Last time, Yacatec’s a slaver but Qualstio won’t do anything about it because the only thing this game loves more than Qualstio is characters refusing to do things.
This is a nice touch. The camp in general has been highly reactive, changing after every quest thus far. Yacatec’s nonchalance here shows how messed up this is far more effectively than Qualstio’s rants. Sometimes less is more.
Qualstio and Tehgonan harass this guy for a while, then he says that if he doesn’t finish his job Yacatec will skin him alive. This goes completely unremarked upon by Qualstio despite him ranting about Yactec being the antichrist earlier. It would have been really nice to see Yacatec’s two-faced behavior more overtly and for the characters actually take note of the way he treats people he has power over, but nope. It’s particularly disappointing because it’s a failure of the central theme; a story about scope should be focused on these people who are less fortunate and have less power than our protagonists. This detail shouldn’t be a footnote.
Qualstio mentions Ques and it turns out the cartographer is his biggest fan and starts fanboying out. There’s some sitcom misunderstanding humor where he mistakes Dehl for Ques and Ques tells Dehl to play along because he’s a dick I guess.
“Oh my god oh my god is it really him?!”
Urgh. I hate it when fantasy stories do this. The glossary explicitly says that humans worship multiple gods, but sure, let’s shatter willing suspension of disbelief by having people talk like someone from our world. It’s not like this is a fantasy universe where the whole point is things are supposed to be different.
Tiny, everyday things like turns of speech can be an easy way to establish a world as subtly different and hopefully even get your readers interested in the world – like, hey, that person said “gods” instead of “God”, that reminds me I don’t know anything about their religion and now I am curious! I know that if I worship Unsounded any more it’ll ascend into godhood so instead I’ll use A Song of Ice and Fire as an example here. The story is essentially set in medieval Europe and this is reflected in everything people say. They use antiquated terms that people actually used back then, as well as their own vernacular where it makes sense. The religions also use phrases and terms that are similar to ours but subtly different, which builds the fantasy element as well – there are even a number of points where you can see someone’s true religious affiliation slip through depending on what exclamation they use, rewarding readers who pay careful attention to those details. It gives the impression of a world built from the ground up, and everything meshes really well together. That’s the additional challenge of writing fantasy: you are setting a story in a different world with different rules. That’s the point. If you don’t care to keep those rules consistent, there’s little point in writing fantasy at all.
This whole situation is also bizarre in more general storytelling terms. There’s been a lot of absurdist humor rolling around, but personally I think the point where you kill off two major characters in quick succession to show you’re playing for keeps is the point where you take the comedy routines down a notch. It fit with the lighthearted tone at the beginning, but now it just clashes with the more serious stuff the game is trying to do. It’s also getting a bit repetitive; surely you can think of a different way to make quest introductions interesting by now, game?
Anyway Yacatec wants to pierce deeper into the swamp so I need to blaze a trail. Qualstio is totally down with this (“That sounds kinda fun!”), forgetting his impassioned stance against Yacatec’s entire operation last quest. Consistency is hard. Also the cartographer says Yacatec doesn’t want to pay guilds if he doesn’t have to but Qualstio convinces him to let them on anyway, so now if Yactec’s displeased the blood is on Qualstio’s hands. Our hero.
On the right is a blood-crazed shra, but it’s… tame? Somehow? It doesn’t attack me if I talk to it and the NPC next to it says it’s affectionate. But… that doesn’t make any sense! What does blood-craze even entail, then? I thought it made them universally violent and bloodthirsty! If they’re pretty much like normal shra with a normal range of aggressiveness then why do they get a special distinction???
This game.
Holy crap you guys, I think this is another guild! An actual other guild! It only took us three and a half chapters but we finally found minor guild characters! They’re not just a myth! Amazing!
The gimmick in this quest is that you need these items to progress, but you can only take one at a time. The stated reason is that they want to preserve supplies, but if you use one up you can come back for another, so theoretically people could chuck every item into the river one by one and the foreman would keep handing them out like party favors. It’s kind of annoying because pretty much all of them are only used at the very end so you have to trek back and forth over the entire level a lot. I also picked the wrong item here so I had to make an extra trip back when I got to the first obstacle.
He still hisses when saying the item names, even when they’re in [official brackets] like that. I think it’s a nice touch.
Cannot tell if sarcasm or genuine niceness. It’s hard to tell with this narrator, sometimes.
Woah, skywatch bird! These things are the closest thing this game has to random encounters, occasionally appearing out of nowhere to dive-bomb you. They may actually be tied to certain locations, but I’m not sure. For some reason they only fly vertically so you can avoid them pretty easily by moving sideways.
I don’t even know what this is trying to say. Food being unable to fly is a good thing for you, birds. It means it can’t escape.
The birds are one of the few mind-oriented enemies here, but they’re not much trouble. Sirush takes them down pretty quick.
In addition to the camp supplies, there are assorted items scattered around the area. You only actually need one of them, which strikes me as a bit wasteful, but whatever.
It functions as smelling salts. I need a bottle to collect it, though, and I didn’t notice that was a camp item until very late in the quest, so I have to backtrack later. Derp.
Now this is an interesting setup. Why are so many snapvines congregating in this area? Is this place important to them? Are they mourning their dead? Sentient plants are really cool and I’d have liked to learn more about these ones. I feel kind of bad about hacking my way through them.
I charge the spring in this battle. For some reason it’s useless until I talk to Brenetto again.
No one wonders why they died, what they were doing here, or why there were living snapvines guarding the area because they are bad protagonists. In the first chapter we got tons of cool flavor text in quests, but sadly that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Anyway, I grab one.
This one was guarded by three bloodcrazed. I honestly don’t get why one item’s in the open and two are heavily guarded. It feels almost like punishing players for exploring, especially since the sabre grass is really easy to find but these are off the beaten path.
Here are some tu’nuok! In a move that is actually subversive and different, I can negotiate with them instead of murder being the only option. Talking to them doesn’t work (does that change if a shra is the leader? It should), but offering any of the three items I found will make them disperse. The other two go unused, which strikes me as wasteful design.
He’s badly injured.
You don’t have any way to wake him, and you don’t want to risk shaking him and hurting him further, since you’re nice and all.
This is funny, but it would be funnier if the only evidence for the characters being nice wasn’t the narration insisting they totally are.
This is where the marathon comes in. First you need the bottle for the oil to awaken him, then you need medicinal herbs for his wound, then you need either a bandage or a splint (so there’s another item that goes unused) to finish patching him up. I really think this could have been handled better and not have the item puzzles all happen at the very end of the level.
He says he found a promising camp location but the natives didn’t want to give it up. Therefore the guild goes over and murders them all to assist the slave-trader, since they’re nice and all.
There’s only one bloodcrazed in the cutscene, where did the other one come from? The game’s usually good about that.
This is chapter 4’s miniboss battle, though it’s not terribly difficult. It’s got the same music as the endboss and, like in chapter 1, it’s our first introduction to a certain enemy type.
That’s kind of a weird thing for a nature mage to be thinking. I’d imagine them to be more about decay bringing life, or at least something more positive than ETERNAL SUFFERING. This sounds more in line with what a si’shra would say.
Na’hrin are the other mind-focused enemy in this area, and they’re tough as nails. They have special armor (…medium, for some reason, despite being no better armored than the bloodcrazed), powerful spells, and a regular attack that’s nothing to sneeze at.
They’re one of the few enemies that uses enchantments, too. Their other spell is noxious, so this can really mess you up (and means you can’t rely on either noxious or divine allies for tanking their spells).
There’s a tu’nuok here as well (the armored guy with the staff), but I couldn’t land a scan on him.
Yactec comes over after the battle to set up the new camp, contradicting his earlier policy of not wanting to mess with the tu’nuok. We only killed one small group; the larger tribe is surely going to give him a lot of trouble over this. I guess he’s willing to fight them if necessary, but it does kind of undermine his previous assertion that they’re a scary unstoppable force.
Alito: “Well! Rank 19! Your efforts impress all of the populace, yes? Keep it up!
The favor rewards in this chapter have really skyrocketed. It used to oscillate but mostly stay below quadruple digits, but now I’m routinely seeing upwards of 2000.
Oh hey, it’s the plot! There really should have been more of these. It’s been a while since we’ve seen one.
They mention that they’re on a time limit of some kind, and Fell is concerned Ilganyag won’t meet their specifications in time. Why is this even a factor? Even from what we learn in IMTS their mission is pretty vague, but it seems to just be finding exemplar latent energy mutants. I mean I guess they might need more exposure or something, but it should be mostly inherent. Otherwise they could just grab anyone and chuck them into Fortifel or whatever. Kott says “If they’re really worthy, then they don’t need the time,” which implies my theory is correct but does not explain why time is important at all.
There’s some depressing stuff about how they don’t want to watch the chosen because they don’t want to get their hopes up only to be disappointed again. I wonder how far previous attempts got. Did they ascend, and just weren’t deemed worthy? Or did they not even get that far? I’m not sure which would be more dispiriting. Fell refuses to give up hope, and says she’s going down to the surface to provide more “encouragement”. Good luck with that.
See we really, really needed more of these. There are inklings of what could have been here, but the scenes are too short and too infrequent to really mean much. Making the vague, mysterious plot people major characters with scenes that show their human side, what they’re like behind the curtain… That could have actually made this game unique and interesting, had it been the focus. Right now it seems waffley – it humanizes these characters, but still seems to want to keep them hidden and mysterious, so their appearances are still rare. The game just doesn’t go far enough (ha!) to pull it off properly.
And it still does the “we’ll see the mysterious people but they’ll only talk in vague terms to tease you” thing even though it has the perfect setup for dodging that. The big reveal isn’t what the Watchers are doing, it’s that even the Watchers don’t understand what’s really going on, so they could easily be less coy while still preserving the twist. If nothing else it would be different from the countless RPGs with vague people vaguely discussing vague things to keep you vaguely hooked.