You’ve put way more effort into analyzing my parents’ decisions than they did in making them. Which honestly should go a long way towards clearing up why they made them.
It would have really impressed me if this game for every shot showed either 70% sky or 70% dirt/soil/stone. If it had done that then had a the protagonist get captured, then switched you over to playing as the mother as you rally the town to go save your son from the starmen. With the climax being you storming their fortress only for everyone to die in a downer ending. Pudovkin and Dovzhenko, Mother and Earth, combined into one game. But perhaps the author is not familiar with early silent communist films and as such missed the opportunity to make this game more pretentious.
I spent five seconds talking about that game store story, to segue into the weird video games market in the '90s and set up a dunk on Michael. It’s not about you.
I’m gonna think about more Soviet films, something else that’s more interesting than this game. They made an adaptation of The Hobbit in 1985 that was an hour long, done mostly with techniques and props that would work for a play on stage. There’s even a huge puppet for the parts of Smaug that they could fit in frame. I’m surprised at how much they could pull off with such a low budget.
That could be a neat setup for an RPG, having everything as cheap stage sets. Though going too far in that direction, you just look like you’re trying to make Paper Mario.
I think there’s merit to the idea. Own it. Take it further. Don’t just set the fight ON a stage; actually make it a staged battle. Weapons that are self-evidently harmless props, exaggerated fake deaths, magic attacks that are equally transparently just special effects. The enemies scuttle away with the help of a couple stagehands after they’re defeated, or walk away unharmed at the end of a fight. Entire game mechanics rooted in old theater superstitions.
There is a great episode of Garo Makai Senki about this. Where the Horror he faces is the Horror of theater. And fights using props, can fly thanks to wires, has stagehands who give him items to use. Obviously foam weapons would cut and he’d throw red confetti that lit things on fire. Garo had to figure out the way to win was to start saying cool lines and putting on a dramatic voice to “Win the audience over” so that he had enough stage presence to defeat the Horror.
: “I think my sister’s soul is down here. So let’s look for her.”
: “Rory, I think you might be a bit – okay, no, this will be fine.”
: “Let’s look for her. I just want you to prepare yourself that what you find down here might not be her.”
: “Whatever, but I know it’s her.”
: Now that we have Rory, combat is about to slow down even more than it already did. This is for several reasons, but let’s demonstrate by fighting that monster over there.
: I feel like “Poo appears” could easily be the title of this game. I also forgot to heal up after all of those earlier fights, but whatever. We’re pretty overpowered right now even with Alex at level 5.
: The Samurai Tortoise here starts out with a whole-party attack, which is now longer because we have to do an extra QTE for Rory.
: There’s an achievement for killing three of these tortoises that lists them as “minibosses” but they’re really no tougher than any other enemy.
: Vella takes off 3/4 of its health in one hit, and Michael finishes it off pretty quickly thereafter.
: The piles of shit are really no tougher than the rats and skulls from the last dungeon. Alex can take one out in one attack, provided he reaches a decent non-time energy combo.
: Now let’s get to Rory. Rory is fucking useless. He has no damaging abilities, and his “attack” is replaced with something called “pacifism” which is the Cover command from Final Fantasy.
: He picks a person to cover, and I think his defense is applied to the attack instead of theirs. He also takes any damage they would otherwise take. Since most things go down in a hit or two at this point, Rory is worse than useless because having to do two extra button presses (plus an attack “animation”) just adds to how slow combat is. Rory’s “weapon” is a protest sign.
: There are doors to the left and to the right of where we started, and I figured I’d do these first.
: We could just do what I did in the factory and use Dali to get the chest without fighting, but fuck that we want the EXP.
: Samurai Rats are slightly tougher rats. They’re otherwise exactly the same as regular rats.
: Vella takes the tortoise out in a single hit, and the rat and shit die soon thereafter.
Uploading: YIIK A Postmodern RPG 2019-07-22 17-31-19-33.png…
: It’s a good thing I chose to go to the right first, because there’s a key in there we’re probably going to need later.
: Behind the other door is a toilet, which… what the fuck is a chemical toilet doing in the sewer? Anyway, it’s a trap.
: I then took the time to go back to the pay phone and level everyone up. Except Alex. I’m really banking on there being an infinite Entity farm at some point.
: Vella in particular got a really good levelup, gaining 5 HP and 2 defense.
: To the south of the first room is this room, which has a pipe blocking the way forward… and rocks up above. All we can do is climb.
: There’s a chest behind a pipe we can get with Dali. By the way, this whole thing feels like a giant Paper Mario ripoff, doesn’t it?
: The box contains a hat that I equipped to Vella because she didn’t have one, and because fuck Rory.
: Now we can break rocks! I distinctly remembered that there were breakable rocks in Frankton, particularly behind Alex’s house. The first thing I did, naturally, was see if I could go back and deal with that.
: Unfortunately, the game locks us into Windtown until the sewers are complete. Fuck.
: This is what Amp looks like. It explodes the rocks a second or so after we use it.
: We can then use that Dungeon Key we found to progress.
: Naturally, given what this game is, the next room is just busy work. No combat, just eight rocks to break. A part of me wonders if the devs put this in expecting that people would speedrun their game and find a way around that first rock, but let’s be serious here: no one is ever going to speedrun this game.
: In the next room, we find… trees? Didn’t we just pick up an ability two rooms ago that let us break rocks? What gives?
: Problem, Alex doesn’t have bangs. In fact, I think you’re the only person in the party who does.
: This is what Hairwhip looks like. No, it makes no fucking sense. It also just seems like bad pacing that we got a new ability two rooms after getting a different one. This feels like the kind of thing you’d expect to see at the end of a game, but we’re only like, three hours in by the end of this update (granted, a bit of that time was me running back to the fountain in Windtown because I’m too cheap to use healing items).
: The chest, which we can get with Dali, only has money in it. We now see the other thing that Amp does: break cracked walls.
: One thing I forgot to mention: while the rocks we destroyed will not respawn, the trees WILL.
: There’s a trash can up here with some healing items, but what we really want is in that chest down there.
: The new keytar is important not only because it has better stats on it, but also because it adds a fourth hit to Vella’s attack.
: What’ll happen is that after getting the first QTE perfect, the green icon will flip over and give you a random key to press out of a choice of like, four. It’s lenient enough on the timing that it’s almost always a free fourth hit.
: There’s another dungeon key in the chest, and while we can go past the green crap dripping off that ladder, we can’t go up the ladder.
: Nothing terribly interesting here either - just a fight with a single… sort-of new enemy type?
: This time, Vella managed to floor one instantly with a crit, so if anything these enemies are somehow even less threatening than the first time we encountered them.
: One thing I’ve always wondered about with games like these is why they bother making you pull out the stupid hair whip at all. Even Pokemon figured out that no one wanted to go into the menu every time they had to use Cut or Rock Smash or something so they just made it a prompt.
: I also made a stop at the Mind Dungeon again and levelled everyone but Alex to 13.
: We can use our second key to pass this door, leading us to the penultimate room of the sewer system.
: Three doors, and if we go up the ladder…
: Having a vending machine that says “Crack” on it seems kinda distasteful. The "combat’ sign tells us about Vella’s ability to banish Entities.
: The purple door has a chest with money in it. If you’re wondering what was in that chest briefly visible in the previous room, it’s some healing items.
: Here, we have a “puzzle” that’s really just a colossal waste of time.
: You might think “Oh, we could just ignore the obvious miniboss and grab the chest with Dali” only the chest is, for some reason, immune to Dali.
: In case you’re wondering, of COURSE they all come with painful TMNT puns. Why wouldn’t they?
: This fight is basically exactly the same as that optional one we did a few rooms back. The only difference with these enemies is that their full-party attack is a bit stronger, doing around 5 damage if we don’t block it.
: There’s three of these miniboss enemies, and each one drops $100. By the end of this update, we go from having around $400 to around $1000.
: This is the room behind the silver door. The chests have a Fitted Ball Cap and a Golf Cap in them, both of which are useless to us.
: It’s a testament to lazy game design that the developers couldn’t be bothered to at least make unique models for the minibosses, or change them in any meaningful way from the regular enemies.
: This is the green door. It’s… yeah, it’s lazy. We should also be able to grab that chest with Dali, but it’s immune as well.
: Michael somehow wound up going first and oneshotted it.
: Naturally, the game makes use each key individually instead of just letting us go through.
: Oh boy, a boss… and it’s just a recolored Soul Survivor. Fuck this game.
: “Can’t you see her too!? That’s my sister! That’s Carrie!”
: “Oh shit! It’s an Entity! We need to get the hell out of here!!”
: “Wait. We need to remain calm. We need to try and talk to him.”
: Ahh, dear little Ocelotte. Where have you gone? Are you hiding from me? Come out, come out, don’t be afraid. You were born a child of dragons. What could you possibly fear? Remember when Dark Souls 3 did this same thing, only it happens during a boss fight and takes like 10 seconds?
: “Rory, that isn’t your sister, it’s–”
: “SHUT UP! That’s CARRIE!”
: “Can’t you feel it? It’s so familiar. I can prove it. She understands what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking. I’ve never been this close to anyone. Trust me, it’s her!”
: “Rory, that’s not Carrie.”
: Oh, god FUCKING DAMMIT! GOD FUCKING DAMMIT! FUCK YOU! You fucking stole this from Persona 4! You fucking stole it and it doesn’t even fucking work! You know what made this shit work in Persona 4? The fact that they had an art team who did fucking art for bosses that reflected the whole idea of the shadows being someone’s repressed inner desires! Fuck you!
: “What!?! What the hell are you talking about?!”
: I’d like to point out that they probably got this line straight out of the Persona 1 battle theme.
: “How can that be? I’m RIGHT here!”
: “Vella, what the hell is going on? You need to explain this.”
: “Rory, what really happened to your sister? Something about your story doesn’t add up. Let’s hear the truth.”
: “Rory, that’s-- that’s terrible. Why did she do it?”
: I’ve never dealt with someone who has had a family member commit suicide, but I would think that “Why did they do it?” is not the kind of question you want to ask.
: “What the hell kind of question is that?! It was those bastards at school.”
: “Stupid shitty girls always ragging on her, going out of their way to make her feel bad, picking on her for being MY sister!”
: “Arghhh!! This is all my fault. It’s all because of me. Because of what I’m like, you know?”
: “How did you find this place, Rory? When did you first see your Soul Survivor?”
: “It was two weeks after she died.”
: “I found her things. I came down here thinking she fell down, or something, I don’t know.”
: So this drags on way longer than I feel it probably should, but we’re clearly getting into some pretty heavy shit.
: “But you knew she was dead, didn’t you?”
: “Of course, but I-”
: “It’s okay, you can tell me. I’m not judging anything you say here. Tell me all of it.”
: “I do. Go on. What happened when you left your body?”
: “I didn’t get far. I separated from my physical form and then I saw my body and my sister – what you say is me.”
: “Did you leave the earth?”
: “I was so close. I was so far away and then I saw it.”
: “The ‘Soul Survivor’, the ‘Entity’, whatever the hell you called it.”
: “That soul over there is not hers. It is yours.”
: What the fuck even is this shit? Like, I get that they’re trying to set it up so that Vella is into some occult bullshit that we don’t fully know about, but still, what the shit? It’s like they’re playing bingo with new-age buzzwords.
: “I’ve traveled the Soul Space and I understand what I am seeing when I look at the Entities. I see the marks of your soul and I can tell you that that is another you.”
: “Somewhere out there in the Soul Space, this you left his world and stumbled on yours. That’s you from another plane. It’s likely it was experiencing the same suffering as you.”
: I think they mean “dimension” here. Planes don’t really work that way, at least not in the D&D sense.
: “Vella, can you PLEASE explain what’s going on here?”
: "I understand what you were feeling. ‘This depression is unbearable. I can’t take it anymore.’ "
: “The depression/pain part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can overcome it is up to you. You decide if you’re going to keep going.”
: Yeah, you know what? It pains me to see this fucking game rip off Persona 4 so hard, but I’m going to keep going. Mostly because of what’s about to happen next.
: “Your sister is gone. There is no changing that. But traveling the Soul Space is incredibly dangerous and if you’re not careful you’ll end up like him!”
: “You can’t help but feel the pain, but you can get through the suffering. That will go away.”
: “Look, I know it’s easy for me to say. I’m not the one whose sister is dead.”
: So, if you’re like me, you’re probably half asleep from this godawful bullshit writing. To fully appreciate what’s about to happen, I need to do this in video format because simply revealing it in screenshot format isn’t really good enough. I will do screenshots of it - after the video. I ask you, the reader, are you ready… to see the moment that made most of the people who played this game drop it?
Here’s the same part in screenshot format so I can talk a little bit about the upcoming boss fight. I apologize about the bossfight in the video being so bad - the game has this weird control lag that gets introduced when I try to stream it.
: So yeah. Boss that reflects Rory’s survivor guilt over his dead sister? Nah, we’re fucking a fucking alpaca. I’d be more pissed, but honestly, I’ve just come to expect this game to be utter shit with no ambitions whatsoever.
: The Alpaca has one main gimmick: it takes a turn to summon two Soul Survivors, and will eat them on the next turn. It has two actions on its turn: one to summon/eat and one to attack. Unfortunately, this means that it’s impossible to stop the Alpaca from eating the Soul Survivors: even if you’re perfect with your banishes and don’t get screwed by RNG, the Alpaca will always eat one.
: The Golden Alpaca is also a fucking tank. I’m pretty sure it has somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 HP. Vella is mostly kept busy banishing every turn, so only Michael and Alex can even do damage. This last shot was from my first attempt after like… two rounds of attacking it.
: If you fuck up a banish, or just get screwed by RNG (because banish can fail even if you pass the minigame), the Alpaca starts evolving. It doesn’t actually do more damage - but I’m pretty sure that if you let it evolve too much, it’ll eventually instakill the party. Banishing it will reduce its evolution by one stage.
: I apologize for the low-quality shots. When recording the video, I forgot to have my screenshot tool open. Anyway, this is the Alpaca’s second evolution. If it gets here, it is very hard to banish it back to its original state.
: I’m pretty sure this is its final evolution, but by this point its health was low enough that I was able to take Vella off banish duty and just finish it off. I should note that as far as I know, each Soul Survivor you banish does count toward boosting Alex’s stats. In the video, I think I managed to get at least six of them.
: “This is insane! WHAT IS A SOUL SURVIVOR?!”
: “Calm down Alex, I’ll explain it now. I haven’t been intentionally leaving you in the dark, so don’t act like I’m some anime character.”
: “Fine. Just – This is too much.”
: “Deep breaths, Alex. Michael’s taking this better than you are. By now you’ve seen enough visual proof that what I am going to tell you isn’t a lie.”
: “I need you to understand that I don’t have all the answers. I can only say what I KNOW to be true from my experiences.”
: “I get it. Spit it out already, Vella!”
: “What you just saw was a Soul Survivor or an Entity. Both names are acceptable.”
: “These beings are a visual representation of a soul that has escaped from its body. You see, it is entirely possible for a human being to separate their soul from their body.”
: These lines are all really fucking stilted and I hate it. “And more often, you can’t retrieve it.” It sounds like a PS1 era JRPG translation.
: “A human usually stumbles on this facet of reality after undergoing a transformation of a grave nature. In Rory’s case, it was the loss of his sister that pushed him towards exchanging his physical nature for a metaphysical one.”
: “This is where things are about to get strange, so bear with me. Our souls do not belong to ourselves, in the traditional sense of the word ‘belong’.”
: Whoa whoa whoa, time the fuck out. You’re saying that one soul is shared by a bunch of people? Then… would it be safe to say… that Rory… killed his soul?
: You can’t hear it in the video because I cut it off before this part, but I absolutely did the Peter Stillman “Ah killed mah soul!” after seeing that line. Also, I would’ve just used Chip and Ironicus’s MGS2 LP for that but I couldn’t find the line.
: But… but… you just said… you just said there’s only one soul for a potentially infinite number of people! How the fuck does this make any kind of sense? FUCK THIS GAME!
: “Normally when you abandon your physical form, you become an omnipotent entity, who exists just in their own reality. You can’t return to your body once you’ve left it behind.”
: “Soul Survivors are Souls whose realities have been destroyed and they manage to leave their reality in hope of finding a physical form.”
: “So that being right there is Rory - a different Rory - one whose reality was destroyed and he’s attempted to find a physical reality to exist in.”
: “But you have a physical form! How did you return to your body when you say it isn’t possible?”
: “This is not my reality, Alex. There was another me here and she left. I was able to take her physical space because her soul had already left this world.”
: So wait, what she’s saying is that Rory should theoretically be a different person, yet I’m pretty sure he’s the same person because he remembers his sister dying and shit.
: “And? What is the Soul Space?”
: “The Soul Space is – how do I explain this?”
: This entire thing sounds like it was taken out of some crappy sci-fi paperback the devs found at an airport.
: “This is crazy. How did you figure all this out!?”
: “That’s personal. Look what leads people to find the Soul Space is different for each person, and I’m not going to share that with you.”
: “Rory, it’s okay. Take a deep breath with me-”
: “CUT IT WITH THE DEEP BREATHS!!! THIS ISN’T OKAY!!”
: So one thing I’d like to point out. I had a save shortly before the Golden Alpaca when I made my second attempt at it, the one you can see in the video. That fight took me over 15 minutes to finish. Counting all of the cutscenes we’re about to see before we gain control again, plus the last one, there’s been more cutscene than gameplay this update.
: No jump scare this time, which is always a plus. However, there is another nonsensical monologue.
: “It was waiting to sting, waiting to have its full impact. From my bedroom window you could see blooming green leaves of summer popping up here and there on the rolling suburban hills, their branches reaching up to the sky like magic ropes.”
: That’s a D-, please see me after class. Holy fuck that is the worst goddamn writing. “Like magic ropes” what the fuck is this garbage.
: “I hadn’t spoken to Michael, Vella, or Rory in almost eight days.”
: So yes, we’re witnessing a timeskip, but right after this we’ll be… back in the sewers like nothing happened. I’d also like to point out that with the last timeskip, Columbine has already happened at this point.
: “Michael was stuck in his house, pretending to study for finals.”
: “I spoke with her manager, the Korean man, about Vella and Sammy, but he offered very little information. ‘She said she needed to take some time off, so I gave it to her.’ Lots of help, thank you, see you later, jackass.”
: I think that’s a natural response to Alex.
: “I hadn’t spoken with Rory since that night either. As soon as we got out, Vella went into depth on her Soul Survivors and metaphysics, then he ran off without saying a word.”
: We fucking get it! You already said you hadn’t talked to him since before the time skip! You fucking moron!
: Self-promotion. Fuck you, Andrew Allanson.
: “Sammy. I missed her. I didn’t know her really, but I felt like I did. In the unreal twilight hours, in-between sleep and waking, she slipped into my dreams, got tangled in my thoughts, like the blankets tangled between my legs, her brain melting with mine.”
: I have my doubts that anyone ever playtested this game, because I’m positive that any playtester would have quit hours ago, but if anyone had ever tested this I can see them being like “Man, you really need to cut the purple prose.”
: “In the dreams, we didn’t speak. In the dreams, we didn’t do much of anything. I could just feel that she was there and that she understood. She had to be out there - out there in the Soul Space, maybe.”
: I wish I could just hold this in front of the dev and shout “THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DO A FUCKING TIMESKIP! THIS ISN’T WHY TIMESKIPS EXIST!”
: This sounds like she’s trying way too hard to be one of the announcers from Earth Defense Force.
Next time, we’ll leave the sewers. Believe it or not, leaving the sewers takes just as long (if not longer) than the entire segment presented in this update. Before we go though, I’d like to show off how bad my luck is.
: I went into the Mind Dungeon to finally level Alex up. The thing is, as I found out, Soul Survivors can wind up attached to doors that don’t have a stat-up associated with them, which is a total fucking waste. The worst part? I got three floors like this in a row.
: Once we reach Floor 8, this cutscene happens. On the way down, I got Alex his first attack skill, which we’ll see in the next update. Said attack skill is why I’ve been only levelling Strength, PP, and Defense.
: “Oh, I guess you wouldn’t. She’s on Floor 15.”
: “There is a girl who minds the place all by herself. Tell her the Krow told you to come read old memories.”
: “She will show you the rest.”
: Fortunately, we have just enough EXP to hit level 15.
: My luck changed a bit on 13 and 14, where we got actual stat bonuses.
: The library is, of course, Marlene doing a different voice. That doll… looks an awful lot like Sammy, doesn’t it? Shit’s creepy.
: “As you can see, no one visits here. No one except the dungeon master… and s/he hasn’t visited in almost a year.”
: “Excuse me, but perhaps you have mistaken this for another floor? This is the library. I can’t imagine you’re here to read all these old books.”
: “Only the dungeon master is allowed to read them anyway. You’re… not the dungeon master, are you? No, didn’t think so.”
: Maybe I’m just missing something, but this seems very Silent Hill, and I don’t think it was INTENDED to be Silent Hill. Like, this is… creepy.
: “Anyway, why have you come? What can I do for you…?”
: “Oh, Krow told you to visit me? Oh… hehehe. Well, it’s nice to have the company. Usually Krow sends people away. That’s his job you know. Outsiders aren’t allowed in the Dungeon of the Mind.”
: “What…? Someone gave you the phone number for the Dungeon of the Mind? I don’t know what that means. Have I met you somewhere before?”
Why have good character design when you can have GIMMICKS!
So, Rory would be an interesting concept for a character in a JRPG, but is really undercut by him doing no DPS and and additional body to Defend for, but is actually useless.
Panda Barrier is a skill Alex has that pretty much nullifies most damage and Alex is able to, y’know, Attack. Rory has none of that going for him (can only cover one party member, takes damage in their place, and no support skills to speak of except one that swaps your HP and SP)
Also there was a funny visual glitch of Rory covering someone in an area Skill that he just pops back in the place where he should be standing.
In case you were wondering, Andrew Allanson confirmed on a…less than savory podcast that the Golden Alpaca is a “haha joke” boss, probably similar to Tesso in Persona, or…a number of bosses in EarthBound. Here’s the thing about joke bosses. YOU DON’T MAKE THEM THE FIRST REAL BOSS OF THE GAME! (Yes, this consitutes as the first “real” boss because you can’t run from it, despite Vella shouting very loudly that you needed to run, has its own special area and music, and is very durable)
And lastly,
The audacity of this man.
The new “tool” Rory brings (aside from himself haha burn amirite) is basically just Vella’s again, too. They remove a designated obstacle from your path, but not the other obstacle, which isn’t meaningfully different from the obstacle it DOES effect. Keys and doors, man.
Also, “I spoke with her manager, the Korean man.” Jesus CHRIST.
Good lord, watching that video was just… woof. It was one thing to read about everything takes so long, and quite another to actually see it. I can’t imagine stomaching this long enough to even get to this boss, let alone fight it. Basically nothing about this is particularly appealing, which is why I’m happy to read along and not touch it myself.
I skipped most of the video, which is not a mark against you it is a mark against the game. To be blunt what a terrible game. I don’t know whether I’d choose to play this or Indigo Prophecy if forced to choose. This maybe because it is easier but way less stupidly entertaining.
: Just behind where the Alpaca was is a chest with $1000 in it. This is roughly equal to all of the money we’ve obtained up to this point.
: Here’s our first “break in reality” - YIIK’s version of the Lost Woods, because that’s absolutely what a JRPG needs. This part isn’t at all difficult: you follow the big, obvious Soul Survivor around. It does, however, get real annoying.
: Because I levelled Alex up, everyone got some new skills. Rory has Protest (a useless debuff) and Sacrifice, which kills him but revives someone else, which we can accomplish with an item we have like 10 of without killing anyone in the party. Rory is fucking useless and I’m dumping his ass the second we can do so.
: The second room is only marginally more annoying than the first. The camera sucks, but at least the controls still work. That’s going to change… real soon.
: Third room. Now we’re upside-down, so the controls for movement are inverted. There’s no challenge here: with only one enemy that doesn’t respawn when killed, it’s more a challenge of fighting the combination of controls and camera to reach the bottom-right door.
: Seriously, fuck whoever thought this shit was a good idea.
: The fight in this room I’m going to show off specifically to demo Alex’s attack skill.
: Not before one of the enemies hits him for HALF HIS HEALTH BAR though. Holy shit that’s some garbage - and this is after I levelled Alex up, and I’ve been putting points into defense every level.
: Alex’s new attack is LP Toss, which is basically the reason why we want to level up his PP as much as possible. You can see that barring Rory (who starts with very high PP due to his ability to switch his HP and PP) Alex has the highest PP of anyone in the party.
: LP toss is a shooter. Red enemies are worth more than the green ones, and you can rack up a pretty big combo with it.
: It apparently works by “banking” damage - it’ll take whatever your damage number would be, apply it to the first enemy, and if it kills the enemy the rest of the damage goes through to the second one and so on. Alex did enough damage to outright kill two Samurai Tortoises and nearly kill a third.
: My first thought here was “Oh boy, more Soul Survivors to banish!”… but as it turns out…
: They talk, but I doubt anything they have to say is important, so I’m going to just do this one’s dialog because there’s a choice that isn’t actually a choice involved.
: “No matter how hard we try, we can’t make him happy.”
: “I know it’s selfish… but… the real reason I’m sad is…”
: That you somehow managed to use three ellipses in a single sentence?
: “Who?”
: “…the Infinite Spirit.”
: “The what…?”
: “Master.”
: “I don’t follow.”
: It’s like I’m playing Metal Gear Solid all over again.
: “God.”
: We get three choices here. I imagine they’re all the same, but I picked the last one because Alex strikes me as the kind of tool that would have a Nietzsche quote in his forum signature.
: Just behind where “god” is, there’s a single polygon that is uh… yeah.
: It follows us around, and what we have to do to progress is to bring it to “god”.
: I thought this might’ve been Yiddish, but it’s apparently just gibberish.
: And there’s our exit door.
: “She really is gone, isn’t she? What the hell am I going to do?”
: Honestly, I don’t give much of a shit about his sister either. Rory’s entire character is “My sister is DEAAAD!”. He’s a lot like Batman in that regard.
: “Alex!! What is wrong with you? How can you be so selfish?!”
: I love how absolutely none of these people saw the fact that Alex is a colossal douche coming from a mile away.
: “Argh. You’re an asshole, Alex. I thought you came to help me!”
: “Yeah, back when you didn’t lie to us! You realize you’ve been leading us on this whole time about your sister?! You acted like this was connected to Sammy!”
: “I-- Arghh.”
: I like how the devs were willing to toss exclamation points around like they don’t even matter, but when Rory is actively having a breakdown they just give him an “Argh.”, almost like he just doesn’t give a shit.
: “And Rory, breathe with me. In. Out. Yeah, just like that.”
: I also like how Vella’s entire character is… just really liking breathing. I also like breathing, being a human and not some kind of alien who has no idea how humans behave like David Cage or Andrew Allanson.
: … what the fuck is this shit? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?! Did I just fucking walk into the end of Dagger of Amon Ra?
: So, this bit here is absolutely fucking godawful. You talk to one of the hooded Alexes, and then he’ll turn his back and another one will turn around to face you. I’m pretty sure what they were trying to rip off here is that scene in Persona 2 where the protagonist takes Philemon’s mask off and it’s him underneath the mask.
: “Man, school really changed you.”
: “It wasn’t school that changed you. Just think about it, dude!”
: “Why are you being such a dick, Alex? Seriously man, keep it together.”
: “I know you got scared because we almost died down there… but can’t you see that Rory is hurt? His sister freakin’ killed herself.”
: When I was recording this part, my brain basically shut off. I didn’t miss any dialog, I just… zoned out. That’s sort of how playing this game is.
: “You know full well that you’re overreacting… but you won’t just back down.”
: “Will it kill you to say you’re sorry? Seriously… just say you’re sorry.”
: Seriously, is Alex’s only motivation in life getting laid?
: “Seriously, just stop being a loser. I think Vella thinks you are a stuck up rich kid, who has never known real world problems in his life.”
: “Okay, so now you’re going back to reality… are you ready to back down?”
: “I want to say I’m sorry. I just don’t know if I can. There’s always time to say you’re sorry… right?”
: Honestly, it’s really hard to see why Alex, or the audience, should care. He’s known Vella for all of what, two weeks? And Michael is just some dumbass who lives next door.
: “Just 'cause you’re cool with Soul Survivors and astral projection or whatever the hell you’ve been on about doesn’t mean everyone else is!”
: “I-- Fine. Whatever.”
: Oh look, Michael’s still alive!
: “You said this isn’t about Sammy, but don’t you think there is a connection?!”
: I mean, other than that there were Soul Survivors involved in both cases, not really.
: “Don’t you realize Sammy was probably taken by one of those Soul creeps!”
: “No. That’s not right. That isn’t how this works. Soul Survivors wouldn’t take someone like that, they have no interest in such things.”
: “They’ve transcended things like kidnapping, or anger, or any other motivation for that.”
: So okay, if they’ve transcended everything… why do they attack Alex? I mean, other than the fact that even I want to punch him.
: “Transcending? What does that even mean?!”
: “Left – Left the reality?! You think she left her body or whatever?!”
: “Then you obviously weren’t listening when I said she was TAKEN by two of those Soul Survivors!”
: “You weren’t there when she was screaming for them not to take her again!”
: “Okay, give me a second to think. I’m sure I can explain it.”
: Bye Rory! No one’s going to miss you! Go ahead and just leave your body and find another dimension to live in!
: “Wait! Come back, Rory! Great, Alex, now look what you did!”
: Honestly, out-douching Rory and getting him to fuck off is probably the high point of Alex’s career as an RPG protagonist.
: “Hey, this isn’t my fault! Don’t blame THAT on me! He’s the one who lied to us!”
: “Dude, he was obviously just hurting - just needed someone to reach out to. Could YOU have said exactly what was going on? Even hiding behind a computer, you can’t help but think what people think of you.”
: Wait, what? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? What the fuck is he even talking about? What does that part about hiding behind a computer have ANYTHING to do with the rest of what is going on? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?
: “In the mean time, try not to be such a jerk to your friends.”
: “Hey, that kid isn’t my friend.”
: Yeah! I’m not your friend, buddy! I’m not your buddy, pal! I’m not your pal, guy! I thought that was from the 1999 South Park film (which came out a few short months from when this game takes place) but it’s not.
: “Cool it man, you’re missing the point!”
: “Maybe he didn’t deserve that abuse. I’ll admit that much.”
: “I was scared. So many odd things were happening around me and I didn’t handle it very well. First I met Sammy, then I lost Sammy, and then I met Rory, who had lost Carrie.”
: Is this a monologue or a goddamn math problem? I feel like he could’ve followed this up with “If this is true, then what time is it?”
: “For a moment I considered saying that we were alike, but I often have to remind myself that I didn’t really KNOW Sammy.”
: “We met only once, but still, I can’t get her off my mind.”
: I understand that the panda is supposed to be sentient and not just Alex speaking through an imaginary proxy, but damned if it doesn’t feel that way. Alex is too much of a tool to even have a yes-man so he has to invent one.
: “How could you tell something is troubling me?”
: “You’re making your ‘I"m thinking’ face.”
: “Mainly, I’m thinking about what Vella said - about detaching your soul from your body, or whatever.”
: “She seems convinced that Sammy had done that. But somehow that just feels wrong.”
: I really, really want to make a joke about the early 2000s Sega-Sammy merger, but no one would get it. The Atomiswave was a mistake.
: Here’s what I don’t get. Why is he telling the panda this? The panda was ostensibly there when it happened!
: “That doesn’t seem like she willed her Mind to separate from her Body. And I don’t know, it’s just-- ever since then I’ve just had this terrible dark gloom following me. No matter what I do, I can’t shake this feeling.”
: “I just feel like all my focus has been on the wrong thing all this time.”
: That pisses me off! We should be out there looking for her.
: “Where do you think you’d look for her? Do you really even know anything about her?”
: “Arghh. I don’t know maybe I’ll–”
: I haven’t been keeping track, but I’m reasonably certain that by now, we’ve had more scenes of Alex talking to himself either directly or by proxy than we have anything resembling a plot.
: By the way, we’re almost four and a half hours in.
: “Did you get taller? Always getting taller.”
: “Haha, I don’t know, Mom. How was work?”
: “Terrible. I’ve slept at the office for the past few weeks. I smell, I need a shower, and I don’t even work in fast food any more.”
: “How’s the project coming? Everything done?”
: “Yeah, it’s done. Alex, would you mind sitting down for a bit? I need to talk to you about something serious.”
: “What’s wrong?”
: Is it just me, or does this feel like a conversation out of The Room?
: “Holy crap!! Can they do that?! Weren’t you, like, the project lead!?”
: “Well, everyone has a boss, Alex. But it’s going to be okay. Just things are going to be tight for a while.”
: “But don’t we have savings? Like, you have money, right?”
: “Yeah, I have a bit. I spent most of it on your last semester.”
: “But I had a college fund. That should’ve been separate from your unemployment fund!!”
: “Well Alex, it was.”
: Welcome to the “everyone is taking a shit on Alex” segment of the game. Unfortunately, the game isn’t self-aware enough to know that Alex really is a colossal douchebag - it’s going to be portrayed largely as people being unfair to him.
: “So what do we do?”
: “I paid a LOT of money for that fancy degree of yours.”
: “Doesn’t have to be today. But by the end of the week, you should at least have some interviews lined up. Okay, you can go.”
: But mom, how am I supposed to be a protagonist in this dipshit RPG world if I have to get a job? It’s not like I’m the protagonist of Persona 4 and/or 5!
: Seriously, does Alex do this shit every time anything doesn’t go his way? Does he do this when he goes to the fridge and they’re out of ketchup?
: “Come on don’t you want to work for yourself… put that degree of yours to use?”
: “Mom did everything for us… and now we can’t repay her this way. Just be nice. Play it cool.”
: “When did you start acting this way, man?”
: “You love your mom, and you’re grateful for everything she’s done. Why can’t you just do a better job of showing her that?”
: “Sounds pretty simple to me. Just don’t be mean.”
: “Yeah, it’s easy to not be a jerk… but I just want to know why you’ve changed?”
: “Have you changed though?”
: “Yeah. Yeah, you’ve totally changed. But… can you change back?”
: So one, this makes me feel like the developers assumed anyone playing this game would be a loser like Alex. Second, what the shit?
: Instead of getting a job, I figured I’d spend the rest of this update exploring. There’s a couple of rocks we can Amp at the construction site, and one of them has a box with nothing good in it.
: There’s also this completely nonsensical path that we ran into earlier. This is the one I was going to try and explore back when we were in Windtown, but couldn’t. Let’s do that now.
: What I didn’t know at the time I recorded this is that what we did has a very minor effect on a cutscene coming up when we advance the plot next.
: A radio tower. At this time of year, at this time of day, localized entirely on a mountain path that can only be accessed from behind Alex’s house.
: The reason the sky is so dark is that… we’re actually not supposed to be here yet. I don’t know why the developers didn’t just lock it off until after we advance the plot. When we do come back here, it’ll be night time.
: The radio tower is basically a maze with chests in it. There’s only one with anything good in it, which I’ll point out when we get to it.
: This game uses so many words, but it couldn’t be bothered to tell us this until after we fought the first real boss.
: There’s also some enemies in the maze. I was going to retreat and wait until I had the whole party, but later I realized we won’t have our party when we come back through here. The skull (with a crown) and bat aren’t really anything we haven’t seen before: they’re both single-target attackers and go down in one hit to Alex and his overfilled strength stat.
: Here, we run into another new enemy type: aliens. Aliens fucking suck to fight, and you should immediately just LP toss them to death.
: As you can see, not only do they have an undodgeable attack, but they also fucking HURT. That’s almost a third of Alex’s HP in one hit.
: Thankfully, while their speed is high enough that they’ll usually go first, Alex can take them down in one decent combo.
: Nothing interesting here, just a running shoes and some healing items, but I figured I’d show this just to give you perspective of how the maze goes.
: There’s a chest over here we need Dali for that has a pog in it. The two encounters are both two bats, but one of them gives you a whopping $1000 for beating them.
: I don’t get why Alex doesn’t just, you know, give his mom the $3500. It’s not much when you’re a homeowner, but it’s definitely enough for a mortgage payment.
: We can see a Dali bridge up there, and we want to hit that Dali bridge, as it contains the only item we want from this place.
: To get there, we have to go up the path and cross another Dali bridge, then drop down from the far side.
: The Back Alley Boiz LP is a straight upgrade to the Sergeant Salty EP. There is some new stock in the record store, including one that has two less attack but has +5 PP on it, but this one has the most STR on it.
: There’s another chest behind it that we can reach from the other side (top of the path) that has a Bike Helmet in it. Fuck defense, I want to load up on STR for maximizing LP Toss damage.
: Onward through the maze! We have no real reason to come this far, except that there’s more enemies.
: This right here is why I’ve been levelling up STR and PP first.
: The last chest before the radio tower has $200 in it, bringing us to $3900 overall.
: Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do in this beaten up radio station. Let’s go look for a job!
: Let’s try the arcade first. Surely Korean Man will hire us. I mean, Korean Man is the name of a robot master from Megaman, right? He’s a renegade Korean BBQ robot that slings bibimbap? Alex could be Whine Man, with the power to complain so loudly that Megaman loses interest in going any further into Dr. Wily’s base.
: That’s okay! Surely, Alex can make pizza and/or pasta… right?
: Yeah, you know what? I don’t think I’d trust Alex to make a pizza.
: Even the burger place refuses to let us work there! It’s almost like this is a really, really ham-fisted commentary on the fact that millennials got fucked out of jobs… even though Alex would be too old to be a millenial!
: Also, I’m going to post this NPC’s dialogue because I love him.
: We can keep going, but after… I think one more stop, Alex will give up.
: Also, you want to see something that pissed me off?
: Fuck you, Allanson! You don’t get to reference Mother 3! Only good games get to do that, and most good games wouldn’t because they don’t need to compare themselves to something else like that!
: Next time, we’ll advance the plot some more. We’ll also the first part where our choices at the beginning come in! Sort of.
: Well, actually, there is one more thing I want to do. Someone pointed out in the thread that Alex’s voiceactor is a guy named Chris Niosi. As I was making this LP, I found out that he recently got patched out of Fire Emblem: Three Houses both because he had broken an NDA with Nintendo, but also because of multiple accusations of sexual assault and abuse against him.
Therefore, I figured I’d just cut him out of this game too. Here’s my demo tape. I apologize for nothing, except to Tim Curry, Tom Hanks, and possibly Grant Goodeve.
It’s possibly ironic that Niosi has posted a giant list of public apologies while you play the “Reluctant Apology Tour” portion of this game. I’ve been waiting almost a week to point that out.
Another thing I need to point out is that this game, which makes a big deal out of the Roman numerals in its own title (“It’s pronounced ‘why-two-kay’”), uses lowercase ls instead of capital Is for the names of the hooded Alexes. You may not be able to tell the difference in the font on this forum, but the font in the game makes it very obvious. It’s like they were trying to find every tiny way to make this game as terrible as possible.
Man, I WISH I’d graduated college in 1999, when “have a few job interviews lined up by the end of the week” was a totally reasonable ask.
I noticed it, but I thought they were 1’s with the bottom line, which shouldn’t make sense either but I think by this point my brain had shut down most of its functions and I was just sitting there like “Okay.”
The Korean Man, coming in 2022 from the producers who saw The Quiet Man and decided they needed a second game. And yeah, I feel like the entire tool system in this game has no reason to be there - the game is so linear that I feel like they could’ve cut out the hairwhip entirely and it would’ve had zero impact on the game except for speeding it up.
So honestly, I didn’t expect to record the entire fight, but there’s one other video of it up on Youtube that I found while searching for music from the game. It’s much shorter, but that’s because I was going to collect as many souls as possible, while the other one ignored that and just went right for the boss with everyone. I do feel like they should’ve taken a cue from Earthbound and added attack items so Rory could at least do SOMETHING.
Please don’t play it yourself, oh god this game is bad. I feel like if I played through it again with a hotkey set up to mash K, it’d probably be half as long as it is.
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Nioisi having his voice removed from FE means his most notable last game was YIIK and well what a suiting fate for an asshole like him
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: After a long… five minutes or so of job searching, Alex returns home in the middle of the day to go to bed, which is perfectly normal for someone in their twenties. But first, the phone!
: “I couldn’t deal with this. I was going to unplug this phone. I winced every time the stupid thing rang.”
: I like how the developers were just too goddamn lazy to make a reskin of Alex in pajamas, or just a blanket or something.
: “It was a weird dream - the sort of dream that shouldn’t be scary because the imagery is actually pretty tame.”
: “But still, no matter what I did, I just couldn’t shake the feeling the dream gave me the next morning.”
: “Yes, we are. You and I. We observe her motionless form, and discuss the state of her condition.”
: Okay, wait, what the fuck? Since when does the player have any agency whatsoever in this game? Are they trying to “compensate” for the way Alex has no character motivation by just saying “oh he’s like that because you’re controlling him”?
I could understand if this was a thing that had been done throughout the game, like in Baten Kaitos where you’re playing not as the protagonist but as yourself, but to call it up now out of fucking nowhere as if we’ve had any kind of agency AT ALL is just… bad.
: “We’re not doctors in the dream. We have no intention of helping her. But at the same time, I don’t think we want to hurt her.”
: “There is a third person there, but she doesn’t speak. In fact, we never see her face. I think she is judging us. In a way, you and I are trying to impress her.”
: I’m obviously not going to replay the entire game just to get to this point again, but I know when I did the opening the second time (with people’s input) I randomed the gender question and it landed on female.
: The other thing I think I hate about this is that he implies the viewer isn’t normally female, which I can imagine is probably really offensive to trans people.
: Oh look, it’s that entity from the jump scares that happened a few times earlier on. This is another design decision where I just want to shake the developer and go “What the everloving fuck were you thinking when you did this?”
: So for starters, this part is incredibly counterintuitive. I wound up Mike Dawsoning my way out of it. What we have to do, for no obvious reason, is go to the kitchen.
: “I don’t know if you’ve noticed. I certainly did. In fact, I’d been trying to ignore it all along.”
: “It followed me around. It was lurking in the corner of my eyes at all times.”
: What I also hate about this is that he makes this thing seem scary when they go on and tell you it isn’t really MEANT to be scary.
: “I don’t think that was it. Something told me the figure wasn’t bad. It had been here a while. Haven’t you noticed it?”
: “It had been here since I returned home from college. Maybe even before.”
: The thing is, I’m pretty sure I know what this thing is meant to be. It’s his mother’s Soul Survivor. You can tell because it goes into all these places we can imagine Alex’s mother going (it sits on the couch in the same spot she was, and goes to places you can imagine her going). Keep in mind that pretty much everything I knew about this game in advance happened before the Golden Alpaca fight. I know NOTHING about the plot.
: And if it’s his mother’s Soul Survivor, I’m guessing that means his mother is like Vella, which means this is rapidly turning into Ni no Kuni 1.
: “I think I needed to speak with it. It was materialized. It was no longer transparent. Was it an entity? Why the hell was it living in my house?”
: That’s another thing I don’t get. If you knew this thing was in your house, why would you not tell Vella about it?
: “This isn’t even a real TV show!! DO YOU EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH!?”
: “Strong silent type, I see. Okay, what to do, what to do?”
: This is where shit gets even more confusing. You’d think that we’d want to leave the house. Instead, we want to go to Alex’s bedroom.
: Then, we want to bring the ghost to the kitchen, where the back door is mysteriously open.
: Remember when I said we weren’t supposed to be at the radio station yet? The reason I knew is because I had recorded this part before the last update hit. Thankfully, this means it’ll be way less of a pain in the ass with all of the “puzzles” solved and enemies dead.
: The maze is somehow more annoying the second time, because you have to follow the ghost. Every few seconds, it’ll stop and do a 5 or 6 second animation of it teleporting short distances to show you where to go. Shit’s irritating.
: “Everything came down to this night, in the end – what I would do next, you know.”
: “I didn’t have to follow the entity here, but I’m glad I did.”
: “I couldn’t imagine life if I hadn’t, but maybe there wouldn’t be life if I hadn’t.”
: Alex acting like he’s a generic Chosen One.
: And of course, more self-fellation by the Allanson brothers.
: “I knew what the entity wanted. It wanted me to play the record, to drop the needle, to broadcast the lush and soaring tunes of this masterful LP for the world to hear.”
: “Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know that exactly, but I had my suspicions.”
: “Hey, not my fault. Do you know where it is? Does it have to be this record? What about one of the others?”
: “You CAN talk. Okay, fair enough, what do you want me to do?”
: “Oh great, now you’re mute! Look, I’ll swing into town in the morning and see if they have this record, this ‘Mystical Ultima LP Legend’ or whatever.”
: Well, let’s see. He’s a manchild, a complete douchenozzle, a blatant author self-insert…
: “Hey, don’t pretend that you wouldn’t have done the same! It’s, like, morbid curiosity and whatnot.”
: “I wanted to see what it wanted, why it’s been living with us.”
: "Har har. So, I’m going to go knock on Michael’s door and swing to town, see if I can find this ‘Mystical Ultima LP Legend’ ".
: No! That’s the entire point! Alex is a completely unlikable asshole! He’s Mao from Disgaea 3 only worse!
: “Hey, easy. Why are you always trying to make me feel bad? Anyway, I’ll pay him a visit. You’ll see. No one is mad at me. They’ve just been busy.”
: Well, let’s just go to Michael’s house, which the game pointed out to us is right next door, and…
: You know, this image of four Alexes in hoods surrounding a character from an over-rated JRPG is kind of like a one-image summary of how this game was written.
: I don’t really like FF7 anymore - not since Square-Enix tried to turn it into a multimedia franchise with movies and shit. Advent Children was a goddamn mistake, so was Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core. Still, this just offends me. The hooded Alexes do have stuff to say and disappear once you’ve talked to all of them but fuck that nonsense.
: Let’s just advance the plot, and…
: I think this is supposed to be something to freak the player out, but my first thought was that Michael hired a girl to answer his door and tell Alex that he never lived here.
: “That was weird. I’ve known Michael forever, and I swear to God he always lived in that house. I needed to relax. I was letting all the paranormal get to me.”
: Technically, the house next door is Alex’s house, but we want this one.
: “Nothing to worry about, see? Stupid Panda. He’s just sick, probably.”
: You might think we want to go see Vella or something, but we want to go to the record store first.
: “Let me check. Na, we don’t have it. It’s like - yeah, I think it’s like, sold out, dude.”
: “Damn. Okay, anyway, can you order it?”
: “Uh, the manager has to do that.”
: “But don’t you pick the indie music here? You literally just said that.”
: “Hey man, lay off. Look, if you want something good, you can check out the Wind Town music shop.”
: Oh look, the Allansons got 1999 confused with 1950 again.
: “Hey, what do you want?”
: “Can you get away from work for a bit? It’s, like – it’s about Sammy, and the entities, and all that stuff.”
: “How long do I need to be away for?”
: “Not long. Just need to run to Wind Town! So like, 3-4 hours, tops?”
: “Are you serious? Y – you want me to just walk away from my job for 3-4 hours?”
: What a fucking asshole!
: “I need the money, Alex.”
: “Hey, I’ll pay you. What do you make an hour? Like minimum wage? I’ll give you the $30.”
: What’s funny is, not only is Alex an asshole but also they’re wrong on the amount. The federal minimum wage in 1999 was $5.15 an hour, meaning it’d be more like $20.
: “Alex, you don’t get it, do you? You have no idea what hard work is. You don’t get having a purpose besides your own stupid whims.”
: Wait, what? What the fuck? This game takes place in fucking New Jersey? Okay, so, hopefully there’s someone reading this who is good at game modding. Can you please, for the love of God, make a mod for this game that replaces all of the characters with the cast of Jersey Shore? And also edit the dialog so it’s in that accent they all have?
: “Sure, it got my DDR game to be amazing, but I’m used to honing my skills to something with more of a purpose.”
: “One day, Alex, when you finally GET A JOB, you’ll understand how everything can’t be ‘conspiracies’ and ‘missing mysterious girls’ all the time!!!”
: “Okay. Yeah, I get it.”
: By the way, this LP is sponsored by Uncle Charlie’s Quality Used Cars of North Bergen, New Jersey. Uncle Charlie’s - best used cars allowed by state law! Now only 51% mafia-owned! You need a car? Come see Uncle Charlie. You need someone whacked? Come see Uncle Charlie!
: “No, I get it. That’s how you feel about me. Nothing I can do to change it.”
: I’ve read some things by the people who accuse Chris Niosi of abusing them, and this sounds EXACTLY like something he’d do.
: “Get over yourself, Alex. Could you be any more of an entitled little brat!?”
: “Last night an entity was in my house. I followed it to an old radio tower, and there I found THIS.”
: “…What the hell?!”
: “Yeah, the entity was IN MY HOUSE --”
: “No, not that. I don’t care about that. That happens all the time.”
: “This – this has to be a joke. Are you screwing with me? Where did you get that?”
: “I told you, it was in the radio tower.”
: “But HOW did it get HERE?”
: “What? I–”
: “But don’t you think this is all connected? Sammy vanishing, me meeting you, Rory, the entity appearing in my house!?”
: “Sometimes a record is just a record and an entity just lives in your house. Don’t try and connect everything together like there is some giant cosmic plan.”
: “Look, don’t look for that record.”
: “Oh, I’m going to. You really can’t stop me.”
: “I–”
: “If you find it, just leave me out of it. I want nothing to do with it.”
: “What, do you like, really REALLY hate this band or something?”
: “Alex, just get the hell out of here. I don’t want to see you for a while.”
: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
: “What do you mean?”
: “Your mom said you’ve been under the weather when I stopped by this morning.”
: “Oh, yeah. cough What’re you up to?”
: “While we’re there, why don’t we stop in and check on Rory? Make sure he doesn’t hate y- our guts.”
: “I almost got defensive. I almost pointed out how Rory endangered our lives with his stupid attention-seeking lie, but I let it go. At least externally.”
: So, on the way to Wind Town, I found a glitch that is going to give us a pretty significant (read: six level-ups) power boost. I was able to replicate it through reloading my save and replaying this part.
: See that little grove of trees directly south of Wind Town? That’s where the glitch occurs. The glitch only exists while the game is in this specific state: if we go to Wind Town (or go back to Frankton) it won’t be there when we come back.
: Around that area, there’s a number of random encounters - which as far as I understood it was something that wasn’t supposed to happen in this game. These enemies are level 15.
: There’s also these crown rats, which do significantly more damage - they hit Alex for 7 if he doesn’t dodge. Thankfully, all I had to do was LP toss at them and they died.
: What I noticed is that the encounters do a cycle: you hit the group of two rats and a smile, then the crown rats, then an encounter with a bat and two shit piles. I was able to get six full level-ups out of this, bringing Michael to level 21.
: “Want to hit up the record place, and if we have time go see Rory?”
: “Uh, I think we should see Rory first since that’s more important. Geez, dude.”
: “I’ve got the record jacket, but not the record. Any idea if it’s in stock?”
: “Mystical Ultima LP Legend… that hast o be by far one of the greatest records ever recorded. It’s other-worldly.”
: “So you’ve heard of it!?”
: “No man, that’s out there. In the ether. That sounds like it’s from a different world. Just by the name alone I can tell it’s amazing.”
: “Any idea where we can get it? Can’t you like, order us a copy or something?”
: “Let me check the record catalog. Does it have to be on vinyl?”
: “I don’t really care. I suppose I’d prefer it to be. More of an authentic sound, you know?”
: I’d just like to point out that I have David Bowie’s entire discography in FLACs that were ripped from vinyls by some German guy with too much time on his hands. The files are over 1GB each and sound no different than a regular-ass FLAC rip of a CD.
: “Yeah, but only if you’re playing from a tube amp. You have a tube amp, right? If you don’t, it’s like you’re only --”
: “Hearing half the song!”
: These dumbfucks remind me of this picture I saw once from an “audiophile convention” where they had a setup with cables that had roughly three foot thick shielding on them. Shit was fucking insane.
: “Hmm… uh, yeah. We don’t have it in our catalog. But we have two sister stores that probably will. They’re both East of here. If they don’t have it, I KNOW they’ll at least know where to get it.”
: “A quest for great music is always a worthy one, man. I think you’ll find this is worth it in the end.”
: “So they’re both East of here? Any specific directions?”
: “There is a strip mall east of here. That’s the closest one. The one after that is Northeast a bit. It’s a standalone building. It’s our flagship store, so I doubt you’ll miss it. Good luck, guys!”
: “He doesn’t get a lot of visitors. Why don’t you come inside?”
: “Oh, you guys. Yeah, Mom. I’m gonna take them downstairs. Come on.”
: “You sure you don’t want to come in and have something to eat?”
: “Leave them alone, Mom!”
: “Wow, Rory! Your mom is all legs.”
: This… is this supposed to be a joke? I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be a reference to Welcome to Night Vale, which makes sense because that podcast sucks.
: I picked the top option because we all know that’s what Alex’s VA tried to do IRL.
: “Look man, I was out of line the other day. I was scared. I don’t know what came over me. So I’m hoping you can forgive me, and we can be friends.”
: “Also, I was wrong to lie to you guys. You had a valid point.”
: “So, we’re trying to track down this record. You want to come with us?”
: Oh boy, Rory’s back! Hooray. I fucking hate him, and how much fucking pointless dialogue there is this update. I really hope you’re enjoying all this pointless dialogue, by the way, because guess what the next 30 minutes of this game is?
Next time, we’ll watch half an hour of pointless cutscenes, visit a new town, get two new party members, and… maybe find the plot? In any case, I accidentally posted half this update early and I don’t feel like transcribing the rest of this trash right now.
: I hope you’re ready for what is almost 30 minutes of straight cutscene.
: Our first cutscene is 33 textboxes, followed by a monologue.
: “Hi, I’m Rory. I’m a scene kid with a dead sister. Uh-- that’s it.”
: Historical note: no one would have described themselves as “scene” in 1999. That was more of a mid-2000s thing that sort of went hand-in-hand with “emo”. The worst part is, the game’s about to double down on the whole being set in 1999 thing.
: “Yeah, I work at this shitty video store, Planet VHS. We can get you any movie six to twelve months after its continental U.S. release on VHS. So basically, we suck.”
: “Any plans for college or anything?”
: “I don’t know if college is really in the cards for me.”
: “Why do you say that?”
: “Well, after my sister died, my parents aren’t really themselves. They’ve had a rocky relationship as it is. So I think if I left, everything would fall apart.”
: “But that’s not your job. You don’t have to keep your parents together.”
: “Do either of you have jobs?”
: “I used to deliver papers, but nothing lately. Now my dad pays me to proofread the things he writes.”
: Here’s what I really hate about this cutscene. They’ve already used a lot of words, and we’ve learned surprisingly little. I feel like Andrew Allanson must’ve had a motivational poster on his wall reading “TELL, DON’T SHOW” or something.
: “Oh yeah, and Alex is unemployed.”
: “I might be able to get you a job at Planet VHS.”
: “Oh yeah. No, I’m good. I’m just holding out for the right job. I’m not really in a rush.”
: “Didn’t you tell me on the way that your mom lost her job and you needed to help her out?”
: Wait, wha- did they just… did they just summarize to almost avoid repeating a plot point we’ve already known about? My god. Why couldn’t they have done this FOR THIS ENTIRE FUCKING CUTSCENE?
: “I think she was just saying that. But I know she wouldn’t want to push me into anything I’m not ready for.”
: “Did you go to college?”
: “Yeah, I graduated earlier this year. I have my B.L.A.”
: I have never heard anyone refer to a degree that way in casual conversation. It’s an actual term - Bachelor of Liberal Arts - but still.
: I wish I had kept a count of typos in the script, but that’s at least the third one I’ve noticed.
: “I’ll find something. I just need to hold out a bit longer til it feels right.”
: “Jetset City” is obviously a stand-in for Jersey City. I’d look up whether Frankton is a stand-in name for an actual place in New Jersey, but I’m too lazy.
: I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it. It was so pathetic.The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself."
: “It wasn’t that I hadn’t been happy or hadn’t enjoyed my high school experience. I could recall a handful of really great times. But if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others.”
: “When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. When I made it to college, I knew this was a time for reinvention.”
: “All I needed to do was imagine the Alex I wanted to be and work towards him. Forget the old Alex and be someone worth being.”
: God, he is such a fucking tool! And the thing is, I don’t think the devs were doing this in a way that was like “Oh, that’s how you’re meant to see it, he’s supposed to be that way”, they probably thought it was actually good writing! Fuck!
: “So anyway, I got to college. Made friends with people I never thought I’d hang out with, got interested in poetry, started listening to Dylan.”
: “I was in with the hip crowd, but being hip doesn’t mean you have direction. That isn’t to say some of the kids I met weren’t going places and I hear many of them did.”
: Okay, so we’re at a train station that we apparently took the bus to? This looks way too anime. Let’s just take a break and grab that trash can and…
: Nope! The game forces us straight into another cutscene.
: “Yeah. I am.”
: “You don’t sound so excited!”
: “It’s just scary. Not the leaving home part, I don’t care about that. But you have four years to ensure that you have a future. That’s a lot of pressure isn’t it?”
: “When my parents were kids, you didn’t HAVE to go to college. I bet, in 10 years, you’ll need your master’s to even be considered for a job.”
: “I’m also scared of the debt, you know?”
: “Did your parents set up a college fund?”
: “Nah. They didn’t really have that kind of money. They did good for a while, but my dad’s work hasn’t been going so well.”
: “Do you know what you want to go for?”
: “It’s 1999 and the economy is terrible compared to my parents’ day.”
: The economy was actually good in 1999 due to the fact that the dot-com bubble was still a thing. Even after the bubble popped, nothing was really that bad until the financial meltdown in 2007.
: “Imagine what it will be like for our kids’ kids if we don’t get our shit together.”
: This reminds me of that one page in the Doom comic.
: “Yeah, it’s scary. But you need to face that reality eventually. What are you leaning towards?”
: “Computers, probably. Maybe I’ll make computer games.”
: OH! Michael’s a self-insert too. I hadn’t realized.
: “Huh. I have no idea. I wonder if they have to translate programming languages.”
: “They don’t. All programming is done in English, unless you’re working in pure binary. Then you have just ones and zeroes.”
: 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00100000 01000111 01000001 01001101 01000101 00100000 01010011 01010101 01011000
: “How do you know this?”
: “Oh yeah. I’ve tried making games before. I used Objective C. It’s pretty fun. Not great at making graphics, but I’m getting there.”
: Just going to skip the next five textboxes because even the game admits they’re pointless.
: This part is particularly fucking egregious. See how there’s stores here? We can’t go in any of them until we’ve gone to Burger Joint. You can’t see it very well, but right next to the “Toys & Sports” store is the Planet VHS Rory ostensibly works at. Worse, after we do the Burger Joint cutscene, we STILL can’t go in any of the stores except the Record Stop next door.
: “Michael, concerned about the future. Rory, who had something to aspire to.”
: “At the time I told myself I had a purpose: I was looking for Semi Pak. I was going to find her, save her, I don’t know. Something was going to happen. Somehow there would be meaning in all this craziness.”
: I really can’t think of anything more exciting you could do in a game than watch people make uncomfortable small talk.
: “Yeah.”
: “Really seems like the world is going to shit, doesn’t it? First Alex loses Sammy, I lose Carrie, the economy is tanking. Future looks bleak in 1999, boys.”
: By mid-1999, local news stations would run shit about Y2K all the time. It was 1999’s equivalent of those days where they have the weather guy standing on the tarmac at the airport so they can say there’s a heat wave. The fact that this is the first time they even mention the thing their game is named after, and that they do it in a completely irrelevant small-talk segment, does not bode well.
: “This will cause various problems with dates and finances, and will probably cause a big mess. People all over the world are panicking.”
: So, let’s talk about the real Y2K ‘crisis’ for a bit. It wasn’t really a crisis. The problem had been thought about for years before 1999, and by 1998 the U.S. government had an entire task force devoted to solving any Y2K-related issues before they popped up. It got to the point where there was even an international body called the International Y2K Cooperation Center that formed specifically to address this problem.
: Most private organizations that had systems that might’ve been effected had long since patched it or found workarounds by the time January 2000 hit. By the time all was said and done, according to the BBC over $300 billion had been spent globally to mitigate Y2K.
: So, did anything actually happen? Not really. Wikipedia has a list of possible Y2K bugs, and the worst was a minor issue at a nuclear plant in Japan that may not have even had anything to do with Y2K in the first place. In fact, there’s a lot of people who argue that the entire Y2K taskforce was a gigantic waste of money because plenty of systems that hadn’t been “Y2K-prepped” never had any issues.
: Really, the only silver lining to the Y2K ‘crisis’ was that it helped mitigate the effects of 9/11.
: One other thing I found that was kind of amusing was that apparently, there was a miniature “Y2k10” crisis in Germany revolving around a credit card system not being able to handle a date of 01/01/2010.
: “What’s wrong with you guys?! That could cause serious problems! This is crazy. How have I never heard of this before?”
: “Probably because you live under a posh little rock and only hear about the things your mommy wants you to hear about.”
: “Screw you, man.”
: “Maybe that’s why everything is going to shit. Maybe the world will end in the year 2000, we’ll all die, and our souls will float up into the Soul Space.”
: Maybe I died in 2000 and this is what hell looks like.
: “Could you imagine?”
: “Do you really think Y2K could have something to do with Sammy’s disappearance?”
: “No, I mean, that’s a computer problem, right? But then again, the world does feel like it’s falling apart - all that war and what not overseas.”
: “What wars?”
: I really, really don’t get where the fuck this conversation is going, or why they’re having it, or really anything at this point. My brain shut off like thirty text boxes ago. I also took the liberty of fact-checking this, because at this point doing research is less boring than this game is. All of them check out, but with the time skip the Kosovo War would either already be over or be very close to being over - it ended in June of 1999.
: “I had no idea there were so many wars happening. What are they fighting over?”
: In order: the border between Ethiopia and Somalia, Communism, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, separation from Yugoslavia and the persecution of the Albanians by the Serbs, the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and overthrowing the government of Sierra Leone but also diamonds and PMCs.
: “Isn’t that what war is usually about? War for war’s sake?”
: Who the fuck are you, Kazuhira Benedict McDonell Miller?
: “I’m so uninformed. Geeze, I used to read the newspaper in college, but now all I read is ONISM 1999.”
: I feel like this was supposed to be the setup for a stupid Family Guy style “joke”, but they never deliver.
: The record store cutscene is a whopping eleven textboxes long, and all they really needed was this one. So we’re free of the godawful cutscenes now, right? …right?
: Nope, because we need to get on the bus again!
: “There was something fun about our little quest for this record.”
: No there isn’t! No there fucking isn’t!
: “Far from my mind were the things that brought me here: Sammy’s disappearance, the entities, Vella.”
: You thought about Sammy in the fucking burger place! You know, where you just were not even minutes ago! You fucking assclown!
: “Vella - she was probably still mad at me, fuming away at her arcade, taking out her anger at me on unsuspecting tweens. I wondered why she didn’t want us to find the record.”
: “I wondered if she had some bad memories associated with it or if there was something about entities that I didn’t know My mind turned to Y2K. Could the world really end this year?”
: “If you asked me six months ago I’d have laughed at you. But now that I’d seen so much strangeness, I could honestly say that stranger things have happened.”
: Welcome to Flag Town. There’s… really not much of a point to a lot of this place. The shops sell the same stuff we can get in Frankton, and nothing new has been added to them since we left. Let’s go hit the record store.
: "Hey man. I’m looking for this record, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s called ‘Mystical Ultima LP Legend.’ I have the jacket, but I’m missing the record.
: This is Claudio, one of the two people who will shortly be joining our party. Claudio is… quite literally a black Travis Touchdown. The thing is, he’d have to be REALLY into anime to have a shirt like that in 1999. Importing stuff from Japan was not nearly as easy as it is today. I also like how they had to rip off Travis’s shirt rather than make something even vaguely original.
: “What?! Yeah, I mean. I go on there but how did you know?”
: I kind of hate all the characters in this game for being badly written, but Claudio has one thing going for him: he uses an actual weapon… even if it’s a katana.
: “I’m guessing it wasn’t you who posted it then, was it? Haven’t you checked the forum today? Someone posted a photo of this record jacket, and they’ve been asking people if they have a copy. They said it has to do with Semi Pak’s disappearance.”
: Typo counter: at least 5 that I know of.
: “I go on the forum too, obviously. Yeah, I’ve been following Semi’s story for a while. But aren’t you the guy who posted the photos of her last known location?”
: “I am. But – wow-- it’s just-- I had no idea anyone around here even knew about Semi. I’m just shocked.”
: RIP punctuation.
: “I’m Alex. This is Michael, he is the one who took the photos. This guy here is Rory. He also lurks on ONISM.”
: “Great. So you’re looking for Mystical LP, huh? Well, sorry we don’t got it.”
: sigh
: “But I do know where you can get it! It’s going to sound a bit odd. Hell, you know what? I’ll come with you. I own this stupid place, I can take a break whenever I want.”
: “Yeah, we’re down. Where do we go?”
: “He’s a really chill guy, a bit out there, but he has the biggest record collection on the east coast. He’s bound to have it!! Let me just grab my sister.”
: Gotta love how they go ahead and repeat shit we’ve already heard IN THIS SAME FUCKING CONVERSATION.
: The menu is now a clusterfuck. The four people on the left are our active battle party. I immediately dumped Rory for Chondra, because she has an actual attack. However… let’s talk about what happened when I tried to equip Claudio and Chondra.
: “Timrod,” I say to myself, “You should probably get some battle footage with Claudio and Chondra, and maybe show off their stats to cap off what is otherwise going to be an entire update of nothing but cutscenes.”
: First, I went and explored the town. Flag Town is very big, in that it’s bigger than Frankton, but also very empty in that the only “hidden” chest is in this dipshit maze over here. It’s a pog.
: Then, I say to myself “I’ve been pretty stingy with money, but we’re fucking loaded. Let’s go get some proper equipment for the new party members because we have none.” What you’re looking at right here is a softlock.
Apparently, the game has a bug where if you are within interaction range of an NPC that brings up a menu (basically any shop owner) and attempt to open the main menu to, say, equip your characters and take a look at their stats, the game stores the menu state and then locks up if you hit F2 (the menu key) again. I got a video of this. You’ll notice menu sounds - that’s me pressing buttons. I took this as a sign from the gods that this update would not in fact be the update where I show off any actual gameplay.
: I’m going to end the update on that softlock, but here’s something that also pissed me off. See these? This is the equipment store’s loadout right now - the only things missing are the default weapons for Claudio and Chondra, which aren’t visible. They sell flip-flops THAT DO FUCKING NOTHING. JUST LIKE THIS GODDAMN GAME. IT’S LIKE A FUCKING METAPHOR!
Next time, we’ll head to the mountain and hopefully get some actual gameplay in, and not softlock a third time this game.
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You notice that the game is setting Alex up to be a victim here? I’m not just talking about the part of last update where he’s trying to guilt trip Vella for having the temerity to be mad at him for being a complete and utter fuckchimp. I’m talking about how all Vella will actually say about The Quest For The Cursed Long Play is “don’t do it I swear to God” several times over before she finally loses her temper and tells him to make like a tree and fuck off. This way, when this inevitably blows up, it will be Vella’s fault for being an irrational bitch, and not Alex’s for ignoring an extremely strong and clear warning.
In a better game she would have told him straight up and Alex would have had a compelling reason to consider ignoring her anyway but that’s kinda the rub now isn’t it. This game was MADE to have someone like Niosi in the starring role.
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01001100 01001111 01001100
Oh, I absolutely do. I have to wonder if Niosi had some kind of input on the character, since that’s a thing that has happened at larger studios - I know as an example that JK Simmons had some issues with the script Valve made for Portal 2 and outright refused to read some of the lines because they sounded too creepy. Sure, Niosi doesn’t have anywhere near the pull JK Simmons does (especially now) but when he’s a relatively big-name voiceactor working with a studio consisting of two chucklefucks whose claim to fame was some indie game no one ever played I can imagine him having the pull to get script changes made.
I think what this game really shows is why it’s important to have a diverse audience of beta testers, even if you’re a small studio and have to rely on giving copies away to people because you don’t have the money to pay full-time testers.