Part 33: Courage Is Crouching In The Dark Listening To The Voices In Your Head

Sorry, bitches, but my recent days have been pretty full. First, my asshole roommate got me sick because no matter how good of shape you're in and regardless of how strong your immune system is, if you're living this close to someone who is literally never well--he has seriously not stopped expectorating and coughing and sneezing and vomiting and dripping all over everything ALL YEAR, and it's a week from second semester finals--you are gonna get sick. But you know, it makes sense that someone who is a unbathing morbidly obese chainsmoking chew-spitting raging alcoholic pothead whose diet consists of frozen calamari, eggs, bacon, eggs with week-old bacon grease, soy milk, and margarita mix and sleeps two hours a day is just never going to get over any illnesses. I almost want to make a BRIAN SAN-style thread about him and his creepy antics (like the time he was breathing over my roommate's soroity girl guest, who didn't slap him because she was piss drunk), but you know how fickle gibbis is.

And then there was the business where we signed up for rooms with the university's new room assignment system, and I found out that this disgusting fat fuck signed up specifically trying to get with any of his current roommates from this semester next year because apparently we're the first people he's ever met in his entire fucking LIFE, his mother excepted, who haven't beat him with a leather belt, smacked him with a ruler, kicked his ass, curbstomped him, burned off his facial hair, chucked him out of a third-floor window, or thrown him into a river in the middle of the night. Honestly I'm all for doing a repeat that last one, but my other roommates refuse to be accomplices and according to physics I can't deadlift something 2.7 times my mass and about 1.5 times my volume, let alone something that's trying desparately to get away.

But rather than the university doing the right thing and relocating him, they made me jump through a hundred fuckin' hoops talking to a million assholes with my hoarse-ified voice to get my room reassigned because nobody knows how to navigate the new room assignment system.

And of course on top of that there was linguistics papers to be written. But now that all this E/N bullshit is cleared out of the way and I am finally defeating this damn cold, I can vacuum my room, wash my sick bedding, get back into my exercise routine, hammer out an update and, if luck smiles upon me, take that nerdy chick to see that goddamn dragon movie this weekend.

And now, for your reading pleasure, a motherfucking hammered-out update.

Chapter 31: Courage Is Crouching In The Dark Listening To The Voices In Your Head

Unfortunately, it seems we have survived.

Even more unfortunately, it seems that Enix took the initiative to include a gratuitous panty-shot of Rena.


So today, we start our update by visiting the library in North City so we can get Reyfus's sidequest started.


As mentioned in the previous update, we need to read each and every one of these categories. There are 3-8 sub- (and sub-sub-) categories under each heading. None of it makes any sense, nor says anything that is anywhere near being imaginably important.


Trying to read the Secret Reports category gets you this response.


So now, we hop on our polygonal jetbird and fly to this cave in the middle of nowhere.


"It looks more like a CAVE of Courage if you ask me. Hah! Hah! Hah!"
"Shut up, Geese"


Gee, sign. Thanks for being about as helpful as that fucking mistranslated pun puzzle in Wild ARMs 2.


Anyway, this dungeon is a series of passages. If you go the right way, it will last you about five screens--three on the way here, and two more to get to the boss. If you wander around looking for treasure (nothing you can't buy), it's about ten screens or so. It's a welcome change after that damn Field of Power.


Once you have the Warrior Statue, head right from the entrance and you'll end up at this teleporter elevator, which has also has a very picky activation pixel.




"yeah geese a lot of NOTHING"
""




OMINOUS MUS--wait no the music doesn't change at all and just stays some retarded ambient one-note-with-random-laser-sounds shit.




OH MY GOD IT'S MORE OF THE SAME BORING SHIT


yes shut up




... Look, game, when I say shut up, I mean you in general.




Well, we have time to do the fourth and final field. Actually you're supposed to do this one first


OH LOOK IT'S OUR FAVORITE FUCKING TRACK AGAIN




this dungeon's gimmick is that these mirrors only reflect intelligent people

seeing as how we don't have any in our party, i guess that's that and we just give up and go


home


So the trick to this dungeon is to go to each of those pacifiers and switch them on.

It's actually a very long and boring process, and the encounter rate in this place is pretty ridiculous. This dungeon is full of enemies who disappear and can't be hit with physical attacks while they're invisible. They also cast spells that take forever to animate, which only makes this place more frustrating than it already has to be.

"But White Dragon," you might say, "Why don't you just bring a caster along to hit them?"

The answer is, of course, that if you use casters for anything other than healing, you're playing this game completely wrong. Also it takes longer to cast a spell and watch its shit-slow animation than it takes for the disappearing enemies to reappear.

For all the shit I give this game's casting system, however, Star Ocean 3 actually handles it worse. Spells don't freeze the action and hit more than once, but instead have such ridiculously long animations that enemies (now with better-programmed AI routines than "wander around randomly and wait for the player to kill them" and "DESTROY EVERYTHING") just move out of their radius before anything happens? Now Tri-ace knows what they're doing, so it's apparently something about Enix that just ruins everything that they touch.


Once they're all activated, this yellow tile appears.

you know what else is yellow? your eyes when your liver fails

you know what makes your liver fail? playing games with shitty composers like motoi sakuraba


Nemo is talking about ZeeToo's rack right here obviously






The boss here is the easiest in that I don't think it can actually hit you. I may be wrong, but even back when I sucked at this game, I didn't have a single character die.


It does have one clever trick up its sleeve if you're overpowering yourself, though. See this thing I'm killing with Sword Bomber? It absorbs Star damage, so if you made the Eternal Sphere, it absorbs enough damage to completely heal whenever you try to attack it, so you have to employ other strategies, as pictured above.


Oh, not this shit again.


billy we don't need to know that kind of thing ugh










THAT is a DOG?


"Everyone and everything hates you and we always have and we always will"
"Even you, mommy?"
"Especially me."


"... Geese, do you hate me?"
"yes"










Well when you're 100 levels higher than you're supposed to be, you tend not to gain enough EXP to level up on dudes designed for level 40 characters.

Well, that's about all the time we have for our update today.

NEXT TIME


THE FINAL SHOWDOWN


BE THERE


or don't because we still have to fight at least one more unbeatable asshole and have at least five more dramatic plot twists before the end of this piece of shit game.

Oh, this right here doesn't count as one of said dramatic plot twists btw