Another sidequest today. I think this is one of the better ones, though.
First, let’s deliver the spring thingy. Brenetto installs it into the previous device (providing an explanation for why I need to talk to him to get the benefit, I will concede). It prevents the chain from breaking if I use the wrong skill, but only a quarter of a time. Random chance abilities, bah. It’s at least more useful than the retention ones, since it means I might actually build a small chain even if I don’t pay attention.
Brenetto gets all weepy because his work is finished so he has to say goodbye and return to Fortifel. He wants to help people through technology and science, and…
Qualstio: “Good for you, man! Just be careful. That kind of talk is what got Metzino killed, ya know.”
There’s this thing called “tact” you might want to look into, Qualstio. He does at least follow up by saying he’ll visit when Brenetto’s rich and famous, which is a nice change from his usual “screw you give me your stuff you suck” routine.
Also, Kulkumatz exists. Is this a tu’nuok tree, or is he just possessive of trees in general?
Now it’s time to examine the quest indicator I ignored last update. I get a “proceed/don’t proceed” prompt even though it only leads to a cutscene.
“Now to conveniently narrate my every action and thought out loud, because I am the best secret agent.”
One of the few times where using thoughts would have made sense, and the game…doesn’t. We can read her thoughts when she’s swooning over Havan, but not here, apparently.
“I’ll go out back behind the tents. Shouldn’t be no one back there this time’a day, yeah.”
Seriously.
Dehl shows up to nag her because he noticed she’s been acting weirdly for the past few days. Qualstio shows up too so this scene can meet the standard dickishness quota.
“Ohh ho ho! Didn’t realize I was interrupting something! Heading back to the tents, huh?”
If I have to read this so do you. (Dehl is completely oblivious, which just raises the question of why Qualstio said it in the first place if he knew it wouldn’t provoke any reaction.)
Kidra asks them if they can keep a secret etc. etc. I wouldn’t trust Qualstio, myself. There’s something going on nearby that she has to investigate but she won’t explain anything further, for reasons that actually make sense in hindsight for once, but Dehl convinces her to take some guild members as bodyguards.
I can only take party members with high charisma; this effectively means no shra. Dehl and Rehm can potentially come if you invest enough in their passives, but they don’t make the cut right now. K and Moke can never upgrade their charisma, to my knowledge, so they can’t ever join.
I make a party of Lani, Falitza, Sirush, and Santes, which is hilarious because they’re probably the worst people for this, personality-wise, despite technically having the required charisma. I also bring Qualstio, because if he wants to act like a paranoid dick all the time he better put his money where his mouth is and actually do some work. (And it does make sense that he’d want to keep an eye on her, what with insisting she’s the antichrist and all.)
This is the only time the game does this (other sidequests just throw you in, no title card). I presume it’s because it’s more involved than the others.
Kidra explains they’ve arrived at a smuggler’s camp. She says she’s going to do all the work, everyone else can just sit still and act casual. I’m sure the nutjobs I brought won’t have any difficulty with that, no siree. She tells the guards they’re expecting her and it goes off without a hitch (~foreshadowing~).
Finally, thoughts. The game explains this is a puzzle section; I have to talk to NPCs to investigate the situation and also get them to leave (making the final battle less ugly).
Kidra: “Paaatience! You just gotta trust me, hun.”
I get the impression that Kidra is just trolling him now. She must be really tired of his crap at this point.
I’d really like to know the significance of these things.
These are the worst secret agents. Everyone else here is a chatterbox, so they stick out like a sore thumb. I remember being incredibly suspicious of them on my first playthrough. Maybe it’s supposed to be that they’re normally good at blending in, but won’t talk to Kidra so as to not give the game away? I dunno.
Kidra: “Orders?”
> Give new orders.
> Ask about his day.
> Ask about the barrels.
Here’s the puzzle part. All of the smugglers have a dialogue tree with one or two options that will remove them from the area, and one that will prevent them from ever leaving. I don’t have them all memorized so I’m winging it here. Kidra might have the skills to convincingly fake new orders, but it’s still risky, and asking about his day is kind of weird. The third option seems like my best bet; if nothing else, it might give me useful information.
He says his job is to guard them, and count to make sure none have been stolen. Kidra tricks him into thinking one is missing and sends him on a wild goose chase to find it. Clever, though it might have been better to make the player come up with it somehow. That’s going to be a running theme here: Kidra does most of the work, I’m just here to set her on the right track initially and then enjoy the ride. It might have been a better idea to create multiple junctures per person to make it more involved, but that might have been too complicated.
This woman is a customer. Kidra says the smugglers have Redfount venom, which makes her freak out and leave, but not before giving some forced exposition about how nasty the stuff is. No choices necessary here, it’s automatic.
This seems like the thing I ran into a few quests ago. It’s weird that the characters can easily recognize it now but couldn’t before.
I picked the absolute worst team for this, didn’t I? It’s a thing of beauty.
Kidra: “But it won’t be as fun if I tell you outright, now will it! Just keep quiet, you’ll see.”
For supposedly being silvertongued, Kidra is not very good at this. She should draw on some evidence of past trustworthiness, at the very least. This just makes her look even more suspicious.
This is clever. Initially I thought she had to be getting real premonitions because there’s no way she could figure this out on her own, but then I remembered she can read minds. So yeah, she totally knows what Kidra’s going to do. What’s less clear is why she’d tip her hand. She could be trying to dissuade Kidra, but why? She’s not trying very hard, regardless. Perhaps she just saw her chance to hop aboard the smug wagon.
I head over to pester the guy at the root table.
Uhh.
He tells her to buzz off.
> Say something suggestive
> Talk business with him
> Ask about “The Boss”
I ask about the boss, because information gathering is always good. Fortunately, he’s cooperative and lets slip that they have a nasty poison in stock, which confirms Kidra’s suspicions. It doesn’t get him to leave, though; for that, I have to talk business with him. Kidra says there are better roots to the north and he runs off…
…leaving his stock unattended. Sloppy. (What’s also sloppy is that I can walk on them.)
Time for the tents. The leftmost one is the shra tent, which Kidra refuses to enter because it’s too gross. It’s a good thing nothing important’s in there, though admittedly her shra colleague might have dealt with it already.
…Is that just the exterior tent graphic with some floor tiles plopped on top? I think it is. Eh, guess the developer didn’t have any other options? That middle crease is really noticeable, though.
This Fortian is buying some drugs. For science, of course. What’s weird is that this choice is only for flavor; both make him leave. I thought “offer something better” was the wrong choice because expertise beats bluffing, but it turns out Kidra just happens to know about a mythical mush-cap strain and convinces the guy they’re real. I suppose that could be foreshadowing, since it’s weird for an ordinary Nalian to have such an elaborate knowledge base.
This shra is drunk and starts creeping on Kidra. I will spare you the dialogue because this blog has enough rapey stuff already. I remember from a previous run that the third option works so I pick that. There’s some banter and a fade to black, then:
I presume she tossed the beer over her shoulder or something? Or maybe she took the direct route and bashed his brains in. (The implication that she “fell for it” once before is very disturbing though and I’m not going to pursue that train of thought.)
Kidra: “Oh, that’s too bad. I’ll try again next time!”
I admit I find this funny. The game doesn’t seem to slutshame her for it, which is a relief. Before her constant flirting felt too much like it was stereotyping her as a shallow flighty weirdo defined by her sexuality, but now that she has other goals and character traits it’s less problematic. (Odd that there doesn’t seem to be a girls’ tent, though…)
He asks what she’s doing here.
> Say you’re just exploring
> Say you’re a customer
> Ask about “The Boss”
I go for the information, obviously. He just confirms it’s the Nalian officer who was hanging around in the corner of one of the earlier screenshots and hints that I have to see him when there are no customers around, even though the officer himself makes that clear. So, nothing significant. I then chose to pose as a customer since it seemed smarter. Even if they buy that she just happened to come across the camp, I don’t think they’ll buy that she totally doesn’t see anything illegal and definitely won’t alert the authorities. Seems smarter to act like she’s in on it.
Once again, the actual method of removing him is something Kidra comes up on her own: she makes up a story about seeing one of the workers tripping out of his mind, making the smuggler conclude that they were stealing from the stock and he has to go after them.
Kidra tries to bluff her way through, but if there are any customers left she gets pushed back. I’ve removed everyone though, so she’s waved through.
(“He was expectin’ me. Lucky guess!”)
What? Why would she attribute this to luck when she knows about the double agents and has already noticed that they seem to be expecting her? This game can’t maintain consistency even within a single quest.
…And she’s back to speaking her plans out loud, with the head of the operation standing right next to her at that. Why.
She wonders if the smoke will poison her if she burns it, but does anyway, potentially killing not only herself but also everyone in the camp. Why wouldn’t she know this? She’s supposedly been on the case for a while and presumably her plan was always to burn it, so it’s weird that she’s suddenly clueless at the critical moment.
Then there’s a battle, which is why it’s handy to remove the smugglers beforehand. These two you can’t do anything about, so a battle is unavoidable. I think it’d be more fitting if you could avoid the battle entirely, maybe with a funny scene where the officer tries to run if there are no guards left.The battle could also have been tougher; even with all six enemies it’s nothing special. It undercuts some of the tension and subterfuge when hacking your way through is a fairly easy option. (They also still give essence, so we run into the recurring problem of disincentivizing the avoidance options.)
Interestingly, they’re unique enemies with unique thought snippets, which is a nice touch. This is why you always bring Falitza.
For some reason the smoke has disappeared even though the tent is still on fire, and this guy is wounded even though he wasn’t in the battle.
And… for some reason this popped up? I don’t know why, it’s never happened to me before. Is the player sprite set below that tent in this cutscene for some reason?
So it turns out Kidra’s a Nalian secret agent, and these three were her partners who infiltrated the camp to make things easier for her. (And apparently “Silvery” is her real name.) This actually does explain why she’s been so cagey, since secret agents naturally have to keep things, you know, secret. However, she is now totally fine with revealing that she’s not part of either the officers or the guards but a super-special secret third group that keeps everyone in line.
Kidra: “As you’ve seen, you can’t trust the Officers OR the guards to behave. So who makes sure the police do their job? Us! We keep Nal from eatin’ itself inside out.”
So Nal appears to suffer from a “who watches the watchmen” problem, yet adding another tier of watchmen somehow fixes everything. Who makes sure these people behave? At least the guards vs. officers thing had a shaky balance where they could keep tabs on each other, but this is one agency to rule them all. Corruption in this organization should be even worse than normal.
Also, why on Earth didn’t this come up during the part of the story that was actually about Nal? The officer/guard conflict and corruption therein was a really big theme then, and this new information is very important to that. But instead this vital setting information is just hastily thrown in to a late-game sidequest, probably because the developer was making it up as he went along.
So… I don’t know about this twist, really. I like it because it makes Kidra more interesting and veers her sharply away from the creepy prostitute premise, but it really comes out of left field. It never comes up again, either, despite being an important worldbuilding detail. I guess the developer decided he needed a way to make Kidra more important, so he slapped this together in an attempt to make her character fit the rest of the story better, but everything is still really wonky. Kidra probably should have been cut entirely; like Sirush, she doesn’t really fit.
Like Falitza’s twist, I feel like this should have been the starting point for her character, not the endpoint. There’s just more room for exploration and development that way, especially with the ties to the Nal plot. This feels like a twist for twist’s sake rather than something that can really move her character forward. It’s as if she’s a plot device rather than a character; she’s introduced as weird and mysterious, and here’s the explanation, now let us never speak of her again. Instead of a character arc, she gets a character… triangle or something. It’s clunky.
Mechanically, though, this was still a good quest. Like “Worthy of the Sea”, it was very interaction-based and a little puzzle-y, like an adventure game. Kidra is also written quite well; the way she talks and manipulates people is very well-done and believable, and the fact she does it so effortlessly speaks to her character. (It’s also nice to see a manipulative, charismatic woman portrayed as heroic for once.)
Conveniently, she decides to stay with the guild. I’ll just assume she’s the top brass or something and can do whatever she feels like. Since she no longer has to pretend she’s an ordinary civilian she gets the most useless of all upgrades, a weapon upgrade. She also gets a boatload of exp, which may or may not be affected by how well you do, I’m not sure.
Alito: “Rank 22! We are nearing the limits which Wadassia will recognize, you may know.”
No completion screen this time. All the character sidequests are like that, which is weird. Even Brenetto’s quests have a message displaying how much favor you get. (Also that’s really weirdly phrased. I guess he’s talking about the max rank, which is still a ways away, but it sounds like you can keep going after 30 but Wadassia won’t acknowledge it, or something? It doesn’t make sense that the cap is an in-universe thing in the first place…)
Kidra’s flavor text is updated afterwards. As far as I know there’s no prerequisite for the quest, so there’s no corresponding text for before she offers it.
Let’s end with more flavor text:
Kidra: “Wanna roll in the dirt some and stain that nice white shirt? That might help!”
Kidra: “Cheer up! You’re my BODYGUARD after all. Mmm, I bet yer wife would be sooo proud!”
Kidra: “Is it really that obvious? Just sit tight and be quiet, hon. We’ll be outta here soon.”
Kidra: “Aww, you’re silly! Don’t worry, this trip is gonna make a MAN outta you, you’ll see!”
kidra he is twelve stop being creepy
I’m kind of curious what Dehl’s is, but eh. The last two guys have unique text here too if you wait to get them, but unfortunately (or fortunately) for you, even I’m not that dedicated.