Part 40: NG+ Update 12: Degradation
NG+ Update 12: DegradationMusic: The More We Dig
Back in the Fairy Colony my excavators dig out a new room and proceed to tunnel their way into an underground lake.
The lake is another hazard that needs to be overcome. Swimming through it drains a massive 40 HP from every ant in the team, making it the single most dangerous obstacle in the underground.
While most of the team makes it through the damage they’ve taken makes them easy prey for the Antlion in the next cavern down.
Thankfully Blue Team are able to tag in and kill it, allowing the dig to continue.
I haven’t shown it before, but at the very bottom of the map there’s a mystery box - an unidentified room with a completely blank backdrop. Now, finally, we can dig into it.
Oh dear. It seems that, like Tolkien’s dwarves, we have dug too greedily and too deep, and in so doing have uncovered Dragon Quarter’s bonus dungeon. It’s a bit too early for us to go nosing around in there, but rest assured, we’ll be getting to the bottom of it before the LP ends.
Since we’ve dug everything out I disband the excavation teams and assign them all to other jobs.
Ants with high Taste go to our newly opened Cafeteria.
Ants with high HP are packed off to be Explorers. You can select where they’re all sent off to, with more dangerous areas yielding better rewards but also a higher chance that the ant will be horribly murdered instead.
Useless ants with no skills go to the Concert Hall. It’s literally just a place where you can hear the OST. It was pretty nice back in the day, but in the Youtube era it’s pretty worthless and I’ll be replacing it with something more useful as soon as I can.
Enough time has passed that we’ve also unlocked some new facilities. The Bank is absolutely vital for making money, so we definitely want to build one.
The Trainer takes in low-skilled ants like the ones in the Concert Hall and trains them up so their stats aren’t so awful. This is very useful if you need to go on a recruitment drive and the only ants available turn out to be useless no-hopers.
The Newspaper is another money making job. It’s more profitable than the Cafeteria, but it demands more highly skilled ants as a result.
The Review Board provides a list of optional challenges for the player to complete. This could involve winning a certain number of battles in a row without taking damage, or killing a certain type of enemy a certain number of times. Doing this grants the player rewards such as Skills and equipment.
I give orders to build all four new facilities and move on to the shop.
There are four new skills to choose from. Weapon Boost and Shield Boost are Shield Skills that respectively increase your attack or defence whenever you get hit by 1%. We already have Divine, and Cutspace is a Skill for Ryu that decreases an enemy’s movement range by 5%.
There are only two Skills left to unlock now. Both are debuffs, but one is actually pretty useful for a change.
There’s nothing left to do in the colony now, so let’s move on to the Industrial Sector.
The Industrial Sector has a glut of SOL Scenes, six spread across both of its sub-areas. The first one triggers as you’re taking the elevator up to the second floor, past the room with all the Ebonfire bats.
Music: Origin
‘Ryu’ stops. The screen flashes, and when it returns…
…it’s Elyon.
Odjn suddenly roars so loudly the remains of his face starts melting.
Elyon slowly shakes his head.
The scene fades to black, but it isn’t quite over yet.
Music: Controllers of the World
The scene lingers on Elyon’s orders to the Dark Rangers before fading out for good, proving that this scene takes place before the one we saw at the end of the last update. This scene is pretty interesting since it shows that Elyon can still contact Odjn despite their link having been severed. It also hints that his body is degrading much more quickly than he’s letting on, and that he might be using illusions to cover it up.
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Bonus Art: Odjn and Elyon
