Summary
: The lighthouse is another 10-minute (on fast forward) walk down a boring, empty path.
: This group of ogres respawns if you need to grind, but it’s better and faster to use the ghost wolves in Talewok. Not that grinding will help you since nothing in this game scales well.
: Six groups of ogres, a group of wolves (regular ones, not the ghost kind) and a group of bandits later, we’re at the lighthouse.
: The door is trapped, which is annoying because Brenna has 7 points in mechanic and can’t consistently disarm it. Several savestates later..
: We get a group of generic bandits we could’ve wiped the floor with hours ago. The only difference is that these bandits are using Dragon Fangs.
: Dragon Fangs are one of two magical throwing weapons, and are generally kind of garbage.
: There’s a unique shield down here, but we’re not going to bother because it’s objectively worse than the Chaos Shield.
: If you do go down the ladder, you get an early introduction to a new enemy type: wyverns. Wyverns are effectively stronger bats, but they have a variant called the Dracovern that can hit for like 30 to 40 damage.
: I use the experience to get Brenna up to around 60 HP, which will be important in a few minutes. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but HP is derived like this: Stamina + Endurance + Level.
: Stamina and Endurance both give 1 max HP per point, with the only difference being that you can cast using your Stamina pool and not your Endurance/Level HP pool.
: It’s possible to overflow your stamina value using a buff spell you can get as early as Erromon, which gives your character negative HP.
: Alaron spouts some gibberish and the lighthouse re-lights. I’m going to skip that dialogue since it might as well be ten text boxes of someone randomly pressing buttons on a keyboard.
: If we head back to Port Saiid, the captain isn’t in his house anymore. We need to head down to the docks for some lengthy cutscenes.
: Before we get there, we run into this guy. This is Farris, and he’s a temporary party member we’ll run into later.
: I feel like I need to use this shot on social media at some point. It’s up there along with the Tetsugoro Kusabi “The internet, huh? Fuck the internet.”
: Again, feel like I could get some mileage out of this on social media somewhere. Maybe the next time I see people posting their FF14 OCs on my timeline.
: I’m picturing Alaron making a cross with his fingers and shouting “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”
: Okay this is boring now. I’m bored. Let’s move on.
: The captain demands we pay him 400 gold to go to Cradawgh’s Isle. We’ll do that because we have no choice.
: If you’re playing this on console, make a save before you move forward on the dock. We’re going to be stuck at sea without access to shops for a while, and there are enemies on Chaos Island that can crash the game.
: Ten seconds into the boat trip, we fight two gryphons. Gryphons are glass cannon types who could potentially kill Brenna in one hit if I hadn’t upped her HP.
: This, for instance, would’ve instakilled her had I not gotten her HP up.
: A storm arrives, and Alaron thankfully tied the branch to the helm so we should be safe.
: The boat crashes on a mysterious island.
: And now the captain tells us to fuck off while he fixes the boat. Welcome to Chaos Island.
: This island is full of chaos enemies, and by that I mean there are probably 20 enemy encounters within a ten-second walk of this screen.
: Here we run into Chaos Stormers, which are identical to Chaos Troopers except that they have a weaker multi-target spell and drop a different weapon.
: The Chaos Maul is a lot like the Chaos Sword - it has a really low base hit rate (30%) but has one of the highest damage ratings in the game at 7. Is it better than the Blood Axe? Not really.
: This island is full of “dracoverns”, which are wyverns that do roughly double the damage of a standard wyvern.
: If you look out to sea, you can see a little island with a portal on it. We need to activate that portal.
: Here, we run into our first Chaos Slayer. Chaos Slayers are giant blobs of HP who can cast shields and haste their entire group, which makes them faster than our party.
: The little island is covered in encounters, most of which are wyvern or dracovern spam.
: There’s a chest on the back side of the island, and this is what we came for.
: This wand is useful if you want to kill a superboss that’s on this island. Let me show that off.
: The superboss is up these stairs, which also lead to the dungeon.
: The red guy here is the Chaos Marquis. He is a superboss brought down by a laughably easy exploit. First, let me show you how this fight normally goes.
: He starts by stacking Clumsiness, a debuff that reduces hit rate by a lot.
: Even Brenna can barely hurt him and she now has 28 dexterity and 29 strength.
: The Marquis then instakills people one by one. As far as I understand it, the way you’re meant to kill him is to stack debuffs on him until he starts taking real damage. But we don’t need to do that.
: Off-screen, I do one fight to get Alaron’s intelligence to 20, the minimum for equipping the wand. From here, we just cast it.
: This is part of what I think is a bug - if the final enemy alive in a fight has Wall of Bones cast on them, the game treats it as if they died.
: We find 6,000 gold and the Marquis Amulet. What does the Marquis Amulet do, you ask? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.
: The “Control Marquis” spell is meant to instantly win a fight against a Chaos Marquis. There is one other Chaos Marquis in the game. The amulet spell has maybe a 5% chance of hitting it at maxed-out wizard with two witch rings and a wizard hat equipped.
: And the best part? You can Wall of Bones that one too!
: Have a rough copy of a pic Salty Vanilla is working on featuring Brenna tossing the Marquis’s useless amulet into the sea.
: Welcome to the dungeon. This is the part where the game starts turning to shit.
: Okay, goes from the fun kind of bad game to the un-fun kind.
: This dungeon has fixed camera angles and is filled to the brim with chaos enemies. If you leave the dungeon, ALL OF THE ENEMIES RESPAWN.
: The first room has a door hidden in a wall we need to take to progress.
: This room crashed the game the first time I entered - the game threw me into combat with one of the caster groups and the game froze because they had too many spell effects going on at once.
: Assuming you get past the two caster groups without the game crashing, there’s a chaos slayer waiting in ambush. These fights are back to back and most likely you won’t have a chance to save in between.
: This room. This room is what made me drop this game the first time I played, and is where a lot of people will probably drop the game. This room is BULLSHIT.
: The big skull on the wall that’s maybe 20 steps away is our goal. It took me over an hour of savestate abuse to get through this room.
: Each of those four braches on either side of the main path has an enemy group in it. The first two are groups of chaos warriors we can steamroll effortlessly.
: This is where shit gets painful. This group of two chaos troopers and two chaos stormers is broken as all hell.
: For some reason, this particular group is scripted to spam their spells, which have a much higher hit rate and a much lower failure rate than normal.
: There’s a pretty good chance (I’d say it’s well over half) that these enemies kill Alaron before you ever get a turn, even with the entire party at max dexterity.
: I think it took me around 12 retries before I got through this fight, even though we’re definitely overleveled for this part of the game.
: Assuming you get that fight down, you get to fight not one but TWO groups of two Chaos Spellcasters and two Chaos Sorcerers.
: That screenshot up above is the game softlocking because the enemies used one too many spells at once. I had this happen on three different recording attempts.
: Here’s another softlock that happened almost immediately after starting the fight. I have no idea how anyone at H2O looked at this and said “This is okay. We can release this.”
: I’m guessing certification requirements were also a lot more lax back then, because this is the kind of thing that would make a game fail cert today. My guess is that Nintendo didn’t give a shit because the N64 was already a dead console by the time this released.
: We’ve battled through over an hour of game-crashing bullshit that should’ve taken maybe 10 minutes to get through. Now what? We can’t get past the gate.
: You go down all the side halls. They’re all empty except for some useless spices and gemstones. How do you make progress?
: The answer is that going up to this specific wall reveals a lever we can flip to open the gate.
: Clearly, if we’ve been fighting shit that can crash the game, this room must have a boss that can delete your save file or brick the N64. Nope!
: It’s full of goblins. These are the same enemies we fought in Erromon, without any stat boosts.
: The way out is this ramp hidden in the floor.
: This leads us to another big empty room with a couple of goblins in it.
: And here’s our way out. This is the other half of the portal we saw outside. If you didn’t activate that other portal, you have to walk all the way back and I think the enemies in that one room all respawn.
: We can then walk back to the boat, where the captain is sitting in the middle of the ocean.
: Normally I’d skip the cutscene that happens here, but I suffered through over an hour of reloading savestates in that godawful dungeon and I need you to understand my pain.
: What if I told you this cutscene goes on for another like, 40 lines?
: And then everybody died.
: Unfortunately, we’re on Cradawgh’s island. There is nothing here but a cutscene.
: I’m going to post a lot of screenshots of this because I want you to see what H2O’s idea of cutscene direction was.
: This isn’t me making the game look bad, by the way. There’s no camera motion at all during these cutscenes - it makes jump cuts and then stops.
: Metal Gear!?
: We get into a fight with one of each chaos enemy we’ve run into so far. It does not last long because they’re incapable of nuking Alaron to death and aren’t likely to crash the game.
: Pochangarat is the massacre princess from the cutscene at the start of the game. I’m going to skip the rest of this and just say that Cradawgh dies after taking what I assume is like six hours to bleed out.
: On the boat ride back to Port Saiid, we get scenes with our party members.
: This sounds like a Vietnam story with “VC” changed to “goblins”.
: His facial expression does not at all match what he’s saying. He looks like my dad does when he tries to explain sports to his dog.
: This dialog makes no sense, so let’s cut the rest of it.
: We wind up back in Port Saiid with Farris still standing there. Our goal is to head back to Talewok, then to Terminor.
: On the way to Talewok, Alaron and Brenna have a chat about romance. This scene becomes a lot more painful if you have Keelin in the party with Brenna.
: Finally, we have a scene with Abrecan as we approach Arturo’s bridge. This is one of the last scenes we’ll have with him because I’m going to dump him in Terminor.
: No you weren’t! There were four enemies!
: There are people who would call Abrecan an example of toxic masculinity, and.. yeah he probably is. He gets worse.
: The road back to Talewok is another 10 minutes of nothing.
: Ardra tells us to go to Terminor and find the innkeeper there, who is one of the glitchiest NPCs in the game. There’s a chance he simply never shows up.
: You can then have a funeral for Cradawgh if you go to his house, which is behind the inn. I’m not going to bother transcribing it.
: We then have a conversation with Abrecan where he tells Alaron not to get involved with women.
: Also Becan is hungry. I don’t know why the game absolutely bombards you with cutscenes here.
: I’m going to end the update here, because Terminor is a giant mess of cutscenes involving a plot point that kinda comes out of nowhere.
: Next update: Sham-suk Deez Nuts.