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Death Zebra posted:How the gently caress did the magi subdue Brinflamme? If Kara remembers it then then presumably they subdued it before they got the Sun King and the Black Knight can't have been much of a factor because Brinflamme swatted that like a fly. I'm just going to assume "it came with the island", like when you rent out a townhouse and its got this really creepy fireplace and you're not allowed to alter it so you just put up with it.
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Sep 12, 2014 23:23
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Death Zebra posted:How the gently caress did the magi subdue Brinflamme? If Kara remembers it then then presumably they subdued it before they got the Sun King and the Black Knight can't have been much of a factor because Brinflamme swatted that like a fly. Maybe they built/summoned it in a weaker form and subdued it then. That or it only got pissed off enough to rip its way free after the party started beating on it.
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Sep 12, 2014 23:52
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I never did understand the whole 'Bind it with the manacles' thing. Basic logic tells us that increasing tension on something enough just makes it easier to break, so why did we even bother?
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Sep 12, 2014 23:54
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Especially since the way out behind them wasn't locked, so they could have just ran away and left it there in the pit. It wasn't going anywhere. Or just have Caesar and Yulie Knight up and fly away with the party (because the Arc Knight doesn't technically exist).
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Sep 12, 2014 23:58
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I'm not sure about that, I guess taut chains would absorb more energy than slack ones, but they aren't necessarily easier to break. What I want to know is why did Brimflamme not break the chains at any point before the party arrived? Brimflamme kind of made breaking chains look easy and would have likely done so before. There is also the question why are the chains in lava since that degree of heat makes metal weaker? Even the in-game people who designed the constraints were incompetent. Perhaps Leonard's incompetence spread through time and space, infecting everything? Then would that make Leonard the reason for all flaws in the world? I don't really want to give WKC much thought, so I'd pass on analyzing the logistics too much more within the game. Scrutinizing WKC is like punching air: it can be done, but there is no purpose and it'll only tire yourself out.
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Sep 13, 2014 03:23
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Guys, guys. It looked really cool.
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Sep 13, 2014 03:37
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ultrafilter posted:Guys, guys. It looked really cool. ...except the part where it came after a long sequence of "run around and hit the switches" that ended up being meaningless, or made things worse because following that sequence there was no longer any way to restrain Brimflamme. Not a lot of games will pull something for "coolness" sake that amounts to telling the player "Suck on Deez NUTS!" A good game will either A: make the restraints loving work. (dragon god in Demon Souls) or make it a mechanic for the actual Boss fight, like making the switches targetable and as you damage them, they restrain the F-er more and more until he's not a threat. Hey! The bit where Brimflamme did the Super Bodyslam? How about making it so the switches could stop that from hitting you by yanking the bastard down into the Lava and stunning it? Make it 4 switches so that unless you take to long during the fight, you get 4 reprieves from a super painful attack, but after that, you have to take the attack on the chin. janusmaxwell fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Sep 13, 2014 |
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Sep 13, 2014 04:57
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Crow, please post the last update faster so we can
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Sep 13, 2014 05:48
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Blind Sally posted:Crow, please post the last update faster so we can I think at this point, the only thing that would cause more suffering than this game would be all of the music in the world disappearing, except for Justin Biebers.
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Sep 13, 2014 13:26
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OminousEdge posted:I think at this point, the only thing that would cause more suffering than this game would be
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Sep 13, 2014 16:07
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nothing was here
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Sep 13, 2014 17:16
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Well, look. Leonard doesn't know about levels, and probably not really about healing items. I mean, who in Balandore would know about that? Framboise?
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Sep 14, 2014 17:28
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 Previously on White Knight Chronicles II…  In the year since Grazel’s defeat at the Dogma Rift, civil war broke out in Faria. Backed by Grazel’s forces, Ban Nanazel launched a bid to wrest control of the Archduchy from those still loyal to the late Archduke Dalam.  We met General Scardigne, a mysterious and powerful Farian warrior sworn to Ban Lorias and the Farian loyalists.  And Miu, granddaughter of Archduke Dalam, and heir to the Farian throne.  With the party’s help, Ban Nanazel was defeated and the civil war was quelled.  Father Yggdra, Faria’s spiritual leader, gave the party the Retrospecticon, which would allow them to (not really) interact with the (not really) past.  Miu led the party back to the night of the attack on Balandor Castle to try and rescue her grandfather.  But Belcitane (and Fate) had other plans…  They discovered that they could not alter the events of the (not really) past, however…  With his dying breaths, Dalam passed the Sylvan Insignia, one of three fragments of Queen Mureas’s power, to Miu, and she resolved to rule Faria in his stead.  Then Caesar came back and the game got awesome again.  He led the party into the (not really) past and met his father, Count Drisdall, as young man. Ovaries everywhere exploded due to a high concentration of sexyfine.  Father and son faced the same problem in two different times: a plague wrought by the Yshrenian bio-weapon, the Netherwrym.  Caesar found the holy lance Wyrmbuke and slew the Netherwrym with it, doing at last what his father never could.  He then received the Dragonroost Insignia from his father’s spirit in the Retrospecticon and they finally parted ways on good terms.  Then this poo poo happened… again.  I guess Shapur was still here. I think maybe he’s an rear end in a top hat now because he killed Kara, but nobody really gave a poo poo.  Then the White Knight glitched out for no reason…  And Leonard fell into a Plot Coma for half the game. Everyone celebrated. EVERYONE.  Because Leonard hosed up that whole “being an actual protagonist” thing, Yulie set out for Faria with Eldore and Orren to retrieve the Moon Maiden Knight and show his dumbass how to actually be a hero.  We found Cyrus and Osmund in the Van Haven Waste. Eldore told to Cyrus to stop being a drunken, racist, self-pitying idiot, and he did.  Then the Best Moment of the Game happened.  Yulie returned to Balandor and broke the Yshrenian siege single-handedly. Because Yulie is loving amazing.  Kara was revealed to be alive somehow, and to be General Scardigne, because, gently caress it, let’s recycle EVERY plot point from the first game. We don’t give a poo poo any more.  And Sarvain/Ledom was revealed to be the General Dragias who killed King Valtos… I honestly thought they weren’t actually going to resolve that plot thread from the first game. Seriously.  As he lay dying, Valtos revealed that the White Knight harbours a dark secret the other four Knights did not: an evil presence lurked inside it, biding its time for some nefarious purpose…  He also bestowed the Philosopher’s Insignia onto Cyrus, telling him how proud of him he was before he passed. …Also, FLORAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINE!!!  Cisna encountered her mother’s spirit in the Retrospecticon as well, she broke the seal that kept Mureas’s powers and memories suppressed within her subconscious. Her powers now fully awakened, Cisna reunited the three insignia…  And forged a holy blade, Falcyos, from the ether for Leonard to defeat the Sun King with. …Because that worked out so well the first time when the holy sword she gave him was called Talion.  Fighting off pain and exhaustion, Leonard ventured out to meet Grazel in combat on Greydall Plain, with Falcyos at the ready…  But because he’s goddamn Leonard, he failed to actually destroy the Sun King. As Grazel retreated he challenged the boy to meet him at the Yshrenian stronghold on Redhorn Isle to settle things once and for all.  Before joining the invasion fleet, Orren obtained the Arc Knight thanks to the work of the (probably insane) Balandor scientist Framboise.  Cisna launched an invasion of Redhorn Isle with the full might of Balandor at her back. She was joined by Archduchess Miu and the entirety of the Farian fleet, and in the skies by Chanko Osmund and every Windwalker he could muster.  Leonard’s contribution to the battle was to sit comatose on a couch until Cisna told him, “we won”…  But he somehow managed to gently caress that up too…  The party confronted Grazel in his stronghold, but it turned out to be another trap.  He unleashed the demonic beast Brimflamme on them and escaped while the monster held them at bay.  Leonard did something incredibly stupid…  Trying to be a hero, he literally parachuted down to where the party was confronting Brimflamme, despite being in ill-health and unequipped to handle a foe of this calibre.  So he got has rear end kicked, spectacularly.  Then Redhorn Isle exploded. Because places Leonard visits tend to explode. It’s a thing. It literally is a thing in this game. I AM NOT MAKING IT UP!  Out of the ashes of Redhorn Isle quickly emerged the flying fortress Garmatha, Grazel’s ultimate weapon. The Garmatha’s firepower and armour proved more than a match for the Alliance fleet, as Grazel prepared to turn the fortress loose on Balandor Castle.  But then the Demithor appeared… for some reason… and held back the Garmatha with its massive strength. It turned itself to stone to stop the fortress just off the Balandor coast. However, it won’t hold out for long, as the Garmatha is already beginning to overpower it.  With the Demithor buying them precious time, Cisna joined the party aboard the Shahgna to lead the assault on the Garmatha and settle things with Grazel, Shapur, and Ledom once and for all. And now, the conclusion…  Okay, here we go then. Garmatha Fortress, the final storyline area of the game. It’s not the final area of the map that opens up, mind you. That would be the Lost City of Vellgander, which is going to appear on the map once we clear the end credits. Another area opens up beyond that, though only in the Japanese version of the game: Guido's Hollow. Though Guido's Hollow only appears on the map at the climax of the Avatar Story. We'll get to that in due time, though. For now, we have a plot to wrap up and a fortress to storm.  You guys know that one ending to Chrono Trigger where you skip the first round of the final boss fight with Lavos by ploughing Epoch right into the motherfucker? Well, guess what?  CUTSCENE: Take ‘Er In Easy, Osmund The game wastes little time throwing us back into the action. Every gun on the Garmatha fires at a non-stop pace to keep the Alliance forces at bay and to keep the Shahgna from touching down on it.  Not that a couple billion bullets are going to stop Osmund, though…    The Shahgna’s able to shrug off quite a few hits and keep going, but we’re probably pushing our luck something fierce here.   Osmund rolls the airship around another volley…  And we get a stylistic Fast & Furious-style into-and-then-back-out-of-vehicle trucking shot.  Not pictured: Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson.  And Eldore’s there too. Because these were the only full CG character models Level-5 made for the first game, and they’d be damned if they had to model, render, and animate brand new models for Caesar, Kara and Cisna just for a two-second barely focused motion shot.       The Shahgna’s port engines go dead after a direct hit from the fortress’s cannons.  And explode just for good measure.   Oh, now you know the game is coming to an end very shortly if they’re blowing up the airship right before you head into a dungeon. Because Level-5 isn’t ballsy enough to pull off a “blow up the airship” twist in mid-story. Plus we’ve had so much of this “final battle” drivel thrown at us over the last 30 minutes that it’d be an absolute curve ball to the face if it turned out we still had another ten hours of story left after this.  Not that Level-5 isn’t capable of making gobsmacking narrative choices, mind you. But no, this really is the end of the line, at long last.  Sadly, for all of Osmund's skill and bravado, there’s not much you can do with a broken airship…   And the Shahgna crashes right into one of the stone pillars dotting the Garmatha’s surface.  And sheers the right wing off it completely. Ouch!     God, I said gently, Osmund!   So the Shahgna comes to a spinning halt on the surface of the Garmatha. God, you let Osmund pilot it ONCE, and it’s a write-off now. Nice work team. I think I’m supposed to feel some kind of emotion here, like you do when you make the aforementioned choice to ram Lavos with Epoch or when the Highwind gets torn apart at the end of Final Fantasy VII, but I just can’t muster the feeling. Because the Shahgna has been a non-presence in the story or gameplay thus far. I’ve formed no attachment to it. It was introduced with mishandled fanfare at the end of the first game and then was a moot point throughout the second game thanks to the fast travel system. Even its destruction right here is rendered a moot point, because once we get control of the characters again, we can just turn around and walk out of the final dungeon and go running around the world map doing random quests for people because there is no point of no return for this game. So farewell, “Mighty Airship Shahgna,” you will be… something. I can’t really remember what that is.  Give me a minute. …gently caress it.  AREA MUSIC: “Chronicles of Darkness” (Game 2 OST, Track 5) This is it, Garmatha Fortress, the final dungeon of the game. And what kind of final dungeon are we talking about? The epic labyrinth of Kefka’s Tower? The 1970’s psychedelic fantasy painting of the Northern Crater? The bio-tech nightmare of Merkava? The gigantic puzzle of Ultimecia’s Castle? Nope. It’s a hallway. A straight forward hallway, not even a Final Fatnasy XIII-style hallway either. Hell, Orphan’s Cradle, as hosed up as it was, was longer and more complex than this. Still, good on Level-5, I suppose, for realizing that anyone who had made it this far into the game just wanted it to be over now, especially coming so hot off the heels of the Leonard-Brimflamme catastrofuck, so I can actually appreciate for once a burst of  game design.Like I said, Redhorn Isle was already the final dungeon in spirit anyway. Garmatha is just the room where the whole “let’s murder the gently caress out of Grazel, Ledom, and maybe Shapur if we remember he still exists” thing happens.   Leonard: Grazel’s in here somewhere. Caesar: The final showdown. Kara: Yeah.But before we begin. Does anyone hear something?   Blue Ball: Hey! Listen! Orren: …What? Blue Ball: Hey! Listen! Hey! Listen! Hey! Listen! Orren: This thing needs a new ringtone.   Hologram Framboise: Orren! Helloooo?! Can you hear me? Orren: Framboise? Hologram Framboise: Oh, sweet, it actually works. …You’re not experiencing a dramatic increase in radiation on your end, are you? Orren: I’m just going to turn around and walk away now.  Hologram Framboise: Hang on! I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been doing some further research into Incorruptus technology, and… well… I’ve managed to whip up a whole shitload of new weapons for the Arc Knight! Orren: Shitload, eh? That a scientific term? Hologram Framboise: Stop being a smartass. Of course it’s a scientific term. Orren: Okay, well, that’s great and all, but I’m on the Garmatha right now, so what good’s anything you whipped up in Balandor going to do me here? Hologram Framboise: Pfft. You think in such three-dimensional terms. How small you are. I’ve used a high-tech ultra-spency phase-transfer jigger-majig to upload them directly to the Arc Knight on the magic plane. …That thing has quite the mouth on it, by the way. Orren: Yeah, tell me about it. Hey, about that big pink malfunction on Redhorn Isle— Hologram Framboise: You signed the waiver.  Orren: …No I didn’t! Hologram Framboise: You had your signature forged on the waiver. Orren: I want to hate you but you keep giving me all this cool stuff… Hologram Framboise: Excellent! My plan is working, then. Orren: What plan? Hologram Framboise: A dependency study. Just one of a few blind psychological experiments… which I just invalidated by telling you about it DAMMIT! Why do I always have to gloat to them? Orren: Just tell me about this new weapon so I can go back to not having you in my life. Hologram Framboise: It’s right up your alley, if I do say so myself. BEHOLD! Hologram Framboise: Behold! A mighty weapon of calamitous power, the god-slaying hammer Drega! Orren: It’s a brick— Hologram Framboise: On a stick! Orren: I can make this work. Hologram Framboise: I figured you could. Orren: Is there anything special I gotta do, or just— Hologram Framboise: Just pull out your Ark and press that red button. Orren: Is it going to kill everybody? Hologram Framboise: …Press that blue button. Orren: Thanks Framboise.  Orren: You know, you are simultaneously the best and probably third-worst thing to ever happen to me. Hologram Framboise: What was the second-worst? Orren: Beg pardon? Hologram Framboise: Well I’m assuming Leonard was the worst-worst, so what was number two? Orren: I’m not telling you—that’s how bad it was. Hologram Framboise: My condolences. Laters! Orren: Wha? Orren: I’d say she needs to work on her people skills… but then I’m one to talk.  Eldore: Are you done talking to your girlfriend there, Niles? Let’s get moving already.  And on that note, let’s head into the fortress. Eldore: Are you all prepared? This is the one fight that matters most. Yulie: I hope this is finally the end. I pray it is. Eldore: They won’t escape us again. It ends here. Cisna: Now is the time to protect the lands Archduke Dalam, Count Drisdall, and my father loved. So out here on the “outside” of the Garmatha there are only a few enemies that show up: Skeletons, undead soldiers, and Ignis Wyverns. You can see all three here in this image with the wyvern’s tail just peeking out from behind the outcropping there in the background. At the level we’re playing at right now, the enemies here are very tough.  Taking them on on foot is going to be a bit of a challenge because they can quickly gang up on your and work over your still incredibly dumb party AI. This is also the where enemies become capable of inflicting the Restrain and Confine status ailments. Restrain prevents you from using Combos in battle, while Confine, denoted by the NO sign over the Knight helmet, means you can’t transform into a Knight while it’s active on your characters.  The best strategy for dealing with these kinds of enemies without power leveling is just to use a Knight against them.  I this case I used the Moon Maiden.  And here’s that Ignis Wyvern I promised.  You gotta love the game’s awkward animations at times. Yulie just point-blank’s the sucker because its so close to her.  Ideally, you should just run down to the area door at the bottom of the hallway and draw all the enemies to you there so you can take them all out in short order and cross the distance quickly without getting bogged down in a running battle. Glacier Soul is good for taking out the wyverns (there’s usually two of them on the fortress—three if you’re unlucky), but the element type that actually works best against undead enemies like skeletons? Fire, interestingly enough.  Once all the enemies are dealt with you head into this sort of antechamber, a buffer between the two open air halves of the fortress. It’s almost like an airlock given how you have to open one door and then open another one immediately after that. There’s a pair of chests on either side of the room perpendicular to your path, by the way. Cisna: One last battle and this war can end. Leonard: Everything we’ve fought for comes down to this. Yulie: Yeah! If we don’t stop them, no one will. Eldore: Ten thousand years-worth of struggle now hinge upon one fight. Kara: Either we win it, or we die trying. Orren: Works for me. Caesar: Riiiiight. So… no pressure. Yulie: Balandor would have been destroyed if they Demithor hadn’t shown up. Caesar: Thank you Demithor! Just hold out a little longer. Leonard: We’ve put the Shahgna through a lot, huh? Orren: Oh yeah, “destroying it” sure is a lot, ain’t it? Eldore: EVERYTHING rides on this battle! Gather all your wits! Yulie: This mobile fortress HAS to be their last stronghold. Cisna: We’ll topple the Yshrenian Empire together.Most of these aren’t actual conversations, I’m just stringing them together because there is an incredible amount of Live Talk for an area that you pretty much walk from one side of to the other in under five minutes. Most of this stuff isn’t even heard by most players because they’re in such a rush to get to the final bosses.  Leonard: Come on, this is it. Kara: Setti, I’m coming for you… Caesar: Setti’s family, he’s our responsibility, in a way. Orren: What part of “Setti died at Sinca Village” are we still not getting here?In this little arena-like area there’s always either a Pyredaemos or a Pyredaemos Rex waiting for you, without fail. The RNG decided to give me a Rex this time, but I’ve had just as many runs through this place where I got a Pyredaemos Lite too.  Taking the Rex on on foot is suicide, so it’s time to suit up.  Just ignore that the Arc Knight isn’t wielding the Drega for the moment. I recorded like six separate runs through Garmatha for various purposes and stitched them all together for this update. I promise you, BRICKSTICK is coming.  The King is dead.  Long live the… guy who killed him, I guess?   Caesar: No stopping now! Not till we finish this! Cisna: This war will rage on so long as Ledom draws breath. Kara: Ledom, no hell is deep enough for you.At the far end of the arena, you find a tunnel leading to the “inside” portion of Garmatha.  And you get a prompt asking you if you want to teleport inside because Level-5 didn’t want to render anything outside of one hallway for it. I suspect that this was at one point another massive seamless Dogma Rift Palace-like area, but Level-5 ultimately ran out of both time and money to make a proper final dungeon so instead it merely became a gigantic visual metaphor for White Knight Chronicles II in and of itself.  In that eventually it just stops.  Yulie: Leonard, are you… are you okay? Leonard: Yeah… I’m in this till the end. Cisna: I believe in you, Leonard. Kara: Pha. Well now we know we’re stuck with him. Orren: I can fix that one, just give me a minute alone with him. Caesar: Seriously, butter him up a little more, Your Grace. Eldore: Once we finish this, the lad can rest. Come on!The best part about that exchange is actually hearing it spoken in-game. Kara’s line is meant to be a playful ribbing of Leonard’s determined goofishness, but I swear to god Catherine Cavadini reads it like Kara is coming to some sort of frustrated realization in that moment, which, after the bullshit that we just saw on Redhorn Isle, works perfectly, in my opinion. Because I’m pretty sure that, much like how I portray Orren in this LP, Kara became good friends with Caesar, Yulie, and Eldore, but never really warmed to Leonard all that much, despite her reluctance to kill him in Frass Chasm when she had the chance. But that’s the thing of, though. Nobody really seems like they warmed up to Leonard in-game. True, the others all care for him on some level, but outside of Yulie, it’s the same kind of care you’d show for a really dumb, rambunctious puppy that you were never actually asked to take care of but got stuck with anyway.  Leonard: I won’t transform again after this, Cisna. I promise. Orren: You never really did to begin with. And this right here is the last door in White Knight Chronicles II—the storyline, anyway. That Logic Stone right there is the final save point of the game before the final boss. Through this door is the teleporter that whisks you directly into the Final Boss Gauntlet, another trio of boss fights that serve as the final bouts of the game’s single-player storyline.    Orren: I just want to say, before we head in there and face whatever Grazel’s got up his sleeve next, that… Well, just in case we DO all die in there… I actually kinda had fun doing this. And, at the end of the day, I really do count you among my friends. There’s no one else I’d rather be saving the world with. Even you, old fart. Eldore: Why, Niles, I—I don’t know what to say to that. Orren: Say my name. My real name. Eldore: I would fight and die by your side any day, but not today. Today, we will be victorious, I swear it… Orren. Orren: Thank you, Eldore. Leonard: Hey, what about me? Orren: I hope Grazel obliterates you, you dumb chucklefuck. Everyone: Amen! Leonard:   Alright then. Let’s go save the world.  CUTSCENE: The Final FINAL Confrontation BOSS FIGHT: Game 2 Final Boss Gauntlet (The Sun King & The Black Knight, High Priest Ledom (and Assassins), and Emperor Madoras (The Demon Knight) - with commentary by nine-gear crow and Blind Sally) Team I Can’t Really Call Them Heroes Any More Because Leonard Is Back With Them rushes into the curiously wide open space inside the heart of the Garmatha. Well there we go. After an entire game of the party being fractured and incomplete for various plot bullshit purposes, we finally get a shot of everyone all together again, plus Cisna, who in any other game would have been our seventh party member anyway. As for the boss fight video, just like last time, this video is a full 25 minute boss extravaganza featuring all three stages of the final battle, including interspersed cutscenes and the end credits to boot. This one is full on spoilers, so you’d be best served by viewing it after the fact once you’re finished this chapter. If nothing else, you’ve been warned.  Okay, just what the hell is it with Grazel and having to be so high up and far away from anyone he tries talking to. I didn’t bring it up last time, but I can only imagine having a scene with this kind of blocking playing out in real life and no one having any idea what the other party is saying because they’re all too far away from one another. It’s like that scene at the climax of Kung Fu Panda 2 where the audience misses nearly all of Po’s dramatic speech because it keeps cutting back and forth between him and Shen who’s like 500 feet away and keeps shouting “WHAT?!” because he can’t hear a drat thing he’s saying. Also, I’m pretty sure the last time I did this gag I lifted it almost directly from Zac Parson’s Paranatural webcomic, which, by the way, is awesome, smart, and hilarious, and you should all treat yourselves and binge-read it to make up for me keelhauling you all through White Knight Chronicles II. Do it right now. The LP isn’t going anywhere.    CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Final Battle” (Disc 2, Track 17) [ENTER: A Transformers joke.]   Grazel: You certainly took your time, friends. Cisna: …WHAT?!Also, gently caress you, Crispin, it’s been like 20 minutes in-game since we last talked to you.  Cisna: Grazel! Your evil ambitions end here! Grazel: What?! I can’t hear you. Come closer.  Ledom: My goodness, if it isn’t Princess Cisna![KAYFABE NOTE: I’m leaving this lone reference to Princess Cisna as it appears in the game, because it’s in keeping with Ledom’s character to be a condescending dick.]  Ledom: Oh dear… now, where are my manners? Ledom: I suppose now we all ought to be calling you Queen Mureas?See? Condescending dick.  Cisna: And you! Cisna: You were behind all of this, Ledom. You have been trying to revive the Yshrenian Empire all along. Ledom: Of course. I am an Ancient. Ledom: I crossed through time and waited for this moment. Ledom: And now, my wait is nearly over.  Eldore: A fellow traveller.See, told ya that portentous passing glance between Eldore and Sarvain in the throne room back at the start of the first game would be paid off… in the closing minutes of the second game. They both came from the Dogma Era and made the same lifespan-swapping deal with death to jump forward 10,000 years in time to serve their respective reincarnated masters. Eldore came to aid Mureas, while Ledom came to aid Madoras, the key difference being of course, that Eldore sucked at his job while Ledom was loving amazing at his.  Cisna: So where does this stop? Cisna: How many more lives are you willing to throw away?! Cisna: And by all means, be specific. I want to make sure that war machine I built to beat you gets its money’s worth. Ledom: Throw away? Ledom: Mwhahahahahahahaha! Ledom: ANY life ended in the name of my master Ledom: is a life well spent. Caesar: So much for moral gray area. Ledom: Wouldn’t you agree, Grazel? Grazel: Indeed. Grazel: Friends, you have my deepest thanks for bringing the Knights together. Truly. Grazel: However, they belong to my empire. They always have. Grazel: And you will give them back. Leonard: Please, Cisna, find some place safe.Yeah, because you’re about to do something. And when you do something, Bad Things happen. They ALWAYS do.  Leonard: Grazel! We didn’t come here to talk politics with you.Because trying to argue politics with Grazel is like trying to debate Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract with Glenn Beck, try as you might to make your point eloquently, the fucker’s eventually just going to scream “NAZIS!” apropos of nothing and make you want to push his doughy head into a pot of boiling water. So, in this case, I’m with Leonard. Let’s kick this guy’s douche rear end already.  CUTSCENE / BOSS FIGHT MUSIC: “The Battlefield Flower (English Version)” (Game 2 OST, Track 21) Leonard: Let’s just skip to the end. Leonard: Your stupid war is OVER! Leonard: [INEFFECTUAL PANTYWAIST MOAN]And now we get a boss fight set to the accompanying music of… the word salad vocal track from the promotional trailer for the game and the opening credits sequence. Never let it be said that Level-5 doesn’t recycle.  Grazel: The end, Leonard? Oh no. This is a new beginning.  Grazel: The sun has risen again on Yshrenian history! Grazel: Verto!     Shapur: Verto!   So we’ve got the Sun King and Black Knight on one side challenging everyone to a fight. This is clearly an attempt to goad the party into using all three of their Knights the same time to kickstart the Final Awakening. So we’re going to be smart about it and sit one Knight out, right? I mean, the game can’t handle more than three Knights on the field at one point anyway, so it would only make sense that we pick our two strongest Pactmakers (IE: Everyone other than Leonard!) and only use them so as not to be goaded into starting the apocalypse because—  Look at that face. Look at that loving thoughtless face. You all know what the gently caress is coming next. You know it in your heart of hearts. You can FEEL it coming, can’t you? He’s. About. To gently caress. The world. Over.  Leonard: I’m helping! Leonard, Yulie, & Caesar: VERTO!  Yep. Five Knights. One confined space. Zero intelligence. You should just go on YouTube and right now and start playing “Komm, Süsser Todd” over this fight rather than “The Battlefield Flower” because we’re unsettlingly close to everyone turning into orange goop right now, and I can’t think of a better way to watch the world end than with an upbeat song about suicide.   Ledom: Hahahahahahahaha!Yeah, because you just KNOW that this is actually a Good Thing now because I’m pretty sure Ledom just came in his spikey purple pants over this.   Leonard: Bring it on! So Our Mutual Idiot leads his troops into battle against Grazel and Shapur in what I can assure you is going to be the least interesting five-person giant robot brawl of all time. Not even Jim Ross would call this thing a slobberknocker, and I’m pretty drat sure JR was paid on a “slobberknocker”-per-broadcast pay scale.  
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Feb 27, 2015 |
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Sep 18, 2014 14:26
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  Caesar: We didn’t come all this way just to lose to you. Yulie: Come on! Shapur: You are only postponing your deaths! Leonard: Falcyos! Grant me strength! So this is Level-5’s idea of paying off the ominous dangling Sword of Damocles that was the prospect of an eventual all-out throwdown between all five Yshrenian Knights. Cramming five massive character models into a space barely large enough for one of them to move around in freely and then let them clip through one another as they launch the same three or four attacks…  That are insane effect-heavy graphic belches that obscure all the action and turn this fight into an even bigger clusterfucker than it already is. Shapur: Ha ha ha haaaaah! Caesar: Boy have I been waiting for this. Yulie: This time, we’re finishing you for good! So we get stuff like this. It’s really not even worth me commenting on or posting a video on with commentary because it’s an unmitigated mess.   Grazel: At last, we’re fulfilling our destiny. Caesar: We only brought the Knights together to stop you! Grazel: Insignificant worms! The audacity! Yulie: Let’s see who’s stronger now. Shapur: You have stood in Lord Grazel’s way long enough.Oh, Caesar. Listen to what you’re saying. Ugh. Another victim of Leonard’s stupid field. You could have handled Grazel and Shapur with any combination of your three Knights. You’ve known for a whole goddamn year that Five Knights = End of World, so why would you be so dumb that you’d actually enable a situation where all five Knights come together YOURSELF?! Fuuuuuuuck. Because it’s White Knight Chronciles, that’s why. The game bleeds stupid when you cut it. I chose the STUPID thread tag nine months ago when I started this LP for a reason, and we at long last are bumping up against the glass ceiling of Peak Stupid in this game.  Okay, so the actual mechanics of this fight then, I really should talk about those. So now for the first and only time you're given a battle in which all three of your active party members are in Knight mode at the same time. You can freely hop between each Knight at your leisure (though at the pace of the game’s lovely character change mechanic). Each Knight has its advantages, but the best practice for this fight is just to stick with the White Knight and trust that the AI will manage to heal any damage done to the Moon Maiden and Dragon Knight with either healing items or their healing spells. The strategy for this fight is (brain)dead simple. Attack the Black Knight first with stabbing attacks, then attack the Sun King with slashing attacks, heal when needed. You don’t need to worry about running out of MP for this fight. I purposefully tried it to see if it netted me a game over like it normally does in plot-based Knight battles (mostly to keep myself from seeing the  ending of this game one more time), but it didn’t. This is probably the one fight in the game where it allows you to remain in Knight mode at 0 MP. At that point all you can do is use the basic attacks that cost no MP. Though if Yulie is using Arslese instead of El’Liet on the Moon Maiden, that means she can’t do anything because even her basic attack uses at least 4 MP per shot. Actually, you’d be better served if you went into this fight with El’Liet on the Moon Maiden because while you take a hit in raw attack power, you’ll have +Glittering Moonlight to fall back on as it can heal all three Knights at once instead of trusting the AI to maybe pull of a self-targeted Healer Soul one second too late for it to matter. Because if any one of your Knights goes down, THAT gets you a game over.  I should point out that this fight is going to be Leonard’s final gameplay contribution in this LP. After this battle, the dumb motherfucker will never return to our active party. Ever. We are done with him being a thing in this game in T-minus 59 screenshots.  I should also point out that I went right from Redhorn Isle into the Garmatha, so I have not had the chance to level up Leonard or change any of his equipment, so he remains the big throbbing weak spot on Team World-Ending Stupidity.  White Knight Chronicles: The Epic Conclusion! Aren’t you all so glad I’m screencapping this for you. You should have seen the screenshots I cut from this chapter. Like every other screen was blotted out by a bright flash of light.  You can take out Grazel and Shapur in whatever order you like. I just feel that it’s thematic to off Shapur first and then go for Grazel.  The funny thing about this battle is that despite being the same weakling shithead that got trounced by Brimflamme in the last update, Leonard does very decently against the combined assault of the Sun King and Black Knight. Though that’s mainly because Yulie and Caesar are taking turns tossing him Heal Potions every other turn as Shapur and Grazel constantly knock him down to half health each time they hit him. But regardless, at least he’s not dying and causing a catastrophic party-rending game over… again.  You should really have the AI set to “focus on my target” instead of free fight, like I stupidly have them set to right now. But still, it just goes to show you that it is capable of hitting the same target you’re focusing on and hitting it with a weakness-matching attack too under utterly ideal conditions. This is also around the point in the fight where Shapur went down hard thanks to the Leonard-Caesar double-team. I really should have been playing as Caesar right now because he has the stronger stabbing attack (Wyrm Dance), and because of all people he deserves to be the one to cap Shapur’s horny rear end for what he did to Kara, but I just want to be done with this game so much right now…  Grazel: The world will be mine once again! Leonard: “Yshrenian History” was over ten millennia ago, dammit! So the Black Knight just folds over and stays there taking up space on the battlefield once its defeated, leaving you free to give Grazel the three-on-one thrashing his smug rear end has been begging for since that time he pretended to kill that guy who turned out to actually be him all along. Remember when that was a thing in this game? I sure as poo poo do.  One more status effect to point out too. The skull icon there by Caesar’s name denotes the Curse status effect. Curse temporarily lowers character stats to make them weaker across the board as opposed to targeting individual stats like attack, defense, or evasion. It’s the final new status effect of the game and only two enemies ever inflict it, this iteration of the Sun King, and the final boss of the game, who we will be meeting in short order. Along with Knock Out, HP Leak, MP Leak, Restrain, and Confine, Curse is one of those rare enemy-only status effect spells. You never gain a spell or skill that can inflict Curse on an enemy. You can inflict Poison, Sleep, Paralysis, and Silence on enemies, but not KO, HP/MP Leak, Restrain, Confine, or Curse—mostly because enemies don’t use combos or transform into Knights. The one party-only status effect you have at your disposal, by the way? Shackle. Or at least I assume, anyway, because in three playthroughs in as many years as I’ve owned this game, I have never once seen Shackle cast ever. Shackle, for the curious, is denoted by a red coil-like icon and apparently causes both the target and caster of the spell to lose their ability to move in battle, thereby shackling them in place. I don’t really know why you would want to use a spell like this, maybe to hold a group of enemies in place so they don’t scatter outside the range of an AoE spell, but yeah, that’s Shackle, a spell so high up the offensive magic skill line that most people probably hit the Skill Point ceiling before they ever unlock it. Because Level-5 doesn’t understand how character development systems work, I guess.   But back to this AWESOME fight…  Grazel  s-out on my and turns around to face AWAY from Leonard and Caesar for whatever reason, allowing me to score a few free hits on him. Sadly, this isn’t an SRPG and attacking form behind doesn’t do more damage.Also, this game’s combat targeting system is such rear end that I would not be surprised in the slightest if Grazel just attacked the air in front of him and still managed to hit both Leonard and Caesar behind him for massive damage.  Never forget what a terrible game this is.  Plot. Characters. Gameplay. Structure. Pacing. Level Design. “Protagonist”.  Terrible.  Unsalvageably. Inexcusably.  Terrible. This was the game Sony was banking on selling PlayStation3s with at one point in 2006. If I were Kazuo Hirai, and I just got done seeing the finished product of what this demo presentation promised, I would personally mail Akihiro Hino the biggest, pointiest wingtipped dress shoe I could purchase (like a size 15 EEEE), put it in a box with bright pink tissue paper and leave a note in the insole lip that said “Shove this up your rear end and send me a picture of it and we’re all good.” And then I’d publish this turd with the shittest of poo poo-eating grins because I’d at least gotten a measure of private schaddenfreude out of this whole debacle. …God, that was really sadistic of me. That’s like Harlan Ellison mailing dead gophers to Hollywood executives-level hosed up. I think I might need some kind of professional help thanks to this game.  But anyway, Grazel goes down one last time, proving himself definitively to be Yshrenia’s Leonard, having only used the Sun King a grand total of three times across the duology and getting his rear end handed to him each and every time he transforms into it. I can’t believe I once said that Grazel was “smart”. I’d like to apologize for that right now, ladies and gentlemen.  CUTSCENE: The Crowning Moment of Stupid Leonard: RAAAAAAAAAGH!   So we come out of the battle into another “That Battle Didn’t Count” cutscene with Leonard and Grazel squaring off in the centre of the chamber.     The camera pans around a full 360 degrees as they lock blades with one another and inadvertently reveals that the Black Knight, Dragon Knight, and Moon Maiden have all blinked out of existence temporarily to accomplish this shot, because otherwise there’d be no room for anyone to maneuver in this cutscene if all five Knights were still there.   Leonard: UAAAAGH! They force themselves apart from one another in opposite directions.  Well, there you go folks. That’s the closest Leonard ever comes to hurting Grazel in a cutscene—impotently locking blades with him for a second, and then being launched backwards by the second law of motion.  Leonard sucks.  He lands hard on the opposite side of the room and prepares to launch the Finishing Attack to take Grazel down once and for all…  And then the game goes “LOL! Were you actually expecting us to do it? Make Leonard competent? gently caress you, pleb!” and the White Knight starts glowing ominously once again.   Grazel: Huh? What the—I’d take it 10x easier on this game instantly if they actually allowed Crispin Freeman to use the word “gently caress” right there. I really would.   So all five Knights begin resonating at the same time now, the first time this has ever happened. Well, poo poo, don’t you all look like asses now for allowing this TO EVEN HAPPEN!  A stream of light emerges from the other four Knights’ chests…  And each of them writhes in shock and pain as it emerges.   What pretty colours.   The essence of the other five Knights floats into and merges with the White Knight. Eh, maybe this is the start of something amazing. Maybe we really are going to get our MegaWhiteKnightmon or Voltron White Knight or something and then we can turn around and kick the poo poo out of Ledom with it in the most one-sided final boss battle since the end of Xenogears where you basically cave Miang’s skull in for all the tomfoolery she was responsible for since, oh, I dunno, History.  Ledom: Ooh! Haa! It begins. The Final Awakening!…gently caress my life. Nice work you shitsacks. This is like a demotivational poster. “Let’s defeat Grazel and stop the Final Awakening!” / *Triggers the Final Awakening*  Alright then, let’s see just what this Big Terrible Event that’s been looming over our heads since the start of the first game plays out then.   Yulie: Uuugh! The four other Knights collapse now that their essence has been drained from them.  CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Chronicles of Darkness” (Game 2 OST, Track 5)   Everyone but Leonard reverts to their natural forms, the power of the Knights now lost to them for good.   The White Knight now floats there, suspended by some unseen power, writing in agony as an ever-darkening energy surrounds it.  The strange glyphs seen when the Phantom first appeared return to surround the Knight once more.  Leonard: Uuuuh URGH! UUUUUUUGGGGH!! Leonard: UuuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Leonard: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! Cisna and the (allegedly) non-Pactmaker party members come running up to join Caesar and Yulie.  Cisna: Leonard!Take one penultimate shot!  Eldore: What is happening to him?The Knight hangs trapped in a cocoon of dark magic, unable to move or break free, as the dark pounding music intensifies. This is what rushing into something clearly beyond your control or the scope of your knowledge or abilities with no plan and no skills ultimately gets you. In some ways, this is oddly smart of Level-5, and is the perfect capstone for Leonard’s role in this entire two-part game: being an over-confident idiot, rushing in, loving things up, and getting tooled by forces beyond his purview. Dumb motherfucker died as he lived: saying “I got this” when he really actually didn’t. It’s not every day someone kicks off the Apocalypse because they LITERALLY CANNOT COUNT TO FIVE IN THEIR HEAD!   It takes another moment for Eldore to put 2-and-2 together, but the dramatic zoom in shot clinches it for him.  Eldore: …OH NO! Ledom: Mwahahahahaha! Figured it out, have you? Ledom: Well, you can’t stop it! Ledom: At long last… Ledom: My ten thousand year wait has reached its glorious conclusion! Darkness begins to bubble up and eclipse the light around the cocoon.    Very quickly the egg of light surrounding the White Knight turns into an egg of darkness.  Grazel: High Priest Ledom! Grazel: What is the meaning of this?! Ledom: You are one fool of a boy. He is returning to us! Emperor Madoras is about to awaken!… … … Holy gently caress. Holy poo poo. Holy CHRIST! Did you all just catch that? Emperor motherfucking Madoras. THAT’s what the shell around the White Knight is about. Let this thought sink in for a moment. After nearly half a game where Leonard has been sidelined—a protagonist kicked out of his own game, essentially—now, after returning to the party for maybe all of half an hour and two battles, the dumb motherfucker is literally about to become the FINAL BOSS of his own video game. I can’t believe it. I can’t loving believe it. It’s been three years since I learned this, and I still can’t loving believe it. This doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t. Show me another game out there where the protagonist of the story becomes the final boss you need to kill at the last second, through their own stupidity, no less. That just doesn’t happen, in any storytelling medium. The closest example I can think of is near the end of Xenosaga Episode III, so if you’re also reading SkurvyKip’s Xenosaga LP concurrant with this one, you’d probably want to skip down to the next image, as the example I have for the next-worst case scenario contains some pretty heavy spoilers for the end of the final game here. Anyway, Shion, the series’ protagonist (and another Leonard-level unlikable dumbass of a character) betrays the party to be with her domestic abuser not-dead ex-boyfriend who has been tasked by the Big Bad to kill the party, and she’s so in LUV with him that she actually helps him try to murder the people she’s spend two and a half years forming life-long fellowships with. Leonard still steals the crown from her because she 1) wasn’t an actual hostile enemy, just a support character for the villain in question, 2) was only a part of the penultimate boss battle, not the final boss battle, and 3) turned good again in time to face the actual final boss of the game… a giant modern art piece powered by an autistic 12 year-old who was actually God or something.  Grazel is understandably shocked that Everything He Knows Is Wrong.  Grazel: Uh! B-but I—  Grazel: I thought I was the reincarnation of the Emperor! Ledom: LOL, no. I trolled you so hard. Eat a dick, ya dumb son of a bitch!   And he collapses in shock as Ledom strides away and not a gently caress was giveth that day by the Artist Formerly Known As Chancellor Sarvain.  Cisna: We failed? Cisna: SERIOUSLY! What the unholy gently caress is WRONG with you people?! Why?! WHY?! Why do constantly gently caress up everything you attempt to do?! Enough of this goddamn BULLSHIT! I have HAD IT with you people. gently caress you, Ledom! I’ll kill you myself if that’s what it’s gonna take. Oh yeah. Shapur’s still there too. I guess.  Shapur: Uh! Shapur: My power… My Knight’s power… Shapur: Uuuuuugh!  Shapur: Give it back to me! Ledom: Gods, this is gonna epic, I can feel it… Shapur: The power belongs to MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!  So Shapur takes a running dive for the Big Giant Black Ball of Doom, reaching out to touch it because that’s ALWAYS a good idea.  [FLASH OF WHITE LIGHT]  Shapur: NNNGHUUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Shapur: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH— Ledom: Schwing! As Shapur disintegrates and his horrific death scream fades, Kara looks up in a mixture of horror and relief at his death. A great weight seems to be lifted off her shoulders. The man who tried to kill her and stole her power is dead, done in by his own greed and stupidity, and at long last the twisted saga of the Black Knight has come to a close. If nothing else, in the midst of this hurricane of stupid and failure, Kara has finally found closure in her life.  Ledom: Should have got a picture of that or something. That was amazing. Ledom: Humph. Another fool.  Ledom: Soon, my most ardent wish will be fulfilled. Ledom: Your roles have come to an end! Ledom: I shall sacrifice your lives in the name of MADORAS! And here’s Boss #2 of the Game 2 Final Boss Gauntlet, High Priest Ledom. We fought him once in the past as General Dragias, and now we get to take him on for reals.  So something interesting happens here, perhaps to make up for all the crazy, stupid bullshit the game has just foisted on you. For seemingly no reason, the game just hands you Cisna to play as.  As you can see here, Cisna is the strongest player character in the game. She’s Level 70, a full twenty levels higher than any other character you’ve got access to at the very least, and has the stats to reflect that. She’s got +15 resistances to all four element types and Poison, Paralysis, Sleep, and Silence status effects, so she’s practically invincible, because, well, poo poo, it’s Cisna. And she also wields the single strongest short sword in the game, the True King’s Sword, which you can’t buy or bind any more legitimately in-game because the sword you create it from was only purchasable from a Guild shop and now that Guild Towns are no longer accessible now that GeoNet is offline, the True King Sword is lost to history now too.  So let’s do this poo poo then. Here’s the throwdown that has been brewing for 10,000 years, and, curiously enough, plays right into the narrative I’ve been cooking up for this LP. Ledom: We have no further need of you Pactmakers! Cisna: Time to die you wrinkled old motherfucker! Ledom: Bend the knee, or BREAK! Yulie: Nooo! Leonard! Caesar: What the hell?! Are you kidding? Ledom: Heh heh heeh! What’s wrong? Where is your strength?So for this fight, in addition to Cisna, I decided to use Kara and Eldore, just for thematic reasons, because Yulie and Caesar already fought in the first round, so using the other two main party members to get the entire cast in on the action only felt appropriate. Plus, Yulie and Caesar don’t have useable Knights any more. Cisna does. She also has the highest level area of effect magic spells for all five elements, including the game’s version of Ultima, +Final Apocalypse.  Ledom: Soon! Soon he will awaken! Eldore: He planned this, all of this! Kara: That poor fool. Ledom, you’ll pay for everything!And that makes taking out the quartet of Assassins Ledom starts the fight off by summoning really easy.  Kara: What’s happening to Leonard? Yulie: Urgh! The Moon Maiden won’t answer my call! Caesar: Leonard is absorbing all the Knights’ power. Kara: What is the cocoon?! Eldore: The five Knights should never have been brought together. Orren: And who’s fault was that, now?! Cisna: I take no responsibility for this. Orren: What else is new? Ledom: Do you feel it? Do you feel his power? Eldore: No! The Emperor must not be allowed to return! Yulie: Ledom! This ends right now. Caesar: You orchestrated this whole drat thing! As usual, the key to this fight is breaking all of Ledom’s stats so he’s a little more manageable because he’s quite the heavy hitter for a guy pushing 140. You might have also seen his cool purple energy sword in the cutscene leading up to the battle. That’s actually a bindable weapon called Dimension Ripper, which, if you put the time and effort into it, you can make for yourself and wield in this battle against him.  Ledom: Do you feel it? Heh heh. Do you FEEL IT?!Ledom spends much of this battle cackling like a madman, by the way, because, well, he just loving won. Why wouldn’t he?  Ledom has a bunch of heavy-hitting sword moves in his repertoire, and the ability to inflict silence on you, as seen above. He also has the ability to cast Physical Barrier to make him temporarily immune to physical attacks in order to compound sealing your magic. He can also cast Restrain and Confine on you to further limit your options. And his summoning Assassins thing? Just like when we fought him as Dragias, that’s not a one-off deal, and he will repeatedly summon a new set of four of them at certain intervals, and they can nearly insta-kill you with their earth magic. Normally, Orren’s +Aftermath attack would work well to get them all near-death as quick as possible, as you have a very limited window between when Ledom summons them and they appear in a circle around him to when their AIs kick in and they start moving and attacking to take each of them out before they do anything to you. …But Orren seems to be missing for some reason. Why is that? Can I keep this straight-faced joke going any longer? Let’s find out.  So anyway, midway through the fight when Ledom is brought down to half health, Cisna decides “balls to this noise, let’s make this overkill” and whips out a Knight of her own. Cisna: O Anthaleta, eternal empress, goddess supreme of the ancient world, grant me your power… Ledom:   Cisna: This is the part where I kill you, Ledom.Look at that face.  Cisna: Today, Yshrenia. Tomorrow… we build me a loving rocket because I’m taking this poo poo INTERSTELLER!   Cisna: VERTO!       And with that, we meet Cisna’s own personal Knight, the Ivory Empress, the ultimate expression of our young warmongering Queen’s undying power.  Ledom: NO! This is—this is IMPOSSIBLE! Cisna: I poo poo impossible every morning after I wake up, dickhead! Cisna: HIYAAAAAAAAAI! Ledom: OH GODS WHY DOES IT HURT SO MUCH! So as you can see down there on the command bar, the Ivory Empress has a slew of new attacks not seen on the other Knights, because, well, it’s Cisna, the game is just bending in on itself to match her will at this point. We’ve seen Flame Soul on Yulie’s Moon Maiden already, however. And we’ll see the other new attack, Knightly Majesty, in a moment.   But first, we need to cook some Kentucky Fried Ledom.   Ledom:   Ledom: Why do you retain your power?!Some people read this line as an indirect reference to the Arc Knight, as the Avatar becomes the only party member able to transform post-Final Awakening, being that they have the only Knight that wasn’t directly tied to Madoras’ power.   And this is Knightly Majesty. This is the attack that the Ark Incorruptus we fought to claim the Arc Knight used on us right out of the gate back in Chapter XIII.  Knightly Majesty lowers a target’s physical attack power, so we’ve pretty much nerfed the hell out of Ledom on all possible fronts at this point.    Heeeer’s the wind up.  And it’s a line drive going goooooing—  GOODBYE BASEBALL!  Cisna: NO ONE SHALL DISPUTE MY RULE EVER AGAIN! This is just insult to injury now.  Poor Ledom, the sly bastard expected to score a walk-off win against a bunch of low-preforming morons, only to get blindsided because Cisna got fed up with all the game’s bullshit and just decided to cheat.  Ledom: I must live! My master needs me! Cisna: I can fix that. Ledom: Your power may be great, but— Cisna: But NOTHING! Cisna: Victory is boring. Eldore: …What the devil just happened? Kara: I… don’t know. Yulie: Since when does Cisna have a Knight? Caesar: Yeah, man! I call bullshit. What the hell?Okay, okay, FINE. Lest I continue confusing the hell out of the people reading this thread who have played this part of the game already and are losing their goddamn minds over what they just saw. [MOUSEOVER TO BREAK LP KAYFABE]: What you just witnessed was the ultimate payoff to an in-LP joke that started with one single line that amused me too much to possibly let go of. That right there was the same Avatar Cisna mock up who appears in Chapter IV of this game, modded into a digital goddess thanks to the power of the PS3 Game Genie and then speed walked to the end of the game for the soul purpose of technically having Cisna finally step up to the plate and kill Ledom herself. The unmodded, running gag-less LP resumes apace from here. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Sep 18, 2014 14:26
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 CUTSCENE: Emperor Madoras, I Assume Ledom: Ugh! Ledom: Mwahuhuhuhaa. You mean to kill me? Cisna: What part of “the last five minutes,” aren’t you getting? Ledom: Go ahead. Ledom: But the future has already been written! Ledom: Emperor Madoras has descended from on high to rule us!  The cocoon shatters in a brilliant light, Madoras’ resurrection finally complete.   CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Advent” (Game 2 OST, Track 15)   ????: Ten thousand years will give you SUCH a creak in the neck! Wait…  Waaaaaait….  Noooooo.  Are you serious Level-5? Are you loving making GBS threads me? Well, here we go. This is it, the reveal of the big villain of the game. Are you all ready? Here it comes….  … … … …. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!! WHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOleee poo poo. Really Level-5? THAT’S what you’re going with for our Series Big Bad? “David Bowie as Anime Satan?” Really? God, gently caress me. Well, then again, given everything we’ve been through in this weird and wonderful adventure, I suppose it’s only natural, really. We started this game facing off against a midget clown with crazy eyes and an insane haircut voiced by Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and we’re ending it with an albino S&M fetishist in a leather man-dress with a terrible dye job voiced by Gaara from Naruto. The game has circled around itself and swallowed its own tail to become an ouroboros of crazy.  But I digress, we’ve got some “Liam O’Brien would like to blow out your subwoofer” to get to.    So Madoras descends to meet the thoroughly unimpressive audience for his glorious resurrection to the living world.  He also has a spikey metal spine… because he’s un-loving-subtly evil, in case you’re having difficulty sussing that out.   Ledom: Oooooooh! Ledom: Your Excellency!  Madoras: Ledom. Rest now. Madoras: You have borne your burden well.  Ledom: You are… Ugh… too kind, My Lord… So Madoras just microwaves him to death or something. I don’t know.   Farewell, High Priest Ledom, you magnificent motherfucker. You won today. You really goddamn did. And nothing or nobody is going to take that away from you. Go and join Belcitane in Competent Villain Heaven, you delightfully scummy bastard. Also, since this is Ledom’s last moment in the game, let’s just knock out this one outstanding plot point related to his character that Level-5 legitimately forgot was a thing and never bothered to follow up on:  Ledom killed Queen Floraine. The game forgot that even happened, but I sure as hell didn’t. Motherfucker helped foster further animosity between Balandor and Faria by assassinating the Queen during a Farian attack on the castle so that everyone would assume a Farian assassin did the deed and thereby further weakened the states of both nations by prolonging the War of the Two Kingdoms for at most another ten years. Ledom, you crafty motherfucker. You really are the smartest person in this game. And he was only one member of the Royal Family off from racking up a bloody Royal Hat-trick in the murder department, too. I think Ledom has almost as high a number of confirmed kills at this point as Leonard does—and all this were intentional too!  And then Grazel remembers he’s still a part of this game, because, oh yeah, we’ve still got one last villain to quickly kill off without fanfare or catharsis because we’ve got like ten minutes left in this game, tops now.  Grazel: Who the hell are you?! Grazel: Who disrupts my coronation? Madoras: Coronation, Grazel? This is bad comedy. Madoras: Hm? I am Madoras, Emperor of Yshrenia. Madoras: Rightful ruler of this world. Cisna: Hey! That line starts back there, buddy, right at my rear end!Also, O’Brien’s voice is so modulated and artificially deepened that I honestly feel that I need to be writing out everything Madoras says in all caps and with bold and underline tags around everything. Doubly so when he just starts screaming all his dialog in the next few minutes.  Grazel takes a moment to ponder this revelation, before deciding, “gently caress reality!”  Grazel: You’re looking at the Emperor of Yshrenia RIGHT HERE! And he takes a running charge at the Villain of all Villains of this world.   Madoras: Ah. Excellent. I was wondering how long I’d have to wait before I got to choke a bitch again. Thanks for obliging me. Madoras uses his PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER to NOPE the world around him.  VOIP!  Grazel: GHA! Grazel: RRGH! drat you! Madoras: This was always the best part of my job back in the old days, am I right or what, Mureas? Cisna: No comment. Madoras: I will be merciful, since you have served me in your own way.Why is that I can practically see the sarcasm quotation marks around the word when you say “merciful”?  Madoras: Your reward shall be without pain. SWAAA!!  Grazel: UH-huaaauuu— So yeah, I think Madoras just Soul Crushed Grazel to death…  His blade tumbles to the ground, followed by his lifeless body.  Kara: SETTI!!!Girl, for the last time, Setti is… actually 100% dead now. drat.  Ah yes, and there’s the capper to the “nothing good ever happens to Kara, ever,” element of this game. Yeah, she just closed the book on the Black Knight chapter of her life with Shapur’s death, but now she also just watched a man she loved as a brother (a man she still believed was fully capable of redemption even at this point) be brutally murdered simply for being an egotistical idiot who was of no actual threat to Madoras in any way shape or form. So now that Team Evil's slate has been completely wiped clean of characters, let’s take stock here of the fates our various villains have met over the course of the game. Belcitane was killed by Shapur, robbing the player of the catharsis of beating him ourselves. Kara was killed by Shapur, and then resurrected and returned to the good side without any real effort to win her back, robbing the player of the victory that would have been Kara’s redemption. Shapur killed himself accidentally, robbing the player of the catharsis of finally doing in the dirty shitfuck who’d killed like half the cast at this point. Ledom was mercy killed by Madoras, robbing the player of the catharsis of killing the A-1 scheming villain—the Hojo, the Dr. Cid, the Miang, the Albedo, the Illusive Man, the Revolver Ocelot—of the game. And now Madoras just killed Grazel, the primary target for this whole counterstrike action by Cisna, Miu, and the party, robbing us of the catharsis involved in either killing or last-second reforming the apparent big bad of the series in the face of the bigger bad. The only villain we’ve actually trounced by our own hands thus far was Ban Nanazel, a bit-player forgotten about two seconds after he died, whose impact on the plot didn’t register with the player because no one gave a gently caress about Faria until we got to know and like Miu as a character.  PICTURED: How 90% of the plot elements of this game tend to go over.  Madoras: I love it when they THUD. It gives me a stiffy.Ew.  Madoras: There. Madoras: Now that the pawns have been scattered from the board… Greetings, Mureas. Cisna: What have you done? Madoras: Whatever I please. The Pactmakers are merely tools of war. Cisna: Where is Leonard? Cisna: ...’s Knight? Madoras: Leonard? CUTSCENE MUSIC: “The Battlefield Flower (Violin Version)” (Game 2 OST, Track 18) Madoras: Muhahahahahahahah. Madoras: The child has been cast into endless darkness. Orren: This guy’s actually kind of alright in my books. Eldore: He’s a monster, Niles! Orren: Yeah, but he got rid of Leonard for us. Eldore: Point taken… But still. Look at him! No one that Anime-looking deserves to live! Madoras: Do you mind? I’m monologuing. Madoras: But this body… I believe it will serve quite nicely. Orren: So that’s actually the Idiot’s body you’re wearing there? Madoras: Yes, why? Orren: …Pff…Huha… Ha hah… PffffffHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH! Oh my loving gods! That’s loving a-mazing! Ooooooooh poo poo, you poor dumb bastard. I am sooooo sorry for you right now. Madoras: I fail to see your— Orren: Do you have any godsdamn idea what an absolute gently caress up’s skin your inhabiting right now? Madoras: I’ve been hiding in the White Knight this whole time, I have SOME idea, yes. Orren: And you went through with it anyway? gently caress me. You’re either desperate, or just as dumb as he is. Probably the latter seeing as how you willingly remanifested looking like THAT! Madoras: What do you mean ‘like that’? Orren: [HOLDS UP MIRROR] Madoras: …WHAT THE poo poo?!! WHY DO I LOOK LIKE SATAN’S DOMINATRIX COUSIN?! Caesar: Wow. Somebody got screwed in this whole “reincarnation” thing. Yulie: It’s what you get for possessing Leonard. Kara: Serves you right, jackass.So yeah, this is Madoras using a mangled version of Leonard’s body to sustain his physical form, like St. Ajora style, only without the unresolved gender identity issues. According to the prequel manga, from as best I can tell, OG Madoras was a wrinkled old man who looked more like Emperor Gestahl than Seymour Guado… which, by the way, I’m pretty sure is some kind of sex joke, I swear to god. But alas, this is the Madoras we’re given in the game, so it’s all we’ve got to work with. Still, there we go. The last car on the train has left the track and followed the rest of it over the embankment and we are now officially in narrative freefall. All the conventions that would have helped guide us in to a safe landing have been broken in the wrongest way possible because Akihiro Hino wanted to do… I have no loving idea at this point.  All the villains we would have had a stake in seeing defeated have been taken out, either by themselves or by each other and replaced with a capital M Monster who we don’t know or care about beating in any way because he hasn’t been a part of the plot in any fashion beyond being a spooky legend who half of you legitimately wondered if he’d ever be paid off or not. And the hero(?) we’d all like to maybe see triumph just once before the end of the game? The gently caress up who could make up for every last misstep and obtuse screw up by actually managing to pull out a win and save the world when it actually was time to step up and save it? Eh. He actually becomes the villain he’d sworn to fight against and wound up putting the entire world in the greatest jeopardy it has even been in in 10,000 years because he’s an impulsive idiot and got manipulated by literally every single person around him. So this leaves us with a blank slate antagonist facing off against a party of deutrotagonists because he already one-shotted the protagonist, and I use that term in the loosest possible sense, by forcibly overwriting his existence like it was nothing. Still though, it is nice to have definitive confirmation that Leonard will always and forever be an unmitigated, undisputed, undeniable, and unarguable failure.  Madoras: UrrrrRAAAAGH!! The inanity! I will exterminate every man woman and child in Balandor for this! Cisna: Give Leonard back! Cisna: Also, the people of Blandor are MINE to exterminate, not yours, thank you very much. Madoras: Ha ha ha ha hah. You mean to defy me, Mureas? Madoras: The Knight’s power is lost to you. Madoras: You cannot win. Cisna: I will stop you. Madoras: Is that so?Total Number of Fucks Given: 0  Madoras: Then by all means… Come and stop me! As the music begins to swell into its action suite, Madoras hefts his Rita Repulsa wand high into the air to make his monster grow… which in this case, is him.     So as you might or might not have ferreted out by now, because Madoras is possessing Leonard’s body he also has all of Leonard’s abilities, including the ability to transform into an Incorruptus.  Show of hands, just really quick here. Who here expected that when we began this journey nine long months ago that the final boss of White Knight Chronicles would be the White Knight itself?  Because it is.  It really loving is.  Level-5 in its infinite wisdom decided it would be a good idea to have you, at the end of all things, mercilessly beat the poo poo out of the icon of the series. This is it. The game and the LP have reached 100% synchronicity. I am no longer a mere man. I am the orange soupy remains of nine-gear crow writing you from inside of a colossal, berserk beast of metallic vented frustration. If exasperation with a person's story telling choices could trigger Third Impact, GOOD GOD would you all be hosed right now.  A white light sweeps over the White Knight…  Altering its appearance into something monstrous.  Because it’s Madoras, and Madoras has to make everything he owns look as cartoonishly evil as he possibly can, just because he worries he me be too subtle with his points some times. This, my lovelies, is the evil variant of the White Knight that will be our final boss for this duology. It has no official name, fans call it the “Demon Knight”, for stupefyingly obvious reasons.      Well now, this looks somewhat familiar, doesn’t it? Where have I seen that curious horn shape before? Oh yeah!  Oh why hello there, The Phantom. Fancy sort-of encountering you again all the way at the end of the game. Just like Ledom murdering Floraine, this is another plot point the game more or less forgot about somewhere between the start of the duology and the end of it. The implied idea here is that Mardoras went full Voldemort and fractured his soul into five pieces, binding them to the five remaining Incorrupti in his possession, the five Knights our story concerns. It’s something similar to how Father Yggdra bound his soul to the massive tree in the Numenshrine, only much more ridiculously complex. This allowed him to escape death and essentially “live” through the next 10,000 years’ worth of history—because remember, Eldore explicitly says at the end of the previous game that Madoras didn’t die at the end of the Dogma Era like Mureas did. He bound each piece of his soul to the essence of each Knight, but the largest fragment, the one where his consciousness resided, was bound to the White Knight and survived in the form of the Phantom, this malformed, ephemeral half-existence waiting to be unleashed and then reunited with its remaining parts as both heroes and villains alike careened unwittingly toward fulfilling his resurrection gambit. …Or so I’m guessing. This is all conjecture on my part trying to fill in all the holes and form a cohesive narrative out of it, because if the game was reluctant to explain things before, it’s goddamn done explaining things now because we literally have like not even five minutes left before the credits start rolling. But back to there here-and-now, at least. The Demon Knight stands an imposing 35-some feet tall, a full 1.5x taller than the other Knights, because Madoras has a massive ego and the game wants to psyche you out even more than it already is. You can pick out design elements from the other four Knights interwoven in its design, from the massive swirling chest piece of the Sun King to the spiky protrusions of the Dragon Knight. It’s not quite a Zarathustra-like mix-and-match abomination of Knight parts, but we’re getting there. And you can also see that the Demon Knight is wielding Talion. It’s a nice design choice, in my opionion, and it really sends the message to the player about what a petty, vindictive prick Madoras really is. He has chosen to not just co-opt the body of Cisna’s “champion” for lack of a better word, but he’s also co-opting the weapon that was specifically forged by the Athwani to destroy his Knights, and was wielded to great effect by Thaumus 10,000 years ago. Madoras just, in essence, whipped out his dick and took a nice long figurative piss on Thalmus’ legend and legacy by choosing to wield his own sword to kill Queen Mureas/Cisna with. Because even though the other guy’s been dead for 10,000 years, he’s still got a grudge to settle and a message to send. So good on you, Emperor Madoras. You may be bland and generic as poo poo on paper, but I have something of a soft spot for seething, rage-blind, pyrrhic, shoot-self-in-foot-and-ENJOY-it revenge-seeking villains. The only thing that makes Star Trek: Nemesis watchable, in my opinion is seeing Shinzon get progressively more pissed off and murderous as the film rolls on and poo poo turns further and further away from his favour. But I digress…  Cisna: NO! Cisna: …But also yes. Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier putting this war behind us and coming to work for me? I’m pretty sure I’ve got this whole “invading sovereign nations and crushing them underfoot” thing worked out. Madoras: Just a moment. Let me just consult my Magic Eight Ba—gently caress YOU, MUREAS! Cisna: Meh. I tried. Alright peons, kill this prick for me. Please. Yulie: Stay back, Your Grace! This is our fight. Eldore: We must prevail… at all costs! Caesar: Right! Kara: Come on! The music fully kicks into its action phase now and we get a dramatic zoom in on the Avatar.  This is it.  I said the Avatar was the real hero of White Knight Chronicles, did I not? Well, now’s the time to cash that cheque I wrote oh so long ago. Submitted for your approval, I present, filmed in Videcolor and Supermarionation: Orren Kicks The Ever-loving poo poo Out of Leonard.  Orren: Stand back, people. I got this one. Madoras: Mwahahahahaha! Vexatious fools! The witch is not long for the world if YOU are her champions! Kara: We have to get Leonard back. Caesar: Leonard, man, I know you’re still in there. Yulie: We’ll save you Leonard, I promise! Eldore: I will fight you to my last breath. Orren: So you mean that after ALL of this bullshit, stupidity, and insanity, it all comes down to us having to probably kill Leonard then? Hoohooo! Sign me the gently caress up, please. Madoras: Do you not know Death when you see it, BOY?! Orren: Tell ya what. I’ll let you know if it shows up. In the meantime, hey dickface, GUESS WHAT? I gotta surprise for you. Madoras: Whut— Orren: O Swordo, emerald champion— Madoras: What? Orren: Master of the ancient hammer— Madoras: WHAT?! Orren: Grant me your power… TO CAVE THIS MORON’S SKULL IN! Orren: This one’s for you, Framboise! Pictured: Utter Badass Incarnate.  And to think, at this point in the story, we’re actually only half-way through Orren’s transformation from mute wine merchant intern to god-slaying man-titan.   Orren: I call this one the “Nineteen-And-A-Half Metric Ton gently caress You”. Orren: Verto!  And thus the mighty Arc Knight emerges from the ether to fulfill its destiny as the cosmic monkey wrench in Madoras’s tightly prophesied return to the mortal realm.       Special Guest Appearance by  BRICKSTICK! Madoras: NO! IMPOSSIBLE! Orren: Gods, I’m never gonna get tired of hearing people scream that. Caesar: Whoohoo! Go Orren! You’re the man bro! Kara: End it once and for all! Yulie: I think I love you. Eldore: Kick his rear end, Niles! Cisna: BREAK THE FUCKER! Orren: With pleasure. The cool thing about the final battle here is that after all the many hours of utterly ignoring the Avatar as a thing in this game and treating them like poo poo, the final battle is engineered to be their moment to shine. Then again, it was done so in order to be the biggest, most unsubtlest of hints that you should really start playing the online half of the game now that the storyline is 99.999% finished.  So let’s break down how engineered it is.  While you’re offered your choice of party members heading into the fight with Ledom who then carry over into the Madoras fight, just like the final boss of the first game, you’d be an idiot not to have the Avatar in the party, or even leading the party because the Avatar will invariably be your strongest character by this point, and the only character with a usable Knight at their disposal now, as post-Final Awakening, the Moon Maiden and Dragon Knight are no longer summonable. Even more incentive to have the Avatar in your party? Everyone’s HP, MP, and more importantly AC are all replenished to their maximum amount at the start of this fight meaning you can do what I did and literally begin by summoning the Arc Knight right out of the gate. But that’s about the only way that the game is going to take it easy on you in this fight.  So Emperor Madoras is a tough motherfucker—to the point of actually making the White Knight legitimately pants-making GBS threads intimidating at times.  This fight is a veritable menagerie of “  HOLY poo poo WHAT!” moments. Por ejemplo: you can see that Kara has Curse cast on her right now. Madoras’s version of the White Knight’s Strong Slash attack has a high percentage chance of inflicting Curse on the entire party, meaning all your stats are hampered against an already deadly opponent, so you pretty much need to go into this fight with at least one character with either Uncurse or +Uncurse on their command bar, or stocked to the gills with Uncurse Talismans, the consumable item that removes Curse status—because Madoras will inflict it early and often to keep the odds stacked in his favour.  Orren: PAYBACK’S A BITCH, AIN’T IT, SHITHEAD?! Madoras: Worthless! Madoras: If I’d known you’d be THIS meddlesome, I’d have had the runt kill you too! Orren: You can’t fight fate, fucker. I was MADE to destroy you! Kara: All the world’s misery began with this man. Orren: And Queen Mureas! Let’s not forget her too!So just like pretty much every boss and giant enemy we’ve encountered up till now, it’s Best Practice to break as many of their stats as you can, which is really bloody tedious, especially since you can’t do it in one fell swoop like Madoras can by casting Curse right back at him.  Your second and third characters are kind of an afterthought in this battle, technically speaking. The throwdown between the two titans of the Arc Knight and Demon Knight is a pretty big (no pun intended) attention grabber. That said, you’re going to want to make judicious use of whatever buffs and debuffs they have available as the Arc Knight doesn’t have access to the Avatar’s regular command bar while its out on the field.  Plus using the human characters gives me a chance to get some unintended ground-level action shots of the Arc Knight doing its thing.  Ruining Emperor Madoras’ day, I mean.  You can see the size disparity between the Demon Knight and the Arc Knight here. Neither Knight is standing at its full height here, but if they were the Arc Knight would only come up to the Demon Knight’s mid-chest. Keep in mind that the Arc Knight was about as tall as, if not, maybe even a little taller than the Black Knight when we saw them both together on Redhorn Isle. That right there gives you a decent idea of how much bigger the White Knight has become with Madoras in control over it.  Madoras: Was it your wish to BORE me?! Orren: How ‘bout a face-full of SHUT THE gently caress UP ALREADY?! So as you can see on the command bar down there, the Arc Knight wielding the Drega hammer has a few more moves than we originally had with the Gigantic Hammer. Earth Soul and Terra’s Rage are back from the Thaseios hiccup on Redhorn Isle, as well as the standard 0 MP attacks Smash and Stab. The three new attacks are Barrier Crusher, Divine Pummel and Soul Bash. You’ve seen a few Barrier Crushers enacted on Madoras’ yelly rear end already in this fight. The Arc Knight swings the hammer back and uppercuts its opponent with it for massive damage, very basic but also very effective.  Now, Soul Bash…  The Arc Knights leaps into the air and dives down, forcing the flat end of the hammer into the ground with its weight.  And KABOOM!  Massive area-of-effect damage for all those unlucky enough to be in the blast radius.  Madoras: Yeeeees! Cling to life! Allow me the PLEASURE of ripping it away!Now Divine Pummel is one fascinating bird…  It’s a brief flash of additional gameplay mechanics evoking the GF Boost system of Final Fantasy VIII or even certain QTE’s. You can see the tiny little X button prompt there in the center of the ATB circle gauge. What you have to do is mash the X button on the controller rapidly and repeatedly to charge up the attack. You’re given like four or five seconds to spam it for all its worth and the more times you hit it, the stronger the final attack will be.  The particularly great thing about it is that it’s one of the few attacks that cannot be interrupted by an enemy attack, like Madoras’ haymaker swing here.  You still take damage, but the attack isn’t cancelled and even the knock-down chance that a lot of Madoras’ stronger attacks carry is nullified while you’re charging up.   When the button mashing window closes, the Arc Knight leaps into the air…   And comes down on its target with a massive amount of force.  It’s not as strong as Soul Bash and Barrier Crusher in damage-per-hit terms, but it is very therapeutic to mash the attack button and then watch the Arc Knight go full Richard B. Riddick flying-punch-to-face-attack on the end boss of the game. There’s one thing you’re probably noticing if you’re paying attention with gameplay mechanics in mind in this fight (and really, why would you?)… the lack of orange critical damage numbers. Why is that? Well, Madoras is the inverse of the Black Usurper from the last game. Instead of being weak to everything, Madoras is hardened against everything; all three attack types, all four elements, and all possible non-stat-altering status effects like silence, poison, sleep, paralyze, etc.  Yulie: Go find your own body! Leave Leonard alone! Caesar: Urgh! I don’t care what it takes, you’re going down!     Orren: Had enough yet? Madoras: Of your feeble attempts to wound me? Or your insolent jabbering? Because I am— Orren: This is never going to get old. Madoras: How dare you harm me! HOW DARE YOU!!! Orren: What did the giant hammer say to the face? Madoras: I don’t even— Orren: LIGHTS OUT, MOTHERFUCKER! Madoras: Urgh! Now you are trying my PATIENCE! Orren: Really? Because I was sick of you before I even MET you. Madoras: Your pithy comments and uncouth cursing won’t save you from me, boy. I will crush the life out of you with my BARE HANDS! Orren: Still waiting on that one… Madoras: You mortals cannot dethrone your rightful emperor! Cisna: Yeah, because they’re working for her, DIPSHIT! Caesar: Go back to the Dogma Age! Your reign ended ten thousand years ago! Kara: Setti! Why didn’t you listen, brother? Eldore: How could we allow the Emperor to return? Orren: I’ll give you the point-by-point breakdown if you want. Eldore: Shut up, Niles! I was being rhetorical. Yulie: LEONARD! Eldore: Keep fighting! The Emperor must be destroyed at all costs! So Madoras has a few very nasty powerful attacks to go along with his regular powerful attacks. He’ll let you know when they’re coming by making very deliberate charging up motions like this blue glowy one so you have a moment or two to prepare of them, which usually consists of awkwardly fumbling through the command bar and hoping you hit “defend” quick enough, or just cursing in frustration as you eat it like a chump.  You can’t disrupt any of his attacking barring full-on charge attacks using a Turn Break…  So that usually just means “eat it like a chump.”  And here’s that Curse-inflicting attack I talked about.   Madoras: I have you now, BOY! Orren: Not dead yet. Still don’t know what you’re celebrating over.So yeah, in addition to potentially inflicting Curse on whoever it hits, it also knocks your Knight off its feet and leaves it vulnerable for a few tense seconds with a full array of broken stats. This is usually the point when most people take on Madoras for the first time where he unloads a second powerful bullshit attack on you and knocks you out of Knight mode. And if you’re knocked out of Knight mode, you return to human form with no MP and critically low MP, meaning you’re easy picking for a third follow up attack and will almost assuredly die. It’s moments like these that can dramatically flip the fight into Madoras’ favour, even if you’re in the level 60 range.  So while the Arc Knight is waylaid for the moment, it’s time to hop into Kara and play Team Medic for a few turns.  Getting Curse off the Arc Knight by any means necessary is your top priority.  Followed by healing and then buffing as best you can.  Giving everyone Haste status in addition to re-breaking Madoras’ stats really helps keep things in my favour. Fun fact: I’m technically NOT cheating for this iteration of the fight. Yes, I modded the materials into the game to build the Drega and the various Arc Knight armour parts, but at this point in the game I could actually bind and equip Drega because already beat the game once and save a Clear file for it, it returns you to the moment right before you head into the Garmatha the first time, allowing you essentially to replay the Final Boss Gauntlet as many times as you want now with (in theory) everything opened up to you… including Knight weapons and armours.     These are all just gravy shots, but I figured you’d all want to see as much of Orren demolishing what’s technically Leonard as you possibly can, right?          Madoras has one final big move to pull off here and that’s this multi-slash attack with Talion that does accumulated damage depending on however many times it scores a “hit” like the Dragon Knight’s Wrym Dace attack does.           Orren: Get thee behind me, jerkoff! Madoras: Urrgh! Enough! Now this farce will end! Orren: Just. loving. DIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!! Madoras: …I’ve made a huge mistake.   Orren: You are cordially invited to bend down and suck my colossal metal n— Eldore: We get the point, Niles. Thank you.Fun fact: I actually killed Madoras in mid-sentence when I captured this footage and had to go back to get the rest of the “now this farce will end” quote. It found that oddly appropriate and satisfying. And that’s it, for all intents and purposes, we have beaten White Knight Chronicles II. Neither the game nor the LP are over by a longshot, but in terms of the broader storyline, this is it. We did it. It’s done. Now, let’s see this fabled “ending” everyone’s been talking about. I hope we have a good deal of emotional catharsis and see the characters we’ve all grudgingly grown to like over the last nine months off with an appropriate level of respect and— Oh, who the gently caress am I kidding. You know what’s the one consistent factor in every single trainwreck ever? The catastrophic abrupt stop. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 14, 2015 |
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 CUTSCENE: Shut It Down! Yeah, I know, the game’s nowhere good enough to end on a 30 Rock joke, but whatever, it fits what’s about to happen next, so let’s roll with it.  So after getting absolutely clobbered by Orren in a battle the game will not recognize in any way what-so-ever, the Demon Knight collapses to its knees and begins to disintegrate.  Hopefully it takes poo poo For Brains with it when it goes…      Poor Madoras, he spends 10,000 years trapped in a busted rear end Knight, has to wait for the right collection of idiots to be goaded into reassembling his soul by Ledom, possesses the body of a 5’0” twat with an IQ of -80, gets his buffed up Knight trashed by a personalitiless mute that wasn’t really even an actual character in the game, and now to cap everything off, he’s about to be murdered by Cisna. …I’m not actually joking about that last one. Cisna is about to kill the motherfucker. For 100% real.  The God-Empress of All Creation, Long May She Reign charges up her most bullshit of Bullshit Athwani Magic.  Cisna: Mureas…   Cisna: Give me strength!  Cisna: HADOKEN!No, seriously, she just launched a beam of blue light at him Ryu from Street Fighter-style. What else can you literally do at this point BESIDES shout out “HADOKEN!”   Madoras: Can this day get any loving worse? Madoras: Oh gods… Madoras: gently caress my— BOOSH!  Madoras: LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!!!   Madoras: RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Cisna: Die motherfucker, die motherfucker, die motherfucker, SQUEAL! So there’s the final nail in the coffin of Failure that is Leonard. Becomes the final boss of his own video game, and then the guy who possessed him is defeated by the woman he spent half the duology failing to rescue. Literally every character in this game is now officially more badass and competent than Leonard.  Madoras: Mureas… You SHE-DEVIIIIIIIIIIL!!! Cisna: Say my name, bitch. Say. My. Name! Madoras: NGHHHAAAAAAA!!! Leonard/Madoras: UHAAAAAAAAGH!!! Leonard/Madoras: …Ciiiiiis-naaaaaaaa!!!Take a penultimate shot. So there’s Leonard’s last line in the game, and it’s a perfect summation of his entire character “arc” in the game: feebly crying out to the woman who doesn’t actually share his affections and ultimately drowned up by another character with a better screen presence than he has. I’m serious. Leonard’s “CISNA!” is a feeble whine, while Madoras’ “CISNA!” is a full-blown, top-of-lungs, rage-filled roar in hatred and defiance.  Cisna: Fuckin’ RIGHT!  CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Fly My Blue Bird! Fly! (English Version)” (Game 2 OST, Track 22) Cisna: Leonard?!Take one final shot. This is also Cisna’s last line in the game, and it too is appropriate to her character, as it’s an expression of confused shock that Leonard is somehow still a thing in her life. Also, the ending credits music kicks in right here so we are now literally SECONDS away from the game being over.    CHING!   Cisna stops her deathray for a moment on the off chance that maybe Leonard can still (against all reason for it) be saved from Madoras’ clutches.  Madoras: NGH-uuuuuhhh… Madoras: Mureas… Ugh... Must you always… Madoras: STAND IN MY WAY!!! Cisna: See ya in another 10,000 years, jackass. Next time, we’re doing this in SPACE! Madoras: UUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Madoras: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—   And then he just sort of disappears in a massive fart of darkness.   Oh hey, twatzilla’s back.  Lovely. Resume your natural place in the world, dipshit.  Faceplant. Leonard’s in his place, all’s right with the world. Hey, this game does have a happy ending.  Yulie: Leonard! Cisna: I am… What’s that emotion you feel when you get all warm and pleasant inside your gut? Eldore: Happy? Cisna: Not even close. Also, fainting now. Eldore: The hell? Cisna: Uuuuhhh… Eldore: Your Grace! Cisna: Muuugh… Donnn’t ugh… tell anyone about… *hic* this… Or I’ll have you…. Uuuug… drawn and quartered. If anyone asks, I won all by my… urk… self. Orren: Now’s our chance. Let’s ditch the both of them and run for it. On cue, the Garmatha begins to shake and crumble because just like the Black Usurper was the last time around for the Dogma Rift Temple, Emperor Madoras was its Load-Bearing Boss, despite the fortress pre-existing him by like half-an-hour.  So we’re at least going to have some measure of an ending like last time… right? …Why’s the timecode on my VLC player say “-00:10”?  Caesar: Hey guys! We gotta go! Like now!And there’s the thesis statement for the game’s ending. “gently caress it, we’re out of money, shut it down and run!” Also, here’s another one for the Leonard Highlight Reel: ending the game by having his unconscious body dragged off screen by the better written replacement for him and the childhood crush who his stupidity crushed her soul into diamond dust.   Eldore: Quickly!And there it is, the last spoken line of dialog for White Knight Chronicles storyline. The game ends on Eldore telling everyone to hurry the hell up and try to outrun the ending.  Orren: So wait, are we literally just— Eldore: Yes, Niles, we’re running away from the ending. Just be glad they had the budget for this last shot or it would have ended two seconds ago with us just standing there. Orren: Point taken. Wait up, old fart! Well, that certainly was a thing and it happened. And you can’t take that away from anyone. Congratulations, Akihiro Hino! You made… something. I’m not really sure what to call it. All I know is that you did it. Boy, did you loving do it… Epilogue’s up next folks. Stay tuned. 
 GARMATHA FORTRESS 
nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Apr 5, 2015 |
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Sep 18, 2014 14:27
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  CUTSCENE: Epilogue & Credits CUTSCENE MUSIC: “Fly My Blue Bird! Fly! (English Version)” (Game 2 OST, Track 22) – continued directly from previous chapter. Our denouement begins with the Garmatha fortress falling lifelessly out of the sky into the ocean.  And then you’re given the perfect visual metaphor for this game: a massive thing crashing and sinking into the sea with Akihiro Hino’s name overlaid on top of it. Just to make sure you know who to blame now that this is all over with.    We’re not getting any more dialog for the game, so let me give you my best interpretation of how I think things went after this point, because I’m still chaffed that I didn’t my Final Fantasy XII-style “Kari Walhgren tells everyone to surrender to her glorious majesty” ending. [From the loud-speaker of the hastily repaired Shahgna flying over the ruins of the Garmatha Fortress] Cisna: Attention soldiers of the micronation formerly known as the Empire of Yshrenina. You are beaten! Your Empire lies crushed beneath the might of my army. Your capital stands in ruins. Your flying fortress is felled. Your leaders are dead. Grazel is dead. Ledom is dead. Shapur is… probably dead, I wasn’t paying attention, to be hone— Eldore: [WHISPERS IN HER EAR] Cisna: Shapur is DEFINITELY dead. Oh, and Madoras is dead too, but I don’t really think any of you know or care who that is. My point is, you have until the count of ten to surrender unconditionally or I will turn my giant hammer-wielding Incorruptus loose on your collective asses and you will all die SCREAMING! Cisna: [TURNS TO ORREN] Cisna: I can count on you to do that, right? Orren: Take your loving bomb back and squat on it and I’ll help you invade Greede for all you care. Cisna: Deal. Right. TEN! NINE! EIGHT! SEV— Yshrenian Remnant: WE SURRENDER! WE SURRENDER! Gods, please don’t kill us! Cisna: Once again, victory is undisputedly— Leonard: Ciiiiiisnaaaaaa! I’m huuuungry! Cisna: [PUNCH TO RIGHT EYE] Cisna: Mine! So remember when I told you to keep in mind that the Garmatha was literally stopped within spitting distance of the Balandor coast? And how the game was going to forget that completely?  Well, who’s up for a colossal city-destroying tsunami?  Millions died that day.  Toppled over just off the Balandor coast, not unlike how the Bahamut wound up toppled over just outside of Rabanastre in FFXII, the Garmatha’s core quietly dies.  And now we’re left to ask the same question Sony’s studio execs did when Hino handed them the final work print of White Knight Chronicles: “who gets to clean up this mess?”   Well, someone looks absolutely pleased with herself.  Cisna: Hot dogs and fireworks for EVERYONE!  Royal Army: YAAAAAAAAAAH!!! The army goes wild in celebration.  And I think these two dudes are about to start making out but the camera cuts back to Cisna and Miu before that happens. …Because we can’t have any homosexuality in a game that’s already this paint-by-numbers safe.   Cisna: Also, one last thing. I was going to invade Faria and take it by force next week, but after staying up all night and talking with Miu, we realized we actually had a lot in common. SO! Instead of a hostile takeover, we instead will be combining our lands through peaceful means. Miu: We’re getting married! Cisna: Hey! Spoilers! Leonard: Wha—? But Cisna! I-I thought you were in like with m— Cisna: Choke on a horse cock and die already. You don’t got a Knight anymore and you nearly got everyone in this room killed thrice over because you’re a dumbass. You’re dead to me. Leonard:  Orren: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!! Eat it, you tool! Cisna and Miu share a knowing nod and smile while Cyrus and Elvee brofist it up in the background. Cisna: ROLL THE CREDITS! …I don’t think you can do tha—  Holy poo poo, she can!  So now we get the second game’s idea of a conclusion. We don’t even get the unvoiced tableaus of the first game, we just get a Windows Movie Maker slideshow presentation. First up we get a recap of the plots of both games, in case everyone forgot what all happened over the course of the last nine months that this LP has been happening. First up, the very start of the game with Belcitane, Kara’s Dragias, and Shapur overlooking Balandor Castletown. And once again, Shapur is treated as a periphery thing in the game, being covered over by the text of the credits. Still though, remember Belcitane? Remember how awesome he was? Good times…  The Magi attack on Balandor Castle…  The only time Leonard does anything remotely heroic: stopping a 10,070 year-old man from harming a girl he actually had every intention of keeping safe because she was the key to all his plans. But still, you tried, Leonard. If nothing else, you sort of tried.  Ah, young…. Not-love.  The genesis of all our problems…  And then Kara turns around, makes Leonard look like a punk and makes the game instantly better. Also you can see here that Akihiro Hino personally wrote the game’s intro and ending songs, and I will be posting the lyrics to them at the end of this update for you to see what word salad garbage they all are.  I’m still convinced that was all in Leonard’s head. I really, legitimately, out-of-angry LP narrator-character am.    And then sex happened.   And another example of Leonard loving up and letting the bad guys win. Hey, remember when Leonard swore not to let Grazel get his hands on the Sun King and then arrived like ten minutes late so Grazel got his hands on the Sun King and won by default? Leonard’s a tool.  And now we start recapping the second game. Why does this kind of feel like when a major motion picture is edited for a television broardcast and they curtail the credits by fastforwarding through everything at like 5 times its original running speed?   Of all the things to remind the player of, they’ve just GOT to keep bringing up the goddamn Toads…  I’m surprised there isn’t a shot in between here of Leonard falling on his rear end one of the dozen or so times it happens in either game.  But at least we get to recap our brief victories again: Cyrus stopped being a drunk racist.  Yulie got the Moon Maiden.  Kara got not dead.  Cyrus stopped being a loser with Daddy Issues.  Miu became Archduchess.  And Cisna magic’d a sword out of her rear end.  And three honest cheers to our voice actors, the vast majority of whom gave even a game this silly and stupid their all and made it somewhat enjoyable overall, other issues aside.    And from here we transition to the ACTUAL epilogue of the game…   Cisna: Okay, you got your one hug. Now get out.  Raus: O-oh! Miss Yulie! Welcome ba— Yulie: Are you STILL loving drunk, Raus?! Raus: Uuuuuh w-well, maybe just a *hic* lit— Yulie: [ROUNDHOUSE KICK] Yulie: …It’s good to be home.Note that Leonard is nowhere to be seen in this scene, nor was Yulie anywhere to be seen in the platonic hugfest of the last image between Leonard and his imaginary girlfriend. Yulie has finally, officially moved on and divorced Leonard from her life completely. Congratulations, Yulie. You’re the real winner of this game.  Back in Greede, the staff of the Drisdall household cheers wildly at Caesar and Kara’s return to the city.   Amir: Welcome back, Young Master! Caesar: Eeeey-hey! How you been, Amir? Amir: Absolutely stupendous, Young Master. And a mighty welcome to you as well, Lady Kara. Kara: Heh. “Lady?” Well that’s gonna take some getting used to. Steward: Indeed, Lord Caesar, Lady Kara. Welcome home. Caesar: Yeaaaaaah. About that one. Hey, Amir… Why is the city stuck on a hillside and leaning over to one side like this? Amir: …Not my fault. Miu and Lorias pray to the palm goddess in the Lost Forest’s Spring quadrant.  Miu: And I want a bicycle, and a pony, and a Malibu Stacey doll… Oh, and a sequel on the PlayStation4. Lorias: …You’re not really getting what this whole “prayer” thing’s about, are you, Little Miu? Miu: …We’re not getting a sequel, are we, Ban Lorias? Lorias: No, child. I fear not. Miu: Balls. Well, if nothing else, Osmund and Rocco are happy they don’t have to appear in any more White Knight Chronicles-related material. Osmund’s doubly happy because he’s like Level-5’s version of Cid. He’ll turn up in another game somewhere down the line… Hopefully something better than this one.  Oh, and this poo poo keeps happening. What the hell happened to “can’t leave the oasis or she’ll die?” Huh, Level-5? Nice to see you don’t give a poo poo about stated plot points and will just throw any old poo poo out there for the sake of a sight gag. Also, holy gently caress Don Phibianacci’s a shitbag if he actually is moving his mistress into the house with his wife. Motherfucking frog sex. Never forget that, people. Level-5 consciously decided to make FROG SEX a part of this game.  Ooooh, here’s a bad idea waiting to happen. Either Cyrus has been made Cisna’s new Chancellor of the Privy Council, or he found Sarvain’s old wardrobe and is doing a “dress up like the dead guy and act like a total dick to insult his memory” routine. What’s more, this is either way in the future or Cyrus starts pulling double duty as both general and chancellor, because the next time we see him he’ll be back in his Castleguard attire leading the Royal Army once again.  And Elvee and the Turks just smile, nod, and humour him because Cisna will have them executed if they don’t approve of every little decision that tumbles out of her diseased mind. Also, good to see Cyrus’s toadies survived the events of the game. You can see Oswald in the background there, and this is the first time Noel and Warren turn up in the second game (story-wise, all four Cyrusites show up in a game 2 Avatar quest). Anecia’s also there on the extreme right of the picture, but she’s cut off by the black Photoshop filter Level-5 put around each slide so you can only barely make out a shape that might be her if you squint. God, I think even Elena got more screentime in Advent Children than her expy does in this game.  And Cisna goes back to being the First Lady of Balandor, apparently. Is it sad that she’s got a more believable relationship with this group of children in a silent still image than she ever had with Leonard while the game was in motion and being voice acted?  And Eldore returns to being a wandering vagabond now that his life has no meaning once again. Or rather, he retired having accomplished all his goals. I don’t really know. I’m just thinking Cisna forbade him from ever entering the castle, once again on account of the Old Man Stench. That poo poo is killer.  Special thanks to D3 for half-assedly bringing the game over to North America and then stiffing everyone on the Avatar Story you promised to localize. Have fun making more licensed tie-in shovelware for the rest of your corporate existence, guys; because I’m pretty sure this will be the highlight of your game catalogue in retorspect.  Also, what the gently caress did Namco Bandai do for this game? Are you telling me that Hino called in Bamco to bail his rear end out and the game STILL turned out to be a piece of poo poo? And to think, this was the essentially the demo reel he sent to Bandai to convince them to let him make Gundam AGE. You only have yourselves to blame for that, Bandai. You saw it coming.  The most misleading credit in this game as I’m convinced it had neither a) a plan of any sort behind it, or b) production values.  Yeah, I bet Sony’s proud the own the copyright to THIS, aren’t they?  And Kazuo Hirai sat in his office gently weeping into his hands in despair. Final Fantasy XIII had been a turd. White Knight Chronicles had been a bomb and a turd. Final Fantasy Versus XIII had been a production disaster. Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story had been lost to the Wii because Namco hosed over Tetsuya Takashi and Square hosed over Hironobu Sakaguchi. And Kingdom Hearts III was just a scribble on a Post-It note on Tetsuya Nomura’s “To Do” board, right underneath “Actually start working on The days of Sony’s JRPG dominance were over. They were killed by dumbass farm boy named Leonard, and his giant, useless robot.  Speaking of, the Great White Dope has one last action to fulfil before we kick him the gently caress out of our lives for good.  He approaches the pedestal in the castle treasure vault from whence he grabbed the White Knight’s Ark and started this whole shitshow a year ago.  He was a useless idiot when he walked in here, he remains a useless idiot even now.  He places the now powerless Ark back on the pedestal.   I don’t know why he’d even bother seeing as how it’s useless now, but whatever. Since Cisna killed Madoras it’s technically a war trophy now. Also, don’t get your  There is a neat kind of symmetry to it, I suppose. He starts the game picking up the Ark to (fail at) saving Cisna. And he ends the game by putting the Ark back after (failing at) saving Cisna and instead being saved BY Cisna. It’s like poetry; it rhymes.  Cisna: Okay, now get the gently caress out and don’t come back. NOW!He walks away and doesn’t look back. I always expect him to look back, just because it’s a cliché of this kind of situation, but no, he just keeps on walking right out into obscurity and oblivion, probably painfully aware that even with getting swaths of innocent people and creatures killed just by existing, failing to accomplish even the simplest goals, and then becoming the monstrous villain he’d set out to defeat in the first place, even after all those black marks, this will still be the high-water mark for his life. 19 years old, and his prospects are so dim that “I once accidentally became Super Hitler” will be the story he proudly tells to… I want to say “his grandchildren”, but the thought of Leonard procreating fills me with horror and disgust.  And on that note, we fade softly to black. Though the White Knight may no longer be a part of its narrative, the White Knight Chroncile still has a few more chapters to cover before we can close the book on it for good.   Meanwhile, in Frass Chasm… Somewhere just south of the settlement of Orrenstown, a young Papitaur travels races through the canyon, out of breath and panicked beyond all reason.  Or rather, panicked with good reason, as a Greaver spawn thunders up behind her, chasing down its prey.   Papitaur: Somebody help meeeeeeeee!!!  Orren: Fear not, miss. Papitaur: Huh?! Orren: Don’t you worry your little rabbity head there.  Orren: I got this poo poo.LOCAL MAYOR SAVES DISTRESSED TRAVELLER, news at 11:00!  …In a format that precluded 90% of the people who played it from seeing the game’s true ending. While this may seem like a stopping point here, we’ve actually only hit the first of several false bottoms between now and the ACTUAL end of the game and the LP. From here out, we transition fully into the haunted wasteland of misspent hours and ill-conceived gameplay known as the post-game of White Knight Chronicles II. We’re not done yet. Not by a long shot. Steel yourselves, my lovelies… Vellgander calls. But first, CONGRATULATIONS, EVERYONE!  SONG LYRICS The Battlefield Flower (English Version) posted:Lyrics: Akihiro Hino -Fly! -My Bluebird- (English Version) posted:Lyrics: Akihiro Hino nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Sep 18, 2014 14:27
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Hahahaha, holy crap, this game. I don't even know what to say.
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Sep 18, 2014 15:42
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My most sincere congratulations on finishing the drat thing's plot. At least from here on out there is no more shitastic Hino writing to deal with.
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Sep 18, 2014 15:50
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Amazing, truly amazing.
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Sep 18, 2014 16:22
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Well, that was... uh. Hmm. Screenshotted? That was certainly screenshotted. Thanks, Crow. No idea how you waded through that turgid filth for our amusement, but I'm impressed. Also, dear God, Leonard, you futile cock-stick. Hang on... Doesn't this leave Orren as just about the single most powerful war machine remaining in the world?
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Sep 18, 2014 16:22
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Take a shot, Crow. Or better yet, take enough shots that's it barely this side of non-lethal. With some luck you'll forget about Leonard. Thanks for going through this something (words fail), wasn't this the original mission statement of the LP subforum?
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Sep 18, 2014 16:29
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The final boss is Noel Fielding?
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Sep 18, 2014 16:30
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Omobono posted:Thanks for going through this something (words fail), wasn't this the original mission statement of the LP subforum? Wait, the original purpose of the LP subforum was to eventually grind up the courage to tackle WKC?!? Also, glad to see the triumphant debut of brick-on-a-stick. It was worth it.
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Sep 18, 2014 16:46
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Blind Sally posted:Wait, the original purpose of the LP subforum was to eventually grind up the courage to tackle WKC?!? "We play games so you don't have to" is the subforum description if you're in the Games subforum. I think it applies here.
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Sep 18, 2014 16:50
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Ha, oh right. In that case, yeah, crow has definitely taken a bullet for us all. But having been with the LP since its start, I feel that he subsequently dragged us into the infirmary to watch his bedpans get changed and the puss being drained out of his bullet wound, while simultaneously chastising us for making him do it and demanding us to praise his sacrifice--while he messily attempts to eat the mush they pass for food in whatever hospital he might be.
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Sep 18, 2014 16:55
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I would KILL to see the look on all you mutha-fuckas faces who hadn't played through this game before and didn't know this poo poo was coming! Madoras was Leonard! Leonard was Madoras! WHERE IS YOU GOD NOW!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAaaaaaa! God in loving HEAVEN I haven't delighted in so many people taking that much SAN damage since I summoned Shub-Niggurath! But that's besides the point, as I have a bit of Kayfabe that occurred to me, ironically enough, when I was asking Crow how he was going to handle the reveal of Madoras...an idea sparked...and a flame took hold. Ladies and Gentlemen, in an slightly alternate universe: quote:Emperor Madoras strolls among the 'worthless peons', the lesser pact-makers that had unwittingly played a part in his ultimate resurrection, and casts his gaze on Orren. Orren’s face is blank, stupefied by how Leonard has somehow achieved the ultimate gently caress-up of 10,000 years.
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Sep 18, 2014 17:13
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janusmaxwell posted:Ladies and Gentlemen, in an slightly alternate universe: You do realize that history will remember you as the guy who writes White Knight Chronicles fanfiction?
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Sep 18, 2014 17:38
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I wonder how many of you here have played Eternal Sonata.
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Sep 18, 2014 17:40
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BrightWing posted:I wonder how many of you here have played Eternal Sonata.
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Sep 18, 2014 17:57
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Ghostwoods posted:You do realize that history will remember you as the guy who writes White Knight Chronicles fanfiction? I'm writing White Knight Chronicles LP fanfiction, there's a huge difference. Also I felt the tears well up at that statement...seriously if you didn't like what I wrote you could've just said that! WKC fanfiction author...that wasn't a cut, that was a gouge and tear...just...ow. 
janusmaxwell fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 18, 2014 17:57
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Ah, there we go. Best plot point in the game. I don't know what I like more about it, Leonard getting hosed over or Grazel being shown up as the massive tool he is. And Shapur gets offed as well, and Ledom seems to be happy being disintegrated. Basically Madoras does a bunch of great things here. Then gets laserbeamed into oblivion, so he doesn't even have time to wear out his welcome. In fact, this plot point overshadows everything so much in my mind I entirely forgot how this bit went and for a while I thought I just hadn't remembered having Cisna in the party. You've done great things with that Game Genie. Not that this game deserves them. Even forgot there was no proper ending. Anyway, I only had one little foray into Vellgander and it ended with a power cut. So it's all new to me from here.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:06
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I'm gonna be honest, I thought crow's character dialogue and writing was trying too hard and playing off itself too much, like breaking the 4th wall with Cisna. But it was all worth it for that boss battle and ending. The I'm actually kind of disappointed Cisna wasn't really a playable character- having her turn out to be a "Lady British" would have been icing on the poo poo cake of this game.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:13
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Ghostwoods posted:You do realize that history will remember you as the guy who writes White Knight Chronicles fanfiction? This LP does tend to bring the worst in us all. We are just trying to save something good. This game could have been saved with just a smidge of effort. Just a bit. Please. Please.
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Sep 18, 2014 18:40
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The weird thing is that they could have just made Ledom the Emperor waiting to regain his power and the problem of the game having an uninteresting final fight would have been solved (what little good it would do) Also blandest final dungeon ever (that I know of). It looks less like a doom fortress and more like a canyon in Mordor
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Sep 18, 2014 19:15
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Kavak posted:I'm gonna be honest, I thought crow's character dialogue and writing was trying too hard and playing off itself too much, like breaking the 4th wall with Cisna. But it was all worth it for that boss battle and ending. The Insane out-of-character tyrant Cisna is the best part of this LP and you know it. Though if "trying too hard" is the worst criticism I get for this LP, then I'm happy with what I've accomplished. Blind Sally posted:Ha, oh right. In that case, yeah, crow has definitely taken a bullet for us all. But having been with the LP since its start, I feel that he subsequently dragged us into the infirmary to watch his bedpans get changed and the puss being drained out of his bullet wound, while simultaneously chastising us for making him do it and demanding us to praise his sacrifice--while he messily attempts to eat the mush they pass for food in whatever hospital he might be. I'd totally do this to you in real life. 
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Sep 18, 2014 20:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFQVZ2h0V8 I don't know if this is funnier when you imagine Shinji as Leonard, Orren, or Crow.
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Sep 18, 2014 20:38
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Waffleman_ posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFQVZ2h0V8 Ye gods, we already did this joke with Shadows Of The Empire, don't make crow do it again! Actually, make crow do it again. DEMAND crow do it again.
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Sep 18, 2014 20:43
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Accidentally a super Hitler. Oh Leonard, you poor fuckup. You should have just stuck with the wine game, man. 
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Sep 18, 2014 21:52
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janusmaxwell posted:I'm writing White Knight Chronicles LP fanfiction, there's a huge difference. In the interests of fairness, yes, there is a huge difference. Carry on 
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Sep 18, 2014 22:18
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