“The other thing is that almost all classic JRPGs have a ton of filler. In every FF game, there’s a sequence where you need to go to the castle, but before you can do that, you have to do a bunch of fetch quests for these people over here, so you can then talk to someone who will tell you who to talk to again so you can walk into the castle. It’s not just JRPGs that suffer from this, but most games that are 60 hours can probably be done in 30. That’s why we aimed for about 25 hours.” - Andrew Allanson, interview with Gamasutra, 08/21/2018.
Here’s an update that’s almost entirely filler.
: “Some kid sent us an email saying his sister vanished.”
: “Really?”
: “Yeah, said it was similar to the Elevator Girl’s disappearance.”
: “Okay, and he wants us to come check it out? I’ll meet you at the Frankton Bus Stop. That’s the easiest way to get there without a car.”
: “You want to leave NOW?!”
: “Yes. I don’t have work till tomorrow afternoon, so it would be best for me to do it today, so I can get some sleep.”
: “Fair enough.”
: “Oh, and Alex, I thought you should know. The Elevator Girl has a name. Her name is Semi Pak. I was able to get some information on her. I’ll share it with you in person.”
: I’d just like to point out that for one simple phone call that should’ve been maybe four or five lines tops, the game used a whopping 12 textboxes. I combined a few of them when I transcribed it, but trust me, there’s 12. I’d also like to point out that Alex has not told Vella WHERE the disappearance was, but she just somehow knows. Twelve fucking textboxes and they left a goddamn hole in!
: On the way out, there’s another pop scare, just in case you didn’t have enough of those the last time.
: Also, there’s another idiot on Alex’s lawn. You know what, let me go ahead and change that sign.
: Much better. Can’t believe Alex’s mom approved a Dipshits Anonymous meeting hall in front of her house. Also, if Alex has a sister - why did she not have a bedroom? There’s only the two: Alex’s room and his parent’s bedroom.
: Nah, fuck that shit. You know what we’re going to do before we watch fuckface monologue on the bus? We’re going to go back and kill the Soul Survivor.
: Now we’re about to see one of the most poorly-explained mechanics in this game! Vella has an ability called Banish, which only works on “entities” - things like the Soul Survivor here.
: Using Banish toggles a mini-game in which we must beat the Soul Survivor before it beats us. Otherwise, the Soul Survivor is (as far as I know, even though I didn’t try) still indestructible.
: The description for what Banish does is badly written. It implies that what happens is you banish an enemy - but it doesn’t say it only works on “entities”. This is what happens if you try to use it against a non-entity.
: Vella’s attack hits a full 360-degree arc, and the enemy will shoot fireballs to damage her. The best way to handle this is to approach from a diagonal.
: By the power of constantly looking like she’s in a state of shitting herself, Vella banishes the Soul Survivor in one hit to the depths of Fuckface’s mind.
: We also get a full level up for everyone (actually, it’s 118 EXP so that’s a full level up and then some) as well as 5 ambrosias and 5 holy waters. Ambrosias can be sold for $10,000 each so I don’t think we’re going to run into any money issues anytime soon.
Now, if we go to the Mind Dungeon..
: There will be black smoke outside one of the doors. If you’re going for max stats, you probably want this to land on the +2 or +1.5 door, but whatever.
: This triggers a second copy of the Banish minigame. This whole thing is tedious bullshit and I hate it.
: When I went through that door, we got a 2 stat increase instead of 1. My guess is that eventually there’s going to be a place where we can farm entities, so I’m going to hold off levelling up Alex unless there’s a really good reason to.
: Now, then, back to our regularly scheduled monologue.
: “When we sat on the bus with Vella and began to talk, it felt as if she was a different person. The edge to her personality had dulled a little bit, and she seemed almost happy to see us.”
: I still can’t get over how Vella constantly looks like she has to take a shit.
: “She was an only child and lived with her mother, until she moved to Frankton on March 2nd for her job. She was some sort of legal clerk and hadn’t begun working yet when she vanished.”
: “Apparently the organization she was going to work for does a public TV Korean news show. The friend who got her the job did the reporting.”
: “The police have no leads. It is currently being treated as a missing persons case.”
: “Are you Korean?”
: “No. Do I look Korean?”
: “It’s hard to say. You look vaguely ethnic.”
: Being constipated is an ethnicity now?
: “Really!? That’s what you’re going with?”
: “I just meant like, you know, exotic. None of the other girls around here look like y–”
: “Stop. Please, just stop. This is seriously uncomfortable now, Alex.”
: They could have shortened this entire exchange to just “I read it in a Korean newspaper at work”.
: “I called the police and asked them if they’d seen the video and they said that the detective in charge of the case would get back to me shortly. This was four days ago.”
: “I’m not surprised, really. It’s almost like no one cares that she’s missing.”
: “I’ll check through more newspapers though, see if there are any leads.”
: “Might not be a bad idea to try and talk to the woman who reported her missing after we visit the guy in Wind Town.”
: I’m imagining the bus driver pointing to a sign that reads “No Monologues While Bus Is In Motion”.
: “The Sammy I met was strange. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who could have grown up in a city, and moved to a small town, and worked for a television station.”
: “People who don’t know what elevators are usually aren’t capable of such tasks.”
: “My Sammy, and the Sammy in the newspaper, may have looked the same, but there was a difference there. I could feel it.”
: Here we are on the world map. The world map has a vocal theme, but I can’t find it on Youtube and don’t feel like sifting through the 60+ video playlist some guy made of most of the OST to see if it’s there. The world map sucks about as much as the rest of the game. See how there’s crosswalks in the road? Those are the only points where we can cross a road.
: This is a really baffling choice, as there are no random battles on the world map. To get to that “monster den” across the street, we have to go all the way around past Wind Town. I did that just to see if I could find anything good in there.
: Just a lot of random enemies. I didn’t even touch this one, mostly because I was curious about what that little area to the south-west of Frankton was.
: There’s also a few more monster dens back near Frankton. I cleared these out and got both Vella and Michael to level 10 while keeping Alex at level 5. They’re full of monsters we’ve already fought before, just with two or three times the HP.
: This is South Town, by the way. It’s completely pointless. There’s some healing items in trash cans and a fountain, probably so you don’t have to go all the way to Frankton’s shopping area to heal if you’re clearing the monster dens. There’s also not a SINGLE Geese Howard reference.
: Enough of that shit, let’s go to Wind Town.
: Windtown is real fucking annoying, mostly because everything is at a weird camera angle.
: “Hahaha!”
: “Did you just laugh?”
: “Hmm, I think this is the first time I’ve heard you do that.”
: “I do it all the time. Well, usually it’s in my head.”
: “And normally it’s aimed at you two.”
: “Ouch.”
: “Uh. Well. Crap! No he didn’t.”
: “How do you propose we do that?”
: “Find the nearest person and ask them about the girl who disappeared here recently. Pretty easy actually.”
: “Just be direct, Alex. They won’t bite. Well, maybe they won’t. This town is pretty suspect.”
: Let’s take a brief tour of Windtown. Up north is the record store that is totally fitting for a trailer park. Next to that is a permanently-closed convenience store.
: Just south of that is this tall grass area, which has a chest hidden in it. There’s really nothing else here, apart from the ability to drop down to the graveyard using a hole in the fence you can barely see on the far side from where Alex is.
: The chest is right here, just in case you decide to play this pile of shit yourselves. There’s also a couple of NPCs here, but they’re not the ones we need to talk to.
To the east of that area is this single house that is absolutely not totally out of place architecture wise. Maybe this is like the Four Corners, only this house and the land immediately surrounding it are part of Arizona while the rest of the town is part of.. I dunno, somewhere that has grass and deciduous trees?
: The Hook Handed Jock isn’t much of a fight - the most notable thing about him is that he gets a surprise attack on you. One attack from Michael wiped some 80% of his HP, and Vella finished him off. He drops the Hook Hands, an accessory that boosts strength but decreases luck.
: By the way, you’ll notice that the Time Energy bar is almost empty. I was working under the assumption that it automatically refilled at the start of combat. It doesn’t. As far as I can tell, what happens is that the bar has a reserve, and we just had enough in it to fill it ten or fifteen times. This makes Alex’s attack SUCK. The way his attack works, which I figured out after a bit, is that he hits for 1 or 2 damage a few times, and then does a final hit equal to how high your combo was plus a small amount. Given that you can easily reach a combo of around 20 with Time Energy versus 7 to 9 without it, his damage is effectively cut in half and then some.
: Welcome to the theme of Windtown - go to place, fight miniboss, go to new place.
: The Underpaid Cashier is where fights in this game really start to suck. It’s not because they’re hard, but because this is where they start slogging down.
: What happens is that she attacks..
: And then we get a new kind of defend QTE. This one is much harder to hit without using time energy, and we have to do this once for each member of our party. Since there’s usually a water fountain nearby, it’s usually easier and faster to just intentionally fail these.
: I did, however, make one without using time energy just to prove that I could.
: This particular NPC just.. doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the game. This is the kind of dialog I’d expect to see in like, Lisa the Painful.
: This is one of those things I really hate about the way they did the camera angles here. You SHOULD be able to see the house with the hook-handed guy from here, but you can’t. I also like how half of the trees here are apparently in autumn.. in April. If there was some weird time bullshit going on, this would be the perfect kind of thing to introduce that but I don’t think there is.
: The kid with the gun is more annoying than anything. Like the Cashier, he has a full-party attack and uses it pretty often. Unlike the Cashier, he has more HP and takes maybe five hits to go down.
: Not shown: the 10 additional lines of dialogue this kid has before he gets to this point.
: Still following the same old pattern.
: Unlike the last three fights, the Adolescent Smoker has two skulls with her. They’re slightly tougher than the ones we fought in the factory, but not much. I kind of wish the devs had, I dunno, at least recolored the enemies? It feels weird having the exact same enemy in a bunch of different places with different HP.
: She’s a freaking tank, too. It took me.. I want to say at least 10, maybe 12 attacks to get her down. She also has a full-party attack which she used at every possible occasion, in addition to the two skulls attacking. This fight takes several times longer than it has any right to. The worst part is, this is (supposedly) after the developers buffed the party’s damage.
: You might ask if we can read the gravestones, and we can - most of them are just references only the devs would understand or dumb in-jokes.
: Well, I guess we found Carrie.
: This is the house we’re looking for. It has two gates, both of which are rusted. There’s a chest hidden behind it. However, this isn’t where we want to be. I got a bit confused because I assumed you were supposed to find an alternate way in - but no, what you’re supposed to do is go one screen west to the trailers.
: The Robust Alcoholic is the real boss of Windtown. He has a load of HP..
: An undodgeable single-target attack like Vella had..
: AND a full-party attack he spams whenever he’s not doing his single-target attack. This guy is just the most tedious bullshit to fight. I’m cutting the four extra lines of dialogue he has: “Take this key, my wife thanks you” etc.
: Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Timrod, you’ve been cutting out some dialogue, why are you suddenly showing mercy?” and the answer is because we’re about to run into the only person with worse writing than Alex.
: “So do we just knock?”
: “Let’s give it a try. Worse comes to worst he’s sleeping and we wake him up.”
: Meet Rory. Rory is our next party member. Not only does he look like he has a cat nose (seriously, I’ve seen furries on Twitter before with characters that have faces like that) but he is the biggest dipshit in this game… at least, the biggest one we’ve met. I haven’t played this before.
: Way to use a meme from the mid-2000s, dipshit! There’s one thing that’s been bothering me about this game, and that’s this: why did this game have to take place in 1999? So far, we’ve seen no mention of the Y2K “crisis” - and yes, I’ve talked to every NPC so far at least once off-screen and none of them have mentioned it. Someone mentioned in the thread that the developer has stated it takes place in 2017. What I don’t get though is why put yourself through the position of having to research what 1999 was like when you could’ve just made it take place in 2017?
: “I’m Alex. This is Vella and Michael.”
: Seriously, what the fuck kind of line is that? “That’ll be more beneficial.”
: I hate Alex so much more now.
: “I am. But don’t believe everything you read on the internet. You boys take that stuff too seriously.”
: See? He’s a dipshit.
: “Well, then just remain on my good side.”
: “Oh, did your parents get the police involved?”
: “Do you think it would be okay if we talked to them?”
: “I see. Well, who else knows that she’s missing?”
: I’d say someone did, given that she’s apparently got a grave at the local graveyard.
: In case you’re wondering, this entire story goes absolutely fucking nowhere.
: This sounds like an idiot trying to write a Stephen King novel while not realizing that Stephen King has a lot of the same issues the writer for this game has.
: “Did anything happen to you personally when you went to these locations? Were you the one who found the toys?”
: What the fuck is that? Why is no one commenting on the fact that the sun has apparently been usurped by a giant Soul Survivor?
: For this segment, we have to follow Rory around town. No, you know, just having the game teleport you there. Rory runs faster than Alex does, but it’s still tedious as shit.
: Don’t you just love it when a character starts spouting unrelated bullshit?
: “What exactly happened here, Rory? What makes you say this?”
: I’d say it’s probably that he’s an idiot who read some new age crap on the internet once.
: The thing is, he absolutely could explain it right now. We’ll find out why in a few minutes, but I could summarize it in two sentences.
: Oh look, it’s plagiarism! The original source for this, and the line immediately after, is 99% of Your Molecules are Water | MalagaBay
: What is this guy, a fucking preacher? I’d make a joke about never forgetting the soul in my makeup only I don’t wear makeup, and I’m pretty sure if I tried, it wouldn’t end well.
: Well yeah, I mean, unless you’re one of those really hardcore fanatics like that one guy who cranked out hundreds of Youtube videos about how deep Dark Souls was.
: How can mirrors be real when our eyes aren’t real? Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? Fucking magnets, how do they work?
: The first part of that sounds like a dril tweet, only taken completely seriously.
: When was the last time anyone heard from Michael? Do we know he hasn’t died of starvation?
: “In my head, the rational part of my brain was already thinking of a variety of corrections to his ideas.”
: “But after this week, I knew pretty much anything was possible.”
: I like how he’s already forgetting there was a timeskip.
: The worst part of this is not even that it won’t just teleport you there, but also that you can pass Rory if you take the most efficient route there. If you do, he’ll sit still until you go get him.
: “You want to go down there?”
Next time, we’ll descend into the sewers.