Part 63: Final Update: The Epilogue

Final Update: Epilogue

Well, here we are. Still hard to believe it's finally here. I said I'd get this LP done, and by Bush, I did it.

But instead of waffling on endlessly about that, let's look at the last bit of content I can dig up for the LP.


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CONTENT WRAPUP

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IRIS NOIRE BOSS FIGHT



I promised this way long ago, and here it is at last.

The cutscenes progress the same up until after the animated cutscene of Noire charging Bush.



Music: Iris Noire Battle


From there, we're dropped right into the fight.

For this, I'm actually using my old file from nearly a decade ago pulled off my Wii SD card, which conveniently wasn't far away from this point in the game.

I tried for forever to get to this point on an old Bush savestate, but the event for Gelwein to open the gates on Whale Island just wouldn't happen.

We're currently invincible for sake of demonstration and carrying a max level farming hammer, aptly called The Hammer.



Iris fights exclusively with spells and no melee, despite what her animated cutscene would suggest.

The first of them is a slow moving wave of fire that explodes on contact.



It spreads out by a lot.





IRIS NOIRE: Go.


Another of her attacks has her create a frozen mist...





Then drops a moonlit meteor that travels slowly at you before exploding into a second wave out in 6 directions.

Also yes that green bar is our HP. We've got so much it doesn't fit on the screen or render properly half the time. This is totally legitimate and not a result of cheat codes, I assure you.




IRIS NOIRE: Fly.


Another attack is a large circle of violet lightning strikes.

Her voice acting is appropriately emotionless and reverb-y, given the mind control magic stuff going on.




IRIS NOIRE: Away with you!


This attack throws out a wave of dark runes in a random distribution. It's not easy to dodge, and does a hefty chunk of damage. I have unnecessarily boosted defense here, so in reality every one of her attacks does a lot of damage.



She rarely strays outside of the center circle and will often teleport back to the Dark Rune.



She can also strafe while casting, so good luck landing a hit.



There's also the fact you can't hurt her anyways.



It's these 4 computer monitor things evenly spread in the corners of the rooms that's the actual target.



They're not lightweight either. Bush is using a hammer with over 140 base damage and spamming the charge attack and they're not going down fast at all.

The challenge is Noire spamming magic at you while you try to break these.



Her moveset gets an update by the last machine. This attack summons a large variety of bat shaped projectiles that remain in place briefly...



Before all of them charge at your last position, giving you little time to escape. Complete with bat noises!



They then just swarm around briefly, although it's worth noting they don't hurt much. It's a move to stagger you so she can drop something real on your head.



Her other new attack summons a massive ring of blue spheres...



That descend to the ground in a chain of icicles.





Your best chance to get in and get hits is to bait her to use the fire wall. If your timing is right, you can get in between casts of the wave and have enough time to drop a special.



With a flash of light and a scream, the fight ends.







From there, the scene progresses kinda similarly. Gelwein just attributes the awareness-control being weakened thanks to Mist's presence and hidden power.


So that's that.

I do still like how they have an alternate, no-fight route if you've spent a lot of time befriending Blanche.


In the vein of some final gameplay stuff we never touched...



Way back when, we read a book about a guy and his squirrel. What it suggests to do is give a Rune Stone to a monster you like.




BUSH: I hope you'll lay some great eggs.


bush, dogs horses don't lay eggs



This prompts us to name a new monster...





And, um, we now have an egg!

I stand corrected, I guess everything lays eggs.

These take a long while to hatch, but pop out a monster with a higher level and the same friendship as the parent.

But of course, no monster can replace Pony, so I just didn't do this. (i also forgot)

And while we're in the menu, let's take a final look at Bush's stats.



Total Villager Friendship:

Mist: 9.9 FP, 6.7 LP
Rosetta: Maxed
Lara: 9.5 LP & FP
Melody: Maxed
Bianca: 5 FP, 6 LP (strange how LP is higher than FP)
Tabatha: Maxed



Eunice: 10 FP, 8.8 LP
Cinnamon: Maxed
Anette: Maxed
Selphy: Maxed
Uzuki: 10 FP, 7.4 LP
Iris: Maxed



Turner : 5.8 FP
Rita: 5 FP
Erik: 7.8 FP
Kanno: Maxed
Candy: 6.8 FP
Stella: Maxed



Ganesha: Maxed
Marco: 4.6 FP
Danny: 5.4 FP
Lute: Maxed
Minerva: 2.9 FP
Kross: Maxed



Brodik: 0.8 FP
Nolan: 5.5 FP
Juniper: 4.3 FP



House has every decoration possible, plus a barn with 30 slots total.

1043 Lumber to spare too, not bad.



A buncha books. It's nearly every cookbook and all the crafting books except for weapons that arent Axes or Magic.



Goes to show that nothing outdid the absolutely crazy 1st summer's output. In the top 5 alone, it makes up for 3 slots and adds up to over 300,000g of total profit.

One summer.



Most of our monsters hover around the 2-3 FP range.



Pony is at 5 because she traveled with us constantly. I did brush all the monsters every day before the large timeskips, so this goes to show the friendship benefits from that and how impossible it is to get FP 10 on a high level monster.

Level 59, and our eternal MVP and best friend.



Bush himself ended just shy of 67, with a very strong skillset. The general average is around 60 skillpoints, with Weapons being our lowest.

75 Lumber/Axe and 57 Magic ain't bad.

We've also got about 50 something Fruit Subs and 40 something Bamboo Rice stockpiled.


And for our last bit of image content, here's some bonus images.



Here's a looping gif of Bianca brushing Franswah. I think I forgot to ever use this. But it goes with the Mist and Rosetta ones.


Here's Bush and Pony's HUD icons.





And here's some profile icons for some of the villagers.

On to the far more text based stuff....


DIALOGUE WE DIDN'T SEE

Having a text dump really lets you pick up on things you might never have found yourself. Some of this, I tried to see, some of it we just didn't because it never came up.

First up is comments on Juniper. The various villagers have lines for it, some if they're the parent others if they're just visiting but I couldn't get them to go off.



Seriously, I tried. Maybe I was getting shot down thanks to festival or pre-festival dialogue, I dunno.

Some of these definitely seem exclusive to them being the parents though.

Anyways, here they are.


Juniper needs no help being a book lover though. She was literate before she could speak. (At least, according to her retelling of the events.)

These are the dangers of too much knowledge + drinking weird snake oil nearly a year ago.



Obviously, this is if you married Tabatha. Juniper doesn't look any different in this regard, although she should be a half-elf.

Is this the time I mention that Turner and Rita will eventually have another kid, meaning if you married Eunice, Bush's kid will have an aunt/uncle younger than them?

Early Rune Factory, I swear.



Melody doesn't charge for kids. Given that 10g is already a pittance, she really just runs the bath as a non-profit.



We don't know if she posesses the ability to sing the spirit song, but I imagine Candy will be a good teacher.



Erik persists with his quirky means of address, even into the future. We never saw it, but rarely he'll say "my pastoral brother".



ERIK: What is it, my pastoral brother?! Are you researching your own plants after seeing my work? Wonderful, wonderful!


This guy.


Another font of dialogue is Quiz Day.



Apparently Ganesha is half-elven? Her ears are huge if that's the case.

There's three half-elves in RF2 and they're all on the normal-sized but pointy ear variety.

Maybe this meant to say Marco?



destroyed




I think that line is Kanno's at least. I have to guess with some of these.

Still, Super Gramps doesn't hold back, sheesh.


Lara barely gets a chance to talk. What's the Buffamoo Foundation? We'll never know.




And a last little note, if there's a tie in points, Kanno gives the top prize to a random audience member. The most interesting one is:



ROSETTA: Just as I planned. See that, Mist? I win!



Rosetta's rivalry extends even to pure chance.


I don't know the speaker of this last line, but it's funny so:

UNKNOWN: You know, I'm the one that donated this...


And now for some other random stuff.


Backscratchers are pretty decent weapons in later games, usually in the early game.







Finally, all of the bachelorettes have different nicknames for Bush when married. Here's the list.



Some final other bits:

- Mist's later LP event reveals that Mr. Dog is getting better at controlling the rune absorption. Also her two ducks have a baby around the same time as you, I think.

- Apparently Rita owns a whip, and she threatens to whip Bush 100 times if you try to take from her apple stock.

No, I'm not joking.

"If you try to sneak a bite, I'm gonna whip you 100 times, Bush!"

"Well, this is perfect. I was just itching to test out my whip."


Anyways.



[CUT CONTENT]

I've picked up a decent bit of cut content through the text dump, and strangely, looking in the savefile.

Yeah, there's leftover filler data in there for some reason, mostly interaction text. It's nothing that isn't already in the files though.

The notable cut content is this selection of events that seemed to have played when staring at the sky. I have had Bush make a minor comment when staring at the sky for a long while, but I'm led to believe these are cut thanks to their use of @Raguna@ internally, instead of the actual player variable, ÿ 0é0°0Êÿ. Or, in hex, 0A FF 20 30 E9 30 B0 30 CA FF 20.

(ÿ [PO›ÿ is Juniper's variable, by the way.)

If they're actually in the game and I just missed them... whoops? This is me just making an inference. Whether or not they're used, here they are anyways.

There's a little over 20,000 characters here, so I put the rest in a separate test post. Here's just the most interesting ones, sans portraits.




There's also a final one that revisits Lara talking to the dream tree.



You can find the rest of this potentially unused text HERE.


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MY RETROSPECTIVE

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Music: The Sweetest Time

(Have some music links of some of my favorite tracks to spread it out.)


So, final opinion on the game having come back to it after all these years?

Frontier is far from a perfect game, but it has it's moments and I've honestly grown really attached to the adventures of Bush and this strange little town. I suppose when you spend nearly 90 hours of gameplay and hundreds more in writing updates, you either learn to love it or hate it. Writing the last updates were very bittersweet- I'm happy to have completed this, but I'm sad to see it go.

That was Rune Factory: Frontier- and with it, my first LP. It's hard to believe it's been a year and a half since it started and since I decided to pick up the art of doing LPs. The whole of this not only shows Bush's adventure, but also that of finding my footing here and in the medium itself. It's a large jump from merely reading what finds it's way to the archive over a few years, and it's been one with a lot of up and downs. I haven't touched any of my old commentary in proofreading, even if I might have wanted to change it.

Did I ever tell you that doing RFF was a last-minute change from what I did have planned? Turned out better than it should've, really.

Music: To You


The Runey system remains dysfunctional, and I'll join in with the chorus that says to just Action Replay that mechanic away. It's just so very, very time consuming to the point where the faster crop growths don't even feel that rewarding. But I proved it could be done, I suppose. I think if the harvester was quality-of-lifed into just a menu where you can pick how many you want to take or put out at time, it'd help A LOT. And maybe if there was something more interesting to the bonuses or something, like certain crops being able to gain levels if there was a heavy majority of a certain kind of Runey.

Goodbye Runey menace, if only you weren't so tedious.

Music: Whale Island Outside


The soundtrack's now got some particular favorites for me, Whale Island Outside is one I've always liked, I've got a deeper appreciation for Kross's theme, and the seasonal tracks all land pretty well. The Spring theme remains uniquely interesting to me, as I remember loading up the Flash powered before it was lost forever website to hear it as I awaited the day I could play the game.

Music: Grimoire Song - Full Version


Grimoire Song, particularly the finale version, always gives me some chills. Sure, the finale passes by rather swiftly and we only meet Gelwein proper a total of 3 times, but I think it's assisted by how much time you spend with these characters. All those little tunes you hear the girls hum from time to time coming together is great. And speaking of the girls...

Music: Spring


The bachelorettes are all pretty good, though some definitely outshine the others. The seeds of the unbelievably wacky characters that would come in RF3 can be seen here through a number of the girls, (Selphy and Melody in particular,) and they're all generally likeable. I do wish Eunice wasn't stuck with the unfortunate shadow lingering over hers (be it the diet or the strained marriage), and I feel like Rosetta kinda didn't get a lot in the end. Cinnamon's was really minor too, but I can kinda respect it. She delivered content through other means.

Music: Summer

Anette is high on the list for me, not in just because her situation is pretty relatable, but particularly for remaining a constant highlight to every morning. I went out of the way to do the narrative thing just because I felt like it, but also because I wanted to give her a bit more agency in the overall story. They never do explain why she can't see Kross or why monsters chase her, though.

Music: Kross' Theme


On that note, Kross himself deserves special mention for being such an interesting figure you have to go out of your way to learn more about. There's no mechanical reward for it, it's just being friends with a cool guy and a bit of connective info from this game to RF1. I didn't remember a lot about Kross from when I first played this, so seeing the story play out was rather fun.

Music: Green Ruins


Mist's Turnip Mafia thing remains a thing I joked about, ran with the joke, put the joke down, and eventually picked it back up. I don't actually dislike Mist, she's got some funny lines, I just feel like she's not very stand-out in this game compared to her RF1 appearance. (Though to be fair, she gets way more dialogue than most other characters in that game.) I still don't know what her hidden power is, whether or not she's a vampire, related to the experiments, or some sort of Earthmate variant, the game never really said.

Music: Iris' Spirit Song


I kinda wish the game had focused more on Iris, to be honest. It really looks as if it was supposed to be more about them, but it was decided Mist had to take focus being this weird, pseudo-sequel. Or maybe they ran out of time or ideas- unrealized potential is ever the name of the game with Neverland. Still, it's unfortunate that her final event mostly deletes the other Iris in practice. Still, probably budget/time constraints.

Music: Rune Factory 1 - Kardia Park

I still can't tell you how this game is a sequel, just that it takes place in a time period later than RF1.


But I suppose I've yammered enough commentary at you for sixty-something updates, there's more important things to talk about now that we're here. The question I'm sure at least one person wants to ask is...


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WHERE TO GO FROM HERE?

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Well, on forwards with Tides of Destiny is the easy answer, right? Unlike Frontier, I never saw a lot of that game, and honestly, didn't give it much of a chance at the time so who knows where my opinion will land?
While, I definitely could and still plan to LP it someday, (perhaps it'll happen in the next year or two,) I need some space from Rune Factory as well as time for other LPs. As much as I wish I could just write LP updates every day all the time, I'm not capable of surviving off the absorption of knowledge like Selphy.

Then, is the answer reviving my other languishing LPs? No, but rest assured I will ressurect them someday. I did with this one, right? (I own that import cart of J2 for a reason, after all.) And it's not to say I won't find the time for something small to run on the side every once in a while, here's just to hoping I don't underestimate the workload again

Doing Frontier was driven by Lord Hippoman's LP of Rune Factory 1, one of two LPs that first got me hooked on this. The other is Sylphid's Atelier Shallie LP. And thus, it only makes sense I move forward with a game that has ties to the latter...

The next LP I will be launching soon (after a short break or so) is...




(if you watch the SA Sandcastle thread, you've already known about this)

Blue Reflection: Second Light, followed by the original Blue Reflection (and maybe even Ray too, if LPing an anime is something that's even possible).

It's an endeavor that will take a long time to complete and I've been so excited to get it started- it's a series I absolutely adore and Second Light is on par with RF3 for me as an all-time favorite. With Frontier done and my footing found, I feel like I'm ready to give this the highest quality, most extensive LP I can manage for it.

If you enjoyed the slice-of-life or the romance aspects of this game, you'll readily enjoy what Second Light has to offer in that regard, and it has so much more beyond just that in it's music, visual presentation, and combat. We'll even have voting, which despite being spaced out, will still be more frequent than in this LP. (It's also a sequel and also about amnesia, somehow.)

Give it a shot when the LP drops, I hope you won't be disappointed.


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FAREWELL

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To close this out, thank you to each and everyone of you readers for sticking through to the end. Whether you're an active poster, just a voter, or even a lurker, you have my thanks. There's nothing better than knowing people enjoy my work.

If you want to support me, the best way is to just keep on reading. Post if you can think of something to comment on or ask- I won't judge if you don't, I lurk in a lot of threads too. It can be hard to think of something to post sometimes, really.

_{(you can also throw a tip my way if you really want to, but don't feel pressured. heck, mentioning it feels weird)}


The thread will stay up until it gets archived (proofreading and a bit of cleanup work), but feel free to ask any unanswered questions you have.

You can find Bush's savefile and the text dump here, for whatever use you may have of them.

Here's also an anonymous comment box that I'll keep open. So even if you weren't here when this was live, you can still leave your own message.




Music: Title Theme


88 Hours. Man.

..,Well, that's really all that's left to say. Bush will live on in his own peaceful life now, working to remove the runey threat from all future games. For now, we say farewell to Trampoli and the strange people that inhabit it.




Bush, Pony, Anette, Juniper- until we meet again.



...After one last dirt nap, for old time's sake.