Part 26: Impossible Fetch Quest

so about your avatar

what

(don't... y'know, answer that, but it just had to be asked)

Chapter 24: Impossible Fetch Quest

Okay, let's get back to our original mission.

Do that... uh, the thing. Get it finished. Someone remind me what we're doing






You People is the politically correct term, you see




Oh well. It's not like this is actually, you know, relevant to anything in any way whatsoever.


Billy has some ideas as far as circumventing the month-long wait goes.


Incidentally, the linguist we want to talk to is friends with the guy who runs this clinic, who also happens to be a recruitable character.






Long story short, he doesn't believe that we got the Ancient Writings from Cross Cave because we don't look tough enough. Forget that the monsters on this continent are mathematically about a hundred times stronger than the things in Cross Cave.

So, to prove our strength, he wants us to go into a dungeon and get some herbs for him.


The caveat being that nobody can have discovered this herb before. We can assume that he's doing this to get rid of us, because only an utter manchild would agree to do something so ridiculous just to get some sheet of paper translated.

Then again, if I ever decided to use my Linguist Powers for evil, I totally wouldn't ask for money and would instead opt to demand that my commissioners do something utterly impossible instead.

"oh yeah no prob i'll totally translate this ancient hawaiian manuscript for you dogg just

uh

lick your ear"


So here we are. What kinds of idiots would waste their time doing this kind of--




--oh, right, right


This dialogue was clearly written for Geese to be the main character, because how the hell would he know what herbs are commonly found in Arlia and Salva.

Why, it's almost as if he grew up there.


I really hate this dungeon. It's long, full of hard-to-see passages, has a terrible encounter rate, and has a background track that is only slightly more maddening and musically-retarded than anything composed by TheD, I don't know why you guys insist on defending this asshole composer.


On the other hand, it does have some of the most unnerving background elements I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, instead of elaborating on things like GIANT PROTO-HUMANOID FOSSILS, we get to talk to a linguist about SHEETS OF PAPER.


Anyway, this is the first room in this game that is notoriously badly programmed. If you're playing on a real Playstation, there is a HUGE chance that, after coming out of an encounter, your game will just freeze completely.

It has something to do with how the game "forgets" out-of-battle sprites (other than your player sprite) during random encounters (but not scripted encounters, strangely enough). It doesn't freeze the game so much as it makes everything run ridiculously slowly, but when you compare a PSX or even a PS2 to a computer with a dualcore processor and more RAM than a PSX can even imagine, and consider that said computer runs the game at like 3fps while it's furiously trying to search for the sprite data (the other sprites literally just disappear, and even some menu sprites are affected) and then can't find it at all, then you can probably figure out why the PSX just gives up and freezes completely.

This happens anywhere that there is more than one pixilated sprite on the screen at once. This includes: floor bosses in the Cave of Trials (which the game treats as random encounters), NPCs (which is why you shouldn't try to do that "use the music specialty to get encounters in a city" glitch), and SAVE POINTS. So any screen with a save point on it is basically Super Danger Territory and if you don't make it to that save point before you get an encounter, then your game will probably freeze for the reasons mentioned above and you will be so angry that the game froze at the end of a dungeon with encounters every two steps that you will throw your discs against the wall in rage and shatter them.


ANYWAY


This is a useless trap room. The treasures suck and the boss can kill you in one hit regardless of your level and defenses because it's the kind of monster that "eats" you. You don't need to fight it, so don't waste your time like I did.


I don't even know what the fuck they're talking about here.

Anyway, remember those crazy fuckin' skeletons a few screenshots up? Just past those to the right is the what we came here for.





There are two herbs in this dungeon that will satisfy our pharmacist friend and get him to let us meet his friend, the linguist. One is simply a rare herb, but the Dill Whip is a yet-undiscovered herb and will get a different reaction from him.


Yeah this is the alternate reaction.


"Haha no fuck you."


"Keith needs to know that there are people so gullible out there that they will actually find you a real, honest-to-god undiscovered herb if you tell them to."


Sorry to break YOUR IMMERSION here, but it's impossible to get this screenshot without showing Bowman's name. For the record, to us, he's Larry.


"Oh I dunno I was just being troublesome"
"'Kay cool"






"That's... kind of the point."


"Looooooots of time because I have much more important things to do. Like send my manuscripts to publishers and play Nintendo for the Internet"


Yeah if I actually told someone that they'd laugh at me too

THE NEXT UPDATE will take a while. We're in "the emulator ate every other image from Disc 1 so this is where we start getting creative" territory. So, uh, ke hiki mai, hiki mai. For the ignorant, that means, "when it comes, it comes."

Let's Destory The World: Making You Cultured