New area, new flavor text.
He really loved sailing that much, huh? Sad. I hope he gets to go to a naval academy or something eventually.
Yet again, here’s something I should be able to interact with but can’t. What’s up with all these? Is there supposed to be text here and a bug prevents it? Did the developer mean to write for these and forgot? Objects in video games that should be examinable but aren’t just feel really weird to me. (Pathologic drove me up the wall with those NPCs that glowed with interaction light but didn’t respond when I hammered the buttons.)
…
One of these things is not like the other.
Remember when Fero had a personality beyond “crazy hunter”? I miss those days.
Yes, good job, Dehl. That pillar is clearly a dangerous threat. Don’t take your eyes off it.
Probably some sort of simple monument left behind by native Shra that lived here hundreds of years ago.
Y’know, I do wonder what’s up with these. They seem remarkably well-hewn, yet are featureless.
I can’t help but shake the feeling that Sirush would feel better if the guild would just talk to him once in a while. But apparently people leave him off to do whatever and don’t interact with him much at all, leaving him with only his delusions for company. Such awe-inspiring friendship.
So he hates going to school, yet he wants to go to an ultra-strict Fortian academy, because…?
Such responsible caretakers these people are. And once again she’s described like an infant or animal.
This isn’t perfectly consistent with her illness being catatonia, so this could be foreshadowing. Maybe. It could also just be that the writer’s inconsistent and doesn’t pay much attention to these texts.
Now, all he has to do is dive inside the tent and button the door shut. THEN he may curl up and weep to himself.
I have to admit that I probably find this to be the funniest quest mode text in the game. Ques puffs himself up as this snobbish stoic but he’s really just a normal guy.
For once Santes is not suffering, hooray.
His proficiency in magic is unrivaled by most of them. He’s still wary of the Na’Hrin, but he has bodyguards to deal with them.
There’s nothing I need to say here, is there?
I train characters and
Are you freaking serious.
So apparently you can’t clear energized squares with Wavecaller, ever, making it totally useless for the one battle where it would actually be handy. Lovely. I soft reset to undo this, but the points I sunk into rank II are gone forever. Agh.
It’s time for more sidequests. This one is pretty meh. Some hunters were lost on a hunting trip and I have to go rescue them. Highlights:
In the opening cutscene Zargos is a jerkface like usual, but Santes displays functional intelligence and compassion. THE END IS NIGH.
For the first time, a pickup has a negative effect. Touching this thing makes it explode, poisoning everybody, and triggers a bloodcrazed ambush.
It’d be clever if it did affect them, but was just negated because they start with regrowth. As-is it doesn’t make much sense why they’re immune when the shra on my side aren’t. Does going bloodcrazed give you poison immunity somehow?
There’s a maze of snapvines you have to navigate around, which I thought was a pretty cool section. If you’re crazy and vicious you could clear them all out, I suppose, but I prefer the obstacle course. You do have to fight at least one because there’s a wall of them at the end, but eh, it works.
The token woman is a damsel in distress, but so is a guy – and the guy is the more significant, quest-ending one who’s in more immediate danger. The hunters aren’t gender-balanced so it’s not perfect, but this is still better than a lot of things we’ve seen. I approve.
Why in the world is this guy rambling about Tezkhra? They aren’t si’shra. Is this some kind of anti-si’shra ritual, an offering to the si’shra, or what?
Every enemy in this battle is present in the cutscene, which is a nice touch.
Alito: “Rank 20! Come, Masters, let us celebrate! The RGRF shall reward us for our dedication.”
Whaaaat? How does the RGRF have the resources to throw parties for random guilds? Why would they in the first place? This feels like something out of a child’s hero fantasy, which is supposed to be what this game is deconstructing. Well, I get some essence and apparently some more party member quests have opened up. I won’t be doing them just yet.
Getting to 20 opens up this quest, though! This whole chapter I was stressing about reaching rank 20 before getting the next recruit. Boy, was that silly! (Another oversight: rank 20 is not mentioned as a requirement in the character guide cheat sheet, which drove me nuts.)
These guys say they found a huge beast and they want me to help them capture it.
“But, Teno, I fled when you did.”
“You did? You DID?! But, I could have sworn I fled when you did! Didn’t I, now, didn’t I?”
“No, Teno, I am sure that, in fact, I fled when you fled.”
They go on and on like this. Is this a reference to something? Because it’s insufferable.
Once again, Santes is eaten by a tree because the developer didn’t check tile passability very thoroughly.
I’m now convinced these do spawn at specific locations. This one-tile-wide path is just too perfect.
Your knowledge of herbology is lacking, so you don’t exactly know what that means. It might be worth a try, though…
Does this change if you have Moke with you? This one is interesting in that it has both benefits and penalties: I get a ton of clarity essence and mana points (there have been a lot of those; I’m practically swimming in them while I have to carefully ration my skill points), but everyone’s mind health drops to 1. This isn’t much of penalty since I can just wait a few minutes for everyone to recover.
It occurs to me that it’s not really possible to punish players given the mechanics. Inflicting damage is meaningless to the sufficiently patient. The other punishment we’ve seen is an ambush, and is that really a punishment? If I didn’t want to play challenging battles I wouldn’t be playing an RPG in the first place. And I get more points from it anyway. An ambush that gave no essence might work, but other than that there’s really nothing. It’s only with more complicated systems like in IMTS that you can really punish players and make tradeoffs (and even IMTS didn’t do it that much).
Eventually I encounter the creature.
Portrait! The prowlers trank him and haul him back. Much ado is made of his seven horns; no shra has ever grown more than six. Horns are a signifier of age, so he’s unfathomably ancient.
Alito: “Ilganyag has achieved Rank 21. I am awestruck! So few guilds have surpassed the twentieth.” Again, this isn’t very impressive to me without some metric to compare it to. The impressiveness also wears out fast when he says this every single time. Might have been better to start the praise-singing a bit later.
Talking to the captive shra starts me on another quest. His name is Kulkumatz and he doesn’t want to be here. He says some religious stuff about how he needs to die in the right place for his spirit to find rest, though the place he chooses directly contradicts what we will later learn about shra last rites. Since it’s the guild’s fault he’s in this mess in the first place, they offer to escort him back.
This quest is very simple, but well-done. The gameplay is just a string of battles, but they’re all interspersed with conversations with Kulkumatz. Alito’s the only other speaking character since the party isn’t set, which allows the scenes to be very focused.
“You would not lasst one night alone in thiss world, young one. Mmmph.”
[…]
“Prove me wrong, young one. Lead uss into the brush. Show your natural insstinct.”
Some parts are bit corny and generic wise-old-master follow-your-instincts stuff, but I still like it. It feels very much like something out of the character-centric outline I proposed in the intermission, allowing you to imagine this is part of a better, more cohesive story. I also believe this is evidence that the story does indeed suffer from Too Many Characters; when speaking roles are reduced to two people, suddenly the writing skyrockets in quality. Music’s nice too; my only complaint is that it shouldn’t have been interrupted by battles.
Kulkumatz provides a lot of information about the wildlife of the area too, which I eat up like candy of course.
“[Bloodcrazed] are the ones who could not ssuffer to live with their own. Pestss, mmmph.”
Here’s some explanation on what bloodcraze might involve, but I still don’t fully understand. Bloodcrazed can clearly pack together and we’ve twice seen them allied with other shra. That doesn’t match up with them being rogues and loners. This would make more sense if bloodcrazed were powerful miniboss enemies that only appeared alone like obsidomina – then you could say that they’re selfish shra who want all the food and resources for themselves, and eventually become bloated and powerful but lose the capacity to think of anything else. That seems to be the implication here (and would be way cooler than them just being a generic enemy), but the evidence contradicts it.
This part doesn’t work well at all, unfortunately. Kulkumatz tells Alito to wait and if he does I avoid an encounter with these bloodcrazed… thus depriving me of their essence. I’m punished for doing the smart thing. This is a common problem in RPGs, where combat is rewarded by default, and the developer should have been more conscious of that. Maybe hand out free essence for avoiding them.
Here, Alito says he doesn’t know much Shra, but later he says it took him a long time to learn Human. So… what was he speaking before then? He may have gotten rusty if he hasn’t used Shra in a while, but he should still have a decent grasp on it. I mean, Moke can read shra flawlessly if you take him to Falitza’s trial, and he’s been exclusively using Human for far longer than Alito. First languages are hard to completely forget. This feels really forced; it’s clearly only doing this to accentuate the differences between the two. (Also it makes Kulkumatz look pretty dickish since he could just speak to them himself.)
Also I finally get the tu’nuok thought snippet here, which just points out how awful everyone is. We’re constantly told how horrible Yacatec’s being by making real-life imperialism parallels, but I can’t do anything about it and the characters never really care. It just reeks of false depth. This is an annoying thing with videogames in general – they’re supposedly interactive, but almost always have a completely linear story I can’t control. Even though I don’t have a choice in the matter, I feel complicit in the characters’ atrocities, especially with condemnations like this. Just what are you trying to do, game?
For the na’hrin, we get some more explanation on magic finally! This particular line is really awkward, though, because he’s encountered na’hrin before and seriously now is not the time. (Indeed, Kulkumatz immediately lampshades it with “Do you intend to argue?”) Kulkumatz says that the na’hrin use nature magic – they control the swamp itself, as well as its surroundings.
The further explanation of “Eventually, with enough dedication, ssuch power can be wielded anywhere.” doesn’t make sense to me, though. How is this possible? Kulkumatz just explained they don’t create something from nothing, they just manipulate what is already there. If they’re able to cast spells anywhere, without drawing on any base materials, that means they’re performing spontaneous creation and I’d classify that as Fortian-style magic. That should be a massive leap and I’m really curious as to what exactly it entails. (K’s own spells are also quite different, so we never get an explanation for those.) To really keep things consistent with shra magic being fundamentally different, this last rider simply shouldn’t be there (or at least it should be given more explanation).
Alito: “The Fortian method is one of structure, with rigorous focus on—”
Kulkumatz: “Then I do not care.”
AUGH. This would work fine if we already knew everything about Fortian magic, but because this is the only time we’ve ever gone into this amount of depth it’s immensely frustrating. The game is dangling information in front of us only to snatch it away at the last moment. I’m trying to make sense of your world, game, throw me a bone here!
In the next section Kulkumatz recounts a memory of an event that occurred 700 years ago. Alito is all BUT THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE because shra don’t live beyond 500. A cringe-worth exchange follows:
Kulkumatz: “You are sstrange, young one. You only trusst what you learn, not what you ssee. Why musst you quesstion what is sstanding right before you? Hmmmm?”
Alito: “I-in Fortifel, we are taught to be skeptical, and to not believe the unbelievable…”
Kulkumatz: “A sstrange world, you come from, where you trusst knowledge over experiencce.”
No, that’s not how scientific thinking works at all. This sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie, where the scientist is set up as an absurd strawman just so they can tear the nerds down. Disbelieving obvious evidence is not skepticism, it’s the reverse: blind faith. The scientific principle of skepticism is to disbelieve your own belief system, that being the scientific theories you rely on. Evidence contradicting what was previously held as fact happens all the time, and it’s the most common way that scientific knowledge advances. If Alito was truly taught to think scientifically, he should have no problem accepting Kulkumatz’s age in the face of such irrefutable evidence. He’s clearly different than the shra most scholars would be studying (being wild rather than captive), and the horns are pretty hard to argue with. Honestly Alito shouldn’t even be surprised by this; it’s explicitly stated that horns are a signifier of age, so the fact K has more than the stated maximum should have tipped him off long before this. This is what I mean by some of the dialogue being pretty corny. It’s just so, so forced.
When they reach the cliff, Kulkumatz bids them farewell and says he wishes he could have learned more from them. More on that later.
There’s a stupid scene with the prowlers I’m cutting because I have no tolerance for that stuff, then Kulkumatz shows up.
So he’s a tu’nuok. He says he’s not ready to die just yet, as he wants to travel with the guild to see more of the outside world. I feel this wasn’t foreshadowed properly because his scholarly personality wasn’t hinted at very well. He told Alito a lot of stuff, but only at request, and he didn’t seem to care about what Alito had to say at all (even cutting him off with the magic explanation). Our only hint for this was his saying he liked talking to Alito in the ending, which comes out of left field. Having their conversations be more of a dialogue, with K showing clear interest in Alito’s own knowledge, would have made this work so much better and given him a more interesting personality to boot. Once again, show don’t tell.
Kulkumatz: “[I wield] life itsself. I know of growth, and sspirit, and decay, and ressurgencce.”
Okay that’s nice but how do you do that. Presumably it’s nature magic similar to the na’hrin, but what is he drawing from? His own body, like Moke?
Dehl: “You may have to do battle with your own countrymen if you join us. Is this acceptable?”
Kulkumatz: “The other Tu’Nuok? Sssah. Battle is all they know. They will fight one another to the end.”
Convenient, and kind of racist. I find it hard to believe the tu’nuok are really that one-dimensional; isn’t Kulkumatz himself living proof that individuals can be different?
He joins. An impossibly old Shra with great wisdom and magical abilities, Kulkumatz wishes to find the most appropriate place to end his life. Proficient in regenerative abilities, Body and Soul damage, and controlling ‘spiritual’ energy in living and non-living alike.
Kulkumatz is pretty awesome. Refreshment is the full-party regrowth spell, which is really useful right now with all the body damage being slung around. Wisp Rending is a standard body attack; Weaponhaunt is a soul attack that supposedly uses the enemy’s own weapon type, but I don’t think it works properly (it seems non-elemental to me every time I’ve tried it); Unleashed is a multi-hit untargetable attack with an incredibly high miss rate. I never bother with it. Communion is mind healing, which isn’t very appropriate thematically but comes in handy. He’s pretty tough in general and has an early passive skill that fixes his low agility problem. I have him replace Ques. (I considered replacing Santes because I rely on her too much, but that’d leave me without any body or soul healing so nope.)