Simply Simon posted:

This part of the game is so dumb. They clearly were proud of their keyword system, used it moderately sensibly at the start (HAVE A PASSWORD, LET US IN), then realized that this is all it can ever do and...resorted to stupid bullshit to somehow squeeze more use out of it.
It is now HAVE PASSWORD, GIVE ME PASSWORD and the people you get them from are arbitrary and it doesn't add anything. It could be used with at least some design idea behind it, and maybe they try that: by forcing you to talk to NPCs you might otherwise skip or ignore after the first conversation, you can get some more snippets of forced worldbuilding and characterization in. Like with the King. However, the game's writing is neither voluminous nor competent enough to achieve any of that, so it's really just tedious padding while you traipse around in the same small corner of the world over and over again. Maybe you overgrind during that and end up shattering the difficulty of the next three dungeons, so that's also a...plus?!