Last time, I climbed a tower and took lots of flavor text pictures.

Metsueno just tells him to shut up and shoots an energy blast from his gun. Pazatto blocks it effortlessly (despite it being powerful enough to break managlass), then the guild shows up. Qualstio is all ?!?! and Metsueno just tells him not to interfere. Qualstio recognizes Pazatto, who segues into a supervillain rant. For some ill-explained reason, he had to get the guilds out of the way, which is why we’ve seen so little of them. The last quest was his method of dealing with Ilganyag.

The two then explain what’s going on: there’s an ancient blood feud between the Pazatto and Metzino lines, so they need to duke it out.

Pazatto: “Come, Keldrin! Our fathers fought to the death, as did their fathers, and theirs as well!”

Why does no one know about this?! Metsueno’s line is supposedly famous, no one ever noticed the genius inventors tended to die in stupid duels? And Pazatto is a councillord! Does Fortifel not do any background checks on its rulers?! (And of course it was only the fathers. Of course. Why would women ever be able to do anything?)

This whole plot twist is so, so stupid. It comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit with the themes of the story (or Fortifel in general) at all. The plotline has been about government corruption, the pitfalls of technocracy, the mechanics of magic… and the conclusion is just, blood feud between two idiots? This whole thing reeks of diabolus ex machina, like the developer couldn’t think of a proper climax and had to slap some conflict together at the last minute. I suppose you could charitably say that the duel ties into the magic vs. technology theme, but the blood feud thing overshadows it too much. It doesn’t even need to be there; Metsueno could just be fed up with the Council’s crap and decide to actively fight back. Maybe they finally issued a death/seizure warrant against him to force his hand so it’s all or nothing. There, done, perfectly fine motivation that actually builds off of previous events, and as a bonus it’d tie into overconfidence being Metsueno’s fatal flaw.

Oh, and Metsueno’s line has been winning the feud, because he wasn’t enough of a sue already.

Dehl: “Then this duel is some matter of honor?”
Metzino: “Honor? All honor is lost once bloodshed becomes a reality. Everyone knows that.”

THEN WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS.

That’s another thing. Why does Metsueno care about the feud at all? All signs point to him not caring, actually: he doesn’t have any children and has focused his efforts on other areas, plus he’s made additional enemies on the side, which seems suicidal when he’s already at war with one powerful adversary. It’d make more sense for him to ignore the feud and focus on his inventions, since that seems to be what he actually cares about.

Yet he fights Pazatto anyway. He chases Pazatto, because Pazatto would have to be constantly retreating to lure him up here. He could have run away at any point, maybe wall up in his mansion, but he didn’t. He chose aggression even though, by his own admission here, he thinks the feud is pointless.

But it gets worse. Qualstio offers to help out, at which point…

Pazatto: “I have toyed with you for far too long, Keldrin Metzino! It ends now!”

So… he could have killed Metsueno at any point, but he dragged it out, because [not found].

Anyway, he starts levitating and says he’s about to unleash “the culmination of the Pazatto line’s work! The true magic!” even though his dad does the exact same thing in interlude 3 so this isn’t anything new.

Metsueno just loads his gun and pops a quip about magic being the old power and his inventions are the future!!!

Then Pazatto paralyzes him with telekinesis and throws him off the tower to his death.

And thus we learn the very important lesson that magic beats technology, because magic is awesome.

Qualstio flips out, which I think is his first legitimate expression of empathy in this entire game. Pazatto says he doesn’t care if he dies; Metsueno had no kids, so the Pazatto line wins. Uh, does he have any children? I don’t think he does. His death will end his line as well, making the victory rather hollow.

Qualstio: “Then after I’m through with you, I’ll hunt down the rest of your sick lineage too! How’s that?”
Pazatto: “Oh ho ho! If you leave this tower alive, then you can do whatever you please! Kyahah!”

Oh wait nevermind he’s willing to throw his kids under the bus because he’s a nonsensical caricature.

Battle time!

Uh huh.

Pazatto is one of the few bosses with no flunkies; it’s just him. This makes him pathetically easy.

His special skill is Telekinetics, which characters resist much better than Metsueno. (It would be interesting if it killed people it pushed all the way back, like the boulders in Nal, but I don’t think it does.) See, again, Metsueno knew his opponent would use magic. If he really cared about the duel, he should have invested in some magic resistance training.

Telekinetics is powerful, but Pazatto can only target one person at a time, and he’s vastly outnumbered. Santes and/or Dehl can easily negate his damage output while the rest of the party pounds away. Pazatto has 150 body points, but they drain fast. His flight doesn’t even do anything, which makes me wonder why it was included at all. It’d have been cool if it made him immune to melee attacks or something, but Dehl can reach him with a sword swipe just fine.

Look, blood! Crap’s gotten real! (The heavy outline art style makes it look ridiculous, though – like some kind of balloon.)

…Tehgonan isn’t looking away. That’s disturbing. Falitza is; if her lucidity was planned from the start, that’s a nice touch. Good to know she has a heart after all.

Qualstio starts screaming hysterically and blasts the corpse with fireballs until Dehl tears him away, which I think is one of the few truly humanizing moments for him. He tries to storm off, but the Council shows up.

I wonder if neglecting the “lord” title is some kind of subtle insult. Regardless, Fetranto is all LOLNOPE, Qualstio’s a murderer so they won’t let him go.

Qualstio starts rambling about how Fetranto’s the one who killed them, and that either death would benefit the Council. I dunno, Metsueno seemed a bigger problem than Pazatto, who may have become more stable once his obsession was dealt with.

Fetranto: “Don’t be ridiculous, Sicious! Do we seem capable of murder to you? We are not Nalians. We have to set an example for everyone down there in Fortifel. A positive one.”

Wow, he’s really enjoying this.

Qualstio does a summation rant about what happened: it was all a conspiracy to kill Pazatto and Metsueno, and they needed the guilds out of the way (for some reason).

Qualstio: “But, there’s a guild in the way! We’re a threat.”

I really do not get why they care about the guilds. Not everything is about you, protagonists! If anything, Ilganyag could be a useful pawn because they’re starry-eyed idealists who want to help the city and play nice with the authorities, plus the Council has leverage against them in the form of Qualstio. Skint couldn’t care less about any of this and the Blue Guard only cares about one thing (which also makes them manipulable). The whole intrigue with getting the guilds out of the way because they’re ~so special~ is annoying and pointless.

I mean, really, what would have been lost if this subplot was dropped? We’d get more scenes with Skint and the Blue Guard (maybe more information about the artifact and why Skint’s here in the first place), so it would actually be a benefit. The plot wouldn’t even have to be changed at all! Pazatto would still want to momentarily distract Ilganyag to remove interference with the duel, so that sequence would play out the same way. It just reeks of the developer needing a way to shoehorn the main characters into the plot, at which point he should have scrapped the whole thing because that means it is a bad plot.

“Pazatto’s had it out for [Metzino] for years. And with the situation he’s put you in… You wouldn’t mind seein’ him erased either.”

Yeah I’m still not seeing it. What “situation”? There have been no complaints or murmurs of discontent among the populace, and he seems to have kept it under wraps pretty well. And why would they even care if there were PR issues? The councillords are superpowered wizards running an authoritarian state, they can probably do whatever they feel like.

“Pazatto knew all this.”

What, the conspiracy to kill him too?

Dehl points out the plot hole of why the Council helped them if the conspiracy theory’s true. Qualstio says PR: “They wanna make it look like they have no part in this.” I’m pretty sure they could have refused to help the criminal-harboring foreign trespassers without looking suspicious. Plus if Qualstio’s right, they now have to kill the entire guild to prevent the secret from getting out. (But they don’t even though he’s right because ???)

Fetranto makes the most transparent cover-up ever: “If I was indeed conspiring with Pazatto, I’d not expected him to thrash me so readily.” Why yes, I’m sure the bloodthirsty, power-hungry psychopath wouldn’t ever harm his co-conspirators. That would be impolite.

For some reason Fetranto says he’s offering to let Qualstio leave unharmed (even though he just said he wouldn’t a minute ago), but if he doesn’t shut up he’ll kill him. Why he doesn’t just kill Qualstio outright now that he doesn’t have Metsueno’s protection is anyone’s guess.

Qualstio storms off, followed by Tehgonan, while Ques and Dehl do damage control. Fetranto says it’s totes okay they murdered someone, Pazatto was nuts so it was actually a public service, thus proving Qualstio’s conspiracy theory right. I prefer to think that Fetranto is just smugly satisfied and rubbing it in their faces instead of being an utter idiot.

Then there’s some awkward exposition about the noxious councillord’s seat being empty. The previous guy went nuts and is now in Sanctifel, which begs the question of why they couldn’t do the same to Pazatto. Dehl suspects Moke is applying for the position, but Moke isn’t a Fortian citizen so I don’t think that’s even possible?

They leave and there’s an ominous after-scene with Fetranto saying they’re going to destroy all of Metsueno’s work.

…

So, while the game plays this up as the bad guys getting everything they wanted, I think there’s a silver lining here. As I mentioned earlier, the Council’s power is contingent on them being seen as the best of the best. The people may never find out about the elaborate scheme to kill two people they disliked, but now everyone definitely knows that a single rebel can decimate them without even trying. If Metsueno was gunning for the entire Council instead of just Pazatto, they would all be dead right now. You can’t rule a meritocracy if you have no merit, and the Council has just forfeited theirs.

Tehgonan wants to know just what Qualstio did to make the Council hate him so much, so we finally get to learn his backstory even though the literal end of the chapter is a horrible place for it.

Also he is the whiniest of emo teens about it.

Qualstio: “Metzino ain’t the first person they’ve been able to bump off, you know. […] [M]y folks, for one.”
Tehgonan: “No way! They killed your parents?!”
Qualstio: “Well, not exactly. Just had ’em sent to Sanctifel […] Probably still out there with the Wracked even today. […] [The Council didn’t do it] exactly for no reason […]“

“My parents went crazy and the government followed the standard procedure for dealing with crazy people! THAT’S TOTALLY JUST LIKE POLITICAL MURDER YOU GUYS!!!!”

“And since I was a dumb teenager at the time, I took it out on the Council.”

You’re still a dumb teenager.

And that’s… it. That’s all the description he gives. So, after all that buildup, no details on what he actually did or how he survived and escaped.

This is irritating because the details are important. Without knowing the severity of his crime, we can’t tell if the Council is justified in hating him or not. For all we know, he could have burned Faithall and Sanctifel to charred husks and gone on a murder spree, in which case I have to admit it’s reasonable for Fetranto to be angry about his return. There needs to be disproportionate retribution. He lashed out, caused minor damage, and the Council banished him instead of understanding that he was a scared, angry kid who got his parents taken from him and didn’t know why. That would have worked in establishing Qualstio as a victim and the Council as authoritarian dicks. (Or just have them actually be responsible for his parents’ disappearance, that would accomplish the same thing and I have no idea why the game didn’t do that.)

Now, guess what Tehgonan takes away from all that. Guess.

Tehgonan: “So you never came back after that, right? Your training, your rank… that means… You got that eyepiece when you were, like, MY age? Damn, I’ve been slackin’ off!”

I’d like to say this is a sign of Tehgonan’s personal growth and he’s distracting Qualstio with something lighthearted to get his mind off the tragedy, but let’s not kid ourselves.

Qualstio says it felt good to let it all out which raises the question of why he never told Dehl, and fade to black.

It seems Metzino was a victim of fate and overconfidence. We should get back to his home as soon as we can.

…”Fate”? So what, Pazatto’s ramblings about how their duel was destiny had narrative support? I’m… just going to assume this is tongue-in-cheek or a play on the Watcher themes and not pursue it further.

So, hm. I think I’ve been too harsh on the game regarding Metsueno. It really does seem like he was purposefully built up as a sue just so he’d have further to fall, given that “overconfidence” bit. His acting as a deus ex machina in the first quest is still grating, though.

Finally.

Qualstio didn’t let his anger get the better of him, much to his friends’ relief. He has learned to better quell his inner fire. As a result, his Element has become Heat*, meaning he is no longer weak against Cold-Elemental attacks!

Just in case you thought the point was supposed to be that Qualstio’s still acting like an emo teen and never got over his issues. Nope, he’s completed his character arc! This was his moment of maturity and personal growth! THE GAME HAS SPOKEN.

This is just so blatantly false. Murdering Pazatto and incinerating his corpse in a hysterical rage wasn’t letting his anger get the better of him? Or I guess it’s because he didn’t murder the entire rest of the Council too? Yeah, congrats Qualstio, you only murdered one person, you deserve a medal! Qualstio has not changed, grown, or learned anything in the slightest. If anything, the Council’s dickishness just validated the beliefs he had as a kid.

I think part of the problem is that his character arc is too compact. The game wanted to have all his backstory and development in this one chapter, but Metsueno ended up stealing the show, meaning it basically all gets forced into this one scene. This is what makes me think there was a heavy rewrite for this chapter. It was clearly supposed to be the Qualstio Show, so why did he get so sidelined?

Concentrating an entire character arc into one section of the story is a poor decision to begin with. It makes the arc’s presence fragile, as it does here, but it also just doesn’t leave enough space for it to work. A good character arc develops slowly over the course of the entire story (exhibit A: Dehl), with the character learning and growing from a number of different situations, not just a single scenario. Otherwise you have a character who’s static for most of the story with a short tumultuous growth period in the middle, which is the best we could have hoped for even if this character arc did pan out.

The next scene is at Metsueno’s house, where guards are already raiding everything despite the fact we literally just saw Fetranto give the order. He must have done it in advance, seeing how he knew Metsueno would never return.

The guild shows up and tells Alito the bad news.

Qualstio: “He’s gone, man. Metzino’s gone.”
Alito: “Gone? Gone where? When will he return?”
Dehl: “He shan’t. Something terrible happened, and…”
[pause]
Alito: “I…see.”

:(

To me, this is the saddest part of this whole sequence – and it really says something about Qualstio that all his rage and angst isn’t. When your best friend’s servant is more broken up about his death than you are, there is something wrong with you.

Lani: “Well look at it like this, Shra-friend! Now yer free to do whatever ya want! Right…?”

While everyone else is tongue-tied, Lani is the one who does her best to cheer people up in the face of tragedy. She is wonderful and the most well-adjusted member of this dysfunctional group.

Alito is Stockholmed good and can’t process the idea of doing anything other than serving Metsueno. Mmh, nice to see that plot point building. At this point it can no longer be dismissed as Dehl’s personal brand of weirdness.

Qualstio: “He knew the risks, but he stayed in Fortifel anyway. He knew what he was doing.”

Wait, leaving Fortifel was an option? Well he brought this upon himself then. If he really just cared about his inventions, he would take them outside of the Council’s clutches. Otherwise he’s just inviting this destruction when they inevitably kill him.

(…More evidence for my theory he really wanted to take power.)

“He knew this was coming too.”

Yeah no. He has no backups or any way of preserving his stuff. He was not expecting this.

“Maybe he thinks they’ll learn something from his work.”

Qualstio is not as good as Lani at this. Alito immediately sees through the obvious lie and knows they’ll just destroy it all.

Qualstio: “Well, maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, I guess we can’t stay here”

And Jerkface Qualstio is back! Even the death of his best friend is no match for Qualstio’s pure, undiluted dickishness! Character development? What character development?

Ques: “Scribe Alito, you are bound to no one. You may fly from here as freely as you wish.”
Alito: “But, I’ve nowhere else to alight…”

Urgh that is awful. Darnit, Alito, this is not the time for stilted wordplay!

Dehl says he should come with them, but Ques brings up his contract expiration. They need to return to Wadassia to renew it, and… I don’t see why that’d be an obstacle? Ques phrases it like they can’t bring Alito along, but they do anyway so ???

Lani: “[If] you get tired from walkin’, I’ll carry you myself! How’s that sound?”

Lani ♥

Alito says a foot journey isn’t necessary, though – Metsueno’s family owns a bunch of ships they can use. His sueishness persists even in death.

Qualstio: “Metzino, you crafty little demon!”

A crafty little demon who JUST DIED. Do you remember when Qualstio was so broken up about that he went on a distraught rampage? Neither does he! I think the intention is that he’s trying to stay upbeat and honor Metsueno’s memory, but, as I’ve said before, given his past behavior it just comes off as dickish.

This whole chapter, just, ugh. The game tried to shoot for a more serious, in-depth plot and it just couldn’t do it. I said at the start that this was one of my favorite parts, but I suppose I just never saw the plot holes you could drive a truck through. It’s particularly infuriating because there’s such amazing potential everywhere. For once, I actually feel like this section may have been stronger if it used the previous chapters’ storytelling styles – perhaps then we could have gotten a better exploration of the magic system and Fortifel society. Instead, we get rough, half-baked explanations filled with contradictions because we have to focus on the amazing adventures of Metsueno. And as I mentioned, Qualstio gets no character development despite teasing us with the possibility the whole chapter.

The art direction was nice, and I’m glad that the developer is experimenting with new narrative styles, but ultimately I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. It’s also pretty disenheartening that the guild utterly failed twice in a row – they won’t have a major victory until chapter 5, come to think of it. Perhaps there’s a message there, somewhere; never lose hope?

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