in addition to the economic games ive been playing (i still need to post about the guild (no not the felicia day show)) ive been playing caribbean legend which is a russian pirate rpg probably most notable for being 200 hours long, extremely unforgiving, and a prime example of european rpg mentality. It’s another one of those games about adventure and pipe laying or whatever like Star Wolves.
it’s a remake of sea dogs: to each his own which is a game from 2010 on an engine from like 2002. most people in america who know sea dogs know it as the pirates of the caribbean licensed game that was on pc and xbox cuz disney paid akella to name sea dogs 2 that. so they went on to make the confusingly named age of pirates: caribbean tales which is supposed to be the REAL sea dogs 2. this is one of the things that I think has contributed to the lasting popularity of pirates of the caribbean because you could not blame fans of that game for not knowing they made more! of course in russia all these games are in the “corsairs” series so its a lot easier to keep track of. there is a microids game named corsairs gold released in 1999, the year before sea dogs, so presumably they could not have used the name here.
its one of those gothic type games. but its the age of sail. so you get to sail all over the place and kinda do whatever you want, because a ton of shit is ~realistically~ time-sensitive and the game does not care if you fuck it up. theres a stalker mod called ogse which is a legendary stalker overhaul mod thats almost soup like in how much it adds…one of the developers is this guy named Simple Yuri who is incredibly adversarial because he has a very particular view of what videogames and specifically stalker should be. this manifested in peoples criticism or bug reports being responded to with YOU WERE UNATTENTIVE. or perhaps TRY LISTENING ATTENTIVELY. another one of Simple Yuri’s ideological beliefs is that rpg gamers (specifically Russian ones I guess) love fetch quests. all these motherfuckers want is fetch quests. they love them. and if you don’t like delivering shit or looking for unmarked shit that’s on you. the reason I’m telling you this is because I feel like this adequately explains an enormous part of the philosophy of russian rpg design.
a contemporary innovation of this remake is that they do let you turn off the time limits for the most part but they do give you shit for it because of course they do
btw we’re this guy who half the time i show his portrait to one of my friends theyre like why is he dave navarro. so you play as french dave navarro in this game. there’s also two other guys you can play as in the sandbox mode who I think are english and spanish but i wasn’t going to put 200 hours into this game and not play the main story
so sea dogs is mostly about staving off unattentiveness as much as possible. there are 40 fucking million ways to drop the bag in this game and half the time you won’t even realize you did it at first. pick the wrong dialogue option in the tutorial and skip learning how to do a bunch of stuff plus loot, skill increases, and xp. when you get off the dock in st. pierre your goal is to ask around about your brother, and if you’ve bothered to actually read the lengthy letters in your character’s inventory at the start you may start to understand that he’s in serious trouble. besides a very specific townsperson you might be lucky enough to see immediately from the dock, pretty much everyone else tells you to ask the governor which leads to you getting all your shit taken and thrown in jail. and you don’t get any of it back, just replacement items. this is probably the first moment I could see a new player falling victim to sea dogs. just outside town you can very easily fuck up the quest that gives you THE WORLD MAP IN A SAILING GAME because the right thing to do is talk to the governor, who quite possibly just fucked you over incredibly hard in the first 5 mins of the real game. what you’re supposed to do is go talk to the abbot at the church after a particular wandering townsperson tells you to, and then you can go meet with dear brother marcel without getting arrested and losing the treasure map you potentially scraped 6k pesos together for in the prologue by being attentive which i’m gonna go back to for a second because the hour i spent there is where i learned to love sea dogs
almost immediately after your first conversation with alonso (at the top of this post) you’re immediately hit with the realization that half the conversations you have in this game are going to be from these crazy ass angles. like it’s not that you have no sense of personal space but rather the camera seems to be an entity unto itself, often clipping through charles’ head and all up into the npc’s shit aggressively of its own accord
you spend most of the prologue stealing peoples shit. man this game is all about stealing peoples shit, but only when their back is turned or they arent home. you break into the captains cabin, collect squared away rums for the crew, making dialogue choices that increase your skills in ways that are impossible to predict without a guide, and literally just deciding to kick the windlass because you’re a dumb asshole so this sailor chews you out. also if you kick the windlass before you talk to another NPC and do a chore for them they fine you an extra 200 pesos lmao
there’s a guy in the hold you can talk to and if you don’t kick the windlass you won’t have a high enough navigation skill to answer his question, which means you don’t get a fairly valuable item that increases all your skills by +2 whenever it’s equipped. good luck knowing that! the game in general seems to reward you having extra sensory perception of what’s going to happen next, like attentiveness wasn’t enough, the player needs to achieve a higher state of consciousness to accurately predict their way through the dialogue trees in this game which get extraordinarily lengthy
this is one of the funniest conversations in the game so far too. just two guys bitching at each other in essay format and trying to sneak in pithy insults
a great example of this high level awareness is the purser sidequest. in the prologue you can get access to 150 doubloons, which you have to trade jewels to the moneylender later on to keep getting. their purpose is to pay the sailors their wages for a sidequest, which you can simply not do if you know that the prologue is going to end in an incredibly bloody massacre where the purser dies and you can just keep the shit. in another game perhaps this would be normal rpg decision making but the scripted nature of many sea dogs quests means it’s impossible to tell if these kinds of alternate “solutions” are regularly available.
anyway you’re gonna go drink some wine with the captain who I think is implied to be fucking you over in some way based on letters you can find in his cabin but a ship attacks so he has the sailors take you to the cargo hold. and i’m not even kidding but charles gets really excited about the concept of a real naval battle so much that he starts hallucinating an elaborate one in his mind palace so you can be tutorialized
meanwhile in reality everyone is fucking dead lol and the prologue ends on a caligula pile of bodies in the cargo hold from both the crew and the pirates who boarded the ship
ok, so this is where you get to st pierre and all the stuff with the governor etc. the game has an even more extended tutorial here where you do a bunch of quests back to back basically. you loot every fucking bulding in town and find a bunch of secret notes that lead you to a stash. marcel tells you that he was doing wetwork for the french government or some bullshit and it went bad so now the governor-general of the french colonies wants 1,000,000 pesos. this is where they have their lengthy bitchy conversation at each other and basically marcel negs you into helping him out thru familial obligations and by going “well if I was free I could do it in 6 months you loser asshole dipshit” which naturally means we have to prove him wrong. furthermore he has a lugger he put a down payment on that we can use to sail around but we gotta get like 10k or 15k more, I can’t remember, you actually need like at least 30k to get off this island properly with supplies and whatnot but he sure as fuck don’t tell you that one. thanks marcel. he also tells us to go talk to this guy named fadey who talks like sidor from stalker once we can sail to Guadaloupe.
you raise the money by helping the shopkeeper find an assistant after his fucks off to the pirate town on the other side of the island, this of course requires you to pick the best worker which at least in my situation required a guess based on the weird personal reward each guy offers you. while you’re in the jungle this is where you find the governors wifes lost earrings on a dead guy but you have to figure that out by investigating on your own and the merchant offers an easy death option where you won’t get the world map, and it’s funny because it’s a worse much deal than if you got the map, copied it to your atlas and then sold it to the priest at the church. so you help this other guy who’s daughter’s been kidnapped by cannibals…and…yeah…this is some russia guy gaming unfortunately. every time you kill one of these guys it says “Indians disapprove.” in the top right of the screen which would be kinda funny if we weren’t getting blasted with the racism beam at the same fucking time
every time the game brings up indigenous people from here on I am just going to briefly summarize it instead of dwelling on whatever fucking dialogues they chose to write for it, and we are all going to agree that whatever they were trying to do is bad.
OK. moving on. when you get back to town a high society type asks you to get him a french lady from the brothel because he can’t been seen going in there. you go in and negotiate with the madam who isn’t happy with your choice in woman and goes on a deeply uncomfortable tirade about how sexy caribbean girls are. she tells you to come back at 11pm so in the meantime you go smuggle in some rum for the bartender, which lets you sail around in the island in a tiny little boat and get used to all that
you come back, escort the girl to the guy’s house, and at this point my goal was to get some more money to cover provisions and crew, so I found some guy at the nearby fort who wanted me to get him no less than 10 bottles of expensive european wine. i ended up having to talk to merchants and get an introduction to the illegal wine trade through a letter the fortune teller gave me but then I was able to buy the 30 bottles and return them to the soldier the next day, which doubled my money. at that point i was finally able to buy the lugger and harass the bartender until he told me where to find sailors and a navigator.
you end up having to do another favor/fetch quest for the money lender if you don’t wanna straight up pay for the navigator’s freedom from debt slavery, which requires you to intercept a spanish prisoner being spirited away in the jungle by some thugs and is the first fight in the game where you gotta take two guys. more wordy ass dialogue by the way
this is probably a good time to talk about the combat, which is pretty basic except you get your ass fucking kicked really easily and your anemic Frenchman only has enough stamina to cuck men’s wives at the start of the game. if you block you basically can absorb 75% of attacks from any direction, but when two guys are wailing on you the chance you can exploit any openings becomes increasingly slim. the game was like “You’re outnumbered! Break for the rocks!” so I attempted to run to the rocks nearest where the fight started and immediately ran into an invisible wall. one of the completely fucked up tricks this game doesn’t teach you is that time compression works on foot as well as at sea so arguably you should be slowing the game down to 0.5 and getting in ez sick flintlock pistol headshots at the start of every fight. it also makes fighting multiple guys easier but i will admit that i didn’t use any sick tech and instead kited the two morons around a rock so they could only attack me one at a time. then of course after you’ve gotten your ass thoroughly kicked by these two dipshits the fucking spaniard you’re supposed to rescue starts giving you lip and you have to kick his ass too lol
so FINALLY our attentiveness has paid off. i exchange my jewels for doubloons at the moneylender and sell the jewelry for pesos. we buy provisions, weapons, medicine, and rum. i get folke’s bill of debt and get him outta jail, then we get in the boat and head to the lugger
folke tells us some really useful stuff, like the fact that rats in the cargo hold are simulated and will destroy everything on your ship if you don’t pay attention, down to gnawing the wood on rifles and pistols until they are totally unusable. amazing stuff honestly
on the way out we have to kill some guys who lure us to Le Francois under false pretenses I assume to board and scuttle our ship because charles looks like a complete mark, and is, but it’s fine we get even more provisions, rum and weapons for some comfortable padding on supplies.
from here we sail north to Guadeloupe. The overworld in this game is fucking deranged; the timescale on it is so whacked out that it’s actually more efficient to avoid it as much as possible. What you should do is sail to the edge of the local sea and only enter the overworld briefly to switch “zones” into the next area of sea. Using this method I made the journey in 7 in-game hours instead of 2-3 days, and that is without catching good wind at all. While I’m still pretty early in the game in the grand scheme of things I do know there’s at least one quest where this method of travel actually makes a huge difference. Here is the fine ship Adeline.
so we meet sidor, I mean fadey, and once again camera angles ftw
your brother tells you to seek this guy out because you know he owes him fucking gambling debts lol which is of course a sign of deep and great reliability. what do you know, fadey is a total prick who spends the entire conversation spinning bullshit like it’s gold at you and gives you some knife which I’m going to assume is totally useless because it’s not hard cash. after fucking you with a polite grin and a handshake he rambles about his house getting robbed and persian shamshirs (???) letting you know there’s some native dude he fingered for the crime. I guess charles decides to go see this guy maybe to get more information, fadey is a dick about it like he is about everything else and sends you off with a “good hunting stalker.” Tichingitu tells you some bizarre story about a shaman killing his wife so he has to do petty theft to eat breads now because he can’t go home. You go back to fadey and negotiate for his release which costs like 35 doubloons if you have the right perk (the Trustworthy perk is another one of those ESP things where you need to know to take it immediately) so we’ve actually lost money now seeing our brothers deadbeat friend who was supposed to help us. But Tichingitu is free now. Here is our new amigo.
immediately after you get him out of the damp cells of club francois he starts going on and on in a…bad…dialogue about how he owes you a blood debt basically. yeah let’s go with that. so now Tichingitu is your sworn bodyguard, he uses muskets which naturally I have not found at all yet.
another racial caricature named “Cocoa Leaf” ran up to me when we got out into the jungle and asked me to straw purchase him several handguns and ammunition from the local European traders. One can only imagine the disaster being unattentive in this present situation could lead to.
that was only the first three hours of the game I just described! i haven’t even gotten into the random quests, treasure hunting, free roam, etc.
