Quarantine zone for downtroddendeity's liveblogging and analysis of the Radiant Historia 3DS port, Perfect Chronology, because someone called her bluff to play their copy for $10 and ice cream.
Posts queued for noon EST.
List of tally categories is here.
Nemesia quest summaries are here.
Oh, I never left, but the person I borrowed PC from took it back and I haven’t felt like subjecting myself to “Manic Pixie Dream Girl renders the entire plot completely meaningless because she can solve everything with her omnipotent handwave powers and actually all the villains are totally reasonable people who only want the best for everyone once somebody who just tried to kill them tells them that omnipotent handwavium will make everything better” enough to ask for it again. Instead I spent my 2020 RH writing allotment on much more fun and cheery topics, like familial abuse, gaslighting, PTSD, brainwashing, and cheating at strip poker out of spite.
As I’ve said at excruciating length before, in my opinion there’s some perfectly good ideas in PC’s new content, they’re just floundering in an ocean of bad writing and terrible ideas. “Here’s how this world could be with some of its fundamental premises changed” is fine. “Noah is still alive” and “Rosch is a general” are fine. Heck, “here’s a new character, she’s a perky know-it-all who loves the sound of her own voice and needs Stocke’s help doing new-content sidequests, and it turns out she’s secretly a time-displaced princess of the old empire” is even fine once you kill the teacher schtick with fire. It’s all in the execution.
Let’s say that when Nemesia approaches Stocke, her pitch isn’t “I know how to save the world.” It’s “I come from another world and I need your help to save my family.” She says that when she was a child, her home was attacked with a magical explosion that threw her out of her own world and into this one, and she’s spent her whole life studying Flux, time travel, and the theory of other worlds to try to get back home. She has, she believes, found a way to do it, but she can’t do it alone. She needs someone with a Chronicle, and even though there’s Black Chronicle energy signatures all over the place she's never been able to actually track the holder down, so ta-da, that’s you. Stocke, suspicious but a perennial bleeding heart, chooses whether to agree.
If you do, Nemesia explains that she’s able to survey alternate timelines, but it’s impossible to enter and affect them without a Chronicle. Her plan is to make a one-use knockoff Chronicle that can send her home, and for that, she wants Stocke to go into another history she found that has a bunch of globs of loose Flux energy just kind of floating around and collect them for her so she can seal them up in her prototype book. It’s a win/win situation, since out of control Flux is hella dangerous and tends to cause all sorts of weird temporal effects that you can structure sidequests around, like time loops or shades of the dead.
Since the White Chronicle was absolutely not intended to do something like this, he’s still pretty limited in his interference: Nemesia can’t get him through for long unless there are a whole bunch of Flux disturbances in the area. She’s also able to triangulate points he can reach better as he both explores this new timeline and fills the Chronicle in his own. This means that as the game goes on, he gains more footholds in the other timeline that he can hop to, and any given nexus tends have a major disturbance that you have to solve to advance the overall plot, plus 1-3 extras. And the same place can become a nexus more than once, so if, say, Cygnus was making diplomatic overtures to the Gutrals the first time you visited, by the time you can get back there you might be seeing the consequences of that. Nemesia plays mission control by talking to Stocke through a communication device, though she tends to get distracted providing Helpful Exposition about random subjects when she’s supposed to be telling him where to go. (He is far too stoic to facepalm about this, but he is facepalming internally.)
What Stocke discovers when he starts poking around is that in this world, the war between Alistel and Granorg has, compared to his own, only just begun to reheat. Noah still makes public appearances, Rosch is about to be promoted to Brigadier General under Raul, and there is no Specint. Raynie and Marco are still mercenaries for a company in Cygnus. And, he discovers after breaking Nemesia’s initial order to stay away from anyone who might know him, none of them have any idea who he is.
What actually happened, it will eventually come out, is that Nemesia did not pick this world at random: she needed a world where 1) both Chronicles were destroyed (accounting for all the random Flux anomalies) and 2) her chosen Chronicle-wielder was already dead. Stocke can only appear in this other world because the version of him that used to be there is dead. But Nemesia only knows about the Chronicles from her memories of the ancient empire- she has no idea about the fact that they’re currently being passed down the royal family, or about the whole human sacrifice thing. She never bothered to look into or ask about Stocke’s personal history because, frankly, it never occurred to her that it was important.
In this world, Ernst was sacrificed, but instead of finding a way to undo it, Heiss decided to permanently sabotage the whole thing by destroying both Chronicles and scattering the pieces. Consequently, the desert has spread more slowly in the last few years- not stopped, because a teenager wrongfully executed for being politically inconvenient does not an enlightened sacrifice make- but enough that there was less pressure to fight over farmland. Noah is still alive because he hasn’t been under as much stress as in the main timeline. Heiss has been living like a hermit in the Imperial Ruins, doing nothing but waiting for the world to end.
Nemesia’s goal is not, in fact, to send herself into the world she originally came from, because she isn’t from a parallel world: she’s from the past. Her goal is to send herself back in time and prevent the fall of the Empire. Everything she knew was wiped out in an instant, and she’s looking at this world centuries later where she’s all that’s left and she’s sure it would all be better if she could just somehow go back and prevent the thing that started all of it. Her plan is that, if she can amass enough Flux power, she can use that and her own life force to close the mana breach just as it forms. The person in her family who had the Black Chronicle at the time tried to do that at the same time they tried to fling her to safety, and she’s sure that she, more prepared, can succeed where they failed and give her past self the life she should have had.
And Stocke, who has in some mission seen the events that led up to the cataclysm and has absolutely figured Nemesia’s deal out before it’s actually said out loud, says: no. It isn’t going to work. This isn’t something that you can solve by hitting it hard enough- it’s a hole in the world, and it’ll swallow you up. There is no single, critical point. The Empire only got to the point where the whole capital could be drowned in sand overnight after long, long years of creating ever more powerful applications of Flux and thaumatech without regard for long-term consequences, and even if you managed to stop it this time, it could happen again the next week. What are you going to do, trust that you’ll be able to live out a hundred more lives like this and fix it every time?
Everything she loved is lost, but the world hasn’t ended. Vainqueur as it is now is a mess, but generations have lived out their lives there. They’ve built new things on the ashes. Nothing and no one Stocke knows would exist in the world Nemesia wants to create. It’s a civilization built on the edge of that hole in the world, sure, but even now, there are people building bridges. Through the reforestation research, they have a path forward to a better reality- not perfect, but the empire wasn’t perfect either.
She’ll burn down everything this world could be because she can’t stop chasing after the past.
And she says, well, fine then, Mr. Smarty Pants, then what do you suggest I do with this giant ball of Flux energy that you collected for me that is absolutely going to explode all over your precious timeline if I don’t find something to do with it fast because I didn’t expect to have to keep it stable indefinitely?
And he says, have you considered using it to find a way to give a future to the world you took it from that can’t save itself?
Re: the alt!Stocke problem, it occurs to me the possible histories might have been more interesting if we did get to play as alt!Stocke. That would allow these stories to have… any emotional content whatsoever, and make this one in particular hit like a freight train. I’m not sure how that would work on the large scale – maybe completely isolate the Nemesia segments to the postgame (to avoid the leveling inflation and “you should know this already” problems) and play as her viewing the different histories, with no involvement from our!Stoke at all. Bonus: gives a female character more agency.
…The possible histories are such an interesting idea, it’s really a crime they just didn’t care.
Exactly. They added an infinite AU generator, and they use it for… AU where there’s a pile of coal in Alistel. Even when they stumble into an idea that’s actually interesting, they just drop it like a hot potato or use it for a horribly-written villain redemption.
I have my own fixit proposal that kind of went the opposite way, but actually encountering alternate versions of Stocke would also have a lot of potential. Especially if you had a single one where he was the bad guy, because he’d be a terrifying antagonist.
Oh hey, I realized a framing device that could actually work pretty well: You play as Lippti and Teo, fleshing out the line at the start that they’ve been searching for the right timeline for aeons. It would make sense that they, from Historia, can view the infinite AUs, no weird ship required, and that they would be desperate enough to look for the really weird ones.
Just off the top of my head, good ideas would be:
Heiss abducted both siblings
Heiss abducted no one and either failed to or didn’t try to assassinate Victor, allowing us to actually engage with King Victor as a person (but haha no we needed Noah Lives AUs that changed nothing instead)
Heiss abducted no one, but did kill Victor, meaning Ernst sits the throne (this could be your antagonist AU)
Eruca is the Sacrifice
Alistel was never founded (Noah either didn’t exist or his rebellion failed)
Gutral focus AU where they aren’t one-dimensional vaguely racist caricatures and have taken over the continent with the help of Celestia or something
And of course, one where Heiss succeeds in his stated goals.
Some of those could probably be condensed, but look! Actually interesting AUs that would teach us more about the world and flesh out the edges that got little attention in original! It would also help if they were longer than five-minute Saturday Morning Cartoon specials, which I think could work if you stuck to 3-4 major timelines.
And this isn’t even getting into the potential for fleshing out the bad ends, which the original also desperately needed and would have made for excellent post-game content.
I disagree that the original needed to flesh out the bad ends. Let’s say that, oh, The World’s Betrayal bad end was playable. Plenty to do gameplay-wise in that one, I commented years ago how ripe it is for fic, and I was delighted when someone did write it. You spend hours of gameplay time watching Stocke side with his enemies, alienate his friends, and generally spiral way out of control. You sneak into the castle in Alistel and assassinate half the high command. You watch as Stocke realizes all of this completely failed to accomplish what he set out to accomplish, and then you’re kicked all the way back and nothing that happened in the entire arc is ever referenced again.
Or, like, Simmering Fury. Say it had played out the plot normally and then suddenly ten hours later Marco betrayed you out of the blue. Sure, the betrayal would have more impact, but the entire pace of the endgame just curled up in a ball and died because you were thinking about saving the world but now you’re trying to remember where the hell the decision point for some forgettable sidequest ten hours ago was.
Or say you pick the right choice and want to see what would happen if you didn’t. In the game as it stands, that’s a couple minutes’ commitment, so a decent number of players will see most of them out of just curiosity. But if they’re all big time sinks, that number’s going to plummet, completionists are going to burn out, and people who just want to get to the end are going to run to walkthroughs en masse so they don’t end up in plot cul-de-sacs and miss all that content you just spent all that time crafting. That’s not even getting into the development costs.
In a game with similar time travel mechanics and a plot structured around a Majora’s-Mask-style time loop on a tight deadline? Sure, actually-branching route paths would be good. This one? No.
...None of which, like, means I disagree that it would be good source material for bonus content, I’ve just seen people argue this about the main game before and I have Opinions. :::PPP
Re: the alt!Stocke problem, it occurs to me the possible histories might have been more interesting if we did get to play as alt!Stocke. That would allow these stories to have… any emotional content whatsoever, and make this one in particular hit like a freight train. I’m not sure how that would work on the large scale – maybe completely isolate the Nemesia segments to the postgame (to avoid the leveling inflation and “you should know this already” problems) and play as her viewing the different histories, with no involvement from our!Stoke at all. Bonus: gives a female character more agency.
…The possible histories are such an interesting idea, it’s really a crime they just didn’t care.
Exactly. They added an infinite AU generator, and they use it for... AU where there’s a pile of coal in Alistel. Even when they stumble into an idea that’s actually interesting, they just drop it like a hot potato or use it for a horribly-written villain redemption.
I have my own fixit proposal that kind of went the opposite way, but actually encountering alternate versions of Stocke would also have a lot of potential. Especially if you had a single one where he was the bad guy, because he’d be a terrifying antagonist.
I know I'm extremely late to this Blog but it had me wondering: Given Atlus’ current meteoric rise to the mainstream, how do you feel about Perfect Chronology being the version Atlus and the media will most certainly be promoting and pushing forth from now on and years to come as the Definitive version that everyone should play? Hope your mental health gets better.
They barely promoted or merchandised the original beyond the artbook, so not seeing how that’s particularly different. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Perfect Chronology was an obvious rush job with very little care put into it. I’ve heard that they’ve hinted in interviews that they originally intended it to be on the Vita and had to retool the project for the 3DS, and everything about that tracks, to me. If they’d waited any longer to shove it out the door they would have had to switch platforms completely again because the Switch was already rendering the 3DS obsolete, so given the original didn’t have great sales in Japan, somebody probably put their foot down and decided to wring whatever money they could out of the project before it cost them any more. I won’t be surprised if they barely acknowledge it exists for a long, long time, unless another dual-screen console comes along and gets popular enough that they can port it again without having to do actual work reprogramming it to make the interface fit.
My mental health is about as much better as anyone’s can be in 2020. But I still don’t feel like making it worse by subjecting myself to more of PC’s stupid, stupid ending.
voceanic replied to your post: “I played PC without ever even hearing about the original game, but...”:
Very informative! I'm probably going to watch a full playthrough of the original when I'm finally done with RH:FC. But these examples really do highlight how PC characters are so different
If you’re interested, I’ve got a list of everything PC added that wasn’t part of the original game over here. (Phrased much more neutrally because of my general efforts to keep the worst of my salt quarantined off my main.)
I played PC without ever even hearing about the original game, but thanks to your blog i now understand why all of the fanfiction that came out prior to PC makes everyone seem so OOC. 👀 it's because PC has completely watered down every character. Anyway I greatly admire the fact that you have a hate blog and am enjoying it immensely. I hope your mental health gets better soon. ❤
Well, some of it’s just OOC because such is the nature of fanfiction, but yes, they did.
Some changes were inevitable with the addition of extra portraits and voice-acting- in particular, as far as I can tell, a lot of Raynie’s voice in the English release of the original is an attempt to replace a distinctive speech pattern that doesn’t translate (she uses the first-person pronoun atashi, which is informal and very girly; the localizers approximated this by having her speak casually and with a lot of slang). Even in a best-case-scenario remake with a best-case-scenario localization, we’d probably end up with changes to lines like these:
...because the people adding portraits to the lines would be looking at the Japanese script, where the way she’s casual and informal has a very different connotation than it does in English. Even in that brief window of hope between a remake getting announced and when Atlus metaphorically broke into my house and kicked my dog, I figured there was no way remake!Raynie was going to be in line with the “slightly jaded enthusiastically bisexual party girl” fanon popular in my corner of the fandom, and I was fine with that, as long as we got a generally good result overall.
But we did not get a best case scenario; the writers on the new content on the JP side clearly didn’t understand the story or the characters to the point of major factual errors, and the localizers on the English side actually seem to have spent significant time and energy going out of their way to remove character voice from existing English dialogue.
Stocke in Japanese talks like a thug. He uses ore (very masculine, informal to the point of being rude), drops honorifics, calls Heiss and Garland by the pronoun anta (which is so informal as to be outright insulting when used to elders and social superiors), and calls everyone else the even more informal pronoun omae. The fact that he comes across downright offputtingly rude and distant comes up in other characters’ dialogue on numerous occasions. So, the odd hyper-informal line like this is a completely reasonable localization choice; this is not a man who bothers to phrase things delicately.
This line got changed to “Sounds problematic” in PC.
This is far from isolated or restricted to Stocke- in fact, the PC localizers actually seem to have sought out dialogue that had distinctive character voices in the original English script and changed it to make it more generic. For instance, the Desert Crows talk like this in vanilla English RH:
They do not talk like this in PC.
This is also the reason for my spectacular tantrum when I hit the Technique Scroll quest early in my playthrough; they revised the dialogue to remove the questgiver’s aggressive, bombastic tone and make the party’s dialogue less snarky so hard that they almost completely removed the joke.
And that’s without even getting into the actual new content, and I’m still incandescently angry at basically everything the late-game Nemesia stuff does or tries to do.
Right now my immediate RH priority is backing up my fic and meta to AO3 in anticipation of the blue hellsite’s self-destruction, the current step of which is “rewrite old daemon fic I’m embarrassed about.” I’ve got this blog mirrored to wordpress, too, though it’s on Private until I get around to checking the layout and formatting.
I keep thinking “I should finish PC just so I can say I did” and then I think about where I left off and what’s ahead and I go “...but not right now” and do literally anything else instead.
To tide you over a bit, here is a fascinating website on some of Atlus US’s other recent godawful localization choices. Some of these translation thumbprints were very familiar to me after PC.
so i've never played RH, and i was going to get the remake to finally play it, but now i'm. not sure if it's worth it? any advice??
Well, my opinion on PC is probably extremely clear by this point, so take this with a grain of salt, but: the original DS game is currently $23.28 new on Amazon and lower used, and DS games are playable on 3DS. PC costs $10 more at base, not including all the DLC; even the original portraits cost… I believe it was an extra 2 or $3?
RH DS also emulates very well on DeSmuME (I did a LP years back that way, which is tragically lost for the foreseeable future to Photobucket yanking free hosting), though I would of course not suggest anyone use a ROM that fell off the back of the truck, that would be illegal. :::PPP
The situations under which I’d recommend PC over the original are:
The existence of voice acting is centrally important to your enjoyment of a game. PC’s voice actors are all turning in solid work, despite my beefs with the voice direction and the script.
You want the option to skip the majority of the combat gameplay and just play for story (but don’t want to go to the trouble of, like, Action Replay codes). PC has smoothed out one of the game’s more annoying (if optional) mechanics and offers an easy mode where you can skip all non-scripted fights entirely while still getting the rewards for them, though once you turn it on you can’t turn it off.
Otherwise, my vote is strongly in favor of getting your hands on the original game if you possibly can. PC has a handful of significant convenience features, but to my mind they’re outweighed by how much worse it looks (not just the portraits and Eruca’s redesign, but the interface and a major graphical glitch with sprite placement), how much worse the translation is, and the fact that it doesn’t allow you to reach the original end of the game without going through some forgettable-to-bad new content.
im going through your remake hate tag rn and man am i relieved i decided not to spend money on perfect chronology! i recently played radiant historia and was strongly considering buying pc, cause i loved the game + wanted to support the series. i was hesitant primarily due to the changed art style. i had no idea about all the other crap - especially the fanservice stuff. what a shame that atlus went all in on pandering to creeps. i hope one day the game will get a remake worthy of the original.
From my view having now played 95% of the goddamn thing before taking an extended mental health hiatus in the middle of the ~new~ ending, at this point the creepy fanservice and general mistreatment of the entire female cast is only about 30% of my beef with it.
The other 70% is that aside from the voice-acting and adding said fanservice, the budget for the game seems to have been about $3, and the translation budget was apparently about 25¢. It actually looks worse than the original in many places due to graphical glitches and cutscene blocking that’s awkwardly unchanged from the original despite a larger field of view, there are a number of features that are clearly only half-finished (most obviously the minimap- it literally just displays rectangles with the x,z coordinates of the exits marked), arguably the biggest balance problem of the original has actually been worsened, and I’m pretty much certain the new content was written in a rush by people who had never played the game and only read summaries of the plot.
There are a few major convenience features like left-right-arrow page scrolling on menus and allowing you to pick what node to go to from a bad end, and at least in English the voice-acting is solid. But that’s the extent of the credit I’m willing to give it, and even said VA is tarnished by a) direction that often seems to miss the point of scenes, lines, and characters, b) the vastly blander and less interesting new translation, and c) the incredibly jarring experience of a character with a portrait who talks in full voice clips having a conversation with a character without a portrait who talks in monosyllabic grunts.
It’s painfully obvious that Atlus did not care at all about this game, and slapped together just enough to say they’d remade it to wring a quick buck out of the IP before the 3DS became completely obsolete. And that’s why the fanservice: they put in anime boobs to sell it to the crowd who buy games for anime boobs, because they figured that was the biggest return on the least investment.
Anyway I’ve got half of one spitefic on my hard drive and an outline for a second and once I finish the damn thing I intend to forget it exists as thoroughly as possible.
Thank god, I played through this game and spent half an hour looking for someone equally mad at OC donut steel and plot changes before I found this blog
At some point after I get back from my Playing Actually Good Games mental health break and when the game finally deigns to let anyone notice that they know n o t h i n g about Nemesia, there will definitely be an interlude about Mary Sues.
FYI, I’ve let the queue run out for the moment while I take a break to make sure my brain isn’t going to Do That again. Be back after a mental health hiatus; trust me, you’d mostly be getting filler posts otherwise anyway.
so anyway last time the game completely firebombed any remaining pretense of understanding how RH's time travel works, and there wasn't much of it left to start with.
It will probably be better for my blood pressure if I just start incrementing Nyarlamesia anytime something happens that suggests what we're actually doing is helping an eldritch horror seize control of the timestream.
Which we clearly are.
Nyarlamesia: 77
"(The Hall of Binding lies down this path. Am I ready?)"
*boss-fight-anticipatory groan*
To my total lack of surprise, they recycled the Vault of Grinding art resources. Wouldn't be like PC to spend money.
"Here we are... The Hall of Binding. What do we do now?"
...But that's just, like, my suggestion. You do you.
Nemesia: "Your next test is to face history itself."
...Yeah, uh, that's not changing my mind.
Nyarlamesia: 78
Sips++++
"This is the history of war. Returning the chapter to the tome revived the war. History is literally repeating itself."
...
......
She's not even trying to hide that she's a malevolent interdimensional entity and what we're doing is a stunningly bad idea at this point, huh.
Nyarlamesia: 79
Sips++++++
"The countless lives lost here... their passion and pain is taking shape, crying out for blood."
On top of. You know. Everything else about this whole thing, I would like to once again point out: PC's refusal to tell you anything until it's literally about to happen continues to make Nemesia look like a gigantic asshole with no regard for the lives or feelings of those around her. haha why would she warn Stocke before he came here that for some nonsensical reason he was going to have to fight the ghost of every single person who has ever died in a war. Or, for that matter, that he was going to have to fight anything at all. Whatever, his job is to kill things she tells him to kill and fetch things she tells him to fetch, so he'll do those things whenever she tells him to and he needs to know nothing else.
Nyarlamesia: 80
Sips++++++
Stocke: "Such violence!"
I include Stocke's name so you can boggle at how incredibly OOC this line is.
Sips++++
"The binder of the Chronicle must understand history's rage..."
Nyarlamesia: 81
Trust me, I understand rage all right.
Sips++++++
"Only then can you turn the page!"
PC do you have any idea whatsoever how books work. You can turn pages that are not in books. You do not bind books one chapter at a time. You do not have to have bound prior pages to turn later ones. Please learn how books function before you start trying to make convoluted metaphors about them.
Nyarlamesia: 82
Sips++++
(Also, we wouldn't want any of the other six people awkwardly hanging around in the background of this cutscene to react or anything.)
...
......
Seriously?
That's your ~history of war~?
That is how you decide the crystallized pain of everyone who's ever died in battle looks?
A brown thaumachine with a popemobile hat and two brown cannons?
Great budget priorities: 31
FUCK YOU AND THE HELL SPIDER YOU RODE IN ON: 62
How Do I Art: 93
Sips++++++
And, naturally, it goes down in two rounds and does no damage because on its single turn, it decided to target Eruca with a normal phys attack when she had Divine Light up.
Sips++++++
"We've recorded the history of war into the magical tome, yes?"
🎶 Nothing 🎶 about 🎶 any of this 🎶 makes any 🎶 seeense 🎶
Sips++++++
"When famine struck 80 years ago, Noah tried to save his fellow Granorgites."
We literally had this exposition unnecessarily repeated less than five minutes ago. I hate PC.
Sips++++++
"But the King of Granorg forbade thaumatech engineering, and as a result the people suffered."
He forbade it because it was hastening the end of the goddamn world, and I have seen little to no indication that PC is aware of this.
Sips++++++
"Noah and his followers went north to start anew. And so, the land of Alistel was born."
Oops: 121
Sips++++++
"But as Alistel grew affluent, Granorg grew jealous. So it has been recorded in the tome."
"And soon, my seeds planted throughout history will have shaped the past to fit it. :)"
Nyarlamesia: 83
Seriously, though, once again, the fact that this is choosing to fixate on the history of Alistel as the first thing we need to put back in this book is really friggin' telling.
Even with PC's timeline, there were 80 years between the fall of the Empire and Noah's rebellion. But why would we care about those when we could talk about how great and perfect fucking Noah was for about the eighth fucking time? All of war is the war between Alistel and Granorg, which was started by Granorg in an EVIL UNDERHANDED WAY because they were JEALOUS of how great Alistel is.
We are, allegedly, trying to solve the mistakes of the Empire, and STILL everything has to be about fucking Noah and how great he is.
Sips++++++
Rosch: "So the starving citizens weren't enough? What a petty reason to finally change their minds..."
I am going to find the Atlus executives and slap every single one of them with a wet fish.
Sips++++
Eruca: "Still, I can't quite grasp why thaumatech engineering would have been forbidden."
…
...…
......…
.........…
...............
FUCK YOU AND THE HELL SPIDER YOU RODE IN ON: 63
*drains glass of tea, makes another one*
Marco: "Hmm, I wonder. That question's never been answered, has it?"
YES IT FUCKING HAS.
FUCK YOU AND THE HELL SPIDER YOU RODE IN ON: 64
*drains that glass, too*
"Not in this chapter, anyway. We have at least two more to go."
*extended groaning noise*
Sips++
"Maybe it's on the next page. Let's keep reading and find out!"
please for the love of all that is holy stop mixing your stupid book metaphors
Sips++++
This is short but there's a node and I can't take any more of this.
Tally:
Why was this changed? 531
Changes I Don’t Hate: 237
Poor choice of expressions/voice clips/sound effects: 148
I guess I should look on the bright side: there's monsters to fight now, and that means less time spent in cutscenes, listening to terribly-written exposition.
On the other hand, less terribleness means I have to spend more time playing the game to have a full post.
On the other other hand, playing more of it means I'm closer to never having to play it ever again.
My very confused observation on reloading is that for whatever reason, the goblin field sprites are a different palette-swap now, with pale blue and much darker gray. This is... weird, because it was definitely the other one before and there are other goblins with that palette when you get into fights, but I didn't think RH even had engine support for randomizing enemy field sprites and it would be very unlike PC to put actual effort into adding that. The darker coloring does look less bad in general, though that was kind of the least of my complaints about the use of monochromatically palette-swapped goblins as random encounters in what's supposed to be a final-er final dungeon.
...Incidentally, at least in this area, it looks like all the goblins are even one type of goblin sprite, out of the three (they're all mages).
So much effort went into PC, you gais.
Great budget priorities: 29
Sips++
The enemy names on the goblin palette swaps are not helping any of my questions about what the hell they're doing here, incidentally. "Heretic Wizard"? Like, great, that implies these are sentient beings with (heretical) beliefs, so why are they just kinda chillin' inside Nemesia's stupid book universe?
Sips++
They're also so weak that Raynie one-shotted one of the ugly yellow-and-white archers from full health with End Thunder. SO MUCH MORE CLIMACTIC THAN THE FINAL DUNGEON, YOU GAIS.
Sips++
"This chest is empty. It must need an Artifact."
"Returned the Red Mirror"
"Obtained Mana Crystal"
...Seriously? That's your idea of endgame loot that requires suffering through a crappy sidequest to access?
Sips++
Also, I checked, and the ~artifacts~ are still not appearing in my inventory because it would take, like, effort to write descriptions for them, and I gotta say, the fact that Stocke is apparently producing them out of thin air when Nemesia did not say she gave them to him is not making me reconsider the early Nyarlamesia count for the game conveniently stopping you from looking at your inventory when he definitely did have them.
Nyarlamesia: 76
I also have yet to see more than two types of enemies, even in battle.
Because, again, this is totally how you make an impressive endgame.
Great budget priorities: 30
Sips++
aaand the next treasure chest gave me three Tourniquets.
Between this and the laughingstock that was Tudeforce, I would be genuinely unsurprised to discover that the Nemesia Nonsense endgame was balanced with the assumption that it was going to be a chapter or two earlier. (And this would have been a terrible reward back then, too.)
Sips++
*realizes I'm out of less cutscene-inducing things to do, gives extended groan, interacts with ~Book Sculpture~*
Nemesia: "Alistel was founded by a man named Noah."
I am going to sneak into the homes of every single Atlus executive and seed their carpets with Legos.
Sips++++++
"His knowledge of thaumatech turned the frigid north into a land of plenty."
It's cold because they're in the damn mountains.
Sips++++++
...aaand that's the scene. Literally. It ends there.
What in Vainqueur's deepest spider-infested hell was the point of that.
Sips++++++
Anyway I interacted with one of the stunningly ugly red-palette-swapped save points and ended up in "Past Sand Fortress," because apparently Nemesia is still getting those kickbacks. And a treasure chest gave me a single Guard Down+, because, once again, why would we want quest rewards that serve literally any purpose at the time you get them.
Sips++
I guess at least this area is full of tigers instead of more gobli- ahahahaha just kidding there's still more goblins in the tiger fights. Because we all love listening to goblin screeches so damn much.
Sips++
...oh good god, PC, I thought we got over stomping all over mythology references by calling saber-toothed tigers "Fenrir" after the English version of Etrian Odyssey 1 did it TEN YEARS AGO.
Sips++++
Incidentally, on top of having HP so low they go down to one base elemental spell from Raynie, the inexplicably bright blue knight goblins are doing single-digit damage to Rosch. Threatening enemies these are not, any more than they're dramatic or thematically appropriate ones.
Sips++
...Maybe it's because if you rob them, they have a sword with an attack bonus of 10.
Anyway the chronicles of godawful treasure chest rewards continue with a Shield Herb+. Seriously, why the hell were the PC staff so convinced you wanted a gazillion Herb+s? Almost all the late-game Nemesia bosses had them as super-rare steals, but they're not that useful.
Sips++
oh good lord, was the entire reason that stupid "AH2 but Viola instead of Rosch and also we're incredibly insulting to the motivations behind Kiel's AH2 sacrifice" quest was key just so they had a required ~artifact~ to stick in the Sand Fortress ~Book Sculpture~?
Sips++++
Nemesia: "Not long had passed since the birth of Alistel before Granorg began to covet their prosperity."
This is still a retcon and it still makes me angry and I still think it's a sign that the PC writers never got it through their damn heads that Alistel are not the good guys.
Sips++++
"Granorg's army was marching on Alistel before its declaration of war reached Noah's hand."
YES, I IMAGINE IT WAS, BECAUSE YOU DO NOT ISSUE DECLARATIONS OF WAR WHEN YOU SEND TROOPS TO CRUSH AN INSURRECTION WITHIN YOUR BORDERS.
Sips++++++
"The Sand Fortress was built to fend off the impending invasion."
(Tumblr steadfastly refuses to accept that this is supposed to be animated, so I leave it as it is here as a monument to the futility of communication on a website programmed by drunken monkeys.)
So. Great. PC wants me to believe that they got invaded without warning and somehow had time to construct a giant fortress at the border in the time between finding out and Granorg's troops making it to the border. Because that makes sense. I hate PC.
Sips++++++
...huh. Apparently two of the "Mythril Knight" goblins in the front row have a formation attack.
Unfortunately for them, I don't care enough to leave them alive to see it.
Also, apparently ~Past Granorg~ is on fire, because reasons. And only on the middle and bottom of the screen, because they totally programmed this effect for the 3DS-sized screen, you know.
How Do I Graphics: 92
Sips++
In the still ongoing saga of bad treasure chest rewards, the ~Red Pottery~ got me a Panacea+, and I cannot overemphasize how not worth sitting through that godawful Tarquin quest that was.
Sips++
"Obtained 2 Divine Water!"
ARE YOU KIDDING ME. YOU CAN BUY THOSE IN EVERY SHOP AFTER CHAPTER 3 FOR 1500 GOLD APIECE
Sips++++++
Seriously, I know we already got rewards from these quests, but this is an embarrassment. These are still treasure chests in monster-infested areas, and they have special conditions to unlock them. You can make a MINIMUM GODDAMN EFFORT to make them have something other than total garbage in them.
Sips++++++
...Okay, I revise my earlier comment about the stupid Viola quest, because apparently PC isn't actually trying to make the key ~artifacts~ at all relevant to the locations they're being put, because the one from the quest with Fake Raul apparently goes in Granorg. So I guess we're back to "why was that quest key, it was bland and forgettable and irrelevant to anything."
Sips++
"80 years ago, a terrible famine befell the Kingdom of Granorg. Noah strove to save lives with thaumatech engineering. But the king of Granorg forbade its use, dooming his subjects to sickness and starvation."
Seriously, though, why is Nemesia even saying this? I mean, I know by now not to expect PC to care about little details like "we have heard all of this before and this dialogue is boring and adds absolutely nothing," but this isn't even framed as one of her infodumps. She just says 2-3 sentences out of the blue whenever you close one of her stupid books. I have no idea why she is announcing this.
Sips++++
"Looks like the path to the Hall of Binding has opened up!"
*extended groaning noise*
"It's where historical events are compiled and set in stone."
...
......
Yeah, uh, see you tomorrow.
FUCK YOU AND THE HELL SPIDER YOU RODE IN ON: 61
THAT'S NOT HOW THE CHRONICLES WORK++
Tally:
Why was this changed? 531
Changes I Don’t Hate: 237
Poor choice of expressions/voice clips/sound effects: 148
Hey, kids! Tez here with a helpful PSA: if you have a history of depression worsened by sleep deprivation, it is a bad, repeat, a bad idea to stay up until 3 AM three days in a row!
