: So uh, before I start this update, I’d like to point out that I was JUST NOW made aware that there are already two VLPs of this game done by people on SA. I don’t have an SA account, thus I had no idea that they existed. One of them is done with the game, the other is… maybe about an hour or two ahead of where we’ll be at the end of this update.
: I know that there’s not really that much left - with any luck, I’ll have this done before Ni no Kuni 1 gets re-released so I can do that. Still, I wish I had known this BEFORE I started a godawful SSLP of something that had already been VLPed twice by people better at this than I am. Apologies to both GrandmaParty and Diacorn.
: “Why was I so convinced finding this android was such a good thing? Why was I putting myself in danger like this?”
: “A lot of times, I felt like I was an airplane circling the landing strip waiting for clearance, waiting for a purpose.”
: I really want to see a video in the style of one of those “REAL LAWYER REACTS TO ACE ATTORNEY” videos that Youtube’s shitty algorithm always puts in my recommended videos, only it’s an English teacher responding to Alex’s monologues.
: “Maybe I was Alex, Android Hunter. No, that didn’t make sense. Alex, Soul Survivor hunter? Still not right.”
: This sounds like something taken straight out of this one kids book I read to a little girl when I was still doing volunteer reading. The book was called… I want to say Sophie the Awesome, but I might be wrong there. Congrats Allansons, you can write at a second-grade level.
: “What do you see? Anything interesting?”
: “She’s incredible.”
: “In…credible?”
: I think this screen transition is meant to symbolize the fact that Alex has now gone so far up his own ass that he has finally come out the other side.
: When I read this, I immediately thought of that one line from The Room with the random lady who tells Tommy Wiseau’s character that he’s her favorite customer.
: “I imagine you are wondering who I am, why I know your name, and where we are going.”
: I mean, yeah I’m kinda wondering where the fuck this plot is going myself. It hasn’t really gone anywhere in the past nine hours or so.
: “I think it is necessary that I first introduce myself. I am The Essentia 2000.”
: “I exist in all realities simultaneously and can account for all parallel versions of my soul. Now, for the questions that is burning away at you the most: how do I know your name?”
: “You and I have met time and time again.”
: “This is the part where you say ‘I’ve never met you before!’ and then silently add ‘Except in my dreams’. This can and will be explained.”
: “Many months ago, you had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a Miss Semi Pak. Semi had begun the process of leaving her physical form behind.”
: “When you met her, she had already made up her mind to leave her body and enter into the place between places, the Soul Space. You disrupted her transition. Shortly after, you witnessed two Soul Survivors taking her away.”
: “Those two entities were that two-thirds of her soul that had transitioned - two injured parts that hadn’t begun to heal.”
: I feel like this is a colossal ass-pull, even for this plot.
: “I was there. I am Semi and Semi is me. When one soul leaves a reality, another can freely enter. The only requirement necessary is having some relation to the departing soul, whether it’s being a parallel version of the departing or having an emotional connection to the departing.”
: “When Semi left your reality, I entered. Before that, this physical form was destroyed, captured, and held prisoner by the two entities that you just defeated in combat.”
: This is another thing I feel the game never really explains well enough. Was Vella just wrong when she said that soul-people don’t give a fuck? I mean, I sort of get why Sammy got kidnapped - that was basically her kidnapping herself - but why do they care about the robot?
: “Ever since then I had tried to return, but as my physical form still held trace amounts of my conciousness, I had to wait until Semi, THIS reality’s version of me, died or escaped into the Soul Space.”
: “I lived with you for weeks as I gained my strength. Finally, I was able to appear to you and guide you to the radio tower. I needed you to find my physical form so that I could speak with you.”
: “But what did-”
: “-- Vella’s record have to do with my physical form? I am glad to see you are keeping up with all of my robotic exposition.”
: Lady, this entire GAME has been nothing but robotic exposition.
: So uh, is it safe to say that you’re every woman? It’s all in you? Every one from A to Z?
: “I do not mean to imply that I go by all of these names and that I happen to share the name of two women in your life. I am explicitly saying that I am them and they are me.”
: Stop stealing from Persona, you fucks!
: “You’re going to have to explain how this is all possible.”
: “First, I will begin with the dreams you had of me. As a spirit, we are not restrained by physical barriers. However, without a body, it is impossible to astral project.”
: “When you slept, I was able to enter inside of your vessel and use it to launch my spiritual form out into the world to seek my physical body.”
: “I am sorry that I violated you in such a way, but it was the only way for me to find my body and make physical contact with you.”
: Sounds like something Chris Niosi would say.
: “Adjacent to your reality is another that contains someone with the same soul as yourself. In one reality, I am Serna Yemima, a Palestinian girl on the run from financial trouble.”
: “In another, I am Vella Wilde, a talented musician whose only setback is the pressure I put on myself.”
: “In all realities, I am The Essentia 2000, a pan-dimensional android made of plastic created so that I can better understand myself in all of my realities.”
: Welcome to uh… the vore dimension? That model is just fucking hideous.
: Please bear with me as I take you on a tour of my parallel lives."
: “Where exactly are we going?”
: “We are going into a very dangerous place - my Dungeon of the Mind. Here I will share with you my other selves. I am doing this in hopes that you will one day understand the nature of reality.”
: “Why do you feel that I need to understand the ‘nature of reality’?”
: And now, we’ve gone from the Vore Dimension to… machine cancer hell. If it were me, I’d be lighting this place on fire.
: “I feared separation from my own body, so I created the Essentia 2000… except it wasn’t THAT me, Naila El-Amin, who brought the plastic ME into existence.”
: “I came to be, through the intellect of another me, a Vladimira Tesar… in that reality, I was a Russian woman with similar goals, sans the severe sorrow and physical fatigue.”
: “As the Essentia 2000, I explored the Soul Space and became aware of all of the different versions of myself. The Essentia 2000, the Essentia 1999, and the yet to be created Essentia 28-90.”
: “So you mean to say that Vella and Sammy share the same soul? But they are not the same person.”
: Uh. Yeah, she kinda said that several minutes ago.
: Essentially, yes. We have the capacity to be anything that we’d like to be. More often than not, we get to be the thing we least want to be."
: “If you’d join me now, I’d like to take you on a journey - a journey so that you can better know Sammy, Vella, Naila, and the other versions of myself. In doing so, I think you mean learn something that you so desperately need to know.”
: So right after this part, I levelled up. What I didn’t know is that one of the existing VLPs somehow got into the game’s code and found out how all the stats work. Apparently, Luck is the best stat. Who’d have thought? It doesn’t matter much though, because as soon as we got in here and I levelled up, something fucking broke with the battle system.
: Our first stop is this pile of crap that has a key in it.
: This dungeon hurts to look at. This isn’t even as bad as it gets, but there’s an annoying static effect all over everything.
: The broken wall just has an item in it, so let’s get into a battle so I can show off how badly I managed to break the battle system. I have no idea whether it’s intentional or not, but I did play ahead a little bit past the end of this dungeon and I think it isn’t.
: This dungeon has a bunch of new enemy types, including the brains in a jar (they have a stun attack) and the frankensteins which… fucked if I know because we’re about to snap the game in two.
: See this? This is ONE LP TOSS. 371 damage is enough to kill this thing about three times over, and by the end of this dungeon, Alex was hitting for almost 900 damage with it. I think what happened is that there’s something incredibly broken about the way LP Toss scales with stats (most likely Strength) that causes it to ball out of control after Strength hits a certain number. The best part is that I didn’t have the Ultima LP equipped at this point. From what I’ve heard, the damage formulas in this game are massively fucked up.
: Pretty much every room in this dungeon is a stupid, badly-designed puzzle. Some are more badly designed than others. I’m not even going to talk about the stupid pun.
: This room has these weird hands sticking out of the ground. Interacting with them makes them rotate a quarter turn. If they’re pointing at a thing of bollards, the bollards will lower to let us past.
: The wall wants us to fetch her some limbs, which is going to be the central theme of this dungeon.
: You can pretty much guess how all the fights go here, I’m just showing off a new enemy type. Again, you barely notice anything because of how fucked LP Toss is. By the way, one thing I found out pretty quickly is that Essentia SUCKS. See, Essentia can’t heal the way everyone else does - she needs a special type of healing item that are rare and expensive. The only other way she can heal is through using the “Charge” command, which lets you charge for a number of turns to regain HP (Maximum of 5). However… if you finish the battle before then, she gets reduced to 1 HP.
: We can access I think two different doors in this place right now, but we want to do this one first. Thankfully, I happened to go in here first.
: This room fucking hurts to look at. There’s a lot of flashing bullshit and it just… sucks.
: There’s a puzzle in this room that I figured out on my own. The game will outright tell you how to solve it if you go down the hall, but I guessed it out. See the footprints on the floor? We have to follow those.
: The ghost spawns a combat with another new enemy type - the Millennium Bug. These cause poison if they hit you, but we have the utter brokenness that is LP Toss.
: A key gets left behind, which we then need to put into a locked door just off-screen from this position.
: I should mention that these stupid tunnel effects take like… 15 seconds each. They’re pretty clearly masking a load screen.
: You know… wasn’t this the one that the robot said was supposed to be Palestinian?
: She then has a mental breakdown for like seven textboxes that I’m not even going to bother posting. Fuck this game.
: This room took me a minute to figure out, because it sucks from a design perspective. This is where you get warped immediately after that last cutscene.
: What you have to do is hit the left switch, then use the Amp on the statue.
: We’ve found what I believe to be the final tool - the Flamethrower. The flamethrower does exactly two things: it melts giant candles and lights torches.
: The two chests hidden behind the candles in this room just have some PP restoration items in them.
: If we go to the end of that last room we were in, there’s six torches around an altar. You can probably guess what comes next.
: We have all the tools we need to clear the dungeon, and we can melt these candles to go upstairs … but we don’t have a key for the door at the top. Instead…
: I sure hope this is prophetic, because goddamn that’d be fun to watch.
: We can also take the dead body’s right arm. This is the only body part we don’t have to do a puzzle to get. What I find hilarious is that Alex has no reaction whatsoever to seeing himself dead on the ground.
: Our next destination is behind those rocks over there.
: This room is EXTREMELY badly designed. It has a gimmick that the game explains - but only AFTER you’ve figured out what the gimmick is. So naturally, your first instinct would be to light the torches.
: Nope! If you do that, you can’t do anything. No, the solution here is about as fucking dumb as it gets.
: So, let me explain what the gimmick is. When the lights are off, the border around the edges of the room disappears, and it allows you to wrap around to the other side. I had to find the guide the developers put up to figure out what the fuck the deal with it was - at one point I figured you had to drop down from somewhere else to flip a switch or something.
: The problem is that most of the chests and switches in this room can’t be accessed unless the lights are on. These chests have around a thousand dollars and some healing items, with the one on the left containing a 9-volt, which heals Essentia to full.
: In the middle is this fucker, who explains the gimmick… after you’ve already figured about half of it out. Also, that would be typo number nine.
: There are a couple of okay chests in this room. This one has a Platinum Bracelet, which gives one more HP than the Gold Bracelet does. I equipped it to Alex because his HP is the lowest out of any of the party members. Not that it matters.
: There’s also a fur lined coat up here, which is still only marginally better than the Camo Jacket we picked up for Alex at the start of the game. I equipped it even though it lowers his strength by one - at this point, we don’t give a fuck.
: The goal is to press a couple of switches to lower some bollards and then wind up here, where you can grab the key we need for the main room.
: Leaving this room puts us up here, where we can create a shortcut. I don’t know why you’d want to do this unless you missed chests or something.
: This is the third puzzle room of this dungeon. It looks complex, but is actually pretty simple - the guide from the dev lists like 50 steps and I skipped a bunch of them. The goal here is to go to the right first.
: See that brown switch? The brown switches turn the wind from the giant masks on and off, which opens up different routes for you to take the moving platforms through. We need to get this one first to open the door up top.
: The problem is that while the door is open, we can’t actually get there unless we turn on a mask right in front of it. That’s what the left side is for. The right side chest has an Ambrosia in it. I’d describe all of the steps I needed to take to do this, but I did the left side first. If you do that, you have to do the left side twice because hitting this switch stops you from accessing the right side. As long as you hit all the brown switches you encounter and do the right side first, this is easy.
: “We are not born the same year. We do not, obviously, die at the same time. As Naila El-Amin, I was a mother of three, a very intelligent scientist living in Sweden.”
: “My children, whose names I will not reveal to you for various reasons, lived with their father.”
: “He took his anger out on the men who worked for him. And they feared him.”
: “I was very lonely. I met a man, whom I loved very much. I gave myself to him in every way possible. I forgot about my children, my husband, my life back home.”
: I’ve seen some hentai in my day, and this sounds like a line from an h-manga.
: “When I was with him, I forgot my name. I forgot my purpose. This relationship lasted six weeks and then he vanished. Gone.”
: So is it just me, or is there a pattern of Essentia or whoever having very poor taste in men?
: “I returned home, prepared to tell my husband everything, but he wasn’t there. My children were gone too.”
: “I felt myself becoming increasingly ill, and I deteriorated over the next days. Finally, I saw a doctor and was informed I had a terminal illness. Then I began to develop my android self, The Essentia 2000.”
: You ever just have such bad taste in men that you develop cancer?
: Immediately after the cutscene, we get warped to this room with the severed left arm in it. That’s three body parts down, one to go.
: To progress, we now have to turn that blue hand in the ground so it points to this hand, and then use this hand to open that barred door just north of Alex’s position.
: This room has toxic goo in it, but we can avoid it by walking around the edges just so.
: One switch and one poorly-hidden button later, and we can cross the bridge to…
: A giant comb. We need to carry this back to a door that was north of where we entered this room.
: This particular spot shows off one of the more poorly-designed aspects of this dungeon. See those pillars in the middle, with what look like vines on them?
: We can Amp those to get to the door behind them.
: This is the final big bullshit puzzle of this dungeon. It’s a maze where certain platforms have skateboard ramps between them, and there’s also light bridges.
: You can’t see it very well, but there’s two doors we need to bring to the faces at the very top. One is in the top-left corner, the other in the bottom-right.
: The first thing I did was go around collecting all the chests, of which there are quite a few. The most notable is this mimic, which is one tile up and one tile right of your starting position.
: One LP Toss erased it, giving us a free level up.
: The mimic drops some money and a Football Helmet, which gives Alex some pretty decent stats. We want to equip this because there’s a chance we’ll miss an enemy with LP Toss in a multi-enemy fight, and Alex is pretty low on HP.
: There’s a switch just below where the red door is that shifts the bridges so that we can get the red door in place.
: The platform next to the mimic also contains a new weapon for Alex.
: Anyway, after some more bridge shifting we eventually get the green door into place. You have to do two switches I think, one to get the green door to the middle of the right side and a second to get it up to the door.
: “The memories here are very painful. So please bear with me as I can only tell parts of the story.”
: “I lived as a young girl with my parents in Pontresina, Switzerland. I had four brothers. My brothers and I rarely spoke, as I was much younger than them.”
: This entire dungeon feels like one of the dumb stories Drebin tells you in MGS4 after you kill a member of the Beauty & Beast Corps.
: “My father was always away on business and my mother was a teacher at my local school. I spent most of my time alone, wandering the Pontresina Valley. I dreamed about writing and other worlds.”
: “In that valley, I found another world - the world of my other selves. Getting lost in solitude is the quickest way to other-worldliness.”
: “Someone who is surrounded by others can achieve this, but only if they are selfless. If you so love another person that you could follow them from the world itself, you can truly see the wonders of all the universes.”
: I’ll just cut the rest of that out. We have another big monologue coming up.
: This room has a series of puzzles that have no real reason to exist.
: There are two of these sets of switches - one on the right of the guillotine and one on the left.
: This room has two torches in it. Lighting one but not the other will open one set of bollards, while lighting both will allow access to the chest. The chest has a new weapon for Vella that we’re probably never going to see because of how broken LP Toss is.
: The executioner wants us to find people to kill. The one we’re looking for in this room is directly at the bottom.
: Not pictured: carrying the guy back to the guillotine, then carrying his severed head to the statue on the top.
: The other side is equally stupid. There’s a poison pool that we can just barely skirt around.
: I really, really do not understand what the fuck the point of this is, or why we need to do it twice.
: We need a third victim, and there are no more volunteers, so let’s just watch Alex die.
: Unfortunately, he doesn’t die and we instead unlock the final door out of this shithole.
: The masks will blow Alex off the ledge if he walks by, but we have to do that to progress.
: It might not be obvious what to do here, but what you have to do is follow the hands to the outline.
: Just gotta make a trip to the freaky glue room and then open the door with the comb. The game will warn you to save first, and I actually did, in addition to levelling Alex up a bunch. What I learned is that while all your party members will get a full heal on level up, Alex does not.
: “These machines - they’re so familiar. And yet, something feels wrong.”
: “Is it safe to approach him?”
: “I cannot say. I would never harm you, Alex. But it is logical to assume that one of my many parallel lives may have some reason.”
: This is Yuzu Imajo. Yuzu is a Japanese soldier who comes completely out of left field. It’s never explained what his deal is (as far as I know) or why he hates Alex so much other than for the perfectly obvious reasons.
: “Somehow you look different. So many lives wasted, taken, and experimented on in hopes of obtaining this moment. And now that I’m looking at you, I don’t know if I should love you or hate you.”
: “To kill you, in the way that you killed me time and time again, has been my only dream, my only waking thought for the past fifty lifetimes.”
: Something tells me that if Alex started a fight with this guy in any universe that doesn’t involve LP Toss being an instakill, he’d kick Alex’s ass.
: “What’s he talking about?”
: “What did I do? What’s wrong with you, man?”
: “Everything was taken because of YOU! You bastard! I lost everything - my research, my wife, my kids. And all for what?! For you!? What the hell were you worth!”
: “Alex, I can’t recall this life. For some reason, it’s blocked off to me. There is a void in my mind. There are white spots where I should see this life on the astral plane.”
: I don’t understand it any better than you do. Honestly, my brain had long since shut off by this point. What it kind of reminds me of is the intro to Senator Armstrong in Metal Gear Rising.
: “Alex, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to say such terrible things. Come here. Let me hug you. Let me say I’m sorry in your ear.”
: If there was an option to hug him, I would ABSOLUTELY force Alex to do it.
: “What!? Get away from me!”
: Welcome to a boss fight that is going to be as boring as the rest of this game.
: Yuzu starts the fight by healing himself for around 30 HP before we even get to go.
: Alex goes right after him and LP Tosses, killing him in a single hit.
: But what’s this? A second form using a meme that wasn’t concocted until sometime in the 2010s?
: Yuzu shows back up in a battle mech, because of course he does.
: Levelling up strength by somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 points caused LP Toss to go from 350 damage to 843, killing Yuzu in a single hit once again.
There’s a bunch more exposition I don’t feel like typing out, so that’ll do it for this update. Next update, we’ll learn about Alex’s destiny and… well, we’ll learn that actions have consequences.