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Screw it. The vote is tied, so I'm using LPer discretion to not reconcile Tybir. Sorry, but I think I've suffered these companion enough. I'm also going to do all three of the sidequests, as they're pretty drat short when I look back at them. From there it's a clear shot to the end of the game.
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May 10, 2020 23:11
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The End of Sidequests So all three of these sidequests are fairly easy and don't get us that much. If you're playing through yourself you can just skip these. For the most part they tie into the game's unholy lust for the trolley problem yet again.  People seemed divided on whether we could reconcile Tybir and Auvigne, and I ended up breaking the tie in favor of not doing that. I really don't have anything insightful to say about this game anymore until we get to the ending. There are more trolleys. The authors write like they're being paid by the word. The prose is bad, but used in great quantities to compensate for the lack of an animation budget. Just keep repeating this when you see anything stupid.  Anyway, this is a weird robot with a dude's head stuck in it. These guys are Decanted, who actually live in the tabletop RPG. I'm going to spoil it right now - they try to kidnap attractive people to put their heads on hot bodies until the body collapses and they have to go back in the robot again.  He is right next to the slave pit. That's a slave auction above us. Guess where this is going?  Again, we know it is referring to a young man over there without the "it points". It proceeds to furnish us with a description, even.    : The young man in the pit is a slave, isn't he? Why don't you buy him yourself? : The murdens in the Old Slave Block captured an attractive woman. They've modified her brain, though.A part of Aligern's quest I cut out posted: So this guy is a solid metal robot. The murdens have swords. I'm pretty sure they don't have super strength or anything. Whatever. This is the easiest sidequest in the game, just watch. : Are any of my companions suitable recruits for you? The Decanted will actually accept Rhin here. If you rescued her from the slavers and are some kind of moron who doesn't like infinite turrets and grenades, you can do this. Aligern will leave the party, and Erritis will actually stop you. Guess Erritis is less bad than I thought. : Tell me about yourself.  Why? You kill people for money.   : Farewell.TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this crap posted:
 This rear end in a top hat is presumably upset we used the Tides to get another of its brethren to answer a question. As discussed earlier, this is entirely so Numenera can talk about how mysterious it is but not actually put in the work of having a satisfying resolution. It's the JJ Abrams playbook. Anyway, let's talk to the slave master. No, we don't have the option to murder him or trick him or anything, our options are "buy slave" and "not interact".  Whoa! He has two rows of teeth! What a mystery! Is your mind blown? Is it? Whoa!  I suppose this could be a commentary on how slavery devours everything it touches, but I'm going to chalk it up to the Numenera setting's obsession with weird for the sake of weird.  Of course, he's just your standard smooth-tongued shady salesman underneath it all.  Oh, you thought Tybir was the only morally bankrupt piece of poo poo on our team? Remember how Aligern said Callistege had a "vivisectionist's heart?" That bit is going to be coming up soon! : Why would I want a slave? Really. This is this game's insane focus on the trolley problem taken to it's logical conclusion. There is a licensed slave trade of people to throw into magical trolley doors so that you can sit back and pick from an incredibly curtailed dialog menu to answer "what does one life matter". Now, you can actually use the trolley problem in fiction, like in the Moby Dick chapter "The Musket", where Starbuck debates whether or not he should take the musket and break the laws of his faith and everything he believes in to gun down Ahab and save the crew. It's not a good chapter because the crew of the whaling ship is worth more life units than Ahab's solitary life, but because it fits the narrative and is the culmination of Starbuck's internal struggle throughout the book - does he remain loyal to Ahab, or the crew? Can he do both? Starbuck is a Quaker - what would drive him to contemplate killing a man? This is just some nerdy sci-fi writer pleased with their own cleverness at "worldbuilding" and getting to match Colin McComb's great visionary themes.  You can also just force them open. I need to show it off at some point, but you can just use the Transdimensional Scalpel to cut them apart.  : I spoke to a construct near the slave pit. It says you refuse to do business with it.  : Maybe you'd better explain how slavery works around here.   : The slaves volunteer to be eaten? : Flint blinks, apparently taken aback. "They're desperate people! And being fed to the Bloom is not a death sentence. Well, not always."  : So these slaves are all criminals?Flint: Of varying sorts, yes. The more vicious, the better, at least as far as my clients are concerned.  : I have some other questions. : I'd like to buy a slave. : [Raises Silver Tide] No, but I'm sure you've heard my name. I have plenty of friends in Sagus Cliffs.Wha...what? We don't have a name. What is our name? I assume this is a dumb bluff or somesuch, but part of name-dropping for influence actually requires a name to drop.   This is funny! Look, the text is telling me it's funny! Laugh! : Go on.Flint: One of my slaves is not attracting any buyers. He's a young fellow, fresh from the streets of Sagus, but I fear he's only a thief, not a murderer or a sadist at all! You can imagine how that's gone over with my clients.  : [Deception] I'll give you 250. That slave isn't a hardened criminal - nobody is going to give you a better offer. : Done. I'll pay 300. I can't believe the slimy slave dealer ripped us off!  What the hell do you want? Flint: Your property shall be extricated from the pit momentarily. I believe his name is Coty. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
Let's talk to our new slave. Like everyone in Numenera, he has a lot to say.  : How did you become a slave? : Is thievery really a capital offense in Sagus Cliffs? : How did you become a slave again? : What are you good at? : What do you want to do? : I'll be back later.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
Yea. I'm not freeing him yet, because at first I think we might need him for the weird robot. This is going to turn out to be hilariously wrong, but right now my plan is to get the Nazi girl, the braindead mutilated woman, and...who knows. Anyway, to do that, we need to deal with the crow dudes.  TheGreatEvilKingThinksThisDescriptionIsUnnecessary.exe  : [Raises Red, Indigo Tides] You left that man to die. For that, I'm going to kill you.My understanding of the Numenera setting are that murdens are always evil, like badly written orcs in D&D. Thus the writers let us massacre these birds to the last man, but people like Dracogen or Tybir? Whatever.  Oh no, not a sword!   This fight goes badly. Can you see why?  All the murdens get to jump our party. They don't do anything interesting, but they do manage to tear apart poor Oom here.  I accidentally throw this on The Last Castoff. It makes her essentially immune to the bird's attacks. This will be essential.  Matkina goes down because there's no way to bring her back up to par and I also forgot to rotate people in for the armor upgrades in Part 2.  Callistege goes down next, befitting the one who gloats.  This screenshot shows one thing the game actually does right - when the murdens are hit, their translator says "Ouch."  I cut the rest of the fight, because it's just the Last Castoff solo draining all these murdens to death.  We can't actually do anything for this poor translator woman.  : Flint just told me that you butcher your recruits. Is this true?  : It may not be worse, but it is not better for them.Oh no! Trolleys!  So I quit the conversation and saved here. : [Raises Red Tide] I have changed my mind. You need to leave the Bloom. Now. Ka-ching! I don't think this rear end in a top hat gives you anything for turning three people over to Robot Mengele here - looks like shins, but the same amount of XP as you would get from driving him off.  Yes, it did dump an entire screen of text just to explain that the robot disappeared in a flash of light while the robot disappeared in a flash of light. Drink, I guess. TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this crap posted:
Seriously, what the hell? You have to put in more work to do the evil option and your reward is garbage. I guess you could in theory not talk to the slave trader even though the robot immediately tells you he wants to do business with the slave trader.  Matkina is still Tier 2. I still hate this game.  : I want to set you free. : [Raises Silver, Gold Tides] As your master, I set you free. Get out of here. I have no idea where this non sequitur about gods came from. I don't care.  Ah, yes, the Middle Ages, where you couldn't make a living with just a strong male body. Wait... : What if I found you a job?Coty: Yeah...all right. You're the boss, I guess.  There are a fair amount of options for Coty here. Because I am lazy and want these sidequests to finally be over, I go with this guard captain on the same screen about 20 feet away who owes us a favor. : There's a boy over there named Coty. I was wondering if you could give him a job.: Brusca looks over to where Coty is standing. "He's just a boy! I'd be afraid of getting him killed."Again, you don't need to describe her looking over. Our lovely Castoff described him as "a boy over there," It is reasonable to assume that Brusca, exclaiming he's just a boy, actually looked at him. Oh well.  : How much would it cost to equip him? Coty should probably learn to defend himself in case more horny body-stealing robots show up. : If you take him, I'll give you 300 shins for his equipment. : [Deception] He may not look like much, but he's young and good with his hands. He'll learn fast. : Farewell. : I got you a job as a soldier for the Memovira. You can start immediately. Coty's deal is that a prank went wrong and his sister died. RIP.  One last sidequest to go. TheGreatEvilKing summarizes posted:
You can also have Coty steal poo poo for you, but then he gets caught and killed and you don't get the XP. You'd think he could steal something good, but it's just the worthless fake currency and vendor trash. Don't do it. Moving on! We need to go to Chirugeon Slump to finish the last sidequest, which is to get Skoura her eyes back. We meet a pile of colorful characters on the way.  Bourras here begs you for money to buy space drugs. You can trick him into going with the Decanted if you promise him space drugs. It's a complete waste of time, but on the plus side he'll be dead and not live in Numenera any more.  You are not Jack Vance! Stop writing half-assed Jack Vance!  Sheen here sells said drugs, but they're distilled memories and whatnot. We can actually sell her the memory of overwhelming someone's mind with a wave of psychic energy, which she can use to make more drugs.  She thinks its really hot that you're as ruthless as her, a professional drug dealer, and gets wet enough to lower her prices.  I grab this mind control cypher and her unique cypher that permanently raises a knowledge skill. I burn the latter right away to get a rank in Lore: Machinery. Of course, a nano castoff can just cast the mind control spell as much as they want, but you all voted no nanos.  This man is mad we made Artaglio kill himself, and doesn't understand that it's a 20% damage bonus. He calls us an rear end in a top hat for taking advantage of a drunk man, and correctly points out we could have done it any other way. We tell him we needed the Maw open and move on.  These are the guys we want to talk to and they have a ton of words as befitting Numenera characters. Just make it end, please.  God  drat  Shut  Up  Apparently we needed yet another Mengele-like mad scientist. : [Raises Blue Tide] What concern was that? Oh, goody, they're more verbose assholes who speak with the same voice as every other character who is not a PC or has some kind of accent.  That sounds like a sidequest because it's the same thing we gave to the Techno-Lich. Incidentally, these guys can help you on Erritis' quest to stop being turned into Tony Hawk. Fortunately we have spared ourselves from the curse of Erritis forever.  Just smile and nod. Just smile and nod. It's kind of amazing how Callistege can, as a character, be boiled down to her dislike of Aligern and her weird hivemind gimmick. I am legitimately surprised Aligern entered a relationship with all infinite of these women at once. Lot of emotional support, my man.  Yes, shitlord! We went and placed the stupid face harp that used Western classical music theory a billion years into the future!  Wow. So the Callisteges handed over a Callistege for these guys to vivisect and, um...you know what? I'm glad we don't have more details here.  : Do you know any way to restore the sight of someone without eyes?  : The subject should retain her faculties, yes. You know what? This isn't the first band of assholes we've had experiment on us. Why not?  : Expensive and time consuming? What about all the eyes your colleague has on his head? Did he undergo all these surgeries, one by one? You are not Jack Vance.  We could pay, but where's the fun in that? : [Raises Blue, Gold Tides] Would I qualify as an 'interesting' test subject? Oh man! These scientists are going to give us deep insight about our origins, right? How can we say no? : [Raises Gold Tide] Then I'll volunteer myself. Callistege just wants an excuse to see us naked.    Ha ha! Comedy! Split over three separate text boxes AND spoiled by scan thoughts!  I would apologize for all these screenshots, but I've been manually transcribing all this dialog for the full Numenera experience.  While I like the idea of being so high you think being torn apart by surgeons is beautiful, the "luminous rainbow" is not great and I really wish they didn't use this clinical passive voice style for everything. The transient beauty is told and not shown. Also, yes, we lose a health point permanently. What new and shocking information can these scientists tell us?  Really? Losing something causes a sense of loss? You don't loving say!  So we're sterile, and...  : [Raises Blue Tide] What kind of facts? ...Really. That's your information. That we're vulnerable to psychic bullshit. We know this, because the Changing God popped up in our head without our consent.  Rubbing in how useless and lovely you are doesn't make me like you any more. Give me back my health point!  STOP  loving  TALKING : So what are the next steps to restore the sight to my blind acquaintance? : [Raises Blue Tide] What if I put it on my own face? Great!  Wonderful! We also have an artificial eye that none of these idiots have commented on. : Farewell.Holy poo poo, read this summary, that was too many words posted:
Uuuugh. Let's go give this eye to Skoura and end all these awful sidequests.  : [Raises Gold Tide] "I have an eye for you." Press Obervich's eye into her face.   TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:Skoura: Yippee! I can see again! Have this jar of hardcore ubernanites. So we got the jar of the Iron Wind. It's kind of a big deal, as one of the few things that can kill us.  They're nanomachines, specifically, "nano-spirits". Remember this? posted:So nanos can tap into nano-spirits for power, and to an extent so can jacks. These are some of the most powerful nanomachines in the setting which can even kill castoffs. Now, a good game would actually let us tap into the Iron Wind and use it as some kind of hardcore ubermagic, maybe even like the old D&D games (Planescape, anyone?) where wizards found awesome spells off scrolls and could use them to utterly dominate combat. It would even make sense for us to try this because turning the Iron Wind on the Sorrow might actually be able to kill it or at least drive it off. Unfortunately, this being Tides of Numenera, we are not allowed to do anything nearly that interesting with it. Now that we are finally done with all the sidequests we can advance the main plot.  : [Raises Blue Tide] "What will happen?"  They are going to shove one last loving trolley door in aren't they?  There's a short cutscene and the Maw appears. : That Maw has been here all along? : Where does it lead? : What does it eat? This is the Maw that murder bot was looking for. This may be relevant soon. Cutting out a few steps to navigate up the dialogue tree... : May I sleep here? I am lazy and don't go sleep in Qianne's hobo tent, so I get gouged and do a full heal. : Pay her. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:The...you know what, that name is stupid: Ha ha! The Memovira sent you because her dumb rear end would get killed by the Bloom! Do you want to advance the plot? Look, there was a trolley door here this whole time! Now to the Maw.   : Observe the behavior of the Bloom-tongues.: You watch as the tendrils wave about, paying close attention to how they respond to those around you...: Two or three of the tongues seem interested in Callistege, stretching themselves in her direction. Some of her echoes observe the tongues with interest, while others seem fearful of them.: Several tongues are fixated upon Matkina, tracking her movements like hounds on a scent. When she notices this, she starts pacing back and forth, but the tongues continue to follow her.: "Hurry it up," she mutters at you. This is unfortunately the only use of the Iron Wind and Waits-for-Prey's head. Really. We can also send Callistege in and she'll kill an echo to feed it to the door, so both those side adventures were completely loving pointless. : [Raises Gold Tide] Offer the head of Waits-for-Prey to the Maw. Rest in peace, missile bot. Truly, you were better than most of the assholes in Numenera.  That was not an invitation to spew more written diarrhea, game.  Oh look, all these words and no emotional or intellectual impact.  I know you have animators. You're about to play an animation after I close the text box. What if you actually trusted the animation team to do their jobs, instead of spewing more words in an already bloated and overwritten game?  See?  Welcome to the Heart of the Bloom! It's the game's only proper dungeon, but that doesn't mean it's not full of pretentious overwritten assholes!  Just...draw...a...loving...character portrait...or..use...the...model...  We know he's nervous because of the stutter. We know that the stuttering is again like shuddering. : Tell me how you came to be here. : What can you tell me about this place? : You said you see strange things. Like what? : Farewell!TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:Vonetion: Ahhh! The Bloom is eating me! Ahhh! It is very spooky! Nooo! Next Time: loving poo poo gently caress I don't want to do a big Numenera dungeon. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 03:27 on May 30, 2020 |
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May 13, 2020 06:51
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: Hey, know any hot people? I'm looking for hot people to put in my museum because I like hot people. Like that slave over there, boyoyoyoyyoing!
: Hey! I sell slaves! I'm gonna interrupt this auction to get you to buy a slave.
: So what now?
: We are mad scientists! Durrrr!
: We're also not funny! drat, Callistege, you're still hot!
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The jar looks like a repurposed cylinder. Aren't most jars cylinders? What the gently caress is a repurposed cylinder?
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May 13, 2020 11:32
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So the Wind doesn't have any other purpose? It has less uses than the memes?
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May 13, 2020 16:52
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:
Doesn't everyone have two rows of teeth?
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May 13, 2020 22:31
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I think the dialogue means "he has a set of teeth behind his regular teeth."
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May 13, 2020 23:15
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I figured, but it's still sloppy writing. (Not that I should be surprised about that...)
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May 14, 2020 00:08
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Strom Cuzewon posted:The jar looks like a repurposed cylinder. Not The Wendigo posted:I figured, but it's still sloppy writing. I am legitimately having trouble focusing on the words in this game right now, I will not lie. Hypocrisy posted:So the Wind doesn't have any other purpose? It has less uses than the memes? The other purpose of the wind is to grab it from Skoura or have Erritis do it for you so you insta die. As far as I can tell you can't actually unleash it to kill a boss or something. What a waste of time.
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May 14, 2020 01:45
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The Butthole Of The Bloom When we last left our band of...protagonists...they got pulled into the Heart of the Bloom. The Bloom is the area the game developers were most fascinated by, and it's just another weird viscera dungeon that has transdimensional portals that open based on stupid trolley puzzles.  There are a lot of these drat things, and you can either take damage or use the Tides to force the Bloom into doing what you want it to do. : Use the Magmatic Annulet to communicate with the Bloom-tongues. : [Tidal Surge]: Channel the pain back into the Bloom-tongues.I don't actually like all this psychic crap. Colin McComb is on record as saying that Blue Oyster Cult's "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" inspired the Fifth Eye (and I would imagine a lot of the rest of the New Age psychic poo poo) but it's just unrelatable bullshit that doesn't relate to mental trauma at all.  Yea despite this being probably one of the game's bigger dungeons it's just a pile of words.  : [Intellect] Take control of the Bloom-TonguesIt's kind of amazing how they put this many words into what is just a glorified switch, that you also have a random chance of failing to flip.  What about this represents the mental behavior of a normal human being? I guess we got Four Whole XP!  : Send the combatants in the middle of this chamber to some other part of the Bloom.  They actually play the generic Maw portal animation sucking these guys away while a text box is open, proving that they can but they just don't want to. : Try to sense what's happening outside this chamber. : Reopen the portal to the Shrine of Chila. : Break your connection to the tongues.: You release your grip on the Annulet, and the voices of the Bloom-Tongues fade.TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this crap posted:
 Translation: We didn't trust the art and audio departments to do their jobs, so here is a description of stuff that should be in the ambience.  They really think their writing is this beautiful, that it must be shown off.  There's a ton of dialogue that's here for basically flip switch/fight murden and get items. Wacky psychic power bullshit abounds. Let's skip all that and see what he drops, shall we?  The synth egg is a plot item we need to solve a puzzle. The Candy Dispenser is a little more interesting.  Hoo boy. Zeniel in the thread had a tale about kickstarter backer items - namely, that their idea for a bic pen people in the future thought was a poison dagger (because of the ink) was rejected for not being mysterious enough because nothing from modern day would survive. This is a Furby pez dispenser. It's a drat Furby. Really.  This is exactly how a Furby behaves. I get it. It's kind of funny there's a Furby pez dispenser, I just think it's a bit inconsistent to say the funny Bic Pen poison dagger is bad, but include the RPG Codex monument and the Furby. Anyway, you can use it twice to get two not-Pez candies that each increase your intelligence by 1. Do this! I suspect this was partially intended as a counter for how the Bloom fucks us over later. Oh, and if you're wondering, the candies are cyphers, so they do the magic thing where everything explodes if you have too many.  We can finally take it apart for the Life Support Module. I just saved you like five screens of text. You're welcome.  So two things stand out immediately. That weird flesh plant thing you can interact with for some tubing. That is needed to solve the "puzzle" of stopping the stomach acid flowing into that hole. The second is that, of course, this NPC is going to offer us yet another Trolley Problem.  : What happened to your eyes? Is this supposed to be another descent into hell? I'm serious. This guy is dead because the Bloom ate him, right? : Why are you standing here? : [Raises Blue Tide] You ever think that standing near this thing is what's making you want to die?  Seriously, is this another hell? We already went to not-hell that was spiritually insignificant. This is a not-hell run by a not-god that provides not-divine revelation to worshipers. We're not going to actually focus on that in this supposedly thought-provoking game and just focus on flipping switches as a reward to reading more of Numenera's awful writing. : Why do you want me to kill you? So this is not the afterlife, it's just Jonah in the belly of the space whale? Maybe? : What happens if I kill you? It's weird, because it seems becoming one with the Bloom IS an afterlife, but we're not going to answer that at all. The game is presenting the Changing God and the Bloom as false gods, but they do provide an afterlife for those they favor (the Labyrinth and being absorbed, respectively). It never really wants to tackle the question of whether or not mortals can transcend their mortality or what a god really is, because again this is just another set up for a trolley problem. Here is a man. He has 20 pain units from being tortured by the Bloom. Is that enough pain to mercy kill him Y/N? : You shouldn't be so willing to throw away your life.: "Really", he says, with a scornful smile. A thread of blood spills from an eye socket, and he wipes it, leaving a blurred arc of crimson across his cheekbone. "My life is over, stranger. The Bloom is digesting me, and I can't escape. Nothing I do here will matter."OH MAN HE SAID MATTER! WHAT DOES ONE LIFE MATTER!!!!!  : [Raises Red, Silver Tides] You're a stone in the Bloom's gut. You're fighting back by surviving. You know what? I'm tired of the game forcing these idiotic ethical dilemmas on us. This is my answer to this entire tedious Bloom section. : Slash his throat with the Transdimensional Scalpel.I mentioned earlier that the Scalpel is a garbage weapon, but its real utility lies in being able to bypass the Bloom's desperate attempt to interact with the developers' beloved question and just slash your way past Maws and other stupid garbage.  I don't know why they bother tracking such piddly poo poo XP rewards. TheGreatEvilKing dialogue summary posted:
The hamfisted trolley problem insertion is getting really, really old. Fortunately we are very near to the end of the game and we can figure out what terrible game I'm going to LP next for you guys.  This is part one of the puzzle to get into the Bloom's hole. We need to find something else to seal the little bridge and then we're set. There is of course an entire text screen of inserting the egg into the hole.  There's even a second screen of text stating the acid level has lowered!  It's like no one playtested the finished product. On our way to go get the second item for this puzzle we run into a familiar face.   : [Tidal Surge] Take his pain on yourself. It's weird how emotionless this sounds. This is how the game describes a man being devoured alive. It will spend reams of paper ineffectually describing how the characters appear, but if it wants to describe anything with dramatic impact it's just not able to conjure that imagery.  : I can offer you more, Artaglio. I can absorb you into my mind, if you'll let me. Better than all this. : [Tidal Affinity][Raises Blue, Gold Tides] Try to draw Artaglio into the Labyrinth. Remember, this act of descending into hell, taking the pain of a poor sinner, and then showing him the way to heaven has no spiritual or religious significance whatsoever. Now we absolutely want Artaglio's broken buff, so we are going to drink acid.  Drinking the acid gets us this message.  Now, this isn't instant death, we just need to drink the acid, for two points of damage every time. Imagine me clicking that same dialogue option while the Last Castoff's "I'm hurt" voice clips keep going off, and you'll get the true Numenera experience. We need to die so we can get to the Labyrinth.  : Talk to Artaglio. : How are things here, Artaglio? : Are you happy to be here? : Tell me a story from your life, Artaglio. It's another mystery the authors feel compelled to insert, but it suffers from overuse and a lack of impact on our characters or the narrative. Numenera! : Do you have any other stories from your life? : Share a drink and form a connection with Artaglio. We literally just got one of the best abilities in the game. The only better ability in my opinion is the Breathes Shadow capstone, which makes you literally invulnerable in combat. : Leave him alone.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 Look at this! This is really good! 20% to all damage, 10% Persuasion, a Willpower boost, and an initiative boost for the entire team if they hang around TLC. In all seriousness the writing of this scene bugs me, because it just goes to show how this game wants to be a work of profound depth and just settles for the surface layer. We descend into hell, find a sinner, ease his pain with semi-divine powers, and let him live eternally in the afterlife the Changing God constructed. It raises some serious questions. If the Changing God can do all the stuff a real god can do, like create life and grant immortality, does that make him a god? If the Changing God isn't a god, what differentiates a real god from the Changing God? Can a god even coexist with the science of the Numenera setting? If the Changing God is a god, do we have the right to judge him? I will grant The Genocide brings the last point up, but so far the game is determined not to interact with the questions it raises as much as just throwing more trolleys in our face. Here is Artaglio. If you give Artaglio to the door you can get past it and get a sweet buff. You can choose not to kill Artaglio and not get the buff. What does one life matter?  Once again we rise from the dead. I just want to point out that we've been collecting lost souls and giving them an afterlife all game, from Seria to Choi to Inifere and now Artaglio. Anyway you slice it that is a role with a lot of religious significance. Why is this set in Numenera?  You need to navigate through all the text boxes here to get the next plot coupon to solve the puzzle and slide into the Bloom's hole.  Thank you, Callistege. It's very mysterious. I also do not actually care. It's another Numenera mystery that will never be solved, and quite frankly I know none of this is going to be resolved, and I just don't care. It's a giant alien. Really, the attitude I'm getting from these kinds of reactions is the attitude of a five year old proudly presenting their finger painting, and all the adults in the room cooing and putting it on the fridge. Wow, it's a generic sci-fi thing, but it's filtered through a nerd's idea of how a person in medieval times would see it!  Again, it's just an alien. In a sci-fi game. XCOM 2 is full of aliens, and it doesn't feature Lily Shen running around in a panic going "Wow! Aliens! Who would have thought it! Aliens! Wow!" Yes, I'm skipping a lot of these text screens. You're welcome.  This rear end in a top hat describes himself as a "life-taker" and tries to threaten us, backs down when confronted, and is very sad because he can't do more murder. You saw that "flat, affectless" sentence, do you really need more Numenera writing? No. No you don't.  This is another switch that opens a door to an optional area, but it takes nine text boxes to flip. Really. Even the dungeon crawls are pretentiously overwritten in this garbage game.  What you're supposed to do here is get one of those two loser ghosts here, because this Maw feeds on despair and those two are very sad, and which will you sacrifice? What does one life matter? It's time to ride the trolley! Yay! Fortunately, the developers gave me the means to bypass all this poo poo and I whip out the Transdimensional Scalpel. Matkina has something to say about this.  : Yes.  I'm always amazed at how dull and lifeless the prose makes everything. They managed to make cutting through a monster's mouth with an energy knife boring and emotionless.   The Maw has chosen a truly fiendish way to punish us by making us endure Numenera combat. Unfortunately for it, its black demon seed monsters have 40 HP and Callistege deals 39 damage in an area with her Maelstrom.  This is again ruined by the Maw monsters' ability to teleport people as a reaction to getting hit, which doesn't really add a layer of complexity to the battle so much as just adding more animations to sit through dully waiting for combat to be over. I apologize for the Nvidia overlay, by the way, but I'm not going back and re-recording this section. Sorry!  It's cumulative per Maw hit too, so Callistege is going to get hit 3 times, but these assholes are going to be left at 1 hp. Let's skip the rest of this.  This is another skill check switch that takes multiple text boxes to open a Maw.  This gets The Last Castoff up to Tier 5, which is kind of a weird Tier.  This is the tier where you can start looting abilities from other classes. We end up taking Press Advantage, which gives us +30% critical chance against enemies we debuff. We're debuffing enemies so we can use our health drain on them, and the rest of these abilities are kinda crap. Plague spirits shows up on the Nano list, and no, we can't get Onslaught or anything like that. Don't be ridiculous.  Going through the Maw basically lets us into a treasure cache. The hammer is a heavy weapon that no one in our party can use.   There's an armor upgrade for our half-bald protagonist, and...yea. Leaving the Maw leads to yet another inconsquential sequence of text boxes.  I'm going to show this in full because I want to show off, once again, how ineptly the game handles its themes. : Examine the brain. : [Tidal Surge] Restore activity to the brain.Yea, the Tides can raise the dead. Remember how that was a whole theme with the Changing God trying to resurrect his daughter? I remember. Is this going to be significant in any way?   It's a start, I guess. What can we do? : Try to scan the brain's thoughts.     Not pictured: Me slack-jawed clicking "continue" to get through the five screens of Numenera prose. : Examine the nerve clusters at the base of the brain. : [Perception, Lore: Natural] Try to determine what parts of the creature's body are controlled by each nerve cluster. Ok, this is kind of an interesting puzzle, right? We can move the big monster and get somewhere new, or get loot? : Manipulate the shoulder nerves. : Manipulate the back nerves. Ok, this is going to do something, right? : Manipulate the intestine nerves. Really. : Step away from the brain.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
Yea. I just want to point out the Oasis of M'ra Jollos, the fourth area they had in the kickstarter that they actually made the stretch goals for, was cut because the developers thought the Bloom was too interesting and expanded this area. Thus they broke yet another kickstarter promise for such gems as Big Monster Goes Poopy. It's such a weird tonal whiplash too, as we go from Artaglio's death and rebirth in our mind to Big Monster Goes Poopy. If you'd had Callistege feed one of the Callisteges to the Maw to get in here, she has a whole scene where the eaten Callistege refuses to rejoin her because she's finally free and doing something for herself, and then Callistege wonders if all the orphans she experimented on were worth it. Really. Then we break this up with Poopy Monster time. I get it. You want comic relief when things get too serious, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Mercutio's dick jokes are funny because it's in character for him as a dumbass teenager. This is just not funny.  You can rest in here. Callistege isn't happy about it. In the alcove above we would have met other Callistege who would give us some insight into her character. By doing the robot battle and/or the jar of Iron Wind sidequests we actively locked ourselves out of Callistege characterization, which was rather thin on the ground to begin with. Great storytelling, developers!  We use the sealant spray. It gives us a text box about how the acid water is blocked and then plays the animation. You all know the drill. We have to sit through a text box, click "yes," and then sit through a description of us falling down the hole while they fade to black. I'm not pasting all that, you're welcome.  Welcome to level two of the Bloom. I'm breaking the update here, because this is pretty dense and we have a lot of plot to get through next update.
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May 19, 2020 04:23
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: Kill me! I am stuck being digested by this monster! It hurts! I want to die! It's been eating me for so long, and then it will absorb me for eternal torment!
: gently caress you! You tricked me into getting eaten! You better make this right somehow!
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How does this thing somehow keep getting worse from a game standpoint
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May 19, 2020 19:26
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Huh. So reassembling the scalpel actually had a payoff. Surprising. Does only the scalpel work? Can you use the impossible sword you got earlier? I never thought about it but is it possible to release people from our mind palace? I assume the dead people would just die but we have some people that might be kind of alive too.
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May 19, 2020 20:32
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I just legitimately feel bad for anyone who kickstarted this and got scammed into believing they'd get what they wanted
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May 19, 2020 21:33
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:
I think maybe this is the wrong image? I don't see the crappy poop joke you're reacting to, and logically it would go here. Don't get me wrong, I'm not crushed to be missing the Numenara writers' sparkling sense of humor, but at least this way we know what you're talking about. 
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May 20, 2020 00:16
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My read was that the Maw was rumbling because you moved the intestines and it caused a poop/fart in its face. I might be reading too much into it.TitanG posted:How does this thing somehow keep getting worse from a game standpoint I wish I knew. Hypocrisy posted:Huh. So reassembling the scalpel actually had a payoff. Surprising. Does only the scalpel work? Can you use the impossible sword you got earlier? The scalpel can be used on any maw, so we could have cut our way into the Anchorage instead of sacrificing the Catena intelligence from our mind prison. Otherwise we can't just gank our reflections, no.
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May 20, 2020 00:20
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So when you drink bile-like fluids from within a creature's gullet, it burns like acid in your gut? Color me surprised. Well, okay, bile is alkaline, so there's a subtle distinction there, but it's not like that would matter.
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May 20, 2020 00:31
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Awkward Tentacle Action Last time, we made it down to the Bloom's second level. What new perils await us?  gently caress! Don't worry, this isn't as bad as it looks. What we need to go is to get to the Heart of the Bloom and rescue Ishen so the Memovira will tell us where the First Castoff so we can stop the Changing God from killing all the castoffs somehow? The optimal way to do this is to just go through the two doors and pass some skill checks, or, in our case, whip the Transdimensional Scalpel out again. You can go and mess with the Bloom-tongues on the side to open various doors, but you really don't want to do that.  This goblin dude was in the sac we burst open to start the transdimensional scalpel quest. He's a bro and will attack the Black Demon Seed monsters for us. Leave him alone. Yea, he's a transdimensional ghost and thus more Numenera bullshit, but he's ultimately making us "play" fewer rounds of Numenera combat. Pour one out for our boy.  We do have to go a few rounds with the tentacle monsters teleporting in, but our whole party can kill them with focus fire and thus like much of the game's combat it's just a big waste of time.  Not only does Tides Dog tear the sac apart, he does it with only one text screen!  Yes yes, the Bloom is very mad.  Matkina busts the other sac open with the scalpel.  They literally used the same sentence for cutting each door. Whatever. It's not like this is an inspired encounter or anything. Wait till you see the final boss fight!  The last part of this encounter is opening this door. Here Callistege is going to use her not-wizardy muscles to pry the butthole open.  It works. We need one more skill check.  Alternatively we can just use the Transdimensional Scalpel to tell the game we're sick of its poo poo.  The Transdimensional Scalpel is the only weapon that works for this, by the way. The Impossible Blade TLC is using as her main weapon, despite doing some kind of time fuckery attack, can't be used.  These guys get teleported in and starting whining about how the we're tormenting our god. Ha ha. I enjoy how despite the text being labeled "Inkpot" the narration has to tell us that yes, that's Inkpot's voice. Whatever. At this point you can go make a sandwich while the NPCs take their usual 15 minutes to slowly walk toward you like you have their Social Security checks, and then click on the rear end in a top hat you just carved to end the fight and get 100 XP.  This is the Heart of the Bloom, the ending of our quest through...the stomach...and the intestines of the Bloom. I'm expecting a pack of Zerglings to unborrow any minute now.  Here you have to convince all your companions to follow you into the Hentai Zone up there because the Bloom is very dangerous. Keep in mind our interactions with the Bloom have been easily mind controlling it with our Tide powers and just cutting our way past the Trolley Doors because my god, we have seen enough of that. : Do you have any insight, Callistege? Trolley! Trolley! : Any advice, Matkina? : Oom, what's wrong? : I'll need your help in there, Callistege. : [Persuasion] Think of what you can learn. How many people have touched the very Heart of the Bloom? 100% Persuasion chance, punks! : Matkina, let's go in together. : [Persuasion]: I can't do this alone. We'll be okay.  : Come with me, Oom. Tides Dog will always have our back! : All right. Let's do this.LEEEEEEROYYYYYYYYY Seriously, they're two words off from the meme. Did no one proofread this? TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 A mass of tubes and tendrils, huh? You don't say.  I kinda gently caress up here. : [Light Weapons][Raises Red Tide] Stab the Heart with the Transdimensional Scalpel.I wanted to see if we could actually kill the Bloom.  You can back out of skill checks. I, on the other hand, was dully clicking through dialog at this point.  Also, 85% chance! Good odds, right?  I hate this game's skill system, I hate this game's writing, and I hate this game's combat.  My failure to kill the Bloom has unleashed the demons of exposition. I also have no idea how memories flash too quickly to think about, and can only conclude the authors are once again thinking like this is a movie and not a pile of writing.   So that memory way back at the beginning where the lady laughed at us for being bad with robots? That lady was the First Castoff, Maralel.  The masked lich looking person? That's the First Castoff. I don't think she's had as much of an impact on our journey as Callistege, Matkina, and I think that's supposed to be Aligern, but what do I know?  Stop with the attribution and trust your dialogue.  : [Raises Blue Tide] Show me the rest of the memory. Yea, gently caress no, we're not doing that. : [Tidal Surge] Try to feed false memories to the Bloom, to keep it from plundering the real ones.  So I did the sidequest to max that skill out, do I get a roll, or...  Oh, yea, no. Suddenly the psychic powers we were using to command the Bloom arbitrarily don't work anymore. Also that's kind of a personal relationship, are we to assume that it was a father-daughter thing or did it get weird?  OH gently caress YOU! You can avoid this, but I didn't think to check a guide. We have plenty of Intellect and the game is almost over. I'm not replaying this segment again.   : Disengage from the Bloom-Tongues.I avoid the Gold Tide ending because I want to get us to Blue and Silver for endgame for...reasons. I probably won't succeed, I think sending Rhin home makes you unable to get out of Gold.  Oh no.   This feels like it should be a big "wow" twist, but we knew the First was alive and the Memovira knew where she was. This isn't a big deal.  Oh, yes, the First Castoff's armies were responsible for Matkina's...erm...Terry Goodkind moment.  Never one to trust the reader to understand this deep, philosophical game, the writers spend another screen spelling it out, in case you didn't put together magic disguise mask + First Castoff = Memovira. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
Ugh. We're still not done, we have to talk to Mazzof. If you don't remember who he is, the Changing God had him build the resonance chamber and then we played a necromancer Choose Your Own Adventure game where he told us that the resonance chamber was actually a trolley set to run over all the castoffs.  This character description feels...not out of place. They could have animated him vomiting, but I guess that would have cut into the rapey sidequest budget and the ignoring kickstarter stretch goals budget.  : I thought I was rescuing someone named Ishen. But here you are instead. Just so we're clear, firing the resonance chamber kills all the castoffs. Or something.  : Hold on. How did you end up a prisoner to begin with? : I don't know, actually. I thought I was working for the Memovira until just a few minutes ago.Memovira is a title. If we'd had Matkina with us earlier she'd have spent a lot of time bitching about how she used to work with the old Memovira and he was just the coolest man ever but the new Memovira took over and she sucks.  : But a headache is uncoiling through your head now as well. Alarm spreads over Mazzof's face, and he reaches out to catch you as you topple forward.Uncoiling headaches. Really.   That's just more bad writing. "The chamber certainly has the power" seems to indicate that yes it does have the firepower to kill the Sorrow.   : Mazzof, what is the First's plan with the Chamber?  Oh goddamn it. I had one of those things lying around, and I know where to get a second. We're going to do the last Merecasters next update. TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this crap posted:
 We take the portal and are back at the Bloom entrance. Next Time: We finish up the Merecaster Choose Your Own Adventure segments before finally ending our long Numenera nightmare.
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May 20, 2020 02:51
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: Aw, crap! This hurts, I got beaten by the bloom. You're the girl from the Choose Your Own Adventure! What are you doing here?
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The combat in this game is bad enough already but I played the PS4 version and it's even worse. There is a weird bug that I don't believe was ever patched out ( I beat it about 2 months ago) where anytime an enemy moves they will reach their destination and then move forward and back around 5 steps about 3-4 times. Combined with the glacial movement speed this takes about 20 seconds extra for every single enemy's turn. So you could be worse off. Also I sent Rhin home and still got the blue/silver event to happen at the end so you might be okay.
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May 20, 2020 10:56
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The Changing God is such an untrustworthy and dickish figure at this point that it'd probably be too easy to go along with the First Castoff. By tricking us in an incredibly pointless way (we would have been forced/been willing to do this trip anyway) she makes the player dislike her. Well done? Why isn't there an enter the mind lab button? Is there a reason to limit your ability to visit it? FalloutFan56 posted:The combat in this game is bad enough already but I played the PS4 version and it's even worse. There is a weird bug that I don't believe was ever patched out ( I beat it about 2 months ago) where anytime an enemy moves they will reach their destination and then move forward and back around 5 steps about 3-4 times. Combined with the glacial movement speed this takes about 20 seconds extra for every single enemy's turn. So you could be worse off. Also I sent Rhin home and still got the blue/silver event to happen at the end so you might be okay. Dear lord...
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May 20, 2020 14:14
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There's no way this game doesn't end with a, "DO YOU SACRIFICE YOURSELF TO THE BLOODTHIRSTY TROLLEY TO SAVE EVERYONE ELSE" choice, right? Like, there's no other logical place for this to go. I hope choosing it deletes your saves. If I was stuck making this game, I would lean the hell into it. Go whole hog, full on balls-to-the wall meta. Throw the player in front of a trolley: there's an option in the ending where everyone is happy, but it's DLC. You want the good ending, you have to sacrifice something. Give the money to some charity, maybe for children who have been orphaned by street cars. TheGreatEvilKing posted:This is unfortunately the only use of the Iron Wind and Waits-for-Prey's head. Really. If you haven't finished recording the LP, can you try to include a screenshot or two at this zoom level per update? I really struggle to parse what I'm looking at sometimes.
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May 20, 2020 23:12
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The Endless Trolley Battle Welcome back! Last time on Tides of Numenera we cut open a monster butthole and got a bunch of exposition dumped on us of how the First Castoff also wants to use the genocidal chamber and maybe the Changing God didn't want to kill all the castoffs and look, we know this is going into another half-assed abstract problem of how many people you want to run over with a trolley.  We're going to talk to Steven Dengler's evil self-insert for the last time. Oom really is popular with the ladies, isn't he? : What will you give me for the Magmatic Annulet?Remember, Dracogen originally wanted the Annulet back but we traded the Space Marine's nav computer for it instead. He will actually give us something else for the Annulet.  Money is not particularly useful in the end game. : I'll trade you for the merecaster.The merecaster is going to bring up our collection of unused merecasters to three. For those who don't remember, merecasters put us into the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure zone where the authors desperately try to convey something about the worldbuilding or their flaccid attempts to convey Colin McComb's beloved themes while the player tries to click fast enough to see if they drop XP or something. They're not great, but you all voted for me to show off everything. Don't worry, summaries will be provided.  I think Dracogen maybe works for the Memovira, but I also know that I don't really care. Thread challenge: name ONE character who was memorable in this game for a reason other than being awful (such as Omahdon and his quest to insert his penis into anime ladies). : Farewell.TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
So we have three Merecasters - the Circulating Merecaster I got in the Necropolis and never used, the Fluctuating Merecaster that Mazzof dropped, and the Ovoid Merecaster we got from Dracogen.  Despite these all having their own portraits in the inventory, the game feels the need to describe them in text. It's like some gorgeous yet unattainable woman told the authors she would take one out to dinner if they spent enough words on imagery. Let's start with the Circulating Merecaster, shall we? Fair warning, these are all, once again, stories about trolleys. It still hasn't sunk in that maybe we actually need investment in these scenarios, and it all becomes once again weighing the abstract pain units. It's kind of amazing that for a game that proposes to explore all these scenarios the only framework they have is utilitarianism.   : [Raises Red, Blue Tides] Demand to know who they are. So do we want to have sex with Cardogo? I'm asking because that is usually what it means when you feel a flush in your body upon seeing someone. The prose also says "armless" but he clearly has something in that sleeve. : My condition? Roots? The Wind? : What's wrong with your side, Cardogo? I would say they're just good friends, but that "flush in your body"... : Then there are preparations to be made.  Remember how one of the other Big Colin Themes was Legacy? Get ready to have it hammered down your throat!  I am desperately trying to avoid the Gold Tide options, but we are locked into the Blue/Gold legacy at the end of this update. Sorry goons, I probably won't be able to show the Blue/Silver thing off. Go ahead and spoil it in the thread. : Seek Cardogo's help.  : How? Is this venture also run by a Nigerian prince? : [Raises Blue Tide] Tell me more about this venture. : [Raises Indigo Tide] This sounds criminal.I want to point out that gullibly enabling and pointing out he's being tricked both raise Gold Tide, if you wanted more proof the judgement of the Tides is incoherent and unreasonable.  Really, kid? : Why are you doing this? I can tell you from recent personal experience this is the sign of an experienced manipulator: all the awful things they were doing to you were actually for your benefit the whole time! gently caress off, rear end in a top hat! : No. gently caress off!  Casca here reminds me of Matkina, and I think it's just the black-and-white? : [Raises Blue Tide] Why are you here? : Why should i give you my money? Another justification I've seen in my recent experience, and I will confess I took far too much pleasure in answering. : You'll get nothing from me. This is not to say that helping the suffering is wrong, but your suffering does not entitle you to other people's possessions.   : Prepared? Plans? : Why do you need more? : Of course. Suddenly, a grimdark and deep plot twist! Our boy Cardogo is a crazy child murdering man! : The Mendicant told me about your children. Now I don't know about you, but I don't think it's very nice to Kaeli to impregnate hookers in secret and murder your illegitimate children. It's more self-serving bullshit! I think we can all see where this is going.  : [Raises Gold, Indigo Tides] Establish a trust for Cardogo's children, wherever they are.The Mendicant seems like the only good dude among the bunch if we are being honest with ourselves. We've already given him a ton of stuff, and he asked us to help the little mutant kids. Our family is a bunch of terrible leeches who came to watch us die, and nobody came up and asked us what they could do to help or expressed sorrow that we were dying. gently caress them. Cardogo may be a weird child killing dude, but he also is our friend who threw himself in front of the Iron Wind for us. I take it back, there was one guy in an officer's uniform. I wish we could have left him something cool. Also, I know I wasn't gonna pick the Gold Tide, but man. I can kinda relate to this guy here. It's not very well written (I dislike the longwinded lawyer line) but I can definitely relate.  Hooray! We didn't run the kids over with a trolley! Toot toot! TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
That wasn't...awful? I guess? I will confess I related a lot more to it thanks to recent life events. It wasn't written very well, and it was more trolley bullshit, and Cardogo's secret hooker and murder section was...actually, you know what, that was kinda stupid. Moving on!   : ::rrrrrrsk:: : Well, that's a relief. I'd hate for someone to suggest that you and I are related.Next up, the fluctuating merecaster we got from Mazzof. This is probably the most in depth the game goes with the Endless Battle, and I'll be honest - I skipped it in my initial playthrough, because I was done with the game at act 3.   : How did the massacre at Miel Avest happen? How did the shields come down? : What are the Reconciler of Truth and Heaven's Rejoinder?  This is actually a concept that could be used to say a lot about the delusions of the powerful, but because this is Numenera, will only be tapped for surface weirdness. More on this later. : [Raises Silver Tide] I'm happy to do what you need, so long as there's opportunity for glory. This sounds like a propaganda war, but that idea was explicitly shot down by George Ziets. Ziets' Tumblr posted:tormentsuperfan asked: Is the Endless Battle an allusion to the Cold War era where two ideologies battle for supremacy in proxy wars? Are the altered realities supposed to represent media war? Also, this is the first time the 'castoff community' has been mentioned. How common are castoffs? It's weird, because that changing history side literally alludes to history being written by the victors. We'll talk more about this once the CYOA is done.  : Tell me more about these White Nests. Moths. Sure. Moths. : Tell me about the reality storm. Oh look it's the Fake News. : I will find the saboteur before he breaks the Reconciler, no matter what time or reality he does it in. You might be asking "if this mission is crucial to winning the war, why don't they send some of the many sci-fi power armored soldiers we saw in the other flashbacks," and my reply is "because a different writer remoted this story in."   This is the general structure of the reality storm - you keep clicking until the game determines you've hit the right path, and then it spews descriptive text at you. : Choose the moonlit lake. : Choose the storm of swirling chaos. : Choose the sunny canyon. : Choose the rolling farmland. : Choose the muddy battlefield. : Choose the glittering swamp.  : Choose the roaring arena.  Cute. : Choose the gloomy battlefield. ...why does Paj Rekken care? When we last saw her she was committing werewolf genocide and enabling the rape of Matkina. I imagine whoever remoted this in was under strict instructions to conform to the "war bad" theme.   : Tell me. : Go and I will consider it. Otherwise...Wait, hang on! The endless war that has raged across half the world didn't kill more than the 10 or so castoffs that were hanging around Miel Avest? Whatever.  : Zerronth told me Commander Rekken was the one who turned off Miel Avest's shields, allowing the Sorrow to kill our siblings. : Thank you, sir. I'll head to the Bloom now.   : Paj, Zerronth told me the Sorrow did not break through Miel Avest's shields. He claimed the shields were lowered on purpose...by you. Now, remember how we activated the teleporter before any of the named castoffs died? I remember. Despite having at least 3 references to "enhanced reactivity" in the stretch goals, this game doesn't. And of course here are the mandatory trolleys. To save all the castoffs the First pulled the lever that sent the Sorrow trolley running over Aardiris and the rest.  It's funny, because they never bothered actually trying to recruit us to their side of the Endless Battle.  Despite us teleporting Aardiris out before she could get killed by the Sorrow, Paj and the First Castoff, despite having a reality rewriting machine that lets them see what happened, do not know this. There is only one answer that makes sense to me here. Is the game hardcore enough to let us break it? : [Raises Red, Indigo Tides][Attack] You are a traitor to the castoffs. You must die!God, it's so melodramatic.  This is a big hint for a future combat I am definitely skipping. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
So unlike most of the rest of this game, there is actually some meat on the bone in this one. The Endless Battle is a pointless stalemate involving weapons so powerful the warring leaders can literally rewrite reality as they see fit so nothing and everything is true. Both the First Castoff and the Changing God are shrouding themselves in the "savior of all castoffs" rhetoric while seeking to fire off the Resonance Chamber that may or may not destroy either all the castoffs or the Sorrow. There are vague hints that the Changing God had a somewhat inappropriate relationship with Maralel, if them staying up all night and talking was any indication, and their intense personal dislike when they're starting the war makes me think it's a bit more than a scientist-castoff relationship. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but all of this points less to a world-spanning war than a weird internal struggle between the masculine and feminine halves of the Changing God. Remember, the Tides associated with the Changing God are Blue and Silver, or knowledge and egotism respectively. It would explain why no conflict in the Endless Battle ever goes anywhere plot important, such as no one going to Sagus Cliffs despite the Resonance Chamber - the object the war is supposedly being fought over - being present and Sagus being a major recruiting ground for the Changing God's armies. The reality rewrites in this interpretation would be something like The Autumn of the Patriarch where the dictator has so much power - or so little - that he lives up his own rear end and his delusions come out as magical realism rambling. The problem with this interpretation is that it doesn't jive with the rest of the game at all. The Changing God, while egotistical, never really came across as someone who was deluded about his abilities (even resurrection is possible if you want to kiss an anime girl enough). There are vague hints about internal conflict, where the Changing God felt bad about killing all the haters with his sweet Tides Powers, but everything we've seen of the Changing God is that he was a driven realist with a hunger for power and knowledge to try to reshape the world in his own image and an excellent knowledge of people. Maralel is certainly not his conscience or even a bearer of the traditionally feminine attributes like compassion, she's just as ruthless if not more so than he is. This leads us back to the Endless Battle being a commentary on the futility of war, but it's a terrible commentary because it's written like a superhero cartoon where no one dies. If we look at Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front that book shows us an awful war because it's a stalemate where young men are killing each other for a cause no one believes in and no one is able to achieve, commanded by people who are out of touch with the front lines of the war and needlessly endanger their soldiers by ordering idiotic charges and handing out sawtooth bayonets. This is a war where literally no one dies because the rewind machines fire up every day. Go back and look at what Tybir said about the Endless War - Auvergne fought in it, and was resurrected on a near-daily basis. The saboteur told us that those 10 or so people who lived in Miel Avest were more castoffs then had ever died in this supposedly apocalyptic reality-destroying war. The only victims seem to be Matkina and maybe Werewolf Village, who people didn't like anyway because the werewolves would occasionally get out of control and murder people. The game is insistent on presenting us with groups of NPCs fleeing the Endless War, but there are maybe 10 in all - Artaglio's tiny mercenary company, and the three people in the corner of the Necropolis. There are no refugee caravans or great musterings of troops marching from Sagus Cliffs to the front lines, there's no rationing, there is no diversion of resources to the military. It's like someone tried to write about World War II, but from the perspective of an American civilian during the Iraq war where the US military fought and died with no impact on the situation at home. You're never going to be able to write about war convincingly with that perspective because you aren't interacting with it. Lastly, I want to once again make the observation that the Numenera setting ruins every story this game tries to tell. I am one hundred percent serious here. The game wants to have a hellish offscreen world war, but also needs to fulfill the Numenera weirdness quotient of having some poorly understood science thing that leads to a contradiction or something the authors think is really unique or mindblowing but has been done before in other science fiction properties. This leads to a war that doesn't really affect The Last Castoff or her party at all, and it's a shame, because if this is supposed to be a crucial examination of the value of human life a war is the perfect opportunity to do that! What are all these men and women dying for? Why does the average trooper in The Changing God's armies care about any of this Sorrow or Resonance Chamber bullshit? What, if anything, is worth dying for? What is worth killing for? Are there things worth trading the lives of others? Before you accuse me of hypocritically invoking trolleys despite criticizing them all game, I will submit to you that the Trolley Problem is the lowest form of this. The Trolley Problem as presented doesn't analyze lives as anything more than "five people are on this track." Let's compare this to Moby Dick again. Is this fair? No. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes. Moby Dick, 'The Musket' posted:Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself. This works, because of the characters and because it's building up to the climax and isn't just hastily stuffed in as a desperate aside that touches on Colin's Themes (pay me by the word, please!) Starbuck and Ahab have been clashing ever since Ahab decided that he was going to defraud the ship's owners and the people of Nantucket and lead the ship on a damned crusade against the White Whale and, by extension, God himself. The thirty people Starbuck proposes to save aren't some street randos rambling about stupid interdimensional bullshit, they are the people Starbuck is directly responsible for as first mate of the ship, in addition to his responsibility to provide for his wife and child. The conflict isn't just "Ahab is one life unit, the ship's crew are thirty life units" either like all the trolley quests in this game are. Starbuck is afraid of Ahab and his terrible charismatic power, and is actually unsure of what to do like a real person, instead of just spewing death sentences for Red Tide points. The question isn't just one versus thirty, but whether Starbuck has the right to judge. Melville isn't afraid to opine on right and wrong either, unlike this game. Ahab Damns Himself posted:“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”—here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.” Melville makes it quite clear that rather than letting the reader "find their own answer" or whatever, this is the wrong thing to do and it shows how lost and damned Ahab is. Rather than postpone his revenge against Moby Dick to save a missing child, Ahab abandons the child and leads his men to their prophesied death against the power of God. Why do I bring this up? This is the story that Tides of Numenera wants to tell. The Changing God overreached and despite his mastery of the fearsome technologies of the ancient world he is not a god and is contending with the Angel of Death or whatever the Sorrow is. It runs smack-dab into the Numenera setting having no spiritual significance whatsoever despite us descending into hell and meeting demons who want to spread evil and whatnot. Numenera further craps the bed by jamming in as much pointless weirdness as possible that it gets in the way of the story it wants to tell because of all these mysteries. Want to tell the story of a man seeking to steal the power of God? Too bad, there is no God. Want to tell a story about an endless war caused by two very similar people draining the world's resources to fight for centuries? Too bad, there's a reality rewriting machine that ensures no one actually dies in this war and also the causes are so abstract that no one outside the Castoff Club will actually dedicate their lives to it. Want to tell a story about a woman who is in psychic communion with legions of her selves from other worlds? Sure, why not! It's not relatable at all, nothing about it makes sense, and it offers no insight into the human psyche or condition, but that's the kind of stories Numenera enables. Want to examine the value of a human life? You sure as hell can't do it here, because there's enough reality-writing, dead-resurrecting, time traveling bullshit that there are no clear consequences for any of your actions. This is the reason we have garbage like a centuries-long war that's killed...nine people. It's absolute and irredeemable trash! Oh, there was a third merecaster, wasn't there? Let's do this.  Guess what?  It's another loving trolley problem! : What's your opinion on Arxalin, Iom? Oh look. The wounded fish guy is 1 life unit. Can you jeopardize your sweet, sweet cash for 1 life unit? : How did you get sick, Arxalin? I don't know who these people are, and frankly I don't care. : [Raises Silver, Gold Tides] We'll leave Arxalin and keep exploring. Saving the Harrows is more important.  Hear me out...what if you used a common term for your warriors, like...I don't know...warrior?  : Some kind of charging device? Sounds like something *you'd* be interested in keeping, Iom.Who are these people? Why do I care? For everyone bitching about me not roleplaying in a roleplaying game or whatever I'm literally playing as a lady watching a past viewer and changing the past of some randos based on the imperfect information available to her at the time.   Oh no, the dumb girl kept the nuclear reactor that was giving the scavengers radiation poisoning!  Silver Tide option! I'm not reading this poo poo! : [Raises Indigo, Silver Tides] I promised the people of the Harrows a profit on this expedition. I have to keep that promise. We continue exploring. Ion, drop Arxalin in the Voil.Oh, yea, just killed step-daughter through radiation poisoning. Whoops. In my defense, it's not like some middle ages idiot is going to know how to treat it.  Oh. Woops. I guess we are the world's worst castoff stepmom. : Sorry, Iom. You're going to have to get rid of it. It's too dangerous.  I see the time honored method of "drooling on the keyboard to come up with a name" has triumphed again. : Get out of here! Run! Run! : Marit isn't looking so good. Let's make camp and rest until morning.  THE ROBOT RAN US OVER WITH A TROLLEY! WHAT AN IMAGINATIVE TWIST FROM THESE IMAGINATIVE PEOPLE! TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this crap posted:
Ugh. There are not many updates left. 2, maybe 3 depending on how much crap I stuff in the next update. I will be foolishly allowing you to vote on the game's final big choice. Think carefully about what rail the trolley should ride! TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 03:51 on May 30, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 07:44
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: What's up, homie?
: You are on your deathbed, surrounded by two people you don't recognize!
: It's me, your main man Cardogo! You are dying because you got hit by the Iron Wind, despite my best efforts to save you, which crippled my arm!
: Hey uncle you should give me money so I can invest in this Nigerian prince's scheme to do crime!
: Hey I'm gonna break into your house in the middle of the night because I want you to give me money. My life was very hard, which entitles me to torment a person who is literally loving dying right now.
: Hey, can we put your plans into motion? The secret ones to donate to the orphanage. I know you've given us a lot, but I need your help. Let me show you this picture of a mutant kid. It's Cardogo's. He's been loving hookers to sire mutant kids and then killing them.
: Hey, I know I'm sabotaging this machine and all, but holy poo poo, you need to know this. Paj Rekken disabled the shields that let the Sorrow into Miel Avest where it killed everyone! That's a real hosed up war crime, yo!
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Obviously the third rail, ender of trolleys.
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May 23, 2020 14:17
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Is it possible to save edit your tide levels to show off what you wanted to?
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May 23, 2020 17:44
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I remember floating anime hair girl and her stalker because it felt so out of place and was dropped just as quickly. I remember the Genocide for being a lot of wasted potential and also being named the Genocide. I remember the Sagus cliffs captain of the guard who burned away years of her life to avoid the probability machine. I remember the singing girl who defeated the probability machine with trying really hard. I remember the 3 members of the psychic gang we doomed to forever war and the 1 member we didn't. Also the dead one. I remember the sculptor. He said the first and only things that made me interested about the Sorrow. That didn't play out though.
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May 23, 2020 18:34
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idhrendur posted:Is it possible to save edit your tide levels to show off what you wanted to? That is far too much work for this dumb game.
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May 23, 2020 19:21
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Which rail erases this game from existence?
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May 23, 2020 20:04
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Genocide, the psychic innkeeper, and the sculptor were all cool characters that were mostly wasted. The two NPCs who, for me, were neither wasted nor outstayed their welcome were both involved in the 1 year Guard Clone bullshit: The boss's "I was going to be haunted to death so I used like 20 years up with Clone Bullshit instead of just 1 and outlived the ghost." And the baker(I think?)'s "I unkowingly gave away a year where lots of people would have died a gruesome death and made a really hosed up clone who's experiencing all of that." Those felt like just the right amount of weird science worldbuilding for the setting to me, even if the broader quests they were tacked onto were dumb. They actually felt like they added texture to the world. And then the clonecops turned out to be completely pointless to the plot and useless at their jobs, and we left that town to never return or see any use of that technology again. But hey, decent vignettes. Also, thanks so much for the zoomed-in screenshots!
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May 23, 2020 22:04
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I remember the baker dude whose clone-thing was made from the absolute worst year of his life because honestly that idea was pretty fascinating. I remember Rhin for actually being reasonably written early on (if not the people around her) and for the hilarity of the game mechanics letting her turn into a murder-bot despite the game's wishes for that not to be the case. I remember the psychic bar NPCs in Sagus Cliffs for being the start where I just straight up stopped reading the dialogue and reading your summaries instead, though that's the wrong kind of memorable.
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May 23, 2020 22:24
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Face Your Torment! Bring Booze. Last time, on Tides of Numenera, we sat through a bunch of trolley themed flashbacks, and I learned the thread has a better memory for a lot of these characters than I do. Whoops! Today we are going to speak with the Memovira and get in position to make the final trolley themed choice of the game.  We can talk to Brusca. She tells us we were never expected to survive, and the Bloom is angry at The First Castoff and will eat her if she ever leaves the fort. The Bloom helped evict the last Memovira, but now it wants to eat the First. Whatever. We have a LOT of words to get through this update, and I may have to split it.  She teleports from the platform with an animation I fail to capture.  : You lied to me. You're the First.: Her laughter scratches harshly against your ears. "Obviously.": She raises her chin high. Some kind of energy shimmers across her body, "I am the First Castoff. I have kept myself hidden for a century and more, watching, waiting, letting our damned sire execute his twisted plans thinking he had the upper hand. But we have plans of our own."There's a short animation as four more people teleport in.  Bonus points for describing four people teleporting in after we saw four people teleport in.  There's a short cutscene where the repaired resonance chamber just floats in, meaning our entire journey to fix the resonance chamber was a complete and utter waste of time. First Castoff: As you can see, my agents have retrieved the resonance chamber from the Reef. With Mazzof returned, we can use the chamber to sever the Tidal connection that draws the Sorrow to us like a war moth. Then we will be free forever - from the Sorrow, from having to hide in Miel Avest or this wretched Bloom, from all our sire's strategems. We will finally be ourselves.  Remember when we had to go back in time and unrape Matkina? Yea, this is the rapist guy. The game is going to be very confused about this for the rest of the update. : Now that she says his name, it is obvious. This is the man whose body you inhabited in Matkina's merecaster so long ago. His only reply is a leering grin.If you remember, we changed the past so Tash attacked trying to save Matkina rather than him Tides-raping her.  : "That's certainly what you remember." His unpleasant grin widens. : Why would you have to kill me?: She cocks her head to the side. "How do you...? You are more clever than my information suggests. Though perhaps not, if you have not yet divined why I would have to kill you.  : You destroyed Miel Avest! You slaughtered all those castoffs!   : We need to talk about the chamber. : I thought my body was the catalyst to the chamber.First Castoff: It is. The Changing God created your body specifically to activate the chamber, to channel its powers. We discovered you had become a castoff when you spoke to Mazzof through Zerian Daywalker. Your body was designed to control the Tidal connection between us. This explains why the only three foci we could pick were generic as gently caress obviously.  : Can my body still activate the chamber then? : I've learned that in activating the chamber, it can be used to weaken the Sorrow. Is that true? : Your plan will kill the castoffs, not free them. We need the connection in order to live. : Our sire learned it from a ghibra castoff named Thom. Thom said both our sire's plans and yours would kill us all.  : Is there any other way to stop the Sorrow?  Oom has been through all kinds of Tides poo poo, resulting in the Sorrow blowing up his civilization. This...may actually be relevant. : I want to ask you about something else. : How was Mazzof taken from you? : We should use the chamber to weaken the Sorrow. We might be able to kill it! Now, if you are playing along, PICK THE LAST OPTION UNLESS IT WOULD gently caress UP YOUR TIDES! I'll explain why in a bit. : How long have you been hiding here?: She shrugs. "A decade? More? I rescued Mazzof from the ghibra after our sire abandoned him. The Bloom's hatred of the Sorrow, and its power to keep it at bay, was known to me, so we came here in disguise.": "But you betrayed the old Memovira. Why take over if you only came here to hide?" : Why didn't you just tell me you were the First from the beginning? : Voices in my head? What are you talking about? You and me both, Maralel. You and me both. : Your plan will kill the castoffs. I won't let that happen. : [Attack] Go ahead and try.  TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
So yea, as the dialogue summary above said, this battle is completely unnecessary and sucks.  The one interesting thing is that our guy Coty, who we freed and got the job with the Memovira, betrays the First immediately to help us out.  There are a few little touches that make me think someone on this game actually cared and was just overruled by people possessed by Colin's poorly thought out vision. This is one of them.  Bericael sucks, because the developers gave her both the jack's life draining attack and the Breathes Shadow capstone that lets her become invulnerable and untargetable. Thanks, assholes.  You can try to talk to the castoffs and if you did their merecasters right they'll turn. I turn Tash by guilting him about Matkina, Bericael is pissed we made her try to kill the First, and I stopped after that because everyone not named The Last Castoff got torn to shreds in this fight.  Of course, they can't actually kill our Castoff, because she has the aforementioned life drain attack, a sword that deals irresistible damage, and enough speed edge that she can just spam it.  Despite this fortress supposedly protecting the First from the Bloom, the Bloom can apparently just teleport in Black Demon Seed monsters. You don't actually want to kill the castoffs here, because they're going to fight the Bloom monsters and you can just kind of dully stare at the screen and remember video games that actually responded to player input. I can only imagine the developers coded this section after playing too much Xenosaga.  We take the First Castoff down. drat, that's a major antagonist dead by our hand, and it's close to the end of the ga -  Oh. Let me tell you the truth about this battle. It doesn't matter at all. You can't make it up there to stop Mazzof in time, and I tested it - you can actually straight up lose here and the game proceeds as though nothing happened. That's why you should just let the First Castoff fire off the resonance chamber, or better yet just not play this game. Anyway, after an arbitrary amount of time we get a second crisis which is even worse than this one (but mandatory to proceed).  Despite what the game tells you, your choices don't actually matter here.  The Sorrow shows up anyway. I promised the thread a Sorrow vs Bloom fight to see who has the better Black Demon Seed. There was some excitement over a cool fight. This is not it.   This red and black fire pops up in the corner and will start spawning the Sorrow sperm monsters. Note that our objective is just to get to the top of the stairs.  The First runs into the Sorrow fire like a dipshit. I want to point out that if your party members go down in this fight they are permanently dead. I lost Rhin on my test playthrough, Callistege was very upset with me ("Her death is on your hands, castoff!") and I reloaded as fast as I could.  Our Last Castoff is not only a fashion trendsetter and deadly warrior, but can run really fast to complete quest objectives and thus she takes control of the Resonance Chamber on her first turn. So what do we do now, you ask?  We have to wait. A better game would make "survive for X turns" an actually interesting and engaging battle. Here?  Order the entire party to hide. Burn speed pools to get it to 100 percent. That's it. You've won. Now you get to sit back and enjoy a three way battle between the First Castoff's Endless Battle team, the Blooms' continually spawning Black Demon Seed, and the Sorrow's Black Demon Seed.  Really. It's like a bad game of D&D where the players sit there as the DM describes how his Demon Vampire Ninja killed a dragon with a single blow and then impregnated five elf princesses at once and they all agreed he didn't owe any child support because he was just that good.  The AI completely ignores Coty, who is 360 no scoping the First Castoff this whole time. What a boss.  The First can actually use the Tides as a combat attack.  After enough staring dully at the screen pressing "End Turn" as the NPCs do their best turtle impression, the Sorrow finally arrives in the long animation the developers think is a dramatic reveal.  It still saddens me that the best manifestation of Death they could come up with was a giant Ringwraith with tentacles.  Once again they pull the old "describe the image we're about to show you in writing".   The last act of the game takes place in the Labyrinth, and things are about to get silly.  Now, if you hadn't done the probability engine sidequest you would have no idea who this woman was. : I thought you were a memory or a copy. Why are you here? She is, of course, the Changing God's daughter we met earlier.  : I thought the chamber would merge all the castoffs into a body, not the Labyrinth.: "The chamber was just a lever." She speaks as though she is just learning this information herself. "The minds of the castoffs can still be merged into a single body. But not by flipping some switch in the real world. Your fate, and that of your siblings, will be decided here, in the Labyrinth that connects you all...that has always connected you."  : How do you know all of this?: Her brow furrows. "I'm still asking myself that. When you and your siblings were drawn into this place, pieces of their memories filled gaps in mine. I know what happened to bring you here. I understand what is happening now. And I...know where the Changing God is and what he plans to do." It's because you're a character in a video game, and the writers don't know how to move this plot along. What are we supposed to be doing anyway? What have we actually accomplished? : Does that mean that activating the chamber did nothing at all? : If all living castoffs were drawn to this place, then where are they? : Why has everything changed? All the doors and portals are different from before.  : If everyone is trapped in an illusion, why aren't I? : I'll try to stop him. Farewell. What she means is that you should really check out the portals on the side. TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this poo poo posted:
 I go to level up The Last Castoff and encounter this wonderful graphical glitch.  Uh, hi, who are you, and why are you in our head?  Hey, Rhin! Been a while! Please don't talk about what Callistege and The Last Castoff did with that creepy guy to send you home, because that was gross. Also, I have no idea how this kid kept her innocence after being abused by a slaver and then we had her shoot all those people to death with energy weapons.  : You've changed quite a lot! Rothfuss. No. Stop. Get your lovely incoherent metaphors out of here.  Not sure if I mentioned this or not, but Rhin did give us a "god of finding" when she left. You might ask if Rhin and her gods are going to interact with this theme's of divinity and falsehood. The answer is, once again, no. : But we're in my mind. Your god helped you find me here? : It's good to see you again, Rhin.: She smiles, as warm and bright as the sun. "It's good to see you too, old friend. I think about you all the time."Rothfuss, you already used the sun metaphor.  : The resonance chamber was activated. It trapped me and all the other castoffs here, in the Labyrinth. Before you ask, yes, Adult Rhin still has the ability to create infinite grenades and turrets and stuff. : I do need you, and I'm glad you're here.: She grins widely. "Of course, old friend. Come on." TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
Rhin does not show up if you don't send her back. You can take child Rhin to the endgame and get an ending where you adopt her. We're not doing that.  Rhin gets some wacky new abilities to go with her "Shaper" class, as I guess she's gone from a lost child to a wacky god summoner lady who walks between worlds. Oh, yes, and her skill loadout is kinda batshit, which is great, as we're going to be needing her skills to avoid the tedious combats in this area. She gets a skill to pull all our enemies into an area for future nuking, and this:  The only other person who can get this is a Nano Last Castoff. The big problem with Adult Rhin is that by the time you get her there's no one really left to fight. Even the final boss can just be talked down trivially, and you're going to want to do that because Numenera combat is awful.  This is still around, but she's got enough intellect edge that it's free to use. Throw down all your turrets, kids!  These three portals are really easy to miss - I did on my first playthrough, but if you want your party members back you need to break them out of their wacky torment sections.  You also run into castoffs here. Rhin wants you to help Tol Maguur because she doesn't want to hold a grudge, even though these shades are the shades of the people Tol Maguur killed with the tides because she didn't have Rhin. This has no spiritual significance.  Sure, Rhin, whatever. We make a Persuasion check, she recognizes Rhin, and disappears from the Labyrinth with illusions dispelled. I'm sorry, but if we go through every side conversation in this place we'll be here for far too long.  This weird spider eye statue is Dracogen's true form or master or some poo poo, and they threw this in here because Steven Dengler gave them money but they couldn't give him an interesting character. You can keep touching the statue despite the game warning you not to and you get an ornament that gives you armor and resistance. Yawn.  This rear end in a top hat is here, and he shows up to waste your time. Incidentally, if we had brought Erritis, this is where we could tell the nanomachine demons that wanted xtreme stuntz to gently caress off and let him go back to sheepherding. We didn't do that because Erritis is a terrible blight on all that is fun. gently caress Erritis.  In the middle portal, Matkina is trapped in her flashback of wolf genocide and Tides inappropriate conduct. The game bluntly tells us we can't do anything for her until we proceed to the next portal.  This next fathom is kind of interesting. I mentioned the cut Oasis of M'ra Jollos, which was an underwater city. What I didn't mention was that it was cut, at least partially, because the devs were having trouble with the swimming animations. It's not a dome city like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, it's literally a flooded city where everyone swims and stuff. Anyway, they bundled their demo area into this fathom so they could claim that the Oasis was totally in the game. This guy tells us that he's a weird illusion and that we need to snap the castoffs out of their illusions if we want to help them.  They do have full swimming animations here.  This guy thinks he's a census taker, but we want to see his book for whatever reason. It has pages about the Tides that infodump some story for some NPCs we've never heard of if we dump intellect into a persuasion check for a whopping 2 XP, and then if we convince him he's not real we get 4 whole XP. Wow!  Mazzof is here too. He's having a flashback to when the Changing God left his body and ditched him in the Oasis and he was imprisoned by fishmen. We have to toss him a shin, which he can use to MacGuyver his way out of Mind Jail. He has a bit more to say on what the Labyrinth actually is though.  Yay! Incoherent rambling about psychic powers? You shouldn't have.  We can ask him to come with us. You'd think he'd be a cool secret party member, but he involuntarily fades out as he wakes from the dream and gives us a cipher that I dump on Rhin and immediately forget I have. It is basically Fire Shield from Dungeons and Dragons. Callistege is here too, and this is where we get the opportunity to resolve her personal quest line and watch the game poo poo the bed with its themes.  : As you touch her, you're moved in time and space to...somewhere else. Images flash in front of your eyes, a cascade of other places and other times and other worlds that barely resolves from a blinding blur. You clutch at a single image, letting it bear you down into the endless chaos. : Please, Callistege, I need you!  : Come back to me, Callistege.  That is a disturbing enough image to survive this writing. : I'm here.  : Callistege, snap out of it. : "You came for me." Callistege smiles at you, radiant, bashful and genuine.Radiant and bashful seem opposed, but what do I know? Also, anyone who says this isn't a romance is full of poo poo. Coming after the stuff where Callistege just stares at you and says she can deny you nothing, even if it means her death? Calling it here.   : Do you wish to explore the datasphere though, or will you return to humanity? : You've been working for this your whole life, and now is your chance. You should decide now. : I'll help. What do I need to do?Oh poo poo! Are we getting a super powered up Callistege, too? Why are the women in this game so overpowered?  : Just concentrate. Concentrate on opening the connection. Allow it to penetrate the Labyrinth, and allow it to reach your mind. I will aid you as I have for so long. There's also 4chan.  : "Don't forget me." Her hand disappears from her cheek. You open your eyes, and she is no longer standing there...but she is still inside your imagination.Wha..aren't we in our imagination right now - gently caress it. It's Numenera. Weird for the sake of weird.  YUP. The game just took a party member away from us in the final dungeon. If you have Erritis you can convince the nanomachine demons to leave him alone...in which case he also leaves the dungeon. Callistege will appear to help us out later, but it's totally not worth it. TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this poo poo posted:
When the Changing God tries for immortality or to resurrect the dead, it is inherently wrong and bad. When literally anyone else in Numenera does it, it's OK and doesn't matter!  Goodbye Callistege. You made the combat almost bearable. Now that that illusion guy told us about illusions, we can go snap Matkina out of it. Yes, we snapped Tol Maguur out of it without the pep talk. I can't explain it either.  : Try to understand how you can help her. : Get close and let her "kill" you.  Jesus, some of these options. Tash didn't try to help, we made him help with the Merecaster override. Tash is still a piece of poo poo. : Matkina, I will help you avenge their deaths. But you need to wake up!  : You're my friend, Matkina. You don't owe me anything. Remember how the game introduced Matkina as the cold, calculating jack, and then proceeded to characterize her as excessively emotional and hot-tempered? I remember.  : You want to join me again?: "Between that and rot down here... not much of a choice." She claps you on the shoulder. "I'm with you." Matkina levels up and gets an AoE blind attack and the same health drain attack that the Last Castoff has, meaning I can run two drain tanks, Rhin's infinite grenades, and whatever the hell Oom does with his life.  This is the merchant from Miel Avest who upgraded our companions' armor. She will upgrade it for free here, as well as sell you some stuff. I buy an energy pistol for Matkina and some cyphers I once again forget to use.  I legitimately had to google how to find Oom, read that he was in the starting area, and felt like a huge dumbass.  Oom levels up. He has a weird system where you can align him to your dominant tides and he gets upgrades to his attack and whatnot. In our case he is rocking the Blue Tide, which increases his hit rate, and Gold Tide, which lets him heal the entire party when he critically hits. I have never seen Oom critically hit.  We have the gang and one lady awkwardly watching us from the internet. Let's do this.  Joy. This is supposed to be a representation of the Endless Battle, but all it does is show how the Endless Battle is small and unimportant in my opinion. Raima here is one of the two castoffs who were arguing in Miel Avest until Aardiris told us to go mediate their argument so we could learn about the Endless Battle. Naturally, we have encountered this deadly battle legion of six whole infantry with swords and axes.  This starts a crisis where we have to talk Raima down, then she mentions that she wants to save the soldiers and I think you have to smash the green thing above the text box? There's a pearl in there that causes a flashbang because nothing in Numenera is allowed to be coherent. Monte Cook will tell you it's to create a sense of wonder and mystery. It honestly reminds me more of Axe Cop.  Here's Rhin's AoE relativistic attack, called "Blood and Bell". No, I don't understand what those two have to do with each other either.  Cool, combat is done, let's run past Raima...   Ugh! Same deal - the castoffs Andronus and Zerian can be talked down, and you can either kill the mooks or activate the pillars to disable them. As I couldn't figure out how the pillars worked I just kinda stabbed them all again. It's not interesting.  Cool, thanks, can we go now?  So this encounter is uninteresting. You need to get to the door past these two bands of warring idiots. Paj Rekken is mad at you for interfering. As the objective is to get to the door, we are going to use our time-honored Hide button and creep past. However, I did find something of interest to the thread.  Zeniel in the thread posted they had contributed to the kickstarter and made an item called the "Shatter Striker" to be included in the game. I found the Shatter Striker! It seems to be some kind of poison attack like Zeniel suggested, and I'm not sure if it's an item we can loot because I left these guys alone. The wiki seems to indicate it's a lootable weapon but not where it can be found.  Other than that the encounter is doing skill checks on the door. This is quite literally the last mandatory crisis in the game. We don't have to fight any more after this. I know, the Changing God and the Sorrow are on the other side of that door. We don't have to fight them. Deal with it.  Finally. Next Time: The plot gets real dumb, real fast. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 04:42 on May 30, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 12:34
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: Ha ha nope.
: It's me, the Changing God's daughter's copy or whatever! Suddenly, I have great but fragmented visions of the plot, as though the denizens of the writers' room didn't know how to proceed, and decided to infodump on you!
: Hey, remember me? It's me, Rhin! It's been 10 years, but you haven't aged a day!
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Aw, and I was so sure The Daughter would be The Sorrow. Which kind of begs the question of who the gently caress it is. Fairly sure we've ran out of relevant characters so I suppose they're either going to pull one out of their rear end (do we know anything about The Mother?) or make it a force of nature of some kind (which would be bullshit given the no divinity in our world thing). e: VVV I think you just found the one thematically appropriate way to end the game. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 19:24 on May 24, 2020 |
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May 24, 2020 19:07
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The Sorrow throws off its cloak to reveal it was The Trolley the whole time!
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May 24, 2020 19:18
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Thinking about it, they should have had an early ending to the game if you go to the Levy machine and make a Levy of the current year. That's pretty cool that Rhin comes back upgraded...though it always makes me a bit nervous when the child character comes back as an adult. What is up with these infinity engine callback RPGs and making you lose companions in the end game though? I don't remember this happening in Baldur's Gate. At least the enemies here seem manageable and aren't death archer squad with a leader that summons more death archers. I'm surprised you can't bring the Daughter ghost with you. You'd think that would be a way to get the Changing God to stand down. Or, maybe for added fun because he's all hubris he sees what you've done and goes nuts. Fun either way.
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May 25, 2020 01:29
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quote:It's like a bad game of D&D where the players sit there as the DM describes how his Demon Vampire Ninja killed a dragon with a single blow and then impregnated five elf princesses at once and they all agreed he didn't owe any child support because he was just that good. that's too specific to not be real
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May 25, 2020 01:33
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This Game is A Joke Last time on Tides of Numenera, we got far enough into the endgame to realize that nothing we did mattered and that this story is not going to have a satisfying conclusion. I'll be straight with you now, this entire endgame sequence is what turned this from a cautiously pessimistic blind LP to a hate LP. It shows no respect for the player or the themes that it is supposedly addressing. Strap in! Last time we totally ignored the dramatic confrontation of the Endless Battle to sneak past the big glowing door to the end of the game. Unfortunately we have a lot more bullshit to do before we can actually confront the Changing God and the Sorrow.  This is the penultimate room before the final boss sequence. Strap in. It's almost over. You won't have to read about characters frowning unhappily or trolleys or Tides soon enough.   The Changing God: You are an accident! I won't deny the advantages your awareness provides, but do not deign to suggest we are anything like equals. : The First's thoughts are jumbled and confused. Her mind is in a loop, reliving the same moments over and over again.Oh, I see she has had the misfortune to play this game's many trolley sidequests.  : What are you doing here? : "Oh, Maralel." His tone is patronizing. "Have you come to tell me about the followers you've gained? Come to implore me to change my mind? Did you think to threaten me?"TrustYourDialogue.exe  : I can't stand by while you withhold the power for us to rejuvenate ourselves. : How do I get out of here?: How do I get out of here? Talking to you is pointless.: He shrugs and smiles. "You know the way out as well as I do, Maralel. You can leave at any time." : Stop arguing. This isn't real.    : You have a daughter.   : How will you finish what you started?    : [Raises Blue Tide] My body is in the Bloom. This is all an illusion, and I won't be part of it anymore.  : [Raises Gold Tide] Your last castoff believes in what I'm doing. I no longer need your approval.   : I said what I thought was the truth.  TheGreatEvilKing summarizes this poo poo posted:
This just confirms that the First Castoff and the Changing God are two sides of the same coin. If anything the First Castoff is a lesser copy, as she changes her appearance with a magic mask while the Changing God changes his appearance by creating new bodies. This would be an excellent commentary on the Endless Battle if the Endless Battle actually killed anyone ever, as it is it's just two petty egotistical assholes, one of whom can't take rejection.  As a result of all the trolley sidequests and grinding we did, we get the Last Castoff up to Tier 6. We get an achievement for hitting the highest level possible in the game. I grab Mind Control because why not? We're never going to fight again, and we can already pass any check with reloading.  That is a Changing-God brand stasis chamber. You might recognize it from the crystal cave where we talked to the Oracle Crystal AIs that the Changing God harvested for the crystal to build the resonance chamber.  The game immediately trolls us by having the sci-fi bridges collapse.  Fortunately the Changing God or whoever left some control panels we can Tidal Surge to do this waste of time puzzle. How do I know this is a waste of time?  By this point you're either really invested in the half-assed story, in which case you would like to know what's going on, or you're as sick of the game as I am but obligated to finish it for the internet.  After enough mashing the buttons to generate bridges we eventually unlock the humanoid button. This summons the alternate gender form of the Last Castoff.  There's a bunch of chatter about how the Changing God liked cloning his future bodies for brief periods of time so he'd have someone to talk to and could pick his new appearance and blah blah blah, but his real use?  Running down the bridge to push the button to change the bridge and exploding in a puddle of gore. No, you can't put your party members at the control panel and have them push the button. Having them makes it worse, because you have to click Clone-of-You (his actual in-game name) while he's buried under the pile of party members who will trigger their dialogue if you click on them.  When you see this you know you're almost done. Just use the Tides and nothing happens.  Oh, yeah, every time you want to change the bridge you have to go through the dialog tree, you can't just right-click him or something. Goddamn, shut up game!  After enough arbitrary time wasting fuckery we finally make it to the stasis pod.  : Something disturbs the air next to you. The ghostly woman's face begins to appear, as though your thoughts summoned her. This is a complete surprise unless you did the probability engine sidequest. Ghostly Woman: He was the father who tried to save me after the siege of the Tabaht. He discovered how to transfer consciousness - my consciousness - into a new body, hoping it would save me, but it didn't. My sickness followed me, in my mind. So he put me in there.  So at the end of the day the Changing God actually kinda saved his daughter, or at least built her an afterlife. : Does this mean you're a castoff? : How often has he tried to bring you back? : How much do you remember from being in that tank? This is the terrible last secret of the Changing God - at the end of the day, he only really cared about himself at the end. : Does that mean this fathom is constructed from your memories? : I need to get to that portal. Can you find me a path? She repairs the bridges for us.  : If you have the power to heal the floors...would you have the power to heal me as well? This fades to black and we get a full heal. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 Through the portal.  Here we are again. This is the tutorial area from the beginning of the game, where we ran around and were told to play a mage after answering questions based on a flashback.  There's a bit of weird rambling about how the doors want to open to you because they're your birthright or whatever. I'm skipping it. We're going to be nailed with a LOT of exposition as soon as we get through.  It's the Changing God's space station, where he chills out and reads science books and brings fly honeys who are as sick of trolleys as he is.  : Where are you? We seem to have traveled back in time to our own conception. This is awkward.  : [Anamnesis] Try to remember how the staff works. So, yup. Are you seeing where this is going? : I know you! : You're a duplicate of my mind? YUP. Not only is the Specter we've been vaguely antagonized by just an AI copy of the real Changing God, but we are about to birth ourselves in a time loop. : The Sorrow destroys this moon. : Step into the glowing pod.  : Do we have anything that can stop the Sorrow? : [Quick Fingers, Lore: Natural] Try to pull off one of the vibrating platelets. : [Smashing, Lore: Machinery] Examine the construct. : [Anamnesis, Perception] Study the map to find the way to the escape pods.   : Try to figure out how the green memory gel works. : Keep running. Get to the escape pods.  : Use the platelet you tore from the column of energy to slow the Sorrow. A shroud is a cloth, you dumbfucks! Also you described it as "like a giant scab" then "scabrous". Why? Why do you do this to me? I literally paid you money for this game.  : Run across the bay to use the injection. I assume this does something, but we are past the part of the game where any of that would be helpful.  : Use the gauntlet that you took from the construct. What are you doing? SHOOT IT AGAIN! : Climb into the escape pod. This is the Changing God's consciousness trying to download into our mind and getting killed by the Sorrow's mind touch, because...that's just a thing it can do now. Along with time travel. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 He's a toy Rhin. He just answers with another sickeningly cute onomatopoeia and Rhin complains it was a bad answer. We know what he is, but we don't answer the woman who literally crossed universes to help us because we're an rear end in a top hat. Oh well. We have one more flashback to get through before confronting the Specter and the Sorrow.  It's the dome we fell into at the beginning of the game. : Look at the chamber. : Open the synth chest.: Examine the rod with a crystal on the end. : Take the domination rod. : Investigate the hovering diamond. : Daughter. : Alarm. : Escape.  : The Tides.  "He wears a look of human terror on its face." I'm going to let that garbage speak for itself. : What are you? : What's here? Why are the alarms going off? : Why is the Sorrow here? What does it want? : What should we do? : Can you make the alarms stop? : Tell me about the girl in the chamber. : Do you control the teleport failsafe? : Can you set it to teleport the girl instead of me if something happens? : The girl's more important. Set the failsafe to teleport her out. : Go back to the synth chest. : Examine the azure steel dome. : Return your attention to the stasis chamber.By setting the backup to teleport poor Miika out of here we've done everything plot relevant, so we just kinda have to click around until the Sorrow shows up.  The Specter will not let you open the chamber because that would kill Miika, by the way. : Go back to the archival diamond. : The Changing God. : Wall projector.  Christ, finally. : How close is the Sorrow? : Tell me what we should do again. : Tell me about the storage locker. : Go back to the synth chest. : Activate the wall projector. : Go back to the archival diamond. I snip out a few "no information" queries here. : Miika. If we query "Merge Consciousness" we get text telling us it's the same entry for Miika. : The Tabaht. : The siege of Sagus Cliffs. : Dalad. They will be important very soon.  : [Raises Red Tide] Use the domination rod against the Sorrow. Well, I tried.   Ohmigod, the L word! Colin would be so proud! TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:
 What, you thought we were done with the words? We just started the final boss sequence! Ghostly Woman: I told you I was aware of everything while I was in that chamber. I remember my father abandoning me. I remember too, how you risked your life for me.  Her father literally put her consciousness in the Labyrinth so he could put her into a real body. I'm not sure that qualifies as abandoning? Whatever. : What do you mean I started changing things? I like how everything that makes us special is who we are and not the choices we've made or anything. Typical fantasy dreck. : So you're not just a memory. I will leave it to the thread to determine if the Changing God saved Miika or not. Her consciousness is right there to be put in a new body. The Changing God could have built her a robot or something. The game wants to make it out like the Changing God abandoned her, but she's right here! Her body is dead, but the Changing God kinda showed you can just put people in new bodies whenever the hell you want. : But I couldn't save you. : I understand all that I need to. So what do we do now?: A familiar voice cuts through the air, interrupting you both. "You don't need to do anything."  : Before he can finish, the air twists in the room, an explosion of light, and a scarred figure steps out of it.   : {Raises Blue Tide] You'd think someone who calls himself the Changing God would learn from his mistakes. This is the climax of our struggle against the Specter. How do you think it will go down? Ghostly Woman: And what is that, exactly?    We could fight him, but why? Why would you subject yourself to more Numenera combat? : The Resonance is not yours to claim. The real Changing God died when I was born. You're just a backup of his memories.: "Ridiculous", the Chalcedon growls. "I've served our sire for centuries. This is him.": "You speak in simple terms," the Specter says, arching an eyebrow. "But you're dense, even for one of my castoffs. I am the Changing God, and you are standing in my way." This is the payoff for letting Callistege join 4chan - she shows up to dunk on the Specter here and tell him how much he sucks. Remember how the game has been telling us attempting to usurp the power of God is bad, and then we have poo poo like Callistege pulling it off with no consequences?  : He growls under his breath. drat, Rhin. : He flinches and turns to face her.: She meets his eyes, blinking once. And shakes her head.  : I remember speaking to you on the moon. You're not the Changing God. You're an assistant - an update.  : Consciousness needs to be continuous. You're a copy of what the Changing God was.: [Dominant Tide: Blue] "I know who I am!" the Specter snaps, but he looks troubled by your argument. "This is foolish!" Yup! We convince him that he sucks and he just goes away.  RIP Specter. There are a few other ways this can go and I'm not sure what triggers all of them. In my test playthrough I convinced him that I was the real Changing God and he got very sad and disappeared. If you are Blue/Silver dominant tides, you can convince him to join you and rebirth the Changing God anew. There are probably others I haven't seen.     : Will we ever meet again? I was going to say we knew her for like a week, but we broke her out of slavery and made sure she got home to her parents. It's..actually not bad.  Presented without commentary.   Take care Rhin, you were one of the better companions in this game. We'll never forget infinite grenade child. TheGreatEvilKing summary posted:Miika: I remember everything now! I'm the real Miika, the Changing God's daughter! You are the Last Castoff, you can fix all this dumb bullshit and end the game! I remember now, you tried to save me!  This is it.  There is only 1 door standing between us and the truly idiotic ending of this game.   Say hello to the Sorrow. No, I can't visualize what tormented psyches in a cloak look like, nor why the basic five colors are "strange".  : It gives me no pleasure to meet you in this place, but you and your kind have left me no choice. Every body your sire creates abuses those forces you call the Tides. They draw energy from those around them. In so doing, you weaken the seals on energy you do not comprehend. You increase the amount of suffering in the world.: Every attempt at mitigating that damage has failed. Every step results in misery. You are the first in millennia to hear me speak in an embodied language. You are persistent, tenacious, and durable, and so perhaps words will suffice where destruction has failed. It is time to bring this experiment in immortality to a close.We know this is absolute horseshit, because she spoke to Zaofi the sculptor way back at the beginning of the game. : While the creature speaks, its thoughts assail you, crushing your mind in an alien embrace. It takes an extreme effort of will to shut them out just so you can speak.  : What do you mean, 'join the rest of your world?' : You were the death of Oom's world?We saw it in Oom's flashbacks, actually.  Wait. Hold up. The Sorrow was created. The Sorrow is artificial. The Sorrow isn't an avenging angel or a natural force. The Sorrow exists because some dude built a genocide robot. That's it. The crime of the Changing God wasn't that he abused the Tides (whatever the gently caress that means) but that he never found the admin password to disable the murder robot. The Sorrow isn't some divine messenger sent to punish the Changing God for his hubris. It's just a robot that somebody built, and we literally caught it in a lie as soon as it introduced itself. THE SORROW HAS NO RIGHT TO JUDGE THE CHANGING GOD OR HIS CASTOFFS AT ALL! The Sorrow has no divine wisdom or authority. If anything, its motives are worse than the Changing God's! The Changing God started out as a grieving father trying to resurrect his daughter and by all accounts at that time was a genuinely good person who cared for the people of Sagus Cliffs to the point of risking his life to fight for them. The Sorrow was created by "masters" - not leaders, not representatives, but "masters" for the sole purpose of committing genocide because the masters were too incompetent to unfuck things and save their people. The Sorrow was created to kill, and nearly every time we've seen her she leaves a trail of bodies in her wake. This is a joke. An actual, literal joke, where the punchline is that the story the authors were trying to tell is completely invalidated! Keep going, it gets better!  Really? Oom didn't teach Matkina despite her being a castoff. Oom sure as hell didn't teach Rhin.  : We stood together in the ruins of your world, Oom. The Sorrow did that. Don't give up. Stay with me. Yup. The first thing the Sorrow does to open negotiations is to get one of your party members to commit suicide. If you let Oom go, he dies.  There's a recurring pattern with the Sorrow here, can you spot it? : How have the Tides increased suffering in the world?: The Tides themselves do not cause suffering, rather the abuse of them in your bodies. Your kind has wrought torment on the world in the name of endless life. You bring pain, large and small, deliberate and inadvertent. Without you, the Endless Battle would never have raged. Without you, the Children of the Endless Gate would not have terrorized the world. Betrayals, slaughter, and bloodshed are the hallmarks of a castoff's wake.There are a lot of idiots in the Numenera fandom who will claim that the Sorrow is just an innocent guardian and important for the world and so on. These people need to put their crack pipes down. All that stuff the Sorrow mentioned? It was directly because of her. The Changing God would have never built the Resonance Chamber if not for the Sorrow's pursuit, he would have left the castoffs free to do whatever, and then Maralel would have no cause for the war. The Children of the Endless Gate were caused by the Changing God trying to hide from the Sorrow in Generic Hell. The Sorrow is gaslighting us here.  The Sorrow murdered an entire civilization including the children. It has implied she has done so multiple times. We also gave Artaglio an afterlife with infinite booze. What has the Sorrow ever done to help anyone?  Really! The Sorrow is blaming Aardiris for poo poo she didn't do! : I'm just trying to stop the abuse of the Tides.: Are you? We shall see.  : What is this place? : Why are you here? Really. Time travel. We're going with that. Why not, it's not like this story had any respect for the player left anyway. : What are you? gently caress you! Every time we've seen you you've been tossing corpses about like flies. Miika didn't even do anything to you and you still tore apart her body in a rage. : I convinced the Specter that the true Changing God is dead. Is this true? : Tell me again what you are. : Aadiriis said she never used a Tidal Surge in her life. How did she abuse the Tides? : Tell me why you're here again. : So what happens now? : I came here to stop you from hunting us.: Then you must cease to exist. So long as you are fractured and bleeding across the world, I will hunt you. : My sire believed that subsuming all the castoffs into himself would stop you from hunting us. Is that true? : What if the castoffs were subsumed into someone else, someone who wouldn't continue the cycle? : You said someone attuned to the Labyrinth could contain the minds of the castoffs. Does that include Miika? : The First said that severing the connection between us would stop you from hunting us. Is that true? : Is there another way to sever the Tidal connection? : What if I just want everything back the way it was? Is that possible? : It seems you'll allow any choice I make. What will you oppose? The Sorrow is only here, because, as that last dialog option implies, we can fry her rear end with the Resonance. Don't ask how any of this works. : Remove the protections? Protections like you? : If you'd prefer we all die, why don't you just sever the connection? We can ask her if she doesn't approve but she just says she'll kill us. : Very well. I'm ready to make my choice.  Decisions lie before us Vote for which ending you want to see. The game will actually let us go through with killing the Sorrow, it's not a fakeout. I will show that ending and only that ending. After that, there will be a postmortem and this game will be over. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 04:12 on May 30, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 01:36
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: I destroyed the bridge so you have to waste even more time in here! Ha ha ha!
: Hey, I'm a short lived clone of you our sire made to talk to, what's up?
: Not so fast! You have me to deal with!
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Kill the trolley
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May 25, 2020 02:48
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kill the sorrow. another thing about this is that ordinarily, hypocrisy is an appealing trait in a villain, if done right. but the sorrow moralizes about loving lovers' quarrels of all things hot off the heels of killing an entire people, and nothing is done with that. the disconnect isn't brought up. it doesn't even add to the villain's hateability or add texture. it only comes off as what it is: bad writing. giving the sorrow a personality at all was a mistake
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May 25, 2020 03:00
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Wow does her rationale suck - "You're doing Tides wrong, so now I have to kill you." My vote is to kill her.
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May 25, 2020 04:12
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So...the Changing God has been dead all along and what has been messing with us is a backup. That explains why the Changing God seemed so weak and incapable the whole time but it also makes it makes for an incredibly unsatisfying conclusion. In the same breath, we have our other long term enemy the Sorrow. She finally talks and it's...some sort of sanctimonious automaton? Also a vain one since she stole her own statue. This is embarrassing... Burn the Sorrow to ash. Hypocrisy fucked around with this message at 04:18 on May 25, 2020 |
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May 25, 2020 04:16
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Finish what the Changing God started.
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May 25, 2020 04:52
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What a boring climax. Does the antagonist reveal anything interesting? No, she's an overzealous security system. Ooh. Gripping. Merge everyone's consciousness into Miika. Since the most interesting-looking choice is always a snore festival, maybe it's reverse psychology and the boring lawful-good choice is actually the most interesting. (I wish.)
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May 25, 2020 06:42
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Kill the Sorrow.
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May 25, 2020 06:56
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