Part 63: Fuck It I'm too Lazy to Make a Seuss-Derived Chapter Title

so uh sup goons

Chapter 3: Fuck It I'm too Lazy to Make a Seuss-Derived Chapter Title

Last time, which was so long ago that I barely even remember what I was doing, we recruited Futch and Humphrey.

This means that we can change their equipment and they will permanently appear on our add-to-party roster.

So we progress through the story normally and go to Muse where





the scene with Nanami plays generally as normal.


She bumps into us without even realizing that it's us.


"Well, I had a big, big adventure.
Are you feeling okay? Are you hungry?
Good. You're both okay."






You know, you'd think she'd be angrier that we ditched her, but whatev'.


Weirdly enough, this event also forces Mukumuku into your party if you got him.


I do like that our little side-trip means that bosses ain't no thang. Which is really important for a speedrun.

•••


Stuff happens, you've seen this all, except in this timeline, we ditch Nanami. Again.

somebody isn't going to be putting the Kindness rune on his weapon any time soon

But that's cool because we get to tank some brews with Flik and Viktor.



"I understand how you feel... Waiting is hard work...
But you know what? It's better to just think that he's alive and fine.... Things usually work out okay...
That's right...he'll come back..."


derp.jpg







•••




Another shitty point about Suikoden 2, which I will illustrate (well, sort of. Calling it illustration is being very generous) in these images is that for whatever reason, it's much less RNG manipulation-friendly. You can't savescum war battles because the RNG advances in a very set fashion after every turn, and every unit's damage, passive triggers, and ability success rates are determined before you can even control your units. The same goes for the dice game: you can't savescum the opponent's rolls since the RNG has a set advancement and they'll always roll the same hands no matter what because it is programmed to release the dice at a set interval, and you either have to get a random encounter or load your game to get different results.

This of course doesn't apply to you, because while the dice have a set spin pattern, you can stop it at any time.

It's not a bad thing, just... S2 has a very strict RNG, and for a war system as poorly-designed as the one it has, this is a terrible thing indeed.

•••


As I mentioned in a non-update post in this thread,






pretty much anyone involved in any event ever in Suikoden 2, as long as they deliver a non-optional line in the script, is completely immune to permanent death in war battles. So for those of you who always dreamt of killing off everyone in your army, well, tough. Simply by nature of who you can make commanders (not a lot of your characters), you can probably kill about four or five, absolute max. Annalee, Mazus, and maybe Tuta (and even then maybe not him because he has unskippable lines earlier in the game), off the top of my head.


Theodor is the master of the Kuro castle. Why? Because when I thought of the name years ago, it was the opposite of Shiro castle.

•••


Huan shouldn't you have a fuckin' office to ask me shit like this in

y'know, in private, just sayin'

•••

Gee I have a fourth-level spell slot and the Bright Shield Rune doesn't have one, what should I



well I guess you'll do for now.

•••

Now, Azure already did the stuff where you recruit Clive after getting a boat to Lakewest, but...





"Look, in this business I'm frequently asked to hold on to messages, and I always do."


Suikoden really likes its Forest Villages, I tell y'what.

Oh, and before this LP, I had a minor theory that the game not only counted your game clock for Clive's quest, but also how many times you've stayed at an inn. The number of times you've slept doesn't seem to affect anything from what I've tested, but there are still a few more things to check before we can be completely certain.

I can say that Suikoden 2 with never sleeping is totally hard mode though, mostly because you never have any MP ever, and that I've been doing it for the past, what, seven or eight years.

•••

FOR MY NEXT TRICK

I will need a Stone of Magic.


Y'know, this stupid fuckin' minigame is so easy to lose, but the hardest goddamn thing, hands down, is coming in second place.

FUN FACT: if you roll a 1, which would normally knock you all the way to your last placed mark, when you're on your mark, the game will knock you back one square.

And if you roll a 1 when you're at the very bottom... actually, it would appear that you can't. The dice in this game aren't actually physics-based and it's all just RNGs crunching in the background, and the die will simply roll to reflect that. It looks like the game just hard-removes a 1 from the rolling pool if you're already at the very bottom of the mountain.


Now, to be honest, I just wanted an extra Stone of Magic, because this is a pain in the ass that takes forever. It totally isn't even worth it, but that doesn't stop the end result from being completely awesome.


First, we run around and let the Rockadillos beat us within an inch of our life.


Then, we save.


We shoot up those statroids and


die, which is more of a pain than you might think because Rockadillos have abysmal accuracy.


Just like earlier, we don't give up,


but unlike earlier, rather than just keeping levels, we keep our stat increases from the Stones as well.


It takes an hour, maybe an hour and a half to max a character with one stone per stat. In addition, no matter how high you take your Magic stat, your MP won't update until you gain a level.


With 255 strength, while Berserk and critting with a Fire Rune on his weapon, Theodor does about 1600 damage per attack at this point.

And the best/worst part is, that's not even scraping the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Theodor can never even hope to scratch it. We'll make some proper Blue Hawaiis with said iceberg later, though.

•••

Oh, speaking of Two River, if you retreat and try to get the Kobolds to help in the middle of that battle, which I accidentally did because I was mashing three different buttons to speed through the text,













the scene gets even more long-winded than it already is. Good job, me!

•••

Now,

Greenhill.

First,

money.


Because everyone on Suikosource is mentally retarded, functionally illiterate and/or otherwise unable to properly articulate the process necessary to pull this trick off (I quote, verbatim, "4. Before it really happened, there is a question to confirm whether you really want to do that or not. CANCEL (triangle button) twice."), I'm going to have to do it here, in normal human English, aren't I.

So I'm not sure which elements of this process are required, but we'll list out all the provided prerequisites first.
1) Have a character with the armor you're buying currently equipped
2) Have a character who can equip the armor you're buying, but has no body armor equipped
3) Have just enough money to buy only one suit of said armor

Select the item and choose the character who has it equipped. It'll ask you if you want to equip the character with it. Choose YES, and then it'll ask you what you want to do with the armor you're switching-either putting it in your bag or selling it. Choose either, and when it asks you to confirm THAT, hit triangle to go backwards two times.


You'll still be in the menu where you choose who you want to buy the armor for. Choose your no-armor character and confirm that you'll buy it.


At this point, the game will freak the fuck out and expect that your no-armor character already has the armor on.


Choose to put it in the bag, and you will suddenly have max potch.

Well I suppose it might work if you choose to sell it but I have bag highlighted in the screenshot so I'm not going to take any chances here.

•••


So, Greenhill. Apparently, it has a piece of really weird spare programming.


You name yourself Nanami,


you name Nanami after yourself


(this is what she says if you let her be Beth),


and you choose Flik's name, except that no matter what you choose, he says that he's fine the way he is. The game plugs in your fake name Strings and sends you on your way.

HOWEVER, and this is why it's really weird spare code,

Flik, too, has a fake name String slot for this sequence that can be edited.


This slot is never called, so it's never reflected in the rest of the game whatsoever,


but for all intents and purposes, thanks to Gamesharky trickery, my file permanently considers the name DONGS to be Flik's Greenhill pseudonym.




It's like Nina stepped straight out of a Working Designs game.



•••

But that spare code thing? Nothin' compared to this.

So a lot of folks seem to think that Futch isn't meant to be in this part, mostly because of this garbled line right here.


Upon further examination, it may, in fact, just be an outlying coding error not unlike the "cool secret" guys around the world who were supposed to tell you which items were hot for selling at the trading posts. As far as I can tell, every line of party text in this sequence is fully flavored: Gengen will always talk like Gengen, Shiro will always Ahwooooooooo, etc.

The fact that Futch has not only this single line but actually multiple in which he speaks in a non-garbled fashion, paired with the fact that he is straight-up flagged as a potential party member in this sequence, leads me to think that the Matilda glitch is, in fact, not as much a glitch as the community by and large thinks that it is. Well, that or there was a lot of story material that got shuffled around long after the game was coded. Either way, there seems to be a lot more to the story behind the Matilda seeming-less-and-less-like-an-actual-glitch, as I will consider it from now on, than just an accidental pushy-block.


Oh also you can totally screw yourself out of getting Emilia until the very end of the game if you don't disclose your reason for being there.

•••


If you don't have Nanami to recruit Zamza earlier, he'll appear in one of those towns in the castle region. He has the exact same dialogue with her as if you'd recruited him in the beginning of the game.

•••








clive relax that's not elza that's a cana--you know what, forget it, I hate that "eh" Canadian stereotype because to me, "eh" is a Hawaiian Creole English interjection derived from the Hawaiian language "e," which was I think an article, a preposition, and of course used in the past as it is today.


"My gun, Sturm, shall be the judge of your death. As a Gunner, I..."


"This... this is not Elza!! Who are you?!"
"I... I beg of you, don't kill me... I'm just upholding my promise... She told me to stand here every day for a week, wearing this..."
"What!? Then, where did she go!?"
"I... I don't know... She said something about Matilda, I think..."



•••


And then we recruit Wakaba, because there are even more shenanigans to be shown in Matilda.

Speaking of which, NEXT TIME

we say fuck walking and just teleport to Rockaxe because technically we've already been there