place. Luckily I have explored this vast desert over the years and I can give you directions to the Market gates.”

: He just wants us to do him a favor one day, and that day may never come.

: “You might want to write this down, as you will forget otherwise.”

: “If you go North, East, South, East, North and North you will make it to the market gates.”

: “Also on my explorations I happened across a cavern unlike any other. If you would like to check it out for yourself you can follow these directions. South, West, North, East, North, West, North.”

: “So anyway Tone, I tells this guy a buncha crap directions that don’t make no sense on purpose, just to see if he’d do it! And he did!”

: “To get back to my house from either location all you need to do is go the opposite direction than the ones I just gave you. Good luck on your quest, and my house will always be open to you.”

Typo Counter: 127 (3x Typo Combo! Seriously, learn to use apostrophes.)

: The reason we need money is that there’s a thing coming up we have to spend a shitload of money on, and if you don’t have it that more or less renders the game unwinnable.

: To be clear, you can still grind for it, but it’d take forever.

: If you take the second set of directions, you end up here.

: Oh god no. Do not bring fucking Sonic 06 into this, this game is bad enough as-is.

: “What? Who is that? Where are you? Show yourself!”

: “Who do you think you are, spewing nonsense about ‘colors’ that no one believes exist.”

: “They will believe. I just need more time to prove to them what I say is true.”

: “If that were so, then why does your belief dwindle beneath your feet?”

Typo Counter: 128 (“You are not worthy of their beliefs.” Really?)

: “All you are to them is a madman claiming that the sky is falling. You are not a savior, and you are not a hero. You are just a man. A man who wasn’t even strong enough to save the wife you claim to have loved.”

: So what you’re saying is that he’s just a man whose… circumstances… went beyond his control? Beyond his control? That he’s a modern man who hides behind a mask, so no one else can see his true identity?

: Anyway, this entire thing is a gigantic fucking maze that I had enough trouble following with the guide. It involves a lot of backtracking, so I’m going to skip it.

: You’re supposed to find a bunch of these statues and then break them to open a door somewhere. I’m not convinced this is scripted properly because there’s a collectible I couldn’t get - and I’m told that even if you do get it, it’s broken and doesn’t count.

: At the end is another collection item.

: There’s another bottle mermaid here but I either missed a statue or this door isn’t scripted right. I’m just going to save edit it in later, since the guide author (who is absolutely Brian Allanson) gives you instructions on how to do that.

: Oh look, another “reference”, this time to Prince of Persia.

: “What the? I’m hearing voices again but this one sounds different.”

: “Over here!”

: “How is it that you can talk to me phantom?”

: There’s no comma in that sentence and in my mind Roy is talking like a pirate. “Avast! How’re ye talkin’ to me phantom? Me phantom talks to no man!”

: “Long ago… I was deceived by a trusted friend. This friend… he made this tomb for me. I was the Prince of a long forgotten kingdom.”

: Uh… Persia still exists. It’s just called Iran now.

: “…I was here grieving the death of my father, the King, when I died.”

Typo Counter: 128

: “While escaping they encountered the King face to face. Wishing to avoid being hanged, one of the bandits plunged a sword into his heart.”

: “In the aftermath the Royal Advisor convinced me to create a secret stronghold, within which to house the Royal Treasury.”

: Look, he’s the Prince of Persia, not the Prince of Correct Grammar and Spelling.

: “I did as he said. For several years things were well… until one winter day when I came here to view my belongings. I brought with me the only person that I still trusted.”

Typo Counter: 129

: “Instead of helping the boy whom he had known since birth - my Royal Advisor just stood there and watched me.”

Typo Counter: 130

: “I looked on as his form changed in the light from the torches. After a hundred hundred years, you are the first person to find this crypt. Take these Holy Beads with you. They shall serve you as they once served me.”

: “These [Holy Beads] are a great weapon containing my life essence. My only request is that should we ever discover the identity of my Advisor… you will slash me into his black heart and leave me there until the end of days.”

: “As you wish.”

: When I left the crypt, the game crashed to a black screen.

CRASHES: 1

: Now that we’re done with all but one sidequest, we can progress on to the marketplace.

: The Holy Beads, by the way, are hot garbage compared to the Master Sword - they’re way slower and the hitbox far more broken.

: The marketplace has a couple of places we need to visit in order to be able to cross the desert. If you don’t have the money, you can either edit it in or just give yourself infinite HP - that works too.

: There’s a guy near the entrance who sells a bottle mermaid along with some weapons we don’t give a fuck about. I bought them anyway because we have infinite money.

: This tent has one of the items we need in it.

: The water jug stops the constant damage you take from being in the desert. This merchant also sells a non-color version of the Color Busting Sword, which… why would you ever use that.

: The other item we need is here, in the cow.

: The Sauros is a whopping 2,000 money. The good news is that there are NPCs strewn about who will buy all of the random crap you find in chests for money… but honestly, just edit your save.

: This is one of those, and I don’t understand why they didn’t just… I dunno, make all of the vendor trash one item and make one NPC who buys it. Then again, that’d be competent game design.

: This lady here sells refills for your water jug, but I don’t think you actually need to cross the desert more than once unless you’ve missed a sidequest… and there’s ways to fill it in the desert.

: Finally, way up in the corner, there’s a chest with another collection item in it.

: And now we’re in the desert. Our lizard thing is right here, so let’s get on and go.

: There’s uh… I guess just random shirtless guys in the desert who attack you. For some reason.

: I thought I had found a stopping spot or something, but instead there’s some guy called Cameron Auld who wants to fight you. He’s a generic enemy with a shitload of HP.

Typo Counter: 131

: Right here, I run into a confusing spot. The guide tells me that the exit is to the southwest, but to go any further in that direction I’d have to abandon the lizard and jump off this ledge.

: So I do. Even though Roy’s HP has been lowered significantly from all of the enemies in the desert (there’s these peahat-looking fucks that do a shitload of contact damage) we’re barely taking damage now that we’re out of water.

: Eventually, I make it onto the world map.

: We want to go North, because that’s where the last sidequest we can do is.

: Another great heart up here, right before the spot we need to reach to make progress.

: What’s strange is that vendor trash and money still drops here, when we’ve already gone past the last place in the game that has shops.

: The first room of the castle is dark, but none of the rest of it is.

: Just like the last dungeon, this place is a maze, though it’s not quite as bad as the last one.

: There’s a bottle mermaid here, which I’m not sure why I bothered to pick up. About half of these are glitched and don’t actually count when picked up, and this is one of them.

Typo Counter: 132

: The way Roy is seemingly constantly saying “Uh… what the hell?” is pretty much my reaction to this entire game.

: Another great heart, bringing our HP up to something like 280.

Typo Counter: 133

: You might ask why I’m counting this as a new typo when I think we’ve run into this exact one before, and that’s because I suspect that each heart had this message hard-programmed into it. Some are definitely missing it.

: And that’s our collection item for this dungeon. We’ve only got a handful more to go until we finish the quest… which has a payoff I honestly want to see.

: Here, we have another one of these fuckers. It won’t leave the raised platform and moves so quickly that you basically need to just damage race it before it kills you via contact damage.

: Once you damage it enough, the boss flees out the window.

: Four or so hits later and it’s dead, replaced with… whatever this guy is.

: That’s a lie. I mean, you didn’t really expect Brian Allanson to program a lifesteal mechanic… did you?

: There’s a post on the Steam forums for this game that insists the Life Mace breaks your save if you try to pull it out of your bag, so naturally I backed up the save and immediately tried this.

: Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be the case. The Life Mace is basically another generic weapon, with shorter reach than the Master Sword. It doesn’t actually have lifesteal.

: Next time, Roy goes to hell and finds the Allansons there. I’m not even kidding.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

Benjamin Cannoli. His name is Benjamin Cannoli. That sounds like a fucking rejected side character in The Sopranos.

Gag me with a spoon. This has to be a backer.

@Timrod

WHY IS THERE A SPACE BALLS REFERENCE IN THIS VIDEO’D GAME?!

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 15

: Welcome to the penultimate update for this LP. We SHOULD be done with this game by the next update. I hope you’re ready for some YIIK-style monologues.

: For some reason, Academia Island has a menu instead of making us walk through a bunch of empty bullshit like the rest of the game. The only place we actually need to go is the dorms.

: There’s another great heart here.

Typo Counter: 134

: Up here is another collection item. As it turns out, I think we had enough stuff to get the reward for this without even picking this up. There’s 20 items, but you can’t actually get them all.

: The reason is that two of the items require you to pick up all the bottle mermaids - but the problem is that the game doesn’t register a few of them even if you pick them up.

: And now, a 25+ textbox monologue in the style of Allanson.

Typo Counter: 135

: The typo counter is going to get some serious exercise in this update.

Typo Counter: 136

: Was it on his spelling and grammar? I hope it was, he could use it.

: She started openly wearing cans of mace and a shirt that read “FUCK OFF, ROY”.

: Could he sail through the changing ocean tides? Could he handle the seasons of his mind?

: You think that’s the only one, and it’s funny because we’ve got two more of these fucking things coming.

: The egg has hatched, and apparently it’s a goat.

Typo Counter: 137

: The guy next to this dipshit is supposed to be Andrew Allanson. Keep that in mind. There is a payoff coming.

: I’m also not sure who “Brock O” is supposed to be, or why he keeps showing up.

Typo Counter: 138 (2x typo combo!)

: “This is the place where the most brilliant minds meet to show their scientific findings… to debate, collaborate, and shine a light on unseen facets of science and the arts!”

Typo Counter: 139 (It’s MDs, small s.)

: “And it’s finally here!”

Typo Counter: 140 (This year’s.)

: Oh, god dammit. No. Fuck you, Andrew. You pulled this bullshit twice now and it wasn’t acceptable either time. Only composers who don’t plagiarize get to do this, and they generally don’t need to because their non-plagiarized music speaks for itself.

Typo Counter: 141 (Pretty sure they mean “protractors”, since that’s about the only way this dumb excuse for a joke makes any goddamn sense. Shut the fuck up Allanson, you’re not funny and are never going to be.)

Typo Counter: 142 (3x typo combo!)

: “Praise be to Science!”

: I hope you’re ready for the dumbest, most ham-fisted attempt at religious critique you’ve ever seen or likely ever will see.

: Come to think of it, why the fuck do they have a band at a scientific conference?

: Here, we have more of the traditional Allanson storytelling technique of “tell, don’t show” coupled with their technique of “cram as much fucking plot as possible into the last hour or so and hope no one notices”.

: What I love is that they had an entire game to give Roy a personality. They had an entire game to develop a plot, and they just fucking didn’t. Not that this is a problem unique to the Allansons, but still.

: “Thank y----”

: “Have we met before?”

: “Yes, a while back.”

: “Right… the… swamp?”

: “Among other places.”

Typo Counter: 143

: “How did you escape the cave? That monster–”

: “Shhh… now isn’t the time to speak of such things. We’ll ruin the performance.”

: I think the performance is already ruined just by the fact that it exists.

Typo Counter: 144

Typo Counter: 145 (Into! One word! How many times do I have to fucking say it, Allanson?)

: I… honestly don’t know whether that’s a typo or not. It’s bad writing for sure.

: “I believe the two of you were expecting weren’t you…? Real careless of you to bring a pregnant woman to such a strange place as the Cursed Lands.”

: Pfft. Oh my god, this is fucking Loss. This is Loss in game format.

: “What the hell did you just say to me…?”

Typo Counter: 146

: “We would now like to welcome to the stage, Dr. Roy James Guarder and Dr. Bivare Cornelius Guarder!”

: Who even does that, just randomly tosses in middle names when introducing someone?

: “Stay where you are. I’ll be having my words with you once I’m done.”

: “I wouldn’t dream of leaving before your presentation.”

Typo Counter: 147 (At least they’re consistent, if nothing else.)

: “We are so thankful to be here with you once again showing something we’ve dedicated more than a year and a half of our lives to!”

: “Uhm… yes! What we’ve prepared is proof of something we never believed possible. Proof of not only an alternative color spectrum, but also proof of a life beyond this one.”

: Little late on that. Andrew Allanson is already off the stage.

: “Well, if you refuse to believe my words, please remember to keep an open mind with what you’re about to actually see.”

: This writing. This fucking writing. I’ve been basically asleep on this shit for the majority of the game, but you can just see how this leads right into YIIK. In fact, it would not at all surprise me to find out that they wrote this part while they were working on YIIK, having just discovered the Allanson Monologue.

: In fact, that’s a new term I’m going to make right now - the Allanson Monologue. It’s a monologue that goes on for long enough that anyone listening from the start is going to be bored by the time it ends.

: “Before we unveil our findings we would like to provide some back story.”

: I saw this and I was genuinely fucking afraid that they were going to recite the entire “plot” from the start for what is probably the… fourth time now? Fifth? It’s all kind of blurred together.

: “But in our research we managed to discover much more than just this. Once you have seen these colored objects, you will begin to understand that they are not of this world.”

Typo Counter: 148 (Plane! It’s fucking plane! Plane of existence!)

: “Just show it already!” should be a fucking tagline for both this game and YIIK.

: “Fine then. If you refuse to hear the origins on these objects, I suppose I will let them speak for themselves!”

Typo Counter: 149 (Pretty sure you mean “origins of”.)

: “Raise the curtain!”

: The payoff is coming. Trust me, the payoff is coming.

: The goat just pulled a fucking Sephiroth and summoned Meteor in a valiant attempt to end this misbegotten excuse for a game.

: Andrew Allanson just killed himself off in his own game. Bravo. Now if only his stupid self-inserting bullshit would STAY fucking dead.

: There’s no way out of the expo hall, so you have to stand in one of the fires until you die. Yes, I checked every single body to make sure there were no typos.

: Oh, fuck you.

Typo Counter: 150 (We are now dangerously close to a typo count exceeding the number of first-generation Pokemon.)

: Anyway, we have to push everyone off the Game Over Zone (yes, I tried to get away without pushing Andrew Allanson) and then we can progress.

: “I can’t find my brother… I thought he died, so I came up here to save him… but he must be burning alive inside the expo hall!”

: Never mind the fact that he just saw Bivare’s dead body, but when have little things like continuity errors ever stopped the Allansons?

: “Yeah… I helped the others, but my brother he-”

: “Huh?”

: Does it lead to a better game? One that was actually playtested?

: “You have travelled in the wrong direction for too long. I have put up with it… for reasons I won’t explain to you.”

: I fucking hate that phrase. They use it a lot in YIIK - “For reasons I won’t explain to you”. It translates directly to “because this entire conversation is fucking unnecessary” with a side of “We suck at writing so we couldn’t think of what to put here.”

: “But I’m done - no - YOU are done.”

: “So what happens now… do I go through the gate like Mark?”

: “No.”

: “What? You changed your mind?”

: “You have abused your life. You throw it away without care. You are not to spend life like you spend gold and silver. I can’t send you through the gate because it would destroy you. You are unworthy.”

: Clearly we’re all unworthy of, I dunno, playing a good game and not this.

: “There is another road. I will send you along… another road…”

: “What other road? I have seen no other gates…”

: “That is because you are blind. You have been on this path for some time.”

: You know, Roy being blind would explain a lot.

Typo Counter: 151

: “I hope your feet are not tired. The last hike is not easy. You should have stayed away from this place.”

: Honestly, yeah I probably should’ve… but then no one would know how godawful this game is.

: “That’s not fair… I didn’t know about this…”

: “This is a greater kindness than allowing you beyond the gate. I think you grasp the situation now. Your life is over. Game Over Roy.”

: I can’t read Japanese, but I know there’s no typos in it. How do I know this? Because I ran the English text through Google Translate and came up with exactly the same kanji-filled output. It probably doesn’t make any sense, but there’s no typos in it.

: The worst part is that the Virtual Boy’s safety warning screen, which is what they were trying to emulate, had the Japanese warnings entirely in hiragana. They could’ve just copied the hiragana.

: Welcome to Hell. Hell is apparently the Virtual Boy, because haha so funny get it? SO FUNNY.

: Roy can no longer take damage, and all the weapons are gone. This is a marked improvement over the rest of the game, because we can now run right through enemies.

: I didn’t get a complete shot of this, but…

Typo Counter: 152

: More typos than Pokemon. More typos than characters in a Suikoden game.

: What we have to do is go through this hallway that consists entirely of re-used assets from the bird temple.

: This gets us a weapon.

: With the hell pick, we can break these rocks and continue on.

: Here’s another dumb bomb-pushing “puzzle”. It looks incredibly annoying, but I got it on my first attempt.

: We want to go to the left, because the left-hand route leads to the real hell.

: This ledge is significantly more annoying to deal with, probably because Brian had to hard-code the one with the bomb to make sure you could get the bomb across it.

: The first thing you see in hell is Ackk Studios. It’s like an inverted version of The Seven People You Meet in Heaven.

: Blew his mind so hard that he quit Ackk and demanded all of his music be removed from Chromophore.

: That’s a fucking lie. There’s no way this game was playtested. I found what, 11 softlocks and a save-fucking bug, and this is AFTER they patched it?

: On the other side, we have a bomb “puzzle” - there’s two lines of fire and the bomb will automatically detonate if it hits them.

: The fires can be put out with the hell pick, and then you just detonate the boulder.

: And now they’re re-using sprites from that shitty Pokemon ripoff boss.

: As you go through the next couple of screens, Roy starts accumulating followers.

: Dunno what this guy’s deal is, you just kill him.

: There’s a “boss fight” against this thing, which looks like one of the fireball statues from Lost Izalith in Dark Souls 1. You can just stand on the side of the head and hit it repeatedly with the Hell Pick.

: There’s a box here that contains another collection item. By the way, I should mention that we do finish the collection sidequest in this update - and the thing is, I’m not entirely sure you even need all the items to trigger the reward.

: The reason I say this is because there’s a counter when we get to the turn-in spot that shows how many items you have, and for some reason (actually, we know the reason: it’s Quality Allanson Coding) it only counted 12 of them even though we have at least 17.

: What happens here is that once you climb up bit, you start getting these prompts where a cursor appears and you have to “leap” to continue climbing. I didn’t even notice it was there until about halfway up.

: “We’re… back…?”

: “That… that was horrific!”

: “Why the hell did you do this to us?”

: “We didn’t deserve that! No one does!”

: “Perhaps you did not… but there are many who do. It is wise to think before you say such things… not deserve? Your life is a precious gift… be more grateful.”

: Read: He did it to pad the gameplay out more.

: “I am sorry you had to suffer… but it was the only way. It was the only way to make sure that you haven’t been tainted.”

: “Tainted by what…?”

: “The dark shadow that seems to follow you wherever you go.”

: “…The goat man…?”

: “Just who is that guy exactly?”

: “His name was lost forever ago… but his actions ring throughout history. Before I let you return… would you listen to my tale?”

: He’s an analog for Lucifer in this dipshit Christian allegory.

: “Of course… I need to understand what is happening.”

: “When your earth was created myself and six others were sent to give life.”

: Wait, what? The walrus is still presumably alive, the fish king got revived by the goat, the gator is still alive… what the fuck are you even talking about?

: “The Nameless One was our protector. He was sent to watch and make sure nothing stood in our way. He so loved the new planet and the life it was giving.”

: This is a lot like the time when Insane Clown Posse announced they were born-again Christians. Miracles around us every day and all that.

: “But as ages went on… he began to grow tired of this world. He wanted to return to our home. Your ‘after-life’.”

: Spelling, grammar, plot trees and words… fuckin’ English, how does it work?

: “But his task had been set and he was not allowed to return. As ages passed and your species grew his heart turned cold… he began to hate this world and long for his home.”

: Typos around us every day.

: “There was a point in time where he decided that he was going to return home. But the hatred in his heart had stripped him of his right to the previous life. He made his rounds, pleading with the others to help him win favor with the heavens…”

: “He begged for forgiveness but still he wasn’t pure of heart. He caused himself terrible harm with all of his anger.”

: This is like watching a Terry A. Davis video, only with slightly less racism. Honestly, Terry Davis was more coherent even when he was creating “prayers” using a random word generator.

: “This is where you come in, Roy Guarder. Those who are the most ‘heroic’ have hearts that shine with the colors of the heavens.”

Typo Counter: 153

: “I don’t understand. Heroic…? What… how is this…?”

: “Throughout the ages there have been several Heroes of Color.”

: I like that we’re basically at the end of the game and Brian Allanson still has not figured out how text wrapping works.

: “In your quest to prove the existence of these ‘colors’ you… you have done just that.”

: The second “you” is probably a typo, but I can’t be sure.

: “The Nameless One pushed you in this direction… knowing that if you obtained a colored heart you would help him return. Do you remember the egg you carried with you?”

: “The one the Fish King in Volta gave Roy?”

Typo Counter: 154

Typo Counter: 155 (The word “city” is part of a proper noun and must be capitalized. Plus, they capitalize it in every other instance that the name is used.)

: “The City of Atius was the final plan for humans communing with the after-life. This King Fish would act as a gateway between this world and the next… in hopes that one day death might not separate our worlds.”

: “However a great atrocity has occurred.”

: Yeah, it really is a great atrocity that the Allansons somehow got picked up by a publisher after releasing this piece of shit.

: “By carrying that egg with you, and encountering the Nameless One…”

Typo Counter: 156

: The image of the Goatse.

: “It looks like a Goat… not a fish?”

: “…Yes… His hope is to enter the Lost City and return here -No— to the next world… to the after-life.”

Typo Counter: 157 (What the shit is with all those hyphens? First you can’t use any punctuation at all, and now you’re just abusing the fuck out of it.)

: “We needed to send someone to stop him…”

Typo Counter: 158 (Penalty, offense, number 58. Unnecessary comma usage, five yard penalty, game remains on third down.)

: “But we needed to know that encountering him has not corrupted you.”

: “Something happened… before I died… he tore my chest open and ate my heart. What does this mean for him… for me?”

: That you’re a prime candidate for a villain in the next Kingdom Hearts game?

: “The Nameless One believes in old magics… one where eating the heart of a greater being can make you great. This is why he has killed all the Heroes of Color throughout time… so that when the Great King Fish hatches once again… he would be able to gain entrance to the heavens.”

: “You can’t mean to force me into following his plan?”

: “You have a choice of course…”

: “Oh?”

: “You are out of continues. We will send you back with an indeterminate amount of lives… but only if you do this for us.”

: Two things about this. First, fuck this dumb fourth-wall-breaking bullshit. Second, this is a lie: you basically continue to have infinite lives.

: Remember when NieR Automata did this, only you actually only had one life and couldn’t just print another 2B or 9S from the bunker so it had an actual impact?

: “Or you can stay here. For by eating your Heart, The Nameless One has taken your essence away.”

: “So even your plan is hopeless?”

: “All is not hopeless. Behind me is a sword. If you were to pick it up… it may just restore your life.”

: “What… is… it?”

: Oh god dammit. So what you’re saying is that it’s his life? It’s now or never? He’s not gonna live forever? He just wants to live while he’s alive?

: Seriously though I had never seen the music video for that song and holy hell it’s laughably dumb.

Typo Counter: 158

Typo Counter: 159 (2x typo combo!)

: “If you mean to defeat The Nameless One, it will restore you to life.”

: “You wouldn’t happen to have one of those for me laying around, would you?”

: “You have not been as careless I’m afraid. …However…”

Typo Counter: 160

: “It was… over a year ago… in the Cursed Lands…”

: “Is that all you can recall?”

: “No wait! It was his spear! The Nameless One! He attacked me with it…”

: “The spear… covered in your blood… could be used in the same way. It will require much sacrifice on my part… but you need not worry about that.”

: “-If you intend to help your brother, that is.”

: “Where Roy goes, I will go.”

: “There isn’t realy an option… I’ll do it.”

: “I knew you would. Roy… take hold of the sword… but remember… You must both use your new lives to defeat the goat man.”

: Why would I want to defeat the Goatse Man?

Typo Counter: 161 (Seriously, what the fuck? Either use punctuation or don’t! Be fucking consistent!)

Typo Counter: 162

: If you really think Brian Allanson actually programmed that in, I have a valuable investment in my own personal cryptocurrency to sell you.

: The Holy Blade is either 3D or pseudo-3D for some reason and looks completely out of place with the rest of the game’s artstyle. It has broken hitboxes and therefore sucks.

: However, you might notice there’s an empty slot in the row of color weapons. I wonder what that last one could be?

: I did a different sidequest first, but I’ll skip to the payoff for the collection sidequest and end the update there.

: If you go between the passage leading out of the Egg Harbor/Fishington area and the mountains going to the Bird Village, there’s a museum hidden away down here.

: The idea is that as you get more of the collection items that we’ve been picking up, more of the museum opens. What’s supposed to happen is that the museum fully opens at 18 items… but you can see in the top-right that the game only registers us as having 12 of them.

: I’m not sure if the counter is broken, the game’s code for registering the items is broken, or this entire quest is broken. I’m gonna guess the last one.

: We can keep going up through a bunch of staircases leading to empty corridors to find… why do those statues look familiar?

: Looks like Toby Fox and Suda51 aren’t the only people who can say they regret working with the Allansons.

Typo Counter: 163

: And that’s all of the color weapons. The Shovel Blade is… honestly kinda meh. It’s less broken than most of the other weapons, but not as good as the Master Sword.

: Anyway, that’s about all the Two Brothers I can take for right now. I’m going to do the last post-mortem on lessons the Allansons should’ve learned for YIIK that they just fucking didn’t, and then next time we’ll finish the last sidequest and also the game.

[LaZodiac]

This game feels like it has been an absolutely miserable experience from start to end, and I hope that you go and play something good afterward.

[drcakey]

@Roy

I don’t understand. Heroic…? What… how is this?

‘What, how is this?’ indeed. If Two Brothers had a plot or themes, I would have said that Roy going around wantonly disrupting the natural order by finding the Spectrum Thingies on an obsessive quest to avoid processing the grief of his wife’s death had been meant to be a bad thing. But Two Brothers has neither plot nor themes, so it wasn’t.

And where did the Christian stuff come from?

[Timrod]

Click Here for the Final Update

: I decided not to do that last post-mortem because it was just several pages of me getting very angry with the Allanson brothers. There’s one last sidequest we can do, and I’m only showing it off because I managed to softlock in it.

: You might recall way back when we first went to Excavation Town, we found a book in the library we traded for a napkin. Now that we’ve reached the final island, we can trade the napkin away.

: Note that she says “pen” but then hands us a “spicy drink” for the napkin.

: We can then go back to Excavation Town…

: And trade the drink for this pen.

: Back at the bar in Egg Harbor, there’s a guy who will… actually, he softlocked the game the first time I talked to him.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 12

: Now if we go all the way the hell back to the other side of the continent, we can find the “Monsters Den”. That’s probably a typo, so…

Typo Counter: 164

: The key opens the way to this thing, which is the final weapon in the game that we can obtain without save editing.

: You can get a fruit from this tree, accessed by the red/orange-ish warp behind the Guide.

Typo Counter: 165 (What’s capitalization? I dunno.)

Typo Counter: 166 (Capitalization!)

: Dragon Mire has pretty okay hitboxes, but we don’t want to use him. We actually want to use the Heaven Sword or whatever it’s called.

: One trip back through the desert later, and we’re at the final dungeon.

Typo Counter: 167

: See, what I failed to realize about the Heaven Sword is that Brian Allanson actually DID code a “walking sword combo” for it - it’s the only weapon in the game that has one, and it’s both a blessing and a curse.

: I have to admit, the color dungeon actually does look pretty nice, and I don’t know why they didn’t just do the entire game this way and think of some other gimmick for the color shards.

: So anyway, the Heaven Sword actually HAS a walking sword thing - if you hit the attack button while moving, you do a dash in that direction. It boots Roy’s movement speed by several times at the risk of slipping out of bounds. The only problem is, uh… I kind of had to re-bind my screenshot key to get this shot, and I forgot to re-bind it so I didn’t get any screenshots after this part. Fuck.

: The good news is, I streamed it, so I can just download my VOD from Twitch and do it that way. No problem. Shit might get a little lower quality from here on out.

: God I just now realized that my mic is way too close to my head when I stream, so you can hear me breathing and god fuck. Anyway, after that room is a shitty dark room maze straight outta SMT 1.

: I wander around for a bit, using the sword dash to move, until…

: I go out of bounds. Now, you might think this isn’t a softlock because you can just go into the bag and die, right?

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 13

: Wrong. I forget where it happened when I was streaming, but if you try to use the bag, Bivare will say something like “Ceila can’t get here right now!”

: Past the maze is this white void, and a couple of these weird holes that close over every few seconds.

: The idea is you run across them when the shutters are down, making this even more un-necessary padding.

: We have to go through four sets of these to reach the next room.

: The spear is key to exactly one puzzle in this entire dungeon, but you wind up carrying it with you the entire time.

: Man, it’s so much easier to capture action shots when you do this off a video and not just, you know, in real time.

: Anyway, the spear overrides your arrow button: the first time you press it with the spear in your inventory, you’ll throw the spear, which will stick into the ground where it lands.

: This means that you can “lose” the spear by throwing it and leaving the room, but fortunately Brian somehow planned for this. if you die, the spear will re-appear in your inventory when you return.

: One trip back through the maze later (which takes like… almost three minutes on the video I have and feels like forever) we get back to the main room of the dungeon.

: This is another very poorly signposted puzzle that doesn’t work well in this format. See the gate on the upper level? It’s hard to tell, but it has a hole in it.

: If you walk right up to it, you can see that there’s a switch on the other side.

: The short spear (and ONLY the short spear) can penetrate through the gate and hit the switch. Arrows will bounce right off. Given that this place is a maze and that only that one room has the spear in it, there’s a good chance you’d pass by this a few times (like I did) before reading the guide because all of these later dungeons suck.

: Here’s what I don’t get about this entire dungeon, and honestly the latter half of this game. Outside of maybe the original NES release, mazes have never really been a thing in Zelda - at least, not serious ones. Why the fuck did Brian go this route?

: The next room is full of these dumbass-looking stained glass windows and a door covered in fire. To open it, we need to find seven sages (because Ocarina of Time reference) and have them open it for us.

: This guy here. This fucker right here. Let me explain how this works, because it’s some bullshit.

: The game keeps a “mercy” counter in the save file. I had seen it, but had no idea what it was for or how you did anything with it. What I think happens is that when you get into a fight with the random RPG text that appears, the enemies will run away if they’re low on health.

: Letting them run away builds up the “mercy counter” and having a high enough counter will cause this to give you a full heal.

: Instead, for about a single frame, the game will flash a message saying “Roy only showed mercy to his ene” and then immediately cuts off to a death screen.

: If you want to get a full heal off these for some reason, you can edit your save file. Just CTRL+F “Mercy” and set the number to a billion. I’m not sure what the threshold is.

: This dungeon is basically non-linear once you get the short spear, but we’ll do this one first.

: The water apparently makes it impossible to walk up these stairs we just walked up.

: This room is full of “speed goons”, who apparently can be mercied, but it didn’t increase the counter for doing so. The one in my save file has been at 11 since I restarted the game after it broke.

: Here’s something I want you to remember for a few minutes from now. See that ledge with the arrows on it? Keep that in mind.

: This thing here is actually a ladder - but as far as I can tell, the room it leads to is pointless.

: I’ve finished the game, and I have zero idea what the fuck he’s talking about.

: What we actually need to do, against all logic, is go into the bag and equip the jump doll that we picked up which had no apparent use.

: I should note that even with the jump doll equipped, the spear will over-ride your first jump attempt, meaning you’ll throw the spear first, then jump.

: We can then jump up this ledge. Great signposting there, Allanson. I mean, you can pick the doll near the start of the game and the thing is completely useless except for the final dungeon. Why not just… I dunno… have it be a pickup in the fucking dungeon!?

Typo Counter: 168 (Capitalization matters!)

: Each one of the sages will tell you how many of them are left as you walk away. I don’t know why exactly we need to do this, since it’s not like they’re imprisoned or anything.

: There’s a warp that goes back to the main room, and then we can go down the stairs to the right of where the dumbfuck spear puzzle thing was.

: I figured I had fucked something up, since the warp tiles usually warp you back to the start of the dungeon, but not this time.

: The sword statue is a warp, and I honestly don’t know what the point of this entire area is. I think they were trying to copy Ganon’s Tower in Ocarina of Time, but the point there was that you had seven puzzle rooms that had actual content in them.

: This room features stairs that cut Roy’s movement speed in half while he’s on them, and handrails that are arranged in about the least aesthetically pleasing way possible. By the way, if you go up the stairs where Roy is in this shot, it’s a dead end - you can’t go to the left.

: Up the stairs is one of those “darkness vases” from that one sidequest we did, but it doesn’t do anything.

: This is probably multiple typos, but I’m not entirely sure where to begin with it, so I’ll leave it alone. I think they were trying to make a pun on “Dalai Lama” but given that the Allansons seem to write on a third-grade level I don’t think they’re ready for that yet.

: Another filler room full of enemies. I honestly want to know what Brian’s thought process was when designing this dungeon.

: “Okay Andrew, so get this. The final dungeon is Ganon’s Tower from Ocarina of Time, only instead of puzzles we’ve just got a big confusing maze with rooms full of enemies that don’t present a challenge to the player so much as an annoyance.”

: These look like one-way doors, but I don’t think they actually are. You can see above where the vine on the right ends up - in a dead end room with no door leading out.

: There’s a room full of purple balls for no reason. They take one hit to kill and just kind of randomly float around. It’s like Dashcon in game form.

: Here’s my favorite thing about this room. See how there’s two staircases and it looks like we’re in some kind of second hub room?

: The second staircase goes right into a wall. Quality level design there.

: We also find the third sage here.

: There’s a part after this where I was following the guide and it has you solve a “puzzle” that doesn’t seem to actually change anything.

: If we go to the right from the main room, there’s a hallway full of pits that just makes us wait to get across. Great level design there. I mean, my absolute favorite part of any game is waiting.

: Oh, right. I didn’t bother to capture it because it wouldn’t be obvious looking at it in a still image, but if you fall into these pits there’s a good chance it just kind of fails to warp you to a safe spot and you’ll just fall in a loop until Roy dies, forcing you to redo the entire room.

: There’s a clone of that one boss we fought in hell here, only it doesn’t move.

: This is the other reason we need the spear.

: Throwing the spear into the statue’s mouth makes it explode into a warp statue.

: As far as I can tell, all this does is warp you back to the start of the dungeon. The guide tells you to do it and I have no idea why.

: If we go straight through that door, we hit a falling tile puzzle that I’m not going to do yet. Oh, and some typos.

Typo Counter: 170 (2x Typo Combo!)

: Instead, we want to go through this new staircase which I’m not sure if it was there the whole time or not.

: This room is a puzzle that would’ve been way shorter had I noticed the ladder directly in front of Roy.

: This side of the room has two pressure plates and an arrow statue.

: The other side has an arrow statue we need to get across the hole. This should be simple - all we need to do is line it up so we can hit it on the other side, then walk over.

: Unfortunately, due to quality Allanson coding, the statue on this side will melt into nothing if we push it anywhere near the hole.

: Seriously, it’ll start melting this far back from the pit.

: This is about as close as you can get it without it melting. Fortunately, the other side doesn’t seem to have the same collision issues.

: This is also probably a typo, unless Ancient is being used as a proper noun kind of like it is in Final Fantasy 7.

Typo Counter: 171 (Rebirth! One word, no hyphen!)

Typo Counter: 173 (Ancient is either capitalized or it isn’t, and I’m going to assume it’s not being used as a proper noun so fuck that, two typo penalty, game remains on third down.)

: Before we do the dumbass falling platform puzzle we saw earlier, we need to do one that’s even more broken.

: This room looks like a dead end, only it’s actually home to the most broken puzzle in the dungeon.

: To the right is a red arrow statue. This one is special in that it’s used as a key, so we need to maneuver it while also teleporting around these disconnected platforms.

: On the other side is another regular arrow statue and a second spear. I don’t know why they give you the spear here, given that arrows (or the Master Sword beams) will work just as well.

: The next part of this horribly broken shitpile is getting this statue up to the top of this platform. The problem is that if you get it in this position, the statue will get stuck. This isn’t a softlock, but you basically have to finagle it around the corner.

: Pushing the red statue onto that switch creates a bridge, which fortunately stays around even if you move the statue off that switch.

: There’s six colored pressure plates here, and six statues to match the colors.

: The green statue here is where I managed to softlock the game. What you’re supposed to do is put a statue on the bottom of the tree corridor, enter from the left and then exit by shooting the statue at the bottom.

: Instead, I accidentally used the dash move to enter the gap in the trees without hitting the statue. You can’t call Ceila here and there’s no way to die.

: I tried to finagle my way out, but ultimately wound up stuck on this tree.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 14

: After reloading the game, I did the initial statue setup so I could cross (it more or less has to be exactly this way) and hit the regular statue to teleport to the other side.

: Instead, I wound up out of bounds.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 15 (2x Softlock Combo!)

: This is now my third time attempting this puzzle. Everything’s all set up again. Let’s just do this, and…

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 16 (3x Softlock Combo!)

: Instead of teleporting to the other side, I get stuck on this statue. Quality Allanson coding right there.

: Anyway, here’s where the rest of the statues are. The purple one is behind the puzzle, just sitting there.

: The blue one is down here, and you basically have to do the exact same thing you did to get the red one, only it’s slightly less glitchy and softlock-prone.

: You then have to drag both of the statues you used to get the blue one over to the right side to get the orange one. This took me several minutes of manually pushing statues (rather than repeatedly warping them) because I didn’t want to softlock for a fourth time.

: After pushing the orange and blue statues halfway across the map, we get everything right and the door opens. The yellow statue starts on the green statue’s pressure plate, by the way.

Typo Counter: 174

: Now we get to tackle the stupid falling floor puzzle. Remember that sign that was like “You only need two switches to progress but all of them for treasure?” Yeah, that’s a lie. The treasure is broken, so even if you hit all the switches there’s no reward.

: Let’s just skip to the end of the puzzle, shall we?

: The thing on the right is supposed to be a teleporter that warps you back to the start of the puzzle, so you don’t have to do it in reverse. I think I tried it and it didn’t work.

: The final prize for all eight switches is another great heart… only it doesn’t work.

: The chests don’t work either, but what would even be in them? We can’t spend money anymore, and we’ve done the big collection sidequest.

: We need to find the Goatse man, so he can remove this game from existence with his almighty Ass Laser.

: The thing is telling us to find the Ubie Doll so we can get past that one jump… which is on the other side of the dungeon and that we already did. This might’ve been useful if this sage was, say, in the room with the jump.

: This door leads to the last sage. We’ve been through multiple softlocks, filler rooms, broken bullshit… how much worse could this last door be?

: Nothing. Not even a puzzle. You just walk right the fuck up to it.

: We don’t even get to talk to it because the game then immediately goes to a cutscene of the seven sages forming a dogpile on the fire to put it out.

: Roy is then immediately warped to the fire door. I like that Brian did exactly one thing correctly in this game and that was not making me walk all the way the fuck back here.

Typo Counter: 175

: This only happens if you’ve done all the color weapon sidequests. If you’ve only done some but not all of them, the blatant ripoffs won’t be here.

: “Take courage”? What the fuck does that even mean?

: “…Roy… Bivare… You have no more continues. If you die here it is [Game Over] for you.”

Typo Counter: 176

: “What!?”

: “Just have faith. You can do this.”

: “We are ready… we made it this far!”

: “Yes, it is do or die for real this time!”

: “The enemy lies ahead. If you intend to finish this make a leap of faith from here to his domain below!”

: “It’s your choice, but remember that you owe me your lives. Go with caution. And remember… if you fail it is [Game Over].”

: The final boss is made of the same broken bullshit as the bird king, so if you’re playing this for yourself, set your HP to 999999 and then go to the Game Over Zone via the bag (which you can access here for some reason) to max yourself out.

: “I must first begin by apologizing for all of the trouble I’ve caused you.”

: “I must first begin” is the best Andrew-ism since “The elevator began to shake, vibrating with motion”.

: “I must admit that you are both victims of circumstance. When I happened upon you at the Cursed Lands… I took advantage of you. You were in distress, at the loss of your loving wife, and I… I used that to my own benefit.”

: “What are you trying to accomplish with all this…?”

: We already fucking know what he wants! He wants to go back to the Game Over Zone! Were you not fucking listening during the giant Allanson Monologue at the end of hell- oh wait, yeah, can’t blame you there.

: “I want… I want to get back.”

: So what you’re saying is you want to leave your home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass?

: “Just beyond this floor is my home. Your ‘after-life’. Surely by now you know of my origins…?”

: “Indeed.”

: “I lost my graces and my right to that life… I saw the opportunity to use you and your good natured way.”

Typo Counter: 177 (The one fucking time you choose not to use a hyphen, and it’s on “good-natured”?)

: “But alas, there is no changing the past. You’ve come all this way, gathered all of these elements of the after-life… you have been a great deal of help to me. My only regret is how complicated your life has become…”

: “But surely you can’t blame me for wanting to return home. No one could blame me for that. I needed to do what I did… and there isn’t anything we can do now to undo it.”

: “So what is the plan? You open the gate to the after-life and just… just… walk back in like nothing ever happened?”

: “The prodigal goat man returns…”

: “I’m sure in your mind you think you can just walk back… but after what you did there isn’t any going back. Don’t you see how clouded your thoughts have become…?”

: “There isn’t any returning to what you were. You need to accept your fate.”

: “What strange words… accept… my… fate… I’m going back. I’m afraid it IS useless to stop me. I have no ill will against you Roy. I consider you to be my friend. You’ve done so much for me.”

: “And besides… I often lent you my help! Without me you would never have spoken with the fish king. Without me you would have never gotten a [Heart of Color]. The heart of a Hero. I did that for you.”

Typo Counter: 178 (Random capitalization still isn’t acceptable, you fucks!)

: “Sure… I did both of those things for me… but deep down we know it is what you wanted. Now you have a choice… you can either leave now… or you can come with me to the other side. I assure you that it is quite amazing…”

: “I think I’ll pass on both.”

: “You’re not leaving this earth.”

: “Surely by now you must know what will happen if you kill me… do you not? You end my life and I end up in the in-between… the place for those who fall short of perfection… but just as I made my way from that world to this one… surely I will find a way to go beyond the gate.”

: “I’m sorry you won’t listen to me…”

: “Then… LET US END THIS AND SEE WHICH OF US MAKES IT TO THE OTHER SIDE!”

: My favorite part of this is how they just didn’t bother to draw back sprites for half the characters on screen.

: “All of my friends in one place. I’ll start this party off then!”

: For the first part of the fight, the boss just sits there. If you walk up and hit him…

: One of the sidequest dipshits will show up and hit him for varying amounts of damage.

: The boss teleports around once he takes cutscene damage, and then starts hurling these gigantic magic things at you. They take off like a third of Roy’s HP each and are very hard to dodge - the hitboxes are deceptively huge.

: Not pictured - two or so minutes of me following the boss around and repeatedly hitting the sword button.

: Once his first HP bar ends, the boss turns into… this. I remind you that you do not get any kind of healing between when you start the first form and now.

: The second form has exactly one attack - it’ll fire two columns of bullshit at you, and then a third down the middle. You could dodge this, or you could just sit here and hit him - there’s a sweet spot where you can hit him but he can’t hit you.

: This screen would be a legit epilepsy warning… if this wasn’t a screenshot LP. The walls flash constantly and it hurts to look at.

: The boss just kind of turns into a blatant ripoff of the SNES Star Fox version of Andross.

Typo Counter: 179

: This is another reason why you just want infinite HP. The boss fires skulls at you on this seizure-inducing background and everything hurts to look at. Just stick Roy in the middle of the screen and hold down the fire button.

: Oh look, a dumb joke about how the boss is 3D… even though I’m pretty sure it’s just a sprite.

: The boss is more or less on a timer now.

Typo Counter: 180

: Once you run the timer out, you get this scene of Roy falling onto the boss. The random dipshits will be here if you met them all.

: “This… was the only way. Phew… he put up one hell of a fight. Didn’t he? What a… hey Roy…? Roy…? ROY!? What’s wrong? Why are you just standing there…?”

: “I… I don’t… I’m not sure what’s happening. I…”

: “Come here… take a step back…”

: “…I cannot. I will not.”

: “What!? You’re freaking me out.”

: “I’m sorry Bivare, but my time is up. I knew it would be soon. I’m not going back with you.”

: “What do you mean? We won Roy! Just take my hand and we’ll head back down now. …Roy?”

: “I can’t… I have to meet someone…”

: “…who?”

: “I’ve been looking for you my dear.”

: “…Roy… hey…”

: “…”

: “Bivare… I’m sorry this is the only option.”

: “Are you coming with me or are you staying?”

: “You know I’m coming.”

: “…I know…”

: “I am sorry…”

: “…I know… but don’t be.”

: “Well… I guess my game is over.”

Typo Counter: 181

: “You’re going to love this!”

: This entire bit of nothing dialogue is just slowly killing me to transcribe.

: “Roy… no… don’t… leave me here alone…”

: “I’m sorry Bivare… but…”

: “I know. I wouldn’t dream of stopping you now. What… do you think is over there…?”

: “I honestly couldn’t even guess. Mom… Dad… Mark… and… Jane. She and I will live on the other side.”

: “Biv… I’ve been living on borrowed time. No one ever gets to die as many times as I have. I’ve had a good run…”

Typo Counter: 182

: “We’re THE TWO BROTHERS… our work is famous. It can’t just be me… that doesn’t work at all.”

: “Roy, it is time to go. Biv, it’ll be alright.”

Typo Counter: 183

: “Why is everyone okay with him going on…? Fine. I’ll just come too.”

: “Bivare… it was good seeing you. I’m very sorry it had to be like this Bivare.”

: “Jane… it’s time I think…”

Typo Counter: 184

: Seriously though, this dialog is so… nothing… that I can’t even write jokes about it. It’s just bad.

: “NO ROY!! ROY COME BACK!!”

: “I… Roy… this isn’t how it was supposed to happen! We had so much left to do! So much left to create… to discover.”

: “Biv. Listen to me. You need to go live your life. Go back home and live your life.”

: Go back home and be a family man… oh, wait.

: “There is still so much left for you to accomplish.”

: “We already discovered the after-life… what’s greater than that?”

: “Goodbye Biv.”

: “Goodbye!”

: “Take care man… it’ll all work out!”

: Where’s the “Chief Plagiarist” credit for Andrew?

: Yeah, no, we’re never coming back to this pile of shit again.

: And with that, I’ve conquered the Allanson Gauntlet. Both of their games now have complete screenshot LPs. Surely that’s the last we’ll hear from them.

: Well, assuming they’re not wrong, I’ll see you on January 14th when YIIK gets this big patch they’re talking about. I doubt it’ll happen.

TOTALS:

Typos: 184
Softlocks: 16 (15 in actual gameplay, 1 during a speedrun)
Save-Breaking Bugs: 1