Part 44: Series Finale: Fuck This Game - Part 2

Series Finale: Fuck This Game - Part 2

Previously on 24:

HOLY SHIT


the end






















Suddenly, through some unexplained and contrived scientific magic...

















Sorry guys, I didn't get any cool polygamous/wifeleaving endings with Larry.










GASP


So I guess Expel was one of those planets that Nede enslaved, uh... three trillion fucking years ago. Those papers had better have been preserved in motherfucking amber.












Oh, it's a lover's spat.




Ahahahaha.








It's hard to illustrate, and even harder to capture and put into a gif, but basically Knox kicks his new boytoy out of bed here.

Well, I guess at least he learned how to love and can now become a real boy. Or something like that.






"You see, your majesty? This is what happens when you marry hookers"
"Well it's better than that time I cut one up and had her leftovers preser--"




There's a penis joke here somewhere.












GameFAQs lied to me, they said that Claude becomes a cameraman






Oh Purple Dragon, you are such a darling.




Oh Red Dragon, you are also a sweetie.


SURPRISED?


I sure was.








SO


How does that work?


"I thought Valvados was locked into an ending with the little girl!", you might say.


Well, so did I.


I certainly didn't fight enough encounters with Rena in my party or run enough Private Actions to surpass the unbelievably high RP quota that Ashton gets with Eleanor.


--holy shit that is terrifying--


In fact, I was trying to pair Rena with Bowman for most of the game, so she DEFINITELY doesn't have the RP to surpass that number, whatever it is.


However, I have two theories. Both are kinda out there and would require some computer knowledge and hacking ability to test.


1) When checking for endings with female characters, because Bowman is already married, he is possibly unique in that it checks their FP instead of their RP because it doesn't him as a romantic interest. This would explain why I got the beach scene with Ashton, even though I purposefully made Rena fight in the same party with Bowman a lot more than I made her fight in parties with Ashton.


2) The main character--the one you chose at the beginning of the game--takes priority over all special endings even if your RP isn't high enough to make the check, as long as it's the highest pair value in the party. This probably only applies to romance endings, so you couldn't get Celine to not marry Prince Clother just because she wanted to traipse around with her best buddy Rena, and she couldn't get Opera to just forget about how they left Ernest to die in some ruins--you'd need to be playing as Claude.


--what--


This is, of course, all just speculation.


For all we know, I could be talking out of my ass.


I probably am, but I clearly spent some time trying to rationalize how it all worked.


Interestingly enough, for all the disparities I came across in this playthrough, this is the first place I know of that this programming phenomenon has been noted of in all of the internet.


Maybe if those asshole programmers would've spent more time making the REST of their game so solid,


maybe, just maybe, SO2 would be a little less Enix and a little more Tri-ace.


Of course, the only thing that programming fixes is numbers and freezing issues.

If they wanted to fix everything else, they'd first need a better scenario writer who would make sure that everything you did in the game didn't actually disappear in dead ends. Then they'd need a better scriptwriter who wouldn't make everything sound like a contrived anime. Then they'd need a composer who actually understood more than two emotions--calm and BATTLE ZONE--and knew how to compose thematically (seriously, We Form in Crystals isn't outright BAD, but it's not objectively GOOD, either, which says a lot about all those idiots who say that it's the "best song they've ever heard in a video game." It provides no sense of conclusion, nor does it have any thematic summation, which is what credit sequences are supposed to have. It actually sounds a lot like something Jeremy Soule would compose, except with PS1 instruments, but the thing that puts even Jeremy Soule above Sakuraba is that Soule actually puts themes in his compositions, and you can follow them throughout the game. They're not complex and you don't have to have very "aha" moments to catch them like you do with composers like Kenji Ito or Uematsu or Mitsuda or even John Pee, if you've ever heard that name, but at least he DOES them). And THEN they'd need to do all their CG in-house and not outsource the job to a company who would animate a town that looks absolutely nothing like what it did in the actual game.

But then, we would have a different game altogether.


In conclusion,


well, there is no conclusion.


Only a poorly-translated message that screams, "caveat emptor."

And that, as they say, is that.