Part 5

Good news for the seven of you following this, Gametap worked fine. The graphics are a little different on the PC version (a little crisper, maybe showing muddy detail at resolutions the original was never supposed to have, and a few visual effects are missing... instead of forming out of bubbles, Homonculus shows up in a bright red light) but the game itself is identical. Investigation has shown you can complete chapter 4 in seconds, without skipping any dialogue.



Forty-one seconds, to be precise. But that's lame, and it makes a few of the later chapters lame too, so let's not.

I started over, and played through the same way as before, only without picking up the egg. I still did the wake-the-owner ending to chapter one, so that free meal is still waiting for Eike.

Anyway. Where were we?





So goddamn effeminate.





Homunculus gently chides Eike for dying the same way twice, and suggests armor. Lacking 200 gp and an item store, Eike will have to improvise.




Whups! Mr. Eckart left an old picture in the book he lent you. But hey, what are the odds of some random photograph having any relevance to today?



Pretty damn good, apparently.



Eike travels to 1902, before the invention of color. (The color brown had existed previously, but it served and died in the war of 1812)









This is Mr. Brum, who's basicly Mr. Eckart. The only notable differance is that instead of having his daughter kidnapped, Mr. Brum was forcably given the world's worst mustache.







Once again, Eike spends the precious last few moments of his soon-ending life making small-talk with people he met on the street. C'mon, man! Spend it memorizing Jeet-Do! Stand with your back to a land-mine! Hop a jet the hell out of Lebenbaum! Do something.

Notably, Brum and his daughter Sibylla are an oddity in video games... a happy, well-adjusted family. Neither of them are ninja assassins, if you can believe it. Even other adventure games come up short on the "normal people" scale compared with Shadow of Destiny.




Mr. Brum decides to commemorate the founding of a museum with a photograph of a stranger. He's as crazy as Eike.




A tear in my jacket? Whups.



Uhh...



Uhhhh...



Sibylla waits until her father is out of the room and makes an excuse to strip Eike of his clothes and put on one of her costumes. Girls grow up so FAST, don't they?



"It covers your face, after all."



Yeah, because founding a museum with a picture of a stranger isn't enough of a joke.




The costume comes with a set of juggling balls... just as Eike said earlier he can juggle three balls with no problem. You can juggle as much as you want, but each time you do, Eike juggles for about three seconds and ten seconds get added to the clock.





Searching the room reveals this... you can tell it's important because it's in color. (also because we saw the juggler scene in chapter one )




Eike remembers the plot! No time to play pretty princess dressup now... he has fate to defy!







Sibylla and Eike more or less solve this puzzle FOR the player. Which is just as well... after destroying myself in the prologue, my knee-jerk reaction was to stay the hell away from previous incarnations of myself.





"I have to see a man... about a pan."



Time-warp forward to today, two PM!



This game came out before Metal Gear Solid did. Clearly that makes it a trendsetter.







You can receive the message from yourself without sending it, or you can give the message to yourself without receiving it. Why? Because time-travel DEFIES continuity.





Eike takes all he's learned from people disappearing while he's distracted and uses it to disappear while someone's distracted.





The Brum Museum... the dream of A Man, his Loving Family, and a Wandering Juggler Hobo.



The next scene starts with a closeup of some keys. Hmm... wasn't there another one earlier?





While changing back, Eike finds a frying pan amoung his things. Hah! Take THAT, causality!



Sorry, kid, but I need to go get stabbed 99 years from now. Soooo... goodbye forever.





Woop woop woop! Subtle forshadowing alert! Woop woop woop!





Hey! Since when do you care about that? You're always jumping through time randomly, popping in and out in plain view of everyone.




Anyway, back in the present, Eike lands five seconds before a fatal stabbing. Convenient.




And we're right where we left off with the 41 second playthrough.



Only now we have a kick-ass photograph. They only did this about fourty times in back to the future.



Next chapter is going to have a plot branch in it! I'll make promises about seeing if I can get to it tonight, and then break them! Won't that be fun?