: What we’re about to see is Alex set the world record for fastest 180-degree turn. Also, this is going to be a short update because… well, there’s a vote at the end.
: “What the actual hell had I done? I was so stupid. He tried to reach out to me. He asked me for help. ME.”
: “For some reason he had picked me as his confidant and I turned him away.”
: “Were my own personal whims so important that I couldn’t see he was begging for help?”
: So honestly, this feels like it just should’ve been the only route. When, at any point, has Alex shown that he gives a fuck about anyone other than himself?
: "A year ago I would have thought ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself’ or ‘If someone wants to die, there isn’t anything you can do to stop it.’ "
: “I would have convinced myself it was somehow not my fault. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to feel guilty. Why was I so afraid of feeling guilty?”
: “Why did I continue to convince myself that nothing was ever my fault? Sometimes things ARE your fault.”
: I think this is supposed to be berating me as the player, but honestly I just did what we all know Alex would have done.
: “Or in this case: me, me, me.”
: God dammit Alex, that song didn’t come out until 2015.
: “I wanted to tell Vella that he had reached out to me. I wanted to tell her I had been cruel. I had been so selfish.”
: What’s amazing is how even in a situation like this, the only person he gives a fuck about is himself.
: “I did my best to not let her know I felt guilty. Why? Because I wanted her to like me. I needed everyone to like me. I needed to be a solid guy in everyone’s book.”
: “No. I just needed to seem like a good person to myself. And I needed to change that. Self love, disguised with gifts and lies, does not make a good person.”
: “Inward appearances? If I wanted to like myself, I needed to be someone worth liking. Grief - it can make you forget about all the things you thought were important.”
: “But time goes on and we were running out of time. I needed to get my shit together and focus.”
: There’s also one thing I realized just now that kind of makes no sense. If you’re in a world where you can commit soul suicide and potentially wind up somewhere where there’s at least a chance you could be happy, why would you ever kill yourself the regular way?
: “The Essentia 2000 worked hard to console me. She reminded me of a mothering Vella, a truly all knowing being. Vella - I needed to call Vella. I need to bring myself back to a functioning level and actually DO something.”
: So basically, the devs were too lazy to actually make a different gameplay sequence for if Rory offed himself. What happens is that you get the death scene first… and then the game switches over to the same scene you’d see if he hadn’t.
: “Vella, this is the Essentia 2000. Essentia 2000, this is Vella.”
: “Hello, Vella. It’s nice to see you.”
: “Likewise… what’s going on here?”
: “I don’t even know where to begin. It’s so complicated.”
: Something about this just made me fucking laugh. “Alex, you’re so irrelevant that we could easily continue this game without you, please fuck off”.
: “Do you know how weird was thinking that? No, you really can’t. Well, maybe now you can that you’re in the same situation.”
: What the fuck is he talking about? I seriously don’t get it. Are they trying to go for an Omikron the Nomad Soul thing here?
: “One soul, but many people. In the darkness, thinking about the end of all reality, knowing inside myself that all of this was true.”
: “These concepts, previously absurd, were now mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands.”
: What the fuck kind of metaphor is that?
: God, this line is just so…off. It sounds like something you’d see in a game written by someone who doesn’t speak English as their primary language.
: “Everyone was gone and then she floated by. Sammy. But she wasn’t Sammy, she was Vella. But also not Vella, she was the Essentia 2000, Oda, Yuzu, and Naila.”
: “Somehow these people were linked by their ‘soul’. Whatever that meant. What did it mean to share a soul, but be a different person?”
: What’s funny is that as many of you have pointed out, I’m not even sure the developers understood what the fuck the deal with the soul thing is.
: “What had the Essentia 2000 called it? A parallel life? I thought of Buddhists and their concept of past lives. Before I was Alex, I was a pirate or a poor village girl living in Croatia.”
: “But in a parallel life, I was Alex, a pirate, and a little girl in Croatia. I lived all of my lives at once, in distant but similar realities.”
: “Similar was only an assumption. I realized how how little I knew about reality.”
: “I have explored the Soul Space, and I have seen the beginnings of destruction to many realities.”
: It honestly feels like for this part, the Allansons contracted the dialogue out to like, one of those late-80s anime fansub groups who did literal translations.
: “I have seen the remains of many souls, and Alex, this scares the living hell out of me. I will do anything I can to help stop whatever is coming for us.”
: “You spoke to us in the past, specifically to Vella, about a feeling that fate brought you two together. I am that fate. This was meant to happen. I do not know if we can stop whatever is coming, but I know that we are meant to try.”
: “So what’s next? What do we do? What’s the plan?”
: “We should get the others onboard.”
: “And then we should train in the Mind Dungeon. Alex, you have seen what is coming for us, and you know better than anyone else the only way to stop it is to understand yourself.”
: This part is really weird because of our entire seven-person party (counting Rory), only three of them have ever been to the Mind Dungeon.
: “If we can get as far into the Mind Dungeon as possible and learn as many abilities as possible, we may stand a chance of dying with dignity.”
: I feel like this is a thing saying “Hey go grind those monster dens” but we really have no reason to. LP Toss already oneshots everything. I feel like that isn’t likely to change given that we’re fighting every enemy we come across.
: “Alex, what did you see in the Mind Dungeon? What did the end look like? Why did she say that?”
: I was really fucking torn on this one. On one hand, I kind of wanted to know what the fuck he thought he saw other than just himself on fire. On the other, dodging the question might piss off Vella, which is EXACTLY what Alex would do. That’s why I picked the second option.
: “Alex, I believe the best course of action now would be to go and find each one of your friends individually and talk to them about the current situation. Remember that the better you do, the more Mind Dungeon Keys you will unlock and the stronger you will become.”
: Why do I have a feeling that this is going to be like Ni no Kuni 2 where I farmed out overpowered equipment only to have the game force me into using worse equipment?
: “It is vital that all of your friends are onboard. Without achieving the highest level by the time the end comes, our futile efforts will be even more futile.”
: “But we don’t even know when the end is coming! It could be tomorrow for all we know.”
: “Y2K. Could that be it? Could the turn of the millennium be the date?”
: “I don’t know, maybe. What do you think, Android-me?”
: “It is possible.”
: “I’ve had a weird sense of impending doom ever since Rory and Michael mentioned it. That might explain why '99 has gone to shit. I’ve been looking at the newspaper a lot lately and things are really screwed up out there.”
: “Well, I suppose having some estimated date is good enough for me.”
: “Alex, you can return to the Mind Dungeon at any time to see how many days remain.”
: “WAIT WHAT!? You mean that date was real!? It has so many numbers and zeroes. How do I even calculate that into a date?”
: “I could not see the number myself, but if you take me there and tell me the number I can help you convert it into days.”
: “Well damn, why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”
: Why is it that the devs can never just let a cutscene end?
: “Well, she didn’t. Lay off of her. We’re not perfect you know!”
: “Is that your new thing? Referring to her as you and et cetera, et cetera?”
: “Yes.”
: And… it’s now winter in Frankton. What I like is how the devs put in the effort to do things like add icicles and decorate some of the houses, but Alex (and all the NPCs in town) are wearing summer clothing.
: It’s strange to me that they also never bothered to give Claudio and Chondra a house. In fact, we don’t even know where they live.
: I’m going to skip a bunch of this because just like the last time, a lot of what they have to say isn’t important. However…
: This to the guy who caused someone else to commit suicide.
: I wonder if Claudio committed soul suicide and someone else took his place.
: Chondra is over here. She has pretty much the same thing to say Claudio did: that she had a dream about Alex and… yeah.
: “Did I really deserve everyone’s help? Nope. Not at all. Maybe this is why I was exceedingly grateful.”
: “I thought about Michael. He was the only one I hadn’t seen since I returned from my trip into The Essentia 2000’s mind. Where had he gone? Why hadn’t anyone else seen him?”
: The Forest Meadow is an area I actually visited once way back before we did Flag Town.
: That chest there contains an Ambrosia, which I picked up the first time I visited.
: There’s also $5,000 in this chest, located behind some candles. This is mostly important if you want the achievement for having $15,000 without selling any of your ambrosias.
: “I’ve been looking for you for the past week! I called your house, knocked on your door, and no one ever answered.”
: Meet Proto-Michael, who is attempting to do his best Naked Snake impersonation. Somehow, I can’t picture someone with that build having that much chest hair.
: “It’s so trivial. Don’t you see? No, of course you don’t. I wouldn’t have a week ago.”
: “What happened? You sound different. Your voice is different. What’s going on?”
: “Alex, something has happened to me. I am transformed. I’ve come to understand certain things. I’ve been exposed to the truth.”
: I feel like Michael just smoked weed for the first time and now he’s ready to write a 3000-word thinkpiece on it.
: “What do you mean? What happened?”
: “Something happened to me. Something very startling at first, but now - now it’s just incredible.”
: So apparently, being “proto” means that you just keep saying the same line over and over with slightly different wording.
: “Are you going to tell me what happened or are you just going to keep acting like Vella?”
: “I met a parallel self. I lived so many lives. I am everything.”
: “Uh, what?”
: “Alex, I entered the Mind Dungeon alone and I wandered and wandered. Soon I stumbled upon a hall of names. Each of these names was etched into a door.”
: Way to describe what we literally just saw, fuckhead!
: “Alex, what I’m trying to say is that I’ve seen the Vore Dimension. All of it.”
: “The very act of experiencing a parallel life is mind shattering. When we are born, we immediately begin developing a series of biases and defenses that help us ground our lives in the ‘reality’ that we invent for ourselves.”
: “In doing so, we lose sight of the temporary nature of life. We forget everything. We lose track of where we came from and only look to the future. Experiencing a parallel life disassembles all physiological constraints that have been built up over the years.”
: “Do you know what the funniest part is?”
: “What?”
: Say what one more goddamn time, motherfucker! I dare you!
: “I know what you’ve come to ask me. And I know that I’ll say yes even though I always turn you down. Do you realize how many times we’ve had this conversation? It’s like clockwork.”
: “He soon asks me to try and save him from self-destruction. Every time I say no and every time you destroy our reality.”
: If someone could please, for the love of god, draw that last line and the one in the screenshot above it, only Michael is Odie and Alex is Garfield, I would greatly appreciate it.
: “Maybe it took for me to realize what not helping a friend can do to that friend, but I’m in. Let’s win this thing.”
: This feels like it’s meant to be a burn on Alex for letting Rory die.
: “Michael, did you see how reality ends?”
: “No. All of my lives end with you destroying everything, but I’m never there to see firsthand how you do it.”
: “Crap. I was really hoping you knew the answer.”
: “I’m surprised you’re not alarmed by what I’ve told you. What have I missed while I’m away?”
: God the grammar just kills me.
: “I think you should meet our new android friend.”
: What the fuck is this, Pocahontas?
: “Their positions have changed. Did you notice the colors?”
: Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon? Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grins?
: “Everything is wrong. This isn’t what it was like. Something is wrong. Something is broken. Can’t you see it?”
: “Michael, I – I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe things feel different. But dude, they’ve felt different for a long time. The very feeling of being me has changed. I can’t really put my finger on it, but something is wrong, you’re right.”
: “Do you ever remember things wrong?”
: “No, I don’t think so. What does that mean?”
: “As we walked back to my house, a strange feeling of nostalgia overwhelmed me. It was as if I hadn’t seen Michael in a really long time, as if the Michael I’d spent the past year with had been broken and now he was fixed. This was the Michael I remembered.”
: “In the cooling winter air, I had a series of memories return to me. All of them involved Michael, but none of them felt real. As if I had experienced them in a far off distant life.”
: “Although in a way, we have met many times before, both in the past of our parallel lives and in the future of our parallel lives.”
: “I am going to make this brief. Starting tomorrow, we will train in the Mind Dungeon.”
: “But tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”
: “Thanksgiving? Tomorrow?”
: “Yeah, so we should start on Friday.”
: “What about shopping on Friday! Just kidding. Seriously. Just kidding.”
: “Many of my parallel lives were Canadian so this is somewhat a surprise to me. As I experienced Canadian Thanksgiving a few weeks ago. All right. Fair enough. Friday we begin.”
: I really think this entire gigantic cutscene-monologue hybrid is here entirely to pad the game out, because the rest of this game is going to be real underwhelming.
: “Now with the threat of impending doom, I realize how silly it was to do so. But what else could be expected of me? I’ve lived the past 25 years knowing nothing but a series of tomorrows. In fact, ‘I’ll do that tomorrow’ had become my mantra over the past two and a half decades.”
: “Tomorrow there may be nothing. Today may be the last day. This knowledge triggered something in me to fall away. It was as if the core of my personality dropped away and nothing came in to fill the hole.”
: “It was like being hungry all the time, except food, mindless fun, and things that normally bring happiness had lost their appeal. The knowledge that this was all temporary had stripped me of the ability to experience basic human pleasures.”
: “What I craved was a sense of normal. The desire to go back. No, that’s not right. I didn’t want to go back. If I went back, I’d be the same person I used to be: selfish, unfocused, lazy.”
: “I had no purpose. I was a blank slate that was covered in war paint. I was going to defeat whatever was coming for my reality, even if it was me. I would defeat myself. What that meant, I didn’t know. But I was prepared to do whatever it took.”
: “It feels good. I was so excited to get to the Mind Dungeon I barely slept last night.”
: “Impressive! Well, get to work!”
: As you can guess, the game just basically became Persona, only way shittier. Alex now has a phone in his room that he can use only to save. Now, you might think we want to head to the mind dungeon - but doing that only brings up the standard level-up menu. What we want to do…
: Is go explore the town. Spending time with friends gives you 100 EXP, but wastes an entire day.
: If you look on ONISM, a whole assload of sidequests just opened up. Most of these are pretty boring, so I’ll gloss over a lot of them. By the time I finished recording for this update, I had basically 100%ed all of the side material.
: First up, if you’re dead-set on maxing Alex out, there’s a couple of places with Soul Survivors in them. This is one of them.
: The one annoying thing is that every time we complete a sidequest, the game will send us back to Alex’s house.
: It’ll also cross off a day. We have just over 30 days, which is WAY more than enough to max everything out.
: I also found the true final tool, the Monster Flute. The Monster Flute is used specifically for monster dens. You see that skull icon on the ground behind Alex? Playing the Monster Flute turns that into an encounter. Naturally, it’s an Ocarina because references.
: The main draw of this sidequest segment is this chest, which was going to be part of a hidden ending to the game that never came to fruition. To get this chest, you have to do a sidequest that involves talking to a ghost in Wind Town’s graveyard, then talking to a second ghost at the Strip Mall, then talking to the Wind Town ghost again and finagling your way in here. This sidequest does NOT end the day.
: Next up, there’s another Soul Survivor here, by the water tower. I’d like to think that this is Rory.
: I should mention that against these lower-level enemies, LP Toss was doing like 1400 damage.
: The next day, I went to finish the pog sidequest. The last one is hidden down here behind some trees.
: So, what’s our reward? An ultimate weapon? A few ambrosias?
: Nope, just worthless money. The shops haven’t stocked anything new since we did the cave near Flag Town. We also get 100 EXP and get sent home.
: Next up is this pathetic excuse for a sidequest. Back at the reservoir, there’s a group of high-level aliens. They SUCK to fight, mostly because of the fact that they can chain-stun Alex and can also dodge LP Toss, but I got them down no problem.
: I like that this quest, which takes like two minutes to do, gives more of a reward than finding all the pogs.
: Our next time slot gets taken up by trading the buried treasure we found to this guy for…
: Pokemon cards… and 100 EXP and a trip home.
: We can then trade the cards for a geiger counter. This is where the trading quest stops having a point - neither this nor the final step get you anything.
: What this was supposed to do is lead you back to where we met Sammy at the start of the game, which would then send us through the window room to find the combination to the locked chest we were never able to open.
: Next up is this kid, who is “missing”. He gives 100 EXP and $400.
: There’s also one I’m going to ignore in Wind Town which consists of fighting a handful of samurai tortoises and getting 100 EXP for it.
: Finally, there’s this lady. She wants us to hang up missing posters for Semi… which is incredibly dumb because someone on ONISM posts that they found her dead right after we went into Essentia’s mind dungeon.
: There’s six spots we need to put these. One is right here, in the mall.
: Then there’s one at the university…
: Strip mall.
: Gas station.
: Wind Town.
: And finally on the arcade. As for our reward…
: We get what I believe to be Michael’s ultimate weapon. Now that we’re done with this shit, our only objective is to level up to whatever the maximum is.
: This is after I cleared out all the monster dens, and did pretty much every encounter in the game. I think we’re down just a bit of EXP (probably like 30) because there’s a specific sidequest for the Soul Survivor that was in the factory that we couldn’t do because it was already dead. Also, then the game glitched and docked me like 200 EXP when I had to reload, which is not a big deal.
: I levelled Alex up to like… level 54 I think? I’m not sure what the max level is, but someone on the Steam boards for this game insisted it was 50. You’ll notice that we’re only on the 5th of December. We have to go ALL THE WAY TO NEW YEAR’S. The fastest way to do this is going to the Mind Dungeon and immediately leaving. However… we could do some of the scenes for “hang out with friends”. Let me put it up to a vote. We can SKIP THAT SHIT or keep doing the visit with friends thing and I can post a few shots of each cutscene until there are no more. Let me know what you want, and next weekend I’ll finish the Endless Eight here and get us back on track.
By the way, if we do go for cutscenes… there’s one other thing you’ll need to vote on.
: “You know, the important one.”
: “Have you been taking care of my cat?”
: “It’s your room, of course.”
: “What the hell are you consuming realities for?! Why do you have to do this!!”
: “I’m really surprised to see you here. I’m glad you made it this far.”
: “What did she say to get you here? Look, I don’t want any trouble. Just let me drink my tea.”
