I’m aiming for a completion run, so before I start chapter 5 I’m going to take a look at some of the sidequests that pop up over the course of chapter 4. Our first stop is Nal. (Lots of images today.)
It is a well-known mystery that Shra from all ages and tribes have the same language with very little variance in dialect.
Ah, that would have made for good foreshadowing if I had come here earlier.
This is Sirush’s personal quest. It’s a bit weird, in terms of mechanical consistency; it has no stat requirements and there’s no actual challenge or anything. This must have been made in the early stages where the developer was still working out the mechanics of these things.
Anyway, Sirush goes to the inn and falls asleep. When he wakes up, the screen is tinted freaky purple and he assumes it’s nighttime. I can walk around, but the only way to advance is to exit the building.
There’s a priest giving a eulogy, which abruptly turns nasty.
“Let the stain in his killer’s soul shine for all of life and death and order to see. Only then shall the guilty be found, and the souls of he and us be vindicated.”
So it’s pretty obvious where this is going. I can talk to the NPCs, and they say some creepy stuff. To advance I have to go south.
Suddenly, there’s happy party music! The guards move to block the exit.
Sirush starts freaking out because he killed this guy. The guy is pretty blasé about it, though, and invites him to stay awhile.
This is some trippy stuff.
To advance you have to talk to Sirush’s wife. He begs for her forgiveness, but she keeps admonishing him for his failure before dramatically shouting that he killed her.
“You have to be the last to go. It’s only fair. Out time isn’t worth keeping any more.”
The gate opens and a voice says “Next. Who is next to go? Justice awaits.” Qualstio walks into the gate and vanishes. Good riddance.
“I’ll go ahead of you. Give you some time to calm down. You deserve it, you know?”
Lani ;_; I am pleased that she is in this quest, she’s the best.
Dehl says something similar, and then Sirush is alone. The sequence does not actually advance automatically, which is pretty nerve-wracking. You can be left wandering the empty room for quite a while.
The solution is to examine the gate, at which point the voice says that Sirush gets to live because he’s the last one, but laughs at him and says his friends wouldn’t have helped him if they knew what a monster he is.
The next scene is the closest thing we get to an explanation for what happened. It appears that on one mission, Sirush killed the wrong target by mistake, and the assassins’ guild hounded him for it, which is what triggered his descent into paranoia.
Sirush runs, and returns to the grave area. Examining the stone confirms that it is indeed his. The shades of the gentleman and his wife show up to berate him, but he professes regret and a desire to atone before returning to the inn, at which point we return to reality.
AUGH
So apparently she just explained the whole story but I WILL NEVER KNOW IT because the perspective was stuck in Sirush’s head the whole time. Couldn’t even do a flashback, just, haha, here’s the evidence that there’s an actual explanation AND NOW YOU’LL NEVER KNOW.
Well, we do get an explanation on one thing: Sirush got it backwards. She left him, because she couldn’t deal with his paranoia, and this drove him over the edge. So it’s all the woman’s fault, as per usual.
Dehl wonders what to do now that they know he’s a professional assassin.
Qualstio: “I say we dump his ass out in the woods again. He seemed to be doing all right.”
Why on Earth was Qualstio a friendly spectre in Sirush’s mindscape?
Then she says she has to leave, because though he wouldn’t recognize her, she would be afraid of her own reaction. Uh, sure. None of this has made any sense, why start now.
Sirush wakes up and Dehl does the whole power of friendship speech.
And Sirush takes off his hat, probably representative of the way he’s exposing himself emotionally here, or just to highlight that this is an important moment. For all that the developer claims he’s a terrible artist, he has a good grasp of this stuff.
Dehl: “You’ve nothing to worry about. And, you will be able to save a lot of people with us.”
Sirush: “Myself… included.”
Aw.
…Okay.
So, that was pretty well-done. It’s decent weirdness/horror, even though mechanically it’s rather flat. I think it could have been greatly improved by adding some actual gameplay and turning it into some kind of evasion-based survival horror gauntlet, expanding on the theme of Sirush having to run from everything even though he realizes it’s not a real solution. However, though the quest is technically solid, it doesn’t fix the problem of Sirush fundamentally not belonging. His character is something out of a mystery-noir novel that just doesn’t fit in this high fantasy adventure. The tone clashes and we don’t get enough time devoted to him to really puzzle out the mystery, which is something that really has to be a centerpiece of a story to work properly. It feels like the developer had tried his hand at a noir story about Sirush before this, scrapped it, and shoehorned in elements of its plot to create this confusing character arc. Is that what happened here? It’s all very bizarre.
And, like most of these, this feels more like the beginning of a character arc than the end of one. It’s a well-written beginning for an atonement arc, but it doesn’t really solve anything and is too open-ended for a definitive finale.
The insanity plotline is also redundant with Falitza. Even though they end up very different, it’s weird that everyone makes such a big deal about Falitza’s craziness yet they treat Sirush pretty normally even though he clearly needs help, arguably moreso than her.