Part 17: Capcom's revenge makes this game vastly more difficult, to my delight. Meanwhile, with Keiji Inafune....

Someone joined the forums just so they could play Red Sun. I have a policy of not insulting those who donate their time and effort to help, so I won't dwell on that. Yes, he's a newbie, so inevitably there'll be rough edges. He's paid money to suffer for entertainment's sake, I kind of have to stop and stare.

Anyway, I'll note the Fuckups as best I can.


Fuckup Tally: 209


Fuckup Tally: 210


Fuckup Tally: 211

2 for one double Fuckup bonus!

Fuckup Tally: 212

What's bizarre is how Chisao can type and set all of this up, including voice masking technology and trapped data, and yet is so young he can't even enunciate properly.

Onto the update proper:



The usual "Lan and MegaMan talk about their opponent and make an assumption" scene basically consists of "The Navi's name is Ponta, that's cute." After walking out for the usual reason, Lan stops for a moment, looks around, and a little girl appears out of nowhere in front of him.



Ponta's operator Yuko is just a little girl, and she has something of a twist on the old Knight in Shining Armor idea.



Oh wait, you mean the Navi. Well, whatever floats your boat, kiddo.



Fuckup Tally: 213

Lan, she wasn't talking about you.



This, I have to hand it to Yuko, is probably the most justified reason for any sidetracking in the game.



Yuko walks towards the exit and abruptly vanishes. It's meant to be the same thing as her sudden appearance, but considering that that's what happens to the player as well when changing areas, it doesn't really work.



Foreshadowing!



A scenario of having to chase Yuko and her Navi around everywhere begins!



Or not. While it looks as though Lan just stands there, there actually is a cutscene of the two of them running around the Dendome exterior chasing each other, it's actually kind of cute.



Lan asks Yuko to play some more after their match, since it seems as though they won't meet again until then. Yeah right, scenario continuity? Blasphemy.



Oh shit! Uh, Sir! Please, don't worry, we were just playing!



Clearly the overprotective type. Lan responds that she was having fun, naturally.



Yuko having fun is a terrible thing, however, because it sets up the scenario. We've already established that children having fun is a terrible thing from this game's perspective, of course.



Welcome to "The Sixth Sense: Blue Moon"!



Don't worry, mister, tragic death in the family makes Lan the perfect candidate to deal with this kind of thing!



Fuckup Tally: 214

Consistency as usual. Navi Ghosts are the V2/V3/SP Navi fights, why we have to do anything involving an exorcism for these in particular is beyond me. Seriously, AquaManSP even pesters me a few times while I'm running around online for a while to nail the point home.



While there are something like 9 or so Navi Ghosts, the only ones you need to find are the bad ones, which will pull the usual routine of summoning viruses against you. There are 4 of those, the others will all just appreciate you sending them to the great recycling bin in the sky by giving you some zenny.



Fuckup Tally: 215

Checking with Haruka about what she thinks of the situation yields this baffling non-sequitur line. What customers!?



To my immense surprise...HOLY FUCK THE NPC DIALOGUE CHANGES! THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE. I-I don't know what game I'm playing anymore! And the dialogue...the dialogue is useful! It denotes that a Navi Ghost or two is in the area.

You can see the CyberCrystal up on the top-right corner of the screen as well. It's blue normally, being near a Navi Ghost makes it turn yellow, and red is when you're right next to it. Just mash the A button then, and you'll find it eventually.



The actual CyberSutra is kind of funny in that it's just a string of random character names.

By the way, at this point, I got very annoyed with the low-level virus encounters that did nothing but waste my time. My response was to turn on the No Random Encounters cheat code I'd used for WoodMan's scenario again, because speeding up the gameplay means I'll keep my patience longer and the updates will come faster.

I'll of course turn it off when in new areas where the viruses make more of a difference and can drop decent chips.



The Navi Ghosts aren't hard to find, really, considering the CyberCrystal's help.



It winds up being a very short scenario! Uh...don't worry, sir, I'll give your daughter a good time...she'll be back in less than an hour, I promise!



Yuko pulls her appear-out-of-nowhere trick again to arrive at the stage.

No video for the generic Navi fights as usual, because at this point they all fight like Flave's Navi with more HP.



This was an easy, simple scenario, with a fairly likable generic NPC. This is absolutely against the design philosophy of this game! You know what that means...



I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. THEY'RE EVERYWHERE. THEY DON-wait no, she does know she's dead. Hey, Yuko, can you make the walls bleed? Pretty please?



We've granted Yuko's wish...to have a NetBattle with a handsome, cool, strong opponent.

Well...okay, when you put it that way. Go on to the next world, kiddo, my bloodthirsty love of fighting has certainly let you face a mighty opponent for your last battle.



She then sparkles and ascends into heaven. Yes, this is stupid...but I can't help it. Anyone who plays to my megalomania and lust for combat is okay in my book.



Bonus: WE GET THE BEST SOUL IN THE GAME, WOO! NumberSoul is 3 turns of having 10 chip slots. Oooohh hell yes. Too bad about the regular chip thing, but after this it's time to pack my folder with Atk+ chips and the like!



Eh?

Fuckup Tally: 216

Kind of a minor Fuckup, but what bothers me is the inconsistency. Literally every single other scenario usually has an email from an 'anonymous sender' or our opponent. Why in the world Higsby's scenario goes with something different is really kind of puzzling. Higsby isn't asocial, he likes Lan, he's sent him emails before...why do it this way? It's confusing.



WHATNONONONONONOYOUFUCKINGDON'TIWANTNUMBERSOUL!



Fuckup Tally: 217

Okay, that's a justified reason, but Capcom, GET THE FUCKING MUGSHOT RIGHT, PLEASE! Yet another one of their consistent errors, like the issue with the word viruses.



Cone here, screenshot where he introduces himself omitted, is from NAM, one of the largest companies in the world. Whom, naturally, we've never heard of before. Let me see, given that that sprite typically represents Netopians, and the N in NAM presumably stands for Netopia, I guess this is a situation of "Netopian megacorp loan sharks are out to get Higsby".



And they want to replace it with...a Scrub Brush store. Oh boy.

Fuckup Tally: 218

Capcom Economics strike again. Okay, look, first of all, ACDC Town is a pretty backwater town, calling it a central location is a mistake. That isn't a good place to put a store that specializes in specific products like whatever Scrub Brushes are, which I can only assume are glorified Mr. Clean scrub pads.

This is to replace a BattleChip store, and considering how NetBattles are so central to the premise of the series, which this game insists on flip-flopping between emphasizing and undermining, NAM is going to wind up with something less profitable by a large margin.

Seriously, we just had a little girl's soul go to heaven because we NetBattled her, I don't think anybody's going to linger amongst the living for the sake of housecleaning.



Right, time to raise awareness of the shop. Higsby goes off to get his best supplies from his warehouse, and Lan is drafted into helping out, though to be fair, we do have a vested interest in keeping Higsby in business.



You're given 20 flyers, and the Cyberworld has 20 NPCs in total to talk to hand them out. However, you only have to hand out 10 of them.



Depending on how many you hand out, Nanako (Higsby's assistant in the maid outfit) will reward you with a different chip.

10-15: I forget.
15-19: LifeSynch Q (Makes all viruses have the same HP, would be useful if not for crap code)
20: Ball T.

I thought the reward for all 20 was better at the time, so I went for them all. Go figure. Also, seeing this and considering the series premise, I wonder about the whole issue of spam.



Fuckup Tally: 219

Also yes, this is something consistently mentioned by the NPCs. Higsby advertises the fact that Nanako is a cute girl in a maid outfit. Kinda creepy, Higsby, but if it attracts customers...



What the? Huh, I thought you could only get this later. Well, okay.



Weirdly enough, you can (and have to if you want to get more than 11) hand out fliers to NPCs within random Jack-In spots, including the oven and doghouse.



And the ElTo-

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MY HP!?

Oh my god. My No Random Encounters cheat seems to have triggered an in-game safety and completely destroyed my max HP. The only reason my Max HP isn't zero, instantly killing me in any battle, is because I have an HP+50 program in my NaviCust. To give myself any significant HP at all for the rest of the LP of this game, I will need to rely on those sorts of programs, and that means that either my HP will be extremely low, or I can't use the Custom+2 and/or FloatShoes programs to give myself very much necessary boosts. This was clearly intended as an anti-piracy or anti-cheating measure to make the game unplayably difficult.

....Well.

BRING IT ON! I'm Epee Fucking Em, Capcom, do you really think this will stop me? If things really get too bad, I'll cheat even further and give myself full access to every chip, which would still mean that I'm playing the game on its own terms. In the case of any end-of-the-LP romhacks though, I'll grab a 100% savegame off GameFAQs or something, because I can only assume that those literally will be impossible with such tiny HP.



Returning to Nanako, we get the stupid Ball T chip, as well as hear that Higsby still isn't back yet. Time to go check out that online warehouse.



NumberMan says that it was Cone's Navi who did it. Loan sharks!



Excellent game design, nice to know they put the effort in where it counted. Back to Nanako!



Back to NumberMan!



You couldn't see before due to the text boxes blocking the screen, but NumberMan was talking to MegaMan from just behind the previous gate.

Fuckup Tally: 220

Why this one is re-locked is anyone guess. What's worse is that the Navi in question is NUMBERman. Cracking a password or the like is his specialty! At the end of MMBN1, the endgame WWW Base dungeons all ended with one of the NPCs helping us, GutsMan, Glide, NumberMan, etc. They helped by destroying obstacles that MegaMan couldn't get past, NumberMan's was a gigantic door with some insane number of possible combinations. He got it open in seconds.



Adding insult to injury, the gate is just a series of numeric questions.



This one is an estimate of the final Fuckup Tally a sequence of numbers that's rather clever though, from a security standpoint. Each digit increases by one. A computer looking for patterns would identify that this was +111 for each number, but if you continued this, you'd start getting discrepencies, which would only get worse as you went on:

Increasing each digit by 1 (adding a digit when 9 -> 10):

147, 258, 369, 4710, 5811...

Increasing each digit by 1 (rolling over to 0):

147, 258, 369, 470, 581...

+111:

147, 258, 369, 480, 591...

Easy for a human to spot, automated code-breaking software would have a lot more trouble with it. I doubt Capcom thought of it as anything besides a decent question for a 10-second puzzle, but it's very fitting for a security door set up by NumberMan or his operator.



That said, why didn't you just Jack-Out, god damn it?

Fuckup Tally: 221

Yes, it's a restricted area that has both a key and a series of number-based questions to answer in order to enter, so you'd think that maybe there would be something to prevent that. No, MegaMan can Jack-Out just fine, blowing that idea out.

Anyway, since Cone is actively working against our attempts to save the shop, I guess something like a vested interest in the Scrub Brush must be at work. Cone, you filthy bastard!



Uhm. Between this and the fliers...Higsby, you filthy bastard! It doesn't help that he looks like he browses the internet all day long, hell, he's pretty much the in-universe equivalent of a goon.



Even with the money flowing in from the new customers, Cone laughs and refuses to back off. Well, after locking NumberMan into the warehouse, you'd think that.



4 children NPCs arrive and talk about how much they like Higsby's shop. With a heroic swell of the title theme!



What do you know, a villain with an even flimsier motivation than Regal!



This is the highest I can bring my HP up to, considering Capcom's protection measure, for this fight. I think there are HP+500 programs from the Number Trader, but screw that.



Fuckup Tally: 222

The reason I need that HP boost, and even sacrifice my beloved Custom+2 program for it, is because NumberMan is much harder than he was back in MMBN1.

In MMBN1, his NumberBall attack moved very slowly, as in that game, attacks that moved smoothly between panels as opposed to moving panel-to-panel didn't exist. Plus, he was stationary. His only other attacks were the DiceBomb and TimeBomb attacks, the former is demonstrated in the video (Attack strength depends on the number rolled), and TimeBomb has been in every game.

Not only is NumberMan now quite mobile, he has a very unintuitive projectile attack. It will travel in either a question mark shape in one direction or the other after pausing, meaning you have to move to the center panel to dodge. If you stay there as it pauses, however, it will fly straight into you. The trick is to be standing next to it, then move into that panel, but identifying that attack pattern is difficult.



Not sure if this is a Fuckup...But hell yes, that was a bad opponent for that security code to hit me at, but I beat him.



Fucking YES! That concludes Tournament Number 4, see you again at the second Hawk Tournament.

Until then:




Coincidence is a funny thing, ain't it? This happened only two days ago on the 29th.