Part 12: Big Birds and Racially Motivated Violence
Update 12: Big Birds and Racially Motivated Violence
This'll be a comparatively short update since there was less left of chapter 4 than I expected. We start out heading southeast from Isten to Durst.
There are a few Masliths along the way since I skipped them by circling out of their aggro radiuses coming up, but I decide to wipe them out this time around since I realized how much easier Adrenaline makes it. I also got two new spells while in Isten which I will never, ever use.
There's all of one(1) charm effect in the game, and I'd never even know who could bust it out ahead of time or who they could target, anyway. Poison weapons... slightly more of a worry, I suppose? But I could also just use the turn to cast Storm, Adrenaline, Quicksilver, Call Lightning, Geyser or any number of spells that would actually kill any theoretical enemies who could poison me faster.
William's one-shotting these idiot lizards now. Early on they'd take like 30 damage a piece, and dodge half the swings aimed at them, so it would take six or seven swings to put one of them down.
On the way to Durst I also stop by Everton to cash in that one quest there.
Oh boy, I bet her house is going to be full of an exciting volume of fuck all.
The exciting contents of her broom closet. I'll also note that at this point the party's hoarded a good number of gems and such which, off-screen, I offload at the jewelry store in Elona. It turns out that even an 80% sapphire or other gem stone barely yields as much as a suit of chainmail. They do also take up a lot less inventory space, but if they were more valuable, as in Krondor, they might serve as an alternative to pure liquidity now that our wallet has a size limit.
In Durst, we'll obviously look for Simon at the temple.
It's important that we get blessed before talking to Jhana, since otherwise she'll basically just stonewall us and not tell us about Simon.
Good thing we already met the Party Pope and know where he's hanging out. Time to head back to Ticoro.
Lucky for us he hasn't moved an inch and will be here at all times or day, in all weathers(if Antara had any weathers...), waiting for us to hassle him with minor questions.
And Fellich points us off down to Ravenne... good thing he's being so helpful.
Coming down past Melay I see something odd on the road. It looks weird at a distance, like some sort of gross ghoul thing. Not quite human proportions...
...are you a bird?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xxg7LToSgo
This encounter is entirely optional but is one of the rare few chances we have in the game to learn something about the world's fourth sapient species, the Trkaa(the other three being humans, Grrrlf and Montari). I'm not sure if they're flightless birds or can actually fly, but they're apparently who you pay to deliver messages when it has to go fast. You might remember that Scott mentioned them in chapter 1 related to the feathers in his hat, which he's apparently earned by telling Trkaa stories they haven't heard before.
Someone obviously had fun with these and the Montari speech tics, though.
Time to pry Simon out of his house and give him noogies until he tells us where the fascists are hiding.
It chafes my balls unreasonably that they just used generic mercenary sprites for these supposed Imperial Soldiers.
The cramped battlefield prevents me from getting all the usual buffs on William before the soldiers get all up in Aren's face.
Not that it helps them much, it just delays their deaths slightly. That poor archer in the back just kept shooting at him all fight and missed every single shot, which was somewhat funny. But it did kind of make me wish that the enemies' equipment was more visible. Like, so you could see who was an archer, or who was wearing stronger and weaker armor, so you had some clues as to who to prioritize for buffs/debuffs/armor-ignoring magic damage.
Breaking into Simon's house again, we find one of his letters explaining where he's at.
Weird that someone knew where we were going, though, maybe it was that damn bird who tipped them off.
Simon now exists in Levosche, but so does an NPC that wasn't around before and is one of the... weirder encounters in the game.
As far as I can tell, there's no... resolution to the fact that this lady is apparently a mass-murdering enchantress. We can't stab her, get trained by her, undo her enchantment, get tasked by her to do anything. She's just... here.
Anyway... here's Simon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpjPGmrdWWY
Simon quit the Shepherds after beating a Grrrlf child to death, not after his buddies told him they were planning to kill children.
Now we're hoofing it back to his garden in Ravenne to collect his Shepherd amulet...
Good thing no one's going to try to stop us in any way beyond having sent these four poor idiots to die at our hands.
The amulet we've just picked up is the exact same one we started the game with, which disappeared on us at the end of chapter 3, probably confiscated by Caverton as evidence. It does raise the question of why we couldn't have picked one up off any other other dozens of Shepherds we've stabbed so far.
Oh well, we're headed off to Ticoro, again, and then north into an area we couldn't enter in Chapter 2 since the party would just say they had a vague feeling it wasn't time to go there.
It makes me realize that we haven't actually seen a lake in the game before except for that one underground one.
This chapter ends with a puzzle.
Our clues: the amulet itself and, on the back "R, L, R".
You flip it right(clockwise), left(counter-clockwise) and right again to indicate the correct symbols.
What are the correct symbols?
They're actually carved on the shepherd on the amulet's staff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrKdiENn1lk
This contains the end of chapter 4(including the amulet solution), the start of chapter 5 cutscene and inexplicably also the first fight of chapter 5.
Next time: we actually see chapter 5 and what Kaelyn and Raal are up to.