Man what the heck, was hanging out in the slums talking to NPCs when all of a sudden this little lady started beating the shit out of this dirty looking guy. I was wondering what was going on as they took turns punching each other in the face, and I was trying to stop it, so I grabbed the guy and ran away and threw him over a wall. BUT the lady wouldn’t have any of that and jumped over the wall and air punched the dude and they kept their fight going, giant blood splatters everywhere. I was so confused so I grabbed the lady and ran into the nunnery/orphanage and hid her in the basement, hoping she’d cool off. NOPE, she ran the fuck outta there to kill that other dude, what the hell
I was eventually able to settle it by talking to the lady and gifting her a flower to distract her, but I wonder what the hell happened
If I let them kill each other, would they have? Would I have gotten into trouble??
Also I like all these castle missions where you have to sneak around in disguise, but they also think the player is an idiot so they leave you disguises barely a few feet within the area you need to sneak into lol. I found other disguises just hidden in nearby noble houses and a well next to the jail, so when I infiltrated, I left the area with like 3x the clothing I came in there with.
It’s such a cognitive dissonance that I’m supposed to secretly spy on the queen but I can also just run up to her bedroom, kick the door down at midnight, have her ignore all of that and run up to her face and ask her what’s good lol
Anyway, I just got to the secret ninja village and I laughed at how there’s an easy answer path and a vaguely hard answer path with a baby’s soulsborne dungeon with platforming traps. I jumped into the last swinging pendulum and expected to get hit and fly away, but it just gently nudged me on to the platform instead, letting me complete the dungeon, and I was like “??? Oh yeah this isn’t souls oops”
I’ve come to think this is intentional in the case of the pawns. Part of the game’s subtle comedy is the way the pawns all worship the Arisen and talk about deferring to your judgment but also constantly second-guess everything you do and give you patronizing advice.
One reason I don’t mind the generic fantasy so much is that it goes well with the cleverness of nearly always playing things straight while also being a clear parody but one that rarely tips its hand overtly.
I think my favorite pawn voice is male kindhearted.
i like that the thing i hear most often from my pawns is the hot tip that if i combine different items i’ll get different results, which is particularly spectacularly useless as far as advice goes
Started playing this today and my entire afternoon/evening just EVAPORATED. I don’t usually lose time when I get into a game, lol. This thing is great. I’m still quite early on, but as others have said, it’s amazing that they really just iterated on the design of the original. Like, they cleaned up some of the hard edges and made it a lot easier to onboard into, but the whole mutant skeleton of the original game is still in there.
Who else is on Xbox? I gotta start adding people to my Xbox friends or whatever.
I just found out that camping kits aren’t consumable. What! the hell
Well, I suppose that’ll really help with one of my biggest problems I’ve encountered so far, the fact that inns are all priced like five star luxury resorts.
That’s something i’d realized too late and sunk 20k into a Vermund house I didn’t really need…
Had been thinking that a point of no return of sorts was coming up locking me out of the next region but I went ahead and progressed. Don’t feel too bad about missing out on any quest threads I might have left undone but am expecting that to come back to bite me later somehow
When I got to the big hidden library, I realized that the quest for the magistrate in jail was gone. I picked him up and carried him to the book room but he didn’t care anymore and immediately ran out of the room to return to jail. I probably missed out on some other quests as well, but it probably doesn’t matter too much.
One quest I failed that seemed like it might be significant in some way is the empress dying when I was supposed to be guarding her. Though it’s possible that the empress is simply one of the possible “beloved” options. I don’t suppose she’s in the mausoleum and that I can use a wakestone, something I hadn’t thought about until just now. Probably not because this is a video game, and whether someone dies in a video game and whether the death is permanent is always based on the whims of developers and not the logic of a game’s systems.
I’ve failed every escort quest but two so far. I’m not even sure why they end in failure, exactly. Maybe they are timed and I don’t head directly to the target location.
Sleeping at a campsite doesn’t interact with the servers so your pawn isn’t updated for other people nor is it brought back w goodies from other people.
I feel like the camping and eating could have been more robust. How far away is the monster hunter team, right?
I’ve wondered exactly when pawns get updated in the shopping rift for other players. Last night I had a period of time where my pawn had a new level-one vocation and was half-equipped with mediocre armor while I ran around arranging things.
(Now my pawn has better equipment than my Arisen.)
The sphinx swiveling her head like an owl and making you wait for 5 seconds before telling you whether your answer was correct or not is an instant classic
I was able to solve that riddle because I remembered basically where I needed to look. I figured it had to be in or around Melve and the Detection augment led me the rest of the way.
It was stressful, though, as it seemed that the game was conspiring to make me take longer than seven days. (Inescapable important-seeming escort quest to Harve, forced night of sleep immediately upon arriving at Harve via ferrystone, oxcart immediately destroyed halfway through the trip to Melve, etc.). I used I think five ferrystones in all to get it done. Good thing I’ve rarely used them and had a stockpile.
Well, I accidentally triggered a point of no return. So much for completing the rest of those quests. A character suggested that I stay at an inn before entering a certain place, which made me think I could just take a look and then reload. But no, I went too far and the main menu item to load from the last inn stay disappeared.
But that’s okay, as moving the story forward turned out to be much more interesting than finishing up some side quests would have been, and I can always make a quick second run through the game if I decide I want to see some things I missed.
In tonight’s adventure, I found a random tunnel by a river near the beginning of the game, and I thought it’d be a short little cave but it ended up being this labyrinthine massive expanse that opened into a waterfall full of lizard men, and a basement full of books with a single treasure chest. Opening the chest, magic exploded and a fuckin lich flew out and cursed everyone and my team and I had a wild super archetypical fantasy lich fight, it was rad. Then like right next to the giant cavern where we had that fight, there was just a little space where a chimera was just chilling out??? So I had to tackle that too right afterwards, and the entire time I was sweating thinking it’s so good I didn’t walk a few feet over into that opening and end up having to fight both at the same time.
Then after finding my way out, the opening ended up leading right up to the cave at the very beginning of the game??? Like literally the wall the griffin you ride and then crash into, behind that griffin corpse was this huuuuge cave???
It rules so much, can’t believe I found a wild lich hideout where they were doing who knows what kinda experiments for ages.
And then later, I was running along a river and across the river I saw a cyclops lying down in the water. So I crept up to it, hoping I could get a critical stab in its eye before it gets up, but then I realized it was actually just dead??? And all around it were the bodies of lizardment and wreckage??? Did they have a wild epic fight while nobody was looking??? That’s so rad, this game fucking rules
I also accidentally did a bunch of great janky cutscene interactions. My favorite was running into a pawn on the road and initiating a conversation, and somehow that completely made us invulnerable during the middle of a fight as a GIANT BOULDER flew right through us LOL
Also good convos were when I couldn’t find where the kingdom admin was hiding his dirty secrets, so I followed him into the prince’s room where he was supposed to be distracted so I could search the office. But then the prince initiated a quest for me and was like talking about how he needs me to give a letter to his buddy to make him join his rebellion, when the entire time, the evil admin guy was IN THE ROOM, A FOOT AWAY, STARING AT US THE ENTIRE TIME fhfjfjjd its so funny why does that happen
Another good one was when I was arresting the evil abbess or whatever, I tackled her in front of a door, and then the little girl of the orphanage fucking opened the door and just watched us with a dumb smile as the abbess was screaming and I was pinning her down??? Why did she come inside??? The timing was so good fjfhgjf
The accidental humor from all these system interactions are so funny, what an A++++ PS3-era game, truly we were never meant to go beyond
