: Well, it’s finally here. I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be. The main menu screen now has the incredibly bitter bibliography on it, leading me to believe they didn’t get rid of all the Haruki Murakami crap.
: Naturally, the first thing I did was check the bibliography to see if they updated it at all. I compared it to the version from Update 2 of the original LP. They didn’t update it at all, meaning that if they haven’t changed that one verbatim copy-paste from Wikipedia I found that I am going to call them on that.
: I will also be closely monitoring the new content for anything that looks even vaguely out of place. If you find anything that you suspect might be plagiarism, please let me know. You would THINK they’d have learned not to plagiarize after two games, but I doubt it.
: I’m also wondering now if some of the things in this list are actually applicable to Two Brothers - I know Two Brothers plagiarizes from Merriam-Webster, but I don’t remember seeing this game do that. Maybe it was in one of the ONISM comments that I never read.
: The start of the game is still the same, only now they ask you if you “want to view a content warning”.
: The only thing this does is allow you to choose whether Rory can die or not. Of course we want him dead, he’s a useless dipshit.
: We then get the choice to turn Reduced Monologues on. So, what does this do exactly? Not a whole lot - I played up to Wind Town and only noticed three monologues that were changed. Two were removed outright, and one was shortened slightly.
: We also get the choice between Normal Mode and Story Mode. If, for some reason, you decide to play this game post-1.25 patch, DO NOT PLAY ON NORMAL MODE.
: They also re-did the chapter title screens, which I suppose is nice. Now let’s see if the Allansons learned anything. Keep in mind this is a patch that they supposedly beta tested with people who weren’t related to or employed by them.
: One of the only three changes I could detect with Reduced Monologues is that it shortens the monologue when you first meet Dali to three text boxes. This is a marked improvement.
: I mean, the writing’s kind of mediocre and all they really did was cut a bunch of text here without really changing it at all, but it’s fewer text boxes I have to read.
: The second thing Reduced Monologues changes is that it straight-up removes the infamous “vibrating with motion” monologue in the elevator in the factory, so it goes from Dali entering the elevator to the loading cutscene without a single line of text.
: We get into combat, and now we can see how the Allansons decided to re-balance it.
: Each character now has an “affinity”. Alex is uh… being a hipster I guess. Michael is Fire, Vella is Water, and I’m not sure what the rest are. The idea is that each element is strong against two others, weak against two others, and neutral to the rest.
: In practice, this system sucks because it means Alex (who always has to be in the party) is inherently useless against certain enemy types. But here’s where we find out that the Allansons learned ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.
: Instead of just, I dunno, eliminating the QTEs on normal attacks.. they now have different QTEs that are also much, much harder to hit.
: What happens is that the colored area on the circle rotates once, and you need to hit the button when it’s under the square. Hitting the light blue area gives you a “poor” which does far less damage than I could rack up even doing the bare minimum on Alex’s old attack QTE.
: Seriously, that’s what you’re going to be hitting for most of the time unless you are either abusing the hell out of the slowdown mechanic or on easy mode. All the bars you’re seeing here are on Normal, and they’re not much more forgiving on Easy.
: Hitting the yellow area gives you a “good”, which does roughly the same amount of damage you could get out of a max combo in the old system. If you manage to get a hit exactly on red, you get a “perfect” which does a significantly higher amount of damage, but these are RIDICULOUSLY hard to land.
: I had to resort to taking some shots off a stream VOD to capture this properly, but waiting too long gives you a “Time Out” which is an automatic miss.
: Oh, and the old defense minigame is still in. So let’s look at what the new combat system is, because it fucking sucks.
: Basically, instead of having a slower but easier QTE that allowed you to rack up damage, you now have.. a slightly faster QTE at the expense of it being really hard to deal even the same amount of damage you were before.
: This means that combat is actually slower, because on average you’re dealing less damage than you were before. I tried looking for where the thing to switch back to the old combat system is, only as far as I can tell it doesn’t exist.
: Oh, and they slowed down the battle text so it’s actually readable. I’m pretty sure this also slows down the attack animations that happen after the QTE, so basically battle is even more of a slog than it was before.
: And here’s our new “vibrating with motion” line.
: The old combat system was bad, this one is worse in every possible aspect to the point where I basically have no idea how you’re supposed to play it without using a New Game Plus file and just auto-killing everything.
: Oh, and I got a softlock here trying to open the menu.
SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 7
: Plagiarism Woman is still here. Her dialog is absolutely unchanged, including the “Eye of Providence” thing, which I forgot to capture. This means that yes, there is still plagiarism in YIIK.
: Everything up to the end of the hotel is the same. The Biggest Bullshit Puzzle is still broken.
: Here’s Sammy’s QTE, which is actually different from Vella’s this time.
: Here’s where the affinity system rears its ugly head. Neither Alex nor Sammy are strong against these skulls, so they take less damage than they did in the base game per hit. This fight is now bullshit hard, because the skulls hit for like 6 damage if you don’t dodge or defend it.
: By the way, the old attack QTEs are now in as special moves. They do more damage than they did as regular attacks, but not much. This means that you basically need to spend your MP to do any kind of meaningful damage.
: Now, Persona 1 and Innocent Sin both did that, and I love those games even if they haven’t aged the best. Here, though? It costs 2 MP to use a single attack, and you start with FIVE.
: On the way to the elevator where Sammy dies, there’s some new content.
: Oh god, the Wilhelm fight. The Wilhelm fight is the gravy of bird shit atop the mountain of garbage that is the 1.25 update.
: Wilhelm has exactly one attack, which automatically hits. That’s right, the defense QTEs that you had to do once per person? Those are gone, or replaced with new QTEs.
: In this case, Sammy will die in four attacks unless she is healed.
: Regular attacks do a total of jack shit unless you get “perfects” on the QTE. Otherwise, this happens and you die in four turns.
: The trick is that he’s weak to Sammy’s attacks, so you need to have her use her old QTE special attack to do enough damage to it before it kills you.
: Seriously though, I want to know what these beta testers were thinking. There were apparently actual testers from what I’ve heard. This new combat system honestly makes me think this was an attempt by the Allansons to make people want the old combat system back.
: Anyway, the game remains the same as before up until this point, where Alex talks about how his mom works for Pacific Bell (not historically accurate as Pacific Bell was bought out by Southwestern Bell in 1997).
: The entire monologue here though, where he talks about getting sent elephant porn and wondering how many of the people he knew in high school are now sex workers, is gone.
: This whole Haruki Murakami ripoff scene with Essentia is still in, still has unskippable text, and is still dumb as fuck.
: We grab Michael, do the whole thing at the camera shop, check ONISM, and then do the unwinnable fight against Vella in the arcade.
: Michael’s QTE goes from “push keys in order” to a yellow box that shrinks. The idea I think is to hit it so that it touches the white parts without being too big or too small, but I managed I think all of once to get a “good” on it.
: Basically, Michael’s QTE is so fucking hard that he’s now even more useless than he was in the base game.
: Vella also has an unwinnable QTE that I don’t think existed in the base game.
: We unlock the Mind Dungeon, and it’s exactly the same with one minor change. There’s a new NPC here who allows us to turn on Full Monologues mode if we want to. We don’t want to.
: No more changes occur until we hit Wind Town and fight the Hook-Handed Jock. In the original game, this guy was a pushover.
: Now, without looking at the next screenshot, I’d like you to tell me what it is you think you’re supposed to do with this QTE. If you start mashing the buttons, you automatically fail it.
: Instead, you have to wait for this stupid lemon thing to descend and try to punch you with its two penises. If you hit the button at just the right time, you dodge it. Otherwise you take full damage. There’s no more “defend for damage reduction”, it’s all or nothing now.
: He wipes Alex in one attack, and only doesn’t kill Vella because I managed to hit the QTE exactly once. At this point, I gave up and decided to just go with my clear file, because this entire patch is insanely bad.
: Next time, we’ll probably run into the Golden Alpaca replacement and do the side story thing, and that’ll be it for this godawful bullshit patch.