Part 3: Boyzby in the 'Hood

Part 3: Boyzby in the 'Hood


With the plot out of the way, we can now start wandering around the town, talking to NPC's and grabbing spare Spirits. There's none up here, sadly, so we'll just head down and speak with Sodina again.


Specifically, there's this whole issue about "I haven't the foggiest where that cave is."

Cross the bridge to the east, then travel to the northwest. Good luck!


Great, that's nice and clear. Next, we can leave the room through this door to the north.


Behind it is Jyabil's spirit smithy. Much like the one at Meis' old house, there are two exits...


...And much like Meis' place, there's an enclosed area with an Elemental Spirit hiding in a corner.


Meis then leaves the house through the front door, only to stop when he sees something interesting.


Specifically, he seems to think that Boyzby has some very beautiful...scenery.



Don't worry! If it was you walking by, I'd stop and stare then, too.

*SLAM*

She wants me.


When Meis tries to leave once again, he gets ambushed by Instruction Guy. I won't bother going over all he says, since I'll be explaining the relevant bits as we encounter them. Sadly, though, Instruction Guy disappears after this initial session, so if you forget something important (like "press square/triangle to cancel combat actions"), you're pretty much out of luck.


Pressing triangle in town or on the world map brings up a map of the area. This is really quite helpful since you can rotate the camera with L1/R1 (plus it rotates as you move) and you can get pretty disoriented. The big red dot indicates the player's position and the map doesn't rotate with the camera, so it then becomes much easier to keep track of your position.

As for the colors, yellow indicates unimportant buildings you can enter, blue is for shops and bars, and green stands for inns. The smaller red dot near the bottom of the map is the goddess statue, which I'll discuss once we get there.


Here you can see that the big red dot has moved next to the blue building on the left. Still, the map is pretty huge and unnecessary once you're familiar with the area, so I'll be keeping it off for the most part.


As for the NPC's, well, there's quite a few of them and some are more interesting than others. Nobody says anything particularly funny or interesting in this bar, for instance. As such, I'll only be presenting the highlights.


Sarcastic Old Biddies, on the other hand, will most certainly be presented.


Young Man: If you're planning on traveling, you'd better go to the smithy before you leave.

This being the first real town, there are plenty of folks with basic tutorial info to give you. I will be explaining the sword-powering mechanic more thoroughly once it's unlocked, however.


We're heading to the Ruins at the moment, so this is actually some foreshadowing.


There's also a Spirit hiding in Foreshadowing Woman's baby carriage.





So apparently Spirit Blacksmith is the sexiest profession in the whole damn world.


Oh, and there's a spare Spirit in Reverse Pedo Girl's potted plant.


I'm really not sure if this is an inn named Hotel or a hotel named Inn. Or maybe it's a hotel run by the Inns?


Well, whatever. It's a place that doubles as both stat restore and town save points.


You'll also find seedy dives in the basement more often than not.

Young Lady: Even if your intimacy level goes up, if your heart is small, you won't be able to embrace the girl's feelings. So, you'll be unable to forge a strong sword. You should try to increase your intimacy and the size of your heart. Your heart increases in size as your level goes up. I wish you the best of luck!

In other words, there's a minimum level requirement to get all the best spells and special abilities. Again, more on this once the mechanic has been unlocked.


I...I think the translators just did a "take that" against themselves.


So up here we've got an item shop.


As you might expect from a game where the lead character is a blacksmith, there is no weapon shop to speak of; Meis will just be improving the existing weapons personally. There are plenty of revival items to buy, though.

Antidotes are a bit of an interesting case, in that each type recovers the character from different status effects. The regular variety cures both poison and sleep, EX deals with silence and confusion, and Hi fixes paralysis and poisoning (basically like poison, but it persists outside of combat). Elixir, as you might imagine, restores mana, called EP in this game.

Anyway, we really don't have to worry too much about status effects in the tutorial dungeon, so I bought 3 extra potions and left.


At the top center of the map are a pair of soldiers who have set up an invisible wall behind them to keep people out of the castle.

Soldier: Well, at least there were no casualties, so he did the right thing in that respect.

[Other] Soldier: I'm starting to get worried about the Dark Acolytes. They've started to become very busy these days. I heard that Tradguld is not the only country they are attacking.



Middle-Aged Woman: The Lord of Kant must be a great person in certain respects.

Well, he IS much better at running and gathering floozies than he is at fighting.


Yet more foreshadowing.


In the bar at the top right of the town, there's a Spirit sitting behind a couple barrels.


Between him and Sir Muza from the first update, there sure are a lot of great swordsmen running around.


So like I said before, with Meis as the lead there's really no need for weapon shops in this game. So what, you may ask, is this second shop for?


Why, it's for the ladies, of course! Note how much more these gifts cost compared to the restorative items. On the other hand, we won't need to use nearly so many of these.


There was an episode of South Park, "Spontaneous Combustion," in which Kyle misheard the word "erection." Since it aired in between Thousand Arms' Japanese and American releases, there is a very good chance that this is a direct reference.


This foreshadows the furthest ahead, but to something that's pretty obvious considering the genre.


Of course, since the game isn't almost over, we can't get onto the airstrip, and this is the best shot I could get of one of the airships that come and go as you run around.


At last, we return to the place of Meis' most recent humiliation. Passing under that arch takes us out of the town, but there are a couple more things to look at first.


Smartass.


Basically, this statue is where to access the dating sim interface. Any female member of the party can be dated just by finding one of these, as well as any townie in the local area. Of course, first Meis needs to find a girl actually willing to date him, so I'll be going into this later on, too.


Next update, I talk about the combat system and show you all around the tutorial ruins.

Oh yeah, there was one other thing. It's worth asking, why do I like this game? The graphics are simplistic, the combat isn't very interesting, and the plotline doesn't do anything which hasn't been seen a million times before.

Well, in the end, it really boils down to this:


If a game bothers to quote from Airplane!, I can't help but like it.