Welcome to the town of METAPHORIA, where all of the young people are snake people and the old people are all vampires!
Welcome to the town of SIMILERIA, which is like METAPHORIA but more literal!
Welcome to the town of ANALOGIA, which I’ll explain by telling you a seemingly unrelated story, but the meaning will become clear soon enough!
(i vicariously love/hate this game)
So hey, as we do more in the town, the game settles down some. Totally. Except of course not at all.
Team EPT went to the library in Chinese gambling town, and because in Level 5 games, nobody just gives you something as simple as a goddamn library card, we met this lady:
Who insists that to get a library card from her, we gotta do three quests. The first one is to get a specific rose, which only grows on this one cliff, which we can only get to if we get one specific spell, so of course we have to find the woman who knows that spell, and do some (relatively non-obtrusive) kill 3 things kinda quest for her. Then she joins the town. Then we can research a spell called Bridge to make an actual fucking bridge, to get the rose.
At some point in here, our Leafbook updates, and we learn that for some reason Level 5-landia has mild pick up artist dudes who post on Leafbook because this is an accurate simulation of the real internet.
So we eventually get the rose, and take it back to the librarian, who makes more and more clear that she totally is all about getting a piece of Evan or the Prez. She’s not picky. She will take either. Evan is uncomfortable with this.
In exchange for the rose, she gives us some…steroids? They are called “Secret Supplements” but c’mon.
Anyhow, we warp to the skypirate canyon (goddamn, thank the lords this game lets you basically just quick travel fuckin anywhere) and we use those one a dead plant to get it to grow back so we can turn it into a propellor to blow us up to a plateau where we fight this dude, who of course has an alliterative subname, because Level 5’s localization squad still think alliteration is the shit.
Why are we fighting him? Because the librarian wants his horn for…I don’t know. We never know. No one will tell us. One of the characters even mildly comments on this. But we take it back to her anyhow, because we are JRPG protags and that is what we do. For her final quest, she wants us to play Not Cannon Fodder with some bandits or something, but she knows we need some more troops because our current two squad are not up to snuff. So she tells us to go recruit this dog who knows his shit about war, but like…
Is this (in universe) racist? Because man, she sure is making it sound like we are enslaving a dog-person and treating him like a pet, and I don’t know. I am uncomfortable with this, Evan.
So we go meet this dog, who is a grizzled old soldier, but he’s really hungry, so he wants us to make him an omlette. He gives us the recipe and all, so we can warp to our kitchen and make it, but like…if he had all that, why didn’t he just go make himself an omlette? It doesn’t seem that tricky. But based on his reaction, it might be.
I mean, look, this omlette is so good that this dude is willing to move across the continent to a whole new country he has never even been to and lead an army for some teenager who just decided to be king of the world, just so he can be close to the chef, who, btw, is this smug cat.
Whatever. He’s willing to join the cause, but he also can’t fight himself, but he knows two bros in town who are down for the battles, and will join up if we name drop the general, so we go get them. They want some easy stuff to join up, so no big deal really, but some of the other people around town want some stuff that…I don’t know. Again, uncomfortable.
I mean, one of them is an apprentice weapon maker named Nu Bi who wants us to kill a monster named Magmanimous (we did, it was maybe the first hard fight in the game?) so who knows.
So here we are, like 8 hours in. I have the start of an army. I have the start of a town. I might be losing my shit on a regular basis.
That’s So Level 5.
i was really impressed that in ni no kuni 1
the game was too much of a slog (of course) to play much beyond that, but what are the notable charming moments??? have they upped their game??? or forgotten about all those tiny wonderful details???
They mostly replaced the charm with stuff like a main character who shoots people with a real world gun and instead of the book you now have fantasy twitter.
The higgledy-piggledies are pretty cute though, I liked their little dance when you find the second one
Yeah, as noted, most of the charming but way too intensive details of the original have been replaced by a ridiculous amount of WTF. It’s an OK trade-off, and it means the game is about a third as long, so I am OK with it.
But yeah, those details were wonderful.
Honestly, both games are so far apart in certain respects that I wouldn’t be surprised if
3 No Kuni was a turn based strategy RPG set in the future with Star Fox style segments for travelling between planets.
Also Lofty the fairy is no Mr Drippy, but I do like that he looks like an off brand Pokemon cosplaying as Lisa Simpson
Would not be surprised at all if the extent of Ghibli’s involvement was refusing to sign off on any version of the game that did not do this perfectly, with no other requirements requests or advice, but still managing to hold up the production for years
And we’re back with another update!
So yeah, we got the troops for the army, fought in some Not Cannon Fodder, and then brought all that back to Boddly, the eviel librarian who wouldn’t give us a library card what without three fetch quests, and she’s using those three ingredients we brought her for…
Yeah, lipstick.
Now you might think “OK, so we got into the library, so now our team is gonna find some cool secret hidden there about a thing or maybe some ancient treasure or something because that is what libraries in videogames are for!” And you would be oh so very wrong, because the dorks on this team, specifically Mr. Ex Prez of Real Worldia, just want o read some books! And so they do, and they learn about the other kingdoms in the world, such as.
Alegoria: Yeah, the name so on the nose that it might be a booger in the nose. The kind of booger you might hit a loaded die with. Just sayin’.
Broadleaf: So get this, this is a high tech society what with electronics and such. They made Leafbook! They made the device you view Leafbook on! I bet someone is evil there!
Hydropolis: Oh, you thought Allegoria was a bit much? Fuck, how about we name our water city just…water city. I think we are going here next in the story.
We also read about Ding Dong Dell, you know, the kingdom catboy used to be in charge of, and the book about Ding Dong Dell had this in it:
OK, seriously, it has been like 5 days in game time, tops, and somehow someone already wrote and published a book on this, and got it into the library? What the fuck kinda rapid publishing system is that? I mean, props to the writers and editors, because that turnaround time is basically impossible. Even Ya Boy Ex Prez knows this:
So after we read about the nations, Old Lady Lipstick Librarian decides to tell us about some dude named Ferdinand who tried to unite all the countries before us, which is what catboy keeps telling everyone he wants to do. To do this, Ferdinand wrote up the…DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE.
So of course catboy wants to write one up too, which he does, and it is a magical item. So of course we go to casino town (between this and Hydropolis, I am kinda convinced this game might be a Sonic crossover) and get Pugnacious to sign it. But because everything in Goldpaw is up to chance, he has to let the goddess of the dice roll. If it comes up odds, he won’t sign it.
So the thing is…it totally comes up odds. And so the team gets all mopey for a second, until Pugnacious is all “nah, fuck that, I will sign it anyhow” and everyone is happy.
So now we are off to Zone 2: Hydropolis to get another signature or something. Also we made one of those HPs that looks like a fire had a screw put through its head. LEVEL 5!
Nah i am fine out here. I will let my good buddy lose his mind.
Re: presidential casual attire, remember this?
they’re sick and tired of discussing presidential fashion choices on Earth 2 btw, it’s only in this timeline that the topic seems fresh
Man, at least that was a suit. Roland, in addition to not giving a fuck about WW3 happening, doesn’t even get that far.
Wait they literally did the library card thing from Barkley???
It should’ve been like infinity procedurally generated quests and she never gives you the library card no matter how many you complete
Dude, you’re getting a Ding Dong Dell
sorry I’ll leave now
…an Internet-enabled vibrator whose embedded chipset is a Pentium 4
RDRAM’s biggest adventure yet
this is only funny to me
base widens into a 45mm fan that spins up after about 30 seconds
Michael Dell’s parents stopped pestering him to go back to college after he showed them the sales figures for the Ding Dong Dell
.
.
… I’m sorry I’m unable to make your joke funny either
