Summary
: The road to Terminor is pretty long, though we’ve done most of it before - you go to Darkling Bog and take a right before you actually enter it. On the way, we have a cutscene with Abrecan I’m going to summarize.
: “You know about her?”
: “I know she was beautiful.”
: “She was. I remember her from my childhood. That’s where all Phelan’s troubles began.”
: “Over Bodecia?”
: “Not over her, but surrounding her. When she died, there were a lot of bad feelings. Things were said.. the Terminor royals have nothing but suspicion where we’re concerned.”
: Bodecia is Sheridan’s mother and Phelan’s wife, who died mysteriously years before the start of the game. She was queen of Terminor and now Terminor hates Gwernia for it.
: Terminor’s gates are behind a group of trolls who can wipe the party if they get lucky, as well as a group of spirit wolves. I dodged both.
: This is one of the only places where the time of day matters. Terminor is mostly empty houses that are purely for show.
: If you take a right from the entrance, there’s a whole second screen of buildings. This is where I want to start off.
: The second area has this building, which is only open at night. With fast forward on, this only takes a few minutes.
: The merchant in here sells magic weapons. Dart of Distance isn’t a bad item if you have Godric in your party or you’re building Brenna as a thrower.
: What we’re really interested in are Helms of Defense. The next dungeon has some really heavy physical hitters.
: Directly across from that is the alchemy shop, which is only open during the day. We’re going to need to grind some cash because we’re going to spend it all shortly.
: First, I"m going to talk to the innkeeper. The reason is that if you don’t, there’s a chance he disappears from the game.
: What’s wrong with his face? He looks like if Pennywise got plastic surgery and they injected him with a lethal dose of botox afterward.
: He looks like he’s wearing a mask made of human skin.
: We need to pick the second option, then the third. The game has some really, really bad flag work here that dictates whether or not Tamberlain opens a shop with items we want.
: There’s a cutscene that happens as soon as we go into the inn that is well over 100 textboxes long. Most of it is pointless bullshit. I’ll give you the highlights.
: A lady who looks exactly like the one from Alaron’s dream (but who I don’t think is intended to be the same person) runs into the inn crying for help.
: Tamberlain is creepy.
: She mentions seeing a wizard leading an army of monsters, and somehow Alaron knows it’s Shamsuk despite barely even knowing who Shamsuk is.
: This tells us that Shamsuk was also the one who attacked Oriana right after we left Gwernia the first time.
: I asked Ryan if the game ever tells you who Shamsuk is because I know he had Rheda when he got to this part, and nope, it doesn’t.
: The woman then dies, but not before a new asshole shows up. This part I’m not going to summarize because it contains a bunch of plot points.
: “Niesen!”
: “Happy to see me?”
: “What are you doing in Terminor?”
: What are you doing in Terminor? I wish I could find a cleaner clip of that, it’s the only episode of that show that was any good.
: “I think that’s obvious…”
: “There was one just now…”
: “You spoke to her?”
: “She described the Minions. She couldn’t name the wizard.”
: “But you know who she meant, don’t you?”
: “Were you there?”
: “Almost to the end. Remember? I was visiting my father. My mother. Our friends.”
: “I’m sorry, Niesen. Were they all lost?”
: “Every one of them. Whoosh.. up in smoke.”
: “How did you escape?”
: “A premonition, feeling…”
: The game isn’t going to explain this at any point outside of the manual, but Niesen was cursed by Shamsuk at some point to slowly turn into a zombie.
: Why Shamsuk did this is never explained, but I bet it’s because it’s the wizard equivalent of cramming Niesen into a locker.
: “Thinking about getting even?”
: “I have had some thoughts.”
: I don’t think anyone involved with this game had thoughts at any point.
: “Just a minute, friends… I know what you’re thinking, but I warn you.”
: How does Abrecan know I’m thinking of LPing something better than this?
: “Against the wizard?”
: “Alaron, you’re joking. His power destroyed an entire city.”
: “I’m going after him.”
: “You’ll fail.”
: “Win or lose, I’ll have my revenge.”
: “That’s the wrong reason.”
: “But it’s the right idea. Don’t you think so, squire?”
: “What tower?”
: I’ll cut this off here because the rest of the conversation is kinda pointless. We’re going to go into a swamp and kill Shamsuk. Have another reaction image, though.
: The gist of it is that we need Niesen to get the party into the tower, and that means replacing someone (Abrecan) with him. This is a half-truth.
: Niesen sucks. He has one very bad damage spell, he can’t use melee weapons apart from his staff, can’t learn anything, and is generally this game’s Rabu.
: Fortunately, the developers added a failsafe - as long as Niesen has been in the party at some point, you can get into Shamsuk’s tower even if he’s dead before you ever get there. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.
: Tamberlain’s shop is open now, so let’s get stuff before it glitches out and disappears.
: I replace the party’s Boots of Adamant with Boots of Speed. These offer one less protection, but give 3 dexterity and have a passive haste effect, which boosts turn order but also how far each character can move per turn.
: I also clarified (via speedrun documentation) that stats do in fact scale beyond 30.
: He also sells these rings, which are incredibly expensive. Ideally we want two per character unless you’re using a caster for some reason.
: The rings boost HP by 5 each and are the only ring we can buy. Once you clear Shamsuk’s tower, Tamberlain’s shop closes assuming he doesn’t glitch out earlier than that.
: The reason we want them is because the rings passively restore HP as time passes. In practice, this means we’ll go into almost every fight fully healed without using potions or camping.
: As soon as we leave, the game forces us to drop Abrecan for Niesen. I could drop Becan as well, but there are two reasons I won’t. The first is that Becan tends to glitch out if he’s dropped from the party and disappears from the game entirely.
: The second is that if you do successfully drop him and he doesn’t glitch out, he’ll be all the way back at the inn in Erromon. With Abrecan, we merely need to backtrack to Talewok.
: Niesen sucks. He is a joke of a character. He starts with 20 dexterity and an armor with a 2-point dexterity penalty on it. His staff can’t be unequipped.
: His only damage spell is Fireball, which he has at rank 8. I’d like to remind you that Fireball hits everything in its radius, regardless of what side they’re on.
: This fight has unrealistic conditions, because I intentionally skipped everyone’s turn until we got to Niesen. In a real fight, Fireball is worse than useless because it means we can’t send the rest of the party in.
: I find a group of Chaos Warriors near Terminor and have Niesen blow himself up. This nearly takes out Becan in the process.
: On the way back to Talewok, there’s this ramp near the bridge separating Darkling Bog from the road to Terminor.
: Going down the ramp brings us to a river.
: The river has a couple of difficult fights in it. This one introduces Lizard Men, who are effectively upgraded goblins.
: They come in two varieties: regular Lizard Men and Lizard Man Sergeants.
: What about the lizard women, like the ones that have those cool frills?
: After killing them and a group of four trolls, we get to this box.
: This brings us to a full 8 Rings of Healing, enough that everyone will have two.
: One trip to Talewok later and we have Abrecan back. Unfortunately, I can’t dump him until after Shamsuk’s tower.
: Now that we’ve rearranged the party, I need to go back to Terminor because Tamberlain has a sidequest we can do. It’s kind of pointless unless you have a caster, but I’m going to show it off because it explains something from earlier.
: If we go back to Tamberlain, we get the option to have him tell us a story. We want that last one, and I’m going to summarize because Tamberlain is creepy.
: Tamberlain tells us about Mago, a spellcaster who was also a Very Special Boy without a true name until he went insane and nearly blew up Terminor.
: Wouldn’t that mean Alaron is the second mage?
: There’ve probably been hundreds.
: Mago’s house is up here, on the third screen of Terminor.
: If we pick the third dialog option with the woman standing guard outside, we can get in.
: The first basement level has a trainer in it.
: Aura of Death is a garbage spell that does nothing. Stamina allows you to set your character’s HP to negative values. We don’t need any of this.
: At the lowest level is Master Willem from Bloodborne, who we saw in Alaron’s vision earlier. He has nothing interesting to say.
: That’s his orgasm face.
: He does, however, give us a pretty good idea of what Darkling Bog and Shamsuk’s tower will be like.
: Back in Darkling Bog, we essentially just head east until we reach Shamsuk’s tower.
: We run into some new enemy types almost immediately. These are Zombies, while the big one is a Plague Zombie.
: Zombies are giant pools of HP with really high damage mitigation. They don’t hit nearly as hard as chaos enemies and aren’t much of a threat.
: Finally, we hit Shamsuk’s tower. This is the point where everyone needs to have a magic weapon, but that won’t be a problem.
: The tower has stone golems outside of it, which.. really aren’t any different from zombies.
: We can’t get in through the front door. Remember that part where Niesen said someone would have to scale a wall?
: The way in is this nondescript section of wall on the right side.
: This puts us. somewhere. I’m not sure how this tower makes any sense.
: To the right is this bag, which has a key in it.
: There’s a ring hidden in the corner of this little niche - you can’t see it as far as I know.
: This ring is kind of pointless. By now, enemies have such a high chance to hit that unless you have a shield, protection is kind of meaningless.
: This ramp leads to the next room.
: It’s a big C with two doors in it. It doesn’t matter which door we take.
: This room is a trick. There’s a new enemy type we can fight.
: Dust Devils are a non-threat that we wipe out quickly.
: This door looks like the way out, but it isn’t.
: If you look at the inner wall, there’s a spot where the textures are off. That’s the way forward.
: This room is the third layer of Shamsuk’s onion. This painting is actually a door. If you don’t have the key from the first room, it won’t open and there’s no message letting you know which key you need.
: As soon as we go through, we get into a fight with six Hellhounds.
: Those aren’t hellhounds. Those are some kind of mutated, two-headed cerberus.
: Everyone knows hellhounds are bipedal and most of them live in polycules.
: And their leader’s a sparklefur voiced by Kesha. I’m glad I’m not that sparkly.
: This fight is either total bullshit or over in ten seconds depending on RNG. Even with 30 base dexterity and boots of speed, the hellhounds will sometimes get a chain of turns.
: They have an AOE fire spell that will quickly wipe the party if they do, hitting for 30 damage or so through the 25% reduction from chaos robes.
: In any case, once we get going we can kill them in a single hit from behind. My second attempt killed them without the enemies getting a turn.
: They drop hellhound hide, which you can turn into an armor of the same name. It resists 50% of fire damage, which will be useful for a boss later.
: Also in this room is a wight and three spirit wolves. The wight is a tank but isn’t noteworthy otherwise.
: The hellhound room has two paths, one going into the big fire pit and another that doesn’t. We want the one that doesn’t.
: This leads us to a small landing with no apparent way out. The door is hidden in the wall and you just kinda mash A until you find it.
: Going through the wall sends us to this room, which is a tiny square with a red mark on the wall. The mark is a hidden door.
: The mark leads to another fight, this one against a Fire Elemental and two Salamanders. Fire Elementals are another “need magic weapon to damage them” enemy.
: Those salamanders look like rats with bodypaint.
: They had to put all their processing power into making the game crash.
: This fight drops a wand of the Crash the Game spell, just in case you needed one.
: The door in the salamander room (which is a big circle) leads here. This hallway is how you leave the tower, but the door at the far end is locked.
: What we need to do is turn around from where we came in and take this door.
: That door leads to a maze with all of three enemy groups in it. The rats are a joke at this point.
: We run into a group of Giant Skeletons and Skeleton Archers. They’re total pushovers.
: This minotaur is what we’re here to find, because it has the key we need to leave the tower.
: This is a Minotaur King, which is slightly bigger than a regular Minotaur and has about twice the HP. It dies quickly.
: You can also find another Wall of Bones scroll here if you need it and didn’t get the one outside Terminor for some reason.
: What polygon did those bones come from?
: Looks like a pentagonal hexahedron.
: Why am I not surprised you know that off the top of your head?
: The smart thing to do would be to backtrack to the twisty hallway and leave. There are a few items here, but we don’t really care about any of them.
: Instead, we’ll keep pressing forward for no good reason.
: This room looks just like that other one, and even the minimap makes it look like we’ve backtracked. It’s actually a different room altogether.
: If we go upstairs, we find Shamsuk’s meth lab. The bookcase to Alaron’s left is a hidden door.
: There’s a hidden trapped chest here that needs thief 10 and mechanic 9 to open consistently. Is it worth it?
: Nope! Cheat Death is a pointless spell, and we’ve had access to it this entire time anyway. If you cast it on anyone but Alaron and they die, it brings them to 1 HP instead.
: Going into that bookshelf I pointed out earlier brings us to the Brown Hallway. Now, I’d like to point out that I was recording this at 12:30 in the morning while on a call with Ryan. This will be important in a minute.
: That door at the end of the hall is progress. Let’s go. Surely nothing bad awaits us.
: So far so good. It’s another white room, doesn’t look too bad. Let’s turn the camera a little so we can see, since this is the default camera angle.
: Huh. What’s this ahead of us? Let’s take one step.
: HOLY FUCK WHAT - oh, it’s the developers thinking they know how to use the camera again. The game actually locks your camera angle here for a few seconds any time you get too close and the whole thing feels cursed.
: It’s a wizard jumpscare!
: Damn wizards, lurking in the middle of circular rooms to jump out and scare people..
: Right next to it is a chest. This has one of the only other items worth anything.
: Breklor’s Firestaff is kinda useless unless you need spell battery for some reason.
: There are three doors in Wizard Jumpscare Hell. One is behind the statue, one is to the left, and one is kind of at the 10:00 position. Let’s take the door on the left.
: What are the chances the game jumpscares us again?
: Close to 100%.
: I really need to consider doing this the next time I build a fortress.
: I dunno, I feel like it’s not as horrifying as the wizard statue. Anyway, the chest next to it has a completely useless item.
: Diplomacy is a useless skill. I don’t know that it actually does anything at all except maybe give you dialog with NPCs where they hate Alaron a little less.
: If we go into the door behind the wizard statue, we instead get this room.
: A statue of Kali? In this godawful shithole? She’d be pissed.
: This weird camo curtain in the corner is the door to the next area.
: The way forward here is pretty clear, just take the ramp.
: This leads us to Shamsuk’s secondary meth lab. I was talking about this with Ryan and he’s like “Yeah, you’d never know the entire reason the tower exists is for Shamsuk to make an army of zombies”.
: The corner has a secret door in it. This is the first time we ever get this dialog box - none of the other doors so far have done it.
: Another new enemy is on the other side. Earth Elementals are big, slow, and die before they can take a turn.
: We’re now in a room with a portrait of what appears to be a photoshopped Harriet Tubman on one side and Pointbeard, the Wizard Pirate on the other. Pointbeard’s portrait is a hidden door.
: There’s a chest and a crate in this room with some pointless shit in it. The crate has a spell that lets you charm elementals and will probably never be used.
: Pointbeard’s portrait leads to yet another meth lab.
: A lot of this tower is the same room with different wall textures. Would you believe we’re just over halfway through at this point?
: Finally, we come to this room that looks like it’s trying to be someone’s grandpa’s living room. See the checkered carpet on the floor?
: It’s hard to capture, but right in front of where Alaron is standing in that last shot is a hidden hole in the carpet that drops you about 8 rooms back if you fall in.
: They were really padding for time here.
: There’s a pretty linear path up to this room, which has two chests in it. One has the Haste spell in scroll form, and the other has a wand of the lifedrain spell.
: We fight an obnoxious number of zombies, and then proceed into another photoshopped Harriet Tubman room.
: There are two hidden doors in this room. One is in the floor - it’s the square that’s darker than the rest. The other is to the right of the painting.
: I think something bugged out and the game forgot to give me a key, because both of those doors are locked. Instead, we’ll use that door at the far end.
: This comes out.. do you remember that room earlier that had two paths, and one was in a fire pit? That’s where it comes out, a few rooms before the exit.
: After a few more rooms identical to ones we’ve seen before, we wind up here at a room that I can best describe as the Bisexual Flag Chamber. Happy pride!
: There’s a little bit too much green for it to be the bisexual flag, but I’ll take it.
: The Bisexual Chamber has a really stupid gimmick. Let me see if I can find the map from the Prima guide to explain.
: Despite being bisexual colors, the room is actually closer in shape to the transgender symbol. There are three groups of enemies in here.
: The floor has numbers on it that are hard to make out due to texture compression. The numbers aren’t part of a puzzle or anything, they just show you where in the loop you are.
: There are four little hallways that lead to the inner ring, which you can only really find by mashing A near the walls until the screen transitions.
: From here, we have to spam A on the inner wall of the inner ring to find another hidden passage.
: We get in one last fight with a Wight and two Spirit Wolves. This is the last group we need.
: We then need to head back to the “5” mark on the outer ring. See that wall to Alaron’s right that has the fucky texture on it?
: This texture is actually a door. The texture is there the whole time, but it doesn’t work as a door unless all the enemies are dead - it won’t even give you a “this door is locked” notification.
: I honestly have no idea how you’re supposed to figure this out short of mashing A everywhere until you make progress.
: The rest of this dungeon is a straight line, so I’m not going to bother showing any of it.
: Eventually, we reach two portals. We have finally reached the end of this godawful dungeon.
: “And fought Shamsuk with all his might.”
: “Hello again, Jester.”
: “Such formality! I’m embarrassed. Please, good squire. Call me Farris.”
: “All right. You already know my name.”
: “In truth your name is lost to me. That’s just the trouble, can’t you see? Or don’t you know who owns this tower? Who dreams this darkest dream of power?”
: Can we kill this guy yet?
: “The Necromancer.”
: “Yes, you’re right. And who helped Shamsuk in his fight?”
: “I had a feeling it was you.”
: “And no amount of reasoned thought could sway Shamsuk from whom he sought. So fearing did I hide behind the guise of readings, cards, and rhymes.”
: Farris gave himself a magic lobotomy. I’m going to skip ahead a couple of lines.
: “That’s Oriana!”
: “Just the name he’s looking for.”
: “But she’s a healer.”
: “No, she’s more.”
: I was under the impression that the game would let us replace someone with Farris, but I was wrong. We don’t really need him anyway, given that at this point everyone’s stats are close to maxed.
: The portal dumps us out into the forest. It connects to the portal that we activated at the very start of the game.
: Farris is annoying, and Alaron zaps him with an anti-lobotomy spell to make him stop being a dipshit.
: That’s all I’m going to show of this cutscene, because we have a very lengthy one coming up that will re-tread the same ground.
: What exactly do “chaos tracks” look like?
: You know those police shows where they’re looking at a dirt path and it’s rained recently and there’s fifty different sets of footprints? Like that.
: “Don’t look, lad.”
: “The house has been ransacked. Does anyone see her? Oriana?”
: “I’m sure she went off through the portal.”
: Yes, clearly she went through the portal that leads directly into the tower full of zombies.
: Becan looks so gormless every time the game zooms in on him.
: “It’s just as you said, Farris! You knew this would happen!”
: “I only guessed…”
: “YOU KNEW!!!”
: “Calm down!”
: “She was no danger to him. Even helping me, she’s just a healer. Not even a witch. Where’s Shamsuk?!”
: “Now listen, lad. Keep your head. She’s safe, I’m sure.”
: “She’s fine. When he came, she ran off to the woods. Why not go back and look?”
: He sounds like my kids when they were five.
: I still don’t understand how you were allowed to have kids.
: “Boy, you’ve been fighting for days. This destruction is neverending. We don’t know what’s happening or why it’s happening. This isn’t the time to challenge the necromancer.”
: This almost feels kind of like the writer was going for a Blood Omen thing where Alaron turns out to be another Kain. The timeline certainly matches up since Blood Omen released in 1996.
: “You don’t want to challenge him? I’ll challenge him!”
: “If it’s a trap…”
: “Well, then I’m trapped. All right?”
: “Alaron.. you tried. You wanted to help.”
: “Abrecan is right, lad. We tried our best. What more can you do?”
: “What more can I do? Do you really want to see what more I can do?”
: I think I speak for all of us when I say no.
: “SQUIRE! COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!”
: “Well, that convinced him.”
: “He’ll be killed, I"m sure of it.”
: I’d like to point out that in that last scene, Alaron was standing outside the door to Oriana’s house. He’s now standing behind the house. Shamsuk was close enough that he could probably hear Alaron the entire time.
: “Leave me alone, Farris.”
: “Get out of here before he kills you.”
: “That’s never going to happen. So you can go back to wherever it is you’re supposed to be.”
: “Please don’t anger him.”
: “Finally! I was beginning to think I might not see you again. Alaron, isn’t it? Or so you would have us believe?”
: “Where’s Oriana?”
: “Patience, squire. You have no idea how gratifying it is to find you at last. I can’t say I approve of your companion there.”
: I like this guy more than Abrecan. Can we keep him?
: “I want to see the healer.”
: “Maybe you will. After all, I can raise the dead. I hold the staff. I am the master of the Fourth School. And of the bogs. And the tower.”
: “Not the tower, Shamsuk. The tower is gone.”
: The tower magically explodes once you leave it. There’s no cutscene or anything. I imagine it’s because the tower is the fantasy equivalent of Groverhaus and the load-bearing drywall finally gave in.
: Also, the writing in this part has degraded to the point where they’re not even using proper grammar anymore.
: “What?!”
: “Great wizard, that’s a joke, and badly spoke! Forget it, o powerful one!”
: “No, listen…”
: Like this. This is.. you know what? Fuck it. This is Allanson writing.
: “Attacked?”
: Metal Gear!?
: I’m skipping like six lines of dialog here where Shamsuk tells Farris to fuck off and casts a pain spell on him and Alaron reiterates that the tower is destroyed.
: This game keeps giving me reaction images I need to use on social media.
: “Dust.”
: “My monsters?”
: “Dead.”
: “What?”
: “All of them. Monsters, zombies, skeletons.. all I could find.”
: I’m sure people are scrolling past this part, and I do not blame you. I’m going to summarize the rest.
: Shamsuk was building an army of the dead to fuck up Rabisat and Pochangarat, because he saw the other wizards as idiots.
: He then confirms that the entire reason chaos exists is because Alaron doesn’t have a name.
: I mean, I imagine it’d be pretty chaotic if no one had a name.
: Shamsuk confirms that none of the other wizards can name Alaron, and with Cradawgh dead he’s the only option.
: Oh, and Oriana was Alaron’s mother. I’ll spoil the obvious and say that Alaron is the bastard child of Phelan and Oriana.
: Shamsuk confirms he burned Oriana to death and then Alaron gets pissed and fights him.
: Shamsuk is effectively an upgraded chaos sorcerer, and comes with two Wraiths and a Giant Skeleton.
: His strategy is to cast Haste on himself, Weakness on the party, and then casts a spell that can potentially crash the game.
: With backstabs, he’s dead in under three turns and never gets to crash the game.
: By this point, we’ve maxed every useful stat on every character.
: Abrecan maxes out just as it’s time to replace him. We’ll do that next update when we head all the way back to Terminor.
: Becan is almost maxed out for damage, leaving Shield as his one remaining skill to max. I’m not sure it’s worth raising Hafted to 10, given that no one in the party has missed an attack for a long time.
: Brenna is maxed on stats but still needs some skill levels. This is a result of her stats being trash when we first get her.
: Alaron is more or less maxed out on everything but Shield.
: When the fight ends, Farris is standing there with Shamsuk’s staff.
: “I’ve been to a tower I saw in a dream.. and Alaron, Alaron, what did you do there?”
: Farris then fucks off with Shamsuk’s staff. I think this was supposed to be some kind of sequel hook.
: You might have noticed the game hasn’t told us what to do from here. I did skip a lot of stuff, but I promise you the game never tells you.
: Next time, we’ll head to the game’s final town and start Aidyn Chronicles’ endgame.
: “Goblins roam the wood and trouble there has been…”
: “Safe and sound.. and well-hidden! I found you in the woods. What you were doing there I can’t guess.”
: “The greatest school of wizardry anywhere on this entire plane!!! Are you prepared to pay the price of admission here?”
: “Some of them. They are not easy to get to know.. they’re far too busy to enter the forest and when they do come here they die so quickly!”
: One thing I thought about a lot while recording and writing this LP is what a sequel to this game would even have looked like.