For some reason, I haven’t seen or heard anything about Underhero online since Jim Sterling did a favorable “Jimpressions” video of it. Maybe it’s been overlooked because it’s got a nine-letter title that starts with “Under” and features a world populated with monsters that you can befriend or fight, very simple RPG elements, a strange sense of humor, a wonderful soundtrack, an indication that something bigger than what you see is going on in the background, and an ending that… No, this isn’t anything like Undertale at all. It’s a side-scrolling platform game with active time combat and basic dodge mechanics. Our character is a simple Masked Kid, a common monster from the final area in a game where heroes cross the Chestnut Kingdom to defeat the King of Evil, Mr. Stitches, and save the world. One such hero has met his end at our hands, and the legendary weapon and its world-saving quest have been passed on to us. Now we’re on a quest to return the Triviality Stones to the bosses who normally give them to the heroes and gain the strength to overthrow Mr. Stitches. It’s not a particularly long journey, but there will be a lot of twists and turns as we go.
This is a pretty casual playthrough, so while I’m going to try to collect everything, I’m going to miss stuff. I’ll go back for it later, so feel free to point out anything you spot that I don’t remark on myself. I prefer not to have spoilers in the thread, but if you must, please tag them appropriately. I’ve beaten the game, but I’ve also forgotten most of the details, so I’m planning to have fun rediscovering the story along with all of you.
Pacifist Run:
Part 1: The Language of Money PolsyYoutube
Part 2: Yes, we’re letting the ghosts live. Don’t ask how. PolsyYoutube
Part 3: I hate zombie moles PolsyYoutube
Part 4: Insulting Swordfighting PolsyYoutube
Part 5: Robots Don’t Count PolsyYoutube
Part 6: We could have funded a year’s worth of Taco Tuesdays for this PolsyYoutube
The combat in this game is fairly simple, and it introduces the various commands gradually over the course of most of the first chapter. It takes some getting used to, and the waiting can be annoying when you can’t attack and the enemy just doesn’t, but I’ll be boosting my Attack as much as I can to cut down on how long the fights will take. Every new enemy presents new attack patterns and a slightly different strategy, so the combat doesn’t get dull as quickly as it seems like it would. There’s also the option to challenge yourself by bribing most enemies, which costs money and decreases your experience gain, but I’ll skip that for this playthrough.
So far I really like this game. I’m not entirely sure why we’re fighting the minions who also work with us but you know what, as long as there are no witnesses I suppose it doesn’t matter.
It’s time to start exploring what passes for a first dungeon in this game, although it’s not much of a dungeon. We need to get to the top of the Big Tree to find the Moth Queen, but our upward mobility is limited. This will begin a long sequence of collecting objects that we’ll use to get to more objects, and every time we find one, it seems like there’s another thing to get. It sounds a bit more tedious than it is, fortunately, since most of the game aims to parody that kind of design more than taking it seriously at all. In today’s adventure, we’re just after a couple of keys to open more locked gates. It’s hard to get lost when there are so few ways to go.
The Big Tree is very tall, as would be expected. But it also has a rather extensive root network, and there’s something at the very bottom that everybody seems to think we shouldn’t see. But that’s also where the elevator fuses are, so we don’t really have much choice. It’s still only the first world, so the puzzles are simple, the enemies are easy, and Tim is still only mildly annoying when he decides to act out.
Well, it wasn’t the way we intended, but we’ve made it to the top of the Big Tree, and we’re that much closer to the throne room. It’s about time to get the final combat technique and start taking down enemies with ease. Let’s see whether I can master the old Dark Souls standby: “Just parry everything and you won’t have a problem.”
I meant to post this a bit earlier, but I’ve been having some major problems with my capture device. It won’t affect the next few videos, which I captured before it started acting up, but I’ve made several tries on a single future part and streamlined a part of the game that really shouldn’t be streamlined. (I am, at least, learning some neat stuff about it, but I’m getting a bit tired of repeating it and can’t easily stitch together multiple takes to get around the issues.) For now, though, a fight that should be the focus of Underhero: the Moth Queen at last! Boss fights have a very different mechanic from the normal battles, but it works. After that, we get a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at what Mr. Stitches and his creepy sidekick are up to and finally collect the rewards for the apartment keys we’ve found.
I think I’ve narrowed the problem down to a misbehaving HDMI cable. I swapped it out and haven’t been having problems with the recordings since. So let’s move into chapter 2 for real and head to Long Woods Manor, home of Baron van Gregory and some very unfriendly ghosts. There’s not much we can do here yet, but we’ll slowly start dealing with the obstacles and open up parts of the manor as we progress.
Funny story - just a few days ago, Underhero updated for the first time in a long time. Among the updates were a potential fix for some of the stuttering issues I had in the early videos and fixes for some achievements, including one that I was very confused that I hadn’t received. It will be a long time before I get to the videos that are affected by the patch, though. Still, I can only imagine that this means that someone from Paper Castle Games was watching this LP, noticed the problems, and decided to put out a patch to fix them. I’m sure that’s not actually the case, but the coincidence is pretty huge. Speaking of huge, our party will be growing in this episode as we meet some new friends who will be essential to progress in this manor.
So it turns out that the problem wasn’t an HDMI cable. Nor was it the USB drive, the power cable, the recording device itself… pretty much every part of the system has been replaced now, and the problem persists. However, I’ve switched to recording directly to the hard drive, which seems to be working, but takes a lot more work to synchronize after the fact. Hopefully, that will at least let me keep producing videos. Speaking of which, here’s half of a sidequest. There aren’t many sidequests in this game, but the few that there are go on for quite a while.
Okay, here it is: The video where my capture equipment officially started giving me grief. I don’t know why it was this video, where I’m exploring a maze, that I had to re-record so many times, but I became very familiar with this area over that time. I tried to recapture the magic of exploring the maze for the first time as best I could, but the route is slightly optimized from the way I approached it the first time. I don’t think you’ll notice the difference. As for the maze itself, it’s a little bit like the treasure vault in the Big Tree - a side area with a bunch of upgrades that you can technically skip, but you really want those upgrades.
Sidequests in Underhero can be absurdly long, but very rewarding. Still, it’s time to get back to the main quest: climbing to the top of Long Woods Manor to meet Baron van Gregory. Oddly enough, we won’t be fighting our way to the top for various reasons. Instead, watch how little I know about alcohol.
This is July 4th, a day when Americans celebrate by setting off explosions that they hope won’t injure as many people as the previous year and standing in the rain in the hope of someone driving a military vehicle nearby. What better way to celebrate such a festive summer holiday than with an ice skating competition?
So, remember that off-color Masked Kid who showed up when we entered the Big Tree back in the first chapter and hasn’t been seen since? No, neither do I. Anyway, we’ve crashed the ghost party and now just need to head to the mausoleum at the far end of the graveyard to pick up the last artifact. I’m sure nothing will get in our way.
Okay, it’s been long enough. Let’s actually go fight the Baron, for real. And wonder why, after all the time he’s been called “Baron van Gregory” in the game, his pop-up title calls him “Baron von Gregory”. He’s not a bad boss, but I think I may be a bit overpowered by this point.
After all of the ghost hunting, it’s time to move into the third world, where everything is very much alive, until it’s not. Pica Pica Island is a tropical paradise, with shining beaches, a lovely volcano (from a distance), and a coliseum where captured monsters are forced to fight for their lives in death matches.
wait what
Well, it’s time for another cursed video. Aside from the problems I had getting a usable recording of this part of the game, it’s another maze, which means a lot of getting lost and generally a fair bit of backtracking even when I know what I’m doing. We’ve been told that the Jungle Maze isn’t as bad as the Dark Maze, which makes sense because it’s not optional, but I think this maze is much more confusing. There are more rooms, parts of rooms don’t connect to other parts of the same room, and there’s nothing as convenient as returning through the door you just came from to get to a new place. There are a lot of rewards, though. I’m pretty sure I got them all. It’s hard to tell.
I’m not going to lie to you - I don’t like World 3 very much. It’s really front-loaded, with the immediate revelation of the fate of Pica-Pica Village, and the mandatory maze coming right after that. There are some puzzles, I guess, but they’re really nothing special. This video is a bit of an uphill climb, and then it’s all downhill for the rest of the chapter.
