Part 9: Update IX - A Miserable Massive Pile Of Secrets

Update IX - A Miserable Massive Pile Of Secrets



♪ BGM: Asgar's Castle - blood009.mid ♫

Alright, so now, it's time to explore Asgar's castle. There's nothing much on the outskirts of the castle, though there is one rather interesting bit here.



And that bit is this mailbox.

the E-Mails I received during the development of VD2. They are meant to make you chuckle as well as think. Since I don't want to humiliate anyone, the name of the sender will not be mentioned... also, I have changed NOTHING of the content and kept the spelling mistakes in order to keep the original impression of those mails... keep in mind, however, that the mails were originally written in German, so the translation may not entirely reflect the meaning of the mail's original content. Should somebody recognize their mail, then I hope they won't take too much offense and think a little about WHY the mail got here.
Although, there were many mails that were simply just cool and funny, so it wasn't meant to be a punishment getting here! And yes, some comments are mean, but only when it's appropriate. Please pardon my cynicism, I am but a poor stricken vampire. ^^

Ah, "^^", the most German of all the emoticons. Not even joking, that thing is ubiquitous. Anyway, there are a grand total of 98 messages in this mailbox that get unlocked over time. I'll be looking at them occasionally, but for now, the first one will do. I will have the original German version on stand by in case there are some problems parsing the translation, given that we're dealing with e-mails that have already been written in a shoddy manner. Anyway, on to the first message.

Will the weapons be cheaper because you will be playing with four. And how do you get money now. My sister said vd2 will be finished in december which.
Since there are many more party members in VD2, who are also all using different kinds of weapons, all weapons are obviously going to be for free.

Now, let's move on to some castle exploration.



Something's not right here! I have this strange feeling...
Let's hope we will find Jayna here. And then get out of here as quickly as possible!



So, Asgar's castle. Apparently, Asgar's been taking interior design tips from Dracula, because much like Castlevania, this castle does not look at all like the one we were in the last time. So I'm going to have to learn the layout of this castle all over again. Bah.



I'm afraid Jayna fled to this place with the book and then summoned these skeletons.
She definitely has to be here!
Those are probably guards. We should sneak through... I believe these skeletons surely have some magical abilities we should not underestimate.
Hmmm... 1) Magical abilities? Nonsense! - 2) Yeah, better be sneaky...

I'm guessing that just stumbling in blindly isn't the best idea.

But I know that magical skeletons have a very narrow vision. More specifically, they can only see what's in their direct line of sight. If we stay out of that line, we should be able to get past them without any problems... furthermore, skeletons can only detect persons that are moving, or if they are fixating on trying to find a specific person. That means should things get tight, you can just try to stand completely still in worst cases. That only works if we haven't been discovered yet, though!

So remember when we found that book talking about the vision that skeletons and zombies have, and I said "please don't be a stealth mechanic"? It is a stealth mechanic.





The skeleton will switch between these two positions about every two seconds, turning the areas in red into the zones you can't walk into. We'll see what happens when we get caught later, because we do get caught. Boy, do we get caught. If we were playing on Easy, the lines of sight would actually be highlighted for you.



So for now, we just wait for the skeleton to look somewhere else and make a break for it.





Another secret, and another new item! There will be a lot of secrets being found, and a fair share of them will be new items. This is another one of those items that inflicts status effects.



The situation is very dire. Valnar doesn't even have time for his beloved books.



Some areas are just going to be straight up locked off via skeletons that don't move, so we've got a fairly linear path to follow - though there's still some paths that will end up costing us time and not really doing anything for us.



Things get a bit fiddly fairly quickly, but it's nothing we can't really deal with.



More secrets!



Even more secrets!





Even even more secrets! Now, actually, while we're bopping around, let's take a look at the map we'll be moving around in.



This is the exterior. We're not going to be moving in the grassy courtyard, just around on the battlements. Note the rad inverted cross motif in the middle.



Here's the first floor of the interior. Our goal is in the bottom left (though we don't know that yet). You'll note that we need to take a route over the second floor to get there.



And here's the second floor. In this shot and the first floor, you can see where the skeletons are by the lines made up of "E" blocks (signifying events) that show their lines of sight. We're basically going to be taking a very roundabout route over the first floor, second floor and the battlements to get to where we want, with skeletons strategically placed to block us.





Some more secrets. I don't know if I'm going to screenshot all the secrets, because as you might remember from the Status screen, there's a fuckton of them. I'll at least show those that are new items.



40 Filar obtained!

Money! Money is always nice.



At the top end of the first floor, we get cockblocked by an unmoving skeleton, so that's not the way to continue. Back to the staircase in the top right corner.



Some more skeleton fuckery going on upstairs as well.



Alas, we're blocked off by an unmoving skeleton here. This is a recurring theme.





Acid Potion obtained!

These acid potions are going to be very useful. They actually directly damage an opponent's Defense stat, which is very neat. I don't know how effective they are, and, well, we're not going to be using any in the beginning, so I guess that's a mystery to be solved later.





More stuff to not use on enemies!



Some staircases are meant to let you continue. This is not one of those staircases.



The other staircase leads us to the third floor, which is made up of towers and the battlements. Still more skeletons to stealth past.



Even more stuff!



Even even more stuff! I'm just showing all the secrets here to show just how god damn many there are at this point.



See above.



There's a skeleton blocking us from getting to that fancy-looking central area.





More items!



More... hang on, this is different.



What are you doing here, and why did you run away from us?
Would you like to save?
Uhhh... 1) ...excuse me? - 2) ...that would be nice!

I guess that would be nice?



Yup, we get to save. Huh. Well, not looking a gift horse in the mouth. A free save is a free save.







Moving on, I guess. More items! I'm not sure how crucial getting everything will turn out to be in dealing with the difficulty, but that's the problem with difficulty - you can't really assume that anything is expendable.





A revival item! Useful! And in case somebody's getting confused as to where the fuck we are, we're currently making a clockwise trip around the battlements, starting from the bottom right corner and currently in the building on the middle left side.





Even more money!





And even more items Jesus Christ how many of these fucking things are there?



Over here, a skeleton is keeping us from continuing along the battlements, so I guess we need to find another way.



On the way back, I let my curiosity get the better of me and pick the other dialogue option. That was a bit of a mistake, as we will notice later.

Who are you? I've heard your voice before somewhere... YOU were the one who whispered "Asgar's castle" to me!
Irrelevant! You are expected inside the Magic Chamber.



That's quite an understatement, Valnar. We do get one more opportunity to save our game, but not picking that first option would have given us unlimited saves for this segment, which would have been handy for reasons we will notice later.





Anyway, now we're on the search for the Magic Chamber. And more items. I used to know where the Magic Chamber was, but alas, Asgar's castle somehow completely redesigned itself during the time it spent being completely uninhabited between the two games. And then...



...I fuck up. I run too quickly and don't check to see if a skeleton could pop up at the top, and we get caught. So, what does that mean?



Well, every skeleton on the map starts pursuing us, and they run quicker than we can run. So, yeah, we're pretty much fucked. And what happens when we get caught?







We get unceremoniously dumped back to the beginning. And at this point, we have a choice to make. Either we reload and have to find the secrets we've found between the last save, or we backtrack.





In the process of backtracking to the third floor, we have to dodge eight skeletons (plus one looking over the area you have to pass after going up the stairs to that level). I mention this because it gives us plenty of opportunities to fuck up and get sent back again. However, in this particular situation, I decide that finding the secrets again is easier.



So reloading it is.





And then we're right back to finding items.





And finding dead ends.



But eventually, I do manage to find the right place, which is in the building at the top of the third floor.





This brings us to the top of the second floor area, moving to the left, finding more secrets.



This chest here really slays me. This is essentially the first item that's in open view, and it's useless. Compare that to all the different shit we've already found in the secrets. This is just taking the piss.



Also, more money.



2 Blood Phials obtained!

At this point, we're just using the stairs in the top left to keep switching back and forth between the first floor and the second floor because I don't know which way is the right one and which way is the wrong one that has more items.



When we try to head outside into the courtyard area, we're told that we can't have that. Fine by me, less area to explore. Oh well, this is a dead end, time to head ba-



FUCK.





SHIT. Well, time to head ba-



FUCK.



Flame Potion obtained!

Well, with those problems out of the way, we make it back to somewhere we haven't explored before.



We actually manage to make it to the place we're supposed to go, but that means we've missed some other things, so backtracking it is!



And our reward is... a blood phial, and that's it. Oh well, every bit helps. Back again!







More useful stuff to be found on the way! Potent healing items always sell for a lot of money.



Some more skeletons for us to dodge.



And some more healing items. Now... what to do about that skeleton. It's looking right into the path of those barrels, and I have to look at those for secrets. Do I just assume that there's nothing in them and risk missing an item, or do I check and risk getting sent back? Of course, just looking in RPG Maker wasn't something I thought of at the time. I had to make a decision, and I did.





...FUUUUUUUUUUUCK.