The site ate my post edit a few times, but here’s a video version of everything that is in this update and then some.
: Vella’s Mind Dungeon is EXTREMELY badly designed, though they do exactly one neat thing in it. The first thing we want to do is talk to this assclown.
: The very first thing we want to do is come over here and drop the panda. The stage manager will give you a hint that you need to get in someone’s way. You’ll notice the Vella on a skateboard just above where Alex is. She skates around the table area on a pre-set path.
: For reference, I didn’t do this until after I had already visited all of the things that we need to do this for.
: “It’s too dangerous for me. I’m scarred for life now. Thanks for that.”
: The skateboard makes Alex move very quickly in one direction. The only problem is that he can’t stop until he hits something, but it’s pretty good for reducing travel times.
: There’s a total of nine doors in this dungeon (but not nine persons or nine hours, because that game was actually okay apart from the digital root gambit). There’s these two..
: Four over here..
: And three over here. We want to go into this red door first.
: The red door leads to a heal room, which will be very important due to how we want to handle all of the enemies in this dungeon. The chests have a new weapon for Vella and.. I think money.
: The next door we want to do is this one. We only want to go halfway in right now - in the video I go all the way in which was a mistake.
: To the right is this dungeon’s gimmick: skateboard ramps. What we’re here for is behind that door.
: This is a key item we’ll need for.. you can probably guess.
: This is the next door we want to handle, because it has a key item behind it and also because we only need to go inside once.
: Beyond the door is a generic horror movie set that is absolutely not 100% post-consumer recycled assets from Alex’s house, no sir.
: The bookcases in back have $5 each in them, and there’s a fight I simply had Alex LP Toss his way through. The way we set up Alex’s stats, LP toss will kill any enemy in this dungeon in one hit.
: Nothing important in here, but you can check the fridge for a couple of okay healing items.
: This is what we came here for.
: Next up is the dark blue door two north of the Sammy room. We want to skip the green one for now because there’s nothing we can do there yet.
: This room is so badly designed that the devs actually posted a guide on how to get through it. See those three switches on the floor? You’d think that we’d need to find something to put on one, then use Panda and Alex to press the other two. I already defeated all the enemies here, except..
: There’s a mimic. This one has about the same amount of HP but hits far less hard and far less often than the one in the last dungeon. Unfortunately, it only awards 10 EXP instead of 100.
: So anyway, when I tried this room the first time, I assumed that ladder in the back was supposed to be used to hold down the third switch. Nope! Let me show you the solution.
: What you have to do, against all common sense, is have the panda on one switch, Alex on another, and then use Dali to hit the last one. Considering that every other time we’ve ever had to hit a switch with Dali it was a toggle and not a weighted switch.. yeah.
: From there, we put the ladder up against the staircase and drop the panda on that newly-spawned platform.
: It’s simply a matter of lining Alex up with the panda and skateboard jumping over the hole.
: The door brings us to the Vella room, which has all four of the musicians we need to find. The middle room you might recognize from those cutscenes with the hooded figures.
: “Do me a favor. When my solo comes up, turn the volume down. We can pretend it was a technical error. I hate having to do these stupid shows.”
: Now, there’s a sort of neat thing that isn’t at all original that the game does here. The background music for Vella’s mind dungeon changes slightly every time we find a new Vella. Bassist Vella changes it the least.
: Up next is the door directly north of the dark blue door we were just in. This is where we need the door piece we found in the Sammy room.
: We need to do this for one of the other doors. There’s like.. fifteen textboxes of the baby crying, and I’m not going to transcribe that shit.
: Now we need to backtrack into the first room we were in. Jumping the first ramp brings us to this door, which is an event flag we need to set for a “puzzle” in that green door on the right side that we skipped.
So, I had the rest of this update done, and then the site ate my goddamn post edit. Second time this has happened to me. I’m just going to give this the Tim Fuckley treatment and gloss over everything. It’s funnier that way. Laugh at my goddamn pain.
: There’s three stupid plot flags we need to get in order to pass a quiz about Vella in one of the rooms. This is one of them.
: So anyway, earlier I said that I handled combat in a very particular way in this dungeon. That way is using LP Toss, which instantly kills anything it hits due to Alex’s high strength stat. He also has the highest PP of anyone in the party. By the way, I also found out that EP Strike is completely useless. It actually does less damage than LP Toss does, and only does it to a single target while at the same time costing 2 more PP. The formula here is “do battles until Alex runs out of PP, run to healing room, repeat”.
: At the end of the room, past a couple more skateboard jumps, is Bathtub Vella, who also happens to be the guitarist we need to find. We need the baby blanket to give her.. so she can use it as a towel.
: One of the other doors has Drum Vella, who wants a drink.
: To finish this, we have to go to this robot that looks nothing like Jill Stingray from VA-11 Hall-A and.. go clear a room of monsters. By the way, Jill would know that only three people work at the bar: her, Dana, and the guy whose name I forgot.
: The loading dock is through the door in the back. marked “EXIT”.
: This room is a big fuckoff maze and I hate it. We have to kill all the enemies (not a big deal) but also find two more plot flag Vellas to get quiz answers from. There’s a weapon in here somewhere I got on my first playthrough but forgot on this run - it’s garbage anyway. It’s a record for Alex that comes with -10 HP and doesn’t have as good of a combo potential.
: Vella is afraid of being fat. Haha it’s funny because the joke is that she puts on a complex appearance but in reality she’s such a basic bitch that you could use her to neutralize sulfuric acid.
: Also she dunks on Alex if you have him examine the scale.
: The fun part is that NOTHING IN THIS DUNGEON MATTERS. Vella is going to tell us her fucking life story the second we leave this dungeon, and none of this is at all relevant.
: What’s funny about this is how this cameo of Jill is absolutely nothing like what she’s like in her own game. This is a line she uses - to herself. In VA-11, she works as a bartender at a bar that is about to be closed by the giant international conglomerate that owns every bar in the world, and thus her entire job is pointless.
: I’m seriously considering taking this LP to SA and never looking back. Seriously, I had an ENTIRE UPDATE ready with dialog and everything and then the site ate it. Anyway, welcome to the shitty piano room which has no reason to exist. The hands damage you if they touch you but it doesn’t matter because by this point we’ve cleared every enemy out of the dungeon anyway.
: I had a joke here in my original update about how I wished this was like that Junji Ito story with the balloons that look like people and they try to hang the person they look like.
: Anyway, the stupid balloon asks three questions before we get through to the last Vella we need to collect. You can get these right but unless you have the plot flags set it doesn’t work.
: You know what this site needs? A thing like that LP Test Poster thing I can’t get because I don’t have an SA account, or at least a “Hey are you sure you want to post this?” prompt so I don’t wind up posting half the update early because my mouse fucks up.
: Pointless busy work! Is this Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean or what? I didn’t have a Baten Kaitos joke in this spot originally but I just read an LP of it and this is exactly the kind of thing that game would do only you’d have like 8 seconds to do it before the scale rots in your inventory and turns into a bird.
: I didn’t show it because again, it’s in the video and I just want this update to be over, but Vella (the real one) has to volunteer to sing because.. I dunno. There’s an actual song here with vocals but they covered it with booing which is real fucking dumb.
: More importantly, once we do this, the curtains open. I have questions, questions like why couldn’t Vella just open that herself? Why is her mind dungeon so different from Alex’s? Why does this segment exist at all other than to be a Persona ripoff? Why is there no bossfight?
: Also why are there so many goddamn hooded Alexes here?
: Next update, we’ll finish this bullshit and then hit another 40 minutes of cutscene.