Part 35: The Kind of Thing You Used to Hear About on the Playground

Chapter 3: The Kind of Thing You Used to Hear About on the Playground

Last time, Roald made it through the southern checkpoint

and Gremio, eternal lover of paddle-spankings, wanted to be, uh, punished.

his punishment will be that we won't take him with us to fight the final boss


Chandler is my favorite character in the entire game. He has like six lines, but I don't care. He's a simple man with simple dreams, but he's just so happy when you give him a chance to fulfill them.


Before going to talk to Mathiu, we walk aaaaaaaaall the way down to Great Forest


and get our levels up to


the mid 20s.


We also get the Lover's Garden painting, which drops off the Holly Boys, and is a very rare drop indeed.


And then we can go recruit Mathiu


and Camille


and we ask her for a handout


This is, by the way, who we were saving those Wing Boots for.


We get Tai Ho to pay us 3000 bucks and join us.


This is my favorite Suikoden castle. This is probably because it's so prohibitively inaccessible. If the sea level wasn't rising at the rate it is, I would totally want to get a little atoll and build a fuckin' castle on it.


And we promptly return to Kaku.


This is so we can sharpen Tai Ho's weapon. Its titles are the names of chicks, so I like to assume that these are just chicks that Tai Ho banged and then later pissed off.





and it is! because it has boss music


The Zombie Dragon is kind of a stupidly resilient boss. I think its vitality is actually balanced around having two or three major casters in your party,


and while it does sport a weakness to Fire, that doesn't make the fact that it has something like 6,000 HP any dumber. There's a definite design difference between pitched and desperate battles, interesting long encounters, and, well, this.

It does have something like a 10% chance to drop a Lightning Rune, though, which would be the first Lightning Rune you'd have access to in the game, not that you have anyone who can 1) equip a rune and 2) is competent with magic before you actually start being able to recruit characters who come with one.

•••




I mean, uh, no.


So, naming your castle.


Nobody actually pays attention to what you name it, and the text is the same no matter what you do.


But instead, we go with Shiro Castle. Why? Because the first I played Suikoden, this was quite some time ago, back when the local state TV station KIKU played subbed episodes of Crayon Shinchan.

Now, these weren't those obscene crap episodes that had a run on Adult Swim a few years back; they were much more faithful to what was actually being said, and I mean the show is immaturely entertaining enough on its own without having to, y'know, go overboard and name everything Asshole or Bastard or Dogfucker like what they ended up doing. I dunno if it's just that they had shitty writers or if they were just going too hard into appealing to fourteen-year-olds, but ugh.

Anyway, Crayon Shinchan's dog's name is Shiro, and I loved that show so much that I named my Suikoden castle after the dog.


Incidentally Shiro is also the Japanese word for "白　white," so yes, this is still White Castle. It is also a homonym for "城　castle," so this is Castle Castle, too.

•••


Luc is fun but I never use him because there are so many better options for casters in this game. Also because the basic Wind Rune kinda sucks, even if the second-tier Wind Rune, the Cyclone Rune, is just fantastic.


So from here on out is my favorite part in the game: where you recruit anyone and everyone and your castle looks nicer and nicer.

When I first played this game, Maui Community College was going through a campus-wide expansion project in which they built a whole bunch of new buildings. My dad, being faculty there, conscripted me to help over the summer. Why? Because Maui Community College has never, ever had its shit together. While the construction of the building was subcontracted, everything else--furnishing, wiring, flooring, and even just getting the goddamn elevators to work--was up to the college staff.

So, that summer, I learned basic electrical engineering and wiring, and I learned basic indoor construction, and I pushed boxes, and checked voltages, and put all kinds of shit together, and I really kind of enjoyed it because every day, the inside of this two-story building would look a little more buildling-like. It was very, very Suikoden Castle, and I really, really liked Suikoden.


Even now, I can play Suikoden and think to myself,


MY CASTLE

•••


chandler you are such a liar

Suikosource, too, is a gigantic liar

because they make this wild claim that if you recruit Chandler or the armorer without having visited any item or armor shops, they won't have anything in their inventories and you'll get some weird alternate scene.


This is of course bullshit because Chandler always sells at least a bandana, albeit a misspelled one.

•••


If you sit in the bath for a long time, you turn red. This is purely cosmetic and you don't see any difference once you get out of the bath. You can also see the Lover's Garden painting above the right-side bath. The painting on the opposite side is the Flower Painting, and it's much less impressive.


And now, we grind in the forest to Level 25.


This is the absolute earliest you can recruit Lorelai. You yourself have to be at least Level 25 to do so. No cheating and slapping the Fortune Rune on Gremio and getting him to 25 when everyone else is in the high teens.


She sucks in this game, and is just a basic archer. No surprise, though, I mean she looks like Rinoa except tripping balls so hard that her pupils have dilated to fill the entire whites of her eyes


Anyway, let's go recruit Lepant.


Steal his sword, etc. If you land on the "?" prize tile more than once, you'll get a Fortune Rune Piece every subsequent time.


Considering that he singlehandedly kills dudes with no problem, presumably by just punching them, it's no surprise that everyone always sees Lepant as being so fucking built that he doens't have a neck and just having this hugely barbaric overbite.


Roald is very vicious, but he's finally getting to live out his goony fantasies about killing corrupt government officials.

You know? Alvin the Treacherous looks a lot like Kraze.


I like to imagine that there's a big fuckin' party every time we recruit someone.


Mathiu is a man after my own heart. Quietly enjoying some scotch whisky with a few of your good buddies is one of life's simple pleasures.


are you hitting on me tai ho


The next day, there's an elf on our dock.


We have to go save his people and shit.


You see another quick image of your castle once it upgrades in size. This is unimportant right now, but--


yay!


"no"




So, this Burning Mirror. It's caused me enough trouble, and I'm done trying to figure out what variables play into the very special completely pointless event I was trying to get to show off to you all.

Long story short,

we get out of prison,


sharpen our weapons,


get sent to steal the plans for a RUNNING WATER ROOT,


deal with some retarded puzzles,


fight a boss who happens to be immune to fire,


pick up this special item

--now, let me note right here that I've never actually read The Water Margin. I'll get around to it, maybe if they have it on Project Gutenberg or something, so I don't know if the item Running Water Root specifically has a significance in the original tale, but as far as I can tell, this is a really bad translation of "electric water pump"--


piss off satan,

and, much to my dismay,

•••


when we get here, the Forest of the Elves is already burning.


As far as I can tell, this scene I'm about to describe is otherwise undocumented anywhere else, but I know I've definitely gotten it before. I don't know how--and believe me, I've tried and tried again to get it once more for this LP--but I have.


Alternatively when arriving here, you will actually get to this vista with the Forest of the Elves not having yet been burned. The dialogue is slightly different, but after you see that it's not on fire, there's a flash of light, the background changes to what we see here, and everyone's all "oh shit what the hell was that" before realizing that they saw the Burning Mirror fire before their eyes.


I've tried and I've tried, over and over, fruitlessly and fruitlessly to determine what factor(s) influence getting said scene. It isn't the game clock. The variables I've entertained have been 1) a hidden timer that starts when Kirkis washes up on your castle dock, 2) an "action" counter that checks how many rounds you've spent in battle, how many rooms you've entered, boxes you've opened, steps you've taken, people you've spoken to, etc., 3) the time spent in the dwarf vault, 4) number of times saved during this sequence, and 5) maybe even just your active party's total Luck stat.


Whatever it is, the result is still the same and I just cannot replicate it. It definitely has nothing to do with staying at an inn or anything because in one of my confirmation test runs, I never stayed at an inn at all unless it was required by the plot. At any rate, there are no gameplay changes; you just see a what is apparently such a rare scene that it's not even mentioned in walkthroughs, forums, Suikosource, whatever. I know I definitely didn't imagine it, but sometimes I wonder if I did.



•••


cry harder kirkis i got tales of shitty deals you can't even imagine







Stallion is like if sperglords could run fast


fuck you giovanni




jesus christ


You know Mathiu plays Terran because he is all about Marine Splitting.


there's this asian dragon on the top floor


racist against dragons


Oh, yeah,


Kuromimi.


The instruction manual lists him as being named "Black Ears."


This confused me for a long time, at least until I learned that Kuromimi transliterates to "Black Ears."


Also this is what happens when you chop off Kwanda Rosman's head.


"I enjoyed the 10 years I fought with you. Farewell, Emperor."




"I give him the Black Rune, yet he fails. What a useless fellow."


"A kobold? I see, Kwanda's Black Rune melted, and you've become free of your curse."


"[i]My beloved Barbarosa will destroy you.
Well, I must be on my way. See you, Roald."


actually i lie you're a goddamn retard if you don't recruit everyone you possibly can


mathiu are you suggesting that i'm gonna get laid because of this battle

because, like, all the elves are dead, camille is pissed off because we owe her money, cleo is like my sister, marie is fat, and lepant would rip my fucking head off

that leaves dwarves and kobolds, and i don't like where this is going

And that's how Roald was no longer a basement dweller. The end!